A certified hood classic for sure. I have one at home and one at work.

True, but even the most despotic feudal tyrants did not actively seek the destruction of the entire planet for money. It is the specifics of our current system that enables the most psychopathic people in our society to control it.

Well for starters, you have to put the satellites into orbit. It’s gonna be pretty hard to do that without an initial energy source.

Second, aforementioned effort +thousands of years.

Third, you are limited by your means to transmit this power, which diminishes as you get further away from the star. Photovoltaic capture abiliy and microwave power transmission capture abiliy drop the further you get away from the star as the energy gets dissipated into the cosmic background. At some point you won’t be able to rely on your Dyson structure and will need to rely on a different power source.

Fourth, these satellites have a continuous upkeep. So it’s not as simple as just putting them up there, they’ll need to be constantly replaced because they will burn out over time.

I like Dyson Spheres/Swarms in concept. Is it possible on paper, yes. Is if feasible to accomplish? No. Not even a little bit, imo.

Any Dyson sphere or even swarm would demand an unfathomable amount of resources, time, and manpower. It would be a mega project that would take thousands of years. You’d need to totally disassemble a cosmic body like Mercury or the Moon to even have enough materials. Even with wildly more advanced tech, you’d end up using an incredible amount of energy to build this, and the EROI would take hundreds more years to ever come to fruition after it’s completed.

I’m of the opinion that any civilization advanced enough to theoretically build such a megastructure has likely figured out a much more feasible energy source by that point.