How would a planet-sized computer power receive power?

Imagine: A Kardashev Type I civilization mainly resides on a planet analogous to Earth, with one moon, analogous to Earth's moon. Eventually, the society grows so complex that machines filling space becomes a serious problem: the world's growing population needs food more than it needs machinery, but it still wants to balance both with the space it has.

Their solution: Building a Death Star like object, roughly the size of their existing moon, in orbit. Its function will be doing all computations required for the civilization, and then some; it will handle all storage of data, and other things that the planet can access wirelessly, to preserve space for farmland and residential areas at home.

Let's ignore unless necessary:

• How such an object will be constructed. Let's just assume at this point in the civilization's life, building this is plausible.
• Where the resources to build it will come from. Assume that all necessary materials can be procured and transported from the inner asteroid belt with relative ease. Somehow.
• Why it needs to be so large. Assume this civilization plans to rely on this object for centuries or millennium to come, so they are building it with far more processing power than they currently need.

But let's not ignore the following:

In this scenario how would such an object realistically receive power?

Note that this method should be on or inside the satellite, that it should power the entire volume of the sphere, and that if it produces heat, there should be a way to reduce its effect on the machinery.

posted about 8 years ago

Zxyrra‭

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