Yeah, who cares about human rights?

There are massive social problems to consider, plus the sheer impetus of our current society's goals: which are very capitalistic almost to the point of exclusion of any moral compass. There are those who will claim its no where near that bad, but it is. Its every bit that bad and it gets worse as the years go on.

Fair enough. That's why I threw in the stellar engineering by the way. Lets face it, if you're that good with materials sciences, can construct the dyson shell or ring, and can travel to the star in the first place, you're also likely to be able to stabilize said star - or you can find a red that's old enough to…

A reasonable argument, but 5 billion years (or 3, or 1) is still a loooong time to have an excellent return on invest. If construction of the Dyson sphere takes, say, 1,000 years, you will still profit from it for millions times as long.

Hey, just keep in mind, I'm no expert. I'm just a geek who happens to love this stuff. There's a million different possibilities. For the most part, I'd like to think this concept makes sense, but there are some things that happen in science that aren't straightforward in the way the average person "thinks" they…

Its also a basket-egg scenario - If you have the technology to build one, why not maximize the effort so that you can more easily build more than one? It helps too that not only is a red-dwarf construction less resource intensive, it is also longer lived. Most red dwarfs are old, very old. But they're still not out…

I think that the best candidate for a dyson construct for an advanced civilization would be a red dwarf. If you think about it, Red Dwarfs have a habitable zone very close to their star, so astroengineering something on the scale of a planet would take considerable energy to keep the planet rotating - as the…