Comment by jmyeet

Believe it or not, this sort of thing is actually relevant to far-future galactic colonization.

The view we have from science fiction is largely of colonizing planets (eg Star Wars) but this makes almost no sense. Alien worlds are likely to be hostile. Just look at any rocky world in our Solar System other than Earth. Gravity wells are incredibly inconvenient. So if you have to live in a habitat anyway because of a hostile environment, you may as well live in space.

And that's where we once again return to the Dyson Swarm.

In this future, stars become incredibly valuable and planets are little more than a source of raw material. The energy output from a star is almost incompehensibly high. It's estimated that human civilization uses between 10^10 and 10^11 Watts of energy. Roughly 10^16 Watts of energy hit the Earth from the Sun. That would be a Kardashev-1 (K1) civilization. But the Earth only gets less than a billionth of the Sun's output.

If you used all of the Sun's output, that would be roughly 10^26 Watts of energy, called a K2 civilization.

We simply cannot comprehend what you could do with this much energy. One application is simply to turn that energy into heavy elements that may not otherwise be present around that star in a method that is basically a scaled up particle accelerator.