"Astronomers may have found 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky Way"

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**Laughing Man**

Gwaihirsbrother wrote:
None of that is relevant to the point I was making. We don't have to worry about agressive aliens around that star for apparently about 1500 years since they would have no reason to know that we exist since our signals won't have reached them yet.

3000 years. They have to get here afterwards, and that number assumes they can get something up to high c-fractional speeds.

**Laughing Man**

Breotan wrote:
I don't think they can even be built. The gravity of the star would pull on it and ultimately cause it to collapse from stress. You could spin it and that would help at the equator but not the poles. Also, if you spin it, you can't have the whole thing be habitable as air would move toward the equator and you'd wind up with the pressures you see on Jupiter or even greater.

A ring would have a better chance but the lack of magnetic field protection presents other problems.

The gravity from the sun is pretty much entirely cancelled out by the solar wind. You'd be building one of these fairly far out, after all. They're also designed not as habitats but for power generation, as you're capturing the entire output of the sun. Even if you are inhabiting it, as you've noted, you only need a thin belt along the equator to be usable, and you'd still have several billion times the surface area of Earth to play with.