There’s not a lot of literature out there around this, but some of our most forward-thinking scientists and engineers have their sights on re-imagining the solar system – at least, large parts of it.

If you think that the Dyson swarm is some kind of new-fangled vacuum cleaner, you’re going to have to do some heavy reading to catch up. Basically, the idea is that we can source energy in space, using large numbers of satellites that basically “swarm” together. But the dream doesn’t end there, and some of the thinking around the ultimate result has the real estate of the local star’s territory looking a little different.

On a new podcast that I host with my colleague Alex Wissner-Gross, we interviewed none other than Philip Johnston of Starcloud , a company that already has some incredible design under its belt. Johnston and his company are famous for developing orbital data centers, plugging Nvidia chips into satellites, and training the first AI in space. And Johnston had some quite advanced ideas about what’s possible with these systems, although Alex ended up really pushing the envelope himself in several ways.

Toward the beginning, Johnston explained a little bit about the current process and what the company’s goals are now that they’re flush with investor money. Starcloud, he said, has filed with the FCC for a design involving 88,000 satellites for a yield of around 20 gigawatts.

From there, we quickly got to some of the grand designs that my co-host envisions for the coming age, starting with the idea of Dyson swarms generating a sun-synchronous orbit halo that we could see from Earth at dawn or dusk. He also suggested that we could print messages in the sky.

“That’s not in the (FCC) application,” Johnston said with what I would characterize as a wry chuckle.

There’s another part of this back and forth, almost right out of the gate, where Alex asks:

“Which planet or moon shall we disassemble first for the Dyson swarm? Do you think it’s Mercury that goes first, or is it the moon, or maybe Jupiter, or some of the moons of Saturn? What do you think?”

“The moon is basically perfectly uh designed to be dismantled to produce Dyson sphere and Dyson swarm materials,” Johnston replied, while also acknowledging that taking it apart could be bad for the Earth’s immediate environment. The moon, he noted, does have a lot of silicon and aluminum. Nobody said what we would do with all of the regolith.

Later, Johnston brought up a partial approach.

“We can easily lose like 5% of the mass of the moon without anybody complaining too much,” he said.

As for Mercury, Johnston had this to say:

“One of the nice things about Mercury is it’s closer, and so you wouldn’t need as much solar to generate the same amount of electricity.”

That real estate decision sussed, to some extent, talk went to timelines. The consensus is that it’s going to take a while, though my co-host is rather bullish on forward progress.

There’s a lot more in the hour-long session: about scientific notions like the Boltzmann equation and the Fermi paradox. There’s some talk about China. And there’s an allusion to pDoom, that quantifying benchmark of fear, uncertainty and doubt that bedevils the twenty-first century human, who knows that, whatever happens, nothing will ever be the same.

Speaking of doom, not to toot my own horn, but I think I coined a new word, maybe two, in characterizing all of what the naysayers are trumpeting around the blogosphere and other areas of media: the doom.

“Given that you’ve seen, up close, the doomerism,” I asked Johnston (that’s the first one), what do you think your success at StarCloud can do to help people be hopeful? I think actions can help people to see the positive, and see the potential, and the fact that you’re a doer and a practitioner, not just a theorist, I think, shows that you can play a role. Maybe fast forward a little bit. How do you think you can help some of these people that may be doomerous,” (there’s #2), “see a different potential future? Because I think that’s going to be important, because it could also become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we don’t do something about it.”

In response, Johnston talked about a project he called the ‘Fermi Explorer mission,’ suggesting people can watch a video at fermiexplorer.org. “It shows this expanse out into the galaxy, where we become the first civilization to settle the galaxy. It’s kind of (a look at) what happens if the great filter is behind us, and we are actually alone. Now we can be the ones to go settle the galaxy.”

At the end, Alex applauds the ingenuity of Starcloud’s mission, asking others to go and do likewise.

“Recognize the SaaS-pocalypse,” he said, “and go do something ambitious and adventurous .”

I thought this was one of our better segments, and the science fiction behind it is really quite compelling. What will the history books say in 2100? And what, importantly, will we see when we look at the sky? Will it be just like the Cambrian sky of yesteryear? Or will it be mind-bendingly different?