Transcript:
Panel 1
Beggrin: Is there anyone living here?
Epo: Negative. My scans show no life signs; although I detect a habitable atmosphere on the inside of the sphere.
Panel 2
Beggrit: Do you detect anything of value down there?
Alkina: Only an estimated surface area 2.81×10 to the 17th power square kilometers of habitable land.
Panel 3
Beggrin: I am beginning to see your point.
Panel 4
(Beggrin imagines being worshipped as King of his own Universe. )
Panel 5
Beggrin: Well, a deal is a deal. Here is the spectral profile of the star Sol.
Alkina: Thanks.
What does it mean?
Surface area – A 2-dimensional measurement that has both a length and a width. For instance, it could be the area on top of a table, in which case the surface area would be the product of the table’s length and width. Surface area can also be the total area covering a shape. As an example, the surface area of a cube is the length of one of its sides squared (that’s the area of a face of the cube) times 6 (since a cube has 6 faces).
In human speak please!
In this episode, the crew discovers that the inside of the Dyson Sphere has a surface area of 2.81 x 1017 km2, it might be hard to imagine, but this is the same surface area as about 500 million Earths put together. The surface area of a sphere is actually very easy to calculate, and it’s done from the following formula:
Surface Area = 4 x (Pi) x r2
Where “r” is the radius of the sphere and (Pi) is that special number, approximately 3.14159256. If we let “r” be about the distance from the Earth to the Sun (149.60 x 106 km), then we get the following equation:
Surface Area = 4 x (Pi) x (149.60 x 106)2 = 4 x 3.14159256 x (2.238016 x 1016) = 2.81 x 1017
2.81 x 1017 km2, which is about 500 million times the surface area of the Earth.