Television
- The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics" - The crew of the USS Enterprise-D happens upon a full Dyson sphere when its gravitational fluctuations distort their warp field and bring them to a stop. Being further advanced than the Federation, the sphere's automatic systems pulled the ship through a door-equipped portal into the structure, revealing the majority of the shell inside was covered with habitable regions, including weather. Lieutenant Commander Data stated that the inside surface area was equal to "250 million class-M worlds." As the diameter of the sphere is given as being 200 million kilometers or two thirds the Earth's orbit around the sun this would indicate that the surface area of one "M-class world" is in fact equivalent to the Earth's surface area. About "Relics", Dyson said: "Actually it was sort of fun to watch it. It's all nonsense, but it's quite a good piece of cinema."
- Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda — the episodes "Its Hour Come Round At Last" and "The Widening Gyre" — The Magog Worldship. Several planetary objects with cave systems, physically locked in close proximity to a small sun, somewhat like the Dyson net variant of the Dyson sphere.
- In Crest of the Stars, the capital of the Humankind Empire Abh, Lakfakale, contains and is likely powered by a Dyson Swarm.
- The Mighty Orbots, Shadow Star employed by Umbra and its minions was depicted very much as transitional form of a solid shelled Dyson Sphere, though it was shown as having gaps and voids through which some measure of light escaped into outer space. It appeared to be a large planet with some parts of its surface torn away and others still connected in a rough analog Earth's own continental plates.
- In the Futurama episode Decision 3012, President Nixon builds a "Dyson fence" on the southern border of the solar system to keep out illegal immigrants.
Read more about this topic: Dyson Spheres In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. Each still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)