No. In even a modest(hah!)structure like Larry Niven's Ringworld the tensile strength required to hold it together exceeds that of any known material. Sorry I'm too lazy to dig up the specific reference, but I'll give you a pretty picture instead.<p><a href="http://www.dennisantinori.com/Resources/Ringworld/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dennisantinori.com/Resources/Ringworld/</a><p>Edit: a reference<p>>>> Peter Weston passed the word from a British college professor: the tensile strength of the Ringworld floor needs to be on the order of the force that holds an atomic nucleus together. From such stuff you could make a garbage bag that would hold a thermonuclear explosion.
<a href="http://www.larryniven.net/stories/macrostructures.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.larryniven.net/stories/macrostructures.shtml</a>
The engineering issues are cool to think about. Setting out to build the whole sphere at once is too much of an all-or-nothing thing IMHO. Instead, build a relatively small solar satellite in orbit around the sun at the chosen distance, maybe between Mars and the asteroid belt. Then build another one, and connect them together. Keep doing that, working towards a ring around the sun. That part should be relatively simple, since each of the pieces would be in a stable orbit by itself.<p>If you still need more power after that, then you consider the ring to be the equator of a sphere, and start building out the rest of the sphere, one ring of latitude at a time. Maybe build it as a basic grid or something initially, and add the solar collectors as needed. The stress would probably start to get higher and higher as you built up and down, since the pieces wouldn't be in orbit anymore, and so would rely on the structure to keep them in position and connected.<p>The problems in getting started are probably more along the lines of needing the kind of robot technology to gather the materials and build something like the initial satellite without much supervision, being able to gather the energy, and being able to do something useful with it.
One thing the article didn't talk about in relation to the dyson swarm is that if each unit is self-contained and collecting energy, how does it then transmit that energy to ... somewhere else (presumably one of the habitation units)? Are there obvious answers I'm not thinking about for energy transmission when you don't have a physical grid of wires to move it through?