It's amazing how long it takes these popular memes to catch up with with scientific progress.<p>The Dyson sphere and the Kardashev scale were brilliant ideas in their time, but today we know they are the wrong approach. Collecting solar energy in this way would be incredibly inefficient and expensive.<p>Once fusion becomes functional, it makes far more sense to use the sun as a fuel source and use a bit of the hydrogen to generate needed power.<p>In the grand spirit of futurism, the engineering challenges of such a system are left as an exercise for the reader.