Could aliens harness stars to keep ahead of expanding universe?

Dan Hooper, a senior scientist with Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has written a paper outlining a way future aliens could keep their civilizations alive in spite of the isolation due to an expanding universe. In his paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, he suggests they might consider collecting and storing stars.

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A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to explain how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Only a fraction of a star's energy emissions reach the surface of any orbiting planet. Building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.

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The concept of the Dyson sphere was the result of a thought experiment by physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, when he theorized that all technological civilizations constantly increased their demand for energy. He reasoned that if human civilization expanded energy demands long enough, there would come a time when it demanded the total energy output of the Sun. He proposed a system of orbiting structures (which he referred to initially as a shell) designed to intercept and collect all energy produced by the Sun. Dyson's proposal did not detail how such a system would be constructed, but focused only on issues of energy collection, on the basis that such a structure could be distinguished by its unusual emission spectrum in comparison to a star.

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By Dyson_Ring

A Dyson ring — the simplest form of the Dyson swarm — to scale. Orbit is 1 AU in radius, collectors are 1.0×107 km in diameter (10 Gm or ≈25 times the Earth–Moon distance), spaced 3 degrees from center to center around the orbital circle.

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By Original uploader was Vedexent at en.wikipedia, converted to png by Falcorian

A relatively simple arrangement of multiple Dyson rings of the type pictured above, to form a more complex Dyson swarm. Rings' orbital radii are spaced 1.5×107 km with regard to one another, but average orbital radius is still 1 AU. Rings are rotated 15 degrees relative to one another, around a common axis of rotation.

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By The original uploader was PNG crusade bot at English Wikipedia.

A Dyson bubble: an arrangement of statites around a star, in a non-orbital pattern. As long as a satellite has an unobstructed line-of-sight to its star, it can hover at any point in space near its star. This relatively simple arrangement is only one of an infinite number of possible statite configurations, and is meant as a contrast for a Dyson swarm only. Statites are pictured as the same size as the collectors pictured above, and arranged at a uniform 1 AU distance from the star.

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By User:Bibi Saint-Pol - Vector version of en:Image:Dyson_Sphere_Diagram.jpg by ed629 on the English Wikipedia

A cut-away diagram of an idealized Dyson shell, a variant on Dyson's original concept, with a radius of 1 AU.

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What if an advanced civilization ran out of room to grow on their home planet? Their best bet might be to build settlements in space, so they could capture more of their star’s energy.