Humanity has confirmed it is nearly ready to begin construction on a Dyson sphere, just as soon as it completes the remaining work of making every app slightly worse.
The announcement follows decades of progress in turning maps into advert trays, taxis into behavioural auctions, search engines into sponsored landfill, streaming into cable television with better fonts, and banking into a haunted drawer full of authentication codes.
Researchers at the Institute for Civilisational Scale Thinking said the move to Kardashev Type II status could begin once the species had finished degrading the final pockets of functional software still carelessly serving users without friction.
Before a civilisation can responsibly harvest the total energy output of its parent star, it must first demonstrate maturity.
“That means taking simple, useful services and steadily converting them into subscription funnels with notifications,” said Dr Caspian Vell, senior fellow in Applied Megastructure Optimism.
According to Vell, humanity is already close to passing this threshold.
“We’ve made weather apps worse. We’ve made recipe websites worse. We’ve made televisions worse by adding operating systems to them. We’ve made cars worse by making heated seats a billing relationship. These are not isolated achievements. This is the foundation of stellar governance.”
The Dyson sphere, if completed, would capture a vast proportion of the sun’s energy and provide humanity with access to almost unimaginable power, which experts believe could then be placed behind four pricing tiers and a free trial requiring a card.
Early concept documents for the project describe a future of “radical abundance,” “planetary uplift,” and “unlocking solar value at scale,” before moving quickly into a section marked “Premium Light Experiences.”
Under the proposed model, users would receive access to Sun Basic, a limited daylight plan including core illumination, standard warmth, and up to three sunsets per billing cycle. Sun Plus would include reduced cloud latency, priority spring access, and personalised dawn themes. Sun Pro would offer advanced brightness controls, glare suppression, and “enhanced photosynthetic throughput” for eligible plants.
A free tier will also be available, supported by sponsored eclipses.
“We believe sunlight should be available to everyone,” said HelioSphere CEO Mark Tetherson, standing beneath a render of the sun with a payment modal over it. “Obviously, availability should not be confused with access, affordability, continuity, usability, or the outdated legacy idea that things necessary for life should not have account settings.”
Tetherson said critics were failing to understand the scale of the opportunity.
“For thousands of years, the sun just rose and set without gathering meaningful engagement data. That is not abundance. That is waste.”
The platform’s first product, currently branded as Sunly, will allow users to manage daylight through a personalised orbital interface featuring AI weather summaries, seasonal energy bundles, warmth preferences, and a redesigned navigation system in which “morning” has been moved to the Discover tab.
Several testers reported difficulty finding sunrise.
“I just wanted it to be light outside,” said one participant in the closed beta. “But the app said my region had been migrated to the new Dawn Experience and asked whether I wanted to connect my calendar.”
Others praised the system’s ambition while noting minor issues, including unexpected darkness, aggressive upsells, crops failing after a payment method expired, and a recurring notification asking users to rate the sun.
Abundance advocates have welcomed the project as proof that humanity can transcend scarcity through sufficient ambition, provided nobody asks who owns the machinery.
“Energy scarcity is the root of most human limitation,” said futurist and newsletter founder Theo Brant. “Once energy becomes effectively unlimited, markets can allocate it efficiently.”
Asked whether “efficiently” meant “in a way that eventually makes ordinary people furious and tired,” Brant said that was “a governance detail” and returned to pointing at a graph.
Critics argue that the main obstacle to post-scarcity is not physics, but the rich tradition of taking something good and slowly making it worse until users are paying monthly to experience a degraded version of what they already had.
“We already have enough food to feed people, enough homes sitting empty, enough technology to reduce pointless work, enough knowledge to make life less stupid,” said Professor Lena Morholt, author of You Are Not Getting The Good Future While These People Own Everything. “But sure, let’s give the same civilisation custody of the sun. I’m sure the login flow will be humane.”
A leaked HelioSphere roadmap suggests later phases may include dynamic daylight pricing, orbital ad inventory, enterprise-grade shade management, and an AI assistant named Sol, trained to explain why users are experiencing reduced warmth without mentioning margins.
Internal documents also refer to “Classic Sun,” a deprecated mode remembered fondly by older users for rising, setting, and not asking anyone to accept updated terms.
The company has denied reports that it plans to remove Classic Sun, stating only that legacy warmth will remain available “during the transition period in supported markets.”
Asked who would maintain the Dyson sphere for the next several thousand years, Tetherson said the company was “very focused on launch.”
At press time, humanity had taken another major step toward becoming a Type II civilisation by moving the moon into a separate app.