What you actually said was:
> You don't need to build the entire thing, just some solar panels floating in space an attached to something useful (e.g. our communications satellites) fit the bill.
Where the implication is that we'd attach these solar panels to something useful and that an example of something useful is the communication satellite. Whereas you wanted to infer that communications satellites were the entire enchilada, a solar panel attached to something useful. Which is also a bit disingenuous as the panel is a part of the satellite, the power source, not an add-on. Which pretty much led to the confusion.
> A Dyson swarm is an orbiting collection of artificial satellites, orbiting the sun.
That's a reduction as to what it actually is. A big part of the Dyson architecture is to capture and use the energy provided by a star. Simply having a satellite orbiting the Sun would not fit the bill.
And a space based solar power satellite does not exist. Because it's more expensive to launch and implement than it would return. All current solar power on satellites provide enough power to power themselves. That's it. What you are asking for is something different.
NASA themselves says that a SBSP satellite is decades away at the earliest. And any proposition to be speculative at best.
And yes, necessity is technically the mother of invention but it can't change the laws of physics. It can't change the cost of what's necessary.
> You're deluded if you think you can get random people on HN to defend their statements to a level you'd be happy with.
This is just a dodge. You've done nothing but say "It's not unforeseeable" and "It's inevitable". You haven't actually provided a reason as to why you think that. I'd be happy with anything more than a handwave in the general direction of the actual issues facing building a Dyson swarm.
> Honestly I don't have the time, and even if I did I don't care.
You do care, you just don't really have any answers besides the blind faith of "technology". Which is no better than blind faith in anything. Believing technology will get better doesn't actually make it better.
Hence why I said (e.g. our communications satellites), which in English means communications satellites are examples of useful things with solar panels attached "floating" in space...
> And you do realize that a Dyson anything is an engineering project that far exceeds anything we have yet attempted. If your plan begins with strip mining a planet 48 million miles away with an army of self-replicating robots, you've obviously skipped a few steps of the process.
I already mentioned that's a strawman. A Dyson swarm is an orbiting collection of artificial satellites, orbiting the sun. It captures all or a good deal of the energy radiating away from the sun - but it's built incrementally and a single satellite can be the start of a Dyson swarm - so we have the tech now.
> You're asking skeptics to prove that we will never reach that level of technology rather than answer the question of why do you think we will. You're the one with the actual claim here, back it up.
You're deluded if you think you can get random people on HN to defend their statements to a level you'd be happy with. Honestly I don't have the time, and even if I did I don't care.
But since you've got me to engage this far, here goes: we have the tech to build solar powered satellites and launch them into orbit around the sun. So we could start building a Dyson swarm today.
The reason we don't is because it's very expensive, and we suffer a chicken-and-egg problem. There's not much demand for industry in space because we don't build anything in space. The inputs and outputs would have to come from and return to Earth. There's no demand for habitations in space because there's no supporting infrastructure, food, water, jobs, etc. Not to mention the long term health effects of living in space seem problematic to say the least. But it's not unforeseeable that something could change that situation, be it overcrowding on earth, demand for space mining, demand for zero-g manufacturing, space war, government programs, etc.