Astronomers are on the Hunt for Dyson Spheres
Astronomers are on the Hunt for Dyson Spheres
In the Kardashev Scale, a Type II Civilization would build a Dyson Sphere around their star. A team of astronomers are searching for them.
Okay, so the title is a bit off. They're hunting for partial Dyson spheres using infrared and optical.
I was confused on how they would detect something completely blocking a sun from millions of light-years away.
Even a Dyson sphere, which is technically unlikely anyway, would be possible to spot. You would look for something very bright in the infrared spectrum with almost no light in the visible spectrum. It would also be larger than a normal star of the same energy, but that would be hard to tell given all the other issues.
A partial swarm is easier because it will have variability towards more infrared and then back to a more normal spectrum.
And, of course, all this is speculation until we find a candidate and determine it doesn't have a natural source for that behavior.
Dyson swarms are more likely. We even have a tiny one with our satellites using solar power in a heliocentric orbit. (Dyson spheres are basically impossible.) But we could theoretically detect either in infrared since if it doesn’t give off waste heat, it’d all heat up and melt.
That being said, I’m personally of the opinion this is a waste of time. Not to get all Fermi Paradox but it’s pretty sci fi brained to think any other species out there is as dumb as we are. Space sucks. You die super fast there. Everything had to align just right for Earth to make a bunch of dumb fuck apes willing to strap themselves onto rockets, have a planet small enough that the rocket could even overcome gravity to enter orbit using chemical rockets, and a World War and Cold War to accelerate things.
Time will always be the great filter. Even if we did spot a Dyson swarm, we have no feasible way to contact anything on a practice timescale. Any speck of civilization we detect will be hundreds of thousands of years out of date at best, billions at worst. Life in the universe, imo, is basically guaranteed. If it happened once, it can happen again. Meaningful contact between separately evolved concurrent sapient species? Not likely.
Everything had to align just right for Earth to make a bunch of dumb fuck apes willing to strap themselves onto rockets, have a planet small enough that the rocket could even overcome gravity to enter orbit using chemical rockets, and a World War and Cold War to accelerate things.
Given the estimated number of planets in this galaxy alone, it's particularly guaranteed that very similar events have occurred on multiple worlds. Unless you're proposing that all theoretical alien races are Vulcan level logical then tensions and interstate conflicts will always exist that will advance technology. This is practically an inevitability unless the race question is a hive mind species.
If it was actually completely enclosing a star that would be impressive. It would also be a bit pointless, since It would result in your spear heating up to stupid temperatures, Which would cause it to glow in the infrared, so you would detect it by that infrared.
Isn’t the idea that the sphere would have a circumference the size of earths orbit? Not sure it would heat up all that much to be noticeable.
blocking a star*
Pretty much immediately after coming up with the idea for what we call dyson spheres, dyson himself recognized that they would not be stable and that a swarm of collectors made infinitely more sense
This feels like trying to determine FTL travel is possible by looking for warp signatures. We don't yet know megastructures are feasable.
Agree this sounds ridiculous, but isn’t this the basic point of science? Propose something is possible, then make predictions and see if you can prove or disprove. The Dyson Sphere idea itself is ridiculous, but to the extent you can detect large scale technology around a star, that would be fantastic. Even better, this is simply a query on existing data. Imagine if they detected intelligent life this way!
Kind of reminds me of the search for Dark Matter. That whole idea sounds so preposterous yet is the best fit for our current knowledge. But we can make predictions based on this. What could all this matter be to fit the theory while remaining undetected so far? Then you can build particle detectors to find them and particle accelerators to explore conditions for causing them. Eventually we should be able to either detect that matter or to rule out enough possibilities for another theory to better fit our knowledge
We don't really know that building a long-term colony on the Moon or Mars is feasible. We assume that it is because there's no obvious reason that it isn't possible other than it being difficult, but that's just a matter of working up to the necessary technology level.
There's nothing inherently problematic in the idea, it's just very big and ambitious. Equally we have no reason to believe that mega structures are not possible, you throw enough resources and science at the problem. FTL on the other hand has real physical restrictions against its existence, we have no reason to believe those restrictions can be overcome.
Dyson spheres are just very very big, no new crazy negative energy, subspace conduits required, just brute force engineering.
True! Long-term travel within the heliosphere is still thwarted due to the radiation of CMEs which require 350cm of concrete for protection. (Our manned trips to the moon were timed during solar minimum, and still had some worrying moments). While a moon base would could be accomplished by putting it underground (or having shelters underground at minimum) it still keeps us from getting to Mars.
Then there's the matter of creating a self-sustained ecology. All of our efforts so far have either died off or required infusions of elements to perpetrate. Also only a matter of time before we work out a configurable system.
But both of these are something like nuclear fusion, in that we know it can actually be done because we have natural examples (even if self-sustaining nuclear fusion only exists in the core of a star, we're pretty sure it happens IRL). We don't have signs of FTL or megastructures that don't collapse into a giant ball of mass. To qualify for a megastructure, we'd simply have to create something that is millions of meters. Our current freestanding structures measure in the hundreds of meters, and we have at most a few kilostructures like the LHC (27KM) which depends a lot on its fixture to the earth.
So yeah, it's a matter of developing the technology, but I suspect there are a lot fewer decades and great filters between when we figure out surviving CMEs in space versus building megastructures in space that don't collapse.
In the Kardashev Scale, a Type II Civilization would build a Dyson Sphere
I know there's an methodical thought process behind those things, but mhh... this feels more fiction than science to me.
I'm fine with research, but I'm worried some might use it as a slippery slope into pseudo science.
I don't think there's any real risk of that. The media often like to overhype scientific inquiries but all they're doing is looking at existing data
A Ringworld would be more likely than a Dyson sphere, the mass requirements are so much lower.
Wouldn't a Dyson swarm be much easier to construct than either? Like a dyson sphere but a swarm of smaller collectors.
A swam doesn't produce anywhere near the real estate though. So I guess it really depends entirely on why the megastructure was built, if it's only for energy extraction then yeah, a Dyson swarm makes the most sense. But if they also want to use it for habitation then it's not a really great idea. Sure you can spread space station's throughout the swarm, but then groups in space station A are always going to find it difficult to interact with groups in space station B, no matter how commonplace space travel is. It would be like intentionally building two cities on either side of a canyon, and saying it's okay because aircraft exist.
Ringworlds are not orbitally stable so they are firmly in the realm of sci fi.
Neither are Dyson spears
what's ringworld?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld_series
Imagine a slice of a Dyson sphere, about one earth wide and one earth deep.
As an owner of three private for profit Dyson spheres, I strongly disapprove.
Stellaris users in the wild
Let's say we detect one in some other galaxy. What then? And how do you reach out to them?
Well if we find one we have proof of advanced life elsewhere in the universe. That's the most important thing. Reaching out will take millions of years.