… And The Key To Unlimited Energy
The Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960.
According to his paper, published in Science magazine, a technologically advanced alien civilization would use increasing energy as it grew. As the most significant source of energy in any solar system is the parent star, sooner or later, civilization will build orbiting solar panels to try to capture it. Such structures would occupy more and more space until they eventually covered the entire star, forming a sphere.
In a 2008 interview with Slate, Dyson credited the concept to writer Olaf Stapledon, who introduced it in his 1937 novel, Star Maker.
Dyson’s hypothesis was complex to verify because a complete Dyson sphere, absorbing all of the light from the star, would be invisible to an exoplanet hunting telescope (such as NASA’s Kepler). Only half-completed spheres would have a chance to be discovered.
Unfortunately, a Dyson sphere is unlikely to remain under construction for long. The time it takes to make a Dyson sphere is relatively short. A 2013 paper by Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg (“Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi Paradox“) estimates that disassembling Mercury to make a partial Dyson shell could be done in 31 years.
An alternative approach would be to search for waste heat in the infrared spectrum. After being absorbed and utilized, the energy from a star needs to be re-radiated; otherwise, it would build up and eventually melt the Dyson sphere. This energy would be shifted to longer wavelengths so that a Dyson sphere might give off a peculiar energy signature in the infrared. In other words, Freeman Dyson saw a search for his namesake spheres as a complement to what Frank Drake’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI, see earlier blog post) had begun to do with radiotelescopes.
Carl Sagan and Russell Walker first raised an issue with Dyson’s SETI notion in their 1966 paper, “The Infrared Detectability of Dyson’s Civilizations,” published in the Astrophysical Journal. The authors noted that:
discrimination of Dyson civilizations from naturally occurring low temperature objects is very difficult, unless Dyson civilizations have some further distinguishing feature, like monocromatic radio-frequency emission.
In the following decades, the search for Dyson spheres expanded dramatically. Starting from the 1980s, researchers began using sources identified by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). These early searches produced little or no results, as most Dyson sphere candidates had non-technological explanations or needed further study. Later investigations using NASA’s space-based WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey), which has higher resolution than IRAS, have all concluded that the identification of a promising source would not, in itself, be proof of an extraterrestrial civilization unless the object could be followed up with more conventional approaches, such as a laser or radio search.
The latest developments about Dyson spheres are:
- Dyson spheres could be built around black holes instead of stars.
Black holes can radiate incredible amounts of energy (105 times more than the Sun) produced by the so-called “accretion disk” of gas and dust falling into the black hole’s maw. Due to their spiraling and spinning motions, these materials heat up through friction to millions of degrees, emitting extremely energetic X-ray photons.
But why would an alien civilization decide to build a Dyson sphere around a distant black hole (if it weren’t “distant,” the civilization would have been “eaten” long before it managed to construct the sphere) rather than using their much closer parent star? Black holes concentrate an enormous mass into a space area smaller than a star’s, and therefore easier to encircle. On the downside, black holes often have bursts of activity followed by quiet periods as they consume varying lumps of matter in their disks. An alien species must protect its orbiting structures from the massive explosions that might destroy them.
- Dyson spheres could circle the husks of sunlike stars known as white dwarfs.
Every star has a finite lifetime. If a civilization were to arise around a typical sun-like star, then someday that star would evolve into a red giant and eventually leave behind a white dwarf. That process would roast the inner planets of its solar system and freeze the outer ones as the white dwarf cooled. Thus, the civilization would have to choose between moving to another system or building a series of habitats that harvest the radiation from the remaining white dwarf. It seems unlikely that a civilization, no matter how advanced, would go through the enormous effort of traveling to another star only to build a Dyson sphere.
This allows a direct connection between stellar lifetimes and the prevalence of Dyson spheres.
If enough aliens decided to build Dyson spheres around their white dwarf homes, astronomers should find at least one Dyson sphere in white dwarf surveys. The presence of a megastructure, such as a Dyson sphere, around a white dwarf would absorb part of its radiation and convert it into reusable energy. Since no conversion is 100% efficient, this process would leave behind waste heat that would escape as infrared light.
Astronomers have already found many white dwarfs with excess infrared emission, which is usually attributed to dust in those systems, rather than being explained as megastructures. According to a 2022 paper by retired UCLA astrophysicist Ben Zuckerman, no more than 3% of habitable planets around sunlike stars are likely to give rise to a white dwarf sphere-building civilization. Still, there are so many planets orbiting sunlike stars that this calculation only provides an upper limit of 9 million potential alien civilizations in the Milky Way.
For more information on this topic, please visit the following links: IS THE UNIVERSE AN AWFUL WASTE OF SPACE and ROGUE WORLDS.
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