I don't know why people are expecting the kind of supercivilizations that build Dyson spheres. It just seems too over-the-top.
The sheer amount of resources available in our own solar system, one solar system, is mind-boggling and enough to sustain a civilization for millions, maybe billions of years.
At least for humans, there would be no need to waste resources encasing the Sun in some gargantuan structure.
Instead, we'd have local nuclear fusion reactors that would be powered by a steady stream of materials from the outside. Small, effective, no single point of failure, perfectly in line with our love for individualism.
That, plus the optimization of resource usage (lower energy consumption, more recycling, etc.) - we'd be more likely to reach a certain technological point and expand as far as possible (=pretty much infinitely in space) instead of building some crazy s&&t in our galactic downtown.
To make an analogy, once we created sailing ships and navigation, we explored and conquered the whole planet. There was no need to create internal combustion engines or advanced life support systems. Those are optional even today.
It seems possible to apply Paul Graham's "blub language" principle to the Kardashev civilization categories. It may boggle the mind of a type N civilization to imagine use for the kinds of energies that a type N+1 civilization may consume, but would be obvious to the type N+1 civilization.
If you do need an energy amount that a star produces, would it be possible to get a source that's more compact than a star itself? The fusion in a star is a runaway process. Does physics let us do it better than a runaway process?
edit: It is interesting to examine this from an artistic and play perspective too. If I had the means, I imagine it would be fun to have "planet sculpting" as a hobby. We ought to be able to detect such civilizations by looking for non-spheroid planets? As a kid I've burnt leaves and written on paper by focusing sunlight using a lens. Imagine a type II kid being told "go to the other solar system and play with your megalens there, dear".
Would type II civilizations have "kids"?
"Look mommy, I made a tetrahedron by welding four planets."
"Wow, this circus rocks! How they juggle 5 intersecting solar systems without the planets crashing into each other!"
All it takes is one civilisation in a galaxy to do this and it takes everything. It is fine to hypothesise that most civilisations won't want to spread, but since it only takes one this is unlikely that all won't if civilisations are common.
I agree. Dyson sphere is the right idea (higher energy requirements) but wrong implementation. One idea I've heard that I really like is that some black holes and very dense objects are actually alien civilizations that have uploaded their brains to computers and miniaturized. So basically, some black holes == dyson spheres. It's not as crazy as it sounds!
Still too over the top. Probably the easiest way to do it would be a Dyson “mirror”, maybe two cone-shaped mirrors built around a star that focus the radiation into a disk, or a parabola on one side, something like that to harness the power and project it where it's needed (most likely to power solar sails for traveling between stars). So probably we should be looking for stars with irregular brightness that's not due to planets or instability. At some point they should also find lines connecting stars where the dust is hotter than it should be. They probably won’t find any of this, which is perplexing.
> ... Wright’s group instead turned to the Templeton Foundation, ...
Unfortunately, I have to stop reading at this point.
(In case anyone doesn't know, this foundation is motivated by religiously-conservative ideology, although I'm not sure if they overtly admit it. More often than not, studies funded by them result in conclusions like 'this universe could not have been created by accident', 'we humans are special', problems with evolution, etc, etc).
Unfortunately, I have to stop reading at this point.
At the university department I worked at, the Templeton Foundation funded a pile of quantum computation research. They fund a lot of pure research projects by cutting edge researchers that wouldn’t otherwise get funding & the results are published in major peer-reviewed journals. It’s hard to see the bias there frankly.
Templeton cultivates respectability. They are not bible thumpers. The foundation and the associated Templeton Prize do not exclusively award money to Christian initiatives. It's only pernicious to the extent that having a billionaire's fortune sloshing around funding people who give a nod toward "spiritualism" might elevate squishy "not-quite-science."
It seems like the obvious answer is that no-one is enveloping galaxies in Dyson spheres. As Dyson says at the end of the article: "The failure of one guess does not mean that we should stop looking for aliens."
The Dyson sphere is really just the extrapolation of 1950s USA - maximize comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs.
There are other extrapolations. Humans put their minds in computers -> people need more and more computing power to do the things they want to do -> all available matter is turned into processors -> energy is need to run them all. They only thing limited humans at that point is matter for processors and energy to run them. Everything else is pointless.
That has nothing to do with "maximize comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs."
This is exactly "maximize consumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs". When you decide that your use of energy / matter transcends all other purposes (including the evolution of other life) then exactly what are your priorities?
Precisely. The only thing this study tells us is that no galactic-scale civilization in the 100 or so closest galaxies fits the pattern imagined by the America of the 1950s. I find that strangely reassuring.
> maximize comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs
Exactly this. I don't think a supercivilization would emerge as one with this maxim. It would die in its own cradle. Likewise, I believe our problems of this nature must be solved here, at home, before moving out and spreading our tragic narrative elsewhere.
What if the smart cultures have realized the best way is to live quietly, sustainably in balance with nature on their planets. This might well mean not expending the vast energy needed to go to space. Perhaps also they are comfortable with themselves and do not need to seek out everyone else.
I think the problem is they are assuming that the Dyson spheres are relatively close to the star and hence the black body temperature is relatively high. If the spheres are far out or arranged in shells then their black body temperature could be only slightly above the background radiation temperature. You will not be able to detect a galaxy filled with such spheres like that optically, only by gravity.
Edit. I just wanted to add that any civilisation capable of building Dyson spheres would not waste any energy that can be captured. The emissions of any energy at any temperature more than slightly above the background radiation level would be inefficient.
Since you essentially can't store energy for long times [1], you still have to dissipate it as heat after use.
For example, you can use energy in computer calculation. Other use is transport operations (like car and naval ships) they move but the energy is transformed into air or water movement and later into heat. Another use is steel blending, you change the shape of the metal, that makes the metal slightly hot. ... Anything you do, you get a lot of heat to dispose.
Also, to dispose that heat fast enough, the dissipater has to be hot or big, because the black body radiation is the faster you can emit. A big dissipater require a lot of material, a hot dissipater waste energy, it's a tradeoff.
[1] You can store energy for a looong time making coal and burying it, the plants we have done that unintentionally . An alternative is to make a lot of aluminum and try to avoid the oxidation. But they don't look like a sensible use of energy for a civilization.
Rough estimates give me fairly low surface temperatures for Dyson spheres having the average diameter of Pluto's orbit (~ 5.85e9 km) or the Kuiper Belt (~6e10 km).
The Sun radiates ~ 10e26 Watts, or ~ 1.21e8 W/m^2 at a temperature of ~ 5800°K. Given that radiated power is proportional to (area)*T^4 and making simplifying assumptions about emissivity, etc., I get that a Dyson sphere around our Sun at Pluto's orbit would have a temperature of about 76°K, and a Dyson with a diameter of the Kuiper Belt would have a surface temperature of about 24°K.
So if the radiator is large enough (i.e., if your civilization is sufficiently advanced), you can dump stellar levels of power to space at quite modest temperatures.
Nice work. You don’t need a solid Dyson sphere of that size, just IR mirrors or Fresnel lenses (these could down to a molecule in thickness) to direct the IR energy into collectors. I would imagine that it would be more efficient to have multiple shells of Dyson spheres with each capturing the waste heat of its immediate inner shell.
I read through the original paper and the lowest object temperature they were able to detect was around 150˚K. Any Dyson sphere dumping that amount of energy would be pretty inefficient.
Terence Mckenna who I generally think is kind of, really, nuts - criticized the way of thinking which anthropomorphized the idea of alien life, In this particular case I think it is a highly valid criticism: our conception of extra-terrestrial life is perhaps akin to the ancient greek's conception of gods.
There is really no basis to assume that another life-form should in anyway resemble a human, a mammal, or some funny green dude. This should go for assumptions about an alien-life forms energy-use/requirements as well.
I used to think that way but not anymore. We didn't just pop out of somewhere with randomly created features. We are the result of an evolution and (almost) everything we have serves a purpose. If we imagine a distant planet similar to ours, bets are the evolution there will produce life forms similar to ours. Whatever the dominant life form is there, it still needs to move around, to be aware of its surroundings, to communicate, to breed, to get energy in some way.
And even if you were designing a life form, it's hard to get creative with the "features". What would you invent to replace eyes? You may put eyes on the back, you may triple the count, you may call them "the seeing things"...but you still need to have something that makes the life form aware of its surroundings.
Now, the fact that we have evolved from monkeys may be a matter of luck. On other planets the dominant life form may evolve from birds or fish but I don't think it's very likely that it will be something that we can't even imagine now.
Of course, with all this I'm assuming a "simple" model of our universe - no God, no intelligent design, no artificial intelligence and no "living in the matrix".
> bets are the evolution there will produce life forms similar to ours
That's exactly the anthropomorphic bias. Why wouldn't it be a huge mycelium? How do we even know there aren't types of life-forms made of structures that current scientific theories wouldn't consider possible?
More so it's entirely unclear why the life should have to be intelligent - or intelligent in a individual-animate-tool-building-animal kind of way.
> And even if you were designing a life form, it's hard to get creative with the "features".
It's hard to get creative, because creativity after-all builds from experience, therefore our imagination of alien life is still derived from the experience of Earth.
For that matter I'm very unconvinced that even Human civilization or life (should it survive for another 10,000 let alone 100,000 or a million) years will resemble anything like the organic individuals, with similar interests (i.e. space-travel, colonization) as it has today.
Why hadn't it? I mean, not only doesn't it posses a drop of intelligence, there isn't even something similar that does. And that's after billions of years. My guess is something like this - intelligence is the most powerful evolutionary weapon and due to the way evolution works, you only get that weapon if you have to survive among powerful adversaries. However, intelligence is of no use if the species can't react fast enough according to changing circumstances. Something with mycelium's structure can't run, can't hide and can't attack fast enough. If it somehow evolves to the point it could, it would start resembling existing intelligent species.
> More so it's entirely unclear why the life should have to be intelligent - or intelligent in a individual-animate-tool-building-animal kind of way.
All life doesn't have to be intelligent and it's not, even here on Earth. It's just that here we are discussing intelligent life that can build stuff.
> I'm very unconvinced that even Human civilization or life (should it survive for another 10,000 let alone 100,000 or a million) years will resemble anything like the organic individuals
Come on, we've had millions of years of evolution and we're still monkeys with less hair. Unless we start meddling with our DNA and/or actually develop artificial intelligence, we won't be changing much.
> Why hadn't it? I mean, not only doesn't it posses a drop of intelligence, there isn't even something similar that does.
If you were an intelligent fungus (on a planet without humans) and could express similar thoughts, you would be saying exactly the same thing about monkeys. Same goes for all of your other reasoning.
The first realistic attempt to analyze extra-terrestrial civilizations from the point of view of the laws of physics and the laws of thermodynamics was by Russian astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev. He based his ranking of possible civilizations on the basis of total energy output which could be quantified and used as a guide to explore the dynamics of advanced civilizations:
Type I: this civilization harnesses the energy output of an entire planet.
Type II: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a star, and generates about 10 billion times the energy output of a Type I civilization.
Type III: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a galaxy, or about 10 billion time the energy output of a Type II civilization.
A Type I civilization would be able to manipulate truly planetary energies. They might, for example, control or modify their weather. They would have the power to manipulate planetary phenomena, such as hurricanes, which can release the energy of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Perhaps volcanoes or even earthquakes may be altered by such a civilization.
A Type II civilization may resemble the Federation of Planets seen on the TV program Star Trek (which is capable of igniting stars and has colonized a tiny fraction of the near-by stars in the galaxy). A Type II civilization might be able to manipulate the power of solar flares.
A Type III civilization may resemble the Borg, or perhaps the Empire found in the Star Wars saga. They have colonized the galaxy itself, extracting energy from hundreds of billions of stars.
By contrast, we are a Type 0 civilization, which extracts its energy from dead plants (oil and coal). Growing at the average rate of about 3% per year, however, one may calculate that our own civilization may attain Type I status in about 100-200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years. These time scales are insignificant when compared with the universe itself.
On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to different types of civilizations:
Type 0
Chemical rockets,
Ionic engines,
Fission power,
EM propulsion (rail guns)
Here is a crazy thought what if dark matter/energy is the result of advanced civilizations? The researchers looked for decrease in visible but increase of infrared radiation, what if highly advanced civilizations can actually make use of all the energy of a star with this unexplained and unknown dark mater or energy being the result.
Whenever I read something like this, I hope that we really are alone in the universe, and just hopelessly deluded. The loneliest species inventing fantastic friends for itself.
Ha thanks, good read! i suppose with 7 billion people on this planet and internet full of conspiracy its hard to come up with original theories anymore :)
what is this nonsense? if a civilization were to emit the energy of a whole galaxy in a single planet they would blow up. Advanced civilizations won't be oriented towards spending their resources in the same way we do either. Why would a supercivilization even want or need to use that much power? Considering they are really advanced, they would orient their technology not to destroy the planet like we do here, but to emit the least amount of energy possible and focus on happiness and well being instead of expanding and destroying like primitive creatures we are.
> the Templeton Foundation, a private organization with a history of supporting controversial and speculative research
... yeah, no. Their history is of attempting to get scientific support for religion. Their aim in practice appears to be to corrupt the public discourse concerning science in the interests of religion, by swaying academics with much more money than they'd get any other way. Anything or anyone funded by Templeton should be viewed in this light.
Well... why not simulate alien superintelligences in the Matrix? Would it be that the superintelligence running the simulation isn't sufficiently intelligent to simulate itself?
As a visitor here from one of the supercivilizations in question (and enjoying the sex, red wine and rock music, I must say) I feel I have to point out a couple of things that may have been missed. One is that many of you are spending a lot of time looking for 'dark matter' when clearly the shrouded Dyson spheres are fulfilling that role in their great abundance - talk of infra-red signatures and such-like is technical defeatism. Secondly if you find a way of getting at other dimensions in the multiverse, then you can find one soon enough that consists largely of energy and funnel some of it back to your own locale. Take your pick.
What a misleading title.
First of all the title suggests that all supercivilizations build Dyson spheres, so that the absence of Dyson spheres implies the absence of any supercivilization. But in the article itself we can already find scenario's for other kinds of supercivilizations.
Second, the fact that we didn't find any sign of a Dyson sphere, doesn't prove that they are not there. We definitely can not see every (Dyson) star in those 100,000 galaxies, so even if supercivilizations require Dyson spheres, they still might be there and we could just have missed them.
Could be, but historically things have leaned towards "we are not special" and it seems like a good working assumption to continue with that. Despite previous thought, we're not really any different from animals, animals aren't really different from other forms of life, living matter isn't really different from non-living matter, our planet isn't really different from other planets, our star isn't really different from other stars, etc. That obviously doesn't prove that life is a common thing, but in the absence of better info, it gives a decent starting place.
There's also the fact that life arose on Earth almost immediately after conditions allowed for it. If it were an extremely rare event then there likely would have been some lag. Again, not conclusive, but suggestive.
Because it's incredibly improbable that we are alone given how much stuff there is in the Universe (something about 10^23 stars) and how prevalent are the chemicals we consist of.
But 10^23 could be vanishingly small compared to what's in the denominator of that probability. How do you have any idea what the odds are on the formation of life?
Does it make sense that if such energy hungry super civilizations exist, they would also covet Dyson Spheres created by other civilizations. The Dyson Sphere then have a dual purpose: capture all energy, as well as cloak the existence of the super civilization from other preditor super civilizations.
Reading such articles I always wonder: what if, by some weird chance of fate, we're among the firsts or even the first to be "out there"?
Highly improbable and whatnot - sure. But we'll never know and neither will we ever be able to give up our search either.
I think the scale is totally wrong. You don't jump from utilizing some portion of your home sun energy to totally utilizing it, next step is realizing the energy content of empty space. Solar systems can't compete with that once you can harvest energy from vacuum.
The sheer amount of resources available in our own solar system, one solar system, is mind-boggling and enough to sustain a civilization for millions, maybe billions of years.
At least for humans, there would be no need to waste resources encasing the Sun in some gargantuan structure.
Instead, we'd have local nuclear fusion reactors that would be powered by a steady stream of materials from the outside. Small, effective, no single point of failure, perfectly in line with our love for individualism.
That, plus the optimization of resource usage (lower energy consumption, more recycling, etc.) - we'd be more likely to reach a certain technological point and expand as far as possible (=pretty much infinitely in space) instead of building some crazy s&&t in our galactic downtown.
To make an analogy, once we created sailing ships and navigation, we explored and conquered the whole planet. There was no need to create internal combustion engines or advanced life support systems. Those are optional even today.