Dyson Spheres Key to Find Alien Civilizations Higher on Kardashev Scale
Searching for intelligent life in the universe? Then look for their energy source. An update on the hunt for Dyson Spheres.
In June of 1960, astrophysicist Freeman Dyson published his paper Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation in the journal Science. In it he argued a way to detect intelligent life in the universe by finding their energy signature that would be created by, he presumed a highly advanced technology.
He wrote, “If extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist and have reached a high level of technical development, one byproduct of their energy metabolism is likely to be the large-scale conversion of starlight into far-infrared radiation.”
Dyson, who died one year ago this month at age 96, believed that an advanced technology would harness solar power from a star with an array of solar panels. He explained in a 2003 interview that he once described it as a biosphere, but since then this theory has been known as a Dyson Sphere.
Dr. Seth Shostak Sr. Astronomer at the SETI Institute explains, “If you’re looking for E.T., if you’re looking for intelligence elsewhere in the universe, you’ve got to figure there are societies out there that are way more advanced than we are, you know the universe has been around for a long time. And they may have constructed something like a Dyson Sphere, or more accurately a Dyson Swarm, or something we can see. And there have actually been searches for alien Dyson Spheres.”
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NASA Announces How It Will Report ET Contact
NASA Chief Bill Nelson says looking for extraterrestrial life is part of NASA’s mission, as its top scientists call for a detailed system for classifying ET life.
In a huge departure from the US government’s historical treatment of UFOs and possible ET life, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in an interview with University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato, “[W]ho am I to say that planet Earth is the only location of a life form that is civilized and organized like ours?”
Meanwhile, top NASA scientists are calling for a scaled system for reporting any evidence of extraterrestrial life modeled after NASA’s progressive scale of Technological Readiness Level already in use for new spaceflight equipment.
Instead of the binary “life or no life” way of looking at off-planet discoveries, these scientists are suggesting a more nuanced way of reporting what they find. Cheryl Costa, retired journalist, UFO statistician, and author of the UFO Sightings Desk Reference, thinks it’s about time.
“I think it’s long overdue, they’ve been talking about this stuff for years. They know that there have been unidentified things in our skies since biblical times,” Costa said. “The fact that they’re finally owning up to the idea of classifying alien life. Their scale is going to have to run the range of organic molecules all the way up to sentient beings, so it needs to be a pretty big scale, and it’s nice to start seeing bonified scientists looking at this issue and saying ‘OK, we need to do this.'”
And what about NASA Administrator Bill Nelson’s comments?
“I think it’s refreshing that the NASA chief came out and said ‘Yeah, maybe’ on the UFOs and off-world life. I think they still know more than they’re telling us. I’m happy NASA is coming out with this stuff, I think they’re trying to feed it to us a little spoonful at a time. They don’t want to scare the populace,” Costa said.
