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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Were Elephants Engineered As Living Metaphors of Grace And Patience?
Earth and human beings were most likely constructed as scientific experiments by extraterrestrial races, that is if you ascribe to the ancient astronaut theories of Erich von Däniken or Zecharia Sitchin. Given this, it’s possible that many of our planet’s species, living and extinct, were infused with unique sets of attributes meant to teach and inspire us.
At the birth of the great Earth experiment, aliens may have had justifiable fears around the dangers of what they were creating. They knew that the outcome would be unpredictable, and most likely, unimaginable. From experience, they recognized the dangers inherent in an experiment like this one.
It stands to reason that our alien architects must have known that developing simpler, somewhat limited, and possibly conscious species in tandem with human beings might preserve their experiment and related research.
“People are so difficult. Give me an elephant any day.”
— Mark Shand
