“This object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.” – Star Trek: TNG
When I was 12 I was abducted by aliens, they told me to do chores, eat my vegetables, shower, and brush my teeth. I guess I was on the mother ship.
When I was a kid, humanity knew about nine and only nine planets. One big question that we had was, because we were a sample size of one, is whether or not planets were common in the galaxy or rare. The first extrasolar planet discovered was51 Pegasi b in 1995.
The question was answered: there were other planets. But how common are planets?
We keep finding them wherever we look. Humanity has found thousands and thousands of extrasolar planets. In 2014, the estimate was that one in stars have planets about the size of Earth with a surface temperature where life (as we know it) could exist. If that’s the case? It’s certain that life exists outside of the Solar System.
That’s a lot of real estate. But is there any evidence that any of it is in use by things smarter than a paramecium or Kamala Harris?
Kamala, just Biden her time.
Recently there have been two studies by astrophysicists that point to the possibility that there are observable technosignatures, specifically the excess infrared radiation that would accompany something like a Dyson sphere. One group focused on a particular kind of star and found 7 candidates; the other study found 53 candidates looking in a different way.
I am of course referring to the physicist Freeman Dyson who popularized the idea that a civilization could take the material in a star system, munch up the planets, and surround the central star in order to use the energy. Oh, and Dyson also invented the vacuum cleaner. That’s a different Dyson, you say?
Dang.
Why would they need that much energy? Oh, they could use it for anything, making video games, or making PEZ®/Anti-PEZ™ powered starships, or running the air conditioning with the doors and windows open and leaving the fridge door open and the lights on. Man, as a dad, it hurts me to even write those words. But I still claim to be the first person, ever, to use the phrase “anti-PEZ©”.
The Future of Humanity: Galactic Empire, PEZ-Driven Starships, and Girls Drinking Beer
The starlight would fall on the sphere, it would be used to create useful energy, and the remainder would be infrared, otherwise known to most humans as “heat”, but not the 1995 movie since aliens don’t have any use for Robert DeNiro either. The big surprise is that some of these stars were radiating more than 60 times the amount of “heat” that they should be, indicating it has been absorbed by . . . something.
But some sponges are more a-loofah.
Now, that could just mean that Yo Mamma is hanging out around in space, or it could mean that there’s an explanation we’re not yet familiar with.
But then there are the fleeing O-Class stars. O stars are very hot and very young stars that burn out very, very quickly (in a cosmic time scale), with total lifespans of as low as 4 million years. Sure, that sounds like a long time, but it’s only half as old as Joe Biden.
The end of an O-Class star is nearly always a supernova – a huge explosion. Isn’t it odd that 25% of the O-Class stars that have been found are being ejected from the Milky Way galaxy at a high rate of speed? It’s almost like there might be an alien intelligence throwing bums out of the neighborhood before the pee on the garage.
What does Taylor Swift have in common with John Wilkes Booth? They both know how to get a crowd excited.
Well, I guess that was an oddly specific example.
I’ve also written before about other examples of possible technosignatures.
If other intelligent life has existed in the past and developed significant technology to gather most of the energy from their star, would they come visit?
I’ve made my opinion clear that if intelligent life exists elsewhere (which I think is probably a certainty) then the Solar System has probably been visited. By Little Green Men? Dunno about that, but it’s much easier to send a toaster than a living critter into space. They could send an A.I. out here, have it wait and watch.
This is called a Bracewell probe, and is really the plot to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sending a probe out would be relatively cheap and easy. Okay, I couldn’t afford to do it, but it would be cheap and easy if you have experience throwing O-Class stars out of the galaxy to improve the resale value of your Dyson sphere.
“Hot singles are looking for dates in your area, Dave.”
If we start hunting around the local Solar System, that would be my first guess of what we’d find, and it would probably be on some sort of weird elliptical orbit around the Sun so it can observe without being observed.
Will we ever make the jump to becoming a species that harnesses the power of our star? I don’t know. We certainly have some roadblocks to doing so.
- We’d have to overcome our tendency to turn wealth into hedonism, and avoid a civilizational tombstone that says “We Were Happy Childfree Couples and Wine Aunts” in our own Mouse Utopia (link below).
- We’ll have to make sure that A.I. doesn’t turn on us.
- We’ll have to ditch anything made by Boeing™.
- And, of course, we need to make sure we don’t blow ourselves up.
At some point, and I think this might be in the next decade if we haven’t blown ourselves up, I think we will finally have reasonable proof that intelligent life exists. In my lifetime, then, we will have gone from not knowing if other planets exist to knowing that other life exists out there.
And if other life exists out there, there’s one thing I know for sure.
If it bleeds we can kill it.
