Got mine plugged in: gonna vacuum later
Okay, so the title is a bit off. They’re hunting for partial Dyson spheres using infrared and optical.
I was confused on how they would detect something completely blocking a sun from millions of light-years away.
Dyson swarms are more likely. We even have a tiny one with our satellites using solar power in a heliocentric orbit. (Dyson spheres are basically impossible.) But we could theoretically detect either in infrared since if it doesn’t give off waste heat, it’d all heat up and melt.
That being said, I’m personally of the opinion this is a waste of time. Not to get all Fermi Paradox but it’s pretty sci fi brained to think any other species out there is as dumb as we are. Space sucks. You die super fast there. Everything had to align just right for Earth to make a bunch of dumb fuck apes willing to strap themselves onto rockets, have a planet small enough that the rocket could even overcome gravity to enter orbit using chemical rockets, and a World War and Cold War to accelerate things.
A Ringworld would be more likely than a Dyson sphere, the mass requirements are so much lower.
RTFA they are looking for swarms, rings, and other subtypes of Dyson Spheres.
I read the fucking article. What makes you fucking think I didn’t?
The fact that you just reiterated one of its points.
Huh. So commenting on the content of the article means it wasn’t read? That’s a really odd position to take.
Easy there cowboy
This feels like trying to determine FTL travel is possible by looking for warp signatures. We don’t yet know megastructures are feasable.
Agree this sounds ridiculous, but isn’t this the basic point of science? Propose something is possible, then make predictions and see if you can prove or disprove. The Dyson Sphere idea itself is ridiculous, but to the extent you can detect large scale technology around a star, that would be fantastic. Even better, this is simply a query on existing data. Imagine if they detected intelligent life this way!
Kind of reminds me of the search for Dark Matter. That whole idea sounds so preposterous yet is the best fit for our current knowledge. But we can make predictions based on this. What could all this matter be to fit the theory while remaining undetected so far? Then you can build particle detectors to find them and particle accelerators to explore conditions for causing them. Eventually we should be able to either detect that matter or to rule out enough possibilities for another theory to better fit our knowledge
