Infrared Emission From Dyson Structures Around Black Holes: Prospects for Detecting Advanced Civilizations

Advanced Civilizations Could be Using Dyson Spheres to Collect Energy From Black Holes. Heres how we Could Detect Them

Andy Tomaswick explains that an advanced civilization could harvest a black hole's energy by surrounding it with a Dyson sphere to capture the emitted power, but even with complete energy capture the heat would radiate in the infrared and could be detectable by telescopes like WISE and SDSS; an international team led by National Tsing Hua University analyzes six potential energy sources around a black hole—cosmic microwave background, Hawking radiation, the accretion disk, Bondi accretion, the corona, and relativistic jets—with the accretion disk capable of providing hundreds of times more energy than a main-sequence star for a stellar-mass black hole, making a full sphere extremely challenging with current materials, though a Dyson swarm or Dyson bubble could collect energy without the same material strength at the cost of added complexity and reduced efficiency; to maximize benefits such a structure would reside outside the accretion disk, and even detecting a single sphere would push a civilization to Type II, but some energy inevitably becomes infrared heat that telescopes like WISE and SDSS could spot out to about 10 kiloparsecs (roughly a third of the Milky Way), with no evidence yet and consistent with Fermi's Paradox, though re-analyzing current infrared data for unexpected emission from empty regions could be worthwhile.