Chethana Janith, Jadetimes Staff
C. Janith is a Jadetimes news reporter covering science and geopolitics.
Extraterrestrials may be hiding somewhere we haven’t looked: black holes.
A cosmologist suggests we should look for exploration, along with energy signatures, to try and find aliens.
Dyson spheres of some kind may be built to harvest energy from dark matter in black holes.
Exploration and Dyson black holes both give researchers more things to look for in the universe.
An Iranian cosmologist has recently suggested another way we could look for extraterrestrial life in our universe. Could it be, he wonders in a new paper (which appears now on the preprint site arXiv), that these advanced alien civilizations are using Dyson spheres around primordial black holes as a way to gather energy? And, if so, how could we look for the signs? His work makes some big assumptions that may not be justified, but this specific type of cosmology has always been a little far out - and it’s where the biggest insights can sometimes lie.
Shant Baghram is a physicist at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. His new paper, which is an unusual solo work in a long career of collaboration with colleagues and graduate students, is a quick-and-dirty introduction to ideas like SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), the Drake equation, and the Dyson sphere - all hallmarks of those who theorize about alien civilizations.
A Dyson sphere is a thought exercise first put forth by Freeman Dyson, a broad-thinking physicist whose career lasted many decades before he died in 2020 at the age of 96. He imagined an advanced alien civilization that relied more and more on computers and data, leading to a bottleneck in energy that couldn’t be solved by any source we are aware of on Earth. To address this, Dyson theorized, a civilization could surround a star with solar panels and turn it into a de facto nuclear fusion power plant.
Another thought exercise, the Kardashev scale, tries to turn civilizations with Dyson spheres and other advanced energy structures into measurements. The line of thinking goes like this: civilizations will grow more and more computerized as they advance, requiring their energy to scale up in ways we can barely imagine. A civilization might end up draining energy from its surrounding stellar systems, for example, or even its entire galaxy in order to power its own needs.
On this Kardashev scale of energy use measurement, Earth is a 0. Baghram estimates that an advanced, AI-powered alien civilization would be between a 2 and a 3, and then takes the concept one step further to suggest a next step measurement for civilizations of this nature, which he calls the space exploration distance. Us puny humans on Earth have managed to send the Voyager I probe over 15 billion miles away - imagine what a civilization with a Dyson sphere amount of energy and advancement could do.
Baghram suggests that a newer idea - a construction similar to a traditional Dyson sphere, but built around a type of black hole instead of a star - could help civilizations powered by energy-sucking AI computers, while also giving scientists on Earth someplace to look for these extraterrestrial civilizations beyond energy-captured stars. Primordial black holes also may offer energy in the form of dark matter, which Baghram believes an advanced civilization is likely to have figured out (to us here on Earth, dark matter and primordial black holes are still very much mysteries).
Baghram’s new work is basically suggesting that the patterns we (or SETI) look for now may be our best bet for eventually noticing another civilization. By adding the factors of space exploration distance into our calculus, we may be able to spot tendrils that lead back to main hubs of advanced intelligent life. And if we’re lucky, these tendrils may be lined with new “generators” made of Dyson-captured primordial black holes - something potentially much easier to stumble across while exploring space than primordial black holes themselves.
For the alien hunters at SETI and elsewhere, this means adding a new phenomenon to the list of faraway blobs that could potentially be alien civilizations. The more data, the better.
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