The Search for Dyson Spheres

Since we talked about Freeman Dyson in class, I figure this post is pretty on-topic. In September, a team of astronomers at Penn State and elsewhere started a two-year search for Dyson Spheres with funding from the Templeton Foundation. Aside from writing about the future wonders of green technology, Freeman Dyson postulated that, in order to maximize the energy collected in a civilization's solar system, that civilization would build a spherical array of solar panels around their star. Dyson's theory plays a role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence-- while SETI is busy looking for a radio signal from space that requires so much power to be generated that we don't have the capability on Earth to do it, the search for Dyson Spheres does not assume that aliens would want to use so much energy for outside communication. When the team of astronomers is searching for Dyson Spheres, they check for large sources of infra-red radiation, which is essentially excess energy given off as heat by solar panels.

I found this news really exciting because it sounds like a story out of a science fiction novel. Here's more information from the article on Dyson Spheres: on the Kardaschev Scale, which is a model of the energy consumption of a developing civilization, a civilization that builds a Dyson Sphere would be a Type II civilization. A Type 0 civilization takes its energy from organic fuels on its home planet, while a Type I civilization uses all of the energy available on its home planet and a Type II civilization uses all of the energy available from its home star. From what I can tell, this progression of development assumes very little about the nature of the developing civilization in question, and so the search for a Dyson Sphere sounds more practical (if indeed the search for extraterrestrial intelligence can be termed practical, which is up for debate) than the search for a radio signal at one or more of the specific frequencies that SETI is monitoring.


Sources:
 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-best-way-to-find-aliens-look-for-their-solar-power-plants/263217/#
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale