And a break from the madness....Potential Dyson Spheres in the Milky Way?....

Re: And a break from the madness....Potential Dyson Spheres in the Milky Way?....

quozzel

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Re: And a break from the madness....Potential Dyson Spheres in the Milky Way?....

Jun 16, 2024, 8:02 PM

There's a whole pile of possible megastructures out there they're looking for, and it all comes back to "what stage of power generation is this alien civ in"?

We're entering the fusion age. It's likely going to be driven by Helium-3 fuel, a heavier isotope of standard Helium-2. The first spot we'll likely find that in any useable amount is on the sunlit side of the moon, deposited by solar winds into the regolith, where we'd have to process it out of moon rocks. Next we'll move on to far bigger sources - particularly the hydrogen-helium gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn - where He-3 is likely to be present at far greater scale...imagine some vast collector stations, essentially sticking giant straws down into the atmosphere and extracting the helium, looking for the heavier isotope.

Those stations could well be visible to sensitive enough arrays if another civ is close and advanced enough, and it's entirely possible if there's a nearby alien civ at the He-3 fusion stage, we may see them back when we get to that stage ourselves. But it's the next stage - antimatter - that is far more likely to get noticed. Basically what you'll likely see are vast solar traps - essentially giant butterfly nets - designed to magnetically bottle antimatter particles expelled by the sun, and those solar nets are likely to be immense - as in, hundreds or even thousands of kilometers across. The geek community calls these things "a-mat farms." And those could well be visible from several light-years off. If they were present at, say, Alpha Centauri we'd probably see them.

There's some other theoretical exotic megastructures - ringworlds, McKendree cylinders, Alderson disks, Bishop rings, Matrioshka brains - that might well be visible from light-years away as well. But the a-mat farms would likely come first and a whole lot more attainable than a Dyson sphere, which would require every gram of mass from thousands of other solar systems to build.

So far we haven't seen any. But like the Dyson spheres, we've been looking for them.

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