Why We Might Never See a Dyson Sphere

Back in the 1960s, a smart physicist named Freeman Dyson came up with an interesting idea. He thought that super advanced alien civilizations might build huge structures around their stars to grab all the energy the star produces.

Think of it like this: if a civilization gets really good at using energy, they might want to move beyond just using the energy from their own planet. Dyson said they could build these massive shells, which we now call “Dyson spheres,” to directly collect the star’s power. This would be a big step up on something called the “Kardashev scale,” moving them from a Type I to a Type II civilization.

Some astronomers have suggested that these “Dyson spheres” might give off unique signals, called “technosignatures,” that we could possibly see from many, many light-years away.

But even though we’ve been looking, we haven’t made any contact with aliens, let alone found one of these giant structures sucking up a star’s energy.

And according to a report in “New Scientist,” there might be a good reason for that. A scientist named Brian Lacki, who works with the Breakthrough Listen Initiative – a project that searches for signs of alien civilizations – thinks that Dyson spheres might destroy themselves before we ever get a chance to find them.

In a research paper that hasn’t been officially reviewed yet, Lacki suggests that having lots of satellite-like objects all around a star at the same time could lead to a really bad chain reaction if they crashed into each other.

As Lacki told “New Scientist,” “When you have a whole bunch of things moving together like that in a swarm, a natural question is going to be, do they sometimes bump into each other? At their orbital speeds, that can be disastrous.”

This kind of risk is actually something we’re already seeing around our own planet. Scientists have been warning for a long time that satellites orbiting Earth could collide with each other or with all the space junk up there. This could even start a domino effect called “Kessler syndrome.” Experts have warned that it’s “only a matter of time” before a collision could cause a big problem.

Lacki believes that aliens would have to be extremely careful to make sure that the objects in their Dyson spheres don’t run into each other.

Jason Wright, an astrophysics professor at Penn State who wasn’t involved in Lacki’s research, told “New Scientist,” “You just can’t have that much material around a star without it colliding with itself and eventually shredding itself to pieces, unless each of those swarm components is careful about managing its orbit.”

Lacki’s idea brings up an interesting possibility: we might still be able to find the signs of Dyson spheres that have already fallen apart orbiting distant stars. However, without those clear “technosignatures,” they would be incredibly hard to find.

When it comes to using the Sun’s power ourselves, researchers “have previously found” that we would need to break apart a planet as big as Jupiter to build a Dyson sphere around our own star. That would be a huge – and probably very risky – undertaking.