There are many ways to scour the stars for intelligent life. You can search for radio signatures whose repetitions suggest intentional design, or examine a planet that orbits its star in a so-called Goldilocks Zone conducive for habitation. One of the wildest (but still hypothetically plausible) scenarios involves what’s known as a Dyson sphere.
Named after physicist Freeman Dyson, the idea hinges on an alien civilization so advanced that they invent a method to directly harness the energy of an entire star. Extraterrestrials could theoretically accomplish this feat in a number of ways, but the simplest approach would likely entail encasing a stellar object with orbital installations that absorb solar radiation, convert it into usable energy, and then re-emit that power back to the Dyson sphere’s engineers.
While Dyson himself once described his original 1960 paper as “a little joke,” he later conceded that the underlying technical details are “correct and uncontroversial.” Despite the joke, many researchers today agree, and argue that searching for Dyson spheres is one of the easiest ways to identify extraterrestrial life.
Unfortunately, an ongoing cosmic survey called Project Hephaistos at Sweden’s Uppsala University has once again crossed off multiple candidates from their list of suspects. According to their findings detailed in two soon-to-be published studies, a pair of faint, distant red dwarf stars aren’t surrounded by high-tech alien energy harvesters. Although disappointing, the findings highlight the ongoing versatility of one of astronomy’s most impressive tools—the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb).
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