I don't know why people are expecting the kind of supercivilizations that build Dyson spheres. It just seems too over-the-top.

The sheer amount of resources available in our own solar system, one solar system, is mind-boggling and enough to sustain a civilization for millions, maybe billions of years.

At least for humans, there would be no need to waste resources encasing the Sun in some gargantuan structure.

Instead, we'd have local nuclear fusion reactors that would be powered by a steady stream of materials from the outside. Small, effective, no single point of failure, perfectly in line with our love for individualism.

That, plus the optimization of resource usage (lower energy consumption, more recycling, etc.) - we'd be more likely to reach a certain technological point and expand as far as possible (=pretty much infinitely in space) instead of building some crazy s&&t in our galactic downtown.

To make an analogy, once we created sailing ships and navigation, we explored and conquered the whole planet. There was no need to create internal combustion engines or advanced life support systems. Those are optional even today.

> ... Wright’s group instead turned to the Templeton Foundation, ...

Unfortunately, I have to stop reading at this point.

(In case anyone doesn't know, this foundation is motivated by religiously-conservative ideology, although I'm not sure if they overtly admit it. More often than not, studies funded by them result in conclusions like 'this universe could not have been created by accident', 'we humans are special', problems with evolution, etc, etc).

It seems like the obvious answer is that no-one is enveloping galaxies in Dyson spheres. As Dyson says at the end of the article: "The failure of one guess does not mean that we should stop looking for aliens."

The Dyson sphere is really just the extrapolation of 1950s USA - maximize comsumption, ignore pollution, expand at all costs.

I think the problem is they are assuming that the Dyson spheres are relatively close to the star and hence the black body temperature is relatively high. If the spheres are far out or arranged in shells then their black body temperature could be only slightly above the background radiation temperature. You will not be able to detect a galaxy filled with such spheres like that optically, only by gravity.

Edit. I just wanted to add that any civilisation capable of building Dyson spheres would not waste any energy that can be captured. The emissions of any energy at any temperature more than slightly above the background radiation level would be inefficient.

Terence Mckenna who I generally think is kind of, really, nuts - criticized the way of thinking which anthropomorphized the idea of alien life, In this particular case I think it is a highly valid criticism: our conception of extra-terrestrial life is perhaps akin to the ancient greek's conception of gods.

There is really no basis to assume that another life-form should in anyway resemble a human, a mammal, or some funny green dude. This should go for assumptions about an alien-life forms energy-use/requirements as well.

The first realistic attempt to analyze extra-terrestrial civilizations from the point of view of the laws of physics and the laws of thermodynamics was by Russian astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev. He based his ranking of possible civilizations on the basis of total energy output which could be quantified and used as a guide to explore the dynamics of advanced civilizations:

Type I: this civilization harnesses the energy output of an entire planet.

Type II: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a star, and generates about 10 billion times the energy output of a Type I civilization.

Type III: this civilization harnesses the energy output of a galaxy, or about 10 billion time the energy output of a Type II civilization.

A Type I civilization would be able to manipulate truly planetary energies. They might, for example, control or modify their weather. They would have the power to manipulate planetary phenomena, such as hurricanes, which can release the energy of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Perhaps volcanoes or even earthquakes may be altered by such a civilization.

A Type II civilization may resemble the Federation of Planets seen on the TV program Star Trek (which is capable of igniting stars and has colonized a tiny fraction of the near-by stars in the galaxy). A Type II civilization might be able to manipulate the power of solar flares.

A Type III civilization may resemble the Borg, or perhaps the Empire found in the Star Wars saga. They have colonized the galaxy itself, extracting energy from hundreds of billions of stars.

By contrast, we are a Type 0 civilization, which extracts its energy from dead plants (oil and coal). Growing at the average rate of about 3% per year, however, one may calculate that our own civilization may attain Type I status in about 100-200 years, Type II status in a few thousand years, and Type III status in about 100,000 to a million years. These time scales are insignificant when compared with the universe itself.

On this scale, one may now rank the different propulsion systems available to different types of civilizations:

Type 0

Chemical rockets, Ionic engines, Fission power, EM propulsion (rail guns)

Type I

Ram-jet fusion engines, Photonic drive

Type II

Antimatter drive, Von Neumann nano probes

Type III

Planck energy propulsion

Here is a crazy thought what if dark matter/energy is the result of advanced civilizations? The researchers looked for decrease in visible but increase of infrared radiation, what if highly advanced civilizations can actually make use of all the energy of a star with this unexplained and unknown dark mater or energy being the result.

what is this nonsense? if a civilization were to emit the energy of a whole galaxy in a single planet they would blow up. Advanced civilizations won't be oriented towards spending their resources in the same way we do either. Why would a supercivilization even want or need to use that much power? Considering they are really advanced, they would orient their technology not to destroy the planet like we do here, but to emit the least amount of energy possible and focus on happiness and well being instead of expanding and destroying like primitive creatures we are.

> the Templeton Foundation, a private organization with a history of supporting controversial and speculative research

... yeah, no. Their history is of attempting to get scientific support for religion. Their aim in practice appears to be to corrupt the public discourse concerning science in the interests of religion, by swaying academics with much more money than they'd get any other way. Anything or anyone funded by Templeton should be viewed in this light.

Of late, they have expanded beyond religion to funding climate change denial. https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/templeto...

I know this is a bit of a divergence but does this type of finding, assuming it's true, bolster the "we are in the matrix"?

Not directly, of course, there are many other assumption that come first, as discussed above, but it's fascinating nonetheless.

As a visitor here from one of the supercivilizations in question (and enjoying the sex, red wine and rock music, I must say) I feel I have to point out a couple of things that may have been missed. One is that many of you are spending a lot of time looking for 'dark matter' when clearly the shrouded Dyson spheres are fulfilling that role in their great abundance - talk of infra-red signatures and such-like is technical defeatism. Secondly if you find a way of getting at other dimensions in the multiverse, then you can find one soon enough that consists largely of energy and funnel some of it back to your own locale. Take your pick.

What a misleading title. First of all the title suggests that all supercivilizations build Dyson spheres, so that the absence of Dyson spheres implies the absence of any supercivilization. But in the article itself we can already find scenario's for other kinds of supercivilizations.

Second, the fact that we didn't find any sign of a Dyson sphere, doesn't prove that they are not there. We definitely can not see every (Dyson) star in those 100,000 galaxies, so even if supercivilizations require Dyson spheres, they still might be there and we could just have missed them.

Why do so many people on forums like this expect intelligent life in space?

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Does it make sense that if such energy hungry super civilizations exist, they would also covet Dyson Spheres created by other civilizations. The Dyson Sphere then have a dual purpose: capture all energy, as well as cloak the existence of the super civilization from other preditor super civilizations.

Reading such articles I always wonder: what if, by some weird chance of fate, we're among the firsts or even the first to be "out there"? Highly improbable and whatnot - sure. But we'll never know and neither will we ever be able to give up our search either.

I think the scale is totally wrong. You don't jump from utilizing some portion of your home sun energy to totally utilizing it, next step is realizing the energy content of empty space. Solar systems can't compete with that once you can harvest energy from vacuum.

I'm surprised Kepler wasn't mentioned. And what is a supercivilzation? Are we one of those?