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Are Black Holes the Ultimate Power Stations?
News from astronomy and space this week
For decades men and women have searched the skies for alien radio signals. That this has so far proved fruitless is perhaps not all that surprising. Space is big, radio signals can come on any one of countless different frequencies, and radio technology is, anyway, a rather primitive approach to interstellar communications.
We might, some thinkers now suggest, have more luck looking for signs of alien engineering. These, the logic runs, should be easier to spot and harder to hide — if, indeed, aliens aren’t seeking to contact us. What, though, might that engineering look like? And if it exists, how can we distinguish it from natural objects in the sky?
At a fundamental level, the need to gather and control energy drives civilization. As they grow more advanced, so does the ability to control energy. One can picture, on a grand scale, our own global civilization in this way: advancing through the ages from simple wood fires to complex nuclear reactors.
It is reasonable, then, to think that an even more advanced civilization — perhaps thousands of years more developed than us — would build power stations of enormous complexity. They may even, some have suggested, place gigantic solar farms around stars. These “Dyson Spheres”…
