Suppose a civilization somewhere in the cosmos is approaching Kardashev type III status. In other words, it is already capable of using all the power resources of its star (4*1026 W for a star like the Sun) and is on the way to exploiting the power of its galaxy (4*1037 W). Imagine it expanding out of its galactic niche, turning stars in its stellar neighborhood into a series of Dyson spheres. If we were to observe such activity in a distant galaxy, we would presumably detect a growing void in visible light from the area of the galaxy where this activity was happening, and an upturn in the infrared. Call it a ‘Fermi bubble.’
That’s the term used by Richard Carrigan (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) in his latest work on what he calls ‘interstellar archaeology,’ the search for cosmic-scale artifacts like Dyson spheres or Kardashev civilizations. A Fermi bubble would grow as the civilization creating it diffused through space. Carrigan notes that, as Carl Sagan and others observed, the time to colonize an individual system is small compared to the travel time between stars. An expanding front of colonization might then move forward at a rate roughly comparable to the space travel velocity. A civilization could engulf its galaxy on a time scale comparable to the rotation period of the galaxy, and perhaps a good bit shorter.
Evidence for Artifacts?
You might think a galaxy like the M51 Whirlpool galaxy would be ideal for such study, but Carrigan says a rough qualitative estimate shows there are no unexplained ‘bubbles’ at the level of 5 percent of the M51 galactic area. The quest is tricky because spiral galaxy structure includes natural voids — even if a void in visible light with infrared enhancement were traced, it would be hard to regard it as anything other than natural. In fact, James Annis has suggested that elliptical galaxies , which exhibit little structure, might be a better place to look for Fermi bubbles than spiral galaxies. Whatever the case, we’ve moved a long way from conventional SETI, listening for intentional transmissions from other civilizations.
Image: M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. A so-called ‘Fermi bubble’ might appear as a void in visible light here. NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: N. Scoville (Caltech) and T. Rector (NOAO).
Where else could we turn in the study of interstellar archaeology? Theoretically, synthetic or unnatural constituents in an exoplanet atmosphere could one day show us a sign of ETI. We’re already managing to study the atmospheres of particular gas giants, but thus far we lack the spectral sensitivity to clearly identify atmospheric signals of life or intelligence. A better bet might be stellar spectral signals, looking for example for signs of nuclear fission waste products that have been disposed of inside a star. More intriguing still is the idea of spectral modulation in stars nearing the end of their lives. Writes Carrigan:
…in the red giant phase Earth will most likely be swallowed as the sun expands. On the other hand if there was some possibility of life continuing the situation might engender a spirit of grand engineering and also an urge to communicate. In many cases the red giant environment generates varying maser signals. Modulation could emerge from dust clouds… moving and transforming in the spirit of weather systems on the Earth. (“Dust clouds” here is used to describe dust clumps around a star.) Modulation could also arise from linking the magnetic field from a Jupiter-scale planet and the stellar equivalent of the solar wind.
Dyson Spheres as Markers
As to those Dyson spheres, their use would greatly expand the useful area for activities for any culture that could build them, absorbing most or all visible light and re-radiating the energy of the star at lower temperatures. Various searches for infrared excesses around visible stars –hoping to target a partial Dyson sphere, perhaps a ring — have been attempted, but no candidates emerged from searches of several thousand stars. Even a pure Dyson sphere, completely surrounding its star, is a tricky catch because there are natural objects that mimic it, especially since dust clouds surround stars as they are born and as they die.
Carrigan used data from the IRAS spacecraft’s database of low resolution spectra, discarding objects that had been previously well categorized and narrowing the sample to sixteen sources that he calls ‘mildly interesting.’ The result:
Only three of these had relatively low spectral statistical fluctuations. All of the sixteen sources have some feature which clouds their identification as a Dyson sphere. In practice, most of the LRS candidates have higher temperatures and just don’t look much like the spectrum expected from a Dyson sphere. The search suggests that there are few if any even mildly interesting candidates within several hundred light years of Earth.
What can we do to sharpen the search for objects like Dyson spheres? Carrigan adds:
…a Dyson sphere does not require intent to communicate on the part of a civilization. The current detection reach is comparable to a SETI search. However there is a problem of confounding signatures from mimics such as carbon stars. Searches for potential Dyson spheres would be sharpened by developing more realistic pictures of construction scenarios including such factors as time to build and approaches to stability… Finally it would be interesting to consider how stellar evolution might stimulate the necessity of such large scale structures with a view to looking at candidate objects in the later stage of evolution along the main sequence.
A Parallel Track for SETI
When we contemplate the kind of structures or effects sought by the interstellar archaeologist, we acknowledge they demand technologies so far beyond our own that their construction seems all but miraculous. We can look for Dyson spheres, for example, but scarcely imagine how a culture could build at this scale. But these are limitations of our own state of development, and they don’t keep us from extrapolating to what civilizations far older than our own might be capable of developing.
Image: A Hubble Space Telescope view of the diverse collection of galaxies in the cluster Abell S0740, some 450 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Centaurus. The giant elliptical looms large at the cluster’s center. Would we be able to detect signs of interstellar engineering in such an object? Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration.
As we supplement existing SETI searches with the search for interstellar artifacts, we have much to do to separate natural signatures from possible signs of intelligence, but engineering on a stellar or even galactic scale should be observable if our imaginations give us a serious hint of what to look for.
The paper is Carrigan, “Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology” (preprint available). Highly recommended especially for its overview of current scholarship on the subject, including the fascinating work of James Annis and his search for Kardashev Type III civilizations. Note this on Annis’ work:
The distribution of galaxies on a plot of galactic optical brightness or luminosity versus the maximum rotation velocity or radius of the galaxy follows a fairly consistent pattern. Cases lying below the typical galactic trend line reflect visible light that has been absorbed and emitted somewhere else in the electromagnetic spectrum. Annis examined existing distributions for spiral and elliptic galaxies and looked for sources below the normal trend lines where more than 75% of the visible light would have been absorbed. No candidates were found in a sample of 137 galaxies. From this Annis inferred a very low probability of a Type III civilization appearing that would be found using this search methodology.
But Carrigan goes on to say:
With more recent information it is possible to extend the search to samples that are considerably larger and also more robust. It may be time to revisit this possibility. In particular with a sample ten to one hundred times larger one could examine the nature of a handful of outliers in more detail looking for any unique features such as a higher than normal infrared component. These outliers might be candidates for a radio SETI search.
Be aware as well of Martyn Fogg’s Planetary Engineering Bibliography, another useful source for sharpening our understanding of what future engineers might do.
I think tesh has an interesting and rather depressing point: Right now we can see many signs that people are losing interest in the physical world, preferring to immerse themselves in virtual realities in their free time. Go on the internet instead of space. It is so much easier, and more interesting.
Similarly, even science and technology are becoming more and more focused on us (our bodies and our society) rather than the world out there. Why is it, you think, that doctors, lawyers and bankers are payed more than engineers and scientists? How often do you see space missions mentioned in the news, compared with, say, Sarah Palin?
It may be that the simple solution for the Fermi paradox is that as soon as a civilization develops the technology to effortlessly fulfill their basic needs, as soon as the conquest of the physical world is no longer a direct matter of survival, they turn inward, not taking advantage of the new-found ability to venture out. Maybe the moon landing was mankind’s last great venture into the physical world.
Eniac said:
“It may be that the simple solution for the Fermi paradox is that as soon as a civilization develops the technology to effortlessly fulfill their basic needs, as soon as the conquest of the physical world is no longer a direct matter of survival, they turn inward, not taking advantage of the new-found ability to venture out. Maybe the moon landing was mankind’s last great venture into the physical world.”
Eniac has just written what has been my deepest concern about our civilization, i.e. we’ll turn inward until resource depletion permanently excludes the possibility of again looking outward. There maybe a very narrow window of opportunity within which a civilization has the economic and technological ability to get off-planet.
I agree with both Eniac and and Gary Allen and had the same concern on my mind as a result of Tesh’s post: an increasingly inward looking civilization may become inherently decadent and vulnerable to decline and even extinction. In fact this is something that we can see in human history.
This is also what constitutes my major skepticism about concepts like ‘uploading’, singularity and the like as a (sustainable) future for an intelligence: apart from any resource scarcity or technical malfunction (those can probably be overcome or minimized), as I have argued several times before: any small ‘island civilization’, no matter how sophisticated and sustainable in itself, is inherently and extremely vulnerable to *external* disaster due to chance events (geological, astronomical, etc.).
Therefore, I am convinced, that long-term survival of any species, intelligence and civilization, and its offshoots, will depend on two things: adaptation and ability to excercise risk-spreading though dispersal.
“There maybe a very narrow window of opportunity within which a civilization has the economic and technological ability to get off-planet.”
Probably the best sentence that I have read in this context for years. Exactly what I mean and would like to shout in the faces of the leaders and decision makers of this world, who seem so terribly preoccupied with the cheap accessibility of a few oil wells in the middle-east for a couple more years.
I do not see this as an inevitable, manifest destiny from the gods, but a rare opportunity to avoid our otherwise inevitable demise and seize with both hands as long as we can.
If you are an American, can you send that sentence to your congress person ;-) ?!
I would like to add one tiny bit of “optimism”. People like to compare the United States to the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic arguably hit its high water mark when it defeated Hannibal in 202 BC. The Roman Republic though victorious then went through an agonizing process of slow economic and political self-destruction that climaxed when the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla defeated the established order in 82 BC. Sulla’s rise to power guaranteed the Roman Republic’s eventual death. To some extent the United States is following this dismal process, i.e. equate 1945 AD to 202 BC. However Rome’s technological and economic high water mark was NOT under the Republic. I believe most classical scholars would agree that Rome hit its economic high water mark under the Emperor Hadrian who ruled from 117 to 138. This same sort of analysis can also be applied towards the ancient Greek civilization. Greek civilization is well known for the achievements of Athens during the Greek Classic. Unfortunately classical Greek civilization collapsed after the end of the Peloponessian War (404 BC) and the rise of Macedonia (Athens self destructed). We see the same scenario as with the Roman Empire that the Hellenistic Greek world that rose up after Alexander the Great actually had a much stronger economy, a higher level of technology and generally better standard of living (Archimedes died 212 BC). It seems a historical rule-of-thumb that Golden Ages occur under nominal democracies while Silver Ages happen under authoritarian rule the follows the collapse of democracy. Golden Ages tend to produce beautiful art work and literature but it is the Silver Ages that tend to produce significant economic and technological advance. For obvious reasons, I’m not very happy about this but I believe the American Silver Age is in our future (it’s maybe a century away). It is during this future American Silver Age that we’ll have our last shot at getting permanently off-planet.
I did not mean to spread doom and gloom all around. I do not believe for a moment that we will lose the ability to go for the stars, just perhaps the interest in going there. For obvious reasons we must maintain, bolster, and even dramatically improve our technology. For example, we are still dying from age and disease, and some of us are still hungry. Or, more ominously, we haven’t all killed each other, yet.
All the historical analogies are of limited usefulness, here, because neither the Greeks nor the Romans achieved the degree of domination of the physical world that we have today.
I am quite hopeful that, once technology has advanced to the point that living in space is easy (and fun), some of us will do it. But it won’t be because of economic necessity, because that is a problem we will have solved by then, right here on Earth. It also won’t be because Earth is uninhabitable, since it is hard to imagine what could happen to Earth to make it less inhabitable than empty space, or even Mars.
Why do people go to Everest, when you can’t even get a decent Hot Dog there? We will go because we can.
Eniac: “All the historical analogies are of limited usefulness, here, because neither the Greeks nor the Romans achieved the degree of domination of the physical world that we have today.”
Bingo! Global resource depletion and over-population are beyond any previous human experience. The Greek and Roman historical analogies fail when confronted with the problem of resource depletion. One is left with the much less optimistic Easter Island / Rapa Nui analogy. Under the Greek and Roman analogy we might have our Silver Age but lack the natural resources to rebuild a Space Program, i.e. we’d be restricted to city states with a 19th century agrarian technology.
Eniac and Garry Allen: maybe, at least this is my hope, that we can leap-frog to a required higher and more sustainable level of technology and civilization once we master nuclear fusion. With near-unlimited energy we can make or obtain almost anything.
Of course a breakthrough Heim/Dröscher&Häuser/Tajmar/Ciao anti-gravity propulsion would be very nice too ;-)
Gary, what I meant by “domination of the physical world” actually is the opposite of resource depletion, I think of it as expanded resource utilization. The Romans were sitting on plenty of petroleum, but didn’t know it was there. They were thus much more resource constrained than we are today. The roman empire might well have collapsed because they ran out of trees to burn (example, without claim of historical accuracy). There were prophecies of doom early last century that we would all suffocate in horse dung if traffic kept increasing the way it was. Today, traffic has increased way beyond those dire predictions, our air is much cleaner than it was then, and transportation is way more convenient and less expensive.
In the future, I expect this trend to continue, until we shake off completely the last vestiges of resource constraints (such as our irrational belief that we need more oil) and worry about other things (longevity, space exploration, or the latest Cameron movie)
Charles Stross had an interesting plotline in Accelerando in which advanced civilizations tend to consume so much bandwith that they end up becoming unsuitable for space colonization; this would be one explanation for the lack of evidence.