by Paul Gilster | May 13, 2015 | Astrobiology and SETI |
It was natural enough that Richard Carrigan would come up with the model for what he called ‘Fermi bubbles,’ which I invoked in Monday’s post. A long-time researcher of the infrared sky, Carrigan (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, now retired) had mined data from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in 2009 to mount a search for interesting sources that could be Dyson spheres, entire stars enclosed by a swarm of power stations, or conceivably wrapped entirely by a sphere of material presumably mined from the planetary population of the system.
Carrigan’s work on infrared sources goes back well over a decade, involving not only data mining but theorizing about the nature of truly advanced civilizations. If we were to find a civilization transforming a galaxy by gradually building Dyson spheres to exploit all the energies of its stars, we would be witnessing the transformation from Kardashev Type II (a culture that uses all the power of its star) to Type III (a culture that exploits its entire galaxy’s energies. Carrigan reasoned that areas of such a galaxy would gradually grow dark in visible light, the signature of the civilization’s activities becoming traceable only in the infrared.
Both Carrigan and the researchers in the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies (G-HAT) project at Penn State point out that there are natural phenomena that could mimic the Fermi bubble. In a recent paper, the G-HAT team led by Jason Wright mentions a kind of galaxy known as a flocculent spiral as a case in point. Unlike the classic spiral with well-defined structure, these are galaxies with discontinuous spiral arms. What might be perceived as a ‘bubble’ structure here would almost certainly be a natural feature.
Image: NGC 4414, a flocculent spiral galaxy in an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It would be tricky business to find the signature of a Fermi bubble here given the lack of definition in the spiral arms. A bright foreground star from our Milky Way Galaxy shines in the foreground of the image. Credit: Olivier Vallejo (Observatoire de Bordeaux), HST, ESA, NASA.
Galaxy in Motion
But I think the G-HAT critique of the Fermi bubble idea truly gains strength when we consider the motion of stars in the galaxy vs. the times needed for galactic colonization to occur. For we have to remember that when we’re dealing with a galaxy of stars over billions of years, we have to set the galaxy in motion. In a 2014 paper cited on Monday, Wright and company note this:
The static model of stars, in which a supercivilization can be said to occupy a compact and contiguous region of space, is a reasonable approximation for short times (? 105 years) and in the case of fast ships (with velocities in significant excess of the typical thermal or orbital velocities of the stars, so ? 10?2 c). In such cases, the stars essentially sit still while the ships move at a significant fraction of c and populate a small region of the galaxy in some small multiple of the region’s light-crossing time.
Remember that the shorter the period for colonization, the briefer the ‘window’ for finding a Fermi bubble. But would such bubbles be apparent even assuming the slowest possible expansion?
The G-HAT team’s work makes a compelling case that they would not. For longer times, and assuming slower ships, the static model fails and fails badly. Stars do not stay in one place, and galactic rotation muddles the works. The G-HAT paper considers what it calls ‘conservative timescales’ for a ‘slow’ colonization of the Milky Way. We can use this work to consider a maximum galaxy colonization time to give us a sense of how apparent galactic colonization would be. It also has ramifications, and significant ones, for Michael Hart’s view that we are alone in the galaxy, but I’m not going to stray from the Fermi bubble question in this post.
Imagine that a single spacefaring civilization emerges that uses colony ships traveling at 10-4 c, a speed not so different from our own interplanetary probes. Also assume a very slow launch rate, so that a ship is launched every 104 years, with a maximum range of 10 parsecs. This is slow travel indeed: The travel time to the nearest stars in this scenario is roughly 105 years, a time during which 10 more ships will be launched. The paper explains that this travel speed is comparable to the velocity dispersion of stars in the galactic midplane, a fact that brings new stars into range of the colony ships.
This is an expansion without pause because as the stars mix locally, a stellar system can continue to populate the ten nearest stars every 105 years:
To first order, the stellar system can thus continue to populate the 10 nearest stars every 105 years, without immediately saturating its neighborhood with colonies or the need to launch faster or longer-lived colony ships to continue its expansion. Further, arrival of the colony ships at the nearby stars should not be modeled as a pause in the expansion of the civilization. Rather, the colonies themselves will continue to travel at these speeds with respect to the home stellar system, and themselves encounter fresh stars for colonization every 105 years, during which time they can also launch 10 colony ships.
Using halo stars, which have high relative velocities in relation to the disk, for gravitational assists can provide a boost in cruise speed that allows higher speeds. We wind up with the capability of crossing the galaxy on a galactic rotational timescale. Here is a model of slow expansion that is anything but the uniform growth imagined in a static field of stars:
The slow expansion of an ETI should thus be modeled not as an expanding circle or sphere, subject to saturation and “fronts” of slower-expanding components of the supercivilization. A better model is as the mixing of a gas, as every colonizing world populates the stars that come near it, and those stars disperse into the galaxy in random directions, further “contaminating” every star they come near. If halo stars are themselves colonizable, then those that counter-rotate and remain near the plane will provide even faster means of colonization, since they will encounter ? 10 times as many stars per unit time as disk stars.
Here again we note the key fact that this stellar motion obscures any well-defined Fermi bubble:
Non-circular orbits also provide significant radial mixing, and Galactic shear provides an additional source of mixing that is comparable to that of the velocity dispersion of the disk stars once the colonies have spread to vrot/?v ? 1/10 of galaxy’s size, or ? 1 kpc from the home stellar system.
Remember, these are extremely conservative assumptions, and they still show that when a civilization begins to colonize its nearest stars, it will populate the entire galaxy in no more than 108 to 109 years. The maximum timescale for galactic colonization is found to be on the order of a galactic rotation (108 years) even for present-day probe speeds. This has implications for the detectability of Fermi bubbles, for on a rotational timescale, such bubbles will be subject to rotational shear and thermal motions that disperse and ‘mix’ them. Or as Centauri Dreams regular Eniac put it in a comment yesterday, “Such bubbles would be sheared into streamers in relatively short order. The spread of civilization would look more like milk stirred into coffee than a clearly delineated expanding bubble.”
The upshot here is that it will be only during a fairly brief period of a galaxy’s history that a spacefaring civilization will have populated only a single contiguous part of that galaxy. The length of that time depends upon how fast the civilization is capable of expanding — the faster the expansion, the shorter the time to observe the interim period between Kardashev Levels II and III. The transition between this era and the galaxy-spanning civilization to follow is, by galactic standards, relatively brief. And if we assume the slowest possible expansion, our Fermi bubbles would be quickly obscured by natural stellar motion within the galaxy. Fermi bubbles, if they do exist, are going to be exceedingly hard to find.
The paper is Wright et al., “The ? Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. I. Background and Justification,” The Astrophysical Journal Vol. 792, No. 1 (2014), p. 26 (abstract / preprint). I consider the SETI work that Jason Wright and his colleagues Matthew Povich and Steinn Sigurðsson are doing with the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies project to be ground-breaking, and plan to check in with it often.
by Paul Gilster | May 11, 2015 | Astrobiology and SETI |
I’m enough of a perfectionist that when I get something wrong, I can’t rest easy until I figure out how and why I missed the story. Such a case occurred in an article I wrote for Aeon Magazine called Distant Ruins. The article covered the rise of so-called ‘Dysonian SETI,’ which is adding an entirely new dimension to current radio and optical methods by looking into observational evidence for advanced civilizations in our abundant astronomical data.
In the story, I homed in at one point on the work that Jason Wright and his colleagues Matthew Povich and Steinn Sigurðsson are doing with the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies (G-HAT) project at Penn State. Keith Cooper went over the basics of this effort on Friday, putting his own spin on the group’s recent search of 100,000 galaxies. For more background, see Jason Wright’s Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies essay.
I noted in the Aeon article that the G-HAT team was examining infrared data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Spitzer Space Telescope in search of the signs of an advanced civilization. What I had wrong in my description was the statement that “Wright’s group is also looking for ‘Fermi bubbles’, patches of a galaxy that show higher infrared emissions than the rest, which could be a sign that a civilisation is gradually transforming a galaxy as it works its way across it.” I know I drew the idea of Fermi bubbles from Richard Carrigan’s work, and generalized from there, but generalizing was a mistake, because it turns out that the G-HAT team doesn’t believe Fermi bubbles are something we could detect.
Below is the ‘Whirlpool’ galaxy, M51, a beautiful image and a useful object for study because we are looking at a spiral galaxy in many ways like the Milky Way from an angle that lets us see it face-on. Could we see Fermi bubbles here?
Image: The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies in the sky. The above image is a digital combination of a ground-based image from the 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and a space-based image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: N. Scoville (Caltech), T. Rector (U. Alaska, NOAO) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA.
Richard Carrigan has studied this galaxy closely, looking for such Fermi bubbles, which he described in a 2010 paper. Here’s my description in Toward an Interstellar Archaeology, written for these pages in the same year:
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.’
Carrigan (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) studied M51 and concluded that there were no unexplained ‘bubbles’ at the level of 5 percent of the galactic area. The Whirlpool galaxy seems like an ideal place to mount such a search given its orientation towards us. A Fermi bubble, if such things exist, might manifest itself as a void in the visible light we see in the image.
Carrigan talked about an expanding front of colonization as an advanced civilization moved through its galaxy, engulfing the galaxy on a time scale comparable to the galaxy’s rotation period or even less. But M51 produced no ‘bubbles,’ and James Annis would suggest that elliptical, rather than spiral, galaxies might be a better place to look for Fermi bubbles because ellipticals exhibit little structure, so that a potential void would stand out.
Here’s Carrigan in the 2010 paper (citation below) on how a civilization on its way to Kardashev Type III status might proceed:
If it was busily turning stars into Dyson spheres the civilization could create a “Fermi bubble” or void in the visible light from a patch of the galaxy with a corresponding upturn in the emission of infrared light. This bubble would grow following the lines of a suggestion attributed to Fermi that patient space travelers moving at 1/1000 to 1/100 of the speed of light could span a galaxy in one to ten million years. Here “Fermi bubble” is used rather than “Fermi void”, in part because the latter is also a term in solid state physics and also because such a region would only be a visible light void, not a matter void.
Wright and the G-HAT team are not persuaded by Carrigan’s Fermi bubbles. For one thing, as Carrigan has noted himself, bubble-like structures are not unusual in extragalactic astronomy, and spiral galaxies include areas that might mimic a void that would be hard to regard as anything but natural. In one of their recent papers, the G-HAT researchers add that with galactic arm widths on the order of ~ kpc, it is difficult to identify structures below this size scale.
The Annis idea, therefore, seems more useful, but for now let’s home in on that word ‘void.’ In the Aeon story, I referred to the galaxy VIRGOHI21 as a galaxy that contains a ‘void.’ But that’s a mistake, for as Jason Wright explained in a recent email, Virgo HI21 has no emissions at any wavelength except 21cm. It may, in fact, be a starless or ‘dark’ galaxy, a galaxy composed of dark matter, although the nature of the object is still controversial. The G-HAT team, according to Wright, has studied Virgo HI21 and found no infrared emission.
In any case, as Wright explained, the word ‘void’ isn’t appropriate, for galaxies do not actually contain them. Areas where there has been no star formation for the past 10 million years or so may manifest themselves as darker lanes between the spiral arms, and dust lanes may also appear dark, but Wright does not believe the shape of these darker lanes is consistent with the spread of a civilization. In any case, these are not voids. They contain just as many stars as other regions in the galaxy. So detecting Fermi bubbles gets to be more and more problematic.
Fermi bubbles would be hard to detect for other reasons as well, as explained by the G-HAT team and presented in their recent work. This is intriguing stuff, having to do with the time scales involved in the spread of a civilization and the motions of stars in that period — these ‘bubbles’ would not be static! I want to look at this issue next but probably won’t be able to get the piece written and published before Wednesday due to an intersection of competing duties elsewhere.
The Carrigan paper is “Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology,” JBIS Vol. 63 (2010), p. 90 (preprint). The G-HAT paper I am discussing today and on Wednesday is Wright et al., “The ? Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. I. Background and Justification,” The Astrophysical Journal Vol. 792, No. 1 (2014), p. 26 (abstract / preprint).
by Paul Gilster | May 8, 2015 | Astrobiology and SETI |
Our speculations about advanced civilizations invariably invoke Nikolai Kardashev’s scale, on which a Type III civilization is the most advanced, using the energy output of its entire galaxy. Given the age of our universe, a Type III has seemingly had time to emerge somewhere, yet a recent extensive survey shows no signs of them. All of this leads Keith Cooper to consider possible reasons for the lack, including societies that use their energies in ways other than we are imagining and cultures whose greatest interest is less in stars than in their galaxy’s black holes. Keith is an old friend of Centauri Dreams, with whom I’ve conducted published dialogues on interstellar issues in the past (look for these to begin again). A freelance science journalist and contributing editor to Astronomy Now, Keith’s ideas in the essay below help to illuminate the new forms of SETI now emerging as we try to puzzle out the enigma of Kardashev Type III.
By Keith Cooper
It’s not often that SETI turns up with a result that can be considered far-reaching, but the initial results from the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies (G-HAT, or ‘?’ for short) survey, which Paul wrote about in April (see G-HAT: Searching for Kardashev Type III), fit the bill. Using publicly-available data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), astronomers have searched 100,000 galaxies for anomalous infrared emission that could be an indication of heat emitted from vast energy collectors and their consumers encircling myriad stars.
The idea is that as a civilisation grows more technologically advanced, its hunger for energy increases. Civilisations could build Dyson spheres to capture all the energy from their star; as they spread to other stars, they may build Dyson spheres around them too. After perhaps a few million years, they spread amongst all the stars in their galaxy, building Dyson spheres around every one of them. The Dyson spheres grow hot and re-radiate some of that thermal energy away as mid-infrared radiation. Consequently, a galaxy that has been completely filled with intelligent, technological life should completely alter the light coming from that galaxy, pushing it more towards the infrared.
Yet the search of 100,000 galaxies has not turned up even one single galaxy that has the signature of a civilisation harvesting the energy of an entire galaxy of stars. This would be analogous to a Kardashev Type III civilisation, referring to the scale developed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev to measure a civilisation’s energy usage. He based his scale on the Milky Way, so a Type III civilisation resident in our own Galaxy would have a total output of 1036 watts; an analogous civilisation in another galaxy may have a higher or lesser energy output as a consequence of the differences in the number of stars between galaxies, but for the purpose of this article we’ll describe them as Type III too.
Going down the scale, there are Type II civilisations, which harness the energy of a single star, which in the case of the Sun would be 1026 watts; again, for other stars, this will vary. Meanwhile a Type I civilisation is able to collect all the energy available to it on its home planet, which for the case of Earth is about 1016 watts. Carl Sagan further developed the scale, adding graduations between the types. Human civilisation comes in at just 0.7 on the Kardashev–Sagan scale.
Image: A Kardashev Type III civilization would be able to exploit the energy of all the stars in its galaxy.
The point of all this is that the G-HAT result throws a spanner in the works, by finding no Type III civilisations anywhere. It demands that we look again at the Kardashev scale and the assumptions that it makes.
Indeed, at first glance it may seem like bad news for SETI. After all, the Universe is very old, as are the galaxies that inhabit it. There should have been plenty of time for a civilisation, or more than one civilisation, to colonise and collect the energy from every star they come across in their galaxy, so why haven’t they?
There are a couple of reasons why the apparent absence of Type III civilisations might not be bad news for SETI. First, although there may be no Type III civilisations out there, Jason Wright of Penn State University, who founded the G-HAT project, says we shouldn’t yet discount civilisations below that level.
“This search would have only found the most extreme case of advanced civilisation, one that had spread throughout its entire galaxy and was capturing and harnessing one hundred percent of the starlight for its own purpose,” he told me when asked about G-HAT’s findings. “Kardashev 3.0 is the most extreme possible case, but there could still be a Kardashev 2.9, where only ten percent of the starlight is being used, or 2.8 where only one percent of the starlight is being used. So we’ve ruled out 3.0, but we’ve not even gotten down to 2.9 percent yet, much less something smaller like 2.5, that could be very hard [to detect].”
So far, the G-HAT analysis has found no galaxies with an infrared emission signature suggesting more than 85 percent of the starlight is being converted into thermal radiation. Fifty galaxies in the survey did stand out as having greater than 50 percent of the starlight being transformed into infrared emission, and follow up work on these is the next step, but to confuse matters there are also natural phenomena that can mimic this infrared emission, chiefly interstellar dust. Starburst galaxies, which are experiencing a severe bout of star formation, produce substantial amounts of dust. This dust absorbs starlight, heats up, and re-emits at mid-infrared wavelengths. The fifty galaxies with high infrared emission are quite possibly starburst galaxies (one of them, Arp 220, certainly is).
Image: Messier 82 (top of image), seen here with the spiral Messier 81, is a starburst galaxy, meaning it is currently forming stars at an exceptionally high rate. This huge burst of activity was caused by its close encounter with Messier 81, whose gravitational influence caused gas near the center of Messier 82 to rapidly compress. This compression triggered an explosion of star formation, concentrated near the core. The intense radiation from all of the newly formed massive stars creates a galactic “superwind” that is blowing massive amounts of gas and dust out perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. This ejected material (seen as the orange/yellow areas extending up and down) is made mostly of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are common products of combustion here on Earth. It can literally be thought of as the smoke from the cigar. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.
However, the analysis has not yet looked at galaxy type. “That would be an excellent next step, to separate out the galaxies that have a lot of dust and which we would expect to be giving out a lot of heat, from the ones that have hardly any dust and shouldn’t be giving out any mid-infrared radiation at all,” says Wright. He is referring here in particular to dust-free elliptical galaxies; if one was found to have infrared emission that might be relatively low compared to a starburst galaxy, but was high for an elliptical galaxy, it might signal something unusual.
It would seem then that there could still be life in these galaxies, life that could be technological, star-faring and energy consuming – we’ve barely scratched the surface. And yet, one pertinent question still remains unanswered: where are all the Type III civilisations?
The G-HAT results tell us that Type III civilisations do not exist (or, at best, have a frequency of less than one Type III civilisation per 100,000 galaxies). This is why I suggested at the top of this article that this result is far-reaching – we now know something that we didn’t know before, namely that civilisations do not seem to reach Type III status. This, though, is the second reason why the result is not necessarily bad for SETI. Think of it this way: the Kardashev scale has become part of the SETI furniture since it was first proposed in 1964. The G-HAT result forces us to question our assumptions about the Kardashev scale and broaden our thinking about extraterrestrial civilisations to encompass other ideas.
Of course, any model has assumptions inherent in it. So let’s assume that technological extraterrestrial civilisations do exist in the Universe and that they are far older than we are (dictated by the fact that the Universe is very old, and there has been plenty of time for civilisations to have gotten well ahead of us before there was even life on Earth); these seem fairly safe assumptions for this kind of discussion. Somewhere along the line they are falling off the Kardashev trajectory. Why?
I want to flag up three possibilities. They may not be the only possibilities. We’ll discount for now the notion that civilisations could destroy themselves – once they become interstellar the task of destroying themselves becomes inordinately more difficult, so for our purposes we’ll assume they at least reach the stage of interstellar flight. On what alternate trajectories away from the Type III destination could their evolution take them?
1. They fail to colonise all the stars
This hypothesis would to an extent fit with the G-HAT observations – extraterrestrial civilisations haven’t built Dyson spheres around 100 percent of the stars in any of 100,000 galaxies, but the result leaves room for them to have done so around a smaller percentage of stars. Perhaps the best reasoning as to why an advanced civilisation possessing the ability for interstellar travel would fail to colonise an entire galaxy is Geoffrey Landis’ percolation theory.
Landis makes the assumption that interstellar travel is short haul only. We might be able to make direct flights to alpha Centauri or epsilon Eridani, but anything much beyond that, moving at just a small fraction of the speed of light – let’s say between 5 and 10 percent – is going to take far too long. So instead, civilisations will hop across the cosmos via the stepping stones of the colonies they set up along the way. For example, imagine three worldships leaving the Solar System for pastures new: let’s say alpha Centauri, epsilon Eridani and Barnard’s Star, all of which are relatively nearby. They set up colonies there, begin building Dyson spheres and perhaps, after a few centuries, those colonies are ready to send out their own pilgrims to new stars further afield, which then found new colonies and, after a few centuries, they too head out on voyages of colonisation, and so on. Over the millennia, humankind’s reach gradually telescopes outwards.
What Landis realised was that not all colonies will seed daughter colonies. The drive to go further will not exist in every colony; cut-off from their mother-world, Earth, by time and space, they build their own cultures, their own histories, and face their own, perhaps unique, challenges. Some will be content to not explore further. Others may destroy themselves, or exhaust their resources before they can build a Dyson sphere. In some cases, there may be no worlds in nearby systems suitable for colonisation. The consequence of any of these possibilities is that some colonies will become dead ends and will fail to colonise further.
To model this, Landis assigns a probability of being colonised to a given planetary system. If that probability is above a critical threshold, then it will be colonised. If it is below the threshold, colonisation of that system will not take place. Eventually, all colonies may result in dead ends, ultimately limiting the extent to which that species colonises the galaxy it exists in. Even if there is one line of colonisation that does continue for a time, there will be voids all around it, left empty by the dead end colonies. A civilisation would struggle to reach Type III status in this fashion.
Landis’ percolation theory is not without its critics. Robin Hanson of the University of California, Berkeley, points to economics and argues that the only way to survive would be to keep up with a colonising wave because the wave would consume all the resources, leaving little of value behind it, a kind of ‘burning of the cosmic commons’ as Hanson describes it. Jason Wright is also critical, arguing that the proper motion of stars would eventually allow active colonies to spread to other stars. For what it’s worth, Landis agrees that the percolation model is not without its problems.
Landis counters that the motion of stars is slow, at least compared to the lifetimes of civilisations in human history, although Wright points out that all a colony then has to do is wait for one of its neighbours to die off before moving in. Landis is unperturbed by the critics, however.
“A lot of people have commented saying they don’t think it is a sophisticated enough model and that they think it needs more work, and that’s fair,” he told me during an interview in 2013. “I just worry that a model that has too much sophistication into which you are putting data that has no validation is hard to really justify.”
Perhaps percolation theory as it stands isn’t therefore the best solution, but instead maybe it’s a good starting point for considering alternatives to how civilisations could migrate through a galaxy.
2. Their energy requirements are low
Another alternative may be that they never really begin to climb the Kardashev ladder at all, which could lead to two outcomes.
Serbian astrophysicist Milan ?ircovi? has described civilisations that are driven by optimisation, rather than expansion. The optimisation is focused primarily on computation (Jason Wright suspects that Type II and Type III civilisations would use large amounts of their energy for computing, which produces heat). An optimised society would not need to colonise other stars and capture their energy because they would lack the population or computing power that would otherwise soak up vast amounts of energy.
“An optimised society is intrinsically less likely to be observed because most of the things that we tend to associate with advanced technology and advanced societies actually consist of waste energy and the waste of resources,” ?ircovi?, referring to the Kardashev scale, told me in an interview around five years ago.
An optimised society need not be limited to one planetary system – they may still wish to explore, sending out probes to all corners of their galaxy, but colonising star systems to harvest their energy and resources is not on their list of ‘to do’ things. Rather than building galactic empires, optimised civilisations could be like the ancient Greek city states, which would send out scouts just to explore, says ?ircovi?.
Jason Wright acknowledges that a galaxy-spanning civilisation need not be a Type III civilisation; it could still be possible to colonise a galaxy without having to build Dyson spheres around every star. Such galaxy-spanning civilisations could be very hard to detect. However, if an advanced civilisation has had time to colonise a galaxy, why would they not build all those Dyson spheres? The distances involved would mean that colonies, or clusters of close colonies, would develop their own societies relatively independently of the others. Some may chose to become optimised, others may be expansionist and energy-hungry, but the result would be a galaxy-spanning civilisation that does not use all the energy of that galaxy.
3. Black holes are more interesting
I confess, I’m rather taken with this idea. It could still be wrong, but it strikes me as being more purposeful than percolating slowly and somewhat randomly through a galaxy, and more ambitious than an optimised city state.
Suppose Kardashev is right, and Milan ?ircovi? is wrong, and that civilisations actively seek energy. So let’s imagine that a civilisation reaches Type II status, after which it heads for the stars, perhaps even building Dyson spheres around some of them. Estimates suggest that there could be as many as 100 million stellar mass black holes in our Galaxy. Some of them remain dark, while a few are lit up in X-ray binary systems, feeding off a companion star. Sooner or later a star-faring civilisation is going to bump into a black hole. What then?
Image: Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The ratio between the black hole Schwarzschild radius and the observer distance to it is 1:9. Of note is the gravitational lensing effect known as an Einstein ring, which produces a set of two fairly bright and large but highly distorted images of the Cloud as compared to its actual angular size. Credit: Alain r (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.
Black holes seem to hold a special fascination for physicists: they create the most extreme gravitational conditions in the Universe, making them a great place for thought experiments. Numerous physicists including John Wheeler, Roger Penrose, George Unruh and Princeton’s Adam Brown have all speculated on methods by which, in principle, it might be possible to draw energy from a black hole. And my, so much energy! Paul Davies in his book The Eerie Silence suggests that a spinning black hole could power our present human levels of energy consumption for at least a trillion trillion years, long after the stars have gone out.
There are numerous options for deriving energy from black holes. Hawking radiation is not the best option, because it leaks out at a trickle, is very low temperature and is difficult to bottle. Small black holes that evaporate relatively quickly would be more efficient for this, but they would not last long. Hawking radiation would make the perfect waste disposal system though – drop your rubbish into the black hole, wait a little while and get energy from Hawking radiation back out.
Then there is the energy radiated by the hot plasma in an accretion disc around a black hole, which is often funneled away in a magnetically collimated jet. This could be created artificially – perhaps by sending a steady stream of asteroids and comets, perhaps even planets and stars themselves using Shkadov thrusters (giant mirrors larger than a star, which act as immense solar sails, the mirror’s huge gravity pulling the star along with it) to nudge the star towards the black hole. Alternatively, there are instances in nature whereby a star naturally exists next to a black hole – the aforementioned X-ray binaries (though in many X-ray binaries the black hole is substituted for a neutron star). Jason Wright suggests that the energy efficiency of such a system would be 10 percent, making it the most efficient sustainable method of converting mass to energy.
Then there is the rotational energy of a spinning black hole. To illustrate the concept, in their book Gravitation, Charles Misner, Kip Thorne and John Wheeler imagined some form of cosmic dump truck swooping down through a black hole’s ergosphere – a region just outside a rotating black hole where an observer is forced to rotate with the black hole, but at the same time can also extract energy from the black hole. The dump trucks, each packing a million tonnes of rubbish, take a particular trajectory through the ergosphere and are able to tip out their industrial waste into the black hole. The dump trucks recoil from the ejection of the rubbish and are catapulted back the way they came, stealing away some of the black hole’s rotational energy in the process. Because the mass of the black hole has increased by the mass of the garbage dumped into it, the mass-energy of the black hole is higher than before the dump truck entered it, allowing the truck to leave with more energy than it started with. To put this in terms of the amount of energy available, up to 29 percent of the mass of the black hole is expressed in terms of its rotational energy, according to Paul Davies – this is leagues above the one percent of a star’s mass that is radiated away over a stellar lifetime.
Image: Artist”s impression of a black hole and a normal star separated by a few million kilometres. That’s less than 10 percent of the distance between Mercury and our Sun. Because the two objects are so close to each other, a stream of matter spills from the normal star toward the black hole and forms a disc of hot gas around it. As matter collides in this so-called accretion disc, it heats up to millions of degrees. Near the black hole, intense magnetic fields in the disc accelerate some of this hot gas into tight jets that flow in opposite directions away from the black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada.
The difference between collecting energy from stars and latching onto black holes is that you can do more with black holes than simply generating power, and it is these extra factors that could make them more attractive than colonising the stars. For one, black holes could potentially make the most powerful computers in the Universe. A computer’s computational power is a function of both its computational efficiency and its mass. Black holes have great mass, but computational efficiency? That would take a bit of organising. The trick is to use Hawking radiation, which is formed of pairs of virtual particles that appear close to the black hole’s event horizon.
For each pair, one particle heads inwards towards the black hole’s singularity, while the other quantum tunnels its way through the event horizon and escapes. However, both particles are forever connected via quantum entanglement. Now, send matter into the black hole – perhaps the waste on the dump trucks – in a specific fashion to ‘program’ the black hole, and it will interact with the infalling Hawking radiation particles. This interaction, specifically fine tuned, will then change the state of the outgoing Hawking radiation particle via entanglement, hence producing an ‘output’. Of course, all the Hawking radiation would have to be gathered, sorted through for the relevant bits of data and processed using knowledge of quantum gravity, a theory that remains stubbornly beyond our limits for the time being.
Then there is the possibility proposed by Sir Roger Penrose that black holes are the birth-sites of new universes; an advanced civilisation may choose to somehow enter one of these universes in a black hole, therefore disappearing from our Universe.
Pressing black holes into service could possibly be within reach of an advanced civilisation; black holes provide astoundingly attractive destinations for intelligence. Clément Vidal, in his book The Beginning and the End, points out that there is a surprising over-abundance of X-ray binaries within three or four light years of the galactic centre – maybe advanced civilisations around their stellar-mass black holes migrating towards the supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy?
Perhaps. The stars still have their attraction, but as the G-HAT result shows, we need to start looking for alternatives to Type III civilisations. These are just three ideas – your own ideas may well be better!
