The search for alien life comes in many flavors, from hunting for Earth-like planets, to looking for stars with Sun-like characteristics, to tuning into some kind of alien transmission. But for more than 60 years, one particular type of search for alien worlds has centered around the idea of a Dyson Sphere.
First proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, the idea is that a sufficiently advanced civilization (at least Type II on the Kardashev scale) would be capable of harnessing the power of its host star by constructing a kind of cocoon that could tap into a large percentage of the star’s released energy.
Over the years, the concept of Dyson Sphere has evolved to include a variety of potential constructs, including rings, bubbles, and swarms (a constellation of satellites tapping a star’s energy). But their impact from our perspective is all the same—variability in a star’s luminosity coupled with excess infrared light due to waste heat.
Hellbound and Down 