A swarm of mirrors and antennas envelops a black hole like bees around a hive. But instead of honey, this structure collects energy enough to power a consciousness the size of a galaxy. These very 'Dyson minds' were the topic of a recent meeting at MIT. The idea traces back to Freeman Dyson, who in 1960 suggested that advanced civilizations might surround stars with spheres to harvest energy. Now the focus has shifted to supermassive black holes — the most powerful energy sources in the universe.
The main question on participants' minds: how to spot such a structure from Earth? A mind distributed across a swarm of devices would emit heat and radio waves very differently from ordinary stars or gas. If the 'bees' act in concert, like a single organism, their signals might be orderly. If they're just a collection of independent machines, the radiation would show chaos. That determines what to look for in telescope data.
In the end, scientists proposed sifting through observational archives — for example, from the infrared telescope WISE or the Event Horizon Telescope, which imaged black hole shadows. Strange objects might be hiding there, discarded as noise by standard processing algorithms. Perhaps among that 'junk' lies the trace of an alien mind basking near the abyss.
as written by the authors arXiv:2604.21886
The Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop, held at the Center for Brains, Minds & Machines at MIT and organized by Penn State, MIT, and The Ultraintelligence Foundation, brought together researchers in astrophysics, engineering, artificial intelligence, computer science, and philosophy to examine "Dyson Minds" -- large-scale post-biological intelligences powered by energy harvested from supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Building on the ideas of F. J. Dyson (1960, 1966) and I. J. Good (1966), participants explored the physical, engineering, behavioral, and observational consequences of civilizations embodied as machinery operating near the universe's most powerful energy sources. The workshop aimed to develop new observational strategies capable of detecting signatures of such systems. Despite the highly cross-disciplinary scope, discussions centered on how a Dyson Mind might be constructed, how it might behave, and how those factors would shape strategies for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Key themes included the thermodynamic, mechanical, and stability limits of Dyson swarms; the trade-offs between power availability and communication latency in distributed minds; and how observability changes depending on whether Dyson Minds act as coherent entities or as loosely coordinated collectives. Across these topics, the consensus was that details of architecture and behavior strongly influence observational signatures. A major recommendation was to apply anomaly-detection methods to archival datasets, including those from WISE, JWST, and the Event Horizon Telescope, to identify unusual sources potentially overlooked by standard reduction pipelines. By integrating insights from multiple disciplines, the meeting advanced concrete, observation-focused strategies for future technosignature searches around SMBHs.
The energy extractable from a rotating supermassive black hole exceeds by billions of times everything stars like our Sun could produce over their entire lifetimes.
The idea echoes the 'Oort swarm' from Dan Simmons's Hyperion, where an artificial intelligence inhabited a cloud of devices scattered across the solar system.