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.
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.