In June 2025, more than two dozen researchers from Penn State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and The Ultraintelligence Foundation gathered at MIT's Center for Brains, Minds & Machines for the "Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop." Their mission? To explore the physical, engineering, and observational consequences of hypothetical "Dyson Minds"—post-biological intelligences powered by energy harvested from supermassive black holes .

The workshop, organized by Penn State, MIT, and The Ultraintelligence Foundation, brought together experts in astrophysics, engineering, artificial intelligence, computer science, and philosophy . The consensus? While the concept is "very out-there," it grounds itself in rigorous physical principles. As Olivia Curtis, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center and lead author of the workshop's published paper, told ScienceAlert: "Even if our ground hypothesis isn't correct and it's not aliens, usually we find something interesting that we had never thought of before. Aliens are always the last solution but maybe one day we'll get there" .

The Dyson Sphere Concept: From Stars to Black Holes

Physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept of a Dyson sphere in 1960. The idea: a sufficiently advanced civilization—one reaching Type II on the Kardashev Scale—might construct a megastructure (or more realistically, a "Dyson swarm" of orbiting collectors) to capture most or all of a star's energy output .

The Dyson Minds workshop took this concept in a bold new direction. Instead of stars, what if civilizations built these structures around black holes?

The reasoning is compelling: supermassive black holes, which lurk at the hearts of most galaxies, produce enormous amounts of energy. Their accretion disks, coronas, and relativistic jets contain more energy than millions of Suns. To a civilization hungry for power, a black hole might be the ultimate energy source .

Why Black Holes?

Black holes release energy through multiple channels, making them uniquely attractive energy sources :

• Accretion Disks: Matter falling toward a black hole forms a disk where intense heating produces radiation. Even a stellar-mass black hole operating at a low Eddington ratio could produce hundreds of times the Sun's luminosity .

• Relativistic Jets: Narrow plasma flows shot from the poles carry radiation and kinetic energy. Jet radiation could equal about 60 to 80 percent of the disk's luminosity .

• Corona: An extremely hot plasma surrounding the inner disk produces high-energy radiation that could increase useful output by 30 to 50 percent beyond the disk alone .

• Spin Advantage: A rotating black hole's accretion disk can be up to seven times brighter than a nonrotating one .

A study by Hsiao and colleagues showed that a civilization could potentially reach a Kardashev Scale Type III classification (galaxy-scale energy use) by combining disk, corona, and jet power around a supermassive black hole .

The Engineering Challenge

Building a Dyson sphere around a black hole presents monumental engineering hurdles:

Distance from the Black Hole: Despite their reputation as cosmic vacuum cleaners, black holes don't pull everything in. A hypothetical Dyson sphere would need to be about 1 parsec (approximately 3 light-years) away from the black hole to avoid melting from radiation .

Material Requirements: Known solid materials would require structures at distances of millions of Schwarzschild radii to maintain temperatures below 3,000 kelvins .

Thermodynamics: A Dyson sphere cannot simply absorb energy—it must re-emit waste heat. The structure's temperature depends on its radius and capture efficiency. For example, a sphere around a solar-mass black hole with an efficiency factor of 0.2 would need to be approximately 0.03 AU away to maintain a temperature of 3,000 K .

Detection Strategies: What to Look For

If an advanced civilization built a Dyson sphere around a black hole, astronomers could theoretically detect it. Here's how:

Infrared Excess

A Dyson sphere would absorb the black hole's radiation and re-emit it as heat, creating an excess of infrared radiation. The temperature of this waste heat could range from 30 K to 3,000 K, producing detectable infrared signatures .

Anomalous Light Curves

A Dyson swarm—the more realistic alternative to a solid shell—would consist of countless satellites orbiting the black hole . This structure could produce:

• Partial suppression of optical light due to obstruction

• Time-dependent transmission effects as satellites move

• Periodic bursts of radiation when orbits align toward Earth

• Erratic, non-natural light curves that cannot be explained by known astrophysical phenomena 

Communication Signatures

If the Dyson sphere functioned as a massive data center (a "Dyson Mind"), information transmission between satellites might be detectable. As Curtis noted, "At these distance scales, if you want to transmit a zettabyte of information, it's just faster to sling your hard drive at it instead of trying to beam the information yourself" .

Microlensing Anomalies

If the Dyson sphere surrounds a primordial black hole, it could create characteristic gravitational microlensing signatures. These include chromatic deviations from the standard achromatic lensing profile and partial suppression of lensing events .

Other Research: Red and White Dwarfs

The Dyson sphere search isn't limited to black holes. A separate study by Amirnezam Amiri of the University of Arkansas suggests that astronomers may have been looking at the wrong stars all along .

Red dwarfs (which make up about 70% of stars in the Milky Way) and white dwarfs are more promising targets. Why?

• Red dwarfs: They burn fuel slowly and can remain stable for trillions of years—far longer than the universe has existed .

• White dwarfs: These compact remnants of dead stars are about 1% of their original size, meaning a Dyson swarm could orbit much closer, requiring less material and a smaller structure .

A star with a Dyson sphere would appear on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram at the same luminosity but shifted dramatically to lower temperatures. A red dwarf at 3,000 K could appear surrounded by a shell as cold as 50 K—no known stars naturally occupy this region of the diagram .

The Project Hephaistos Candidates

In 2024, Project Hephaistos identified seven potential Dyson sphere candidates among approximately 5 million cataloged stars, all linked to red dwarfs . One candidate was ruled out after it was shown that a background black hole caused the observed signal . However, some candidates remain under investigation, with follow-up observations using telescopes like e-MERLIN and e-VLBI .

What's Next: Observational Recommendations

The Dyson Minds workshop produced practical recommendations for future searches :

1. Apply Anomaly Detection to Archival Data: Researchers should examine existing data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) for unusual sources that standard pipelines might have overlooked .

2. Focus on Infrared Signatures: JWST's infrared instruments are well-positioned to detect the faint, cold signals expected from Dyson structures .

3. Classify Anomalies: Astronomers must distinguish Dyson spheres from natural phenomena like dusty disks or background galaxies .

Conclusion

The Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop represents a serious scientific effort to explore one of the most far-out ideas in SETI research. While no evidence of Dyson spheres around black holes has been found, the workshop has established a rigorous observational framework for future searches .

Even if the alien hypothesis never proves correct, the search itself advances scientific knowledge. By applying anomaly detection to archival data and refining our understanding of extreme astrophysical environments, researchers may discover phenomena no one previously imagined—whether extraterrestrial or not .

As astronomers continue to scrutinize black holes, examine candidate stars, and develop new detection strategies, one question remains: Are we alone, or is someone out there harvesting the darkness? The answer may be closer than we think.