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How extraterrestrial civilizations could become “stellarvores”
- A series of papers by the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science (BMSIS) examines what Earth’s level of technological development will look like in the future.
- They offer a reinterpretation of the Kardashev Scale, which suggests that civilizations expand to harness greater levels of energy, and instead suggest that civilizations might circumvent this by harnessing stellar mass directly.
- The scenario proposed presents some new and interesting possibilities for advanced civilizations, for example, civilizations that consume stars, which scientists call ‘stellivores,’ would be able to expand in energy use beyond the luminosity limits of the Kardashev scale.
- The Kardashev Scale was proposed by Soviet-Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev to characterize the level of an extraterrestrial civilization’s development based on the amount of energy they could harness.
- The scale reflected the assumption that civilizations and their energy needs will grow exponentially, but traditional applications of the scale predict that growth will be exponential and have even considered how this could give rise to a civilization capable of utilizing the energy output of all stars in the Universe – a Type IV Cosmic Civilization!
- However, Haqq-Misra and his colleagues took a different approach and suggest that civilizations can follow different trajectories for their expansion in space and their energy consumption.
- These projections offer constraints on what SETI researchers should search for and provide hints about our future development.
- The author of the study recommends scientists observe accreting binaries to search for abnormal behavior, which could indicate technological activity.
- Future SETI surveys should examine “accreting binaries,” closely orbiting binary stars with mass flowing from one star to another.
- It is worth keeping our minds open and actually searching for such evidence of advanced and exotic civilizations rather than ruling them out before we look.
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