Scientists think alien civilizations could be using Dyson Spheres to siphon energy from black holes

They’re hole-ar powered.If super-advanced alien civilizations exist, they would surely require insane amounts of energy to run.

Now, international scientists are theorizing that these intelligent extraterrestrials could be harnessing the requisite power from black holes, per a study in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.“We’re aware it’s a very out-there theory,” paper lead author Olivia Curtis, of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI) at Pennsylvania State University in the US, told ScienceAlert.She was among the researchers who attended the “Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop,” organized by Penn State, MIT, and The Ultraintelligence Foundation, where astronomers, astrophysicists, AI experts, engineers, and industry experts explored whether extraterrestrials could build energy-harvesting structures around black holes to power their civs.While this isn’t the first time this hypothesis had been proposed — Taiwanese researchers notably floated it in 2021 — this conference marked the first time experts from so many different fields gathered to discuss it.The power siphon they proposed was a Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical engineering structure devised by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in the 1960s.Originally floated as a mechanism to harvest energy from a star, many experts believe that the ability to harness the Sun is a hallmark of an advanced stellar society.But instead of star power, the researchers declared that they could use these spheres to amass power from super massive black holes — voids at the center of a galaxy that accrete (eat) everything in sight.

They also blast out jets filled with more energy than a million suns.In an April piece for The Conversation, UK radio astronomer Steve Prabu described these cosmic plasma beams as the “most energetic phenomena in the cosmos.”While Curtis acknowledged that the theory was very “science fiction,” she deemed them less far-fetched when you conside...