SETI: Detecting ‘Stellified’ Objects
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36030
When Nikolai Kardashev looked into the question of where to find advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, he argued that the obvious starting point
would be in the vicinity of extreme astrophysics. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) come to mind, or even the centers of comparatively quiet galaxies like
our own. Clément Vidal picked up the same point in his The Beginning and the End (Springer, 2014), arguing persuasively that we should consider how
black holes could be used, perhaps by manipulating the merger of such objects. And yes, this is astroengineering utterly beyond our skills,
but possibly not those of an advanced ETI.
Using black holes for energy is extreme, but Roger Penrose has imagined a super-civilization extracting black hole rotational energy by the injection
of matter, and there are a number of other propositions on how such advanced engineering might work. Extracting energy from a black hole’s accretion
disk might be the most efficient method, but lower-grade operations could exist around neutron stars. To that idea we might add, as Milan Ćirković
does in the paper we looked at yesterday, the exploitation of X-ray binaries or quasars like SS433.