Looking for ‘Technosignatures’
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36675
We speculated yesterday that categorizing civilizations on the basis of their power use may not be a given, though it is the basis
of the familiar Kardashev types. It seems natural to a rapidly changing technological society like ours that the trend is always upward,
a clear path toward harnessing the energies of the home planet, then the Sun, then the galaxy.
That this may not be the case seems to go against the grain of ‘Dysonian SETI,’ which looks for, among other things, artifacts as large
as Dyson spheres and other astro-engineering projects on massive scales. Or maybe not, for some engineering involving adjustments to
planetary environments may well produce observables. We just have to be aware of the range of possibilities here, and recognize our
own limitations in trying to figure them out.