Alien megastructures would likely self-destruct before we spot them

An artist’s impression of a Dyson sphere

If advanced alien civilizations are constructing enormous satellite swarms to harness the energy of a star, we should be able to detect them. However, despite this expectation, the reason we have not yet observed these structures, known as Dyson spheres, may be due to their potential self-destructive nature, as suggested by recent calculations.

Physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept of structures capable of extracting a substantial amount of energy from their host stars in the 1960s. Scientists have hypothesized that these hypothetical megastructures would emit distinct signals…