If a civilization ever outgrew its need for stars and evolved into something closer to a distributed machine intelligence, where would it go looking for power?
Perhaps the best option would be the most extreme energy gradient in the universe: a black hole.
That is the provocative starting point of a growing research effort into “Dyson Minds,” hypothetical post-biological intelligences that might cluster around black holes to harvest their energy, and that’s part of what Olivia Curtis presented during IAUS404: Advancing the Search for Technosignatures.
About the Presenter
Olivia Curtis is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University, where she works with Professor Jason Wright at the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI Center) on extragalactic SETI. Her training, however, began far from the search for aliens: she earned her Ph.D. at Boston University studying galaxy evolution and large-scale structure, focusing on the population statistics of galaxies in cosmic voids, and completed her undergraduate work in physics and mathematics at the University of South Florida.
At PSETI, Curtis has redirected that galaxy-scale modeling expertise toward a very different question: whether advanced civilizations might leave detectable infrared signatures on galactic scales. As she explains on her personal website, she works to place rigorous upper limits on the energy supply of industry across large samples of galaxies observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), reasoning that any sufficiently advanced star-faring civilization would leave a mid-infrared fingerprint that ordinary starlight, dust, and active galactic nuclei cannot fully explain.
The talk featured here shifts that lens from galaxies as a whole to one of the most extreme environments within them: the supermassive black holes at galactic centers.
More About Curtis’s Work in Advancing the Search for Technosignatures
Curtis’s talk was largely a report from the front lines of a workshop she helped organize: the Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop, held June 3–4, 2025, at MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds & Machines. The event, a collaboration between Penn State, MIT, and The Ultraintelligence Foundation, gathered around 25 researchers spanning astrophysics, artificial intelligence, engineering, computer science, and philosophy to ask a deceptively simple question: what would a “Dyson Mind” look like, and how might we detect one?
The concept builds on two older ideas: physicist Freeman Dyson’s proposal that advanced civilizations might build megastructures to capture starlight for computation, and mathematician I.J. Good’s argument that sufficiently advanced computation tends toward a runaway “intelligence explosion.” Combine the two, Curtis suggested, and you get an entity that outgrows its home star entirely and migrates toward the largest energy gradient it can find: a black hole, potentially even the supermassive black hole at a galaxy’s core.
Why a black hole rather than a star?
Curtis pointed to the sheer efficiency of the physics involved. Extracting spin energy from a rotating black hole via the Penrose process can reach roughly 20 percent efficiency, compared to 1–10 percent for radiation from a typical accretion disk and about 7 percent for nuclear fusion. Supermassive black holes also sit at the center of nearly every galaxy, making them natural “watering holes,” in Curtis’s words, for any civilization or intelligence seeking either to project power or to hide in plain sight.
The talk included focus on how the internal architecture of a Dyson Mind might shape its observability. Key organizing questions included:
Engineered versus emergent minds: whether a mind was deliberately built by an advanced civilization for efficiency (likely producing regular, structured signals) or arose from many independent, competing swarm elements (likely producing messier, more heterogeneous signatures).
Coherent versus incoherent minds: whether widely separated components, potentially light-years apart, could remain a single unified entity, or whether communication latency would force them into a looser, ecosystem-like collective.
Hiding versus broadcasting: whether a mind would try to minimize waste heat and bury itself in the dusty torus surrounding a black hole, or whether it would tolerate detectability in exchange for closer proximity to its energy source.
Curtis also described work extending this framework to entire galaxies. By modeling how a galaxy’s combined starlight would change if some or all of its stars were enclosed in Dyson spheres, from ordinary starlight to a nearly pure blackbody glow, she and her collaborators are building the tools to search WISE data for outlier galaxies that might already be showing this kind of infrared signature. That project, an extension of the “Ĝ” infrared technosignature search that Jason Wright’s group pioneered for stars, has since progressed: a paper Curtis submitted in August 2026, The Ĝ Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. V. When Galaxies Glow with Industry, reports the first galaxy-by-galaxy limits on this kind of energy harvesting, finding no evidence of industry among 129 nearby galaxies surveyed.
The workshop’s findings, along with a literature review of prior black hole SETI work, have since been formally published as Curtis et al. 2026 in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, with a preprint available on arXiv.
Key Takeaways
Post-biological intelligences seeking maximum computational power might be drawn toward black holes rather than stars, since extracting a black hole’s spin energy can be far more efficient than nuclear fusion or ordinary accretion.
A “Dyson Mind’s” detectability may depend heavily on its internal structure and behavior: whether it is engineered or emergent, coherent or incoherent, and whether it is actively trying to conceal or advertise its presence.
Active galactic nuclei, quasars, and their surrounding tori emit across nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum plus neutrinos and gravitational waves, giving researchers many independent channels in which to search for anomalies.
Techniques originally built to search for Dyson spheres around individual stars are now being scaled up to search entire galaxies for infrared excesses, using archival data from missions like WISE.
The Dyson Minds research program remains an open, actively growing collaboration, with a full workshop paper now published and follow-on observational searches already underway.
Black hole technosignature research sits at an unusual intersection of astrophysics, computer science, and speculative philosophy, but it is grounded in concrete, testable physics: known accretion efficiencies, known black hole demographics, and archival datasets that already exist. As searches like Curtis’s galaxy-scale infrared survey mature, they offer one of the more rigorous paths toward asking whether the universe’s most extreme environments might already be occupied.
This video was included in the proceedings of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) symposium #404, Advancing the Search for Technosignatures, hosted by Blue Marble Space. Stay tuned as we explore the boundaries of knowledge in technosignature science!
Thanks for joining us here with Planetary Perspectives, an editorial endeavor and science communication project from Blue Marble Space.
