Alien Supercivilizations Absent from 100,000 Nearby Galaxies

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Source: By Lee Billings, Scientific American          

Excerpt: ...search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) ...has yet to detect any signals that withstand close scrutiny. Even if brimming with life, to us, the galaxy seems to be a very quiet, rather lonely place. Now, new results suggest this loneliness may extend out into the universe far beyond our galaxy.... After examining some 100,000 nearby large galaxies a team of researchers lead by The Pennsylvania State University astronomer Jason Wright has concluded that none of them contain any obvious signs of highly advanced technological civilizations. ...they looked for the thermodynamic consequences of galactic-scale colonization, based on an idea put forth in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson.  ...the team searched for type 3 civilizations in an all-sky catalogue from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). They looked for objects that were optically dim but bright in the mid-infrared—the expected signature of a galaxy filled with starlight-absorbing, heat-emitting Dyson spheres.  ...Provided he can get more funding, Wright intends to perform follow-up work investigating some of his survey’s strangest galaxies, looking for civilizations further down the Kardashev scale. ...Dyson, now 91 but still eager to talk about SETI from his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., says the null results aren’t surprising but shouldn’t be discouraging. “Our imaginings about the ways that aliens might make themselves detectable are always like stories of black cats in a dark room,” Dyson says. “If there are any real aliens, they are likely to behave in ways that we never imagined. The WISE result shows that the aliens did not follow one particular path. That is good to know. But it still leaves a huge variety of other paths open. The failure of one guess does not mean that we should stop looking for aliens.”

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-supercivilizations-absent-from-100-000-nearby-galaxies/

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