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# can we find aliens by looking for cold stars?
- URL: https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/alien-dyson-spheres-cold-red-dwarfs/
- Published: 2026-09-07T16:30:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T16:30:34.000Z
- Description: A novel proposal says that we should look for alien megastructures. But can we really expect an alien civilization to build them?
- Author: Greg Fish
- Tags: aliens, astronomy, dyson spheres, alien civilizations

Here is a hot take to consider. The Kardashev scale and how popular it has become has really warped our ideas about what a real alien civilization would be like since it focuses so much on grading intelligent life by its energy requirements. Yes, it's why we love it so much. It's an easy taxonomy that gives us a neat shorthand for what an advanced alien species should be like. It also leads us to some unlikely ideas in looking for them, ideas that are likely to be dead ends.

Case in point, take [a proposal](https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1997/12/4/113) by a physicist to look for [Dyson spheres](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/wowt-explains-what-is-a-dyson-sphere/) around red dwarf stars by trying to see which of them would be dimmer and cooler than we'd expect, and see if we can explain this unnatural lack of energy with an alien civilization siphoning off the star's power for its own needs. It sounds a tad too good to be true, and I really think it is, since it's making a number of very big assumptions.

First and foremost, would aliens even want to create machines to encircle their home star? To build a manage a vast solar farm beaming lasers and microwaves for tens of millions of kilometers across a solar system takes a tremendous amount of resources. You'd need to take apart a large moon and it's a big question of how many societies are going to be both able and willing to do that.

If we think of the Kardashev scale as a natural progression, it seems like a required step for an alien species that masters space travel in its own solar system. In reality, we don't know that. If they can solve fusion and use that to find a shortcut to produce antimatter on an industrial scale, a swarm of satellites tens of millions of kilometers across being buffeted by solar winds [may seem like a huge distraction](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/examining-hawkings-alien-dyson-sphere/). They have a means to create a global cataclysm with a cup of water. Why bother disassembling a stellar body the size of Mercury to figure out how to store and use the excess?

It's even worse when it comes to building it around a red dwarf. Unlike a larger star like the Sun, they lack the mass to stabilize the differentiation among their internal layers, with massive plasma flows churning deep into their cores, which results in intense and hard to predict flares. If creating a Dyson swarm around a Sun-like star is like deploying buoys in choppy tropical waters, building one to orbit a red dwarf is like trying to keep them steady in the North Sea in winter.

Sure, they'll be much smaller and require a lot less material by comparison, but they will be much harder to maintain, and the environment on planets in a red dwarf's habitable zone [is not exactly conducive to complex life](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/why-the-typical-habitable-planet-may-be-nothing-like-our-own/) unless they'll turn out to be [Hycean worlds](https://www.cyberpunksurvivalguide.com/p/alien-life-breathing-hydrogen-on-hycean-worlds/) in comfortable orbits, with dense atmospheres and steady geological activity. And those [may be fewer and farther between than we like to hope](https://www.tiktok.com/@neutronfish/video/7408743820625595679), so we shouldn't count on them to crank out aliens that reach for the stars and decide that "oh shit, we gotta get to Type 2 if we want to be taken seriously by other spacefaring civilizations, start harnessing the sun's energy, quick!"

This isn't meant to be a complete debunking of the concept of Dyson spheres. We may just find one if we look at enough stars because some aliens may decide that it is worth it because they never discover antimatter, or nuclear energy, for example. It's also not meant to bum you out by saying that Kardashev Type 2 civilizations don't exist. No, my point here is to make sure that we keep in mind that our ideas of what an advanced alien society may be like or what they'll build are still very, very nebulous and need to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

See: Amiri Amirnezam (2026). Dyson Spheres on H–R Diagram. Universe, 12(4), DOI: [10.3390/universe12040113](https://doi.org/10.3390/universe12040113)