--- title: "New SETI Plan: Detect Alien Starships Powered by Black Holes" description: "## Alien Starships" date: "2019-03-07" modified: "2019-03-07" authors: - name: "Jon Christian" job_title: "Executive Editor" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jonc" url: "https://futurism.com/the-byte/seti-plan-detect-alien-starships-black-holes" categories: - "Astronomy" - "Astrophysics" - "Black Holes" - "Exobiology" - "Space" - "SpaceX" - "Starship" tags: - "aliens" - "Black holes" - "SETI" - "the digest" --- # New SETI Plan: Detect Alien Starships Powered by Black Holes ![A new paper suggests that we could spot an alien civilization by looking for signs of starships powered by the radiation thrown off by small black hole.]() *\Image: Pixabay/NASA/Victor Tangermann\* ## Alien Starships To detect alien civilizations, astronomers need to make some assumptions about the forms they might take — and the traces their technological artifacts could leave behind. An [outrageous new paper]() by a mathematician at Kansas State University does just that, positing that a sufficiently advanced alien civilization would likely build starships powered by the radiation thrown off by small black holes — and speculating that astronomers could use gamma telescopes to spot evidence of these black hole starships. ## Black Holes The basic idea, according to mathematician Louis Crane, is that a spaceship powered by a black hole would leave distinctive spillover from gamma rays. He suggests astronomers could detect that spillover using a telescope like the orbital Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. "If some advanced civilization already had such starships, current \[very high energy\] gamma ray telescopes could detect it out to 100 to 1,000 light years if we were in its beam," Crane said in a [press release](). "They could be distinguished from natural sources by their steadily changing redshift over a period of years to decades." ## Game SETI Match Crane also said, provocatively, that he believes astronomers may have already spotted several gamma ray sources "for which no natural explanation has been given." He also speculated about what it would mean for a civilization to be capable of creating an artificial black hole — and it sounds absolutely epic. "To produce an artificial black hole, we would need to focus a billion-ton gamma ray laser to nuclear dimensions," Crane said in the press release. "It's like making as many high-tech nuclear bombs as there are automobiles on Earth. Just the scale of it is beyond the current world economy. A civilization which fully utilized the solar system would have the resources." **READ MORE:** [Gamma ray telescopes could detect starships powered by black hole]() \[*Phys.org*\] **More on black holes as power sources:** *[Stephen Hawking Suggests That Black Holes Could Power Our Future]()* ## Author I'm responsible for editing, assigning, and scouting at Futurism, as well as occasionally writing for the site. That work involves keeping an eye on a wide range of narratives and issues, but over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping the future of media, the web, and information itself. My day-to-day often involves collaborating on reporting and commentary projects bylined by my colleagues, but I try to find time to do my own reporting as well; stories I've broken for Futurism have been cited by publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Wired, Ars Technica, New York Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg, and more. I grew up in Southern Vermont and attended Vanderbilt University. Prior to Futurism, I contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe, Vice, Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, the Outline, Ars Technica and more, and did stints in farming and food service. I currently live in Brooklyn, New York, and in my free time I enjoy pinball, word games, cycling, running, and music production. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()