Researchers like Stuart Armstrong of Oxford University, point out that “An actual sphere around the sun is completely impractical” however, in the years since Dyson’s proposal, the idea has been modified to a more practical “Dyson Swarm,” while keeping the premise and goal intact. The Dyson swarm would consist of thousands of relatively small mirrors or solar panels that would orbit the sun like a dense cloud of bees buzzing around a hive. The copious amount of panels would shroud the sun from an external view and capture most of the available solar energy. Armstrong, once a skeptic of Dyson’s plan, believes that the swarm method is not only practical but could be manufactured by robots mining materials in as little as several decades. We would have to demolish Mercury in the process, but who needs Mercury anyway? Can’t we just be happy with Venus?

The Dyson Sphere wasn’t originally thought up as a source of a reincarnation machine, it was first a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. You know, everyone’s favorite theoretical paradox about why we’re not currently hanging out with aliens, even though the universe is so big that

we probably should be by now. Dyson and many other scientists theorize that we don’t see them, because they’re all chilling in their own Dyson Spheres (Space). The theory is that when an intelligent alien species settles moons and planets in their local stellar neighborhood and their population increases and consumes more energy, any species would need to turn to their sun and create their version of a Dyson sphere (Space). This has led some researchers to believe that the way to find an advanced alien species is to try to find their Dyson Sphere. In 2015, there was speculation that one had been discovered after Yale Astronomer Tabetha Boyajian reported a mysterious dimming of light from a star called KIC 8462852, whose irregular flickering looked like nothing researchers had ever seen before. The organization known as SETI, The Search for extraterrestrial intelligence conducted a study if building a Dyson sphere around a black hole would be effective, the results of the study led the team to report that a megastructure around the stellar-mass black hole is detectable in the ultraviolet, optical, near-infrared, and mid-infrared wavelengths via the waste heat radiation in the Milky Way Galaxy (Oxford).