This Is What Extraterrestrial Life Would Look Like

5. In A Dyson Sphere

Right, so lets dial it back a bit from black hole-dwelling master races and get back some more familiar ground. In October of 2015, scientists thought they might have spotted some kind of "alien megastructure" around an alien star and suddenly everyone was talking about Dyson Spheres - but what actually are they? A Dyson Sphere is basically a huge structure around a star used to collect as much energy as possible. Our alien chums could even be living on it if their home planet became to inhospitable, in an interconnected network of power stations and habitation zones. Despite the sci-fi depiction of a Dyson Sphere as a big old shell encompassing a star, there's no reason why it should be a solid structure. It could be made up of a swarm of artificial satellites forming a kind of biosphere around it. Incidentally, this is closer to what Freeman Dyson, the guy who kicked off the whole sphere hype in the first place, meant. Whether or not this is what we spotted around a distant star, it could well be something that is on the cards for the human race at some point in the future, if we can get it together for long enough to build one.