Last June, while most of us were sweating it out and scrolling socials, more than two dozen of the best scientific minds in the world headed to MIT.For two days, they gathered around whiteboards and lecture theaters discussing a pretty out-there idea: alien technology. Not just any alien tech, mind you, but the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligent life may have built energy-harvesting structures called Dyson spheres around black holes.We know how that sounds.When a paper came out describing the get-together a few months ago, we immediately had to interview someone in the room who could tell us exactly what went down. It turns out it was grounded in a lot more sensible science than you might think."We're aware it's a very out-there theory," Olivia Curtis, lead author of the paper and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center (PSETI) at Pennsylvania State University in the US, told ScienceAlert. "But we wanted to ground everything in physical facts and try to actually think of what physical observables we might actually be able to detect … It was a very fun two days."
"Even if our ground hypothesis isn't correct and it's not aliens, usually we find something interesting that we had never thought of before," she explains. "Aliens are always the last solution but maybe one day we'll get there."
