Speculative Fact #277: Alien Megastructure?

The star KIC 8462852 has been making a great of buzz in the news lately. Using the Kepler space telescope, a team noticed that the star’s brightness is periodically dimmed as something passes in front of it. Scientists were cautious not to jump to conclusions and suggested things like orbital debris or a massive comet belt, but the amount of light being obstructed is not consistent with stellar models.
            Scientists and Science-Fiction writers have long hypothesized that a sufficiently advanced civilization could construct massive megastructures (such as a Dyson Sphere, named after the physicist Freeman Dyson) around their native stars when they grew beyond the need for planetary resources. A civilization with much greater energy demands might build massive structures to collect solar energy on a system-wide scale, for example. Theoretically such megastructures could be detected over vast interstellar distances (the star is about 1,500 light years away) and astrophysicists hunting for ET have long been searching for such a thing.
            Now let’s put our brains to work. Like Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama and Larry Niven’s Ringworld, speculative fiction is often rich with large, ancient alien artifacts that stretch our imaginations to the limits. Try to create your own alien megastructure or take an old one and put your own spin on it. Think big.

-Jonathan Hernandez

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