Tonight, we are talking about something that only one of the brightest minds in mathematics could have even conceived of. We're talking about a man named Freeman Dyson, who way, way back in the day started dreaming of this. What if someday we could build a superstructure so big, we could basically surround our sun and capture its energy directly? Enter Dyson's fears. Check this out. Yes. Unlimited power. Obviously, we We don't have anything close to that yet, but that doesn't mean that an advanced alien civilization hasn't already done it. And guess what? Well, recently, two separate groups of astronomers have announced that they have detected dozens of possible Dyson's fears in our Milky Way galaxy. So of course, we're going to call up Dr. Michio Kaku, who is a theoretical physicist and author of Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything, as well as so many other fascinating books. Doctor, thank you so much for joining us. First off. What do these discoveries mean? And if a Dyson sphere is out there or several are out there, how intelligent would an alien race have to be to pull off something so incredibly complex?

Well, for a civilization to create a Dyson sphere that envelops an entire star, you would have to be thousands, perhaps millions of years more advanced than anything we have. Now, think about it for a moment. A type 1 civilization, maybe a few years more advanced, is like Buck Rogers. They roam around the planet Earth. But a type 2 civilization can envelop the entire mother's star and absorb all the energy. Similar to what you might find in Star Trek. Star Trek would be a Type 2 civilization. Then there's Type 3. They could whip up a Dyson sphere that could envelop the galaxy with lots of mini Dyson spheres. That's a Type 3 civilization. By the way, what are we? Are we Type 1 that can play with planets? Type 2 that we can play with stars like with the Dyson sphere? Type 3 that we can soar through the galaxy like Star Wars? No, we are TypeZero. Sorry about that.

We're a type zero, and I feel like we keep getting an F. We keep failing and repeating at Type Zero. Apart from the whole, we can't seem to get along that great on our planet, let's say we did get our stuff together. There. What's stopping us from building our own Dyson sphere when it comes to the physics of it all and when it comes to where our technology is going to be in the next 100 years, 200 years?

Well, first of all, Carl Sagan was asked, what about our civilization? We use oil and coal. We're actually a 0.7 civilization that can harness planetary powers to a degree. But we're almost there at type one. But by the time you're type two, you're like Star Trek. You can roam your sector of the galaxy, and you can build a gigantic metal shield that absorbs all the sunlight. Now, think about that. The sun is so much bigger than the Earth. To envelop the sun with Earth-like technology, that'll take millions of years, perhaps more advanced than what we can harness here in the planet Earth. But sooner or later, one day, perhaps we will become type 2, and perhaps we will build our own Dyson sphere in our own backyard.

Fingers crossed. For now, it does seem as though we can at least imagine what that might look like, hypothetically. But then we're talking about the possibility of detecting these things. What techno signature are we looking for? What do we need to be scanning for to see if somebody or someone out there has already come up with this?

Well, two groups of astronomers, as you pointed out, about what they've It was identified about 60, 60 candidates for type 2 Dyson spheres. Now, how do you do that? By looking for infrared signatures. Stars usually blast out a tremendous amount of visible light that lights up the night sky. Infrared radiation is pretty much invisible, but it's a byproduct of heat. And so the heat generated by the star would eventually heat up the Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Sphere itself starts to heat up to emit infrared infrared radiation. And bingo. By looking at the galaxy, we have found about 60, 60 candidates emitting infrared radiation. So who knows? Maybe there's another Star Trek enterprise out there wondering whether or not they should visit the planet Earth, or are we too backward?

Yeah, if we're spotting them, guarantee they've already spotted us. But it does seem so cool to have this almost like a blinking beacon out there that we can look for when it comes to these Dyson's fears. Dr. Michio Kaku, always such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time.

My pleasure. Anytime.

Thanks for watching. Stay updated about breaking news and top stories on the NBC News app or follow us on social media.