The Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop: SETI around Black Holes

The Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop, held at the Center for Brains, Minds & Machines at MIT and organized by Penn State, MIT, and The Ultraintelligence Foundation, brought together researchers in astrophysics, engineering, artificial intelligence, computer science, and philosophy to examine “Dyson Minds” — large-scale post-biological intelligences powered by energy harvested from supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

Building on the ideas of F. J. Dyson (1960, 1966) and I. J. Good (1966), participants explored the physical, engineering, behavioral, and observational consequences of civilizations embodied as machinery operating near the universe’s most powerful energy sources. The workshop aimed to develop new observational strategies capable of detecting signatures of such systems.

Despite the highly cross-disciplinary scope, discussions centered on how a Dyson Mind might be constructed, how it might behave, and how those factors would shape strategies for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Key themes included the thermodynamic, mechanical, and stability limits of Dyson swarms; the trade-offs between power availability and communication latency in distributed minds; and how observability changes depending on whether Dyson Minds act as coherent entities or as loosely coordinated collectives.

Across these topics, the consensus was that details of architecture and behavior strongly influence observational signatures. A major recommendation was to apply anomaly-detection methods to archival datasets, including those from WISE, JWST, and the Event Horizon Telescope, to identify unusual sources potentially overlooked by standard reduction pipelines.

By integrating insights from multiple disciplines, the meeting advanced concrete, observation-focused strategies for future technosignature searches around SMBHs.

Olivia Curtis, Van Hunter Adams, Daniel Angerhausen, Joseph Bates, Anamaria Berea, Steven J. Dick, Martin Elvis, Sunil P. Khatri, Richard Linares, Manushaqe Muco, S. Seager, Jason T. Wright

Comments: Published in PASP, 14 pages
Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
Cite as: arXiv:2604.21886 [astro-ph.GA](or arXiv:2604.21886v1 [astro-ph.GA] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.21886
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Journal reference: PASP 138 046001 (2026)
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1088/1538-3873/ae5a02
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Submission history
From: Olivia Curtis
[v1] Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:38:36 UTC (169 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21886

Astrobiology, SETI, Astrophysics,