Supermassive black holes might be the ultimate power plants for post-biological alien intelligences that have moved their entire civilizations onto galactic-scale computers.
April 24, 2026
Original Paper
The Dyson Minds 2025 Workshop: SETI around Black Holes
arXiv · 2604.21886
The Takeaway
Black holes offer the most efficient way to harvest energy and process information for civilizations that have transcended biological life. Scientists are shifting the search for extraterrestrial intelligence from radio waves to the thermodynamic waste heat of these Dyson Minds. These hypothetical supercomputers would use the gravity and rotation of a black hole to power massive data processing centers. This framework treats a black hole not as a void, but as a potential battery for a civilization-sized AI. Detecting these entities involves looking for specific mechanical and thermal signatures that cannot be explained by natural physics.
From the abstract
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 ex