Extraterrestrial

'Dyson trees' could enable alien life (and humans) to live on comets

By T.K. Randall
January 21, 2025

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) Most people will be familiar with physicist Freeman Dyson's concept of a Dyson sphere - a theoretical artificial structure built around a star by an advanced alien civilization to harness its energy.

But this wasn't the only idea of this kind that Dyson came up with - he also devised a much more obscure concept for something that became known as a Dyson tree.

This is essentially a large, bio-engineered tree-like organism that lives inside a comet, turning what would otherwise be a dead, inhospitable place into a habitable environment.

Dyson envisaged that such 'trees' could be sustained through the absorption of water from the comet itself and from the light from any stars that happened to be in the vicinity.

"Ice is better than rock as a basis for life," he wrote, while also noting that "comets contain not only ice but also most of the other chemical elements that are essential for biology."In effect, Dyson trees could create 'bubbles' of life, not tethered to any one place but capable of traveling the stars, almost like a form of biological spacecraft.

People could live there, too - free of planetary limitations.

It is perhaps not outside the realms of possibility that there are comets such as these out there in space right now with members of an intelligent alien civilization living inside them.

Entire generations could live and die while safely cocooned within the comet's protective environment.

Who knows, perhaps one day humans will be able to travel the stars in much the same way.

Source: Boing Boing

Tags: Dyson, Alien