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Extraterrestrial

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

By T.K. Randall
January 21, 2025 · Comment icon 10 comments
Comet
Could we one day live on a comet ? Image Credit: Pixabay / rolandoemail
Could comet-dwelling trees provide safe, habitable 'bubbles' of life that travel through the cosmos ?
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 | Comments (10)




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Recent comments on this story
Comment icon #1 Posted by Djehuty 27 days ago
This story reminds me of Oumuamua.
Comment icon #2 Posted by ercbreeze 27 days ago
Living on a Comet would bring a different meaning to the song "Here comes the Sun"  ??
Comment icon #3 Posted by Antigonos 27 days ago
Damn. It must have sucked to have been an alien life form living on Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Comment icon #4 Posted by and-then 27 days ago
An interstellar cruise ship  
Comment icon #5 Posted by Hazzard 27 days ago
Now you see me... ???
Comment icon #6 Posted by Trelane 27 days ago
Definitely not Dyson vacuums.
Comment icon #7 Posted by Procyon 26 days ago
If we could do this, than we should be able to bio-engineer ourselves to have longer lifespans too, and if we can do all that, pointed ears better become a fashion statement too. Wandering space elves, anyone?
Comment icon #8 Posted by iAlrakis 26 days ago
they will need the Dyson headphones with airfilter though :-) 
Comment icon #9 Posted by Hazzard 26 days ago
That was awesome, for a little while. I blame Arthur C Clark and Rendezvous with Rama for that one. ?
Comment icon #10 Posted by WolfHawk 22 days ago
Loved the Rama series!


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