Back in the 1960s, a smart physicist named Freeman Dyson came up with an interesting idea. He thought that super advanced alien civilizations might build huge structures around their stars to grab all the energy the star produces.

Think of it like this: if a civilization gets really good at using energy, they might want to move beyond just using the energy from their own planet. Dyson said they could build these massive shells, which we now call “Dyson spheres,” to directly collect the star’s power. This would be a big step up on something called the “Kardashev scale,” moving them from a Type I to a Type II civilization.

Some astronomers have suggested that these “Dyson spheres” might give off unique signals, called “technosignatures,” that we could possibly see from many, many light-years away.

But even though we’ve been looking, we haven’t made any contact with aliens, let alone found one of these giant structures sucking up a star’s energy.

And according to a report in “New Scientist,” there might be a good reason for that. A scientist named Brian Lacki, who works with the Breakthrough Listen Initiative – a project that searches for signs of alien civilizations – thinks that Dyson spheres might destroy themselves before we ever get a chance to find them.