Interesting piece at The Atlantic here about how a group of scientists are hoping to find alien life by first finding Dyson Spheres–the power sources that Freeman Dyson posited would likely power advanced civilisations.

For some reason, I found this quote really funny:

‘”More than once some inexplicable object has been discovered that looked like aliens, and then slowly it became clear that it was a very interesting, but totally natural, phenomenon,” he said. Indeed, Nikolai Kardashev once thought he’d identified several good candidates for Type III civilizations, which operate on a galactic scale. But in the end, they turned out to be quasars.’

Writing SF is making my sense of humour weird.