Determine whether civilisations would manufacture detectable cold radiator swarms

Determine whether a technological civilisation would choose to manufacture a Ceres-scale mass of thin-film radiators to create a detectable Slysh halo around its host star.

Background

The paper estimates that a detectable Slysh halo could require roughly the mass of a fraction of Ceres in thin-film material, while arguing that such material might plausibly be obtained from small-body reservoirs in a planetary system. Orbital dynamics, radiation pressure, collisions, and mutual shadowing do not obviously prevent construction or deployment of the swarm.

Nevertheless, physical feasibility does not establish that a civilisation would adopt this architecture. The authors explicitly leave the behavioural and engineering choice unresolved, making the question relevant to interpreting null results from searches for cold computational technosignatures.

References

Whether a civilisation would choose to manufacture a Ceres of thin film is not something we can know; what we can say is that nothing in the orbital mechanics forbids it.

— Slysh haloes: the waste heat of cold computing as a submillimetre technosignature  (2608.31153 - Garrett, 31 Aug 2026) in Section 3.5, “Mass budget and dynamics”; specifically the concluding paragraph of Section 3.6, “Dynamics and stability”