[Dominisi]

What.

IR radiation is bound by the same laws as all other forms of radiation, most namely the inverse square law.

You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy, more than say a red dwarf, to be detectable from "millions of light years" away without fading into the cosmic background as noise.

Think about it this way. With the naked eye you can see a bunch of individual distinguishable stars around ~4000 light years away. These stars produce more energy in a second than mankind has ever produced.

But our closest neighbor, Proxima Centuari, you can't see with the naked eye. Its a red dwarf. And while it still produces unfathomable amounts of energy AND is the closest star to our own. You can't see it.

TLDR: No, a Dyson swarm would not be detectable from "Millions of lightyears away"

[cletus]

In what world do you conflate "detectable" with "visible with the naked eye", particularly when talking about IR which isn't in the visible spectrum anyway?

What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.

> You would have to be radiating monumental amounts of energy,

You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?

[Dominisi]

> In what world do you conflate "detectable" with "visible with the naked eye"

They are literally synonymous and only vary in the instrument we are using to detect it. Your eye versus, say, an antenna.

Visible light is also on the electromagnetic spectrum, it also abides by the inverse square law.

> What's more, the ratio of visible light to IR would be... highly abnormal.

No, it wouldn't. The sun radiates across the entire EM spectrum including IR and Visible light.

It would take ~6200 structures that have the same area as the United States including Alaska (3.8 million square miles) to block out 1% of the EM radiation that the sun produces.

>You mean like the energy output of, you know, a star?

IF a sufficiently advanced civilization could magically conjure up enough materials in the solar system strip mining the solar system AND we had 100% efficiency in collecting then radiating 1% of the energy the sun gives off.....

Yeah isn't gonna happen.