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Dyson Spheres are megastructures that can extract the entire energy output of a star. They can be in the form of shells, bubbles, disks and rings. The concept was dreamed up by British-American physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson in 1960. In 1997, futurist and computer scientist Robert J. Bradbury advanced the concept of a mind-bending megastructure: The Matryoshka Brain. This structure consists of layers of nested shells to wring out every last joule from the star to power a vast computational engine. The Matryoshka Brain is the ultimate cosmic supercomputer.

The name is inspired by the Russian Matryoshka dolls that are stacked inside each other. Dyson Spheres tend to radiate absorbed energy in infrared frequencies. Matryoshka Brains tap into the waste energy as well, with nested shells soaking up the energy from the layer inside. Each shell runs calculations and computations, running cooler than the inner one. The IBM engineer Rolf Landauer came up with the formula for the lowest possible amount of energy consumption for a computer, known as the Landauer principle. The extra layers will quickly add more mass and complexity, while providing reducing computing capacity. The theoretical constraints might prevent the nested shells from translating to a proportional increase in computation powers.

Building any Dyson Sphere, let alone a nested one is a monumental undertaking requiring the processing of vast quantities of material, in excess of all the mass in the Main Belt of Asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Several terrestrial planets will need to be disassembled to provide the material needed to construct a Matryoshka Brain. Building a single shell would require a minimum of 2,000 years. Any civilisation capable of constructing Dyson Spheres may call more than one star home, indicating a long-term, multi-system effort. The material of several terrestrial worlds would be required to construct just one shell. The scale of the computational capacity of the Matryoshka Brain indicates that it could be used for detailed and complex simulations, metaverses for entire civilisations.

Widely spaced nested spheres could be beneficial for more messy dissipative activities, such as maintaining habitable packets for squishy biological lifeforms. The spaced-out shells make sense as each could feed on the wasted heat of the previous, leading to a system with material distributed across a wide range of orbits. While Dyson Spheres radiate waste heat in infrared light detectable over astronomical distances, the layered Matryoshka Brains would me more difficult to spot. A number of surveys are scanning the skies for the telltale dips of light caused by an excess of infrared radiation. About a quarter of these may host Dyson Spheres, and about a quarter of those may be Matryoshka Brains. If so, we may have already spotted a handful of Matryoshka Brains in the vast reaches of interstellar space.

Sources:

Are the Dyson rings around pulsars detectable?

Searching for technosignatures in exoplanetary systems with current and future missions

Dyson Spheres around White Dwarfs

Application of the Thermodynamics of Radiation to Dyson Spheres as Work Extractors and Computational Engines and Their Observational Consequences

Dyson Spheres

On the possibility of the Dyson spheres observable beyond the infrared spectrum

On the resolution of a weak Fermi paradox

Project Hephaistos – II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE