Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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NoXion
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by NoXion »

In the unlikely event that it is some kind of Dyson swarm, let's hope that it's not a Griefer.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Channel72 »

I'd also add that, I think that the (hypothetical) development from primordial ooze to building Dyson spheres is a function of bottlenecks - it is not a linear function of equal difficulty along each point.

In other words, there are just certain bottlenecks in biological (and probably technological) development that are very hard to overcome. But once they're overcome, successfully moving on to the next bottleneck is very likely. At least, the first bottleneck we have already overcome is the transition from single cell prokaryotes/eukaryotes to sexual multi-cellular organisms. But it took ~2 billion years for that to happen. And there's a limited time window here - if it took another ~1 billion or so years, it would have never happened, because the Earth would have eventually become uninhabitable as the Sun grew to become a red giant.

Once that bottleneck is overcome, it seems relatively easy for an explosion of various multi-cellular organisms to ensue (i.e. the Cambrian explosion). But the next bottleneck is getting to the point where large-brained organisms - capable of abstract reasoning and tool usage - emerge via Darwinian processes. This is definitely not guaranteed by any means, and even on Earth it is only a few rare evolutionary pathways that managed to get to that point. In fact, even if a large-brained organism appears, there's no guarantee that particular species will survive, or be in a position to develop tools (i.e. cetaceans are pretty intelligent, and probably capable of certain rudimentary forms of abstract reasoning, but they will never develop tools due to their physiology.)

So that 2nd bottleneck may be even more difficult to overcome than the first, which means we should expect a Universe filled with interesting fauna, but nothing more. But once you get past that bottleneck, you gain a lot of steam. Tool usage likely results in trial-and-error type reasoning, which eventually leads to something like the scientific method. (I mean, for fucks sake, my cat is capable of trial-and-error reasoning to a limited extent, or at least associative behavior) The 3rd bottleneck is probably getting to the point of industrialization. It's possible that even after getting tool-using, abstract reasoning organisms capable of understanding advanced mathematics, these organisms never make it to the point of industrialization due to some catastrophe, like a worldwide plague or extinction event - or simply being wiped out by some less intelligent but extremely dangerous predator. But assuming these abstract-reasoning organisms remain alive for a few million years, it's likely that at some point somebody is going to figure out how to start manipulating nature via things like agriculture, which is the first step towards industrialization.

There might be a 4th bottleneck here, which is making it to an industrial society, but then not killing everyone in a nuclear holocaust. Presumably, we have not really made it past that bottleneck. But I would imagine that once an industrial society solves a lot of problems that lead to social unrest, the prospect of a nuclear holocaust becomes less and less likely, until you get to the point where millenia can go by with zero "close-calls" like we had during the Cold War.

If that 4th bottleneck is overcome, I'm not sure there's really any more bottlenecks towards ultimately building Dyson Spheres or whatever. Because once principles of computation are realized, and material resources are extracted from the ground, there's nothing that would really stop a civlization from gaining the momentum to eventually start building infrastructure in space. Although, I'd qualify that with one important note: it may not be possible to reach Earth-levels of industrialization without being able to "bootstrap" your civlization with a ready supply of fossil fuels. It's probably not the case that all planets will have a readily accessible supply of fossil fuels that can be used towards that purpose, and it's unclear how something like the industrial revolution would have happened if we only had alternatives like steam-power, etc., to work with.

But the point is, I don't think the path from primordial ooze to Dyson spheres is a path where each point is equally difficult and equally dangerous. It's more like, there's simply certain bottlenecks to overcome - and they're very, very hard to overcome. But once you overcome them, you pick up a lot of momentum and then it becomes more and more unlikely that your civilization will fizzle out.

Given the estimated 40 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, I really don't think a 1/40b chance of a particular planet providing the right conditions for a space-faring society is that crazy. And it only takes a simple application of the anthropic principle to see that we are the lottery winners here.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by NoXion »

I think we might also be overestimating our ability to detect starfaring civilisations. The kind of things that seem to be most often talked about in terms of spotting evidence for ET civs include things like Dyson swarms and big fuck-off torchship rockets. But if most of them are building much smaller structures or less obviously powerful rockets (maybe hibernation/stasis is easier?), then realistically what would our chances be of spotting them unless they're right on top of us in galactic terms?
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Darmalus »

@Channel72

The 5th Bottleneck: Getting into space before falling into a "completely engaging digital entertainment trap". Why explore space (or even bother reproducing) if you relatively cheap utterly engrossing entertainment at home? Why explore space at a painfully slow pace when you can be a god of your own virtual reality? It doesn't require every member of society fall into this trap, just enough that those who don't never have the collective resources to get into space.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Channel72 »

Darmalus wrote:@Channel72

The 5th Bottleneck: Getting into space before falling into a "completely engaging digital entertainment trap". Why explore space (or even bother reproducing) if you relatively cheap utterly engrossing entertainment at home? Why explore space at a painfully slow pace when you can be a god of your own virtual reality? It doesn't require every member of society fall into this trap, just enough that those who don't never have the collective resources to get into space.
Yeah - that's true. Although, in general I find the "post-21st century" theories of doom a lot less plausible than the "pre-21st century" theories of doom. I mean, I find it a lot more likely that the bottleneck was in the past - not the future. Simply because, all proposed theories of future bottle necks are... to put it mildly, mostly speculative bullshit. We have hypothetical evil aliens who go around destroying everything, or scenarios where we lose the ability to travel through space due to too much debris, etc.

Here's another proposed bottleneck that I just pulled out of my ass: it's possible the entire Universe is a computer simulation nested inside a Jupiter Brain in a parent Universe. Maybe the beings who maintain the simulation periodically "delete" any potential K2 civilizations, because it takes up too much processing power, and they're not interested in studying scenarios involving K2 civilizations.

I mean, whatever. Just another wild conjecture, I guess. The "completely engaging digital entertainment trap" is more likely than the bullshit I just spewed, I'll grant, but the problem is this theory fails to account for how something like 99% of society is trapped in virtual reality, while the resources and infrastructure necessary to provide the processing power to maintain all this somehow continue to operate over millenia. Who is working on patches and upgrades for all the software? You'd need an entire class of programmers, engineers and maintainers who keep all this going - and, unless they're all AIs or slaves or something, why are they content to serve their "masters" who spend all day jerking off in a VM?

It also doesn't account for basic human nature - which includes things like curiosity and status seeking - a nature which will likely be inherited to a certain degree by whatever post-human beings inhabit this planet. We have billionaries now - who can literally just sit at home all day, watching porn, eating steaks, taking drugs or drinking wine. People right now are capable of indulging themselves with engaging distractions. Yet we observe that many billionaries simply don't do this. Instead, they try to acquire more wealth, or they start companies, invest in things, sometimes they even do good things like philantropy work (i.e. Bill Gates, etc.) So we already have a segment of society which is "post-scarcity" and capable of sitting around indulging themselves all day in fantasies or mind-altering substances. Yet, barring a few party animals in the House of Saud, this is not typical.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Arthur_Tuxedo »

Channel72 wrote:I'd also add that, I think that the (hypothetical) development from primordial ooze to building Dyson spheres is a function of bottlenecks - it is not a linear function of equal difficulty along each point.

In other words, there are just certain bottlenecks in biological (and probably technological) development that are very hard to overcome. But once they're overcome, successfully moving on to the next bottleneck is very likely. At least, the first bottleneck we have already overcome is the transition from single cell prokaryotes/eukaryotes to sexual multi-cellular organisms. But it took ~2 billion years for that to happen. And there's a limited time window here - if it took another ~1 billion or so years, it would have never happened, because the Earth would have eventually become uninhabitable as the Sun grew to become a red giant.

Once that bottleneck is overcome, it seems relatively easy for an explosion of various multi-cellular organisms to ensue (i.e. the Cambrian explosion). But the next bottleneck is getting to the point where large-brained organisms - capable of abstract reasoning and tool usage - emerge via Darwinian processes. This is definitely not guaranteed by any means, and even on Earth it is only a few rare evolutionary pathways that managed to get to that point. In fact, even if a large-brained organism appears, there's no guarantee that particular species will survive, or be in a position to develop tools (i.e. cetaceans are pretty intelligent, and probably capable of certain rudimentary forms of abstract reasoning, but they will never develop tools due to their physiology.)

So that 2nd bottleneck may be even more difficult to overcome than the first, which means we should expect a Universe filled with interesting fauna, but nothing more. But once you get past that bottleneck, you gain a lot of steam. Tool usage likely results in trial-and-error type reasoning, which eventually leads to something like the scientific method. (I mean, for fucks sake, my cat is capable of trial-and-error reasoning to a limited extent, or at least associative behavior) The 3rd bottleneck is probably getting to the point of industrialization. It's possible that even after getting tool-using, abstract reasoning organisms capable of understanding advanced mathematics, these organisms never make it to the point of industrialization due to some catastrophe, like a worldwide plague or extinction event - or simply being wiped out by some less intelligent but extremely dangerous predator. But assuming these abstract-reasoning organisms remain alive for a few million years, it's likely that at some point somebody is going to figure out how to start manipulating nature via things like agriculture, which is the first step towards industrialization.

There might be a 4th bottleneck here, which is making it to an industrial society, but then not killing everyone in a nuclear holocaust. Presumably, we have not really made it past that bottleneck. But I would imagine that once an industrial society solves a lot of problems that lead to social unrest, the prospect of a nuclear holocaust becomes less and less likely, until you get to the point where millenia can go by with zero "close-calls" like we had during the Cold War.

If that 4th bottleneck is overcome, I'm not sure there's really any more bottlenecks towards ultimately building Dyson Spheres or whatever. Because once principles of computation are realized, and material resources are extracted from the ground, there's nothing that would really stop a civlization from gaining the momentum to eventually start building infrastructure in space. Although, I'd qualify that with one important note: it may not be possible to reach Earth-levels of industrialization without being able to "bootstrap" your civlization with a ready supply of fossil fuels. It's probably not the case that all planets will have a readily accessible supply of fossil fuels that can be used towards that purpose, and it's unclear how something like the industrial revolution would have happened if we only had alternatives like steam-power, etc., to work with.

But the point is, I don't think the path from primordial ooze to Dyson spheres is a path where each point is equally difficult and equally dangerous. It's more like, there's simply certain bottlenecks to overcome - and they're very, very hard to overcome. But once you overcome them, you pick up a lot of momentum and then it becomes more and more unlikely that your civilization will fizzle out.

Given the estimated 40 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, I really don't think a 1/40b chance of a particular planet providing the right conditions for a space-faring society is that crazy. And it only takes a simple application of the anthropic principle to see that we are the lottery winners here.
To add to this, there are some conditions in the solar system that have to be just right, too. You need a Jupiter-like object to migrate inward toward the star, sweeping up most of the debris that would otherwise have rained down on the planet and obliterated any life, but also a Saturn to pull it back so it doesn't wipe out all the inner planets and become a Hot Jupiter. You need enough metal in the core and enough spin to generate a magnetic field that keeps the solar wind from stripping away the atmosphere. You need enough atmosphere to regulate temperate during day and night, but not so much that you end up like Venus. You need to be not be nailed with a gamma ray burst, nearby supernova, pulsar, or even another star that passes too close at any point in billions of years. Those are just the conditions for any kind of life to be possible.

You also need a number of mass-extinction events to jump-start evolution, but ones that don't quite wipe out all life, just most of it.

As for the Fermi Paradox, the most satisfying answer seems to be that tool-using civilizations capable of going into space are just really, really, rare. Other good candidates are that alien civilizations use a non-radio form of communication that we haven't discovered yet, and we are essentially looking for their smoke signals and semaphore lights, or that there is a source of power that's better than a star so there's no reason to build a dyson swarm, or there is a way to travel to parallel dimensions, and colonizing those parallel homeworlds would be a lot easier than colonizing other planets.

Death by AI is not a solution to the Fermi paradox because those AI beings would still build things (like a Matryoshka Brain) that we could detect. Death by nukes or pandemic doesn't do it either, because some people would survive and rebuild, and the evidence of what happened to their ancestors would be abundant. Grey goo is a candidate, especially if any jackass can 3D print it, but a civilization capable of making grey goo should also be able to engineer an artificial immune system to counter it, and unless the propagation rate was lightning quick we could airburst a nuke above the affected area, an EMP which nano-scale robots could not survive. Of course, there could always be some unknown future technology that seems awesome and is discovered before spaceflight becomes affordable, but as soon as we switch it on, Earth goes kaboom.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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Channel72 wrote:In terms of (B), I mean the wealth and resources that could be extracted from the asteroid belt alone would justify the expenditure. Right now, sitting here in the early 21st century like a bunch of idiots, when we have zero infrastructure to even begin to dream about doing anything like that, it may seem really far-fetched. But it really isn't that far-fetched if you're thinking about timescales over thousands or even millions of years. I mean, extracting oil from the ground requires a very expensive infrastructure - once we realized it was worth it, we built that infrastructure. Granted, mining materials from asteroids is an order of magnitude more expensive, but it has to happen in baby-steps over centuries or millenia.
That's true, although I think the "wealth" is a bit of a self-licking ice cream cone - you're building space-based infrastructure to extract resources with the justification that you need them to produce space-based infrastructure. In the case of Earth, for example, you'd need much higher population and much more wasteful usage of resources and energy to justify the cost of sending resources back to Earth (which is why the few efforts to do so are pretty tepid, like Planetary Resources).

But on the time-scale of millennia or longer, who knows?
Sky Captain wrote: A planet may also lack resources for development of industrial civilization. Imagine if Earth had little or no easily usable deposits of fossil fuels. Industrial revolution likely would not have happened and we would be stuck in 18th century tech level.

Or a planet that is mostly covered with oceans with little to no dry land. While very intelligent dolphin equivalents may live there they are not going to build technological civilization and spacecraft any time soon.
It's tricky with "no fossil fuels" because we don't know how much that would hinder development of other technologies, particularly metallurgy in the long run. If they can get to electricity then they might be able to eventually industrialize through electrification using wind/water/nuclear/sun.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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Guardsman Bass wrote:It's tricky with "no fossil fuels" because we don't know how much that would hinder development of other technologies, particularly metallurgy in the long run. If they can get to electricity then they might be able to eventually industrialize through electrification using wind/water/nuclear/sun.
Those all require a certain level of technology to produce. Especially the last two. Hydroelectric power would be possible at a lower tech level, but it would have the problem of being geographically isolated. Mechanized agriculture and mining would be essentially impossible.

I actually wonder if fossil fuels are the biggest limitation once you reach agriculture. If humanity had been the first apex species to evolve rather than the most recent, we would not have any fossil fuels to work with.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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Guardsman Bass wrote:
Channel72 wrote:In terms of (B), I mean the wealth and resources that could be extracted from the asteroid belt alone would justify the expenditure. Right now, sitting here in the early 21st century like a bunch of idiots, when we have zero infrastructure to even begin to dream about doing anything like that, it may seem really far-fetched. But it really isn't that far-fetched if you're thinking about timescales over thousands or even millions of years. I mean, extracting oil from the ground requires a very expensive infrastructure - once we realized it was worth it, we built that infrastructure. Granted, mining materials from asteroids is an order of magnitude more expensive, but it has to happen in baby-steps over centuries or millenia.
That's true, although I think the "wealth" is a bit of a self-licking ice cream cone - you're building space-based infrastructure to extract resources with the justification that you need them to produce space-based infrastructure. In the case of Earth, for example, you'd need much higher population and much more wasteful usage of resources and energy to justify the cost of sending resources back to Earth (which is why the few efforts to do so are pretty tepid, like Planetary Resources).

But on the time-scale of millennia or longer, who knows?
I dunno about that. It is estimated there isn't enough platinum in the earth's crust to fully meet our needs, so mining asteroids for it might be worth doing.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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That's where the "substitutes" issue comes in. Back when the Chinese cracked down on the exports of rare earth metals, there was some fear about the impact - which turned out to be unwarranted. Turns out it was possible to change things up to use less of them. It may not have been the ideal solution, but it was affordable and satisfactory.

It's the same thing with rare metals. They might be the best possible option for something, but if they're really expensive to gather (and they would be if you're mining them off asteroids - the cost of sending a kilogram to GEO alone, for example, is much higher than the per-kilogram value of Platinum), you'll try out imperfect substitutes first.

Now, keep in mind, I'm talking about the plausible near-future. Centuries from now, millennia from now, who knows - it all depends on the trajectory of robotics and AI development.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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Yeah, I mean, I think we're all in agreement that humanity isn't going to be mining any asteroids in the 21st century, and probably not even the 22nd. But I imagine that this century we'll start seeing the first baby-steps towards setting up an infrastructure in space, which will eventually be leveraged to actually mine asteroids and other extraterrestrial bodies. My (obvious) prediction would be that the beginnings of that infrastructure will be related to space-tourism or perhaps orbital defense initiatives, since those are really the only potentially profitable short-term ventures related to setting up an infrastructure in space. At least, Elon Musk seems to thing so with regards to the latter.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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Looks like the Allen Telescope Array has been pointed at the system and is currently listening for any radio signals. Although the odds are practically nil that it will find anything, I am still finding myself getting excited about this.

http://www.space.com/30855-alien-life-s ... cture.html
The search for signs of life in a mysterious star system hypothesized to potentially harbor an "alien megastructure" is now underway.

Astronomers have begun using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a system of radio dishes about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, to hunt for signals coming from the vicinity of KIC 8462852, a star that lies 1,500 light-years from Earth.

NASA's Kepler space telescope found that KIC 8462852 dimmed oddly and dramatically several times over the past few years. The dimming events were far too substantial to be caused by a planet crossing the star's face, researchers say, and other possible explanations, such as an enormous dust cloud, don't add up, either.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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With off-world production, I think we'll see it as an outgrowth of an international lunar base. When ISS ends its mission, they'll be looking for another "big" crewed mission that can rope in a bunch of international partners with their own astronauts and space programs, and a lunar base would be the logical next step there if they don't want to do another big space station in orbit - it's something that the US, Russia, China, and others circa late 2020s could probably do together in terms of hardware development and planning. While they're on the moon, they could do stuff like reprocessing lunar material and building things out of it in terms of ISRU.

With the asteroids, I don't think it will be orbital infrastructure so much as someone figuring out how to make a remotely operated multi-ton mining robot, then launching it on a medium or medium-to-heavy-lift booster to an asteroid to pull it apart looking for useful material. The benefits of frontloading all the production back on Earth and launching it in one piece are enormous - actually building all the components in space would come much later on.

Of course, whether that leads to anything more except on the very long-term is anyone's guess. Even if you've got a robot that can do it, it may not be cost-effective to mine asteroids for material, even for the spacecraft you're planning to use.
Borgholio wrote:Looks like the Allen Telescope Array has been pointed at the system and is currently listening for any radio signals. Although the odds are practically nil that it will find anything, I am still finding myself getting excited about this.
Holy shit, that was a fast response time. I figured they'd have stuff on their plate, and we'd hear about them doing it a few months (or years) from now.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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The really frustrating thing is that this is likely to remain inconclusive for a while. Even if they don't pick up any signals, it doesn't necessarily rule out the alien-megastructure hypothesis. Is there any way, with current technology, to actually rule that hypothesis out in favor of something like the comet storm?
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

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So apparently, Jason Wright and some other scientists wrote up a journal article to be submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, outlining the available techniques for distinguishing artificial megastructures, and the inherent difficulty in distinguishing potential candidates from natural phenomena. They mention KIC 8462852 as a candidate, and discuss the possibility of a Dyson swarm being the cause of the dip in brightness in Section 4.

The paper is still awaiting peer review and is therefore not published yet - but the draft is available for reading:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.04606v1

It's worth reading, as it lays out the case for various possibilities and methods for detecting K2 civilizations in more rigorous detail than we get from the general media. It also contains the least cautious assessment with regards to the possibility of KIC 8462852 being the result of an alien civilization that I've ever read from an actual PhD astrophysicist:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.04606v1 wrote: We have in KIC 8462 a system with all of the hallmarks of a Dyson swarm (Section 2.1.3): aperiodic events of almost arbitrary depth, duration, and complexity. Historically, targeted SETI has followed a reasonable strategy of spending its most intense efforts on the most promising targets. Given this object’s qualitative uniqueness, given that even contrived natural explanations appear inadequate, and given predictions that Kepler would be able to detect large alien megastructures via anomalies like these, we feel is the most promising stellar SETI target discovered to date. We suggest that KIC 8462 warrants significant interest from SETI in addition to traditional astrophysical study, and that searches for similar, less obvious objects in the Kepler data set are a compelling exercise.
The thing that really bothers me about all this, as I mentioned above, is that evidence for alien megastructures seems to be non-falsifiable. I mean, if we observe a star of similar age that has a similar brightness dip as KIC 8462852, how exactly do we falsify the idea that it might be a Dyson swarm? Obviously, radio signals could confirm it's a Dyson swarm - but the lack of radio signals really doesn't get us anywhere. So we're stuck with various non-falsifiable hypotheses which get us nowhere.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Borgholio »

Holy shit, that was a fast response time. I figured they'd have stuff on their plate, and we'd hear about them doing it a few months (or years) from now.
Either they actually had spare time (which I doubt), they prioritized this over already-scheduled time, or someone volunteered their time for this instead of their scheduled project.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Zeropoint »

The thing that really bothers me about all this, as I mentioned above, is that evidence for alien megastructures seems to be non-falsifiable. I mean, if we observe a star of similar age that has a similar brightness dip as KIC 8462852, how exactly do we falsify the idea that it might be a Dyson swarm? Obviously, radio signals could confirm it's a Dyson swarm - but the lack of radio signals really doesn't get us anywhere. So we're stuck with various non-falsifiable hypotheses which get us nowhere.
This is one of those reasons not to get too excited about it. An idea that's not falsifiable isn't testable and isn't really part of science. The only thing you can responsibly do with it is leave it on the far back burner until you can think of a way to test it.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Sky Captain »

If there is Dyson swarm around that star, I'm curious why would it cause such large dimming and then returning back to normal. I thought in a Dyson swarm solar power sattellites would be placed more or less evenly around the star so they don't occlude each other too much. There could be some fluctuations in light output as different number of satellites in their orbits happen to be between Earth and star, but dimming by 25 % is kind of weird.
Also if there is Dyson swarm that star should have larger than normal infrared output because of waste heat coming from Dyson swarm. IIRC spectral analysis did not show anything unusual.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by salm »

Sky Captain wrote:If there is Dyson swarm around that star, I'm curious why would it cause such large dimming and then returning back to normal. I thought in a Dyson swarm solar power sattellites would be placed more or less evenly around the star so they don't occlude each other too much. There could be some fluctuations in light output as different number of satellites in their orbits happen to be between Earth and star, but dimming by 25 % is kind of weird.
Also if there is Dyson swarm that star should have larger than normal infrared output because of waste heat coming from Dyson swarm. IIRC spectral analysis did not show anything unusual.
Maybe it is preferable to have the existing structures as close together as possible for cheaper maintenance or easier defense?
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Borgholio
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Borgholio »

Update from the ATA - nothing yet, but here are some nice details on the search so far:

http://www.universetoday.com/122971/set ... c-8462852/

In a nutshell, they're looking at a wide range of frequencies instead of narrow bands like a normal SETI search. Other articles online state that this phase of the search will last for the rest of this week, then they will jump to a different set of frequencies. Also, this article confirms that they over-rode the existing observation schedule specifically to conduct this search.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Sky Captain »

At 1500 light years it probably would have to be dedicated signal from very powerful transmitter focused at our solar system for us to pick up since normal radio transmissions would be below the background noise at that distance. It is still worth to listen for unusual signals, but I would not be suprised if nothing is detected. Possibly best bet is to keep observing the star and if something orbits it odds are it will make another crossing. It would be worth to get light spectrum if/when that unknown object makes another pass.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Channel72 »

Can anyone with a better understanding of astrophysics or orbital mechanics explain why it's considered so unlikely that this whole thing isn't simply the result of some giant clump of matter naturally just orbiting this star? I mean, like an enormous gas giant or something that is being pulled towards the star, or a giant mass of asteroids or cloud of dust orbiting the star on a collision course? I realize that gravity tends to "smooth" everything out over time, so a phenomenon like that would be relatively short-lived, and given the overwhelming age of the Universe, it would be something of a coincidence to actually observe it ... whereas, a hypothetical Dyson swarm could potentially exist in a stable position for millions of years.

But:
  • (1) Even though it would be rare to observe a giant clump of matter orbiting a star like that, when we're cataloging millions of stars, I suppose we might eventually observe something like this.

    (2) I would think that over millions of years, a Dyson swarm would tend towards becoming more like a Dyson sphere - to the point where less and less visible light escapes from the star. But this star is still emitting like 70% of it's visible light when it dips, and it only dips sometimes - which would indicate that even if this is a Dyson swarm, it is for some reason not complete. So we're back to (1) - where our observation can only be explained by the fact that we just happened to observe this alien structure at a point in its infancy where it still isn't complete. So that seems just as coincidental as (1), so we may as well just go with (1) since at least giant clumps of matter are things we're sure exist, unlike alien K2 civilizations.
You could also argue that the hypothetical Dyson swarm around KIC 8462 is complete, and for some reason the aliens just didn't need to build a full "sphere" or "bubble". I mean, I wouldn't expect them to build a completely solid sphere, obviously, but I'd think they'd eventually build a dense enough swarm such that most of the light around KIC 8462 would be utilized, and thus appear very dim to us. So even if this is a Dyson swarm, it still seems an incredibly unlikely coincidence that we somehow managed to see it during it's early construction phase.

Finally - isn't it the case that an actual Dyson swarm would emit very little visible light, but a lot of infrared light? Have the astronomers tested for this?
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Napoleon the Clown »

The star is old enough that it shouldn't have a big ol' dust cloud, or clumps of failed planet, around it. It's older than our sun. Any debris fields like what we're seeing around it would need to be relatively recent, something caused by another star disturbing the orbit of multiple somethings. And Jupiter is already at roughly the upper limit of planetary diameter, so there's no way a single planet could get that goddamn huge.

The good news is, there's a red dwarf close enough to this star to explain how orbits could get disturbed and disturb enough orbits to cause this. They have checked infrared readings around the star, and there's nothing unusual going on there. It's actually why they highly doubt a planet was smashed into rubble. There'd be a crapload of heat from that, and given that there's not really anything weird going on with the infrared output...

Keep in mind, the people who got the ball rolling on "OH EM GEE, ALIENS!" are largely with SETI, a group that's around just to try and find proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by K. A. Pital »

Channel72 wrote:Who is working on patches and upgrades for all the software? You'd need an entire class of programmers, engineers and maintainers who keep all this going - and, unless they're all AIs or slaves or something, why are they content to serve their "masters" who spend all day jerking off in a VM?
Why millions of present-day engineers and workers are content to serve a class of rentiers who jerk off on the Bahamas? :P
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Re: Scientists suspect alien structure around star.

Post by Simon_Jester »

This happens because we have an entire economy configured so that the engineers and workers have to do something. Some source of income is necessary to life, and by and large you can only earn an income by working in a role 'allowed' by the capitalist system.

In an economy that is massively automated, the engineers and workers could also be doing nothing- that is a viable choice. A modern-style system would not be enough to do this. Remember that the owners here are numerous individuals who spend their time in virtual reality. They are not going to be well equipped to defend or speak for themselves, so if the people who run their machines go on strike, they're out of luck. By contrast, the rentiers of whom you speak can always hop on a plane and come back from the Bahamas to hire some lawyers and straighten out any issues that arise from their employees going on strike for shorter working hours.

To make this work you would need to set things up so that whoever is tending to the needs of the people in virtual reality will do so automatically and has no incentive to stop. This basically requires automata... or alien, non-human beings who might feel differently about issues like labor and just rewards. Since this Dyson sphere, if it IS a Dyson sphere, was clearly constructed by aliens... that's plausible.
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