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Star exhibits strange light patterns which could be a sign of alien activity

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aliengmr

Member

You did notice those orbits right?

1024px-Solar_System_and_KOI-351_system_comparison.jpg


Similar as in not batshit insane, basically.
 
Similar as in not batshit insane, basically.

We have no idea if a solar system exactly like ours is rare. We're barely able to detect them at all. My point was we found one at least somewhat similar in a few years of searching.

It's a big galaxy, and to be honest we don't even know if a solar system exactly like ours is needed for life to emerge.
 

Not

Banned
And we're only seeing what was going on thousands of years ago. That is crazy.

The Truth Is Out There
 

Javaman

Member
Maybe a dyson sphere would make for a high tech way to communicate with less advanced species across the galaxy by simply "flashing the star". They could still harvest most of the energy from the star yet by blocking the star completely send an mass frequency message that requires almost no technology to receive.

Us and othet species wouldn't need any technology to detect it. Our eyes can only detect a narrow band of frequencies so we need special tools to see outside of them. Not necessary if you are blocking the spectrums of a star completely.
 

pringles

Member
Chills down my spine reading this stuff. Even if it's probably something else, it's still exciting to think about 'what if'... what if it's truly a sign of a very advanced civilization. It would be a universe-changing discovery.
 

Camjo-Z

Member
Stars exhibit strange activities all the time, doesn't mean they're aliens. Take Miley Cyrus, for example...

...I'll be here all week!
 

SomTervo

Member
Spent all afternoon talking about this with colleagues.

The best bit about the whole story is that, unlike most scientific studies, they'll get follow-up results within 3-4 months.

We should know for sure in no time at all.

Yusssssssssss.

Not that this will be conclusive anyway.

Stars exhibit strange activities all the time, doesn't mean they're aliens. Take Miley Cyrus, for example...

...I'll be here all week!

slowclap.gif
 
I would die a sad man if I never got to experience the confirmation of alien life out there. Even microscopic life is good enough for me!

Having said that, if this discovery truly relates to an advanced alien civilisation, they likely don't give a rats arse about us on earth. We'd look like incompetent gnats compared to their intelligence, which is still cool think of :)

Looking forward to the results in 2016.
 

CDX

Member
If a civilization has the ability to create a Dyson ring 1400 years ago and we are not yet dead. Then the speed of light is a hard limit.

If this is an advanced civilization 1400+ light years away, and this is the only sign of them we can find.

Then I think I might have to agree. That is both slightly comforting and disappointing at the same time.
 

Staccat0

Fail out bailed
So... can Science GAF tell me how legit these researchers are on like a scale of 1-10?

I feel like people pick up this stuff and I never know enough to even have a baseline on how serious I should take any of it.
 

endre

Member
So... can Science GAF tell me how legit these researchers are on like a scale of 1-10?

I feel like people pick up this stuff and I never know enough to even have a baseline on how serious I should take any of it.

The researchers are quite legit. You can check the institutions they work for from the paper someone linked on the first page.

As expected their proposed explanation does not include aliens:

Our most promising theory invokes a family of exocomets.
One way we imagine such a barrage of comets could be triggered
is by the passage of a field star through the system. And, in fact,
as discussed above, there is a small star nearby (∼ 1000 AU; Sec-
tion 2.3) which, if moving near to KIC 8462852, but not bound to
it, could trigger a barrage of bodies into the vicinity of the host
star. On the other hand, if the companion star is bound, it could
be pumping up comet eccentricities through the Kozai mechanism.
Measuring the motion/orbit of the companion star with respect to
KIC 8462852 would be telling in whether or not it is associated, and
we would then be able to put stricter predictions on the timescale
and repeatability of comet showers based on bound or unbound
star-comet perturbing models. Finally, comets would release gas
(as well as dust), and sensitive observations to detect this gas would
also test this hypothesis.
 

SkyOdin

Member
Maybe a dyson sphere would make for a high tech way to communicate with less advanced species across the galaxy by simply "flashing the star". They could still harvest most of the energy from the star yet by blocking the star completely send an mass frequency message that requires almost no technology to receive.

Us and othet species wouldn't need any technology to detect it. Our eyes can only detect a narrow band of frequencies so we need special tools to see outside of them. Not necessary if you are blocking the spectrums of a star completely.

You can't block the energy of a star completely. If you construct a sphere to completely encase a star, that sphere would ultimately start to heat up and radiate that heat in the form of black-body radiation. That sort of infrared light can be detected, and is one of the theoretical methods of discovering a Dyson sphere.

Otherwise though, the rest of your idea of using a Dyson sphere as a long-range open communication device works out. You could theoretically pulse the light (be it visible or infrared) as a means of sending a signal out to the rest of the galaxy. I'm not sure what you mean by a "mass frequency" though.

At the very least, it is more likely than inventing a form of FTL communication. People bring that up casually as a possibility, but I don't think people realize exactly why most physicists consider c to be the hard speed limit for the transmission of information. The simple answer is that FTL communication would immediately result in the violation of causality. If you were to try to send out a message at superluminal speeds, you could easily receive the response to that message before you even finish composing the message in the first place. That is, it is possible to receive a reply to a message you never wrote. FTL communication itself is the only prerequisite to this paradox. Thus, FTL communication breaks causality, and is a form of time travel.
 

Slayer-33

Liverpool-2
You can't block the energy of a star completely. If you construct a sphere to completely encase a star, that sphere would ultimately start to heat up and radiate that heat in the form of black-body radiation. That sort of infrared light can be detected, and is one of the theoretical methods of discovering a Dyson sphere.

Otherwise though, the rest of your idea of using a Dyson sphere as a long-range open communication device works out. You could theoretically pulse the light (be it visible or infrared) as a means of sending a signal out to the rest of the galaxy. I'm not sure what you mean by a "mass frequency" though.

At the very least, it is more likely than inventing a form of FTL communication. People bring that up casually as a possibility, but I don't think people realize exactly why most physicists consider c to be the hard speed limit for the transmission of information. The simple answer is that FTL communication would immediately result in the violation of causality. If you were to try to send out a message at superluminal speeds, you could easily receive the response to that message before you even finish composing the message in the first place. That is, it is possible to receive a reply to a message you never wrote. FTL communication itself is the only prerequisite to this paradox. Thus, FTL communication breaks causality, and is a form of time travel.

Fuck.
 
The thing that has me convinced that this is something significant is that they studied this for years before going public. That means they really did exhaust every method and reasonable explanation they had before even implying that an alien civilization might be a possibility.
 

Erevador

Member
This is absolutely fascinating. Finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End yesterday, and woke up to read this.

We live in interesting times.
 

Fuzzery

Member
This is absolutely fascinating. Finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End yesterday, and woke up to read this.

We live in interesting times.

Just finished The Dark Forest, the sequel to The Three Body Problem

I highly recommend both books.

SEMI BOOK SPOILERS
This exact scenario emerges in the second book. It posits that because technological advances can't be predicted, it's possible that in 1400 years, a very short amount of time cosmically, we might have the means to destroy them, given the level of technology we are at now. Thus, a prisoner's dilemma emerges, since they have means of knowing or even predicting what we will do, and because a round trip communication would take 2800 years. If they send a greeting, our first move may be to destroy them, and by the time our weapons reach them, if they are moving anywhere close to the sped of light, they'd have little to no time to respond. Thus, if an alien civilization exists, if they are discovered, even if they are a "benevolent" civilization, they would have a large incentive to strike first, if they are capable of doing so, or risk destruction.

If you think about it, it's impossible to predict the actions of earth's governments. If a message arrives, even if we respond in peace at that moment, who knows what will happen in a hundred years or two. There's just too much uncertainty. What if planet killing weapons become accessible to the masses? What if a militaristic nation a la nazi gemany comes to power? Or a rogue agent decides to launch one? They would have no way of predicting or influencing any of this, other than by making a killing blow at first discovery.
 
I know how we would have to travel the stars if the speed of light is a hard limit. Aren't there, theoretically, computers/communication devices that are instantaneous.

Maybe we use those and then we have "transporters" set up when we finally reach a place. Except, they don't actually transport you, they just kill you and an exact duplicate is made at the place you want to go.
 

Caayn

Member
At the very least, it is more likely than inventing a form of FTL communication. People bring that up casually as a possibility, but I don't think people realize exactly why most physicists consider c to be the hard speed limit for the transmission of information. The simple answer is that FTL communication would immediately result in the violation of causality. If you were to try to send out a message at superluminal speeds, you could easily receive the response to that message before you even finish composing the message in the first place. That is, it is possible to receive a reply to a message you never wrote. FTL communication itself is the only prerequisite to this paradox. Thus, FTL communication breaks causality, and is a form of time travel.
How does that work? I can never quite wrap my head around this part.

If for example we've got two communication devices, both are at a distance of 10 light years away from each other. Com device A would see com device B as it was 10 years ago. But if com A sends a message at FTL speeds to com B it should arrive before com A can observe it. Com B can send a message back before com A can observe that the message has arrived, however com A did send the message. Just because com A can't oberserve the message arriving for another 10 years how does this mean that it's automatically time travel?
 

V1LÆM

Gold Member
I'd love if it was aliens and it was something like a spaceport orbiting their planet. Kinda like how we have the ISS orbiting us but they would be far more advanced than us and be able to travel to nearby planets.

Maybe they already see us.

Most likely just something natural and we keep looking. It's fun to imagine I guess.
 

Apt101

Member
I hope they can prove it's an alien civilization. We'd be seeing how their civ appeared over a thousand years ago, which would be really cool.
 
Having said that, if this discovery truly relates to an advanced alien civilisation, they likely don't give a rats arse about us on earth. We'd look like incompetent gnats compared to their intelligence, which is still cool think of :)

I don't think that's really true. If we found a sentient species less advanced than ourselves it'd still be the most significant discovery we'd ever made, regardless of whether they could offer us anything or compare to us technologically.
 

Maxrunner

Member
I simply can't be the only one who laughed at - "A Japanese plane loaded with wine".

Seriously though humans are human and make mistakes.

So you think they drank all the wine???If there's a real UFO case, you wont get a better one than this. They even had radar readings....
 
I don't think that's really true. If we found a sentient species less advanced than ourselves it'd still be the most significant discovery we'd ever made, regardless of whether they could offer us anything or compare to us technologically.

I get you.

I guess my point was that such an advanced alien civ might have discovered other species of life already (wouldn't this very discovery of super intelligent beings prove the proliferation of life in the universe?)

In that case I don't think humans would prove particularly alluring or interesting to them. If humans are one in a gazillion intelligent species in the galaxy then yeah those aliens would be interested.
 

Mikey Jr.

Member
Maybe a dyson sphere would make for a high tech way to communicate with less advanced species across the galaxy by simply "flashing the star". They could still harvest most of the energy from the star yet by blocking the star completely send an mass frequency message that requires almost no technology to receive.

Us and othet species wouldn't need any technology to detect it. Our eyes can only detect a narrow band of frequencies so we need special tools to see outside of them. Not necessary if you are blocking the spectrums of a star completely.

Imagine finding a star, and it just started blinking? But not just blinking randomly, but with a pattern?

That would be both amazing and scary at the same time. But scary in a good way.
 

Unai

Member
I get you.

I guess my point was that such an advanced alien civ might have discovered other species of life already (wouldn't this very discovery of super intelligent beings prove the proliferation of life in the universe?)

In that case I don't think humans would prove particularly alluring or interesting to them. If humans are one in a gazillion intelligent species in the galaxy then yeah those aliens would be interested.

We don't know that. You have to consider that that civilization is very close to us in a galactic scale, so it wouldn't be surprising if we are the first sentient life they find even if the galaxy is indeed full of life elsewhere.
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
I know how we would have to travel the stars if the speed of light is a hard limit. Aren't there, theoretically, computers/communication devices that are instantaneous.

Maybe we use those and then we have "transporters" set up when we finally reach a place. Except, they don't actually transport you, they just kill you and an exact duplicate is made at the place you want to go.

instantaneous communication (or transfering any kind of information faster than light) is equivalent to FTL, for the exact reason you specified. If one is impossible, so is the other.
 
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