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[PrivateWHudson]

Nope, because any meaningful observation initiates the particle committing to one state. You can't "see" that it's still fuzzy, when you look at it it stops.



Also that you can't "make" it collapse into one state. You can't make it so that of ten entangled particles 3 become "left" and 7 become "right"

Ugh. Headache material. How do we know that it was ever fuzzy then? I tried to read up on this once, and should probably give it another go. I envy the people that can make sense of this stuff.

 

[KarmaCow]

But what about using the off/on state as a form of ftl communication? I thought the biggest oddity was that when the Left Hand was observed, the Right Hand was resolved instantly regardless of distance. Is it possible to "kind of" observe? Like peek just enough that you know the other guy hasn't "observed" his particle yet?

As stated earlier, the term observing is a misnomer. When you interact with the system, you fundamentally affect it, collapsing it to a single state.

 

[SkyOdin]

until we turn atoms into transitors

That's not necessarily practical or possible. At the ~14nm scale of modern transistors, manufacturers are already at the very limits of what is possible with silicon, thanks to the effects of quantum tunneling and other issues. There are people researching methods to shrink transistors down to 5nm or such using new designs and materials, but once your transistors is small enough that it starts to run into the limits set by quantum mechanics, it stops being practical.

In other words, an individual atom will probably never be able to be used as a transistor, since an individual atom is very much at the mercy of quantum mechanics. The positions of individual electrons that make up the atom's shell exist in quantum waveform states. We can only describe them in terms of probabilities, not certainties. Thus, they would make for rather unreliable transistors.

 

[teh_pwn]

I imagine a species that advanced would have little interest in our solar system. They can harvest the energy of stars, and ours is small. They also would likely be able to terraform planets to their conditions and synthesize basically any substance. What good is a tiny planet full of water, nitrogen, and trace amounts of common metals?

 

[King_Moc]

When Betelgeuse goes supernova, it's going to be a sight to see.

Didn't it already go nova? It's a red giant right?

 

[ibyea]

Sun is actually barely offwhite. I wonder why these comparison charts keep using the wrong color.

Because we are more likely to see the sun when it's lower in the sky, which means Rayleigh scattering has greater effects. So people think the sun is yellow. It doesn't help astronomers call G stars yellow dwarfs.

 

[PrivateWHudson]

Sun is actually barely offwhite. I wonder why these comparison charts keep using the wrong color.

As for the story, pretty cool. I wonder how they would harvest energy. Based on our limited understanding of everything. I would assume some sort of Graphene like netting in clusters because carbon is everywhere and it would be an efficient way to handle electricity, though this is based on 21st century Earth Science so no probably not.

Also radio waves for straight up broadcast detection wouldn't be a thing for this level of advancement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6N_4jGJADY#action=share + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8OhJKR3AA4 + That Graphene stuff

 

[The Technomancer]

Ugh. Headache material. How do we know that it was ever fuzzy then? I tried to read up on this once, and should probably give it another go. I envy the people that can make sense of this stuff.

That is a very large question that even I can't really answer, but the short version is
-Quantum mechanics depends on it
-Quantum mechanics makes some very specific predictions about the world
-Observation backs up all of those predictions to a staggering degree, therefore stuff has to be capable of being "fuzzy"

EDIT: All properties of everything are (apparently) probabilistic on fundamental levels and this starts to get into how particles are really just disturbances in fields and stuff

 

[God of Gamblers]

Isnt KIC 8462852 even larger than our star, by 60% I think.

But its still tiny compared to the biggest star:

Combining the two previous references so you can see what covering 20% of our Sun would look like:

 

[Doctor Doom]

That's not how quantum works. You are confusing being measured with "knowing being watched". Measurement in the definition includes contact with light and other objects. Secondly you can't say thermo doesn't work in quantum because thermo is a statistical phenomena due to the average motion of many particles. And while the quantum nature of objects can have effect, especially at very low temperatures or very dense objects, they don't violate any fundamental thermo laws. Nor do quantum objects violate energy conservation, despite the time/energy uncertainty.
.

I've heard the second law can be violated for short timescales in small systems,

If they looked back at us they would see the world as it was 1500 years ago. Barely any lights in any city or radio waves coming from us at that point. They would've looked here a long time ago and went to search elsewhere..

Well, larger telescopes doesn't really mean anything if there is nothing to see in the first place. We are also 1480 lightyears from them, so at best they can only see Earth as it was in the year 535 or so. That was centuries before Earth began to broadcast radio waves or produce significant light pollution. Heck, Earth still had most of its forests back then. There would be very little evidence to an outsider that there was an intelligent species on our planet, unless they landed a spaceship on the planet. It will be over a thousand years from now before human civilization will become more evident to them.
.

They would know earth is earthlike in the goldilocks zone, and also likely that it harbors life. That's enough incentive to visit and or start sending signals this way.

edit: Also I hypothesize that they may be able to build some kind of solar system size hypertelescope, by using millions of satellite telescopes and pointing them at some direction, through optical interferometry such may or may not enable more details to be gained.

The following is for hypertelescopes that can conceivably be built with our technology, much smaller than what such a hypothetical super civilization could build[a solar system or larger than solar system hypertelescope]:

Labeyrie and colleagues have shown how a technologically feasible hypertelescope could be used to detect surface features such as continents, seasons, and climates on worlds as far as 10 light-years away. -wisegeek

As for why they'd ignore us...

Either a.) habitability is useless to them and or b.) life on other nearby planets is of no concerns to them.

I imagine a species that advanced would have little interest in our solar system. They can harvest the energy of stars, and ours is small. They also would likely be able to terraform planets to their conditions and synthesize basically any substance. What good is a tiny planet full of water, nitrogen, and trace amounts of common metals?

To study indigenous lifeforms?

Nope, this is what's been disproven. Now we're getting out of my depth, but basically its been shown repeatedly that the decision between which particle is "left handed" and "right handed" is not assigned at the time of entanglement and just unknown to us until we measure. It really is that the state of both particles is undefined up until the point of measurement but that measuring one means you know the measurement of the other

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem

Hidden variables have not been disproven, either nonlocal hidden variables or superdeterminism allow for the existence of predetermined outcomes.

The following makes more sense of the idea of the wave particle nature of matter:
Deterministic Fluid models of quantum mechanics

I'm still skeptical of the very idea of the singularity. It seems predicated on a blind belief that intelligence and computational power are capable of infinite growth, which I am doubtful of. No matter what, any computer is dependent on being built in the physical world, and thus has to deal with physical limitations. Eventually people are going to hit the limits of what is physically possible with computers.

There are limits, but it all depends on how far they are, some estimates of the brain and future computational limits give the following

[a] nanoteched grain of sand has a total bit switching (computational) rate that is a factor of a quintillion (a million trillion) times larger than the [human] brain’s- De Garis

Now that might be a bit overoptimistic, but it is indeed a question how fast can computers go, there is the idea of things like reversible computing, that if they prove viable would mean that we would only be limited by manufacturing technology but could build volumetric technology. Assuming molecular components, you only have to speak to a chemist to know just how many molecules there are in 1 Cubic meter of X molecular constitution. With such number of elements you're talking ridiculous processing power.

The idea is that once intelligence is cracked, you have 24-7 scientists, these scientists can have iq as high as human and probably higher if not far higher. On top of that they can likely operate faster than realtime in simplified simulated universes, some estimates indicate up to a million fold speed up is conceivable. Using advanced supercomputers they can also conduct experiments via simulation at faster than realtime 24-7.

Imagine millions or billions of scientists working 24-7 say at 10x the speed of humans, able to rapidly exchange memories and with interconnected minds and knowledge of all domains. Even a 2x speed up 24-7 scientist would radically accelerate things, a 10x or 100x let alone 1000x or million x sped up scientist is completely unimaginable even at human levels of intelligence. If intelligence surpassing humans is possible, a theory of the nature of intelligence will likely open the way to bringing such to the table.

 

[Cyber Caesar]

That really makes me question the megastructures. I mean, damn, you forget just how big area you have to map on a star size of our sun. It really has to come from a civilization that has been around millions of years, if not colonized a galaxy. And I don't see any aliens around.

A civilization that's reached technological maturity might be able to reach that area in a couple hundred years. They would probably be post biological or maybe not. They won't be monkey meat for sure, no way to know really. The Information Eschaton

 

[ibyea]

Didn't it already go nova? It's a red giant right?

While it is a red supergiant, it has not yet exploded. You can still see it chugging along in the left shoulder of the constellation of Orion. It will take a very very very long time to explode, even if star scale wise it doesn't have much life left to it.

Something within human lifespan could happen with Eta Carinae though. It could explode tomorrow, or it might take another hundred thousand years. Who knows.

 

[SkyOdin]

You're assuming that an advanced AI is reliant on more and more transistors being packed into ever a decreasing physical space. Radically different approaches in the use of existing hardware and software could very give rise to such an entity.

Oh, I'm not discounting the possibility of people making advanced AI. In fact, since human beings are capable of intelligent thought, there has to be a means of artificially replicating the result.

However, I am skeptical of the concept of the singularity. The basic idea being the intelligence singularity is that you task AIs with designing smarter AIs, and then use those resulting AIs to repeat the process. The idea is that eventually you will result in making super-AIs that are thousands of times smarter than humans, resulting in dramatic technological progress. I am unconvinced that this possible, since it is very likely they will hit the physical limitations of computation before they get an AI-God. I don't know what the physical limit is, but I don't believe that the potential growth in computational power is limitless.

 

[Atlas157]

Isnt KIC 8462852 even larger than our star, by 60% I think.

But its still tiny compared to the biggest star:

Not the biggest star anymore.

 

[teh_pwn]

To study indigenous lifeforms?

Sure.

I guess I should have pointed out I was getting at the "we'd be dead if the speed of light weren't a hard limit" idea. We don't have resources a species like that would want that they couldn't get with a tiny fraction of the effort by other means. A species like that needs energy and basic elements. To go out of their way to eradicate a planet like Earth would be like a family hiring a pest control service to kill a massive roach infestation in another city.

I think the mentality holds us at a higher value than we are. Now if we started setting up power extraction bases at competing high value star systems, I could see war.

 

[DieH@rd]

So what we are observing is 1480 years ago, or the year 535

I just found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_weather_events_of_535%E2%80%93536 which states that there was extreme weather events across the globe, possibly caused by space debris.

Coincidence? I think not.

Man, I just read that and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315–17
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

Europe got fucked really hard in 14th century.

 

[ibyea]

I've heard the second law can be violated for short timescales in small systems,

Of course, for small systems and short time periods. Because entropy is a statement on probability, in small systems and short time periods, unlikely things can pop out more. Unless I am missing something else from this it doesn't seem to contradict what I said.

 

[teh_pwn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6N_4jGJADY#action=share + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8OhJKR3AA4 + That Graphene stuff

Exciting advances in material science. So many industries are going to be made possible, and existing ones accelerated.

Intel already is rumored to be ditching Silicon with their Cannonlake design.

 

[LookAtMeGo]

Sure.
Now if we started setting up power extraction bases at competing high value star systems, I could see war.

Cool idea for a movie.

 

[ibyea]

Hidden variables have not been disproven, either nonlocal hidden variables or superdeterminism allow for the existence of predetermined outcomes.

The following makes more sense of the idea of the wave particle nature of matter:
Deterministic Fluid models of quantum mechanics

Bohm's interpretation, eh? It does show promise, and all the Bell experiments, while each different one closing certain loopholes, they don't close all the loopholes at the same time. I was skeptical at first but it looks like the legit thing!

 

[Doctor Doom]

Oh, I'm not discounting the possibility of people making advanced AI. In fact, since human beings are capable of intelligent thought, there has to be a means of artificially replicating the result.

However, I am skeptical of the concept of the singularity. The basic idea being the intelligence singularity is that you task AIs with designing smarter AIs, and then use those resulting AIs to repeat the process. The idea is that eventually you will result in making super-AIs that are thousands of times smarter than humans, resulting in dramatic technological progress. I am unconvinced that this possible, since it is very likely they will hit the physical limitations of computation before they get an AI-God. I don't know what the physical limit is, but I don't believe that the potential growth in computational power is limitless.

You don't necessarily need a single super ai to achieve rapid speed ups. Even human level intelligence if sped up 10-1000x let alone 1 million x would prove pretty substantial. As I said imagine millions or billions of even human level AI scientists exchanging thoughts and knowledge at the speed of light and operating a million times faster than human.

A year within their computer simulation would occur ridiculously fast(In just a few of our seconds, if I'm not mistaken). In a single of our years they'd experience a million years. Imagine mathematicians, programmers and engineers working for 1 million years and getting their results within 1 of our years. Even the other sciences could be sped up significantly if high precision simulations can be created at realtime or faster than realtime.

EDIT:

Right now the bottleneck for technological progress is the human brain itself. If we can automate intelligence and especially if we can do so at faster than realtime progress will inevitably skyrocket. We are only one invention away from getting a perpendicular line on the graph of progress, and that invention is our final invention, Artificial General Intelligence. If the nature of intelligence is understood, and a theory surrounding it and how to engineer entities exhibiting it and increasing in capability, the doors are open.

 

[Jacobi]

So I'm still not really convinced these aren't comets brought from another star. There isn't really an argument against it although I really want to believe.

 

[Skinpop]

That really makes me question the megastructures. I mean, damn, you forget just how big area you have to map on a star size of our sun. It really has to come from a civilization that has been around millions of years, if not colonized a galaxy. And I don't see any aliens around.

not really, you just need self replicating machines to build the thing. once they start replicating factories and worker machines the construction speed would increase exponentially. we could probably have the necessary tech ready within a few decades if we put the effort into it. then another 50 years or so to build a complete dyson swarm.

 

[ibyea]

You don't necessarily need a single super ai to achieve rapid speed ups. Even human level intelligence if sped up 10-1000x let alone 1 million x would prove pretty substantial. As I said imagine millions or billions of even human level AI scientists exchanging thoughts and knowledge at the speed of light and operating a million times faster than human.

A year within their computer simulation would occur ridiculously fast(In just a few of our seconds, if I'm not mistaken). In a single of our years they'd experience a million years. Imagine mathematicians, programmers and engineers working for 1 million years and getting their results within 1 year. Even the other sciences could be sped up significantly if high precision simulations can be created at realtime or faster than realtime.

EDIT:

Right now the bottleneck for technological progress is the human brain itself. If we can automate intelligence and especially if we can do so at faster than realtime progress will inevitably skyrocket. We are only one invention away from getting a perpendicular line on the graph of progress, and that invention is our final invention, Artificial General Intelligence. If the nature of intelligence is understood, and a theory surrounding it and how to engineer entities exhibiting it and increasing in capability, the doors are open.

I am skeptical, especially at the extrapolation of rate of growths. In the real world things do not grow forever, and just because there are superadvanced AI working on things doesn't mean technological progress will be much faster. It may be that they pick all the low hanging fruits (at least for AIs) and the rate of progress will be very slow.

 

[Doctor Doom]

I am skeptical, especially at the extrapolation of rate of growths. In the real world things do not grow forever, and just because there are superadvanced AI working on things doesn't mean technological progress will be much faster. It may be that they pick all the low hanging fruits (at least for AIs) and the rate of progress will be very slow.

Well I personally believe that they will likely reach near optimal(limits of the physically possible) molecular machine designs, the best forms of generating energy if feasible(say fusion) and advanced brain computer interfaces, after that it will likely plateau unless we've got some nice surprises ahead in the unknowns of physics.

But once we have virtually unlimited energy due to things like fusion(either ours or from the sun), fully automated self replicating molecular machines, immortality, and advanced brain computer interfaces as well as unlimited content thanks to automation, it really doesn't matter much what comes after does it? Such a world would be radically different from our own, and anything that can conceivably be experienced would be instantly accessible through direct stimulation of the brain.

 

[Mario]

I guess I should have pointed out I was getting at the "we'd be dead if the speed of light weren't a hard limit" idea. We don't have resources a species like that would want that they couldn't get with a tiny fraction of the effort by other means. A species like that needs energy and basic elements. To go out of their way to eradicate a planet like Earth would be like a family hiring a pest control service to kill a massive roach infestation in another city.

Maybe they'd treat it more like our efforts in eradicating malaria than a distant innocuous insect infestation? Proactive preventative activity to suppress other life ever reaching a potentially detrimental or competitive state.

And an alien civilization that is harnessing energy at the Dyson Ring/Sphere level has so abundant an energy and resource stockpile that eliminating (or resetting) non-spacefaring life would be easy and inexpensive. All it takes to wipe us out is Earth being hit by a 3 mile diameter asteroid, and that feels like it would be cheap "bug spray" like effort for such a civilization. Perhaps the dinosaur extinction event was no accident

Hard to know what any alien civilization would do when how they even rationalize would itself be alien.

 

[Lovely Salsa]

Combining the two previous references so you can see what covering 20% of our Sun would look like:

This is why it isnt aliens

If it was, is this really the type of aliens you first want to discover?

 

[dabig2]

This is why it isnt aliens

If it was, is this really the type of aliens you first want to discover?

Yeah, sure. If we're lucky, they're Carl Sagan-like aliens who are mostly interested in discovery and have an appreciation for life instead of the Hollywood aliens who all mostly seem to be even bigger dicks than humans (probably because they were created and imagined by man)

 

[BSsBrolly]

This is why it isnt aliens

If it was, is this really the type of aliens you first want to discover?

Yes, super advanced. Could learn a good deal listening to any transmissions from them. Now if you mean we should contact them? Hell no.

 

[Orthogonal]

So I'm still not really convinced these aren't comets brought from another star. There isn't really an argument against it although I really want to believe.

The comet theory seems pretty absurd. It is an adhoc explanation that requires another star to pass by and dislodge millions of comets that then fly in a relative cohesive formation for a significant amount of time, frankly alien megastructure sounds more plausible.

It is more likely that it is a measurement error or artifact, and if its not, I think a more plausible answer would be something like a giant sun spot or something.

Aliens is just a fun possibility to entertain.

 

[Chiaroscuro]

I think they already discarted sun spots. The comet cloud theory is a extremely unlikle event, but within the realms of possibility. And, of course, there are fun hypothesis.

 

[aliengmr]

Didn't it already go nova? It's a red giant right?

No, well, at least we haven't witnessed it yet. Its either got a few hundred or a few thousand years left, forget which. When it happens you won't miss it, Orion will lose a shoulder

EDIT: Any where between 100,000 and 1,000,000 years it will explode, leaving behind a neutron star.

 

[Slayer-33]

Isnt KIC 8462852 even larger than our star, by 60% I think.

But its still tiny compared to the biggest star:

The size of that thing is mind exploding to the 9000th degree.

It's not even funny

 

[Branduil]

The size of that thing is mind exploding to the 9000th degree.

It's not even funny

The interesting thing about a star like Canis Majoris is that despite it's ridiculous size(or I suppose because of), it's a hundred thousand times less dense than Earth's atmosphere.

 

[aliengmr]

Then there is UY Scuti.

 

[Piggus]

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.

Or they just don't give a dick about us.

 

[Quazar]

So if we use our technology timeline from sending out our first radio waves, and Michio Kaku saying we're 3k years away from type two civilization. This puts their first signals being sent out around our Iron Age, correct? By the time we get our awesome Allen telescope array up they could be on to a more advanced way to communicate, thus missing any of their previous communication.

 

[More Fun To Compute]

This is why it isnt aliens

If it was, is this really the type of aliens you first want to discover?

I'm sure that any alien in the universe would be sure not to do anything on a scale that would seem improbable or dangerous to people as important as us.

 

[Doctor Doom]

Or they just don't give a dick about us.

Well if it turned out to be intelligent life so close, that would suggest a very good chance even intelligent life itself is not that rare. I honestly doubt there could be some sort of filter for a civilization past dyson sphere levels. So the question is why wouldn't at least some spread and colonize the galaxy? or how about exploring the various planets for life to catalog lifeforms and explore?

 

[Badlucktroll]

Its almost certainly naturally caused. But just think of the bombshell and ramifications if it is a bunch of energy harnessing dyson spheres. And how fucked we would be if we contacted them.

 

[Tesseract]

if it's real, it's natural

we're natural, don't forget that

 

[BobLoblaw]

Its almost certainly naturally caused. But just think of the bombshell and ramifications if it is a bunch of energy harnessing dyson spheres. And how fucked we would be if we contacted them.

Why would we be fucked? It would be like an ant trying to communicate with you. Would an ant's attempt at contacting you make you want to destroy it's anthill or just ignore it altogether?

 

[Jacksinthe]

So if we use our technology timeline from sending out our first radio waves, and Michio Kaku saying we're 3k years away from type two civilization. This puts their first signals being sent out around our Iron Age, correct? By the time we get our awesome Allen telescope array up they could be on to a more advanced way to communicate, thus missing any of their previous communication.

If they are intelligent I'm quite sure they would monitor and send all possible signals for just this reason, that is, if their purpose is to discover. They may and/or may not give a fuck to.

I'm of the mind any intelligent species, if they exist, are always actively looking.

 

[Battersea Power Station]

Why would we be fucked? It would be like an ant trying to communicate with you. Would an ant's attempt at contacting you make you want to destroy it's anthill or just ignore it altogether?

I don't think applying our own value system to a theoretical unknown life-form means anything one way or another.

And anyway, how I feel about one anthill when I know there are millions doesn't reflect how I would feel about the one and only anthill I ever find.

 

[jerry113]

And how fucked we would be if we contacted them.

Or maybe not at all.

Do we, the human species, really care much about an anthill colony somewhere on a grassy plain in North America?

edit: on the other hand, an anthill broadcasting its location and existence to the internet might attract the attention of an internet troll who decides to stomp on said anthill just for the lulz. So maybe you have a point.

 

[Crisco]

Its almost certainly naturally caused. But just think of the bombshell and ramifications if it is a bunch of energy harnessing dyson spheres. And how fucked we would be if we contacted them.

It's 1500 light years away and even an advanced alien civilization can't violate the universal laws of physics. We'll be fine.

 

[Cyber Caesar]

I think it's terribly naive of us to assume any civilazation that can build a Dyson Sphere is still using radio or any type of broadcast signal.

 

[akira28]

if it's real, it's natural

we're natural, don't forget that

life....but not as we know it?

 

[Skinpop]

I think it's terribly naive of us to assume any civilazation that can build a Dyson Sphere is still using radio or any type of broadcast signal.

what would they use instead? cables all over their system?

 

[lastplayed]

Wouldn't it be easier to colonise other planets and harvest the energy from other stars?

Building a dyson sphere or something like it seems like overkill in a galaxy teeming with stars. Unless space travel really is unrealistic.