• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

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

Status
Not open for further replies.
I wonder what it is that's making them publish analysis so quickly. A need to move onto other stars?

The regular sky survey schedule was interrupted last week to check out this star system so they will be going back to the regular schedule soon, yes. Also it's only one system so if there are any artificial signals there then I guess it won't take a long time for that analysis to be done.
 
But the exocomet explanation is an admitted contrivance, not an observed phenomenon. It is just a possibility put forward, unless they have cases of similar spectrographic dips known to be caused by exocomets.

Your statement "Other hypothesized causes have roots in observed phenomena," doesn't make a case against the possibility of this being artificial. Life is an observed phenomenon, so how is more of a stretch to say "life elsewhere may have done this" versus "comets elsewhere may have done this"?

For the intermittent pulsar signals, was artificial origin considered definite or just presented as a possibility among others? You are presenting that like it suggests some folly on researchers at the time.

What I am saying is that this will be confirmed as aliens by eliminating all other possible explanations. Not by looking for aliens and finding them.

I just noted pulsars because this initial reportinf is similar to the early days of pulsars.

At this point, Burnell notes of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?"[5] Even so, they nicknamed the signal LGM-1, for "little green men"
 
Let's be real, the SETI stuff is going to come back and its going to be silence....like always.

That Fermi Paradox ya'll

The Fermi "Paradox" is bullshit. It's the equivalent of saying : I looked out my bedroom window into my yard for 3 seconds and found no evidence of Natalie Portman in my yard. Therefore, I conclude that Natalie Portman doesn't exist".
 
The Fermi "Paradox" is bullshit. It's the equivalent of saying : I looked out my bedroom window into my yard for 3 seconds and found no evidence of Natalie Portman in my yard. Therefore, I conclude that Natalie Portman doesn't exist".

That's not at all similar to what the Fermi Paradox is.
 
The Fermi "Paradox" is bullshit. It's the equivalent of saying : I looked out my bedroom window into my yard for 3 seconds and found no evidence of Natalie Portman in my yard. Therefore, I conclude that Natalie Portman doesn't exist".

You are saying that Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest physicists of all time, would say something equivalent to that?
 
The Fermi "Paradox" is bullshit. It's the equivalent of saying : I looked out my bedroom window into my yard for 3 seconds and found no evidence of Natalie Portman in my yard. Therefore, I conclude that Natalie Portman doesn't exist".

It's a lot more like "I looked out my bedroom window into my yard for 3 seconds, and while I may have seen plenty of people, I didn't see any celebrities. And, I mean, I've been sending out DMs left and right to get in touch with them, but none of them are responding to any of my messages! It's like they're not even real!"
 
Update from Dr. Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute.

The SETI Institute is following up on the possibility that the stellar system KIC 8462852 might be home to an advanced civilization.

This star, slightly brighter than the Sun and more than 1400 light-years away, has been the subject of scrutiny by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. It has shown some surprising behavior that’s odd even by the generous standards of cosmic phenomena. KIC 8462852 occasionally dims by as much as 20 percent, suggesting that there is some material in orbit around this star that blocks its light.

For various reasons, it’s obvious that this material is not simply a planet. A favored suggestion is that it is debris from comets that have been drawn into relatively close orbit to the star.

But another, and obviously intriguing, possibility is that this star is home to a technologically sophisticated society that has constructed a phalanx of orbiting solar panels (a so-called Dyson swarm) that block light from the star.

To investigate this idea, we have been using the Allen Telescope Array to search for non-natural radio signals from the direction of KIC 8462852. This effort is looking for both narrow-band signals (similar to traditional SETI experiments) as well as somewhat broader transmissions that might be produced, for example, by powerful spacecraft.

But what if ET isn’t signaling at radio frequencies? Our ATA observations are being augmented by a search for brief but powerful laser pulses. These observations are being conducted by the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory in Panama, part of a nascent global network of optical SETI observatories.

Both the observations and the data analysis are now underway. Once the latter is concluded, we will, of course, make them known here and in the professional journals.

On the basis of historical precedent, it’s most likely that the the dimming of KIC 8462852 is due to natural causes. But in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, any suggestive clues should, of course, be further investigated – and that is what the SETI Institute is now doing.

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
 
You are saying that Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest physicists of all time, would say something equivalent to that?

I'm not going to defend that analogy, but the Fermi Paradox is indeed bullshit. It takes a question we have too little information to answer and fills in all the gaps with ignorant and self-contradicting assumptions. A scientist should know better.
 

GaimeGuy

Volunteer Deputy Campaign Director, Obama for America '16
I believe it's confirmed that single cell life arose on earth at least 7 times independently.

Fact is, anywhere life appears, it will be adapted to the gravity, atmosphere, terrain, climate, etc of its host planet, the radiation from its host stars, etc. Overcoming these hurdles to survive on an extraterrestrial or interstellar level is going to be ridiculously hard, and the scale of travel increases by orders of magnitude. All constrained by the laws of physics.


Take mars. It is 300x further from the earth than the moon. Proxima, the closest star to our own, is over 177,000 times further from the earth than Mars. Every time we figure out how to walk a mile, we have to figure out how to circumnavigate the globe 60 times to reach our next interstellar milestone. And that's putting it lightly.

All Fermi does is confirm that it's really really really fucking hard maybe impossible
 

Joey Fox

Self-Actualized Member
I believe it's confirmed that single cell life arose on earth at least 7 times independently.

Fact is, anywhere life appears, it will be adapted to the gravity, atmosphere, terrain, climate, etc of its host planet, the radiation from its host stars, etc. Overcoming these hurdles to survive on an extraterrestrial or interstellar level is going to be ridiculously hard, and the scale of travel increases by orders of magnitude. All constrained by the laws of physics.


Take mars. It is 300x further from the earth than the moon. Proxima, the closest star to our own, is over 177,000 times further from the earth than Mars. Every time we figure out how to walk a mile, we have to figure out how to circumnavigate the globe 60 times to reach our next interstellar milestone. And that's putting it lightly.

All Fermi does is confirm that it's really really really fucking hard maybe impossible

All life on Earth has a common ancestor. Where did you get that number seven from?
 

soco

Member
I'm not going to defend that analogy, but the Fermi Paradox is indeed bullshit. It takes a question we have too little information to answer and fills in all the gaps with ignorant and self-contradicting assumptions. A scientist should know better.

Except, that's exactly what science and even good science is.
 
Except, that's exactly what science and even good science is.

I don't follow, at all. Science involves observation, deduction based on that observation, and testing the deductions to further knowledge.

The Fermi Paradox is (poor) reasoning based on none of those. It's not even bad science. It's not science at all.
 
It's exciting to know that SETI is investigating, but I'm betting there won't be anything special....but I could be terribly wrong and part of me hopes I am.
 

ElFly

Member
I don't follow, at all. Science involves observation, deduction based on that observation, and testing the deductions to further knowledge.

The Fermi Paradox is (poor) reasoning based on none of those. It's not even bad science. It's not science at all.

The Fermi Paradox is an attempt to systematize the ignorance on the reasons for not being part of a galactic civilization, given that there must be millions of planets with life in the galaxy.

Sure, we have only one point of data, but that doesn't mean we can throw our hands up in the air and go "this is impossible to know". It also helped raise some interesting questions about a civilization life, when Drake tried to codify the paradox in his equation.

We don't have a lot of data, but it is not necessarily bad science. Knowing whether life on earth is a rare accident or a common development is interesting by itself.
 

bengraven

Member
angler-fish.jpg
 

Ether_Snake

安安安安安安安安安安安安安安安
I believe it's confirmed that single cell life arose on earth at least 7 times independently.

Fact is, anywhere life appears, it will be adapted to the gravity, atmosphere, terrain, climate, etc of its host planet, the radiation from its host stars, etc. Overcoming these hurdles to survive on an extraterrestrial or interstellar level is going to be ridiculously hard, and the scale of travel increases by orders of magnitude. All constrained by the laws of physics.


Take mars. It is 300x further from the earth than the moon. Proxima, the closest star to our own, is over 177,000 times further from the earth than Mars. Every time we figure out how to walk a mile, we have to figure out how to circumnavigate the globe 60 times to reach our next interstellar milestone. And that's putting it lightly.

All Fermi does is confirm that it's really really really fucking hard maybe impossible

How far could a car go on a fuel tank, compared to a space rocket? We built the first car and a spaceship that went to the moon in a gap of around 60 years.

There can come a point where a species' ability to survive becomes easy, even surviving a meteor strike. 3D printing a few thousand humans with implanted memories from geostationary orbit so they can repopulate the Earth while AIs and nanomachines rebuild habitats and convert organic matter into rock-hard structures, deep sleep, etc., stuff that might sound crazy now won't a few hundred years.
 
Transcript from a recent interview with a SETI scientist

Tidbits:
What kind of object, how big and how far away, to block twenty percent of the light for eighty days, is that one of these eclipse periods?
Siemion: It is something or some things that are about the size of the star. These are very large objects.
Hoagland: We are talking something that is a million miles in diameter?
Siemion: These are indeed very, very large objects. There were two very significant events in the light curve; one was at an earlier time and one was at the later time. The one at the earlier time, about 800 days into the Kepler mission, is, in and of itself, a very, very strange event. It is asymmetric, it is very deep, it involves a decrease in the flux of the star of about fifteen percent and it appears to be a single monolithic object which has a very, very significant non-spherical character to it that blocks the light from the star very, very slowly over a period of about ten days, and then somehow egresses out of the line of sight between us and the star very, very quickly - in a matter of just a day or two.
The simplest model of it would be something that is shaped like a very narrow triangle. Where as we are watching the star, the point of the triangle passes in front of the star and blocks a little bit of the light, and then very slowly, as the triangle moves across the star, it blocks more and more of the light. Then when the flat-edge of the triangle finally passes out of the line-of-sight between us and the star, there is a dramatic increase in the light of from the star. It happens very, very slowly at first and then a knife-edge at the end.
This is like an isosceles triangle - a very narrow point that passes in front of the star at first and then the larger edge of the triangle passes away from the star. Again, this is a very, very simple model.
Siemion: If we go another three months to a year and we do not have a satisfactory explanation for what is going on with this star, then it is likely that there would be a dedicated mission, or a dedicated telescope that was specifically designed to follow up on this object. That could be something like a very special purpose successor to Kepler that would only monitor this one star.
 

Prez

Member
Would the James Webb telescope be able to see the shape of the object that's passing in front of the star?
 
Yeah Hoagland being involved in that interview raises some brows but there's some interesting info from the seti guy:

We have looked for infrared excess from this star and we do not see any. But it is not clear whether we would see any depending on the amount of the star that is being blocked by these objects and depending on their orientation when we made the observations. What the infrared observations rule out are certain arrangements of dust, so it does not look like there is a protoplanetary disk around the star which is something that adds to the mystery of what we are seeing.

So if we did see some infrared excess with the observations that we have performed, those may be indicative of a disk of dust around the star, but we do not see that.

If these were solar collectors, they may have some infrared excess emissions, but we would not have seen that with the follow-up that we have performed, simply because we do not have the instrumentation available that would allow us to be sensitive to that kind of radiation.

So I guess that rules out a dyson ring, though he mentions there are many objects detected in addition to the one large "triangle" one that's the size of a star O_O

This is just nuts, I feel like getting into some amateur astronomy myself after reading that. Very exciting.
 

Ether_Snake

安安安安安安安安安安安安安安安
Are there ever natural occurrences of triangles cosmically?

A comet and its tail could be somewhat triangular, but that's not it, especially considering they say the object appears to be one single object.

Maybe it's a Dyson sphere under construction.

They don't give any info about the second dimming event?
 

Xe4

Banned
Would the James Webb telescope be able to see the shape of the object that's passing in front of the star?

Doubtfull, to image even something as large as a star would take a telescope much larger than JWST, much less anything smaller than that. Include the massive ammount of glare trying to observe such an object would entail.
 

Skinpop

Member
So I guess that rules out a dyson ring, though he mentions there are many objects detected in addition to the one large "triangle" one that's the size of a star O_O

dyson rings doesn't make much sense though, it's hard to imagine the materials to construct one could ever exist. a dyson swarm though, which is what dyson himself originally meant is still possible according to what is said here.
 
if aliens had the tech and knowledge to build those large structures a long time ago, why were they not able to see us while we can see them or at least know of this star's existence ?
 
dyson rings doesn't make much sense though, it's hard to imagine the materials to construct one could ever exist. a dyson swarm though, which is what dyson himself originally meant is still possible according to what is said here.

So if I'm reading the wiki correctly a swarm could take any shape really, such as the "triangle"? Guess I assumed a swarm would encompass the star but that'd be a sphere by definition even if it isn't occluding all the light.
 

Slayer-33

Liverpool-2
if aliens had the tech and knowledge to build those large structures a long time ago, why were they not able to see us while we can see them or at least know of this star's existence ?


Nothing over here would let us be seen, unless they managed to pick up radio waves
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom