• 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.
D

Dreez

Member
Chittagong said:
So here is the thing I don't get, if we think of Dyson Spheres.

Imagine Earth is like a pea, and sun is like a basketball. The pea is 30m away from the basketball. Now imagine you were to draw lines from the basketball to every direction. And infinitesimally tiny fraction of those lines hit the pea. In other words, a tiny, tiny fraction of sun's energy even reaches earth.

Mankind's total energy need in our current state of development is 18 TW. The total amount of solar energy reaching earth is 174,000 TW. So even if we could capture all of the tiny fraction of solar energy hitting one planet, we'd have 10,000 times more juice than we do currently. What could we do that we can't do now if we had ten thousand times the available energy at our disposal? It's hard to think of anything that would require that much power.

Now, up the game from there to all of sun's output, a total of 3.8 x 10^26 W, or 380,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 W. That's about a trillion times more that wll the sunlight earth receives in total, and about a quadrillion times more than all of mankind uses currently. What would a civilization do with that amount of energy?
Click to expand...

What if they're much bigger than us, like dinosaur size? They would need much more energy than us for their 1000" screen tv's
 
S

slit

Member
Chittagong said:
So here is the thing I don't get, if we think of Dyson Spheres.

Imagine Earth is like a pea, and sun is like a basketball. The pea is 30m away from the basketball. Now imagine you were to draw lines from the basketball to every direction. And infinitesimally tiny fraction of those lines hit the pea. In other words, a tiny, tiny fraction of sun's energy even reaches earth.

Mankind's total energy need in our current state of development is 18 TW. The total amount of solar energy reaching earth is 174,000 TW. So even if we could capture all of the tiny fraction of solar energy hitting one planet, we'd have 10,000 times more juice than we do currently. What could we do that we can't do now if we had ten thousand times the available energy at our disposal? It's hard to think of anything that would require that much power.

Now, up the game from there to all of sun's output, a total of 3.8 x 10^26 W, or 380,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 W. That's about a trillion times more that wll the sunlight earth receives in total, and about a quadrillion times more than all of mankind uses currently. What would a civilization do with that amount of energy?
Click to expand...

Well if we knew the answer to that we would probably already have the means to get there and find out.
 
J

John Dunbar

correct about everything
random question from someone who doesn't understand any of this: if is possible to convert energy into matter (which i understand it at least sort of is), would it be possible to build a dyson sphere/swarm/whatever that builds itself overtime? meaning that the energy it captures goes straight to building more of it.
 
G

G.ZZZ

Member
Detecting signals is extremely unlikely. The earth for example is lowering is actual radio emissions into space because things are better transmitted via cables (the internet). Not to talk about super advanced method of encryptions like quantic encryptions, which would make any kind of detected signal appear like noise. If anything, detecting irregular dimmings in stars is much more likely to find alien signal in megastructures than regular radio signal which are obsoleted already in our society.
 
J

Jonm1010

Banned
G.ZZZ said:
Detecting signals is extremely unlikely. The earth for example is lowering is actual radio emissions into space because things are better transmitted via cables (the internet). Not to talk about super advanced method of encryptions like quantic encryptions, which would make any kind of detected signal appear like noise. If anything, detecting irregular dimmings in stars is much more likely to find alien signal in megastructures than regular radio signal which are obsoleted already in our society.
Click to expand...
Yeah radio signals always seemed problematic to me because how long is a civilization going to really use un-encrypted radio signals?

It would seem like the window is pretty small in technological development. Like we are poised to in roughly a 100 year span go from using them to barely using them to likely not using them at all by the next 100 years.
 
F

forgeforsaken

Member
N.Domixis said:
I read that they listened for signals of any kind and they did not detect a singal signal.
Click to expand...

I commented earlier on this, in addition to what other posters have just said it's well beyond the range of what SETI would pick up for general leakage, it would have to be a direct targeted signal for SETI to see it at that range. SETI likely wouldn't even detect earth at 1500 ly.
 
O

oreomunsta

Banned
John Dunbar said:
random question from someone who doesn't understand any of this: if is possible to convert energy into matter (which i understand it at least sort of is), would it be possible to build a dyson sphere/swarm/whatever that builds itself overtime? meaning that the energy it captures goes straight to building more of it.
Click to expand...

Umm... As far as I know, humans have never built matter from pure energy. We can witness the reverse, however, from very frequent annihilation events (when anti matter meets it's counterpart of regular matter and they convert into pure energy).

Here's a napkin calculation of how tricky this would be. To build one kilogram of Dyson sphere, a speck of the entire thing, you would need:

E = mc^2 (c being speed of light in a vacuum)
E = (1 kg)(300000000 m/s)^2
E = 90000000000000000 J

That many Joules of energy is equal to the energy used in creating Meteor Crater in Arizona, and is more energy than the output of a typical thunderstorm, according to Wikipedia
 
J

John Dunbar

correct about everything
oreomunsta said:
Umm... As far as I know, humans have never built matter from pure energy. We can witness the reverse, however, from very frequent annihilation events (when anti matter meets it's counterpart of regular matter and they convert into pure energy).

Here's a napkin calculation of how tricky this would be. To build one kilogram of Dyson sphere, a speck of the entire thing, you would need:

E = mc^2 (c being speed of light in a vacuum)
E = (1 kg)(300000000 m/s)^2
E = 90000000000000000 J

That many Joules of energy is equal to the energy used in creating Meteor Crater in Arizona, and is more energy than the output of a typical thunderstorm, according to Wikipedia
Click to expand...

i didn't say people have ever done it, just that it was my understanding that it is at least theoretically possible. if i am mistaken, the whole question is of course meaningless.

and that is indeed a big number. but how many joules of energy could you produce with a dyson thingamajig that covers 20% of a star?
 
O

oreomunsta

Banned
John Dunbar said:
i didn't say people have ever done it, just that it was my understanding that it is at least theoretically possible. if i am mistaken, the whole question is of course meaningless.

and that is indeed a big number. but how many joules of energy could you produce with a dyson thingamajig that covers 20% of a star?
Click to expand...

It's theoretically possible, but I'm not sure if there's a solid understanding of the natural mechanism that converts energy to mass.

Okay, this calculation will be slightly botched, since we should be looking at the flux of solar energy, but this can be a quick estimate. I'll take this claim about the Sun's energy output:

"The Sun's output is 3.8 x 10^33 ergs/second, or about 5 x 10^23 horsepower. How much is that? It is enough energy to melt a bridge of ice 2 miles wide, 1 mile thick, and extending the entire way from the Earth to the Sun, in one second."

from (http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sun.html#power)

We'll say that our Dyson sphere is large enough to capture 20% of that at 95% efficiency, so we have 0.95 x 10^23 horsepower. Leave that infront of the Sun for about a year, and we've got (2.23e10) x 10^23 = 2.23e33 J.

If we convert that using the value we have from earlier, we can make 2.48e16 kg... Which is equal to 0.0000004% of Earth's mass.
 
D

DarthWoo

I'm glad Grandpa porked a Chinese Muslim
Would probably be more efficient to drag asteroids and whatnot into the system and use any such system to convert matter to other types of matter using the energy.
 
Joel Was Right

Joel Was Right

Gold Member
I read earlier this morning that the infrared readings have remained largely the same. If it were a Dyson Sphere, wouldn't that impact the infrared?
 
C

Chumpion

Member
You build something really big, like a Dyson ring, by self-replicating robots. They multiply exponentially, making as many copies of themselves as is needed and get to building. I'm sure it's vastly more complicated than that - you need to coordinate the logistics for building materials, processes and energy. But that's the basic approach when you really want to haul ass.

Schafer's comment about aliens not being able to build something that big in 100 years seems wrong-headed indeed.
 
U

Unai

Member
Chumpion said:
You build something really big, like a Dyson ring, by self-replicating robots. They multiply exponentially, making as many copies of themselves as is needed and get to building. I'm sure it's vastly more complicated than that - you need to coordinate the logistics for building materials, processes and energy. But that's the basic approach when you really want to haul ass.

Schafer's comment about aliens not being able to build something that big in 100 years seems wrong-headed indeed.
Click to expand...

There are so many self-replicating robots in fiction that out lived their creators. It seems like something that could really if they are very efficient.
 
R

RobotChant

Member
DD-11 said:
If it is a dyson sphere. It's is complete now. They could also possibly create wormholes. If we can see them, they can almost certainly see us, and in much more detail.

Let's assume that is true. What's scary is that they could visit, but haven't bothered because we are insignificant to them. We would be less than what Ants are to us, and when was the last time we had meaningful communication with Ants?

We are very small and very insignificant.
Click to expand...

We study ants. We even have a term for it- Myrmecology. They may be below us but we still try to mimic many of their traits. We've tried to apply what we've learned from them to better transportation systems, networking and algorithm efficiency, and many other things.



Maybe we should alter (or better explain) what we consider "intelligent" life. Ant like species capable of building a dyson sphere, would that be considered intelligent life?

Maybe life is so abundant in the universe that intelligent life doesn't care to bother with us. That would be exciting and scary.
 
M

Measley

Junior Member
I'm certain that we're going to have definitive proof of extraterrestrial life within the next 50 years. It might be on Mars, Europa, or even that star, but we're going to find it.
 
C

Calidor

Member
AbsintheGames said:
This is easily explained. You see, it takes time to construct a Dyson Sphere. Aliens spent the last century building it and the larger it became - the less light we see.

Simple.
Click to expand...

I picture a megastructure sucking the star like the Starkiller base but just preparing it's power to be used for warping a wormhole and do a FTL jump
 
G

GSG Flash

Nobody ruins my family vacation but me...and maybe the boy!
oreomunsta said:
If they're capable of Dyson technology, they're capable of high resolution, deep field scanning
Click to expand...

But deep field scanning won't make light travel any faster to them, so, even if they're looking at us, they probably think we're just a bunch of pyramid building morons ;)
 
S

ssharm02

Banned
wouldn't there be more alien activity around this star? More mega structures around the area? but yea SETI and NASA should keep searching other stars for dyson spheres
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite telescope discovers potentially habitable planet 31 light-years away
2
62
4K
Tesseract replied
  • Locked
Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting near Milky Way
10
3K
ModBot replied
  • Locked
Kickstarted: Research for the most myterious star in the universe
47
6K
Version 3.0 replied
  • Locked
Stars exhibit nonuniform brightness. No, it isn't aliens.
2
53
9K
The Mule replied
  • Locked
95 light years away star emits strong signal that might come from alien life
2
1K
Systolique replied
Top Bottom