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

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params7

Banned
Coins said:
So it doesn't matter how advanced they are, they can't observe us until our light reaches there, right? I mean, all they'd see is a planet, with maybe evidence of some kind of life due to our atmospheric makeup, but they can't be observing evidence of an advanced society.
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That's assuming they have not discovered FTL methods of communication and space exploration. Who knows what kind of limitations science and tech will have that another form of intelligent species can come up with.

Civilization began as of 10,000 years ago with collective societies and towns. So if they're observing us and not already here in some form they know we are advancing rapidly with our science at a pace where we will eventually detect them.
 
R

RumblingRosco

Member
Arkeband said:
Does this mean that somewhere in the universe, WE are the ayyy lmao's?
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Probably.

TheLostBigBoss said:
That's not how infinity works. It's not if our universe is infinite, it's if there are infinite realities of our dimension with a constant splitting of each possible reality, which creates an infinite branching of realities.
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I have no idea what I'm talking about, but what about the old "monkeys in a room with a typewriter given infinite time writing Shakespeare" thing? Isn't that essentially what it would mean if our universe is infinite in all directions and were to last forever (which, I guess it won't, which I guess may be why my post is incorrect).
 
D

DarkKyo

Member
Rock Hardy said:
It's going to have a natural explanation. I don't expect to ever discover alien life in my lifetime. I'd love to be wrong, but I won't be.
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Well that's the thing, we possibly haven't found anything just because of the immense scale of the universe and our tiny, tiny reach within it... It could be that life is everywhere, we just don't know yet.
 
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maniac-kun

Member
Well its still to far away to do anything about it with our current technology. When we send a probe we will get the results in 2800 years if we knew how to travel at light speed. Also who would know that 2800 years ago someone send a probe there?
 
D

Doctor Doom

Banned
Trouble said:
It's sort of amazing to think that we could find an advanced civilization and it would take 1,480 years for a signal we send to reach them, then another 1,480 for them to respond.



The first radio signals sent into space from Earth still won't reach them for over a thousand years. If there is an advanced civilization there, it's fairly safe to assume they don't know we exist yet.

Edit: Unless, of course, faster than light travel is actually possible and they have discovered it.
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They might not know there's intelligent life on here, but if they really exist at that level of technology they can tell earth is an earth like planet in the habitable zone and they can likely tell that there's life here.... They might already have sent selfreplicating colonizing probes this way which may arrive at any moment...

Crunched said:
Even if it were blindingly obvious, I can't imagine something nearly 1500 lightyears away will be proven in our lifetimes. It will remain speculative until we can get a much, much better look at it.
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Depends, they could be AIs, and knowing this is an earthlike planet they could be sending signals constantly at lightspeed with their AI code that will be properly received once the planet reaches a certain technological level.

abstract alien said:
Isn't this assuming they would even want to kill/harm/enslave us? We don't know what they would want, and it could literally be anything. We don't even know anything about life that isn't Earth related, and we are still figuring that out.
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Indeed, right now we have the death penalty of aging, if it is not solved. Millions are dying annually from it, their time having run out. A species centuries more advanced could eliminate aging, work, poverty, disease, and could probably replace the governments of the nations of earth with something more efficient.
Soka said:
So, while developed nations on Earth observe isolated tribes in New Guinea by planes, boats, or foot, this advanced alien species is using a handful of telescopes to record and process every movement on Earth in 540,000p resolution from hundreds of light years away.

.
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It probably is not viable to record earth in high detail from that distance, but if they're there, they likely found earth was earthlike and habitable decades or centuries prior to the dyson, and might have sent a monitoring probe that beams them images and data from within the solar system.

TheLostBigBoss said:
That's not how infinity works. It's not if our universe is infinite, it's if there are infinite realities of our dimension with a constant splitting of each possible reality, which creates an infinite branching of realities.
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It is how it works, if the universe varies infinitely and is infinitely large, it has been said that the number of possible states the universe can be in is finite, thus there would be infinite repetition

[Why must there be infinite repetition in an infinite universe?]
The answer is that there are only a finite number of possible states that a Hubble volume can have, according to quantum theory. Even classically, there are clearly only a finite number of perceptibly different ways it can be.

[FOUR MULTIVERSE LEVELS]
Level I: A generic prediction of cosmological inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which contains Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions - including an identical copy of you about 101029 meters away.
Level II: In many models, inflation can produce multiple Level I multiverses that have different effective physical constants, dimensionality and particle content.
Level III: In unitary quantum mechanics, other branches of the wavefunction add nothing qualitatively new, which is ironic given that this quantum parallel universes have historically been the most controversial.
Level IV: Other mathematical structures give different fundamental equations of physics.
- link
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LookAtMeGo

Member
UnaiGamer said:
lol I'll be excited if (when?) we found microscopic life out there, let alone a type 2 civilization.
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Lol same here. I'd imagine if there was a method of FTL or if wormholes existed and could be manipulated, a type 2 civilization would have probably figured it out by that point. That would be pretty cool because if we are seeing them, they probably already know about us and could reach us somehow.
 
Astral Dog

Astral Dog

Member
GrotesqueBeauty said:
There is definitely a tinge of human ego at play in perceiving ourselves and our activities as distinctly separate and easily distinguishable from other natural phenomena. Of course the distinction exists in a general sense for practical reasons, but it starts to break down when you try to pinpoint it. Are nests unnatural? Webs? Animals which use objects as tools or crudlely manipulate instruments to change their environment or make acquiring food easier than biological function alone? As it happens most people attribute it to human activity alone, but at what level of manipulation?

Also, I would take issue with the idea that "everything is within our reality", assuming "our" means whatever falls in the realm of human perception, either immediate or aided by external tools. There is unequivocally more that falls outside our ability to apprehend than within it. Most people are fearful of admitting what a fingernail grip we have on the vastness of all that manifests (which is why so many people are erroneously convinced of abstract systems of logic as a catch all rather than a useful mechanism when applied within certain appropriate contexts).

The wider point though is that I don't see why intelligent activity should be considered the absolute least of all likely explanations compared with other phenomena in this instance given that it's precisely the conspicuousness of the patterns observed that marks it out as a worthy point of investigation. Which isn't to say any one conclusion should be jumped to, just that I find it odd to say "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider".
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Si

So you dont think we are special on the universe? ಥ_ಥヽ( ´¬`)ノ
 
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Josh7289

Member
As far as I understand arXiv, this paper is probably not peer-reviewed, right? For those who don't know, that's reason to be very skeptical. It's best to wait for a peer review process to occur.
 
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opticalmace

Member
Josh7289 said:
As far as I understand arXiv, this paper is probably not peer-reviewed, right? For those who don't know, that's reason to be very skeptical. It's best to wait for a peer review process to occur.
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It's been submitted to MNRAS, so it's in the peer review process right now. You are correct, but with this author list, it is extremely likely the paper will make it through unscathed.
 
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opticalmace

Member
Stormhammer said:
are we prepared for the Galactic Alien Fedoration
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efyu_lemonardo said:
nice touch ;)
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tumblr_mvhy9xAFC41s822dfo1_250.gif
 
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JZA

Member
hobblygobbly said:
One of my favourite quotes is by Arthur C. Clarke that will always remain true:

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

What if we really are the best in terms of intelligence and progress the universe has, all situated on a small blue planet.
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I've always liked the sci-fi stories where aliens have an even higher and stricter definition of intelligence that humans are nowhere close to meeting. Makes it feel like it's not completely our fault if we mess up the planet.
 
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Malvolio

Member
The programming for that star just hasn't been finished yet. Get to work galactic code monkeys before the blue rock monkeys point their dish that way.
 
C

Cimarron

Member
Personally I find it amusing that we believe that advanced societies would still be using radio waves. They more than likely have means of communicating that we can only theorize or not even have dreamed of. Just like telegraphs imagine if some technology completey makes electromagnetic communications obsolete? We would only have broadcasts that were detectable for that period of time at any given point in the galaxy. I would imagine that some breakthrough in physics is what would truly open up our world. Hell there could be quantum porn "transmitting" right through the solar neighborhood and we would be none the wiser. If the last detectable radio signal from them went out in 1492 we would be straight out of luck.
 
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wanderingprostheyltite

Member
Cimarron said:
Personally I find it amusing that we believe that advanced societies would still be using radio waves. They more than likely have means of communicating that we can only theorize or not even have dreamed of. Just like telegraphs imagine if some technology completey makes electromagnetic communications obsolete? We would only have broadcasts that were detectable for that period of time at any given point in the galaxy. I would imagine that some breakthrough in physics is what would truly open up our world. Hell there could be quantum porn "transmitting" right through the solar neighborhood and we would be none the wiser. If the last detectable radio signal from them went out in 1492 we would be straight out of luck.
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I bet we're missing out on some crazy intergalactic porn.

maxresdefault.jpg
 
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wandering goat

Member
soxwgyn.jpg


Anyway, interesting. I suppose this is one of the few ways we can speculate about life existing elsewhere when the distances are that huge, though it's very hypothetical. Not quite related, but it's always fascinating to see the kind of conclusions that can be gathered with such little data when it comes to astronomy.
 
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Beartruck

Member
Come on fellow humans, there is no way beings as intelligent and staggeringly handsome as those of the zinthpar system would already be hiding among us. Now, let us laugh heartily and smash our consumable liquid containers together in a sign of fraternal bonding!
 
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LookAtMeGo

Member
Beartruck said:
Come on fellow humans, there is no way beings as intelligent and staggeringly handsome as those of the zinthpar system would already be hiding among us. Now, let us laugh heartily and smash our consumable liquid containers together in a sign of fraternal bonding!
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Consumable liquid containers? That is the key to the bottled water problem.
 
U

Unknown Soldier

Member
Gallbaro said:
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.
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There's only like 100 million stars in the Milky Way, I mean the alien invasion force would surely zero in on our tiny ass planet which has no evidence of a spacefaring civilization and no natural resources to speak of instead of attacking one of the other 100 million possible star systems.

Humans have quite the collective ego to believe they are even important enough to get exterminated. We're so primitive that we still have nation states, projectile weapons, and can't even travel to the edge of our Solar System in one lifetime. If there are aliens out there they probably couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about us.
 
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Skinpop

Member
felipeko said:
it also probably means that Fusion Reactor is a very hard, if not a impossible, problem.
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why would this be a problem?

radioactivez0r said:
I don't understand this statement. It's "consistent" with a theoretical construct - nay, a swarm of them - that we have never actually seen but can extrapolate how it would change light patterns? At some point this devolved from "well, I mean it could be something else" to "we totally made it fit our existing ideas of how an alien civilization would progress".

That being said, I hope it's aliens.
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if you collect sun light you will produce ir radiation. in the case of a dyson swarm, a lot of ir radiation that can be observed. from what I understand that's one of the things we look for when searching for alien life.
 
W

Walpurgis

Banned
Unknown Soldier said:
There's only like 100 million stars in the Milky Way, I mean the alien invasion force would surely zero in on our tiny ass planet which has no evidence of a spacefaring civilization and no natural resources to speak of instead of attacking one of the other 100 million possible star systems.

Humans have quite the collective ego to believe they are even important enough to get exterminated. We're so primitive that we still have nation states, projectile weapons, and can't even travel to the edge of our Solar System in one lifetime. If there are aliens out there they probably couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about us.
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We're relatively close to any aliens that might be living there.
 
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Skittles

Member
I've read about this story before. It's the people who created the simulation we're in, using stars to communicate with us
 
U

Unai

Member
Unknown Soldier said:
There's only like 100 million stars in the Milky Way, I mean the alien invasion force would surely zero in on our tiny ass planet which has no evidence of a spacefaring civilization and no natural resources to speak of instead of attacking one of the other 100 million possible star systems.

Humans have quite the collective ego to believe they are even important enough to get exterminated. We're so primitive that we still have nation states, projectile weapons, and can't even travel to the edge of our Solar System in one lifetime. If there are aliens out there they probably couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about us.
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Sure, but we are not talking about a civilization in the other side of the Milky Way. This particular star is 1480 light years away, so they are pratically our neighbors as far as space scale goes.

By the way, the Milky Way has 400 billion stars.
 
A

aliengmr

Member
Unknown Soldier said:
There's only like 100 million stars in the Milky Way, I mean the alien invasion force would surely zero in on our tiny ass planet which has no evidence of a spacefaring civilization and no natural resources to speak of instead of attacking one of the other 100 million possible star systems.

Humans have quite the collective ego to believe they are even important enough to get exterminated. We're so primitive that we still have nation states, projectile weapons, and can't even travel to the edge of our Solar System in one lifetime. If there are aliens out there they probably couldn't possibly give less of a fuck about us.
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More like 400 billion stars. And our solar system is quite rare. I mean yea, we probably don't rate to a space-faring species, but then again, it could be just us. By default that would make us the most powerful species in the galaxy.
 
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