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The Search For Starivores, Intelligent Life That Could Eat the Sun
sarahnaomi writes: There could be all manner of alien life forms in the universe, from witless bacteria to superintelligent robots. Still, the notion of a starivore — an organism that literally devours stars — may sound a bit crazy, even to a seasoned sci-fi fan. And yet, if such creatures do exist, they're probably lurking in our astronomical data right now.
That's why philosopher Dr. Clement Vidal, who's a researcher at the Free University of Brussels, along with Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick, futurist John Smart, and nanotech entrepreneur Robert Freitas are soliciting scientific proposals to seek out star-eating life.
That's why philosopher Dr. Clement Vidal, who's a researcher at the Free University of Brussels, along with Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick, futurist John Smart, and nanotech entrepreneur Robert Freitas are soliciting scientific proposals to seek out star-eating life.
Is "Black Hole" not fancy enough anymore?
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"Stellarvore" would be the correct Latinisation. N'est-ce pas?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Be seeing you...
It's on a wordpress subdomain for fuck's sake.
Eating the sun seems like the ultimate "fire challenge"
Monstar L
If there was such a creature, would Galactus orbit around it?
And I'll create a starivore for you. It'll take a while, but should be more fun than staring at empty space.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Philosopher, astrobiologist, futurist, nanotech entrepreneur.
WTF do astrobiologists actually do besides suck at the government teat?
And futurists... gah. Those idiots are Miss Cleo rejects.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
More like "dark matter dust bunnies" or "acid space plumes". The drama leads to money, even if it doesn't exist. Bonus points for selling the film rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Surely a starivore has to settle around the sun.
Organisms using energy stored in star: PLANTS
Organisms devouring stars (as in taking away actual mass of the star): how? It's a high energy plasma out there, how will you get any structure in that?
Are we done yet? This is just some toy of some people who definitely need more hobbies, making 500 euro available for a good joke.
Really, does it get more stupid than this? Whenever somebody claims to be a "futurist", you already know they have no clue but a big ego. The others in this group are hardly better. Now the thing to do is to _not_ give these people any attention, because if they get any, they will come up with even more ludicrous claims.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Fueled by Justin Beibers, lets hope
Table-ized A.I.
You mean they will dust off Willis again?
Douglas Adams provided a conclusive very thorough analysis of this concept in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" wherein the planet of Golgafrincham is obliterated by the mutant star goat foretold by the descendants of the Circling Poets. I think that settles it.
Wouldn't the gravity well of all but the most pitiful excuses for stars require technology indistinguishable from magic (or at least the ability to make local modifications to gravity on a practical basis, which is pretty close) to exploit anything aside from whatever radiation you can capture, and perhaps the occasional coronal mass ejection or solar prominence?
The sun isn't even a terribly heroic specimen, if conveniently close for our purposes, and it has an escape velocity of what, almost 60 times that of earth? It seems that the hypothetical organism, even if astonishingly heat resistant, is going to have a brutal time dining on a star; while (if it instead 'engulfs' stars, like some giant space amoeba) also not being able to 'eat' too many stars before its own mass would annihilate any sort of 'organism' structure and result in one of the outcomes that befall ordinary stellar cores of considerable mass, whether it be some billions of years of fusing heavier elements, a collapse into some sort of exotic neutron soup, an event horizon, or some other life-incompatible fate.
I don't generally discount the ability of life forms to survive harsh environments and metabolize seemingly inedible things(I am a fungus after all); but eating something with so much mass that your gravitational death-throes will ignite self sustaining fusion in your corpse seems a bit more challenging than the usual lineup of metabolic challenges.
Wasn't the idea of a Dyson sphere proposed years ago? That would be the closest thing to something astronomical sized 'creature/civilisation' that would consume stars?
The principle is simple enough - searching for life in the cosmos is *hard* to the point of near impossibility. If an identical twin sister-civilization was orbitting the nearest star, it's unlikely we could detect it from here. *Maybe* we could detect their military radar pulses. Maybe.
So, what do you do? You either give up the search completely, or you confine it to looking for things you might actually be able to detect with your current technology. That is - you look not for things that are particularly likely to exist, but for things easy to detect. Because those are the only things you have *any* chance of spotting. Star-eaters would qualify I think.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Easting stars is not really a new idea.
In that show you can see a large mass of Mantrid Drones big enough to gravitationally siphon mass out of stars. It's their way to replicate, until the universe is nearly gone. Mantrid arguably is intelligent.
Find the Silver Surfer
Telephone sanitizers are more useful than this wunch of bankers.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
And please, don't call it "starivore". Call it "astrovore" or, if you're an engineer, "astrophage".
on DeviantArt.
On the deirious mode a really well developped being would eats the whole universe and and in passing eats all gods. Consequence: it would enter an infinitie loop of eating itself, no need to look for food again.
It's a high energy plasma out there, how will you get any structure in that?
Actually, the sun has a lot of structure in its magnetic field. This is not just complex in the way Earth's weather is, meaning is is unpredictable. It has long term structures, such as the 11-year sunspot cycle.
I really doubt if these magnetic fields are sentient at all, and certainly not sentient as we understand it. The world's phone system has a similar complexity to the human brain, but if that was sentient, it would be hard to imagine what it thought about, as it has no obvious eyes and ears.
However, suppose we wanted to delay the supernova of our sun. We could do this if we had the technology by injecting fusible hydrogen from the sun's surface into the core at the same rates that it was consumed. This would require completely bonkers apparatus, but the physics is good. Supposing the best and most efficient way of doing this was to influence the magnetic field of the sun so that it did this itself. Suppose the best way of doing that was to artificially induce intelligence in these plasma fields, so it could do this without regulation...
That is a lot of supposes. But in my mind, I think if civilization lasts for astronomical time-scales, this is less ridiculous then expecting to detect them by their leaked unfocussed long-period radio waves, which is what SETI is looking for. I wouldn't spend any money on it, but the thinking doesn't hurt.
The problem with such people are, they are just proposing hypotheses without any proof, clues or observation in nature. This is no theorem, conjecture or (even good enough to be called as) a law. We call such people as "shekhchilli" in Hindi (pronounced Sheik-Chilly, or daydreamers in English). Is the current article a news for geeks or vomit for them.
for the Ignoble Prize!
Does snacking on a star count as eating it?
There's no reason (such as I see it) that animals wouldn't exist in outer space, or near various atmospheres. We just don't know them yet, because they could probably not survive our conditions.
Have any of you guys seen that footage that Nasa officially released of all their satellite cams have picked up over the years? It was some 2 hour footage with lots of interesting stuff, you may want to look at that. PS. go to the source, don't look at the many fakes from unofficial sources found on youtube.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
There are two universities in Brussels. Université Libre de Bruxelles (French for Free University of Brussels) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Dutch for Free University of Brussels). Translating the name of either into English makes it impossible to tell which institution he is a member of.
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So.. it eats stars, farts nebulae and poops dark matter. Makes perfect sense to me.
There was a science fiction book called Eater by Gregory Benford, which covers this possibility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eater_(novel)
An intelligent black hole traversing the universe, eating planets and stars along the way.
But we already had found that!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
modern day toothsayers
This definitely requires a complimentary toothche !
To the B Ark, quick!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Except I don know how "intelligent" this thing was -- and except that this time around it was not big enough to eat all of the star -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But it is in our "astronomical records", whatever you call the object.
But then - wouldn't the organism necessarily be so large and massive that it would collapse under its own weight, and spontaneously self combust? Or "self fusion", as it were?
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
Mmmh - fusion cuisine - I like my black holes with a large helping of red giants and a smattering of dark matter...
File not found. Fake it(Y/N)? _
Maybe something already ate the sun, we're in its digestive tract right now, and that's why the speed of light is so slow in here.
Civilizations of course have energy needs, but devouring stars seems a bit excessive. For strict survival it would make more sense to minimize your resource requirements. A human brain needs 500 calories per day, and our sun outputs 3.8 x 10^26 watts. So efficient use of our own sun's energy could presumably sustain on order of 10^25 human-level intelligences as is. If your appetitite for energy is more rapacious than that, I think it's a good guess it's effectively infinite. In which case, maybe it would be better to examine galaxies than stars. It's going to be a billion times more probably that an individual galaxy contains a star-devouring civilization than that a single star system does, and presumably not unnoticeble.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Some people find Mexican food hard to tolerate. This thing would need some *really* powerful indigestion medicine after that meal.
That is not an alien I would like to meet, we would totally be like ice cream to them.
"What you talking bout Willis?"
So, instead of looking for a Kardashev type II civilization, we should look for a Kardashev type II, um, organism, or something?
Maybe there is such a thing, but it would be so different from life on Earth that I'm not sure it would even make sense to try to distinguish an organism from a technological civilization (especially when even on Earth that distinction can sometimes be a little bit blurry).
The iron in your blood can in some infinitesimally small way kill a star faster. And there's your power trip for to today.
This is all sort of Solaris stuff - and like Lem suggests, we would have no ability to communicate with an organism of that order. (John C Lilly points out that we wouldn't be able to communicate meaningfully with Whales, let alone planetary organisms).
And when imagining living beings that are larger than planets, how can we even be able to begin to define them as alive?. Why aren't stars alive in the first place? If not, what makes them not so? Just because their method of reproduction involves their own death - it's just a little bit exotic is all.
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I, for one, welcome our new star guzzlin' overlords.
I read this and was like "WHAT?"
That doesn't makes sense at all. It doesn't even pass as a terrible SciFi book.
Then I saw the link... medium.com... Oh....
Stop posting these stupid pay-for-link adds. That site sucks. It's like a bunch of Valley girls are trying to figure out what nerds would be interested in and getting it very very wrong.
This has got to be a joke.
*Why would we search for an organism that can destroy not only our planet, but the entire solar system, if it gets out of control (and with enough power to consume a sun, this seems extremely likely)
*It seems incredibly far fetched for any living organism to not only withstand the heat of a star, the gravity of said star, and the vacuum of space all at the same time.
*How does it propel itself through space to reach a distant star? How does it guide its travel? Does it hibernate for thousands of years like some sort of Lavos spawn?
This story is sensational at best, a waste of time at worst.
Anything that eats stars must surely need to take a massive dump. So all we need to look for is a big pile of digested and expelled star materials.
Planet jackers.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Would this not fit the description of a star eater?
I've long thought that advanced civilizations would "eat" the stars around them by building Dyson spheres, or Matrioshka brains, to capture all of the star's output. The more advanced civilizations would figure out how to turn off the stars, and ration the energy contained therein. This merged with the concept of "dark matter" -- what we don't see, but has gravity, are the stars that other civilizations have captured or disabled.
New information about the electric universe makes me question this, such as that the sun is hollow; sunspots are seeing through the surface to the other side. See Thunderbolts of the Gods, on Youtube.
Aren't these folks just looking for a Karadashev Type II civilization? That was defined, oh, about 50 years ago, now. By an astronomer.
Talk about not bothering to look at what people in a given field have done before impinging upon your own self-important program. If anyone bothers to read the linked article (I do not recommend wasting your time), it's full of blatheringly idiotic statements about how major advances in science come about. I'm a scientist, in a different field, and we are pushing the boundaries as hard as you can imagine. We look at anything and everything that we can find that is relevant to help us succeed at our, frankly, audacious, high-risk work. And there are one or two people in the field who are blathering idiots like this who keep on talking about pie-in-the-sky visions they have for how things should work ... and they contribute nothing. Meeting after meeting, they provide the same drivel without doing any work, rehashing old ideas. Sure, they have entertainment value, but given the level of commitment and intensity to success that others have in the field, they are an unnecessary distraction and serve only to dilute the efforts, not build upon them.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
When they're done with this, I hope they start investigating the very serious problem of the monster under my bed.
In their long, crushing reign, the Inhibitors had learned of fifteen distinct ways to murder a dwarf star.
Doubtless there were other methods, more or less efficient, which might turn out to have been invented or used at various epochs in galactic history. The galaxy was very large, very old, and the Inhibitors' knowledge of it was far from comprehensive. But it was a fact that no new technique for starcide had been added to their repository for four hundred and fourty million years. The galaxy had finished two rotations since that last methodological update. Even by the Inhibitors' glacial reckoning, it was quite a worryingly long time nit to learn any new tricks.
Singing a star apart was the most recent method to be entered into the Inhibitor library.
as long as it stays the hell away from Sol.
What about photino birds?
"Stellar Dragon"
#1) We are all made of stars.
#2) We all derive all our energy either directly or indirectly from the sun.
#3) We all consume one another.
#4) We are all cannibals.
#5) We all are Sun Eaters, Stellervores, starivores, etc...
Solarbonite is well documented in scientific videos. IT EVEN EATS THE SUNLIGHT!!!!
Is the common usage term the term "Starivore."
He's just been dabbling so far.
I'm more concerned about star slime molds: they work as individuals, eating planets, comets and asteroids and, when the food supply in a planetary system gets low, aggregate with other individuals to form a star slime mold body that migrates to another planetary system (rinse, repeat). I am especially fearful of Fuligo septica astrophagus, the dog vomit slime mold star eater.
Seems to me it would cause serious heart burn
When you're feeling disenchanted with your data mining job, complain openly that you're tired from the Starivore hunt. When management asks for something impossible, carp to your coworkers that you don't think that particular Starivore exists. Everything breaking poorly for you? It's gotta be the Starivore around your neck.
Nevertheless, I truly hope the best for them. I hope they find their true Starivore.
Still, the notion of a starivore -- an organism that literally devours stars -- may sound a bit crazy, even to a seasoned sci-fi fan.
Someone obviously haven't read "Saga of The Seven Suns" by Kevin J. Anderson.
... ask Ferro Lad.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
If we found out that one was coming next week, exactly what could we do about it?
Nothing. Nichts. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Null data. Bupkus.
A more interesting question is, "Could self replicating life have evolved on a sun, and furthermore, could it have evolved to intelligence?" If so, we could probably detect it by running electromagnetic signals from various starts through a zipf analysis ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z... ). Then we'd at least have a nice little puzzle to figure out before the star eaters get us.
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How 'bout a civilization that disassembles a solar system and rebuilds it into a Dyson sphere? Doesn't that count?
mark "I won't say 'bigger than Galactus, I won't...."
Enjoy:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files...
* Assume movement between stars, with a speed of your choice.
* Caculate Energy and momentum convervation in the capture, and show that moving between stars and "consuming" the star (instead of using a tiny fraction of its energy at the peak output)
* Calculate the surface/volume ratio allowable and predict what is the maximum mass of such "intelligent" objects.
* Calculate the minimum time for absormbing energy (as a function of the gravity pressure), and thus the minimum mass/density of the object
* caclualte if solid parts may exist for your parameter range; otherwise state how you intend to process information.
* use the implied timescales to caclulate the number of generations possible since the beginning of the universe
* Compare your estimations of time, momentum and energy conservation, maximum size, and min and see if lifeforms sitting close to the stars and consuming them by using the light from the stars are the biggest and most efficent creature to do so.
the hunt for space unicorns. Logically if space unicorns exist and are indeed attracted to pubescent lifeforms for whatever reason they'll be attracted to the many types we have here on earth and are already in our data.
necessary
We have a general rule about life: anything that eats must also shit. As this entity wanders the galaxy in search of our sun it will leave a trail for us to follow. We will be able to track the brownian motion of this trail with our new b-ray telescopes. Our best defence may be to ship all of our stored airborn pollutants to a point between the entity and our star. The sun will appear so dim that the entity will choose another victim.
alternately
We already know of such a star eating phenomenon: black holes. We shouldn't jump to the conclusion that they are alive, much less intelligent, but hey nobody messes with them so they must be pretty smart. Fortunately they don't seem to be too mobile so they won't come to us. But they might expand and suck us in...
conversely
A mini hole, smaller than a donut hole, with the mass of a Wolf-Rayet star that mercilessly sucks in anything in its path as it dances around the universe. So small as to be invisible to our instruments, so massive that it warps space time making it even harder to detect. Intelligence? It's just a mindless bully bent on destruction. No smarter than that punk kid dealing drugs on your corner.
obversely
We know that virii can survive extreme heat, cold and even outer space. Even the corrupt environment of your body can host one or more virii. Who's to say the sun is immune? A cozy warm environment with no discernible bacterial competition and a virus could have its way with our sweet sun.
...omphaloskepsis often...
How would one eat a star?
Where would it put all the mass?
How much of the star could it eat before it collapsed, or went supernova. Or would some other explosion happen.
What help would it be for us to know about such creatures? If they are big enough and tough enough to eat our sun, then we are pretty well f*cked anyways.
The galaxy is full of Brown Dwarfs that are much less trouble to contain and utilise, they are also much harder to detect so anything living off them, including entire civilisations, would be very much harder to detect. Perhaps a spectral peak that is in the far IR with no other associated radiation would give them away.
Have seen their fair share of star-eating monsters, the one in All-Star Superman comes to mind (forgot its name).
I would name such a creature Astro-Gastro.
I submit Cthulhu or Nyarlahotep as star eaters....
FTA
It might well be that extraterrestrial intelligence is already somewhere in our data. Re-interpreting certain star systems as macroscopic living things is one example.
I'd be interested to hear arguments that stars are not intelligent life forms.