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.

Comments

Kardashev

[Livius]

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).

Medium

[Charliemopps]

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.

Re:Starivore?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It may depend on whether you're combining established loan words or just creating a fancy neologism. "Mobile" and "vision" had been established in English (and perhaps not perceived as foreign anymore) before someone combined them. Ditto for auto- as a prefix, even if to a lesser degree, perhaps, since it also fits about anywhere. -vore, on the other hand, appears to only appear in newly coined specialist terms where indeed it is customary to juxtapose words from the same language. If both parts are distinctly foreign and neither is in already in common use in the target language, *then* someone will take care to match them properly, but otherwise, that's not likely to happen. That has nothing to do with engineers.