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The Search For Starivores, Intelligent Life That Could Eat the Sun

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-life-jim-but-not-as-oh-god-it's-eating-the-sun dept.

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.

5 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Starivore? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Astrophage

  2. Re:Do it in your free time by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Interesting

    yeah.. maybe, somehow, it happened in 1 galaxy out of billions.

    but really, such a creature would more likely be what's commonly called a "civilization".

    there's quite a few hurdles between starting as a single cell life and evolving into something that eats stars. - big, BIG jumps necessary - more likely such that they're much more likely to be done by groups of intelligent beings - or such a being would have to have been created on purpose.

    like, the creature would first need to eat up the place it evolved in - but before that think/find/somehow have a way to get the next star, no small feat on it's own.

    giving them public money would be a total waste. especially when if such existed, detecting it would come for free from the observing we're doing currently.

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    world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
  3. Look for what you can see. by Immerman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    1. Re:Look for what you can see. by N1AK · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There was an interesting, short, interview about Kepler's observations of other earth like planets. One thing mentioned was that we can now analyse the atmospheres of planets reasonably close to us if we can observe the light from the star they orbit going through it. Because there are elements in our atmosphere that couldn't be their naturally, another species doing the same thing to us could tell that there was, or had been, life on our planet.

  4. Re:BS by non-scientists by EnsilZah · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've always considered the word "futurist" to mean "bad sci-fi writer who couldn't be bothered with coming up with a plot and characters".