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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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Kindly do not suggest to the public that you're just screwing around on the public dime. What you do on your own time is your own business.
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"Stellarvore" would be the correct Latinisation. N'est-ce pas?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Be seeing you...
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
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.
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.
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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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To the B Ark, quick!
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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)? _
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).
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.
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.
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...