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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.

20 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Starivore? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is "Black Hole" not fancy enough anymore?

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

      Astrophage

    2. Re:Starivore? by LQ · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Astrophage

      Or stellavore if you prefer Latin to Greek.. But "starivore" is an abomination. if you're going to make up new compound words, you should stick to the same language for each component. "Star-eater" would be ok.

    3. Re:Starivore? by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

      if you're going to make up new compound words, you should stick to the same language for each component.

      I agree, a man on the television said so.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re:Starivore? by Ihlosi · · Score: 4, Insightful
      But "starivore" is an abomination. if you're going to make up new compound words, you should stick to the same language for each component.

      Unless you're an engineer. Then words like 'automobile' and 'television' are perfectly fine.

    5. Re:Starivore? by JWSmythe · · Score: 4, Funny

      So I'm not the only one who read that as the basis for a bad made-for-SyFy movie.

      Plucky protagonist: Oh no, the Starivore is coming to eat our sun!

      Glasses wearing scientist: Yes Plucky, and there's nothing we can do about it!

      Ribbon laden general: We'll nuke it!

      Plucky protagonist: But the nuclear detonation would only make it stronger.

      Glasses wearing scientist: You have a point there Plucky, I'm glad you figured that out before we made a terrible mistake.

      Ribbon laden general: Too late, the missiles have already launched, there's nothing we can do.

      Glasses wearing scientist: There's only one thing we can do, stop it with a black hole!

      [all somewhat technical people viewing it]: shit, I should have known better than to watch more SyFy channel crap.

      Shit, I really shouldn't have said anything. Now they'll really make that movie. Right after Sharkgle.

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      Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
    6. Re:Starivore? by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

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      Ezekiel 23:20
  2. Calling Star Trek by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Funny

    We found your stoned script writers.

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  3. I think... by Guy+From+V · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Stellarvore" would be the correct Latinisation. N'est-ce pas?

  4. 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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  5. Even more useless than politicians by Nutria · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    "I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
  6. BS by non-scientists by gweihir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. 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".

  7. 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.

    2. Re:Look for what you can see. by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But if you saw one then would you recognise it? If they travel faster than light then you won't see them except when they're feeding. If they don't, then most of their life is likely to be in a dormant state as they spend a few thousand years between stars. Then there's the question of how they eat. If they eat the entire star at once, then you'll notice a star vanishing, but we don't have continuous observation on most stars, so there's a good chance that we'd see something odd in the data but not be able to tell what. If they eat in a more plausible way, then how would we tell it apart from, for example, a star near a superdense non-alive object that is drawing matter away from it?

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    3. Re:Look for what you can see. by rastos1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That is - you look not for things that are particularly likely to exist, but for things easy to detect.

      So for example rather then trying to find factorization of a 2048-bit RSA modulus (which exists but is hard to find), you try to find 2048-bit prime that is even and bigger than 2 (that does not exists but is ridiculously easy to detect). Totally makes sense. Huh.

  8. Too heavy by Zawash · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

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  9. Kardashev by Livius · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).

  10. Medium by Charliemopps · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.