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Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com)
gurps_npc writes: Phil Plait just wrote an interesting article about a star that is extremely variable. We generally look for cyclical, minute (1%) variations in star light to detect planets. But we found one that has a variation in starlight of over 20%. We don't have a very good explanation for this, and some people are speculating that such variation could be caused by a civilization building a Dyson Sphere around the star. From the article: "Such a sphere would be dark in visible light, but emit a lot of infrared. People have looked for them, but we've never seen one (obviously). Which brings us back to KIC 8462852 (PDF). What if we caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact? Huge panels (or clusters of them) hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, and oddly-shaped, could produce the dips we see in that star's light." Plait says it's overwhelmingly unlikely, but interesting nonetheless.
Are there natural explanations for oddly-shaped globs revolving around a star?
It's important to note that the actual scientists studying the star aren't the ones screaming "ALIENS!" - that's the journalists who misreport and distort things to make them "sell better".
...but still fun to wildly speculate about.
That would only apply if it was finished being built. The rabid distortions and exaggerations are claiming it's "under construction", which means it would be all patchy and full of mostly open areas still.
I'm far from an expert, but the wild speculation that's coming from outsiders (i.e. not scientists who published the paper) is that it could be a civalization in the process of building a Dyson sphere. I suppose if they only had a piece complete maybe we'd see something like this?
Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it could be?
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Like the second Death Star
I don't care about this. I just need to know if it will still vacuum efficiently.
Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now. Of course, it's just as possible that we're seeing the star in question being blocked off by comets, clouds of dark matter, or other random space debris.
That would only apply if it was finished being built. The rabid distortions and exaggerations are claiming it's "under construction", which means it would be all patchy and full of mostly open areas still.
But if their Congressional funding got cut mid-sphere... Dyson's Bowl.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Given the level of technology (and investment) needed to build a Dyson sphere, I would guess that it would be designed to last for quite some time. So the descendants of the builders are probably still alive and using it.
It probably has been repainted a few times. Some Bondo in the meteorite dents, etc.
Have gnu, will travel.
How about a more sane and more plausible... larger brown dwarf twin?
Nahh, let's go with a civilization that has harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This star believed to have large amounts of dust remains of broken up comets orbiting it with high eccentricity (very elliptical as opposed to more circular). Yawn.
The alternative is so much more exciting, provocative, brain invigorating: "Now I'm not saying it was mega-engineering by aliens, BUT IT WAS MEGA..."
We're within a few generations of eternal biological life ourselves, why would death be a concern for a civilisation that can build Dyson spheres.
Doesn't matter the farther out we look the farther we see into the past.
The one of the farthest known galaxies is EGSY8p7 what we see of it today happened 13.2 billion years ago. When you look up at the sky you are looking into the past.
KIC 8462852 however is only 1,500 light years away.
You might be able to complete a dyson sphere in that time frame. But I don't know the timescale you would have to be working on for such a project to be feasible.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
A civilization probably wouldn't need the output of an entire star right away. We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet, a small panel could feed our energy needs for the next few decades.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
We know almost nothing about nature anywhere outside the solar system. We have been making assumptions as best we can with the data we have, but the fact is all of our real experience is local and we just don't know what might be going on that far away.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Except that it's lots of lightyears away which means it would have been lots of years ago which means....OMG THEY'RE ON THEIR WAY HERE, RUN!
Keep in mind the closer to us the occultation is occurring, the smaller the occluding object needs to be. Could just be a small chunk of matter in interstellar space moving along a coincidental path nearer to us than the star in question. You know how big an object would have to be to completely occult our sun from the edge of our solar system? You could carry a whole collection of them in one pocket.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Dark matter doesn't interact visibily with light or matter. Comets or "random space debris" will not cause consistent 20% dimming.
And yet it's still equally likely, since as the original article, and several posters have pointed out, the whole "it was aliens! Dyson sphere!" thing would be causing large emissions in the IR area, which are not present.
Also, the term "dark matter" is not just applied to exotic invisible space matter, but also to clouds of gas and dust that are just too cold to emit any light (hence, dark). Random space debris in large enough concentrations, oort cloud distortions from another star (the small red dwarf about 130 billion km out that the article mentions) are again a possible cause.
The problems with the majority of these ideas (including the dyson sphere/swarm/...) is that most of them would be showing additional signs like glowing brightly in IR, which is just not present.
Also, the dimming is not a consistent 20% - it's changing frequently, and not in a smooth or repeating pattern. (which would suggest a planet or other orbital body) If anything, what makes it interesting is that it's not consistent, but it keeps happening.
While we "watch" them build their sphere, they would have already completed it, detected us using their advanced long range sensors, and used their FTL armada of battleships to come destroy us. Since we are still here, that is a NOT a Dyson sphere.
When there is no scientific evidence to back up one's wacky and complex idea, we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
If an alien civilization had the means to build a Dyson sphere, why would they want to do it? By definition, they would also have to have the ability to assemble or disassemble large planets and to make them inhabitable and should be able to make as many planets as they needed.
Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?
The idea is that you live inside of the sphere, and can convert all of the sun's rays into useful energy.
What if that armada is causing the whole blinking effect? Like it's on the straight path from their star to ours, we and they are jittering a bit. Boom! An explanation! :)
We always imagine great things at the slightest anomaly, only to find the boring truth later.
Maybe it is just Jesus playing with a dimmer switch. Kids like to play with dad's things you know.
The only problem is there's no actual excess of IR emission from the star - which is one of the reasons they've ruled out a lot of conventional dust-cloud and asteroid belt explanations.
Why bother creating an actual sphere if you just want the energy. It is worse for balance than a ringworld. Stick with orbitting rings at different distances and you can still live in slowly rotating megastructures.
And much less worry about a stellar-level catastrophe from a zombie apocalypse.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They are building an intergalactic highway, and the star is simply in its way.
"dark matter" is never used in astronomical terms these days to refer to cold objects. They're called "cold" for that reason.
Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?
Think about it. Or Google it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet
If 99% of the sunlight reaching the planet was suddenly blocked, I think you'd quickly redefine what you mean by "need."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It's pretty obvious what this has to be. The Protectors are building a ringworld (aka Niven Ring) and have installed the shadow-squares (or rectangles) first. We're seeing the periodic dimming as they pass in front of the star. When they finish the ring, the star will look constantly slightly dimmer (unless precession) from our angle and the variation will go a way.
Wrong. It's a Kempler Rosette. The Pierson Puppeteers got there first.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It could also simply be *not a dyson sphere*. A matroshka brain would actually be somewhat more consistent - clouds of thinly spread dust, punctuated by a few planets or planet remnants in the process of being disassembled.
Seeing as how the star is never completely occulted, but the predicted object sizes for some scenarios have to be substantially larger then the star, then it would be somewhat more consistent.
It is however a threshold situation. The tools and technology to build a solar panel to sustain us like that would make it cheaper to build the next one. Once we can do it once, economic growth would dictate that we pretty obviously should build another to get the most out of the investment. Repeat to the logical conclusion...
I'm far from an expert, but the wild speculation that's coming from outsiders (i.e. not scientists who published the paper) is that it could be a civalization in the process of building a Dyson sphere. I suppose if they only had a piece complete maybe we'd see something like this? Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it could be?
The Dyson Sphere is moreso a ton of individual solar panels, that partially surround and orbit a star. Completely surrounding a star is not very likely, to be far enough away to not have molten metal that was once solar panels would be a HUGE area to cover. And also, what civilization would remove the heat and light from their own sun? Their planet would die in an effort to obtain the energy. And if you say "Another sun in another solar system", well... the energy transfer I believe would take far too long to be practical.
Any scientist would apply Occam's Razor and look for a simpler natural explanation and not an Alien Species building a Dyson Sphere.
Besides, Ringworlds are much more efficient.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Ya know, it is possible to make a Dyson Ring on a different orbital angle than your planet, so it does not "die".
You know, right there in the abstract (don't even have to dig) is "... we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event." They already have a hypothesis.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
Besides, Ringworlds are much more efficient.
But ringworlds are unstable!
Only if they get hit by giant meteors.
Well it's easy to test. If we continue to observe it over time and we keep seeing less and less light, which one would expect as they construct more and more of the sphere, then the hypothesis becomes more likely.
Of course given the distance of this star, if they were building a Dyson sphere, it might be finished by now (we'd only being seeing construction progress from ~1,500 years ago) and a civilization advanced enough to do that could probably travel the vast expanses of space, which they might well need to do in order to have enough suitable material to build a Dyson sphere.
One would think that if that were the case we'd notice some other strange anomalies in the area as well, but if everything else looks normal, it's less likely to be aliens and more likely to be some unknown phenomenon that we don't understand well or at all.
[yada, yada, yada, ...] That’s the whole basis of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (see the movie Contact, or better yet read the book, for more on this).
Read a book? With words and stuff? Talk about science fiction. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is just proof of how anything that has the word "Dyson" makes the news.
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That is certainly possible - no one will ever be able to tell what is happening > at that distance. Yet, why do you think it is 'more than likely'? 1500 years is not that long. 1500 years ago, the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Human history goes back a lot further. And plenty of artifacts that those Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and lots of others build around or before that time still exist. And, at this moment, we are still alive too...
Earth has only been broadcasting since the early 20th century. At 1500 LY away, they're still seeing light/etc from Earth around the end of the Roman Empire. Excluding the possibility of some sort of sensor/communication system that defies relativity, any aliens there won't see us until around 3420 AD our time. A response wouldn't be able to arrive until 5000AD or later, probably much more if they were trying to send actual ships.
At this point, only star systems within 100LY of Sol are the ones we would be concerned about - and we can be reasonably sure that the ones within 50LY either don't have anyone listening, or that they have elected not to respond in a way that we've noticed.
I'm far from an expert, but the wild speculation that's coming from outsiders (i.e. not scientists who published the paper) is that it could be a civalization in the process of building a Dyson sphere. I suppose if they only had a piece complete maybe we'd see something like this? Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it could be?
I'm no astronomer/astrophysicist, but I wonder if the 20% dim could be caused by a bunch of brown dwarfs floating in tight formation, or a recent collision among planets/planetoids that created a large cloud of debris, the one is still floating around the original center of mass, and which still has not have had enough time to disperse evenly around an orbit)?
Or maybe it's God... Jibbers Crabst!!!!
Cuz really, there is a lot of bat-shit crazy speculation going on in the interweebz.
FTFA, "we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event." So yes, there are natural explanations.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Make your own star, or one you can access, blink.
As AC mentioned, there's no particular reason you have to orbit in the same plane as your planet - you could build a solid ring around our sun just just off the ecliptic, providing untold billions of times more power than currently reaches Earth, and only have to deal with a couple brief solar eclipses a year as we pass behind it. You could even put a small gap in the ring and tune its orbital speed so that the gap is always passing through the ecliptic during the window when there would otherwise be an eclipse, and never block the Earth's sunlight at all.
There's no inherent reason you even need to rely on orbital mechanics - for example graphene is far lighter than necessary to produce a solar sail that can hover over the sun on photon pressure alone, without orbiting at all - If you could build sufficiently low-density solar panels from the stuff you could slowly encase the sun in stationary solar panels - so long as you left empty a thin "equator" in the plane of the ecliptic you could capture 99.99..(???)% of the sun's radiation without shading the planets at all. In fact, unless those panels were 100% non-reflective you'd end up with a long thin "line" of reflected brightness passing behind the sun - you might need to put up some solar shades just to avoid *increasing* the light hitting the Earth too much.
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Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?
Of course this question has been answered before... ;^p
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."
A civilization probably wouldn't need the output of an entire star right away. We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet, a small panel could feed our energy needs for the next few decades.
Or maybe quite a bit less than 1% (you know, global warming and all that stuff)...
By the time a civilization's technology evolves to the point that it could build a Dyson sphere, it won't have to.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If built large enough, the sphere could be outside your planet's orbit.
Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now.
1500 years ago on Earth, the "real" King Arthur reigned; Clovis beat the Visigoths at Vouille; Constantinople saw the Hagia Sophia wrapped up; and Justinian ruled the Byzantine empire.
Why do you assume that a species capable of building a Dyson swarm around that time, would have died out by now? Or even that such a species hasn't effectively conquered death, potentially allowing for individual members of it to remain alive today?
Nah, terribly inefficient with materials, A Dyson sphere with a radius equivalent to Earth's average orbital distance would cover roughly 109 thousand, million, million square miles, at an average power density of only ~1.5kW/m^2. Build it instead at only a million miles distant (only ~twice the diameter of the sun) and you need cover 100,000 times less area to capture the same power, though admittedly the 13MW/m^2 might provide some engineering challenges.
Then just leave a minimally-occluded ring in the plane of the ecliptic and your planets, space stations, etc. don't get shaded much
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually, Dyson's original concept is a massive swarm of solar satellites or statites with no need for any superstructure. The idea of a single physical sphere came later, to say nothing of the ridiculous idea of living on the surface of the inner surface of the thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Grest set of books if want to see some big physics ideas in a readable fun sci-fi novel (s)
Light sails from a Motie invasion.
Fuck you! It was a fully armed and operational battle station!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
<shakes head>
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That's the beautiful thing about Dysons spheres, especially the original "cloud of orbital solar panels" version - the infrastructure for building the very first panel is a challenge, after that you just keep adding more to incrementally increase the power output as needed until you're absorbing a large percentage of the star's total output. At that point things become a little tricker, but having a sizable fraction of the star's total power at your command probably makes the consolidation phase far more tractable...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The poster meant "need" as in "need to convert to electricity." Only a tiny fraction of sunlight reaches our planet. If we put an object in orbit around the sun such that it was always ahead of or behind us in orbit, it could collect solar radiation that would otherwise never touch Earth and could beam that power back to us. We could also put something in place above or below our orbital plane to collect the solar radiation that goes up or down (or what constitutes up and down in space relative to our orbital plane). In either case, if we could intercept the equivalent of 1-2% of the Earth's daily solar radiation (from radiation that would otherwise not hit the Earth), we could completely solve our energy needs. (Well, at least for the next few billion years. We'll leave that energy crisis to far-flung future generations to solve.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I was thinking the same thing, if this is an interstellar signal lamp, it would probably display a repeating pattern since anything else could be mistaken for a natural occurrence. When they find a star also displaying a repeating pattern, then they know they've got 2-way communication and could try to send a meaningful message. Too bad about the latency though...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you've ever watched Star Trek, you know that every strange phenomenon is an indication that the nebula, or asteroid belt, or whatever...is actually a living, sentient being. Maybe THAT'S what's going on here!
This article says we'd need 20% efficient solar panels covering 191,817 square miles (496,803 square km) to supply the world's energy needs. Of course, these panels could be spread out across continents. Previously oil producing nations could easily become solar energy giants by placing tons of solar panels in their deserts. Houses could cut "from the grid" energy needs by placing solar panels on their roofs. The US could use desert lands in the south west to become energy independent.
With the cost of solar panels dropping and efficiency rising, the cost of this venture and the area needed is sure to shrink as time goes on.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This makes the assumption that energy will be as difficult to harness for an alien civilization as it is for us, which I sincerely doubt.
The Universe is filled unimaginable amounts of energy, it just needs sufficient technological development to harness it. Moving 150,000 tons of goods in one ship would have been unimaginable five centuries ago, and yet that's what one container ship can move today.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How is it that Plait says no excess infrared means it isn't dust clouds and unlikely comets, but then he turns around and suggests Dyson sphere? One of the defining characteristics of Dyson spheres is excess infrared.
Here is a hypothesis that fits the data gathered so far: interstellar debris. It can be oddly shaped. It can block the star's light without generating excess infrared. A cloud of it passing between Earth and KIC 8462852 would produce non-periodic luminosity variations. If the debris was a light year away from Earth, the largest chunk would have a diameter of around 500 km. There would be no constraints due to orbital velocity, and no aliens.
If you're anywhere inside a symmetrical spherical shell, there's no gravitational pull from the shell. It all balances out. So, unless the sphere was spinning fast, you'd just fall into the sun - and you could only tune the spinning for one narrow band, you'd still get too much or too little everywhere else.
This problem is what inspired Larry Niven to publish his idea for a "ring world" - a more practical, lower tech approach. First as a non-fiction article in a SF mag, then as a series of SF novels. Now most people only know the idea Halo, sadly.
Plus a sphere isn't gravitationally stable - you'd have to constantly work to keep the star centered. Without some sort of gravity control, the whole idea is impractical, which is why finding one would be a big deal to physicists - we have no reason to think any such thing is possible today (but then, we don't have a good quantum gravity theory either).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No, it's entertaining speculation put forth by scientists who fully believe that a natural explanation is more likely, but haven't yet found one that fits the data. Otherwise known as "cocktail-party conversation"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Original statement: "Ringworlds are unstable."
Response: "Only if they get hit by giant meteors."
No, that's incorrect. Larry mentions in one of is forewords that some nerdgeekcosmologists did a bunch of math to show that a ring spinning around a star is unstable in the sense that it'll drift such that the star is no longer at the center. Fortunately (back-filling :-) ) it turned out the Ringworld Engineers put in a bunch of stabilization mechanisms.
The big meteor led to other problems.
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Really? We're going straight for the absurdly unlikely sci-fi answer? That's like the people who claim UFOs must be of alien origin conveniently forgetting what the U in UFO stands for.
There's a saying that when you hear the sound of hoofs you should be thinking horses, not zebras. You can include it on the list of possibilities but it should be somewhere near the bottom.
And how do you proposed to rotate a sphere, so all surfaces are moving perpendicular to the star?
It is a huge space armada passing somewhere between ourselves and the star. And they brake for nobody!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I've confirmed that the star has a Dyson Sphere by consulting the comprehensive Library of Babel. Concealed in page 304 of one of its texts is the sentence, "kic eight four six two eight five two is a star fifteen hundred light years away, which is known for its elaborate dyson sphere." Clearly, we will have much to discuss our new sphere-building brethren.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
or, you know, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Nah, they probably know that that there's life here (unless they regard an oxygen atmosphere as a caustic toxin that would make life impossible, or are so convinced of their own uniqueness that they haven't bothered to look), but it'll be another 1400 years or so before they will see the atmospheric changes that indicate there might be a technological species here.
Of course a species capable of building a Dyson's sphere might well be curious enough to spend a pittance of their resources to send observation probes to get a closer look at a living world, but until at least a tiny shred of evidence of is found that FTL is possible it's probably a safe bet that they're still watching a bunch of primitives that are centuries away from inventing the concept of zero. A starfaring civilization doesn't need an armada to conquer that, a bunch of "college students" on a road trip could wipe us out by accident.
Meanwhile they're obviously confident enough that they don't mind broadcasting their location to every intelligent species in the galaxy by occluding their star in an an obviously artificial manner, so unless they're incredibly xenophobic they shouldn't feel even remotely threatened by us, and when you have the power of a star at your fingertips terraforming worlds or building massive artificial habitats around neighboring stars is probably a lot more convenient and appealing than traveling for thousands of years to settle a distant and nondescript star. They might establish a research outpost, but the logistics of interstellar travel are unlikely to make colonizing our system appealing until their empire expands to include the all the appealing stars closer to them.
And considering that there are about 1400 star systems within 50 light years of us (~130 of which are similar to the Sun), there's probably (at an insanely rough estimate) about 1400*(1500/50)^3 = 40 million star systems closer to them than us, over 3 million of which have stars similar to the sun. I suspect they have plenty of real estate available before they feel the need to take ours.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
pando laughs at your foolish preconception of living and life-span.
Ah, the Pak. You win the Internets today, sir or madam. You should be awarded an honorary Tree-of-Life simulacrum.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, but why would you waste the resources to make it so much bigger when you could get the same power output from something much smaller, and still be able to see the stars?. It's not like there's anything much interesting in our system outside the ecliptic, and there's not enough material available to fill even the ecliptic plane with a significant density of artificial structures
If you're *really* energy-miserly but still want your planets to get sunlight, then you could build just a secondary solar-ring outside the orbit of the outermost planet you care about, just wide enough to capture the bit that escapes through the "equator" in your sphere (probably somewhere around the size of our asteroid belt, Jupiter doesn't really get enough sunlight to be useful anyway), or better yet, just surround the star entirely and mount great big directional lights on the sphere to shine directly on the planets with the same spectrum.
The problem is the bigger you build it the less power density is available - at Earth's orbit we receive a measly 1.5kW/m^2, while at two solar radii we'd be getting around 13MW/m^2.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It is exceedingly unlikely this is the result of the actions of an alien civilization, but the importance of such a discovery makes it worth some effort to investigate. In any case its a non-understood astrophysical phenomenon so its interesting to investigate in any case.
If you see something strange, studying more is a good plan in general
Among competing hypotheses, the one with Aliens should be selected.
As long as they are on their planet they are not aliens but inhabitants of planet XYZ.. An English major them Aliens is being politically incorrect and insensitive.
... 3... 2... 1...
Um, a sphere is more unstable than a ring. The sphere has components in different orbits, which causes massive stresses on the structure. Both need massive stabilization to keep the star centered, which was the topic of at least one of the Ringworld books.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Why not an equatorial orbit that is always 90 deg before and after the planet's orbit.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Make it out of physically separate rings at varying angles of inclination.
No one said it was a solid sphere.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Frankly, if we had evidence that there is a civilization with the tech to build a Dyson Sphere out there, I'd be terrified.
I'm not optimistic that all civilizations at that level of tech will somehow magically be all peaceful and loving. Life is struggle, and anything that "wins" at evolution has to be a tremendous competitor.
-Styopa
If we were seeing laser light mixed in at those power levels, we'd know it immediately. It's extremely unnatural.
The only way to get two things to orbit with the same period is to have them orbit at the same distance, so the panels would have to share the planet's orbit. Still, it would be perfectly viable if you're content with just a few biggish collectors catching a little extra solar power rather than large rings. For orbital stability you'd probably want them in Lagrange points 60* away from the planet (L4 and L5) instead of 90*, but that's a minor detail.
The big argument against doing it that way is that those exact same panels would collect even more power if you moved them closer to the sun - cut the distance in half and you quadruple the power hitting their surface. But that also shortens their orbital period, causing them to pass between the planet and sun on a regular basis. Fortunately that can be avoided simply by tilting their orbit onto a slightly different plane than the planet, then such eclipses can only occur for the two brief periods each year when the planet crossing the orbital plane of the solar panels.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If the signal is not an obvious message, it'll be less likely to influence the society of the recipients. Perhaps the tranmitters figure that a civilization advanced enough to interpret their message may be advanced enough to avoid destroying itself upon receipt. Or maybe the reverse—civilizations advanced enough to interpret the message are advanced enough to be a threat, so the message is a warning or designed to incite riots or something. Lesser civilizations are no threat, so no need to disrupt them by inserting information into them. The answer to the Fermi Paradox is, then, that a single civilization does exist in our galaxy, but it only takes action when it detects another to hinder the other's advance. Once we find the one, we're doomed.
I would hardly call the light curves in TFA consistent. Erratic, sure, consistent, no, it is 15% one day, 20% with fuzzy the next with the changes even being odd as well. This is a very weird object.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
If they have FTL then all of those distance/time calculations are blown to hell.
I read the internet for the articles.
I have found that Atheists have almost (not 100% but close) universal belief in Aliens.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Occam's Razor please! It's most likely to be the absorption of a star-scale body, or occlusion by fast-moving matter.
Since they're 1,500 light-years away.
Or life is everywhere and we're among a handful of mentally-challenged species that build a big enough telescope to spot someone before inventing warp drive.
Nah, Moore's other law predicts that the process will be down to 10 to the -10000th nm by then. Those AI CPUs will make more power than they use!
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Give credit where credit is due. Olaf Stapledon was the first to describe such a sphere. Dyson borrowed (i.e. stole) the idea. Stapledon was one of the greatest sci-fi writers, but most people have never heard of him, much less read his works.
"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle."
Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, people. It's the Vl'hurgs.
Or, just get a small dog.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
This problem is what inspired Larry Niven to publish his idea for a "ring world" - a more practical, lower tech approach.
Larry Niven got this right in the later books, but only because a lot of his fans called him out on it.
Halo installations don't actually ring a star, so don't have this problem.
If you say that's the case, it must be! It's not as if you are frequently wrong or anything, so everyone should just listen to what you say and accept it as perfect fact.
And so are spheres. The original dyson sphere is not a sphere. What was proposed was in fact a swarm. There really is no reason to do ring worlds or sphere ones even if you could.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
And how do you proposed to rotate a sphere, so all surfaces are moving perpendicular to the star?
You still stuck in 3 dimensions? Lame earthling!
could beam that power back to us.
How?
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The Black Armada also explains dark matter. It's their stealth technology.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There are a few ways of doing this.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.
One possible use for the energy, would be to blast material off of a gas giant.
This would enable somewhat efficient (ahem. Big grain of salt taken.) collection of material, because the collection vessels do not need to go deep into the giant's gravity well. They just need to be leeward of the high energy stream being shot at the planet.
I think 20% of a star's output would be more than enough to blow atmosphere off such a thing for more easy collection.
That poses a chicken and egg type problem though. If you can build a dyson sphere, why do you need to use such a trick just to get light gasses? The construction of the sphere would require similar levels of energy investiture.....
But if we are going for radical, unsubstantiated wild speculations---
Perturbations in local light trajectories caused by use of very large Alcubiere warp drives. Depending on the direction of travel of the object going to warp, and the requisite size of the warp distortion, light from the star would be bent in directions that prevent that light from reaching the earth (massive occultation) without producing any local IR re-emission, since the light never gets absorbed-- just redirected from the spacial curvature of the warp metric. This would neatly explain the irregular shape, and the lack of IR.
The inhabitants of that system need not be constructing a dyson swarm-- they may merely be FTL capable.
If the facts don't make sense for a single planet, why not several different planets. Maybe their planets are not as neatly arranged as in our solar system, so maybe they go in different directions on different planes of orbit.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It deserves it.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Maybe it's a super advanced Tea Party isolationist culture that doesn't want outside light. >_>
If you build it sturdy enough at the goldilocks zone, you could not just harvest light for electrical energy, but make much of the interior surface habitable for plant life. Also, perhaps a civilization wouldn't do this to their own star, but to a nearby star with no habitable natural bodies around it. Or they could use their entire planetary mass to build the sphere, and live in pods within the sphere.
Forget the interior surface spinning for false gravity, put structures on pylons inside it, with the floors perpendicular to the spin.
Perhaps if some civilization did do something like this, there wouldn't even be life in the solar system as it was done. It might all be robotic probes from the next system over.
As long as it's all speculation, we can speculate all sorts of things.
Sorry for the Star Trek lingo, but might it not be something dampening the nuclear processes at work, actually dimming the star, rather than something having to occlude it to describe its variable nature? Is such a thing possible without the destruction of the star? Perhaps something like a blackhole with a very elliptical orbit around the star, where at times it comes close enough to suck up much of the stars output?
>make much of the interior surface habitable for plant life
Only if they have artificial gravity generators, or grow well in freefall atmosphere-retaining domes.
Even then though to do such a thing you would need an *insane* amount of materials. Consider our own solar system - assuming a 1AU radius we're talking a surface area of over 4x10^25 square kilometers. If we converted the entire ~2x10^30kg of mass of our solar system into the sphere (including the ~99.9% of which is the sun itself), that's still only 50grams per square meter. that's only about 2/3 the mass of your average sheet of paper. Leave the sun in place so you still have a power source and you're down to only 50 milligrams per square meter. Good luck building much durability into that.
If instead the sphere radius was only twice that of the sun itself, then the surface area would be only 3.4x10^19 - over a million times smaller. We could manage 50kg per square meter - far more than is likely necessary. And that would leave plenty of mass to build habitats, people, plants, etc.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You're assuming a group would endeavor to build a totally enclosed sphere with the resources of only a single small system. That's a reasonable assumption, but perhaps they built only scaffolding and pods, with each pod having its own solar collectors nearby. Maybe they're bringing in material from several systems. Maybe it doesn't need to be habitable (at least not yet) because it's built by an advance team of robotic probes.
Any scenario that isn't an as yet unexplained natural phenomenon is already violating Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Once we're not worried about the most probable, then anything possible is within the realm of discussion.
Sure, you *could* theoretically bring in material from another system, but that seems extremely unlikely - with the time and energy requirements necessary to move star-masses across even short interstellar distances you could build multiple Dyson spheres instead. And if they're not cannibalizing the stars themselves then you're talking about bringing in material from hundreds, maybe thousands of other systems.
>already violating Occam's Razor
Except we're not. As a rule Occam's Razor isn't violated, there's just forces you haven't considered in play. You don't see a skyscraper and say "that's not a natural phenomena, so there's no point in thinking about the social and engineering considerations that shape it." That would be silly. Sure, the most likely explanation is a as-yet not grasped natural phenomena. But barring that, the next most likely explanation in an engineered "structure" build in accordance with sound engineering principles - i.e. something that performs the intended task in a reasonably efficient manner with the resources available.
I quote "structure" because, again, the most likely solution is not a coherent structure, but a swarm of solar satellites - the sort thing we're probably not far from starting to build ourselves. The swarm can then be expanded organically to meet rising energy demand until a significant fraction of the sun's output is captured. If instead statites with their tight mass constraints are used, then you can ignore orbital mechanics and intercept up to 100% of the sun's output.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Sound engineering principles follow improvements in materials, logistical support, and manufacturing techniques. If someone finds a lot of material around a dim star near a much brighter star with little material and they have the means to transport it from one system to the other, it's a possibility. Perhaps they have something like a working Alcubierre drive that allows rapid transport among nearby compact solar systems. Maybe they're collecting interstellar dust and debris and moving it inward into systems.
Also, perhaps this alien engineering includes fabricating matter from energy. Perhaps they have enough energy, physics, and engineering to start harvesting enough energy to create much of the matter they need in a solar system that has a high-output star, in order to capture yet more energy.
All of these things are hinted at by our current understanding of physics. If a society could master them, it may be a geometric improvement in capabilities like the computer or the internal combustion engine rather than taking a species just along a slightly faster linear path.
Sure, an Alcubierre drive could conceivably transport planets, perhaps even whole stars, though their gravitational field might provide some challenges. (And if you could transport stars, it might make more sense to build the drive around your home star so you could cruise the universe with power source in tow). Of course the same theories on which an Alcubierre drive are built also state that any faster-than-light drive will also operate as a time machine, which makes them a little implausible. It would also probably require more energy than you'd get from total mass-energy conversion of the star you're moving - as I recall even a small spaceship-sized bubble using all the tricks we've thought of (including pushing many limits to the point that plank-scale effects may make it impossible) requires around a Jupiter-mass worth of energy
As for interstellar dust - there's just not enough to be useful - you would ave to sweep many cubic lightyears of space to collect enough material to make even one puny Earth-sized planet. Consider that our entire asteroid belt, the densest non-planetary distribution of mass in the solar system, masses only about 5% as much as the Moon. Even if by some astounding twist our Oort cloud contains half the total mass of our solar system, you're still talking about having to sweep over 30 cubic lightyears to collect it - and in reality our best estimates put the mass of the Oort cloud at around 5-80 Earth-masses, not even a rounding error compared to the mass of the sun.
As for using energy to matter conversion - no chance. Our sun converts roughly 4 billion kg of mass into about 4x10^26 J every second - so if we already had a 100% efficient dyson sphere and energy->mass converter we could reverse that and produce 4billion kg of matter every second, or 1.26*10^17 kg/year. Spread that across 4x10^31 square meters and you're getting about 3*10^-15 kg per year per square meter - it's going to take you a billion years to generate just 1 milligram per square meter worth of material. And if you had some other power source that could generate power fast enough to be useful for that endeavor, you probably wouldn't have any use for a Dyson sphere in the first place.
A binary star system is probably the best bet - but you wouldn't be transporting the mass around the second star - there's just not enough to be useful, you'd have cannibalize the entire star, or at least a sizable fraction of it. The rest of the mass in the system is unlikely to be more that a small fraction of a percent of the stellar mass. And we're still talking about probably transporting it over at least a sizable fraction of a light year. Plus the difficulties of extracting that mass from its insanely deep gravitational well, which would likely require energy on the scale of a harnessed star to do in a timely fashion, plus some ridiculous technology to not be melted or crushed while "mining" the star
Meanwhile, they could have instead just harvested just a percent or two of the planetary mass already present in their home system to build solar statites in a tight constellation around their star to accomplish the same thing, except for the part where they blocking out the view of the stars from their home planet with a massively inefficient solar array. No magic speculative technology required, just a project almost within reach of even our own technology.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
[Beats head against floor. ]
Well fuck me sideways - a far less revolutionary interpretatino, from people who have spent months more reading the data than the average Slash-dotter.
I can see why the count of low-digit-count contributors is decreasing.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"