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Second Irregularly Dimming Star Found (phys.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: Remember the screaming and welcoming of our Dyson-Sphere-Dwelling 1500 LY distant Overlords that accompanied the news that star KIC 8462852 was irregularly dimming on both short and longer timescales? A second star with a similar light curve has been discovered and reported on ARXIV.
With the euphonious names "EPIC 204278916" and "2MASS J16020757-2257467", the star is a young M1 (red) star, traveling as part of a group of stars which haven't had time to disperse from their place of formation. The age is estimated at 5 — 11 million years. Analysis of 70+ days of data from the K2 mission epoch shows a rotation of 3.6 days, but a period of 25 days near the start of the observation epoch showed dips in intensity of up to 60% lasting for up to about a day each. Details are in the Arxiv paper linked to above, particularly figures 1 and 4.
If confirmed, this discovery changes the situation with interpreting the so-called "Tabby's Star". Firstly with a second object in the class, the odds of it representing a class of naturally occurring objects compared to a unique, unusual object is greatly increased. Secondly, the different celestial mechanical situations around the different stars allows a better estimate of plausible formation mechanisms. One potentially important point is that clumps of debris that could produce these dimmings seem to be quite large. "It is also important to note that the resulting size for the transiting and occulting clump would be quite large at with the clump being in the order of 1.5 times the radius of the Sun. Sadly, this appears to be a new class of "dirty young planetary system." no alien Overlords, no screaming in the streets. Just business-like astronomy.
With the euphonious names "EPIC 204278916" and "2MASS J16020757-2257467", the star is a young M1 (red) star, traveling as part of a group of stars which haven't had time to disperse from their place of formation. The age is estimated at 5 — 11 million years. Analysis of 70+ days of data from the K2 mission epoch shows a rotation of 3.6 days, but a period of 25 days near the start of the observation epoch showed dips in intensity of up to 60% lasting for up to about a day each. Details are in the Arxiv paper linked to above, particularly figures 1 and 4.
If confirmed, this discovery changes the situation with interpreting the so-called "Tabby's Star". Firstly with a second object in the class, the odds of it representing a class of naturally occurring objects compared to a unique, unusual object is greatly increased. Secondly, the different celestial mechanical situations around the different stars allows a better estimate of plausible formation mechanisms. One potentially important point is that clumps of debris that could produce these dimmings seem to be quite large. "It is also important to note that the resulting size for the transiting and occulting clump would be quite large at with the clump being in the order of 1.5 times the radius of the Sun. Sadly, this appears to be a new class of "dirty young planetary system." no alien Overlords, no screaming in the streets. Just business-like astronomy.
It's a Dyson. It shines in a shop window. It dims when you start using it.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Or...now follow me on this...maybe there are *two* Kardashev-II civilizations out there?
Or it could be two settlements of the same civilization. They are only a few thousand LYs apart, which is a blink on cosmic timescales, so if they are both at about the same stage of development, it is unlikely to be coincidence. It is more likely that they have the same origin.
If you are an advanced alien race that needs more living space, it's much more practical to construct a partial dyson sphere in your own back yard, than to colonize other star systems. Our galaxy is big enough that there should be multiple inhabited star systems out there, and possibly multiple partial dyson spheres. But the laws of physics make visits from flesh and blood aliens highly unlikely.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
"
If confirmed, this discovery changes the situation with interpreting the so-called "Tabby's Star"."
The most important reason why this deprecates Tabby's Star as an alien megastructure is that at 5-11 million years, this new star is far too young to have undergone planet formation, let alone a highly developed civilization. If we can identify a natural mechanism for its odd light changes, Occam says this is the most likely explanation for Tabby's Star also.
Meanwhile, we ourselves are making these observations as a Kardashian Type I civilization, which means that we are too focused on the antics of celebrities to have a real space program. Fortunately, private sector initiatives like the Allen Telescope Array may get us the definitive data first.
This star is different, it has a disk.
Rats, you guessed my password!
Table-ized A.I.
Um, no. It couldn't be. "A few thousand lightyears apart" is um, too far. How would someone travel a few thousand light years? It isn't possible, because, you know, Physics. This is what is wrong with Space Nutters: instead of accepting the fact that these are naturally occurring systems, the rush is to assume it is fantastic alien civilizations. Let me break to down for you: there is no intelligent life out there. We are likely the only intelligent civilization that currently exists. There likely have been many before us, and there will be many more after we are gone.
One day you might pull your head out of your ass and realize that there just might be an organism in the known universe with wisdom and intelligence that far outshines yours. Until then, keep assuming that man-made concepts such as "physics" is the reason a far more advanced civilization wouldn't be able to travel quickly through space.
As you try and convince others here of your theory, I should also point out the obvious irony. 100 years ago you wouldn't have been able to convince a single human on this planet that a man would walk on the moon soon, and yet you expect the masses to believe this bullshit.
What evidence do you have that you can travel faster than the speed of light? If you have evidence of it, then produce it. Einstein said it isn't possible. Do you know better? Welcome to reality. Reality isn't Star Trek.
By the mere fact that we have noticed this twice now (and we've looked at very few stars) would suggest this is not terribly uncommon. Even if it's one in a million, there are thousands in just our own galaxy.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
None of it is plausible. You space nutters with your "antimatter fuel" nonsense. You can't travel near the speed of light. We know that from basic Physics. How are you going to travel "a few thousands light years"?
Well, it's an older, advanced race that moved to a younger star over a long period of time. And I think the irregularly dimming light can be simply explain by the same set of facts... Old people driving with their turn signals on all the time and hitting the brakes randomly for no apparent reason...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Um, no. It couldn't be. "A few thousand lightyears apart" is um, too far. How would someone travel a few thousand light years?
Probably slowly, by human standards. Project Orion in the 1950s studied a hypothetical fission propulsion systems that could reach ~0.01c. So a few thousand kly = a few hundred thousand years. That's certainly a long time, but consider that it's 65 million years since the dinosaurs and billions of years since life began. If our civilization gets to be several million years old and we can't figure out anything better we might say it's better than not spreading at all. And we still have some ideas for fusion and anti-matter drives we might figure out eventually. We're pretty close to fantasy here but not wormhole/warp drive/hyperspace degrees of fantasy.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They are two different things. The young star system would have a lot of debris in it and the star itself would be still unstable. So it is reasonable for its light output to vary. The other star was old.
Generational ships. Also, no reason to think an alien's lifespan is similar to a human's
Also, relativity.
Generational ships ...
That is biology based thinking. A civilization this advanced has likely made a full transition to machine based AI. There are no "generations", only periodic upgrades.
IMHO 'Q' didn't fit in the category of 'civilized, but he could be responsible for the phenomena we are seeing.
You can't travel near the speed of light.
You can get up to about 0.25c with a solar sail, using laser boosting. Your payload would not have to be big. Just enough to bootstrap a new civilization. DNA based beings could send plenty of genetic diversity encoded on a computer, and just splice a base sequence. Machine/AI based beings would not even need that.
How are you going to travel "a few thousands light years"?
Using vessels that can survive a ten thousand year journey. They would be self-repairing, and error correcting, to prevent systems from failing or wearing out. A civilization thousands or millions of years more advanced than us should be able to figure out how to do that.
So I guess it is impossible after all, because there's no way that ship lasted 1000+ years without being bricked by a forced update.
What evidence do you have that you can travel faster than the speed of light?
Interstellar travel does not require FTL velocities.
What evidence do you have that you can travel faster than the speed of light? If you have evidence of it, then produce it. Einstein said it isn't possible. Do you know better? Welcome to reality. Reality isn't Star Trek.
Absolutely none, and it is not possible according to current models.
However, maybe those models are incomplete. For example, maybe the universe is a simulation and someone exists outside of it capable of mucking about with it. Or perhaps we will discover how to create a buffer overflow.
Real lawyers write in C++
We have known for quite some time that young stars can behave this way. The reason Tabby is odd is because it DOESN’T appear to be young. I doubt the same mechanism will explain both unless Tabby’s age is radically down graded. I suppose that could happen, but the reason I believe it won’t is the highly symmetric first dip and the another dip indicating a huge ring structure object, then came the wacky random fluctuations that without the other two anomalies would like a young planetary forming nebula. On September 14th, GAIA will release its first trove of data on star distances and motion. Likely this data will give us a much better idea about what Tabby’s star is. Still only if and when another occlusion occurs we will really be able to draw some real conclusions.
Letter To Iran
Use an induction catapult to fire a stream of metallic reaction mass at your chosen target. Then send a second induction catapult along that stream, carrying passengers, flying to the target. Most of the work is done in the originating system. Your pellets reaction mass are self guided with microcontrollers and little ion drives so they can stay aligned.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
No, Einstein said it is possible, and described its effects. What he said was impossible was to accelerate to the speed of light in a conventional Newtonian way.
Jules Verne was a space nutter.
Imagine, sending people to the moon by shooting them out of a cannon? The acceleration would kill them.
Solid scientific principles of the day? That's nutter talk. No, it's impossible, Newton said so.
-- Alastair
Such a statement is useless conjecture without observing the natural progression of such a race and then drawing a conclusion. You might as well say "A race that advanced has OBVIOUSLY replaced all their limbs with broccoli.".
Science is based on observations. Fiction is based on wild speculation. Combining the two makes for some interesting stories, but remember that science fiction is a type of fiction, and not a type of science.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Actually about 100 years ago, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was working out and publishing the theory of how humans would eventually use rockets to reach the Moon, and other places in space:
Mainly because Star Trek needed to cripple its future to keep its main characters and their challenges recognizable to the audience. Thus things like cyborgs, sapient supercomputers and genetic engineering were reserved for enemies. On the other hand, we have little reason to self-limit ourselves to what natural selection came up with, so why would a thousand-year journey be any more of a problem for our descendants than morning commute is for us?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
None of it is plausible. You space nutters with your "antimatter fuel" nonsense. You can't travel near the speed of light. We know that from basic Physics. How are you going to travel "a few thousands light years"?
Bah. Fully qualified experts used to insist going faster than 35 MPH would be fatal. Not crashing, mind you: just going faster than that. It would turn the body to jelly and shatter all your bones. You'd die instantly. When that turned out to not be true, the bar was moved to 100 MPH. That wasn't true either. Then they said we would never fly. We did. Then they said we'd never survive breaking the sound barrier. We did. Then they insisted 1000 MPH was lethal. It isn't. They said helicopters were impossible. They aren't. They said we would never survive going into space, that we would die the moment we tried, that we would never get to the moon much less back from it.
A lot of supposed experts have said we can't do one thing or another, and of course always backed up with charts and numbers and science and stacks of absolutes. And yet time after time they are proven WRONG. The science they relied upon and swore upon to say 35 MPH was lethal---- absolute crap, despite their assurances to the contrary. Most of us break THAT one multiple times a day. I know I have exceeded over four times that speed in my car and I am still here.
The only thing these experts have proven is the overwhelming ability to be wrong about their science and underestimate what people are capable of doing. So perhap it is possible to break the C barrier. We will try. We might even do it. And perhaps it will become just another 35 MPH barrier, meaningless and forgotten.
Sig for hire.
The Thought Police will be using tickle-sticks along with the nerve gas and whips?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Hmm, at 0.01c, it would take 430 or so years to reach AlphaCent. It would take 20M years or so to get to the other side of the Milky Way.
It's probably safe to say that a Type II civilisation would be capable of at least 0.01c, and that it would last 20M years or more.
This completely ignoring that if you have the entire energy output of a star to play with, speeds closer to 0.25c+ would be more realistic than 0.01c....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Light manages it. We can't do it so fast, but that's an engineering issue, not a physics ban.
You didn't actually read even the fucking summary, which I spent 3/4 of an hour writing. You fucking unspeakable cad. Piss off back down your troll hole.
Certainly not in your momma's cellar, if you can't even read the fucking summary, let alone the paper linked to from it.
To be precise, we have no evidence for intelligent life outside the Solar system (leaving aside quibbles over whether Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere, it's not even a small fraction of the way to the limit of known gravitationally-bound objects in the Solar System). Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - or evidence of anything else, either.
This is the position which we have evidence for. However, given that the universe is large, and our locale doesn't seem to be particularly uncommon, it strains credulity.
Almost certainly true. And completely unsupported by any evidence except the very speculation which you decry.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
The same way that our ancestors populated the Earth at an average speed of around 3km/year : slowly, with the technologies we have when we start, plus any that we develop along the way.
In that previous diaspora, the travellers developed things like "clothing", then "fabric" and sewing. I'm pretty sure that pottery was also developed on that journey, probably multiple times. But they started with fire and stone tools.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
They'd be here by now. What plausible reason would they have for ALL stopping, once they've got a technology that can make an interstellar move in a manageable period of time?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I, for one, would not welcome Patch Tuesday on my AI "shell".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
(2) Which part of "slowly" do you have a problem with understanding?
(3) How would you deal with languages evolving? Simply : with records of existing protocols and including a protocol for updating protocols. No, it wouldn't be easy. Who (apart from you and the Star Trek scriptwriters who seem to be your only source of information) believes that it will be either easy or quick?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
That is biology based thinking. A civilization this advanced has likely made a full transition to machine based AI. There are no "generations", only periodic upgrades.
Some of us enjoy our biological meat puppets.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Completely ignoring the reality that "Type II civilizations" exist only in your imagination.
Moron. Read the post I was responding to. He said "began communicating". It isn't possible. Slowly? You mean like thousands of years apart?
I am glad that you think experts have nothing to say on the subject of the impossibility of travel between stars. Because I am not an expert and I am utterly convinced by the physics and the psychology of humanity that we will never travel between stars. You are about to elect a president who is so stupid he wants to build a wall against the Mexicans and make them pay for it. What makes you think that any civilization that ugly and stupid is going to avoid war and sinking back into the stone age after the first nuclear strike? Interstellar travel my arse, we will be lucky if we get back to using metal tools after the crash we are currently heading for. There won't be any coal to get industrialization going next time, good luck with steam engines powered by wood.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Well, I don't believe it, but assuming FTL is a pipe dream, a Level 2 civilization would still be quite capable of accelerating a colony ship to a sizable fraction of the speed of light, even enough so that journeys across thousands of light years would take negligible time for the passengers, though that would likely still get extremely expensive even with the full power of a star behind it.
So, they build up their infrastructure, and then eventually send a colony ship to another rich candidate star when their other projects leave excess power available. Sill, seems unlikely they'd cross thousands of light years to colonize another star, skipping all those along the way. Unless I suppose they take "not putting all their eggs in one basket" VERY seriously, Hmm, wonder if there are any civilization-ending supernova candidates near the original star? I mean that's a serious consideration - we' know of at least one candidate that could detonate at any time and potentially destroy life on Earth. If you're going to go to all the effort of building a Dyson sphere, It's probably worth avoiding stars likely to be sterilized any time soon.
Alternately, there may be an unknown number of fully encased stars already between these two whose leakage emissions are too dim to see, and we're only seeing newly colonized stars whose Dyson spheres are still in early construction. The galaxy's a very big, very old place, an empire could easily span thousands of light years and still not have reached us yet. If they know we're here they might even be intentionally avoiding us - if the emergence of complex life is rare it might be considered worth leaving a buffer zone around worlds that might eventually birth their own interstellar civilizations. Space is big, no sense crowding each other.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Actually, no. While the true underlying rules that govern the universe are not man made, our concept of Physics most certainly is - it's our best mathematical model so far of what those real rules might be, but there's nothing sacred or "True" about it - the models have been torn down and rebuilt many times already, and it's pure hubris to assume that we wont do so again in the future. And when we do so, there's no telling what new ways of manipulating the universe may become possible for us.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's a big universe out there, and the further we look, the older it is. Takes a lot of hubris to announce that something only exists in a given person's imagination, based solely upon one's knowledge, limited though it may be.
Bit like a slug under a rock being unable to fathom a jet airliner...
Holographic storage.
Fusion power.
Flying cars.
Real soon now.....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We don't know that at all, warp is theoretically possible and so are worm holes.
Or, somewhat more seriously, destroyed by an impact with something...anything really, at large fractions of the speed of light, or destroyed by a terrorist attack from within (many generations gives time for indigenous doomsday cults to form), or cleared of all life due to an unrecoverable malfunction with any life support system. A generation ship is constantly rolling the dice for its own survival, and what I see as a major flaw in the concept is the belief that it will never roll snake eyes in however many hundreds or thousands of years it spends in space. The odds of a generation ship reaching its destination intact are just too slim.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"Science is based on observations. Fiction is based on wild speculation. Combining the two makes for some interesting stories"
Yes, those stories are called hypothesis. Science is about observing and then speculating based on those observations, speculating on what else would be true if your speculation were correct, devising ways to test those something elses and observing the results. Rinse, repeat.
Science fiction tests nothing in the physical world although it often simulates such testing in a fictional world where the hypothesis have to be able to integrate coherently with everything else in that fictional world. This lab of the mind is arguably more exentisve than that of most scientists forming a hypothesis. Nobody would claim science fiction is science but science fiction contains hypothesis (even if they are more loosely founded than those of scientists) and inspires actual scientists who often later test those hypothesis and there is a reason science fiction often later becomes science fact.
"Meanwhile here on Earth we use chemical rockets."
Sure but it isn't like we haven't developed at least infant forms of these other technologies, our space program just sucks so we don't have opportunities to test and develop them. We have so few resources we can't afford to Edison it and discover all the ways not to build an FTL drive and go the next step and revisit all these techniques periodically to make sure we didn't rule them out prematurely because of some underlying tech that wasn't quite there yet.
Look at the space elevator concept, we have numerous materials theoretically strong enough now, nobody has attempted to build a space elevator yet. Why? Resources.
"If you can build megastructures around a star you can also slap engines on the things and get up to maybe 10% of lightspeed."
Maybe, maybe not. I'd contend we could build megastructures around a star already we just wouldn't do so.
Can you imagine the human race of today pursuing a project on a term of millenia building a megastructure composed of billions or trillions of small components flocking and interacting in unison to form of a megastructure? Lots of redundancy. I don't see any huge insurmountable technological obstacle to that, the logic is already being built into our cloud computing structures, the obstacles are social. I couldn't see modern man engaging in a project like the pyramids or the great wall either.
If we could somehow get the globe on board, possibly with an international pissing contest, we might get them to begin such a thing as an effort to terraform mars. Focus a big sun powered microwave at mars and you'd shake those water molecules up pretty good. Then we just keep expanding it bit by bit. In theory if it got ignored by the world for a bit the part that was already there should keep working until we start expanding on things again. Eventually we are doing a lot more than just terraforming mars.
Flying cars have been here for a long long time. Nobody actually wants them in practice.
Yeah! Because what's better than one Dyson sphere? TWO Dyson spheres! Or perhaps at some point your civilization gets to the point where building a Dyson sphere is the equivalent of a baking soda volcano elementary school project. "Oh look! Little Johnny made a Dyson sphere! Isn't that just the most adorable thing?"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Slowly? You mean like thousands of years apart?"
Yes, exactly. Now you are getting it. Even we are already at a point where not dying is a reasonably forseeable possibility. We have many paths, AI, singularity, effortings to engineer away aging. As we age timescale perception changes. A young person is in a rush to make every minute count and years feel like forever, to a middle aged person a year doesn't really seem like so long after all. Imagine time perception to a being a few million years old that is part of a civilization full of beings a million years old. Perhaps they are even all just copies of the same being that evolved the capability to split and replicate it's mind without having to reset generation after generation so there is an absolute feeling of confidence, competence, and shared self-interest. What difference does it make if it's 5 minutes lag or 5000 years lag? Stars last a hell of a lot longer than that, those timescales represent an acceptable rate of expansion to continue persisting on timescales that mean something even to you and represent distances that reduce threats likely to happen on timescales of millions of years that seem very real to you.
Interstellar travel does not demand high speed, just long life and patience.
More important: is it blue-shifted?
--
The Internet. Where science goes to die.
But this is all really silly... what naturally occurring phonomena could cause dimming? Could a star itself brighten and dim if something sufficiently large crashed into it?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You receive what you think may be a message (there's a few decades of decision time there, for starters), then decide (1 generation, or two) to initiate communication. You dispatch your first message. Then you wait a decade, or a generation, or a civilisation-collapse cycle?
No, you re-send the message. With slightly different encoding. And then you repeat it again with a different preceding set of mathematical symbols to establish your language-designed-for communication. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In both encodings.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In three encodings. Remember, these are aliens, and they may not have understood your first message.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In four encodings. You have no reply, but you are not going to get a reply for another 2.8 millennia.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In five encodings.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In four encodings. You have no reply, but you are not going to get a reply for another 2.7 millennia.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In six encodings.
Are you getting the message yet? This is going to be a project which extends beyond the duration of (on a human scale) your dynasty's connection to the question of interstellar communication. Possibly YOUR civilisation collapses half way through (possibly the reciever's civilisation does too, but a millennium later). So, you repeat the earlier messages, including the "establish encoding, grammar and linguistics2 messages.
Did you not get the point of "slowly"?
By coincidence, I happen to be listening to a programme about "Quipus". That's a communication tool between humans, from a little over 600 years ago. And we still haven't decoded them. And we can be reasonably sure (due to the absence of finger-amputated skeletons) that the people sending the message had five (not four, or six) digits. Of course, we don't know if they counted their thumbs differently to their fingers and used base 8, not 10.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Think more about what you mean by "civilisation-ending". You're talking about space-faring organisms. That means either FTL-impossibilities (impossible - it's in the name) or generation ships. Generation ships require radiation management. Outside the immediate blast zone of a supernova (a mere few dozen LY), the issue is radiation management. And supernovae hardly happen without warning - you need a star somewhat brighter than Sirius, drastic changes in it's diameter, luminosity and neutrino flux. To miss those signals, you'd need to be talking about a uranium-level technology with an incredibly short-sighted view of the reality that surrounds them.
Even our rather fucking stupid species has nut-cases building underground shelters capable of possibly surviving a few years of supernova bombardment. I just do not believe that level of blind stupidity persisting to the time that we are even vaguely comfortable in space.
(How much does it take to preserve a "civilisation"? At best guess, a couple of thousand people, and a Wikipedia-dump. Say, 1 km.cu inside a 3km.diam asteroid. i.e., not a lot.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Oh I see. You are just plain nuts.
"Even we are already at a point where not dying is a reasonably forseeable possibility."
What planet do you live on? Here on Earth, the current generation of Americans is expected to live not as long as the previous generation, due to obesity. You are going to die. We are all going to die. And no: you are never never ever leaving the planet to live on another one. No one is. Grow up and learn to live on Earth.
Resources, we have plenty of. Ability to get on with others, we have a real problem with.
If the US spent only as much as China on defence, they could have a complete Apollo AND shuttle AND space station program EVERY YEAR.
http://www.thespacereview.com/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
*WE* can't travel at velocities approaching the speed of light, or light years at a time, but that doesn't necessarily preclude others from doing so. When I see discoveries like this and you say it is definitely nothing especially interesting, I am reminded that any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic.
If there exists a civilization that has managed to survive and advance for say, a billion years, or maybe even 1/100th of that, they would surely have at least some technologies that would be difficult for us to comprehend. We all walk around with miniature high-powered computers in our pockets, while just a generation ago few people knew what the internet was and less powerful computers occupied a lot of desk space and stayed tethered to walls. Merely two hundred years ago there was no widespread use of electricity. I think it is the height of hubris to presume that something can't be done simply because we have no idea how to do it today. And, after all, our laws of science and mathematics are still evolving constantly, as they always have. FTL travel may be impossible, but even if we find a way to work it out theoretically we are still a long way from making it practical. So what if our understanding of the underlying physics and the nature of spacetime is less sophisticated than we presume it to be?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
You're right - we don't have that evidence. But even Einstein was wrong more than once, and we haven't been developing technology for very long at all, on cosmic, geologic, or evolutionary timescales. If you mean *we* aren't traveling to other stars any time soon, you're probably right. But if comparable life elsewhere isn't it right to assume that some civilization somewhere might be much older and much more advanced than us? Human understanding of math and science hasn't been perfected yet, so maybe we have some big things wrong and there are probably some significant technologies that we haven't even conceived of yet. So I'm not saying these stars we've just found to dim oddly are evidence of Dysonspere-esque structures or alien civilizations, but we haven't exactly been around long or traveled very far, ya know?
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
On a colony ship. Take 100,000 years to cross a few thousand light years. With automation and high-latency communications, you'll arrive at your destination 1000 years behind the civilization you left, unless the colony ship "evolves" at the same or faster rate than "home".
Learn to love Alaska
Einstein never said [faster than light travel] was impossible. When corrected by idiots, the original idiots look more plausible. You should keep your incorrect corrections to yourself, furthers your cause farther than you opening up your mouth.
Learn to love Alaska
Okay, yeah in terms of terminating a species that spans thousands of light years, it's not so much of a threat. But even at that level of technology, travel between even close stars would still be a non-trivial endeavor, it would be difficult if not impossible to physically evacuate the inhabitants of a fully domesticated star within the kill zone unless you started millenia ahead of time, and while radiation management would be possible, it would also be a very expensive and disruptive expected long-term cost of colonizing the star in the first place. It might well be more attractive to simply grow your civilization away from such threats instead of toward them.
And just as an aside, assuming light-speed is insurmountable, with even the closest stars having decades-long ping times in communication, and physical transportation between them being even slower and very energy-expensive, such a "civilization" might well be far more fragmented than the "human civilization" on Earth currently is. Even if they shared a sense of species unity (aided no doubt by the difficulties of waging interstellar war), it might be difficult to call them a cohesive civilization in any traditional sense of the word.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Good education and the capacity to take care of everyone's basic needs should make cults and terrorists a non-issue. We are talking about an advanced civilization, I think we can assume those things would exist on a starship.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
No "fully qualified expert" said we would die if we went faster than 35 mph. The people who said that had no evidence or observation to support the idea and there was in fact evidence to the contrary (cheetahs, lions, many types of birds) that they were ignoring.
Don't conflate saying something is too hard (likely to be proven wrong eventually) with saying something is impossible based on known physics (less likely to be proven wrong).
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Machines that advanced, would be indistinguishable from biological bodies. Except maybe a bit "better".
Maybe, biology -is- what you get after machines?
Except, we've just missed a few upgrades and preventive maintanance... 8-)
Agreed. Launching a generation ship is going to be a "fire and forget" deal. You'd try to persuade the colonies to keep some sort of transmissions going, mainly so that you'd have some idea what is killing them. It's not as if you could offer any assistance on any useful time scale. You'd have to use some pretty serious carrot to persuade them to put up with the stick of sending data back home.
It's a topic that has been well-explored by SF.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
If there exists a civilization that has managed to survive and advance for say, a billion years, or maybe even 1/100th of that, they would surely have at least some technologies that would be difficult for us to comprehend. We all walk around with miniature high-powered computers in our pockets, while just a generation ago few people knew what the internet was and less powerful computers occupied a lot of desk space and stayed tethered to walls. Merely two hundred years ago there was no widespread use of electricity
It's worse than that. We have only had any kind of technology for about 2500 years or so; before that we were stacking rocks and that was about it. And about 1000 of those years we regressed and didn't do anything noteworthy technologically (between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance). It's only been in the last 200-300 years we've really made big strides technologically and scientifically.
In short, our civilization is less than 10k years old at most. It's impossible for us to even comprehend a civilization that's been around for 100k years, let alone 1M - 1B, unless that civilization has progressed far, far more slowly than ours. Someone born 1000 years ago, and somehow resurrected today, would barely recognize anything or have any idea how to live in modern society, even if you could get past the language barrier. They'd basically think everything they saw was witchcraft and sorcery.
As for FTL, even at this early stage we do have a bit of an idea how to do it (see the Alcubierre Drive). It just requires negative mass or exotic matter, which doesn't seem to exist, but if one physicist can come up with this based on Einstein's theories, with an improved understanding of physics there's no telling what could be devised in the future. Now, give us another 100K years of development and it's quite possible something would be discovered. If the ETs have had a civilization that long or longer (which is nothing in cosmic timescales), there's no reason to think they wouldn't have come up with something.
If you mean *we* aren't traveling to other stars any time soon, you're probably right.
It's more likely that *we* aren't *ever* traveling to other stars. With too many members of our species being as stupid and short-sighted as him, we are certainly doomed as a species. Hopefully the ETs are a lot smarter than us reality-TV-watching imbeciles.
He "just discovered" trolling? He has a 6-digit UID; he's been around here for a while. He's certainly not a kid in his mom's basement, unless he's one of those 40-year-old virgins who never moved out. The fact that he's still around and prolifically posting while so many other quality posters are long gone just shows this site is on its last legs.
Not sure I agree with the stick analogy - maintaining communications is unlikely to be particularly burdensome, nor is making regular "incremental backups" of your research servers into the datastream. Compared to sending a colony ship between stars, setting up a gravitational telescope to examine your target would be pocket change, and make for a wonderful insanely-high-gain communication relay as a bonus. And I think a king size carrot would be easy to offer. Sure, you can't get any short-term immediate assistance with a problem, but a colony world will have considerable long-term challenges as well, and extremely limited resources and manpower for a very long time. Local energies would likely be directed towards relatively more survival and development goals for generations.
Meanwhile if the homeworld keeps sending them the latest and greatest new advances in science, technology, and art, the colony is getting continuous access to the intellectual bounty of an otherwise increasingly more advanced civilization - right down to plans to feed into the fabricators. And even if technology and culture have plateaued, there's also the possibilities of researchers sending back details of long-term colony challenges and getting detailed analysis from home, where many individuals would probably be interested in researching things like xenogeology, in far more depth than could be afforded on the colony. If you sent good data back, then even a ten year old geology analysis done with 10x the number of dedicated experts and 10,000x the CPU cycles might well have much to offer the local geologists.
When it comes to getting the most bang for your research dollars, communicating with a more advanced civilization is probably hard to beat
And as the colony builds up to rival the homeworld civilization, that's the payoff for homeworld's investment. There's much to be gained from both sides maintaining communication. Much less potentially paradigm-shattering novelty than engaging with a completely alien civilization, but you've still got two worlds worth of intellectual productivity to consider. They'll no doubt retread a lot of the same ground, but especially with some coordination to pursue different directions, they could still advance faster together than alone. And whats a decade of lag in cultural feedback matter in the face of having twice as many Mozarts, Rembrandts, etc. sharing their creations?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Wouldn't a Dyson sphere require a vastly considerable amount of resource material?
I wonder if there is not enough material in all 8 known planets plus asteroid belt to construct a Dyson sphere around our own star.
Not to mention the inconceivable amount of other resources needed to process and construct the thing; like workers and manufacturing facilities.
My money would be on a more naturally occurring phenomena. Perhaps a dark object(s) occluding view, or an as-yet unknown type of core reaction.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.