Could Giant Alien Structures Be Dimming a Far Away Star? (sciencemag.org)

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: Astronomers and alien life enthusiasts alike are buzzing over the sudden dimming of an otherwise unremarkable star 1300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. KIC 8462852 or "Tabby's star" has dimmed like this several times before, prompting some researchers to suggest that the megastructures of an advanced alien civilization might be blocking its light. And now -- based on new data from numerous telescopes -- it's doing it again. "This is the first clear dip we have seen since [2013], and the first we have ever caught in real time," says Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in State College. If they can rope in more telescopes, astronomers hope to gather enough data to finally figure out what's going on. "This could be the first of several dips about to come," says astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University. "Many observers will be closely watching." KIC 8462852 was first noticed to be dipping in brightness at seemingly random intervals between 2011 and 2013 by NASA's Kepler telescope. Kepler, launched to observe the stellar dimmings caused when an exoplanet passes in front of its star, revealed that the dimming of Tabby's star was much more erratic than a typical planetary transit. It was also more extreme, with its brightness sometimes dropping by as much as 20%. This was not the passage of a small circular planet, but of something much larger and more irregular.

Comments

No

[Required Snark]

Glad that I cleared that up for you.

Re:No

[Diac]

Citation please

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I'm glad that you are glad.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't prove that, so aliens clearly did it!

Also, "1300 light-years away". Why is this even worth considering, outside of sci-fi?

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we need a citation for the GP's "No". What was he thinking posting such nonsense without a citation.

It's bio us that we are living in a computer simulation. Some Silicon Valley big shots say so and in Amerca, the richer you are, the righter and smarter you are.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Betteridge's law of headlines.

Re: No

[Maritz]

I know it's not you claiming this - but if you posit that we live in a simulation, you better have an explanation for why that simulation itself is not a simulation. Very rapid reductio ad absurdum.

Re:No

[91degrees]

Well, it could. It's unlikely, but if there is an alien superstructure, then that is likely to be the cause.

Much more likely to be a more mundane explanation.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Postman put a letter in the mail box. My first guess is that I hit a mega jackpot and they wrote a letter to tell me.

Re: No

[zakzor]

When the words "NASA" and "alien" appear in the same sentence, the answer is "no".

Re: No

[msauve]

I call my simulation Turtle It's Turtles all the way down.

Re:No

[PolygamousRanchKid]

So-called "brownouts" due to demand for electricity exceeding supply are relatively common in Third World countries . . . why should outer space be any different . . . ? The nukes that power the star just aren't big enough.

. . . or . . .

The system's civilization utilizes advanced solar technology for 100% of their energy needs. They turn down the brightness of the star on weekends and holidays to conserve precious solar energy.

Alien mega-structures are not blocking the sunlight. The Dead Kennedys successfully halted the mega-structure construction, because it would have obstructed the view from their mega-compound there.

Re:No

[stealth_finger]

Glad that I cleared that up for you.

Well, it could be. It could also be a swarm of interstellar teapots that use the stars to get their tea just that much hotter. Probably not though.

Re: No

[stealth_finger]

Yeah, we need a citation for the GP's "No". What was he thinking posting such nonsense without a citation.

It's bio us that we are living in a computer simulation. Some Silicon Valley big shots say so and in Amerca, the richer you are, the righter and smarter you are.

At least we can see something is going on there. the simulation thing is just the end point of a logic chain.

Re: No

[Chrontius]

That's the cosmology for my D&D game.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad that I cleared that up for you.

Only took us a couple thousand years to get the majority of the human race to agree the earth was round, so of course there's no way in hell your assumption would ever be wrong...

Re:No

[Chrontius]

Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved.

Now what?

Re:No

[Quakeulf]

There needs to be an update to this:

If the answer to the question is new and exciting then it is the least likely option to happen.

Re:No

[91degrees]

Well, I hate to respond with a meme, but http://imgur.com/lLxCoWM

Re:No

[mwvdlee]

The answer is, with absolute certainty, "Yes".
If there were aliens and they could make giant structures and those structures were placed between us and some star, it would surely dim.
Whether any of this actually exists is an entirely different question from whether or not it could exist.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the bulbs in the Great Simulator is on the fritz. Happens every few billion years.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

No they were not.
The answer has been "no" every couple of weeks when this story runs. And it's still "no", and it'll be "no" next time too.

Re:No

[Talderas]

A more mundane explanation like the below.

we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet or planetesimal fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous break-up event, possibly caused by tidal disruption or thermal processing.

Which is in the link to the paper.

Re:No

[drinkypoo]

Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved.
Now what?

Now we put it in the "don't know" file until we come up with a good explanation. Any explanation which is not testable isn't science, it's just imagination.

Re: No

[Diac]

My comment was made on two grounds.

First as a bit of fun using the citation meme when someone makes a large generalized statement in this case the statement of No in reply to a theory of large alien structures dimming a star.

Second the theory that his comment was responding to was based on observable evidence of a distant star dimming in what appears to be random intervals and was a proposal to what was causing this dimming.

There reply of No is not backed up with anything, I am guessing it is this persons believe or lack of believe that giant alien structures could exist that caused them to make there statement rather than any theory about why it could not be the proposed giant alien structures that are causing the dimming.

So to put it simply, Citation please was posted both as a funny comment in reply to a one word response to a theory based on evidence and as commentary that this response had no backing in its statement.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they say the dimming is 'erratic' which lowers the likelihood it is caused by some structure development, which is more likely to be a steady progression. A field of large bodies or dense gasses passing in front of the star might produce an erratic dimming.

Re:No

[rainmouse]

The burden of proof rests with the proposal, so you can reject out of hand the premise, "We don't know, therefore aliens."

Re:No

[FilmedInNoir]

[Genesis 2:7]

Re:No

[syn3rg]

Betteridge's law, hard at work.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the warp factor.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

If this were something that was a hypothesis of Miles Dyson, sure..total looney Terminator type shit, but Freeman Dyson? No, you bitches have nothing on Freeman Dyson. Nothing. Fucking corporate whores, I swear.

Re:No

[Dunbal]

Archives of the Invisible Space Goat, Chapter 1, page 37. You would do better proving things exist rather than insisting people prove that things don't exist. Otherwise please provide proof that my citation is not real.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Betteridge's law of headlines.

Betteridge has failed me -- I saw lots of articles last year with titles asking whether Trump could become president.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

Except that I'm pretty sure nobody has made that claim.
What has been said is: "What is being observed is consistent with a partially constructed dyson sphere, and thus far it is not consistent with any other explanation we've had".

Now it's possible that this recurrence will allow for more observations, allowing us to learn more - and narrow things down further. That could easily end up with "We're now quite certain that 1300 years ago there was a partially constructed Dyson sphere around Tabby's star". And the likely assumption that, right now, that sphere is complete (or the project failed and it was never pushed past halfway and there's just a few floating bits of scattered construction equipment now.

The thing is - until there is more evidence, even if something else fitted the observations the odds of it being a Dyson sphere is NO LOWER than that other thing. No, it really is not. We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe.
The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS. We've also had the theoretical design for a Dyson sphere for 40 years, we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.

So lets say the new observations STILL fit a Dyson Sphere in progress but ALSO fits a "weird meteor cloud" or something - you have absolutely no grounds to assume the weird meteor cloud is more likely - in fact it's less likely since we've got no evidence that such a meteor cloud can form, no theory for how it may have formed and no evidence for their existence.

Jumping to "There is alien life" would be a mistake, but jumping to "there is NOT alien life involved" is the EXACT SAME mistake.

Right now, the available evidence is consistent with one thing that would require alien life to exist, and not consistent with anything else. This may change - but right now the odds are, very slightly, in favor of aliens.

Re:No

[sh00z]

The burden of proof rests with the proposal, so you can reject out of hand the premise, "We don't know, therefore aliens."

You act as though this premise were pulled from thin air. It was theorized *after*comparison with all previously-observed and postulated natural phenomena, and does not match any of those. Determining whether it is the result of an intelligence is the next natural set of tests to try.

Re:No

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Archives of the Invisible Space Goat, Chapter 1, page 37.

I always wondered what that so-called Trinity was up to: you know, The Father, The Sun and the Holey (Wholly) Goat . . .

Re:No

[TapeCutter]

Betteridge has not failed you, Trump is above the law.

Re:No

[Pahroza]

Well, if by alien we mean "unknown," maybe. If by alien we mean "creatures of unknown origin," then I agree. No.

Re:No

[TapeCutter]

Citation please

"Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" - Hitchen's razor

Re: No

[RobotRunAmok]

>>Citation please was posted both as a funny comment

See, that's where you're wrong. When you feel the need to post a lengthy explanation for your "funny" comment, it's a tip-off that it never was.

Re:No

[omnichad]

come up with a good explanation

Starts with imagination. Imagination is just thinking thoughts that haven't been thought before.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, it's just that some autists don't have a sense of humor. Normal people chuckled a bit when they saw it.

Re:No

[fyngyrz]

The Father, The Sun and the Holey (Wholly) Goat

Oh, I see where your problem lies. It's:

The fodder, the son and the wooly goat.

It's a story about a shepherd who majored in animal husbandry.

Until they caught him at it.

Re:No

[Applehu Akbar]

If we observed a series of very regular dimmings, that would be a better point in favor of the alien hypothesis. If the pattern of dimmings were consistent with an orbiting ring around the star whose orbital plane shifted through our line of sight over time, that would be better still.

Re:No

[drinkypoo]

Starts with imagination. Imagination is just thinking thoughts that haven't been thought before.

I don't want to discourage imagination. I only want to discourage people from imagining that it is the whole process.

Re:No

[Jhon]

" you have absolutely no grounds to assume the weird meteor cloud is more likely - in fact it's less likely since we've got no evidence that such a meteor cloud can form, no theory for how it may have formed and no evidence for their existence."

Asteroid belt. But that's fairly uniform. How about a large body (say a small planet or moon) coming close to a much larger body and getting ripped apart? Say, Shoemaker–Levy 9, for example? And you end up with a grouping of 'bits' of that body ending up in an irregular orbit.

Were there a single instance of hard proof extraterrestrial life -- never mind intelligent life, I think we'd be further along the path to 'maybe it's a big artificial construction' vs. something else.

Re:No

[The Grim Reefer]

Well, I hate to respond with a meme, but http://imgur.com/lLxCoWM

Oh cool, Londo Mollari is finally here. So now we can build a jump gate to go see what's actually causing it.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Star is prolly just running-short on coal-to-burn. No fuel dim-Yule as the saying goes. Soon as the coal-supplies are replenished all star-bright-see-tonight will return.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a law, it's an observation

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is "Could it be?". The answer is "Yes, of course it could be."

There is no reason to believe that we are the only things in the universe.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

There's a problem with that - you haven't explained the weird part. The weird part isn't the regularity, plenty of things orbit regularly. The weird part is that we can't see it. Every natural object we know off would, when absorbing light, heat up. 20% of a star's light output it s about 30 megafucktons (to use the proper metric unit) of photons. That will make that thing really hot, we'd be able to see that heat pattern.

Now perhaps we WILL see a heat pattern if we look with more telescopes now - but we've not seen one before. One possible explanation for whatever's blocking the light not heating up - is if that energy is instead being turned into something other than heat, like kinetic or electrical energy. That fits the dyson-sphere idea, but nothing we know of in nature.

I don't think we have enough information to rule it out, and it DOES fit the observed evidence. We don't have enough information to confirm it either - hopefully more information will let us settle on an answer.

And we don't need evidence of extraterestrial life to be forced to consider it a possibility - we have evidence of life in this universe. That alone proves that life is possible in this universe.

Re:No

[budgenator]

Nah, they just have too reorientate the ring occasionally so the X class CME misses it. Man, if you're in the bathroom when one of those suckers hit the ring, it's like pissing on an electric fence!

Re: No

[EvilSS]

I like turtles

Re:No

[tehcyder]

It's not a law, it's an observation

Well he should have called it the Betteridge Observation of Headlines then, shouldn't he?

Re: No

[DickBreath]

The United States Senate proudly decrees that it shall be the law of the land that: Gravity is a hoax.
Reality is that the Earth is a flat disk.
The sun is only 100 miles above the surface of the disk and moves in a circular motion about the surface.
The disk is on the back of the first of an infinite stack of tortoises.
The final tortoise of that infinite stack is propelled by a rocket at 9.8 meters / second ^ 2 using a perpetual motion machine.

Re: No

[DickBreath]

The bulb is scheduled to be changed within one quarter of a galactic rotation.

Re:No

[tehcyder]

We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe.

The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS.

This does not lead logically to the conclusion that the construction of a Dyson Sphere is possible, since we have not constructed a Dyson Sphere.

Re:No

[tehcyder]

[Genesis 2:7]

You can't argue with facts like that.

Re:No

[jonr]

Ah, good old Ancient Aliens argument. That show is my guilty pleasure.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the cosmology for my D&D game.

In my D&D game, there is an NPC named Chrontius who has the same cosmology in his D&D game.

Re:No

[tehcyder]

Postman put a letter in the mail box. My first guess is that I hit a mega jackpot and they wrote a letter to tell me.

And if you never look in the mail box again, you will always be able to say that your guess is not impossible, and might be true.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

I didn't claim it does - in fact I addressed that in the very next line which you conveniently ignored.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

"No" in common terms perhaps, but No doesn't really exist in scientific terms. Even things that go completely against common sense have a "Yes" in certain areas of science (see Quantum Physics). There is a possibility that it is an alien mega-structure, it is simply ffffffffffffffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrr more likely that there is a more mundane explanation.

Re:No

[mark-t]

While you could always do that, this is mostly equivalent to simply assuming that the claim is false, which may be wrong, and provides no opportunity to potentially further one's knowledge beyond its current bounds. The claim may very well still be false, but asking for a citation gives the person an opportunity to provide one which may have only been omitted by oversight or an invalid assumption that was made only about how well known the claim was. The veracity of a citation, if then provided, can be evaluated on its own merits, and if one is not provided in reasonably short order when one is explicitly asked for, then one may safely assume that the claimant has deliberately made a claim that they are unwilling to substantiate, and the claim may then be justly deserved to be dismissed.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

We've also had the theoretical design for a Dyson sphere for 40 years, we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.

Unfortunately there's a reason it could not be done: Materials. Even if we disassembled every planet in the solar system to use in the construction, we'd still lack 98% of the needed material.

Re:No

[swillden]

Glad that I cleared that up for you.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof... and you've just made a whopper of a claim.

Specifically, you're claiming that it's absolutely impossible that there is an intelligent race elsewhere in the universe which is a few hundred years technologically more advanced than we are? Care to try to back that up?

Now, if the headline had asked "Are giant alien structures dimming a far-away star?", I'd have had to agree that "maybe, maybe not" was a reasonable answer, and "probably not" is a reasonable reflex response, until you think about it. But the headline asked if it could be a giant alien structure, and the answer to that -- based on everything that we currently know about the universe -- is a resounding yes.

We have no evidence to indicate that Earth is the only place that intelligent life has arisen. We have no evidence to indicate that it has arisen elsewhere, either, but logically it seems clear that if it could happen here, it could also happen somewhere else. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that if intelligent life does exist elsewhere that it couldn't develop technology roughly analogous to our own. And there is absolutely no reason to believe that if intelligent, technology-producing life exists elsewhere that it can't be more advanced than us.

So, unless you have some really compelling evidence that I've never seen, there is no way the headline can be answered any other way than "Yes". That would be true even if we hadn't seen this intermittent, irregular dimming.

Having seen the dimming, we can discuss to what degree we believe that this particular observation is due to technology-producing intelligent life or some other astronomical phenomenon. Given that we have no other theory capable of explaining the phenomenon, right now the smart money is on aliens. More information and more theories will change that evaluation, either offering other alternatives, or firming up the one workable explanation we have at present. If you feel like you know which way that change is going to go you're fooling yourself, because you have no rational basis on which to make that judgement.

Re:No

[slack_justyb]

we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.

There's not enough material in the solar system as we know it currently to provide enough material to construct a 2 AU in diameter Dyson sphere. If we're willing to fly to another star to get more material for building around our star, we're more than willing to fly somewhere else with more building material at the site. Just saying.

Re:No

[boneglorious]

"Were there a single instance of hard proof extraterrestrial life -- never mind intelligent life, I think we'd be further along the path to 'maybe it's a big artificial construction' vs. something else."

What?? extraterrestrial life isn't something special, it's just another case of a system of life like we have here where we are. The fact that we're here doesn't somehow make a big difference between terrestrial life and extraterrestrial life. Terrestrial life is proof that extraterrestrial life is 100% possible, and in fact, there being no other system of life in the universe besides what we have here would be the far weirder case.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.

I mean, obviously there are tons of theoretical reasons why it could not be done, but yeah, you can sweep those all aside with an appeal to magical "sufficient technology".

So, slight flaw in your logic I'm afraid, which could be ameliorated by explaining how even in theory you can surmount the insurmountable problems with constructing a physical object that large, such as where the hell does all that matter come from?

Jumping to "there is almost certainly not alien life involved" is in fact the safer conclusion, and the fact that scientists lack the imagination or knowledge to come up with an alternative to the Dyson sphere hypothesis isn't an argument in its favour at all.

Re: No

[Gr8Apes]

Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Every natural object we know off would, when absorbing light, heat up.

Including any possible kind of solar collector, due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

Care to try again?

Re:No

[sinan]

The answer is obvious to me. The aliens are on a Yuuge Spaceship traveling towards Earth for an "Invade and Exterminate" mission. Anytime the Spaceship gets between us and their star, we see dimming(not dining you damn autocorrect, however that'll come after extermination). Eat spicy foods, cause I understand the aliens like their food spicy.

Re:No

[Jhon]

"There's a problem with that - you haven't explained the weird part"

I'm happy with my explanation. I read the article fully now and quite satisfied.

https://academic.oup.com/mnras...

...we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet or planetesimal fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous break-up event, possibly caused by tidal disruption or thermal processing. The minimum total mass associated with these fragments likely exceeds 106~\mearth, corresponding to an original rocky body of >100~km in diameter. We discuss the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system.

The latest dimming observations will give give more weight to this -- or maybe toss out this explanation entirely.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

Well that or we have to build it really, really thin....

Or, since matter can be converted into energy and vice versa - why not build the Dyson sphere out of matter made from solar energy ?

The thing is, we're talking thousands of years in the future. There is hardly a piece of technology in your life that wouldn't have been deemed impossible - even magical - just a century ago. Now imagine what it would look like to an Aztec ? To a Roman ?

We have no way of predicting what will be possible in a thousand years.

Re:No

[postbigbang]

Yeah, Alien Morse Code, sent at two words per Earth year rotation.

This is clickbait, albeit interesting clickbait. What else could it be. Hmmm.

- a local black hole bends light elsewhere
- fast dark matter
- their sun is fully quantum entangled with a Heisenberg experiment conducted in Los Alamos in 1948, but who knew?
- big fat asteroid rock with lots of holes in it, kind of a cosmic peep show
- first evidence of cosmic blinking

But hey-- aliens.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You're defining your possibilities broadly to support your hypothesis while insisting that other hypotheses define their possibilities narrowly. Specifically, you're allowing for the possibility of unknown intelligent beings, but you're not allowing for the possibility of unknown natural astronomical phenomena.

Yes, we have absolute proof that intelligent beings can build things in space. But we also have absolute proof that natural phenomena can dim the apparent magnitude of a star. If you insist that we must identify the hypothetical natural cause of the dimming of the star, then it's reasonable to insist that you identify the specific race of intelligent beings that's building the hypothetical Dyson sphere.

Since neither is possible at this moment, then we must go with the broad definitions in both cases. The dimming is caused either by an unknown intelligent race, or by an unknown natural astronomical phenomenon.

If we're going for the explanation with the fewest assumptions, my money is on the natural causes.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

A fairly recent planetary collision could produce a localized debris cloud that hadn't yet been stretched out along the star's orbit could also explain it.

Or a natural phenomena that we haven't yet encountered, for instance a non-sphericial homogenous planetoid that formed outward like a crystal rather than in a simple compact lump of heterogeneous matter.

An unlikely explanation, but seems less unlikely then a sci-fi writer being perfectly predictive.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, you got it wrong, there's no such thing as perpetual motion!

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, what do you think you're doing, citing an actual research paper here? You're supposed to link to memes and crazy 1993-era psychotic rant pages like time cube to back up your claims in this thread!

Get with the program man!

Re: No

[penandpaper]

Hopefully, the turtles like you or else you are in for a bumpy ride.

Re:No

[luis_a_espinal]

Citation please

Sure. Betteridge's law of headlines

Re:No

[luis_a_espinal]

It's not a law, it's an observation

Well he should have called it the Betteridge Observation of Headlines then, shouldn't he?

DS9: Body Parts: Gint: "Would you buy a book called Suggestions of Acquisition?"

Re:No

[luis_a_espinal]

We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe.

The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS.

This does not lead logically to the conclusion that the construction of a Dyson Sphere is possible, since we have not constructed a Dyson Sphere.

This would be people before powered flight claiming that it is impossible to build a spaceship to take them to the moon, or solar panels because neither of them had been constructed at the time.

Re:No

[painandgreed]

Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved. Now what?

Now we put it in the "don't know" file until we come up with a good explanation. Any explanation which is not testable isn't science, it's just imagination.

True, but there are certainly some testable criteria to the hypothesis of a Dyson sphere. If there is a Dyson sphere it should have reached thermal equilibrium by now and so if there is a drop in the normal output of the sun but a rise in the infrared region, it could be assumed that something is occulting the star. The hotter the object, the thinner the occulting object.

Still, what we need right, and what they are calling for, now is more data. The more we know about exactly what is going on, the more likely the solution will come out of it.

Re:No

[painandgreed]

Now, if you really wanted a gedanken experiment of extreme explanations, let's assume we have a T-machine circling and occulting the star. Then not only would it occult the star, but also light form the star would exit at other times as it possible followed rotating acausal light-like pathways. If I was still a physic grad student, I might break out the GTR and see what a path through such a frame dragging gravity well that is rotating around a point in cyclindrical coordinates would be like, but these days the math just makes my head swim.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why everyone jumps to the idea of a Dyson sphere. A rotating sphere, even an incomplete one, would produce a regularly repeating pattern.

Re:No

[swillden]

Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved. Now what?

Now we put it in the "don't know" file until we come up with a good explanation. Any explanation which is not testable isn't science, it's just imagination.

There's nothing inherently untestable about the theory. Perhaps we don't know to test it, and perhaps we lack technology needed to test some aspects of it, but those don't make it untestable. There are predictions of modern physics which we either don't know how to test, or know how but lack the technology to perform the tests. That doesn't make those aspects unscientific.

In this case, I think we do have some ideas about how to test. We can identify ways in which dimming would be different if caused by a partially-constructed Dyson sphere vs other sorts of astronomical phenomena, then observe and analyze to see which hypotheses hold up. We could potentially find a way to construct a telescope capable of letting us see sufficient detail at 1300 light years' distance to more directly observe the occlusion. Such a "telescope" might consist of exploiting gravitational lensing of light passing distant stars, coupled with massive computation. Though it would take a very long time, we might even test it by sending a spacecraft. There are lots of ways to test, even though many of them are not currently practical, and undoubtedly there are many ways of testing which no one has yet thought of.

The only truly untestable theories are those which either make no specific predictions or which can predict anything at all.

Re:No

[R3d M3rcury]

Yes. Yes they could.

Is it likely? No.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

In purple, it would be stunning.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof... and you've just made a whopper of a claim.

No, this is what you're not getting: he isn't seriously claiming anything.

He just said No. It's frivolous and not-in-depth enough that your humor processor is supposed to handle the event before you go examining it for serious scienticianistic claims. But your processes are out-of-order or something, different from the mainline.

Being off mainline isn't necessarily an error, but it means you'll misunderstand a lot of conversations.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Put your hand over your eyes. You block the whole world. Now put your finger in your ass.

Even the thought of this is rediculious. The astronomical size. Why? Why large ones and not many small ones. The economy of it.

Or maybe, from point of view. Something else much smaller is closer to us and in front (again). Perhaps something on a cycle.

What absolute moron wrote this.

Re:No

[Dread_ed]

Since we do not know the antecedents and chain of events that led to life happening in the first place, and since we have not observed non-terrestrial life, I am at odds with your statement that "Terrestrial life is proof that extraterrestrial life is 100% possible, and in fact, there being no other system of life in the universe besides what we have here would be the far weirder case."

We have no idea how astronomically difficult (or easy!) it was for life to become prevalent on this planet. It could be a series of ridiculously unlikely occurrences stacked one on top of another in excruciatingly specific order and requiring impeccable timing in a very specific environment is the only path leading to "life."

We really have no fucking idea what the requirements are. Until we do, using a singular known example with unknown provenance is logically unfounded.

An analogy would be you finding a gold coin on your coffee table. If you have no idea where it came from or how it got there you cannot assume that one would appear on other coffee tables in other homes across the world.

Re:No

[Dread_ed]

I see your [Genesis 2:7] and raise you...[John 10:16]

Re:No

[boneglorious]

"An analogy would be you finding a gold coin on your coffee table. If you have no idea where it came from or how it got there you cannot assume that one would appear on other coffee tables in other homes across the world."

There's a terrible analogy. There's no reason to believe anything other than natural processes gave rise to life. Sure, it could be that conditions aren't often right, but it the possibility that they would be right exactly 1 time in a huge universe that we know very little about has got to be vanishingly small.

Re: No

[Hognoxious]

Is there also a character called Xzibit?

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe.
The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS. We've also had the theoretical design for a Dyson sphere for 40 years, we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.

Lots of issues here:
1) we have absolutely zero evidence that intelligent life exists outside of Earth
2) and if there is life outside Earth, there is zero evidence that it is spacefaring
3) the technology is the smallest hurdle for a Dyson sphere and feasibility is the highest hurdle. Where will the building materials come from? Combining all the planets and space dust in our solar system is still too little material to build one, even if we built it 3 feet from the Sun surface.

You've been looking at the smaller and out-of-scale version of our solar system for too long. And you should probably review your interpretation of the word "proof" too.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Were there a single instance of hard proof extraterrestrial life -- never mind intelligent life, I think we'd be further along the path to 'maybe it's a big artificial construction' vs. something else.

_WE_ are extraterrestrial life from the viewpoint of any other life in the universe.

Re:No

[swillden]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof... and you've just made a whopper of a claim.

No, this is what you're not getting: he isn't seriously claiming anything.

He's providing an answer to the question. That's a claim.

Re: No

[sentry65]

Exactly. Might as well say the observations are consistent with ghosts or angels or god sending us morse code across space. I'm not sure how it's scientific method to observe something then base a theory about it on something we haven't observed anywhere else other than a made-up star trek story with no other evidence to support it. It's as far out there as saying JFK was shot by an alien who teleported back into space. We haven't observed an alien or teleportation, but surely any technology is possible given enough time! Maybe we haven't observed super advanced species, but have FAITH that it's just a matter of time;) This is a marketing dept trying to keep spinning a story to get the public interested in funding NASA more.

Re:No

[swillden]

Alternative theories are obviously very appropriate. My understanding (from nothing more than the summary, of course, this is /.) is that competent astronomers have spent time thinking about it and haven't yet found any alternative explanations that fit the facts. That makes aliens -- at the moment -- not only a viable theory, but the best theory.

The knee-jerk reflexive dismissal of the idea is unscientific, especially given the fact that we know that intelligent, technology-producing life has arisen on at least one planet, and that life has invented the notion of a Dyson sphere, although it presently lacks the technology to build one.

Re:No

[trooper9]

So, Schrödinger's Dyson sphere?

Re:No

[Jhon]

"_WE_ are extraterrestrial life from the viewpoint of any other life in the universe."

Objection, your honor! Assumes facts not in evidence!

Re: No

[sexconker]

In my D&D game I set the stage by locking the players in my basement, which has been retrofitted to look like and operate as a dungeon.
Their only hope of escape is to slay my "dragon".

So far, no D&D player has even complained. Their characters were all hungry for the XP.

Re: No

[sexconker]

What about the accelerating expansion of the universe?

Re:No

[amicusNYCL]

You're linking to a paper published a year and half ago, if that's the correct explanation then why did Tabby send out a Twitter blast to a bunch of observatories, and why did they respond by looking at the star? It's a "family" of exocomets or planetesimal fragments, right? We've known that for a year and half, why redirect all of our telescopes to watch it when it happens again?

Oh, and why isn't that cloud of comets or fragments giving off any IR radiation that would be expected? And, if it's gas, why can't we measure the absorption to figure out which gas it is? You've read the article fully, so I'm sure you know the answers to those.

I did see an article which mentioned that the latest dip in brightness is similar to an event that happened 3 years ago, which is why they are predicting more dips this week. But the real interesting thing about that is, if there is in fact an object orbiting that star at a distance that it takes 3 years to go around, and it's capable of blocking this much of the light, then that object is larger than the star itself. If it was a cloud of dust, it would be radiating the IR that it is absorbing from the star. These are the kinds of things which make this star interesting, and even though you might be satisfied with that year and half old guess, astronomers aren't and they're still looking.

Re:No

[radarskiy]

Poe's Law Trumps Betteridge's Law

Re:No

[Dread_ed]

Intentionally terrible analogy, as almost all analogies are terrible. Don't miss the point by diving into the parts of the analogy that don't matter. Also, don't think for a second that coins and tables are not natural processes. Just because you think doesn't mean you are able to disassociate yourself from nature. Ant mounds are natural processes, just like computers, cell phones, cities, automobiles, and satellites are. They are just a subset of by-products of the natural process we label "life." Still natural. I don't know anything that isn't natural, when viewed from the perspective that all life and its resultant behavior is governed, enabled, and allowed by the underlying laws of the universe. Life is not separate, nor are the things that life produces.

We have no idea how life (coin), much less "intelligent" life (ourselves included), got here (table). Unless/until we do, any conjecture about how common or uncommon life (additional coins) is throughout the rest of the universe (additional tables), much less how common intelligent life is, is based on nothing other than feelings, wishes, and unprovable woo.

Re:No

[lgw]

Any theory that requires an unlikely series of events to explain the universe we see is a bad theory. The more unlikely, the worse the theory. The theory that life is so unlikely that we're the only place it happened is quite bad indeed.

So far we've found nothing all that special about Earth. Certain composition, certain distance from the right sort of star, that seems to be all it takes.

The unlikely transition seems to be multi-cellular life. Life on Earth started very early, evidence that it isn't that hard. Multi-cellular life to the Cambrian explosion took a while, but its seems evolution was fairly steady, trying out lots of body patterns.

From the Cambrian explosion to intelligent life was again pretty quick (in geological terms), again evidence that it wasn't that hard.

Re:No

[ravenshrike]

Luckily, there's also this thing called a Dyson Swarm. Which doesn't actually require enveloping the entire star in a single megastructure.

Re:No

[ravenshrike]

Because it would prove it CAN be done. Which means that the human race may eventually move beyond a single planet.

Re:No

[beckett]

[Job 38:4]

Re:No

[slack_justyb]

Or, since matter can be converted into energy and vice versa - why not build the Dyson sphere out of matter made from solar energy ?

Please stop.

We have no way of predicting what will be possible in a thousand years.

I think economic rationality will still be a thing then, but then again that's me.

Re:No

[quantaman]

Jumping to "There is alien life" would be a mistake, but jumping to "there is NOT alien life involved" is the EXACT SAME mistake.

Right now, the available evidence is consistent with one thing that would require alien life to exist, and not consistent with anything else. This may change - but right now the odds are, very slightly, in favor of aliens.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You need to take into account the fact that you really want it to be life, we all do, so we're going to give that conclusion an unusual weighting.

It could be an asteroid cloud, some sort of binary system with a black hold, an unusual type of star, a huge gas cloud that randomly sits in the path, some sort of analysis error, etc, etc.

We have a long history of looking at space and saying "this is really weird, life would cause weird things to happen... maybe it's life!!"

So far, in all of the cases we could resolve, it hasn't been life.

Right now a partial dyson sphere is possible, but definitely not probable.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

{quote}The final tortoise of that infinite stack is propelled by a rocket at 9.8 meters / second ^ 2 using a perpetual motion machine.{quote}

When you say propelled, you actually mean 'accelerating' rather than just 'in motion'.

I wonder how fast the tortoise stack is actually moving (relative to what?) after a few thousand years of accelerating.

Obviously all that big bang stuff is rubbish else it would be moving impossibly fast after accelerating at that rate for the many billions of years they claim as the universes lifetime.

Re: No

[silentcoder]

A thousand years ago economic rationality meant something utterly different to what it means now. Multiple utterly different things in fact - what it meant to Aztecs has nothing in common with what it meant in Europe and neither had any resemblence to ours.
You cannot predict what it will mean in another thousand years.

Re:No

[slack_justyb]

Also more to the point. The idea that we're going to work our butts off to build one around Sol when there's an insanely high chance that elsewhere is a whole lot better gives Sol, IMHO, this special status that it isn't due. If say in thousands of years humans have the technology to build such a structure, and we're talking the solid kind here, it's also highly likely that we're able to travel the stars at will. That said, it's also likely that Sapiens aren't the only species of Homo out there anymore and that the variety of humanity that will exist at that point will just not give Earth a second thought other than a chapter in some history book. While it's cute to think of H. Sapiens wanting to build a better house around their crib, it's more reasonable to think that they'll look at Earth about the same way we look at the bed we slept in as children. With greener pastures a plenty elsewhere, there's just no overriding need to build such a thing unless building such a thing is massively easier than blasting off to the next nearest star.

Dyson spheres in all of their forms are basically power plants more so than they are habitats. Say we want to build a giant device to test gravity at the quantum level, okay you need a giant power source for that and a Dyson shell is a good source for that. But that basically means we're bulldozing a stellar system to basically conduct a science experiment. I highly doubt someone is going to say, oh let's use that system our ancestors from thousands of years ago lived in, it's not the most ideal spot to build it, but ya know, it just tugs on my heart strings. Nope more than likely they're going to look at how best they can build it and with the least amount of energy put into its construction.

Thinking that humanity is going to cling to this rock in thousands of years into the future is just silly. Somewhere in Africa, Europe, Middle East humanity started there, but just because that's where humanity started doesn't mean I have this sudden yearning to make it the best place ever on the face of the Earth. I sure it was a great place back in the day, but we've evolved since then and have found way better places all over the world. And there's an incredibly good chance that as humans and all of the different species we eventually evolve into will find way better places for themselves outside of our dusty old rock that served as humanity's crib. Right now, there's no planet #2, so yeah Earth is very special at the moment. But if we're conjecturing into thousands of years from now, Earth is just some place like any other place in the Universe. It doesn't deserve *status especial" in that context.

Re:No

[Jhon]

"You're linking to a paper published a year and half ago, if that's the correct explanation then why did Tabby send out a Twitter blast to a bunch of observatories, and why did they respond by looking at the star? It's a "family" of exocomets or planetesimal fragments, right? We've known that for a year and half, why redirect all of our telescopes to watch it when it happens again?"

The article was also updated last year -- less that a year ago I believe. As to why everybody is pointing at the star:

"We discuss the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system." -- from the article and summary. Analysis is on going. I'm not saying it's NOT artificial -- I'm saying it's highly unlikely. All things being equal, the (very very very) safe bet is on something "natural" and not "artificial".

  And I have no explanation with regards to heat but I assume that the current observations may shed some light on that. If not, maybe again in threeish years with it may happen again.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Very good point.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

The Big Bang was powerful enough to explain why that's still going on.

Re: No

[silentcoder]

Its not an extraordinary claim bevause we already have absolute proof that life can and do exist in this universe.

Our not finding it is likely more of a testament to how limited our looking is tgan to life's abundance. The evidence from earth us life lives everywhere it can't

Re: No

[Jesus H Rolle]

That's a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese; elsewise rulers would get longer over time.

Re: No

[mlyle]

That's actually the whole concept though.

Let's say "we're at the top," and one day in the future we have enough resources for there to simulate a universe for whatever reason, and do so, and it has enough fidelity to simulate another one within, eventually. Of the three universes' dwellers asking themselves "are we in a simiulation?" the answer is "yes" for 2 of them and "no" for 1. This ignores the possibility for branching and deeper nesting.

Now take it one step further, and say "we don't know if we're at the top." We already know that most universes are simulated... how would you bet?

Of course, there's probably a very outermost, "real" reality. But most universes with beings dwelling in them are simulations, so...

Re:No

[amicusNYCL]

I'm just trying to point out that there is not an agreed-upon explanation. Even though you might be satisfied with your explanation, not many other people are. It's interesting to say the least, because we haven't seen something like this before. One of the ways we detect or confirm exoplanets is because the particularly large ones will block around 0.5% of the star's light. Something blocking over 20%, that we can't see or otherwise detect, is so far unheard of. Even "only" blocking 3% of the light (the most recent dip) is 6 times more light than a large planet will block. All of this would be perfectly fine if we could detect the thing doing the blocking, the difficult part is that we can't detect any dust or gas, or any other heated object.

As for the artificial explanation, obviously that's an extreme long shot, but my major disappoint there is our tendency to say that if we don't detect any radio signals, then there must not be life there. That seems like a really narrow criterion for detecting life from 1300 light years away. I don't know of a better one, but I'm not really satisfied with the conclusion that there can't be life there because we pointed a radio telescope at it for a couple hours and didn't detect anything.

Re:No

[Anon-Admin]

First, I am not sure the laws of thermodynamics would apply. They say that "In a closed system" and there is lots of evidence that the universe is not a close system.

Though that is another argument as with our current technology we can convert heat to mechanical energy with a 90%+ efficiency. There is no need to radiate heat energy when it is trivial to convert it to a usable energy.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of having fun with friends you are waiting for cops to show up and shoot your balls off.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you care, you'll be stuck on this planet next to stupid sand n1ggers for the rest of your life.

Re:No

[Script Cat]

It's Alderaan!

Re:No

[Grishnakh]

We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe.

Citation needed. I haven't seen any intelligent life yet, just a bunch of dumb, talking, overgrown monkeys.

Re:No

[Dread_ed]

If we saw evidence of life elsewhere in the solar system, or elsewhere in the galaxy your conjecture about how easy it is would carry more weight. We don't see life or evidence of it anywhere, in spite of all of the billions of stars and in spite of the billions of years all of those other places have had to develop it. Essentially I am saying that the Fermi paradox calls bullshit on your statement that life is easy to make.

Furthermore, modern science is at odds with your statement that unlikely is a bad theory. You say it is easy, but we can't even cheat and reproduce the circumstances that create it in a lab in order to reverse engineer the environmental circumstances that would allow it to happen. It appears to be quite difficult, even if you already have life on hand to study.

Also you say that we have found nothing special about the Earth. However, since we don't know what circumstances lead to the creation of life from non-life we cannot even begin to speak about what is important or not, or what is "special" or not about the Earth, that qualifies as a precursor for life. Furthermore, if it were merely placement, temperature, and composition that led to life spontaneous generation would still be a valid theory.

Simply put, if we don't know how it came about, we can't estimate how likely it is to occur elsewhere.

Re:No

[Script Cat]

if there were a swarm of solar collectors that are a type of parabolic mirrors that focus on thermal engine type of generators. Would the mirrors not reflect the wast infrared back in the star's direction? We would not necessarily see the obscured infrared and any infrared reflected back to the star would not really appear as an anomaly.

Re:No

[lgw]

If we saw evidence of life elsewhere in the solar system

We're the only planet in our system that's the right temperature, simple as that. Most systems don't have even one such planet, but it's not all that rare.

Also, you're nothing special.

, or elsewhere in the galaxy

Our eyes aren't good enough yet. Give it time.

Also, you're nothing special.

Essentially I am saying that the Fermi paradox calls bullshit on your statement that life is easy to make.

We don't even know that aliens haven't visited the outer reaches of our own system and cluttered it with relics. We've barely looked around.

Also, you're nothing special.

Furthermore, modern science is at odds with your statement that unlikely is a bad theory. You say it is easy, but we can't even cheat and reproduce the circumstances that create it in a lab in order to reverse engineer the environmental circumstances that would allow it to happen. It appears to be quite difficult, even if you already have life on hand to study.

Well, it did take half a billion years or so. Fairly fast in geological terms, but I gather scientists are running somewhat shorter experiments.

Also, you're nothing special.

Also you say that we have found nothing special about the Earth.

Indeed.

it were merely placement, temperature, and composition that led to life spontaneous generation would still be a valid theory.

We don't know how many places on Earth life evolved spontaneously, but the Oxygen Catastrophe killed most everything so we're only looking at the descendants of the few survivors. The conditions that led to life arising no longer naturally occur.

Simply put, if we don't know how it came about, we can't estimate how likely it is to occur elsewhere.

Sure we can. It must be fairly likely, because you're nothing special.

Re:No

[angel'o'sphere]

We still only have "third world" countries in the sense that the government is not working, e.g. Somalia.
Otherwise there are no "third world" countries on the planet since decades.

Re:No

[angel'o'sphere]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof...
Actually not. Any ordinary proof is good enough.
E.g. if I make the extraordinary claim that you are not the father of your first born, but I am, then a simple DNA test will proof it. Your DNA btw would be sufficient, I don't even need to show up :D

Which idiot invented that "quote"?

Re:No

[swillden]

Agreed, ordinary proof is sufficient.

Re: No

[quantaman]

Its not an extraordinary claim bevause we already have absolute proof that life can and do exist in this universe.

Our not finding it is likely more of a testament to how limited our looking is tgan to life's abundance. The evidence from earth us life lives everywhere it can't

We have a single instance of intelligent life, some hints that single cellular life is fairly common, and that's it. Throw in the many-worlds hypothesis and multi-cellular life culminating in intelligence may be an event that occurs with a frequency of much less than once per universe, we simply don't have the data to make a meaningful prediction. Claiming a second instance is a very extraordinary claim.

More than that, a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere in visual range would bring up a lot of awkward questions concerning the Fermi paradox. Why didn't they shoot off seed ships to every surrounding system? Did we just happen to pop up in the same cosmic instant as they finished that structure but before they expanded?

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been ABSOLUTELY PROVEN, that there is NOT enough MATERIAL in our SOLAR SYSTEM for us to construct even remotely close to a laughable 0.0001% of a complete Dyson Sphere around our Sun. You couldn't even hammer all of India's GOLD thin enough to cover our own tiny orbital slice of space.

The only future is blasting humans out to terraform the galaxy.

You'll probably run out of fuel before then.
Because you're stupid, greedy, wanton, consumerist, and wasteful.

Re: No

[silentcoder]

>We have a single instance of intelligent life, some hints that single cellular life is fairly common, and that's it.
We've also found life in every environment we've looked, no matter how inhospitable it seems. Life lives everywhere it can't.
And intelligence is such a generic trick that it has independently evolved multiple times on earth. You mean we have a single example of technologically advanced life, that's not the same thing as intelligent life. Octopi are intelligent life. And I'm prepared to bet the only thing Octopi need to be as technologically advanced as us is the right evolutionary survival pressures and time.

>Throw in the many-worlds hypothesis and multi-cellular life culminating in intelligence may be an event that occurs with a frequency of much less than once per universe, we simply don't have the data to make a meaningful prediction
That's a silly question. The entire universe is setup so life can evolve - it's the inverse of the anthropic principle though - life exists BECAUSE that is the kind of universe this is. But to assume that only once did that universal set of coincidences succeed is to bet on impossible odds. It smacks of religiosity. Even string theory predicts that universes that can support life are an inevitable occurrence.

>Claiming a second instance is a very extraordinary claim.
Claiming that a second instance must be an extraordinary claim is the most extraordinary claim imaginable.

>More than that, a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere in visual range would bring up a lot of awkward questions concerning the Fermi paradox
Forget the Fermi paradox, it's idiotic. The biggest stain on the man's career. For starters - the 'paradox' may not even be true - who says we HAVEN'T found a signal from another civilization ? Odds are if we did we wouldn't have known it - because the chances that their methods of communication are even recognizable as such by us are vanishingly small. Communication develops from biology - we have no reason to assume that another civilization would have senses like hearing or sight or if they do that their communication would be based on that. This being the case for most (not all) earthbound species is a result of the specific conditions on earth favoring them in evolution - nothing about that can be extrapolated. A civilization far more advanced than us could communicate entirely by pheromones - or some process we've never encountered or imagined.

More-over - if this is a Dyson sphere they did NOT happen 'at the same time' - that star is 1300 light years away. That means what we're seeing now was 1300 years ago. There are plenty of starts within 10 light years of us - do you really think we'd head to somewhere 1300 light years away before we do those ? It's quite far enough that they could well have explored nearby stars without ever coming near us. If they are seeing us- they would see virtually no evidence that this planet is inhabited. None of the things we did which may be recognizable evidence of technologically advanced life even EXISTED 1300 years ago. We did most of them in just the last 70 years. Even if they have sufficient technology to peer through our atmosphere - they are watching the VIkings raid England - there is nothing there to make them think we're worth visiting - a primitive, violent species with nothing worth trading.

>Did we just happen to pop up in the same cosmic instant as they finished that structure but before they expanded?
The structure is NOT finished - Observations fit a Dyson sphere under construction - not a completed one. Now it's possible that by now it is done, but that's not what we're seeing. It's just as possible that they went extinct before it was completed. Life is amazingly resilient, species are terrible fragile. Or hell they got halfway and ran out of money - it's happened to some pretty prestigious projects we've done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And for all you know - they ARE our ancestors. Cosmic seeding is a legitimate hypotheses.

You give way too much credence to Fermi and not nearly enough to Drake.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

Calling them intelligent is mild. You know their actual scientific translates as "the wise man"... arrogant much ?
We may be, on occasion, intelligent but wisdom is the single rarest attribute you'll ever observe in us. It occurs sometimes, once in a century or so - but it's hardly an attribute of the species. It's an attribute that, very rarely, a single member of the species may briefly acquire.

Re: No

[silentcoder]

By the way, why do you assume that, if it is life, that it has to be intelligent, technologically advanced life ?

It could just as easily be a single organism - unfathomably huge by our standards - plantlike growing in orbit around that star and living off solar energy. Or a colony of micro-organisms building what ammounts to a Dyson sphere one dead body at a time the way choral does on earth.

Now both these ideas have some problems - mostly a case of where do they find additional matter, solar energy alone can't (easily) produce mass -but those objections only exist if we assume "life" has to work the way it works here. That is not a viable assumption. The way life works here has CHANGED more than once in history, it seems to be largely determined by local conditions. If abiogenesis occurred in orbit of a star, with no planet, could life evolve not to need material resources ? To rely only on the energy of that star ? Perhaps then it is actually MORE likely that it evolved very little, reaching whatever form gives it a decent equilibrium in this ultimate sparse environment and just stayed there because there was simply no other resources to take advantage off - hell it may not have DNA and whatever evolutionary process it uses may be far slower than life here. It may not have anything we would recognise as "cells".

Yes, this is pure speculation - but it is entirely possible. The reason I mention it is not because I am jumping to that as 'likely' - we don't have the data to call anything likely yet, merely because in a universe this big, and with the sheer resilience of life we've observed, the logical assumption becomes that you cannot safely discount life as an explanation until and unless you have evidence to the contrary.

No my friend - the extraordinary claim is not that it might be life, the extraordinary claim is that life is the unlikely answer. Scientists certainly don't work that way - huge scientific resources are spent searching for evidence of extra-terrestrial life, thus far most of it is limited to our solar system - but that tells you one thing: scientists are looking because they think there are good odds of finding something. It's not a few cranks chasing a long-shot whom we'll be surprised if they turn out right (which, while it does happen on occasion, is exceedingly rare - most cranks are just cranks) it's a huge swath of limited research resources being directed by many of the most respected scientists in their fields - constantly looking because they think the odds justify the search.
If NASA had unlimited budgets we'd already be building a drilling drone carefully designed not to risk destroying what it's meant to find and go look for life in the underground oceans of Europa.
Some scientists have discovered that the red lines on Europa have a virtually identical infrared signal to certain Earthbound bacteria. They also had to admit that some salts would have very similar signals - so nobody is saying we've FOUND life there, but nobody familiar with the field is denying the possibility either. The fact that respected scientists were willing to posit that - suggests that scientists are not as closed to the idea as you are.
As we speak a team of scientists is designing the next generation Mars rover - and it's designed for a very specific purpose: to find life. Almost every scientific device being crammed onto the limited weight they can give it, is looking for some kind of sign of life. A mars rover is an extremely expensive project, and according to you, their wasting the whole thing because they are building it to find life ? Maybe it won't - but clearly they were able to justify looking.

Perhaps the biggest concern in our search is that we have a tendency not to bring the right people. Evolutionary biologist Jack Cohen went to a convention in the late 1990s where a number of phycisists and astronomers were discussing possibilities of extraterestrial life - and stood up and asked: "How would you feel if you went to a convention on planetary formation an

Re:No

[stealth_finger]

Archives of the Invisible Space Goat, Chapter 1, page 37. You would do better proving things exist rather than insisting people prove that things don't exist. Otherwise please provide proof that my citation is not real.

Let's see. Chapter 1, page 37. "Dunbal is a jerk". Not really relevant. Prove it doesn't say that ;)

Re: No

[quantaman]

We've also found life in every environment we've looked, no matter how inhospitable it seems. Life lives everywhere it can't.

Really? We've found life on Mars, the Moon, Venus?

Or rather, you mean we've found life on earth, rather, we've found that life, that evolved under fairly specific conditions on earth, has now spread to a much wider range of environments

And intelligence is such a generic trick that it has independently evolved multiple times on earth.

Has it? I wasn't aware that complex nervous systems evolved multiple times.

That's a silly question. The entire universe is setup so life can evolve - it's the inverse of the anthropic principle though - life exists BECAUSE that is the kind of universe this is. But to assume that only once did that universal set of coincidences succeed is to bet on impossible odds. It smacks of religiosity.

Huh? The fact that the universe supports life does not mean that life is likely to arise, nor that multi-cellular life is likely to arise from single-cellular life.

Claiming that a second instance must be an extraordinary claim is the most extraordinary claim imaginable.

No, because a single instance is consistent with life being an extremely rare phenomena, two instances suggests it's fairly common. That is the extraordinary claim for which we lack evidence.

Forget the Fermi paradox, it's idiotic. The biggest stain on the man's career.

I'm sorry, but you're out to lunch with this one. The Fermi paradox is both easily understood and extremely relevant.

For starters - the 'paradox' may not even be true - who says we HAVEN'T found a signal from another civilization ? Odds are if we did we wouldn't have known it - because the chances that their methods of communication are even recognizable as such by us are vanishingly small. Communication develops from biology - we have no reason to assume that another civilization would have senses like hearing or sight or if they do that their communication would be based on that. This being the case for most (not all) earthbound species is a result of the specific conditions on earth favoring them in evolution - nothing about that can be extrapolated. A civilization far more advanced than us could communicate entirely by pheromones - or some process we've never encountered or imagined.

WTF? Can you see or hear radio waves? Communication is dictated by physics, even if they did communicate by scent they would need something like radio waves to transmit that scent over a long distance.

Now, it's possible that a) light waves are totally passe and advanced civilizations use some other sort of advanced communication technology that we can't detect, and b) all of the civilizations have decided not to blab signals our way, and/or we're under some kind of prime directive galactic blackout.

But those are grasping for straws, the conclusion that makes the fewest assumptions is that we're not hearing galactic radio because there is none.

More-over - if this is a Dyson sphere they did NOT happen 'at the same time' - that star is 1300 light years away. That means what we're seeing now was 1300 years ago. There are plenty of starts within 10 light years of us - do you really think we'd head to somewhere 1300 light years away before we do those ?

The universe is 13.8 billion years old.

1300 years IS "at the same time".

Hell, if we're looking at the midpoint of a 10 million year old project it is "at the same time".

And for all you know - they ARE our ancestors. Cosmic seeding is a legitimate hypotheses.

Legitimate, but you still have insufficient evidence to make such a claim.

Re: No

[silentcoder]

Damn, so much stupid assumption.

No BIOLOGY dictates communication. Physics provides a medium - but what you DO with it is dictated by earlier biology. Nobody would send the radio signals WE send if not for the fact that the recievers and senders alike have ears and eyes. Without translating those signals, ultimately, to things that can be interpreted by those senses - they make no sense whatsoever. They are just garbled, excessively regular, things.

And yeah - who says radio waves is what aliens would use ? Their limited to light speed, it sure as fuck wouldn't be my first choice for interstellar communication - you want something FTL for that, or if FTL comms is truly impossible that alone resolves the paradox - we haven't heard from them because there is no practical, physically possible, way to send a useful message when the turn-around time is thousands of years !

>Legitimate, but you still have insufficient evidence to make such a claim.
And that, right there, is what is wrong with all your thinking and why I hope no university was insane enough to call you a graduate. Nowhere did I, or the scientists who are studying this, make such a claim or any claim what-so-fucking-ever.
Nobody made any claims at all.

We merely listed possible hypotheses which fit the observations. Unlike you - we did not try to exclude some of them without evidence to back that up because we have a personal bias against that hypotheses. No astronomer ANYWHERE has said this is a sign of life. All that's been said - is what is absolutely sound science: this COULD be a sign of life and we'll know better when we have more data.

Re: No

[silentcoder]

Ultimately the simplest way to think about the Fermi paradox is this:
Why are we not sending message out to every star we can see ? Why are we not trying to send messages to other species ?

Because it costs a LOT more to send messages far away than to listen. Because it's hard to justify spending a lot of money on spending a message whien, if there's a reply, nobody who remembers it being sent will be alive anymore when that reply comes. Hell the protocols we use will likely have changed so much our progeny probably could not understand the reply if they figured it out and used it for the reply.

We're not hearing from other civilizations for the EXACT SAME reason they aren't hearing from us.
They are listening, like we are, but nobody is TALKING - because in this case, talk is not cheap - it takes an inordinate amount of resources with no guarantee of getting anything whatsoever for it and absolute guarantee that if there IS a reward you won't get to experience it.

It's not a paradox. It's basic accounting.

Re:No

[angel'o'sphere]

Well, as the dimming is "random" it suggests that multiple (actually probably _many_) objects are orbiting the star in various orbits. We obviously only see the ones that cross in front of the star in our line of sight.
A set of planets however would more or less orbit in the same plane, and we had already figured their orbit parameters. So there would be nothing "random".

Then again, the light dimming effect seems to be extremely strong. That would either imply that the objects are insanely big or extremely close to the star.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stop.

No. Circlon theory??? Give me a break. Pair production and annihilation are well-established scientific observations. There is no reason why an advanced civilization could not scale them up. Although, I don't see the necessity. A Dyson sphere need not be extremely thick. Also, they could have pulled material from nearby solar systems.

Re: No

[Areyoukiddingme]

Let's say "we're at the top," and one day in the future we have enough resources for there to simulate a universe for whatever reason, and do so, and it has enough fidelity to simulate another one within, eventually. Of the three universes' dwellers asking themselves "are we in a simiulation?" the answer is "yes" for 2 of them and "no" for 1. This ignores the possibility for branching and deeper nesting.

Now take it one step further, and say "we don't know if we're at the top." We already know that most universes are simulated... how would you bet?

Uh, no we don't. Right now we have no evidence whatsoever that a universe like ours can be simulated. You're suggesting that we're going to have four dozen husbands when we're actually somewhere very very VERY close to the zero point on the y-axis in that plot in terms of how many we have now. We have so few data points about simulating universes that we don't even know if our improvement in our ability to simulate them is linear or exponential. We've gone from Pong to Skyrim in 40 years, and nowhere on that continuum is anything that looks remotely like a simulated universe. Quite the opposite. We have arguments based on thermodynamics and Shannon's Limit that we can't simulate a universe within this universe—that it's not physically possible.

So no, we do not know that most universes are simulated. At the moment, we know of zero simulated universes.

Re: No

[Anonymous Coward]

More right

Re:No

[vandamme]

John 14:2..... "In my father's house are many mansions..."

Re:No

[angel'o'sphere]

Scientists actually recreated what they thought to be the "environment" and crafted artificial proteins in labs with simple stuff like the right chemicals and lightning ... uh oh, in the 1960s or so.

Chances are that basically every solar system that has planets in the so called godlylock range harbors life.

Assuming that earth is "special" is just plain idiotic.

Re:No

[angel'o'sphere]

We don't see life or evidence of it anywhere, in spite of all of the billions of stars and in spite of the billions of years all of those other places have had to develop it.
Mankind is abe to detect radio signals/lasers since about 150 years.

Most of the stars you mention, hence my emphasizes, are billions of light years away.

Chances that "intelligent life" once managed to send a signal we can detect (now) to the place where our solar system right now is: zero

We are just living on an ant hill. Unaware of all the ant hills around us, because we lack the means to communicate and even see those ant hills.

Concluding from this that there are no other ant hills is just plain stupid.

Re:No

[Chrontius]

Yes - but the part I look forward to is that now that we're out of accepted theories, whatever happens, we're going to learn something.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

the reason the answer is no is that it is impossible to build something that big and retarded to move it around erratically

trump 2020

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Silentcoder did not say "extraterrestrial" life, but intelligent life, and yes, we are proof it exists.

Re:No

[ArmoredDragon]

So-called "brownouts" due to demand for electricity exceeding supply are relatively common in Third World countries

Like California?

Alien mega-structures are not blocking the sunlight.

Have they ruled this out as possibly being just a really large planet? I.e. does the star wobble?

Re:No

[Dread_ed]

I have a hard time believing that intelligent life like us is common in the universe. Those stars that are billions of light years away had about 9 billion years before the Earth formed to create intelligent life that thinks like us. Besides there are many that are not billions of light years away. The milky way galaxy is estimated to have between 100-400 billion stars, all within roughly 200,000 light years. There should be evidence everywhere by now if intelligent life like us is easy and prevalent. I personally wish it were so that intelligent life was easy and prevalent, but the evidence I see stands firmly in the way of that belief.

A couple of conjectures that I am more likely to believe than intelligent life similar to us is everywhere:

1) Self-conscious life is an anomaly. There is no sign of alien life trying to communicate or search for other life because they are vastly different from us mentally and the subject is completely irrelevant to them. In this scenario we are the most alien of aliens.

2) There are other methods of communication unbeknownst to us that are easily discovered by all other intelligent life. They use those methods and we don't. We could be observing them right now (FRB's, GRB's, CRB's, or other kinds of energy phenomena) and we don't know how to parse them.

3) Everyone else in the universe has learned the axiom that intelligence implies belligerence and keeps their mouth shut. Hiding is survival.

Re:No

[syntotic]

Do you imply we have astounding third rate stars?

Re:No

[RockDoctor]

Asteroid belt. But that's fairly uniform. How about a large body (say a small planet or moon) coming close to a much larger body and getting ripped apart?

Interestingly (amusingly), just as this dimming was happening, a paper was being published proposing a mild periodicity in the dimmings which was interpreted as an occultation by a planet, then a dimming due to the planet's trailing Trojan cloud (do I need to explain Trojans in an astronomical sense? No? good.) then the secondary eclipse of the planet (planet occulted by star, from our PoV). At which point, they were predicting a Trojan secondary eclipse in about 2021.

Bzzzt! Sorry guys. Beautiful hypothesis slaughtered by an ugly fact in the very days of it's birth.

But I was just doing some back-of-a-thumbnail calculations on the amount of "Trojan" material (some tens of Jupiter masses), and the planet itself (some hundreds of Jupiter masses. Neither is credible to me, but the hundreds of Jupiter mass "planet" would be comfortably (x2, x3) above the thermonuclear turn-on mass, so wouldn't be a "cold" planet but a small star. Bzzzt! Sorry guys. Dead idea.

The paper is on Arxiv.

Re:No

[angel'o'sphere]

I have a hard time believing that intelligent life like us is common in the universe.
I think it is extremely common. There is just no technology to discover them, except by accidentally looking at the right spot.

There should be evidence everywhere by now if intelligent life like us is easy and prevalent.
The evidence is likely there, but as I said above: we only see it by accident, because there are to many stars to look at and most are for todays telescopes to far away.

A couple of conjectures that I am more likely to believe than intelligent life similar to us is everywhere:

Perhaps your definition of "similar" is extremely strict ... I don'T expect exactly humans with our mentality and urge to search/discover and communicate.

Scrith

[MichaelSmith]

Well does it block 40% of all neutrinos?

Re:Scrith

[Anonymous Coward]

We can't detect anything but solar neutrinos or supernova neutrinos with our existing level of technology.

Our best hope for constructing advanced neutrino detectors is to send a message to Tabby's Star asking them for assistance in this matter.

Re:Scrith

[silentcoder]

Mmm, not sure I agree.
It would take 1300 years for the message to get there.
Lets say there is somebody listening. We won't have any common language. Hell they may not even have anything we would recognize as our primary senses for communication (hearing and sight). There are many other senses (even humans have about 20 of them, we tend to forget that 'sense of ballance' is a sense).
So we need to be on the generous level in how long it takes them to translate the language, even with advanced science they are starting at a major disadvantage. It took about a century to fully translate the Rosetta stone - and that was from earlier languages by members of our own species ! So lets double that. 200 years to figure out the question.
Okay, then they have to send the answer back - which will take another 1300 years.

So that means it will take at least 2800 years to get an answer, and right now we have no idea if one will ever arrive at all !

I'm pretty sure our own Neutrino detection technology will advance fast enough that, by the time we receive those blueprints, they will already be obsolete since we'll have figured it out already. Hell in 2800 we may be busy building our own Dyson Sphere.

Re:Scrith

[Applehu Akbar]

Our best hope for constructing advanced neutrino detectors is to send a message to Tabby's Star asking them for assistance in this matter.

...It would take 1300 years for the message to get there.

So it would be like airline customer service, then.

Re:Scrith

[silentcoder]

I don't know, those United guys seem to have pretty fast fists.

Re:Scrith

[Applehu Akbar]

But now United credits you with miles for the distance they drag you.

Re:Scrith

[tehcyder]

Lets say there is somebody listening. We won't have any common language. Hell they may not even have anything we would recognize as our primary senses for communication (hearing and sight). There are many other senses (even humans have about 20 of them, we tend to forget that 'sense of ballance' is a sense).

So we need to be on the generous level in how long it takes them to translate the language, even with advanced science they are starting at a major disadvantage. It took about a century to fully translate the Rosetta stone - and that was from earlier languages by members of our own species ! So lets double that. 200 years to figure out the question.

You just send a tape with someone speaking English. VERY. SLOWLY. AND. QUITE. LOUD.

Always works for me on holiday. That and the ability to mime drinking a pint of beer.

Re:Scrith

[silentcoder]

Only Americans try that. If you want good service in Paris - the answer is really easy, don't speak English.
It doesn't matter what you DO speak - as long as it's not English.

Parisian waiters are the most polite and courteous in the world - to anybody who speaks any language other than English. They will spend however much time they need to understand what you wish to order, as long as it's not being done in English.

Once you've confirmed that you speak a language other than English - you can then switch to it if it's your only common tongue with no repercussion - you just need to prove you're neither British nor American.

Re:Scrith

[Rick Schumann]

No, Mike, it's not the Finagle-be-damned Ringworld.

Re:Scrith

[Dread_ed]

They ARE communicating with us, by dimming and brightening the star!

I have recorded and parsed the sequence. It says:

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

Re:Scrith

[ravenshrike]

Does this work for Klingon or Elvish?

Re: Scrith

[silentcoder]

I have not tried those... but I am willing to bet it does.

Re:Scrith

[MichaelSmith]

If the Ringworld is precessing fast enough to cause these occultations, its not going to be good for the occupants.

Re:Scrith

[stealth_finger]

Don't speak to this animal.

Re:Scrith

[Obfiscator]

In my experience, Parisians were extremely nice...except in the touristy areas.

My French is pretty good, and plenty of people (waiters and waitresses included) wanted to speak English to me, not because they couldn't understand my French, or because they thought I was butchering their language, but just because they were excited to practice English.

All bets are off in touristy areas, though. My guess is that after dealing with tourists day in and day out, they get burned out and jaded. Probably similar to working at an IT support desk.

Where's the bad-hair "It was aliens!" dude?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory Google images link

And not just not, but fuck no.

Re:Where's the bad-hair "It was aliens!" dude?

[Opportunist]

It it me or does he look like a Bab5 Centauri?

Re:Where's the bad-hair "It was aliens!" dude?

[Samantha Wright]

Joke available in both B5 and Voyager flavours!

Re:Where's the bad-hair "It was aliens!" dude?

[Briareos]

Obligatory predator bonus link...

Re:Trump 2020!

[Anonymous Coward]

Trumps radiant glow is simply outshining this distant star as he continues to make America great again.

Dude, Trump's a really dim star.

You might even say he's a wrinkled brown dwarf star.... ;-)

He just isn't quite as dim as the black hole he wound up compared to.

Just ask

[Anonymous Coward]

We could always ask? And while we're at it, point out we have breathable air, can work hard and, most importantly, we're edible.

Re:Just ask

[Maritz]

We're just assuming that our breathable air = everybody's breathable air, are we? Doesn't strike me as a good assumption to make.

Re:Just ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty much. Breathing is nothing more than a chemical reaction to produce energy from sugars.

Re:Just ask

[Opportunist]

You are aware that the air we breathe is actually highly corrosive? That stuff once killed nearly everything that lived on this planet!

Seriously, don't mess with Oxygen. It's poisonous.

Re:Just ask

[Zocalo]

Breathing might be a common trait, but breathing generic atmospheres... probably not so much. Much of the life here on Earth has fairly tight tolerances as to the specifics of the environment it exists in to the point that even a fairly small shift in levels of some trace elements would be lethal. Evolution can deal with global changes if they occur over a sufficiently long period time, and migration if the changes are more localised, but the chances of being able to breathe the unmodified atmosphere of another planet - even with a similar mix of primary elements like nitrogen and oxgen, in our case - is *much* slimmer than SciFi usually depicts.

Re:Just ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no. Breathing is a mechanical action. ATP is the chemical reaction.

Re:Just ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't making an argument against that but rather clarifying that breathing is nothing more that a chemical reaction to produce energy from sugars (in case of living organisms on earth). We evolved to breath oxygen simply because it was the path of least resistance given the conditions on Earth (and I stress this)... I didn't argued that breathing anything else would be ok for us or most of the organisms on Earth.

Most organisms on earth, now, breathe oxygen but the eukaryotes who "lived" in anoxic environments respired nitrogen instead because the path of least resistance, given the conditions where that organism existed, led to that.

With that said, it's nothing extraordinary if other life would respire anything else than oxygen and wouldn't be able to breathe on Earth. People don't realize but oxygen is toxic to humans given the right pressure, just so happens that we live on sea level or above and the pressure doesn't reach levels where it would be toxic and damage cells by hyperoxia. So even if another planet had the same atmosphere as Earth, if the atmospheric pressure was higher than on Earth to the point of breathing oxygen becoming toxic to us, we wouldn't be able to breathe there.
This is one thing that always gets me with scifi: "there's breathable atmosphere... the scans indicates breathable levels of... and... and... "... sure, and what about atmospheric pressure, you numbnut?!

Re:Just ask

[Maritz]

If the CO2 in our atmosphere was a few percent higher we would die. It's toxic past about 10,000ppm. We need it more-or-less as it is. Sad but true.

Re:Just ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair point, but still isn't wrong, just wasn't precise to that degree.

Re:Just ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Abstraction, learn about it.

Re:Just ask

[penandpaper]

*Takes deep breath*

Bring it on.

Re:Just ask

[hey!]

*Takes deep breath*

Bring it on.

Now try it at 160 kilopascaals partial pressure...

I thought not. Dose makes the poison. Life on Earth evolved to to tolerate, make use of, and in many cases depend on high levels of free O2, but those levels of O2 are a byproduct of life itself. It's conceivable that complex life on other planets could evolve to use some kind of fermentation, although the forms of fermentation familiar on Earth (alcohol and lactic acid) require bound oxygen.

Re:Just ask

[penandpaper]

I would comprehend what you are saying if I wasn't nauseous, with a ringing in my ears and tunnel vision. I need to sit down, I am a little dizzy.

Wait.. what were we talking about again?

Re:Trump 2020!

[Rei]

That glow radiating from his skin ever since he placed his hands upon the orb still seems kind of creepy. Ever since the Invocation opened up the Portals to the Deep, things just haven't felt the same.

Re:Trump 2020!

[Anonymous Coward]

Orb Police: "HAIL ORB!!!"

Re:Trump 2020!

[Rei]

Hail Orb.

Could they?

[Maritz]

Yes.

Are they? Probably not.

Re:Could they?

[sudon't]

For most people, no explanation = God(s). But for a small group of people, no explanation = aliens. You know who you are. Then there is that third group who is willing to admit that we simply don’t know the answer yet, without jumping to extraordinary conclusions.

Re:Could they?

[Anonymous Coward]

speculation != conclusion

Re:Could they?

[Anonymous Coward]

As Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Ergo if you see a phenomenon that you can't find any natural explanation for, one possibility to consider is that an advanced technology might be at work. Of course, you would have to look for significant supporting evidence to take it beyond the realms of speculation, but that's kinda how science works. If you don't like the hypothesis, come up with a better alternative, and find supporting evidence for that.

Re:Could they?

[Maritz]

Yeah. But people jump the gun. No explanation now does not equal no explanation ever. Religious people and alien enthusiasts just need to accept that sometimes we don't fucking know. Let's fucking investigate!

Re:Could they?

[gtall]

We cannot investigate, the science budgets are being cut.

Re:Could they?

[meta-monkey]

I explain it as aliens made by God.

Re: Could they?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're free to donate your money to research.

Re:Could they?

[Anonymous Coward]

For most people, no explanation = God(s). But for a small group of people, no explanation = aliens. You know who you are.

These two groups are in fact the same. Both of them have created their own answer derived from little or no evidence.

Also, God(s) would technically be considered an alien life form, but really there's no sense in trying to inject logic or facts into that argument.

Re: Could they?

[nitehawk214]

But Clarke didn't say "anything we don't understand is sufficiently advanced aliens" because Clarke wasn't an idiot.

Re: Could they?

[nitehawk214]

Also, he did not say "if you can't come up with a better explanation, then mine is right" because, again, Clarke was not an idiot.

Re:Could they?

[Maritz]

Then we wait patiently for civilisation to return.

Re:Could they?

[Anonymous Coward]

The chance of aliens will always be greater than the chance of god(s). Because god(s) is a subset of aliens.

Re:Could they?

[Solandri]

There's a fourth group you're missing. People who, because there is no evidence of it being caused by aliens or god(s), erroneously conclude that it cannot be aliens or god(s) (or aliens sufficiently technologically advanced to be indistinguishable from gods), and thus "has to be" some sort of natural phenomenon.

No explanation simply means no explanation. Any proffered explanations are merely conjecture, but rejecting those explanations is also conjecture. All are jumping to conclusions. For millennia, rogue waves were dismissed as drunken sailors' tales simply because nobody believed something so extraordinary was possible, and the sailors who experienced them could offer no proof other than their eyewitness testimony. It wasn't until 1995 that we finally managed to record evidence that they really do exist. Further work with the math showed that they are possible (and natural), just extraordinarily rare.

We've got evidence of a new weird, unexpected behavior. We're doing the right thing by trying to study it and collect more data on it (fortunately, this one doesn't change location, making it easy to study). At this stage, rejecting theories and implicitly insulting those suggesting them is the only premature conclusion.

Re:Could they?

[swillden]

Then there is that third group who is willing to admit that we simply don’t know the answer yet, without jumping to extraordinary conclusions.

And the subset of that group which is willing to accept that aliens may be the most likely answer, based on current knowledge and theories. If the only theory you can find that is consistent with observations is one that goes against your prejudices, it is still your best theory. You should seek to apply it to generate predictions, then test them. You should also keep looking for other theories that fit.

Re:Could they?

[david_thornley]

And eventually another will arise with lemon-scented napkins.

Re:Could they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything you just wrote says far more about the human race then about any specific individual. Mostly it describes Humanity simply because from a realistic standpoint (one where imaginary creatures are actually considered IMAGINARY) God(s) == Aliens in that both are imaginary and therefore DO NOT EXISTS.
The sad thing is that Humanity, when taken as a single group, cannot understand that Imaginary != Real and so the sub-group of people who understand the difference is left living in a world full of kindergartners.

Re:Could they?

[Pfhorrest]

Every possible concept of a god that is not literal nonsense is tantamount to aliens anyway, so same thing either way.

Re:Could they?

[sudon't]

And the subset of that group which is willing to accept that aliens may be the most likely answer, based on current knowledge and theories.

Since we have zero knowledge of, or evidence for, aliens, I don’t see how that can ever be the most likely answer. Considering that we have no idea how life arose, and that all evidence indicates that it only arose once in the one place we know it arose, even though there are certainly a lot of stars, we can’t really make useful predictions from a sample of one. When you consider the immense distances between stars, and the vast aeons of time our galaxy has existed, even if life had arisen elsewhere and, against all odds, evolved intelligence, the chances of them being our contemporaries is, well, astronomical. Also, Fermi’s Paradox. If, and when, we begin to find evidence of biological activity elsewhere, then we might be able to say something about it. For now, it’s all pure speculation. Plug any numbers you like into Drake’s Equation.

Intelligent aliens are only slightly more plausible than gods. Which is to say, not very.

Re:Could they?

[swillden]

And the subset of that group which is willing to accept that aliens may be the most likely answer, based on current knowledge and theories.

Since we have zero knowledge of, or evidence for, aliens, I don’t see how that can ever be the most likely answer.

We also have zero knowledge of, or evidence for, the lack of aliens. The law of parsimony suggests that since we have no specific reason to believe that we're unique in the universe, we should assume that we're not.

When you consider the immense distances between stars, and the vast aeons of time our galaxy has existed, even if life had arisen elsewhere and, against all odds, evolved intelligence, the chances of them being our contemporaries is, well, astronomical.

This is only true if you believe that intelligent life is extremely rare and/or short-lived.

Also, Fermi’s Paradox.

Fermi's Paradox ignores the fact that human recorded history, and especially human technological history, is a vanishingly short interval of time. Given the abundance in the universe, there's no reason for an interstellar traveling species to be particularly interested in our planet. It seems likely that the only thing remotely interesting about Earth is us, and we've only been a detectable feature for a little under a hundred years (when we started pumping out radio waves). Given the light-speed propagation delay of that information, even assuming intelligent, spacefaring species are relatively abundant, how many can even know we exist yet? For that matter, we may *still* not be advanced enough to be interesting to interstellar travelers. Also, even if Earth is interesting enough for a visit, who's to say they didn't drop by several thousand years ago. How would we know unless they stayed? For that matter, they could have stopped by just a few hundred years ago, and as long as they were circumspect we'd never have noticed.

No, I think the only thing that the Fermi Paradox line of thought tells us is that faster than light travel probably is as impossible as we currently think it is. If FLT were feasible, then it's much more likely that someone within the ~200 light-year sphere within reach of our radio waves might have noticed us and have had time to come visit. Assuming we're interesting enough to visit, that is, which is a big assumption.

Idiots...

[sjbe]

Astronomers and alien life enthusiasts alike are buzzing over the sudden dimming of an otherwise unremarkable star 1300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. KIC 8462852 or "Tabby's star" has dimmed like this several times before, prompting some researchers to suggest that the megastructures of an advanced alien civilization might be blocking its light.

"Some researchers"? Perhaps as a joke. Trillions of stars out there of immense variety and form and the moment someone sees something they don't recognize immediately it clearly must be an alien superstructure... Sigh... It's like the people who see some lights in the sky they aren't familiar with and immediately forget what the "U" in UFO stands for, instead going straight to deciding it must be alien visitors.

And the proper term for "alien life enthusiasts" is "mentally ill person". These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence. The pattern recognition parts of their brain are stuck in overdrive and no longer function properly because they are disconnected from the rational parts of their brain.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence. The pattern recognition parts of their brain are stuck in overdrive and no longer function properly because they are disconnected from the rational parts of their brain.

That's weird, I just decoded that same sentence from the digits of PI!

Re:Idiots...

[Salgak1]

Not quite. Several questions involved:

1. Is there life, elsewhere in the universe? Given basic chemistry, and the known fact (well actually, exceptionally well-supported theory) that abiogenesis occured one one planet (i.e. Earth), the likelihood of it arising elsewhere is close to 1.0.

2. If there IS life elsewhere, has it evolved to intelligence? Unknown, and too little data from the one case we have (Earth) to generalize.

3. If Question 2's answer is "yes", has it survived and advanced to the state where engineering works of such magnitude are possible ? Absolutely zero data: we certainly don't have the capability.

Re:Idiots...

[djinn6]

Trillions of stars out there of immense variety and form and the moment someone sees something they don't recognize immediately it clearly must be an alien superstructure... Sigh... It's like the people who see some lights in the sky they aren't familiar with and immediately forget what the "U" in UFO stands for, instead going straight to deciding it must be alien visitors.

So are you saying that of the trillions of stars and trillions of habitable planets out there, not one of them has intelligent life on it?

As far as I can tell, "aliens" is just one of many explanations brought forth by the authors of the original paper. Unfortunately, many of the more mundane explanations such as dust clouds and massive comet clusters had since been ruled out, so that leaves "aliens" as one of the few remaining viable explanations (until somebody comes up with more of course). I personally would like to believe there's some cyclic process in the star itself, but I wouldn't rule out aliens just because it "sounds ridiculous".

Re:Idiots...

[Zocalo]

To be fair, the claims of "aliens" are mostly coming from the media because sensational headlines leads to more readers. What actually happened was that some scientists included the possibility that it could be a Dyson structure in their list of possible explanations for what's going on, stressing that it was unlikely to be the case, and the media ran with it without the emphasis on the last part.

The problem here isn't with the scientists - except in so far as they were naive in their handling of the media - because a good scientist shouldn't discount *any* viable possibility (and a Dyson structure *is* a viable possibility for what's going on, no matter how unlikely) until there is evidence to do so. The problem - as usual - is the media's current bias towards sensationalism over unbiased factual reporting. There's also a world of difference between those who think aliens must be out there somewhere because of the Drake Equation and feel that figuring out a solution to The Great Silence could help us avoid a catastrophe vs. those who jump to unfounded conclusions that LGM as the cause of everything that they can't explain. In practice most (but certainly not all) applicable scientists are going to fall into the former group, but thanks to the media they're tarred with the same brush as those in the latter, with all the problems acquiring funding for potentially useful science that results in.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite. Several questions involved:

1. Is there life, elsewhere in the universe? Given basic chemistry, and the known fact (well actually, exceptionally well-supported theory) that abiogenesis occured one one planet (i.e. Earth), the likelihood of it arising elsewhere is close to 1.0.

2. If there IS life elsewhere, has it evolved to intelligence? Unknown, and too little data from the one case we have (Earth) to generalize.

Do you really want to find a place that has the same "intelligence" as here?

Imagine a situation of Trump's equivalent there President of the Solar System or the like.

Re:Idiots...

[Big Hairy Ian]

Do you really want to find a place that has the same "intelligence" as here?

I take the fact that there is no evidence that Aliens have ever visited Earth as conclusive proof that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe :D

Re:Idiots...

[CrimsonAvenger]

1. Is there life, elsewhere in the universe? Given basic chemistry, and the known fact (well actually, exceptionally well-supported theory) that abiogenesis occured one one planet (i.e. Earth), the likelihood of it arising elsewhere is close to 1.0.

2. If there IS life elsewhere, has it evolved to intelligence? Unknown, and too little data from the one case we have (Earth) to generalize.

So, given that life evolved on one planet, the likelihood of it evolving elsewhere is close to 1.0, but given that it evolved intelligence on one planet, the likelihood of it evolving intelligence elsewhere is impossible to generalize?

Why the inconsistency?

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

"And the proper term for "alien life enthusiasts" is "mentally ill person". These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence."

Similar to Space Nutters who constantly harp about the end of the Species and invoke dozens of sci-fi "solutions"?

Re:Idiots...

[BarbaraHudson]

Imagine a situation of Trump's equivalent there President of the Solar System or the like.

Entropy in action. Who knows - maybe once you hit a critical mass of population and technology, you have the means to try to force stupidity and servitude on the population. Would explain all the oligarchies, including the one in the USA.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence. The pattern recognition parts of their brain are stuck in overdrive and no longer function properly because they are disconnected from the rational parts of their brain.

That's weird, I just decoded that same sentence from the digits of PI!

That's because Pi is an irrational number dude!

Re:Idiots...

[drinkypoo]

maybe once you hit a critical mass of population and technology, you have the means to try to force stupidity and servitude on the population.

What? In a small population, all you need for that is a few muscled bullies. You haven't thought this through.

Re:Idiots...

[drinkypoo]

1. Is there life, elsewhere in the universe? Given basic chemistry, and the known fact (well actually, exceptionally well-supported theory) that abiogenesis occured one one planet (i.e. Earth), the likelihood of it arising elsewhere is close to 1.0.

And if it didn't occur here, then the odds of life on other planets actually go up, because our planet would then be proof that life can cross the void of space between planets. We're pretty sure of that already, with some viruses and spores being hardy enough to survive the trip if protected well enough, which actually isn't very well at all.

2. If there IS life elsewhere, has it evolved to intelligence? Unknown, and too little data from the one case we have (Earth) to generalize.

No, but odds are good that it's possible, since intelligence is useful for all kinds of tasks.

If Question 2's answer is "yes", has it survived and advanced to the state where engineering works of such magnitude are possible ? Absolutely zero data: we certainly don't have the capability.

That is the sticking point. Not only can we not do it, but we lack the technology to figure out if someone else is doing it from that distance. As a totally unprovable theory, it's not science. It's just musings, wonderings, imaginings.

Re:Idiots...

[hcs_$reboot]

the moment someone sees something they don't recognize immediately it clearly must be an alien superstructure... Sigh...

Could be worse. Like the Marian apparition or some other religious miracles that happen when a phenomena finds no explanation.

Re:Idiots...

[BarbaraHudson]

In a small population, they can just up and leave, since your population of enforcers is also small, and the land is large.

Re:Idiots...

[drinkypoo]

In a small population, they can just up and leave, since your population of enforcers is also small, and the land is large.

Never underestimate the value of fear.

Re:Idiots...

[ausekilis]

Besides... it's 1300 light years away. Whatever we are seeing today happened 1300 years ago, you know, when Charlamagne was in power, Japan was in the Nara period and Buddhism was first beginning.

Whatever society created that giant whatever-it-is could be long gone by now. Even if we were to launch some satellite toward the thing today for a closer look, it would be 3000 years before the satellite got there, and another 1300 before an image came back.

Or, you know, it could just be some other debris in space that blocked our view. Maybe sufficiently large asteroid, or even one of our own space junk in orbit around Earth.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus dude. I'm no alien enthusiast, but try to find it in your heart to give them a break. They have a hobby or passion that causes no harm to anybody. In fact, if these people didn't exist, you'd have one less reason to beat your chest, wouldn't you?

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, you have as much data for question 2 as you do for question 1, so your conclusion should be the probability of life evolving is close to one, and if it does evolve then the chance of it evolving to intelligence is also close to one.

Re:Idiots...

[meta-monkey]

Imagine a situation of Trump's equivalent there President of the Solar System or the like.

Isn't that this exact scenario? I mean, they're building a wall around a star...

Re:Idiots...

[silentcoder]

>No, but odds are good that it's possible, since intelligence is useful for all kinds of tasks.

Not to mention that intelligence has all the earmarks of an evolutionary universal - a generic trick independently evolved several times. Octopi are as smart as cats - and the rest of the molusc kingdom is mostly things as stupid as clams (literally). Cats and Octopi didn't inherit their brains from a common ancestor (Their last common ancestor didn't have much of a brain) - they developed it independently.

So if intelligence can develop multiple times, independently, that fits the idea that it's so generically useful that evolution will favor it whenever a mutation arises that assists it.

Humans took it a step further, and so far the evidence suggests nothing else has done so except under influence FROM humans (literally - when interacting with us, their brains are pushed to learn to think a bit more like ours) which is to become self-referential. It's not just that we're smart, it's that we can think about WHAT we think, think about HOW we think - and even come up with ways to do it more effectively - that seems to be unique. And we took it one step further yet again. We didn't end at inteligence - we developed EXTELIGENCE, the ability to store our thoughts outside ourselves where they could outlive us. The first tool for this was complex communication: speech, which made it possible to convey our thoughts to others, and store it in their memories. The next step was writing, and so on and so forth until the current peak of exteligence: the internet.
Now these two things appear to be utterly unique to our species. We didn't just learn to use and make tools - but to share those techniques across societies, and allow others to improve on our progress over time. Since, here on earth, that looks like a uniquely human achievement - it's a lot harder to extrapolate that it will have happened elsewhere. At the same time - since it DID happen here at LEAST once - we cannot dismiss the possibility either. The odds of it being possible is 1. It has happened, therefore it is possible.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obviously sensationalized, but if you read the original article from when this anomalous dimming was first discovered, the 'ALIEN MEGASTRUCTURE!' claims didn't just come out of left field. The original authors showed in their paper that all currently known natural causes of dimming cannot explain the dimming pattern being observed. Multi-planetary transits, dense comet-fields with elliptic orbits, and gaseous cloud obstructions are all incapable of explaining the dimming pattern.

At this point another cosmologist did some crude calculations to show that a Dyson-sphere in mid-construction could produce this dimming pattern. It was a fun thought to entertain and of course the media ran with it. Having a very rare unexplained phenomena is exciting regardless of what the ultimate explanation ends up being. It means we've discovered a gap in our understanding of how the universe works, in a domain of science that we understand now better than we ever have. Either a very interesting and unique event happened in this star systems history, an event we aren't yet creative enough to imagine, or ALIENS!. Either way, in an age when we are discovering and explaining so much, its awesome that the universe can still rear its head rub our faces in the fact that we don't know everything. Let people be excited about it, and don't discount them as idiots just cause they wan't to get excited about unexplained phenomena.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because life can mean anything, the universe could be filled with single cell organisms but we don't know the odds of that evolving into something more complex. It could be a trillion to one that intelligence evolved here or one to one, we just don't know.

Re:Idiots...

[UnknownSoldier]

De' Nile is not just a river in Egypt.

Open your myopic eyes for once in your life instead of ignoring NASA's own evidence

First Contact is going to happen around 2024. No amount of ad hominem attacks is going to change this fact.

You do realize that WE are aliens to them, right?

It would behoove you to follow Mark Twain's advice:

"Better to remain silent and thought a fool,
then to speak and remove all doubt."

But go ahead and keep whining about others who know more then you -- because the rug is about to be pulled from under you in a decade. What will you do then?

--
You can tell how advanced a species is by how many religions their home planet has. 1 are the oldest ones. > 1 are the youngest ones. What about 0? LOL.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the proper term for "alien life enthusiasts" is "mentally ill person". These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence. The pattern recognition parts of their brain are stuck in overdrive and no longer function properly because they are disconnected from the rational parts of their brain.

"Paranoid schizo nutweasel" is perhaps not a politically correct term nowadays, but along with "semi-autistic twatmuffin" it sums up at least half of the people who use the internet.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

2. If there IS life elsewhere, has it evolved to intelligence? Unknown, and too little data from the one case we have (Earth) to generalize.

/quote>

Some 100,000 years ago there were three intelligent and sentient species on Earth: H, Sapiens, H. Neanderthalensis, H. Erectus [which lived all along until 20,000 ago - the logenst living hominin species]. So the odds are good.

Re:Idiots...

[tehcyder]

In a small population, they can just up and leave, since your population of enforcers is also small, and the land is large.

Never underestimate the value of fear.

Fear, surprise and near fanatical devotion to the Pope

Re:Idiots...

[tehcyder]

"And the proper term for "alien life enthusiasts" is "mentally ill person". These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence."

Similar to Space Nutters who constantly harp about the end of the Species and invoke dozens of sci-fi "solutions"?

We've got to get off this rock and settle on, like, the Moon, because when the next asteroid wipes out all life on Earth, the two men and a dog left on the Moon will be able to regenerate the human species. Even better, on Mars there's water, somewhere, plus you can grow potatoes in your own shit like in that film, and there's an atmosphere. Sort of.

Re:Idiots...

[tehcyder]

Whatever we are seeing today happened 1300 years ago, you know, when Charlamagne was in power, Japan was in the Nara period [wikipedia.org] and Buddhism was first beginning.

Buddha was born in the 6th century BC

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides... it's 1300 light years away. Whatever we are seeing today happened 1300 years ago, you know, when Charlamagne was in power, Japan was in the Nara period and Buddhism was first beginning.

Umm, nope. The religion that was just beginning was the Islam [we're talking ~700 AD, no?].

Re:Idiots...

[jheath314]

Because you can do anything you want when extrapolating from a single data point.

Re:Idiots...

[Dread_ed]

Holy shit, I feel marginalized and discriminated against. All I want to do is immigrate to their star system and do the jobs all those damn entitled Glorpgleeps won't do.

Do they think all those antigrav sleds will pull themselves? HA!

Re:Idiots...

[lgw]

Life happened quickly, intelligence didn't. However, Intelligence happened quickly after the Cambrian Explosion, so the path from complex multi-cellular life to intelligence seems easy. The journey from life to complex multi-cellular life seems like the hard part, to judge from history.

This was already ruled out as unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

20% of a starts output is a lot of energy and whatever is obscuring it going to have to do something with that energy, most likely convert it to heat. If it's something in orbit around that start it's going to have a thermal signature we'd be able to see. So, the current answer is very unlikely. And given that they knew this, have already pointed more telescopes at it and they still don't have a thermal signature the answer is probably still going to be very unlikely.

The James Web Space Telescope is still slated for launch October 2018 and hopefully they'll be able to schedule some time to look at this star with that. It will be able to a more accurate thermal picture than even teamed telescopes on the ground. Just cross your fingers our new tiny handed overlord doesn't decided he wants to burn ants with it instead or something like that.

Re:This was already ruled out as unlikely

[bogeuh]

is it not 20 % reduction of observed brightness instead of 20% of the stars output?

Supernova... were fucked

[wolfheart111]

Just like anything, at the end of its life... such as a battery for a flashlight... it dims a bit then back to normal.... Supernova. And with that recent article about how supernovas life killing effects has now practically doubled its distance... this is my conclusion. (I cant find the article but im sure you've read it).

Re:Supernova... were fucked

[Maritz]

Just like anything, at the end of its life... such as a battery for a flashlight... it dims a bit then back to normal.... Supernova. And with that recent article about how supernovas life killing effects has now practically doubled its distance... this is my conclusion. (I cant find the article but im sure you've read it).

If you're using your experience with everyday objects to act as a guide for how you should think about things like supernovae, all I can say is... Don't. There is literally no comparison.

Re:Supernova... were fucked

[sudon't]

Just like anything, at the end of its life... such as a battery for a flashlight... it dims a bit then back to normal.... Supernova. And with that recent article about how supernovas life killing effects has now practically doubled its distance... this is my conclusion.
  (I cant find the article but im sure you've read it).

If you're using your experience with everyday objects to act as a guide for how you should think about things like supernovae, all I can say is... Don't. There is literally no comparison.

Flashlights and stars both produce light. ::rimshot::

Re:Supernova... were fucked

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory What If: Neutrinos from supernova

A supernova at 1AU would exert about a billion times the radiation pressure on you as would a hydrogen bomb pressed up against your eyeball. Even in the absence of photons, the radiation received just from neutrinos at 1AU would be enough to give you a lethal dose.

Re:Supernova... were fucked

[EvilSS]

This explains all the people who died when my flashlight batteries died the other day.

Re:Supernova... were fucked

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually if you drain a Li-Ion cell too far it can explode ...

Re:Trump 2020!

[Anonymous Coward]

What I see is Trump making America crate again.

Yes

[MrKaos]

It could also be an gigantic orbital doughnut maker using the star to heat the pig fat. We don't know but it's fun to make up some explanations.

We do know for sure that doughnuts are cooked in pig fat though.

Re:Yes

[Walter White]

I'm picturing a giant dimmer switch and an alien of some sort saying "Watch what they do when I do this ..."

Re:Yes

[drinkypoo]

We do know for sure that doughnuts are cooked in pig fat though.

We know for sure that doughnuts are typically cooked in trans fats, because fats which are solid or semi-solid at room temperature tend to produce a superior product. You can also use canola oil or peanut oil. I have retrieved the peanut oil used by one vendor for use in biodiesel manufacturing. (This failed because the BioPro 190e failed. And then they failed to support their hardware. BioPro can DIAF.)

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

BioPro can DIAF.

Which is a remarkably appropriate end to a company involved in the manufacture of fuels...

Re:Yes

[EvilSS]

It could also be an gigantic orbital doughnut maker using the star to heat the pig fat. We don't know but it's fun to make up some explanations.

We do know for sure that doughnuts are cooked in pig fat though.

I mean, technically, that would fall into giant alien structure so it's already covered by the article.

Re:Yes

[MrKaos]

It could also be an gigantic orbital doughnut maker using the star to heat the pig fat. We don't know but it's fun to make up some explanations.

We do know for sure that doughnuts are cooked in pig fat though.

I mean, technically, that would fall into giant alien structure so it's already covered by the article.

Why would aliens waste there time building a gigantic doughnut maker WITHOUT AN ORBITAL ICING MACHINE. It just doesn't make any sense that intelligent alien life would overlook such a thing.

Re:Yes

[MrKaos]

I'm picturing a giant dimmer switch and an alien of some sort saying "Watch what they do when I do this ..."

I was wrong. It's an alien projector, and we're the movie that better not suck.

Re:Yes

[Walter White]

I was wrong. It's an alien projector, and we're the movie that better not suck.

It's going to be real hard for us to watch if we're the screen. :-/

Answer is no

[andydread]

If it where alien megastructures such as a Dyson type sphere the dimming would more likely be at consistent intervals rather than random intervals which seems to be what's happening here. It's probably interstellar dust/gas of some sort

Re:Answer is no

[Chrontius]

Assuming that it's a single regular ring around the equator of the star, and not a massive constellation of collectors eclipsing each other at seemingly random intervals because that's what was maximally efficient according to both energy capture, and launch costs, while slowly moving into more efficient orbits over the millennia using solar sailing.

It's not like there's no good reason to have anything but a blandly periodic function in a Dyson swarm

Re:Answer is no

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, it's the debris of an alien megastructure, destroyed in an alien inter-galactic war!

Re:Answer is no

[bogeuh]

see now, dust and gas clouds follow the laws op physics, regular and orderly
the construction crews of the tabby dyson sphere on the other hand.

Re:Answer is no

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah HA! Unless it's a dyson sphere still being constructed!

Re:Answer is no

[wjcofkc]

Perhaps a Dyson's Swarm, under construction.

https://youtu.be/M8ryqjyLBL8

Re: Answer is no

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there is nothing to posit that a theoretical structure would be built to your specification.

Re:Answer is no

[OhSoLaMeow]

Obviously, it's the debris of an alien megastructure, destroyed in an alien inter-galactic kegger!

FTFY

Re:Answer is no

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because budgets for mega projects are always consistent.

Take a look at Crazy Horse...

Re:Answer is no

[bozzy]

Yes, and this would be a much less expensive way of achieving this instead of using an overpriced vacuum cleaner.

Someone has discovered...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Russell's Teapot!
Shame we can't photograph it.

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a mega structure of teapots!

Large and irregular

[sabbede]

like a big 'ol dust cloud or asteroid field, of varying density, possibly perturbed by other bodies?

Re:Large and irregular

[110010001000]

Other bodies? like aliens???

Re:Large and irregular

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, or maybe a planet got crashed into creating a much, much larger field of debris and dust.

Sounds like someone should revisit the Occam's Razor chapter of their favorite book on scientific methodology. oh, wait, wait, okay, I get it. pop-sci, clickbaits and all that. Yeah, okay, I'll play along. Erliens.

Still, this should be easy to dis/prove with spectrometry of light when it dims. If they find evidence of complex metallurgy or carbon based nano things, then it's them erliens.

Re:Large and irregular

[Anonymous Coward]

Large, Irregular, AND dusty? Simple, its your mom.

Re:Large and irregular

[freeze128]

"What's bullshit, Mr. Quaid? That you're having a paranoid episode triggered by acute neurochemical trauma? Or, that you're really an invincible secret agent from Mars, who is the victim of an interplanetary conspiracy to make him think he's a lowly contruction worker?"

Re:Large and irregular

[sabbede]

I was thinking of celestial bodies with enough gravity to make things move strangely, but now that I think of it, we don't know how fat aliens can get, so why not?

Re:Trump 2020!

[Anonymous Coward]

Abdel, you owe me 100 Riyals. I told you I'd have this chump fondling my balls before he left.

Prove me wrong. It's aliens.

[Danathar]

Astronomers and alien life enthusiasts alike are buzzing over the sudden dimming of an otherwise unremarkable star 1300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. KIC 8462852 or "Tabby's star" has dimmed like this several times before, prompting some researchers to suggest that the megastructures of an advanced alien civilization might be blocking its light.

"Some researchers"? Perhaps as a joke. Trillions of stars out there of immense variety and form and the moment someone sees something they don't recognize immediately it clearly must be an alien superstructure... Sigh... It's like the people who see some lights in the sky they aren't familiar with and immediately forget what the "U" in UFO stands for, instead going straight to deciding it must be alien visitors.

And the proper term for "alien life enthusiasts" is "mentally ill person". These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence. The pattern recognition parts of their brain are stuck in overdrive and no longer function properly because they are disconnected from the rational parts of their brain.

Until proven wrong, I say it's Aliens. You can't prove me wrong until you have facts to dispute me, and besides my fact-less assertion is just as valid as your fact-less assertion. One difference though. MINE is fun to think about. Yours is BORING.

Need more than "cannot rule it out yet"

[sjbe]

So are you saying that of the trillions of stars and trillions of habitable planets out there, not one of them has intelligent life on it?

No I'm saying that extraordinary claims require actual proof. Just because we cannot yet conclusively rule out that it is an "alien mega-structure" doesn't mean we should be favoring that as the likely explanation.

As far as I can tell, "aliens" is just one of many explanations brought forth by the authors of the original paper.

At most it should be a "we cannot rule this out conclusively" sort of footnote with copious caveats. Even mentioning it without additional evidence is borderline irresponsible given how crazy people get about such claims.

Unfortunately, many of the more mundane explanations such as dust clouds and massive comet clusters had since been ruled out, so that leaves "aliens" as one of the few remaining viable explanations

Unless ALL of the mundane explanations have been ruled out AND we have more evidence than some mere unexplained dimming, aliens is not a viable explanation. It's simply wishful thinking.

I personally would like to believe there's some cyclic process in the star itself, but I wouldn't rule out aliens just because it "sounds ridiculous".

It's not that it sounds ridiculous (though it does) but rather that there is no actual evidence for it other than an inability to conclusively rule it out.

Re:Need more than "cannot rule it out yet"

[CrimsonAvenger]

No I'm saying that extraordinary claims require actual proof. Just because we cannot yet conclusively rule out that it is an "alien mega-structure" doesn't mean we should be favoring that as the likely explanation.

Luckily, noone is suggesting that "aliens" are the "likely explanation". Merely a "possible explanation".

One "possible explanation", mind you. Out of more than one. And as we eliminate "possible explanations", we'll eventually reach the point of "well, it's either this one thing that's left (comets, aliens, whatever) or we have not a clue what's going on over there. Let's go look."

It's just marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just marketing, to promote the release of BLAME! on netflix.

It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Slicker]

A Dyson sphere, much less a partial Dyson sphere with sporadic orbit makes no sense. Why build such huge things? With technology so advanced, there are plenty other ways to gets lots of energy. They could harvest cosmic rays or put quantum entangled particles inside stars to generate energy from the paired particles. A lot more fissile material must exist in the parts of a solar cluster that failed to ignite.

However, an armada of spacecraft heading straight here from that star would not only dim it, from our perspective, erratically but also dim more and more of it, as it draws near to us. While also highly improbably, I prefer this alternative as it just seems way more exciting.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Anonymous Coward]

Ringworld.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. By the time it gets to our current position, we will probably be far away. That's if our path through space and that of KIC 8462852 are not colinear.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, due to a massive miscalculation of scale, the entire armada was later swallowed by a small dog.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Anonymous Coward]

put quantum entangled particles inside stars to generate energy from the paired particles

Somehow I don't think you understand how this 'physics' stuff actually works.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Anonymous Coward]

"A Dyson sphere, much less a partial Dyson sphere with sporadic orbit makes no sense."
A whole Dyson sphere or Niven ring don't make sense, that much is for sure since they wouldn't be able to maintain a stable orbit around the star.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Dread_ed]

Maybe the structure is a life form. Some kind of spacefaring creature that eats planets, asteroids, comets, and the like to make a shell around a sun to capture all of the energy.

Then, when it is ready to reproduce it causes the sun to go supernova, distributing its spores throughout the surrounding solar systems.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[painandgreed]

A Dyson sphere, much less a partial Dyson sphere with sporadic orbit makes no sense. Why build such huge things? With technology so advanced, there are plenty other ways to gets lots of energy.

Not really. Earth is probably unusual for it's amount of fissile material and it would be trivial. Even then, solar energy will be of greater use in space. Eventually, their planet will reach capacity and they'll have to move energy gathering resources off planet.They might be able to try and colonize another planet, which would take percentage of their star's energy over lifetimes to do, which would be about right for large collectors capable of dimming their sun to an observer like ourselves. Even that amount of energy probably wouldn't allow them to escape their solar system for anything but perhaps a small bit of research.

Dupe, but not just on /.

[thegarbz]

For some reason this has done the rounds in the popular media twice.

But it was just as ridiculous when we discussed it in October last year

Re:Dupe, but not just on /.

[Zocalo]

Blame the media, but it's not entirely a dupe. The actual story here is that Tabby's star has just started to dim again which means that astronomers are scrambling to do more observations, gather more data, and hopefully figure out some alternative possiblities with supporting evidence for what's going on, natural or otherwise. Unfortunately, we're probably going to have to get used to the Tabby's Star / aliens theory cropping up every time this dimming happens because - unlikely as the alien mega-structure theory might be - it generates clicks and, short of an overwhelming amount of evidence for an alternative solution or a reason why it can't possibly be a Dyson structure, it's still bad science to just rule it out.

That's not going help with the lunatic fringe that see aliens everywhere, or if it actually is some kind of Dyson structure (which is currently still a possibility, no matter how unlikely), of course...

Re:Trump 2020!

[h33t l4x0r]

I don't appreciate the obvious attempt to open a Hellmouth, just to distract us from the Russian collusion.

Occam's Razor?

[mi]

I am not an astronomer — not even an amateur one — but is "giant alien structure" really the simplest explanation they could come up with?

And how is it different from the "God made it so"?

Re:Occam's Razor?

[hcs_$reboot]

I am not an astronomer — not even an amateur one — but is "giant alien structure" really the simplest explanation they could come up with?

Yes, because the UFO fanatics shot before the religious fanatics.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[zarmanto]

I agree with your Occam's Razon reference: It seems pretty obvious that natural obstructions are far more likely than artificial obstructions.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[snookiex]

And how is it different from the "God made it so"?

Because that would be the simplest explanation.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[jittles]

And how is it different from the "God made it so"?

you must respect my authoritah.

Respectfully,

God

Re:Occam's Razor?

[Holi]

Comets or a planet being torn apart are the logical hypotheses I have seen from actual astronomers.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[aicrules]

I don't know man...that would have to be one huge razor...

Re:Occam's Razor?

[EvilSS]

I am not an astronomer — not even an amateur one — but is "giant alien structure" really the simplest explanation they could come up with?

And how is it different from the "God made it so"?

No, and none of the actual astronomers and other scientists involved with this think it's the most likely answer. In fact most believe it's the least likely answer. However, it is possible based on what has been observed and, of course, the media latched on to that for headlines.

As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.

The good news is that because of all the interest there are a ton of resources looking at it right now so even if it's not an alien superstructure, we will probably learn something new from it.

Oh, another side benefit: When it comes back to be some weird natural phenomenon the tinfoil hat crowd will have another conspiracy about the government suppressing knowledge of an advanced alien race to keep them happy. So win-win-win.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[argStyopa]

When the only other explanation is "something we completely don't understand is happening", then the alternative of "giant alien megastructure" tends to sound reassuringly better to academics who are very uncomfortable admitting they don't have a fucking clue what's happening.

It's apparently aperiodic so it's not - (as far as we can tell) orbiting the star in a regular way. It's also MASSIVE, causing up to 20% dimming...this is gigantic.

It could be orbiting so far out from the primary that we haven't yet seen a repetitive cycle...but if it's that far out and still occluding the star by 20% that makes it a ridiculously huge thing.

So "we don't have a clue" doesn't get you grants. "Potential alien construct" - even if everyone agrees the idea's a ridiculous place to start - might get you some sympathetic review.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[mi]

As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.

If it is that far away from us, I'd say both are equally "testable" in practice...

Re:Occam's Razor?

[sl3xd]

the alternative of "giant alien megastructure" tends to sound reassuringly better to academics who are very uncomfortable admitting they don't have a fucking clue what's happening.

You seriously misunderstand the emotions and motivations of academics: they're excited that they have something they can't explain. An oft quoted phrase is: "The most wonderful words in all of science is 'Huh...that's funny...'" It means there's something new to observe and learn from. It could make their career even if they don't figure it out, because they'll have the opportunity to get grant money, telescope time, and data that can be published - all of which both helps human knowledge and their personal careers. However, they're not fools - they know how to set expectations, and not one has said anything other than it "would be a good candidate" - which is practically worthless. It's like saying a rocky planet in the Goldilock's zone is a good candidate for life.

Science reporters, on the other hand, are a different story. They don't like saying "we don't know," because that doesn't often make headlines. However, if you can throw "aliens" and "science" into the same story, you can just watch the page views roll in, which helps with your next employee review.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[EvilSS]

As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.

If it is that far away from us, I'd say both are equally "testable" in practice...

Not really. One of the reasons they are so excited to see it right now is that they can monitor it as it happens (from our frame of reference at least) and they can watch it through an entire cycle and take a look at the full spectrum of light coming from it. Neither of these were possible last time since it wasn't caught live but found in archived plates as they were planet hunting. By looking at the spectra they can determine quite a bit about the composition of whatever it is blocking the light coming from the star, and they can get more precise data about it by monitoring it more closely.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[Anonymous Coward]

We know life forms exist, we don't know if gods exist. Thus assuming a god did it requires an additional assumption, failing Occam's Razor.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[mi]

they can monitor it as it happens

The ancients could monitor lightning as it happened too. But whether it was Zeus throwing them, or aliens, or "electricity" was just as equally "testable" to them, as the two explanations I mentioned...

Re:Occam's Razor?

[david_thornley]

An omnipotent God could put a dimmer switch on a star and fiddle with it, or put a big neon sign around it, or anything else. Therefore "God did it" is not falsifiable. An alien structure would have to adhere to certain physical laws, and we can observe the effects and rule out causes. This doesn't necessarily tell us that "aliens did it", but we could figure out exactly what's going on. If it's so incredibly improbable that it happened by natural causes that the likelihood of one within 1300 ly is vanishingly small, and it clearly could serve a useful purpose, that's at least some evidence of aliens.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[EvilSS]

they can monitor it as it happens

The ancients could monitor lightning as it happened too. But whether it was Zeus throwing them, or aliens, or "electricity" was just as equally "testable" to them, as the two explanations I mentioned...

In what way is this not testable? Please, enlighten me. Don't just say "because it's far away". That's bullshit.

Re:Trump 2020!

[necro81]

Bravo.

But, damn, no mod points today.

You want aliens go find the evidence

[sjbe]

Until proven wrong, I say it's Aliens. You can't prove me wrong until you have facts to dispute me

I don't have to prove you wrong. That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong. You made the assertion that it is aliens so you get to be the one to back it up with actual verifiable observations. You have a hypothesis and you get to be the one to run the experiment. For all I know it might be aliens and I'm not saying it is or is not. I'm merely saying that it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations and that we should not favor it until we have better evidence. This doesn't mean I'm ruling out out but merely that the evidence thus far does not even come close to the level needed to support that as a reasonable conclusion.

Re:You want aliens go find the evidence

[Luthair]

In fairness to alien crackpots, the logic is the same as religion. What causes lightning bolts? Its a man in the sky throwing them!

Re:You want aliens go find the evidence

[lgw]

There's as much evidence for alien superstructure as random gas clouds. Since it doesn't matter in any practical way which explanation we favor, why not go with the fun one? Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?

Re:You want aliens go find the evidence

[Danathar]

Until proven wrong, I say it's Aliens. You can't prove me wrong until you have facts to dispute me

I don't have to prove you wrong. That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong. You made the assertion that it is aliens so you get to be the one to back it up with actual verifiable observations. You have a hypothesis and you get to be the one to run the experiment. For all I know it might be aliens and I'm not saying it is or is not. I'm merely saying that it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations and that we should not favor it until we have better evidence. This doesn't mean I'm ruling out out but merely that the evidence thus far does not even come close to the level needed to support that as a reasonable conclusion.

You say it's not "the most likely"? Based on what? We have absolutely NO evidence one way or the other that it's NOT extraterrestrials. So what? You can say absolutely NOTHING concrete one way or the other with NO evidence. You can be skeptical all you want. Good for you. Sounds boring. I'm choosing to believe it's Aliens until something better comes along. My belief is cooler and more fun than yours.

Re:You want aliens go find the evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

For everyone who does not understand the Parent's post, simply substitute "fairy" for "Alien" and all will be come clear.

Re:You want aliens go find the evidence

[Pfhorrest]

That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong.

Actually, that's very much how science works. Nothing is ever proven so, it's only ever proven not. That doesn't mean anyone else has to believe every assertion anyone makes if it doesn't seem likely to them, and the burden is on the person making the assertion to change others' minds. But conversely, the burden of proof is on you if you want them (the person making the assertion) to change their mind. The default state of affairs is "who knows? anyone might be as right as anyone else", and all you can do from there is show that some of those possible opinions are wrong. So if you think someone's opinion is wrong, show that it is, else accept that it might not be. That's how science works.

Re:You want aliens go find the evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

You are, in your own words, saying "it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations".

What are the other specific "possible explanations" that you consider to be more likely?

Zaphod Bebblebrox

[sjbe]

Imagine a situation of Trump's equivalent there President of the Solar System or the like.

I don't have to imagine it because Douglas Adams already wrote about him

Counterexample

[alexo]

When the words "NASA" and "alien" appear in the same sentence, the answer is "no".

Counterexample:
"Trump's budget proposal cuts funding of NASA climate missions and eliminates tax credits to illegal aliens "

Re: Counterexample

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why bag of words algorthms perform poorly.

Re:Counterexample

[MiniMike]

When the words "NASA" and "alien" appear in the same sentence, the answer is "no".

Counterexample:
"Trump's budget proposal cuts funding of NASA climate missions and eliminates tax credits to illegal aliens "

When the word "Trump" also appears in the sentence, the "no" should be preceded by an "oh ".

Really Old News

[mrthoughtful]

This isn't news. This is olds.
What's going on? Editors, wake up please.

Re:Really Old News

[mrthoughtful]

Here's news: ''Synestia'': a new type of planetary object.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...

Slashdot is so dead.

Re:Really Old News

[Gerner]

Well it's obviously not dead. I just found out about this planetary object called a "Synestia" only because I read Slashdot. And get this, the article I read was only released one day ago, so the news was even pretty recent.

Re:Really Old News

[mrthoughtful]

Yes, friend, I guess you could say that.

On the other hand, you could just subscribe to a real news-for-geeks site such as eurekalert.org and read all about what's happening days or weeks before the news gets hammered by general press, or turned into a blog item for some blogger to post onto /. hoping to generate more traffic to his/her blog.

I have an equally plausible hypothesis

[alexo]

The FSM obstructs them with his noodly appendage.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

but asteroid belts could.

Just say "I don't know"

[sjbe]

Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved.

So you shrug your shoulders and say "I don't know" until we can gather more evidence. Just because we have an observation you cannot yet explain does not justify jumping to the most fanciful conclusion one can imagine. To do otherwise is to be no different than people who see bright lights or weird object in the sky and immediately conclude that a UFO must be alien visitors, conveniently forgetting what the U stands for.

Go ahead and say "I don't know". It's good for you.

Now what?

Gather more data. That's how science works. There are a lot of things we haven't fully explained yet. One more isn't going to matter.

Re:Just say "I don't know"

[Jason Levine]

Gather more data. That's how science works. There are a lot of things we haven't fully explained yet. One more isn't going to matter.

If anything, it is very exciting when there's something we don't know. There's so much that is known about the Universe that finding something that makes us say "We have no clue" is a wonderful development. This is the kind of thing that spurs scientists on to new discoveries.

Re:Just say "I don't know"

[Anonymous Coward]

the possibility of fanciful conclusions actually being possible are what makes science fun... of course you should gather more data, but why not think about the possibilities and actually be excited about it. why not? why not try and see if the odds are correct and there is extraterrestrial life out there? why not put more money into it? all we are doing continuing to sit here is destroying ourselves and our planet, and eventually we'll pass away without ever knowing , having destroyed or allowed to be destroyed the few sentient or semi sentient species we know of and the planet they live on.

unless your religious of course.. in which case you really shouldn't be criticizing anyone else's "fanciful" conclusions anyway.

Re:Just say "I don't know"

[lgw]

Just because we have an observation you cannot yet explain does not justify jumping to the most fanciful conclusion one can imagine.

That's pretty much how quantum physics came to be. None of the sane explanations worked, so a very far-fetched approach was taken. "It's crazy, but the math works."

"Fanciful" is not a legitimate objection.

Re:Just say "I don't know"

[Chrontius]

Yes! This~! This guy gets it!

This is how I feel whenever I hear a new twist out of Tabby's Star. Whatever it turns out to be, we're nearly certain to find something new!

Citation Meme

[Anonymous Coward]

It's annoying. This isn't wikipedia for one.

Secondly, there's citations for every damn kook idea that's out there - meaning, I wouldn't trust any citation anyone posts on some comment site like this. Just look at all the global warming denier citations.

Re:Citation Meme

[mark-t]

Obviously, but the point of asking for a citation is so that readers can independently evaluate its veracity. It's just part of healthy scientific scepticism. Of course, if we aren't encouraging that on slashdot, then it seems to me that the only remaining solution here is to censor a differing view by downmodding it because one disagrees.

Which I suppose can be effective in terms of an outcome that might feel superficially satisfactory, but isn't at all ideal in terms of actually learning or finding out anything you didn't already know.

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos

[Anonymous Coward]

http://i3.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/facebook/000/158/327/i-dont-care-what-you-say-ancient-fucking-aliens.jpg

Only vaguely suggested

[Thyamine]

The articles I have read pointed out they go through all the normal explanations, and then at the bottom they basically go 'well, it doesn't fit anything well with the data we have so far, so could it be exotic or cool like an alien structure? Sure, that would be cool' but they never suggest that that's the current/main hypothesis.

But you know, Aliens = Headlines.

Clone

[gearloos]

This is why you don't buy clone knockoffs. Sure they work great for a couple billion years but then when you need to return it the galaxy you bought it from has expanded so much they could care less and ignore you so you're stuck with this thing that just isn't steady.

It was...

[Ramley]

"The dimming of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus. "

Sorry, couldn't help myself... :-)

Giant Smoke Signal

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were trying to communicate and show other intelligent beings that you exist without covering the vast distances of space or overcoming the technological issues of sending deep space communications, might it be easier to just put your hand in front of the flashlight and signal?

A no brainer...

[Patent Lover]

Clearly this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It's a Death Star.

Yes, and...

[fyngyrz]

A field of large bodies or dense gasses passing in front of the star might produce an erratic dimming.

...and a field of much smaller bodies closer to us passing along the line of sight would also do it. We know of at least one such field here: The asteroid belt; and there is the theory of the Oort cloud. Saturns rings probably qualify also. Regions of greater and lesser density are not a stretch for such fields. Some other broken-up large object or other cloud of small bodies is a perfectly reasonable candidate for the observed dimming. The closer said cloud might be to us, the smaller the objects could be and still block significant amounts of light.

I'm intrigued by the "alien megastructure" idea, but the suggestion that "we have come up with no other possible explanations" is nonsense. It's just the media doing what the media always does: making money off of shading ideas. Pun intended.

Re:Yes, and...

[Anonymous Coward]

So your explanation is that, with all the stars we've observed, this is the first one where we've either seen an asteroid belt, or somehow failed to compensate for it?

Because I can't imagine something so novel as an asteroid belt hasn't been considered and ruled out already. Not saying it's aliens, but seriously? "Asteroid belt" is about as weak an explanation as "maybe it just has fast day/night cycles". Maybe not quite that bad, but you get my meaning.

Re:Yes, and...

[fyngyrz]

No. The smaller the object, the closer it has to be to us to block the light. The possibility I am describing is that the objects or clouds are fairly close to us. Not in the system with the star. On this end, it wouldn't take much at all. And yes, space is mostly empty, so it's not something you're likely to see much of, is my guess. Emphasis on guess.

Also, wasn't suggesting an asteroid belt. Was pointing out that an asteroid belt is an instance of lots of small bodies in space, therefore, we know that's a possibility -- lots of small bodies in space. Light doesn't go through rock, so this possibility allows for periodic dimming.

Another thing one can see if one is into astronomy are various clouds of gasses, some of them quite opaque, and many of them topologically irregular. Look at the horsehead nebula, for instance.

There's natural stuff out there. It moves around, and it can be opaque. We know this. It's pretty much the rule. When you hear hoofbeats, you should think "horse", not zebra, at least until you can see if the thing has stripes or not. Especially if all you've ever seen are horses, over and over.

Harvesters again?

[volodymyrbiryuk]

Well it has to be the giant mother ship heading to earth for Independence Day 3. These alien fuckers are a bunch of sore losers, they just can't let it go.

Name the Phenomenon

[NEDHead]

I suggest "Dark Shadows" as the underlying cause

And I have a $30M proposal for a shadow detector...

Re:lets look at the likely causes first

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep hoping, someday they'll come back for you.

"Aliens"

[Anonymous Coward]

Lister: Oh God, aliens... Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is aliens, isn't it? You lose your keys - it's aliens. A picture falls off the wall - it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day, you thought that was aliens as well! -- Red Dwarf, "Kryten".

Probably not

[nitehawk214]

But it makes for great clickbait.

Again. Seriously, this is over a year old.

Re:Probably not

[Holi]

Except it's not since the dimming has started again.

https://www.theatlantic.com/sc...

Re:Probably not

[Holi]

They want to have telescopes trained on it so they can do a spectrum analysis to see whether it is dust or gas or something else blocking the light.

Re:Probably not

[EvilSS]

Again. Seriously, this is over a year old.

Yea but the star started dimming a few days ago. This is the first time it's done it since they discovered it in archived images so it's their first chance to observe it live and collect a bunch of spectra data on it.

The general consensus

[Holi]

I thought the general consensus was it was a planet breaking up.

I know what it is

[slashmydots]

It's definitely just your mom walking past the star. She's pretty big.

Remain silent

[sjbe]

It would behoove you to follow Mark Twain's advice:

"Better to remain silent and thought a fool,
then to speak and remove all doubt."

That's good advice. You should take it.

Probably junk

[Rick Schumann]

It's probably that systems' asteroid belt, and all the junk left over from planetary collisions is not only so much higher in overall volume, but has had enough time to clump together. Bet you if they watch long enough they'll see a pattern to the dimming, and the dimming varies.

Not a structure

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not actually a structure dimming the star. It's just countermeasure drawing on local energy resources in order to fight the blight.

The First Order

[Anonymous Coward]

They're charging Star Killer Base

Morse Code...

[Anonymous Coward]

The message is: "Get out of the universe. He's already here."

I'll place my bet on a new type of variable star

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll place my bet on it being some new kind of variable star. Perhaps an exotic companion star and/or some stellar dynamic that they haven't thought of yet. Weren't pulsars thought to be alien at first? The idea that something could be so regular, people thought it had to be intelligent. Nope.

Doubtful

[Anonymous Coward]

Martian channels were not either.

Space whales obviously

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an alien mega-structure--that's stupid, It's clearly a pod of space whales migrating around the star.

Citations

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOmwtAXVI00
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piQOSJs2WgM

Sheez...

Extraterrestrial people are welcome on the Earth.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pope from Rome isn't reigning at Jerusalem. Why not?

So, the popes did foolish the people as if they were the Messiah for the fool people.

Must be aliens...

[dawdler]

Something is happening that we don't understand! Aliens. Yup. Aliens.

There is no way it could be aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine that aliens out in space are blocking the light from random stars. Mexicans just don't have the technology, and it would be pretty asinine to think if they did have that level of tech available to them. To even consider that aliens would use the technology to make astronomers lives interesting by creating unknown conditions that the astronomers would spend hours, years debating. That is completely ludicrous, delusions of grandeur, on the researches part to think things like that. Aliens are not internet trolls.

Texas sharpshooter fallacy

[sjbe]

That's pretty much how quantum physics came to be. None of the sane explanations worked, so a very far-fetched approach was taken. "It's crazy, but the math works."

If the math works and it backs up experimental data and observations it isn't crazy. And no quantum mechanics was not discovered like this. Quantum physics came about through a steady progression of theory and discoveries and experiments over several decades all of which ultimately agreed with each other. Yes it is weird but it wasn't discovered via a process anything like what we are talking about here.

"Fanciful" is not a legitimate objection.

It is when there is no actual evidence to support the hypothesis. What we are seeing is a form of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. They couldn't figure out what the data was telling them so the painted a figurative bullseye (the alien mega-structure) on the data after the fact. To say that is bad science is to be very kind.

Re:Texas sharpshooter fallacy

[lgw]

There certainly is evidence to support the "alien superstructure" theory. That evidence supports many theories, of course, and that's one of them. Future data my narrow down the choice of theories.

Quantum physics very much came from "blackbody curve, WTF?" Getting to the bottom of Plank's Law turned out to be a trip through the rabbit hole.

Re:Texas sharpshooter fallacy

[sjbe]

There certainly is evidence to support the "alien superstructure" theory.

If you want to call that evidence, fine, but it's extremely weak evidence. Weak to the point of being unworthy of serious consideration. Certainly not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis ("not aliens").

Quantum physics very much came from "blackbody curve, WTF?" Getting to the bottom of Plank's Law turned out to be a trip through the rabbit hole.

Yes there was a lot of physicists saying "that's odd" with a bunch of twists and turns which lead to quantum mechanics. Same for relativity. Same for many other branches of science. What they didn't do was make a handful of observations and then trumpet the most improbable of possible explanations that hadn't yet been ruled out into the mass media. They got to quantum mechanics gradually and with careful effort over many decades.

Re:Texas sharpshooter fallacy

[lgw]

If you want to call that evidence, fine, but it's extremely weak evidence. Weak to the point of being unworthy of serious consideration. Certainly not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis ("not aliens").

That's not how this works. Science work by advancing a collection of hypotheses to explain any unexplained data point - as long as the hypothesis fits existing data, anything goes. You cull the collection once you have more data - which one predicted it successfully, which one was falsified. "Alien superstructure" fits the available data and is falsifiable, so it's on the list. For now.

Subjective "well, I don't think that one's likely" judgement calls may influence personal choices of what to pursue in the meantime, but only observations can falsify a hypothesis.

What they didn't do was make a handful of observations and then trumpet the most improbable of possible explanations that hadn't yet been ruled out into the mass media. They got to quantum mechanics gradually and with careful effort over many decades.

Never confuse science journalism with scientists.

Planck's law was really out there at first - Planck didn't even have an explanation for why there would be a connection to statistical distributions - no underlying model - just a "hey, the math works, so maybe". Most of the key work for quantum physics happened very quickly after that - any revolutionary change in a field takes 20ish years, but the foundational work was complete 100 years ago. It took several decades to understand and accept that the universe really was a crazy as the story that QM tells, and to tame the math needed.

Null hypothesis

[sjbe]

You say it's not "the most likely"? Based on what?

Based on the fact that we've never seen evidence of alien life of any kind ever in any form. Not in the entirety of human history. Furthermore you should familiarize yourself with the concept of a null hypothesis. Proper scientific method is to presume there is no relationship between the observations and the existence of aliens until you can find evidence proving to a high degree of confidence that there is actually a relationship.

We have absolutely NO evidence one way or the other that it's NOT extraterrestrials.

I never claimed otherwise but that doesn't justify making the extraordinary claim that ET must have or even may have built it. The null hypothesis has to be that it is not aliens until we can find evidence to the contrary. To date there is precisely zero evidence for the existence of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations. Find some and we can revisit this discussion.

You can say absolutely NOTHING concrete one way or the other with NO evidence.

Sure I can. I can say that the null hypothesis remains intact. That is a concrete statement about the evidence. I can also say with absolute certainty that we have never seen any evidence of aliens in human history. As such I can say that my confidence that this is not evidence of aliens is fairly strong. More evidence might move my opinion one direction or the other but there is not a strong case to be made for aliens as the most reasonable explanation at this time.

Re:Null hypothesis

[Agent0013]

I can also say with absolute certainty that we have never seen any evidence of aliens in human history.

Doesn't that also only hold if you discount the evidence that we have seen? Current eyewitness accounts, people who claim to have been taken aboard the ships, ancient people who saw battles in the sky between many flying ships and drew pictures of what they saw, etc. It also seems the same could be said about it being gas clouds or asteroids also. We don't have evidence it can be any of those things because it blocks too much light and from what I was recently reading gives off no infrared energy from the light it is supposedly blocking. Nothing we know of can do that, so it can't be a passive object, it must be something that is actively absorbing the energy and transforming it into something else that gives off no signature, so you can say with absolute certainty that it is not a natural object.

Ancient Alien Theorists

[Anonymous Coward]

Ancient alien theorists say yes, and point to this pile of rocks as proof.

This is established technology

[ChrisMaple]

The dimming devices are manufactured on Venus.

Venusian blinds.

Logic

[Script Cat]

We don't know what it is. It doesn't match any natural phenomena. We haven't proven that it's aliens, therefore it is defiantly not aliens. It's just logic.

Calm down, everyone

[sheramil]

It's one of the Calebans from Frank Herbert's Consentiency stories, and she's about to reach orgasm.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one, welcome our new dimming overlords!

It makes a certain sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

You see... if you're a sufficiently advanced civilization, and you want to get your message out REALLY far and wide, because you've just realized your entire civilization is the size of an atom in a vast, VAST universe... and that the most powerful radio signal you could possibly produce will be undetectably faint by the time it's far enough to maybe find someone who could understand it, you instead use a signal mirror-like device, or just block out part of your sun, to make a kind of cosmic smoke signal, to tell people you exist much, MUCH farther away than you could with a puny couple of gigawatts of radio energy.

Ironically, that's what this could be. A kind of cosmic smoke signal.

You build some VAST reflector in space, between your star and the area of the universe you hope to communicate with, and set the reflector to periodically occluding the star through rotation of some kind. Or maybe you hang it out at a Lagrange point so that it rotates, with the orbital period of a planet around its host star, so that it orbits slowly, and can be like the beam from a lighthouse, slowly sweeping the universe with a simple message: "how." (We exist(ed) here.)

You may scoff, but what species sent a tiny, tiny toy of a spacecraft across the universe with a PHONOGRAPH record on it, hoping someone happens to find it and plays it at some point in the next billion years or so? Oh, that's right. Ours.

So who's to say that another far away, and long ago civilization didn't decide to use what are very closely akin to smoke signals, on a universal scale, by periodically attenuating the light of their star, to send that simple "we exist" message?

10 Print "Hello universe!"
20 Goto 10. FOREVER.

Or at least until microscopic (and not so microscopic) projectiles and space dust and debris, and whatever else might hit it, rend it into little, teeny, tiny, itsy bitsy BITS.

Actually, maybe WE should do that. Just a great, big, GINORMOUS disc of some thin but tough, reflective or absorbent material, to orbit the sun spinning in some way that would produce occlusion that could NOT happen by accident. Then instead of being limited to how much power we can devote to blasting into space, to tell the universe we exist, like shining a penlight while standing next to a SPOTLIGHT, you instead just wave something IN FRONT of the spotlight, to make it darken a little.

Or maybe it's just SPACEDUST. Who knows?

The central task of experimental science

[sjbe]

Actually, that's very much how science works. Nothing is ever proven so, it's only ever proven not.

You need to (re-)familiarize yourself with the null hypothesis and what it means. The default position on any assertion is that there is no relationship between two measured phenomena unless there is positive evidence to justify rejecting the null hypothesis. This is the central task of experimental science.

Things are "proven so" all the time through observations. Using the term proof is probably not ideal when talking about science. Math has proofs. Science has observations and models. The distinction can be subtle sometimes but it's important. Regardless, we find positive evidence ("proof" if you will) of the existence of things constantly. If I want to prove the existence of a bird I go out and find an example of a bird. I don't prove the existence of a bird by process of elimination. We aren't going to prove the existence of aliens by any means other than a positive observation of aliens or their remains. We gain confidence in our models by making observations and seeing if the data fits the models. But remember, models are not proofs, they are descriptions. To your point we can disprove models by making a single positive observations of something incompatible with a proposed model. But we do not accept unsupported positive assertions without supporting evidence either. If someone believes that a Vogon construction fleet is the best model for this observation then the burden is on them to make an observation to support that model. The null hypothesis is that it is not a Vogon construction fleet until proven otherwise.

That doesn't mean anyone else has to believe every assertion anyone makes if it doesn't seem likely to them, and the burden is on the person making the assertion to change others' minds.

This is a good approximation of my point with the caveat that the burden is not to change someone's mind but to support or refute the model. If someone proposes a model ("this is an alien mega-structure!") then the burden is on them to find the evidence in the form of observations to support their hypothesis so that we may reject the null hypothesis ("it is NOT an alien mega-structure"). The burden is expressly NOT on me to go look for non-evidence to reject the null hypothesis.

But conversely, the burden of proof is on you if you want them (the person making the assertion) to change their mind.

Science is not about changing minds. It's about proving a model. Whether you believe the model or not is outside of my control no matter how overwhelming the pile of evidence I have might be. The default position (the null hypothesis) is properly that it is not aliens in the absence of compelling data to the contrary. Practically speaking I don't care if they want to believe something unlikely. My position on the alien mega-structure is "I don't know" as the evidence of alien activity is extremely weak. Until I see actual evidence it will remain "I don't know" and I will consider the null hypothesis to be the most likely correct one. I'm not rejecting the possibility of it being aliens, merely stating that I do not find the available evidence sufficiently strong to reject the null hypothesis. If someone wants to believe that aliens are involved and they aren't hurting anyone by their actions I certainly don't care.

Occam's Razor

[sjbe]

You are, in your own words, saying "it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations". What are the other specific "possible explanations" that you consider to be more likely?

Pretty much any physical phenomena less complicated than a highly advanced alien civilization. Just invoking Occam's razor here. I'm not ruling the possibility out but it doesn't seem the most likely among the possible explanations. Pretty much every explanation other than "alien mega-structure" requires fewer assumptions.

Theology

[sjbe]

There's as much evidence for alien superstructure as random gas clouds. Since it doesn't matter in any practical way which explanation we favor, why not go with the fun one? Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?

I consider properly conducted science to be incredibly beautiful and fun. If you want to make up fanciful stories unsupported by evidence to describe the world just wander down the hall to the theology department which is where you seem to be hanging out at the moment. They're really good at coming up with "fun" stories unconnected to reality as we know it.

Re:Theology

[lgw]

If you want to make up fanciful stories unsupported by evidence

The current evidence supports alien superstructure to exactly the same degree as random gas clouds or the debris of a planet, which are the other hypotheses in the paper. There's no additional evidence to choose between them.

Have you actually ever formally studied logic and meta-logic? It's also a fun field.

Much of scientific progress has been made by taking a long jump away from established theory to explain some measurement that doesn't fit. Quantum mechanics tells a very strange story indeed, one discordant with pretty much everything in ordinary experience and most scientific fields. Yet it was the right answer to the puzzle of blackbody radiation curves.

Re:Theology

[sjbe]

The current evidence supports alien superstructure to exactly the same degree as random gas clouds or the debris of a planet, which are the other hypotheses in the paper. There's no additional evidence to choose between them.

There is a HUGE difference between them. We've seen gas clouds and have proof of their existence. We have seen planetary debris in our own solar system. We have, to our knowledge, never seen any evidence of alien civilizations. While we may not be able to conclusively rule out aliens in this case at this time, there is ample reason to doubt that is the likely source of the observations given that we have no evidence of even so much as an alien microbe, much less an advanced civilization.

Have you actually ever formally studied logic and meta-logic? It's also a fun field.

Yes I have. Not sure what relevance that has here.

Much of scientific progress has been made by taking a long jump away from established theory to explain some measurement that doesn't fit.

Yes all science is based on observations we cannot explain. That doesn't mean every observation requires invoking improbable causes derived from an absence of clear data. They have an observation that current models cannot adequately explain and the data available is sufficiently limited that we cannot yet conclusively rule out aliens as a potential cause. That is not the same thing as saying aliens ARE the cause and there certainly is insufficient evidence to have reasonable confidence in such a prediction. The null hypothesis is that it is NOT aliens until we have clear and compelling evidence to the contrary.

Quantum mechanics tells a very strange story indeed, one discordant with pretty much everything in ordinary experience and most scientific fields.

Quantum mechanics is a model that was built over the course of decades based on numerous observations and experiments. This "alien mega-structure" nonsense is not being handled remotely with the same care and precision.

Re:Theology

[lgw]

That was a very roundabout way to answer my original question:

Have you become that drab, gray, and soulless?

A simple "yes" would have sufficed. You reject it because it's fun, not because of any evidence against it.

That's a long time ago...

[willisit6538]

In our never ending need to know.. stuff, by the time we understand this, that star might not even be there (since it's already 1300 year old data). If it were a Dyson sphere (or something of that nature), the answer itself is rather unimportant compared to what the Dyson sphere's existence means - but again, 1300 year old data could mean those that built it are long gone, already rebuilt it twice, eaten the star, discovered fire etc. I like to think about it from that distance's perspective. If we were there, looking here, they'd see nothing of interest. Certainly not right now, looking back 1300 years, so it's not likely a large fleet of ships (and if it were, at the speed of light, they'd already be here if the flickering were anything to go by). Can you imagine that? Expecting to turn up and see some rural nonsense and be greeted by us (I should add that "greet" is a loose term). Again, I'm not sure what the point would be. I hope, in my lifetime, something comes of all this searching. Not necessarily the Borg coming to wipe us out (since we created them anyway, right?) but something more fundamental.

Share and enjoy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not quite like tea

Based on numbers. There are more things

[Anonymous Coward]

it could be than aliens, so given no better handle, expect them all as likely, so it's less likely aliens.

Moreover, the alien possibility is based on a set of contingencies: they are technically advanced, they find they must do it, leaving is not an option, there is sufficient material to do so.

The sufficiency of material is a problem for other ideas, such as it being a loose collection of rubble, but not if it's the result of odd perturbations in the stellar atmosphere.

By the law of headlines

[HuguesT]

The answer is No.

Nice info

[dealsmahancom]

Thanks for sharing

Do we really want to know?

[iq145]

What if they built a Death Star? :-)