I RTF-Abstract a couple of days ago, but decided against submitting it as bing probably a bit too esoteric for Slashdot. But most of the questions I've seen posted up-thread are covered in the actual paper - at least to the level that I can handle cosmology, which is not very deep.
They can have as proprietary a power connector as they like, with built in gold-plated FleshLight if they like. As long as, in the retail box they also have something with a female micro-USB receptacle through which the device can be re-charged.
If the end-user then leaves this at home, tough shit.
Well, taking off with the Bowl would itself have been sufficient to cause the K-Pg impactor, not necessarily the returning. But its probably the thick end of a year since I read it, and I'd rather given up by the time I waded though to that, so I'm not 100% sure on what was exactly the wind up. It didn't make much sense to me either.
I don't think I'll buy the third book - if there is one. Might get it from the library, if I see it there.
with even the closest stars having decades-long ping times in communication, and physical transportation between them being even slower and very energy-expensive, such a "civilization" might well be far more fragmented than the "human civilization" on Earth currently is. Even if they shared a sense of species unity (aided no doubt by the difficulties of waging interstellar war), it might be difficult to call them a cohesive civilization in any traditional sense of the word.
Agreed. Launching a generation ship is going to be a "fire and forget" deal. You'd try to persuade the colonies to keep some sort of transmissions going, mainly so that you'd have some idea what is killing them. It's not as if you could offer any assistance on any useful time scale. You'd have to use some pretty serious carrot to persuade them to put up with the stick of sending data back home.
Unsurprisingly, it's an AC who displays gross ignorance of mosquito biology in a discussion on mosquitos:
My favorite option would be to use CRISPR to create a female mosquito that never drinks blood, and is preferred as a mate (by whatever criteria the males use).
For your information, for most species of mosquito, the consumption of a blood meal from a host (mostly vertebrates, sometimes invertebrates) is either necessary or a considerable assistance in producing their eggs. They need the nutrients.
To put it into a human-centred format, this suggestion is similar to trying to cure the problem of date rape by breeding men without penises and women without vaginas.
Hmm, wonder if there are any civilization-ending supernova candidates near the original star?
Think more about what you mean by "civilisation-ending". You're talking about space-faring organisms. That means either FTL-impossibilities (impossible - it's in the name) or generation ships. Generation ships require radiation management. Outside the immediate blast zone of a supernova (a mere few dozen LY), the issue is radiation management. And supernovae hardly happen without warning - you need a star somewhat brighter than Sirius, drastic changes in it's diameter, luminosity and neutrino flux. To miss those signals, you'd need to be talking about a uranium-level technology with an incredibly short-sighted view of the reality that surrounds them.
Even our rather fucking stupid species has nut-cases building underground shelters capable of possibly surviving a few years of supernova bombardment. I just do not believe that level of blind stupidity persisting to the time that we are even vaguely comfortable in space.
(How much does it take to preserve a "civilisation"? At best guess, a couple of thousand people, and a Wikipedia-dump. Say, 1 km.cu inside a 3km.diam asteroid. i.e., not a lot.)
Given the comparative difficulty of turning asteroids into living space versus building a Dyson object {sphere, ring, cup, mesh... whatever), I honestly cannot see how any space-faring species woud waste effort on building a Dyson [whatever]. Until they have literally run out of places to live in their entire galaxy, it's a non-starter. IMHO.
You receive what you think may be a message (there's a few decades of decision time there, for starters), then decide (1 generation, or two) to initiate communication. You dispatch your first message. Then you wait a decade, or a generation, or a civilisation-collapse cycle?
No, you re-send the message. With slightly different encoding. And then you repeat it again with a different preceding set of mathematical symbols to establish your language-designed-for communication. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In both encodings.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In three encodings. Remember, these are aliens, and they may not have understood your first message.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In four encodings. You have no reply, but you are not going to get a reply for another 2.8 millennia.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In five encodings.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In four encodings. You have no reply, but you are not going to get a reply for another 2.7 millennia.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In six encodings.
Are you getting the message yet? This is going to be a project which extends beyond the duration of (on a human scale) your dynasty's connection to the question of interstellar communication. Possibly YOUR civilisation collapses half way through (possibly the reciever's civilisation does too, but a millennium later). So, you repeat the earlier messages, including the "establish encoding, grammar and linguistics2 messages.
Did you not get the point of "slowly"?
By coincidence, I happen to be listening to a programme about "Quipus". That's a communication tool between humans, from a little over 600 years ago. And we still haven't decoded them. And we can be reasonably sure (due to the absence of finger-amputated skeletons) that the people sending the message had five (not four, or six) digits. Of course, we don't know if they counted their thumbs differently to their fingers and used base 8, not 10.
My OpenAthens subscription doesn't cover IOP, but sci-hub did the business for getting the full paper. And WOAH!, look at EPIC (that's the catalogue for the K2 missions) 204137184 in figs 2 and particularly 3 where it's light curve is folded onto it's principal component ! That is some seriously lumpy eclipsing variable! We live in interesting times!
(1) Why would they need to communicate? YOU might feel the need to hear responses to your messages, but why do you assume that is true for others?
(2) Which part of "slowly" do you have a problem with understanding?
(3) How would you deal with languages evolving? Simply : with records of existing protocols and including a protocol for updating protocols. No, it wouldn't be easy. Who (apart from you and the Star Trek scriptwriters who seem to be your only source of information) believes that it will be either easy or quick?
Well, it's an older, advanced race that moved to a younger star over a long period of time.
They'd be here by now. What plausible reason would they have for ALL stopping, once they've got a technology that can make an interstellar move in a manageable period of time?
How are you going to travel "a few thousands light years"?
The same way that our ancestors populated the Earth at an average speed of around 3km/year : slowly, with the technologies we have when we start, plus any that we develop along the way.
In that previous diaspora, the travellers developed things like "clothing", then "fabric" and sewing. I'm pretty sure that pottery was also developed on that journey, probably multiple times. But they started with fire and stone tools.
Light manages it. We can't do it so fast, but that's an engineering issue, not a physics ban.
This is what is wrong with Space Nutters: instead of accepting the fact that these are naturally occurring systems, the rush is to assume it is fantastic alien civilizations.
You didn't actually read even the fucking summary, which I spent 3/4 of an hour writing. You fucking unspeakable cad. Piss off back down your troll hole.
Let me break to down for you: there is no intelligent life out there.
Certainly not in your momma's cellar, if you can't even read the fucking summary, let alone the paper linked to from it.
To be precise, we have no evidence for intelligent life outside the Solar system (leaving aside quibbles over whether Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere, it's not even a small fraction of the way to the limit of known gravitationally-bound objects in the Solar System). Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - or evidence of anything else, either.
We are likely the only intelligent civilization that currently exists.
This is the position which we have evidence for. However, given that the universe is large, and our locale doesn't seem to be particularly uncommon, it strains credulity.
There likely have been many before us, and there will be many more after we are gone.
Almost certainly true. And completely unsupported by any evidence except the very speculation which you decry.
The civilization that build the megastructure may have evolved elsewhere and then migrated to this star.
When SF authors make this sort of suggestion, they normally have some sort of hand-wavey McGuffin to explain why the civilisation in question stopped migrating. What's your McGuffin?
(The most cringe-worthy I saw recently was "We're the dinosaurs that left Earth to it's Cretaceous asteroid fate, and we haven't stopped migrating." No names, no pack drill on that one, but it dirtied the hands of both collaborating authors.)
A: A mature star system, where most of the raw materials for construction have already coalesced into planets, and may only have 2/3 of its stellar life left. B: A new star system, where most of the raw materials for construction are still drifting around in the form of large rocks and the star has its entire life left. Pretty sure it's "B" -
In your "B" scenario, don't forget that you've got a LOT of volatiles still floating around, unless you've already built your gas giants. In which case, you're into scenario "A". The volatiles do exert appreciable drag - we see the resulting collisions in terms of the debris impacting the star and being spectroscopically detectable.
t 5-11 million years, this new star is far too young to have undergone planet formation, let alone a highly developed civilization.
Agree on the "highly developed civilisation". Disagree on the planets.
Our current better models for the formation of the Solar system have it taking in the order of 20-100 Myr to have put the bulk of the planets together including forming the Moon, though locally we had a (probable) re-arrangement of gas giants at about 0.6-1.0 billion years after formation leading to the "Late Heavy Bombardment". Given the "slop" in such models, I wouldn't call 5-11 million years as being too young to have a well-stabilised planetary system. Of course, that may not go with having irregular, eccentric, warped, lumpy debris discs. but we have a sample of one well-studied planetary system and a handful of ones with a few of the larger components roughly characterised. As the old cry goes, "more data, more data!".
Fortunately, private sector initiatives like the Allen Telescope Array may get us the definitive data first.
So, you didn't read the paper? The data sources cited are Kepler (K2) and ALMA. From the paper,
ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (USA) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada) and NSC and ASIAA (Taiwan), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ.
Nothing to do with the Allen Telescope Array. Fine project though that is, I don't think it's suitable (receiver sensitivity, telescope mirror reflectivity at these wavelengths) for this sort of work.
If you are an advanced alien race that needs more living space, it's much more practical to construct a partial dyson sphere in your own back yard,
I really doubt it. If you're an advanced race (hoomin, alien, or our current feline overlords) living within the laws of physics, then the need for living space can be much more easily accommodated by turning asteroids into large numbers of hollow, spin-stabilised structures. It's much simpler, incredibly more fault tolerant, and doesn't require the disassembly and total matter-conversion of one or more gas giants. There's also the non-trivial detail of needing to clear every significant meteoroid out of the solar system in which you build your Dyson sphere (your home system? Come on, get real!), and then construct a 100% reliable defence against incoming extra-system debris. Otherwise, one big bang and your Dyson sphere becomes unbalanced and gravitationally unstable (instead of just being gravitationally unstable).
If you're really, really short on living space, or you want the redundancy of inhabiting multiple stellar systems, stick a motor on the end of one of your hollowed-out asteroids, wind it up until the radiation that gets through your 20m (of ice, or 10m of asteroid rock dust) is as much as you're happy to live with for your grand children's life, et voila! you have launched your first generation ship.
The number of generation ships cruising the Milky way, occasionally stopping in an Oort Cloud to rape an iceball for reaction mass, volatiles and some construction material, is going to far exceed the number of started Dyson spheres.
Since Mr Dyson is a competent engineer, I would be pretty surprised if he didn't know of the "classic" Dyson Sphere. Whether the Marketing Department (to each, their own skills) has canned the idea of using the name as "too geeky", or whether they're keeping the name in the "pool" but haven't found the right product to put it to yet, I don't know. And I doubt that we'd get an answer if asked.
OTOH, I'll file the question in case I ever see Dyson doing a Q&A session here.
Now add in the mix a culture that rewards overconfidence, even arrogance, and you have the makings of really crazy behavior.
Sounds to me like now is the time to invest in a funeral parlour or some other corpse-handling business. Or, if I'd done so recently, sue Stanford for their policies discriminating against my business.
Slashdot Mirror
That's too much like hard work for most ACs. And most "journalists".
But we need to mine Great A'tuin to make the unobtanium for the space elevator.
Useful, but not a dinosaur killer. It's comparable in size to the Chelyabinsk window-shattering meteorite of a couple of years ago.
I RTF-Abstract a couple of days ago, but decided against submitting it as bing probably a bit too esoteric for Slashdot. But most of the questions I've seen posted up-thread are covered in the actual paper - at least to the level that I can handle cosmology, which is not very deep.
If the end-user then leaves this at home, tough shit.
I don't think I'll buy the third book - if there is one. Might get it from the library, if I see it there.
Agreed. Launching a generation ship is going to be a "fire and forget" deal. You'd try to persuade the colonies to keep some sort of transmissions going, mainly so that you'd have some idea what is killing them. It's not as if you could offer any assistance on any useful time scale. You'd have to use some pretty serious carrot to persuade them to put up with the stick of sending data back home.
It's a topic that has been well-explored by SF.
For your information, for most species of mosquito, the consumption of a blood meal from a host (mostly vertebrates, sometimes invertebrates) is either necessary or a considerable assistance in producing their eggs. They need the nutrients.
To put it into a human-centred format, this suggestion is similar to trying to cure the problem of date rape by breeding men without penises and women without vaginas.
Think more about what you mean by "civilisation-ending". You're talking about space-faring organisms. That means either FTL-impossibilities (impossible - it's in the name) or generation ships. Generation ships require radiation management. Outside the immediate blast zone of a supernova (a mere few dozen LY), the issue is radiation management. And supernovae hardly happen without warning - you need a star somewhat brighter than Sirius, drastic changes in it's diameter, luminosity and neutrino flux. To miss those signals, you'd need to be talking about a uranium-level technology with an incredibly short-sighted view of the reality that surrounds them.
Even our rather fucking stupid species has nut-cases building underground shelters capable of possibly surviving a few years of supernova bombardment. I just do not believe that level of blind stupidity persisting to the time that we are even vaguely comfortable in space.
(How much does it take to preserve a "civilisation"? At best guess, a couple of thousand people, and a Wikipedia-dump. Say, 1 km.cu inside a 3km.diam asteroid. i.e., not a lot.)
Given the comparative difficulty of turning asteroids into living space versus building a Dyson object {sphere, ring, cup, mesh ... whatever), I honestly cannot see how any space-faring species woud waste effort on building a Dyson [whatever]. Until they have literally run out of places to live in their entire galaxy, it's a non-starter. IMHO.
You receive what you think may be a message (there's a few decades of decision time there, for starters), then decide (1 generation, or two) to initiate communication. You dispatch your first message. Then you wait a decade, or a generation, or a civilisation-collapse cycle?
No, you re-send the message. With slightly different encoding. And then you repeat it again with a different preceding set of mathematical symbols to establish your language-designed-for communication. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In both encodings.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In three encodings. Remember, these are aliens, and they may not have understood your first message.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In four encodings. You have no reply, but you are not going to get a reply for another 2.8 millennia.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In five encodings.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In four encodings. You have no reply, but you are not going to get a reply for another 2.7 millennia.
Bored of sending that? Repeat the same, and add some more. In six encodings.
Are you getting the message yet? This is going to be a project which extends beyond the duration of (on a human scale) your dynasty's connection to the question of interstellar communication. Possibly YOUR civilisation collapses half way through (possibly the reciever's civilisation does too, but a millennium later). So, you repeat the earlier messages, including the "establish encoding, grammar and linguistics2 messages.
Did you not get the point of "slowly"?
By coincidence, I happen to be listening to a programme about "Quipus". That's a communication tool between humans, from a little over 600 years ago. And we still haven't decoded them. And we can be reasonably sure (due to the absence of finger-amputated skeletons) that the people sending the message had five (not four, or six) digits. Of course, we don't know if they counted their thumbs differently to their fingers and used base 8, not 10.
My OpenAthens subscription doesn't cover IOP, but sci-hub did the business for getting the full paper. And WOAH!, look at EPIC (that's the catalogue for the K2 missions) 204137184 in figs 2 and particularly 3 where it's light curve is folded onto it's principal component ! That is some seriously lumpy eclipsing variable! We live in interesting times!
(2) Which part of "slowly" do you have a problem with understanding?
(3) How would you deal with languages evolving? Simply : with records of existing protocols and including a protocol for updating protocols. No, it wouldn't be easy. Who (apart from you and the Star Trek scriptwriters who seem to be your only source of information) believes that it will be either easy or quick?
I, for one, would not welcome Patch Tuesday on my AI "shell".
They'd be here by now. What plausible reason would they have for ALL stopping, once they've got a technology that can make an interstellar move in a manageable period of time?
The same way that our ancestors populated the Earth at an average speed of around 3km/year : slowly, with the technologies we have when we start, plus any that we develop along the way.
In that previous diaspora, the travellers developed things like "clothing", then "fabric" and sewing. I'm pretty sure that pottery was also developed on that journey, probably multiple times. But they started with fire and stone tools.
Light manages it. We can't do it so fast, but that's an engineering issue, not a physics ban.
You didn't actually read even the fucking summary, which I spent 3/4 of an hour writing. You fucking unspeakable cad. Piss off back down your troll hole.
Certainly not in your momma's cellar, if you can't even read the fucking summary, let alone the paper linked to from it.
To be precise, we have no evidence for intelligent life outside the Solar system (leaving aside quibbles over whether Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere, it's not even a small fraction of the way to the limit of known gravitationally-bound objects in the Solar System). Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - or evidence of anything else, either.
This is the position which we have evidence for. However, given that the universe is large, and our locale doesn't seem to be particularly uncommon, it strains credulity.
Almost certainly true. And completely unsupported by any evidence except the very speculation which you decry.
The Thought Police will be using tickle-sticks along with the nerve gas and whips?
When SF authors make this sort of suggestion, they normally have some sort of hand-wavey McGuffin to explain why the civilisation in question stopped migrating. What's your McGuffin?
(The most cringe-worthy I saw recently was "We're the dinosaurs that left Earth to it's Cretaceous asteroid fate, and we haven't stopped migrating." No names, no pack drill on that one, but it dirtied the hands of both collaborating authors.)
It's up to ten now. I didn't follow the references.
Sorry, twelve, including this star and the original "Tabby's Star." Time to split the genus into species.
In your "B" scenario, don't forget that you've got a LOT of volatiles still floating around, unless you've already built your gas giants. In which case, you're into scenario "A". The volatiles do exert appreciable drag - we see the resulting collisions in terms of the debris impacting the star and being spectroscopically detectable.
Agree on the "highly developed civilisation". Disagree on the planets.
Our current better models for the formation of the Solar system have it taking in the order of 20-100 Myr to have put the bulk of the planets together including forming the Moon, though locally we had a (probable) re-arrangement of gas giants at about 0.6-1.0 billion years after formation leading to the "Late Heavy Bombardment". Given the "slop" in such models, I wouldn't call 5-11 million years as being too young to have a well-stabilised planetary system. Of course, that may not go with having irregular, eccentric, warped, lumpy debris discs. but we have a sample of one well-studied planetary system and a handful of ones with a few of the larger components roughly characterised. As the old cry goes, "more data, more data!".
So, you didn't read the paper? The data sources cited are Kepler (K2) and ALMA. From the paper,
Nothing to do with the Allen Telescope Array. Fine project though that is, I don't think it's suitable (receiver sensitivity, telescope mirror reflectivity at these wavelengths) for this sort of work.
I really doubt it. If you're an advanced race (hoomin, alien, or our current feline overlords) living within the laws of physics, then the need for living space can be much more easily accommodated by turning asteroids into large numbers of hollow, spin-stabilised structures. It's much simpler, incredibly more fault tolerant, and doesn't require the disassembly and total matter-conversion of one or more gas giants. There's also the non-trivial detail of needing to clear every significant meteoroid out of the solar system in which you build your Dyson sphere (your home system? Come on, get real!), and then construct a 100% reliable defence against incoming extra-system debris. Otherwise, one big bang and your Dyson sphere becomes unbalanced and gravitationally unstable (instead of just being gravitationally unstable).
If you're really, really short on living space, or you want the redundancy of inhabiting multiple stellar systems, stick a motor on the end of one of your hollowed-out asteroids, wind it up until the radiation that gets through your 20m (of ice, or 10m of asteroid rock dust) is as much as you're happy to live with for your grand children's life, et voila! you have launched your first generation ship.
The number of generation ships cruising the Milky way, occasionally stopping in an Oort Cloud to rape an iceball for reaction mass, volatiles and some construction material, is going to far exceed the number of started Dyson spheres.
OTOH, I'll file the question in case I ever see Dyson doing a Q&A session here.
Sounds to me like now is the time to invest in a funeral parlour or some other corpse-handling business. Or, if I'd done so recently, sue Stanford for their policies discriminating against my business.