The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It claims that another star having a close encounter with KIC 8462852 (the star discussed in the article) and stirring up its comet cloud "would be an extraordinary coincidence". There is, in fact, evidence that such an encounter happened in our own solar system, "only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space." Calculating the speed and trajectory of a particular star, astronomers found that it would have crossed within the radius of the Oort Cloud approximately 70,000 years ago, producing exactly the scenario that "would be an extraordinary coincidence."[1]
Additionally, astronomers have checked stars in the galaxy for the possibility of a close encounter with our solar system, and find dozens of such candidates to come close to our solar system, sometimes within the radius of the Oort cloud, within the next million years (some as close as 240,000-470,000 years from now).[2]
The idea that a passing star would stir up the comet cloud of KIC 8462852 should not be dismissed as a coincidence, especially not to give leeway to discuss the potential for intelligence to build megastructures, when we see that such a coincidence is not even that rare for our own solar system.
[1] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/800/1/L1...
[2] http://www.mpia.de/~calj/stellar_encounters/stellar_encounte...
It seems hasty to extrapolate either way without more data.
Occam's razor, plain and simple.
If the strange variations in that star's brightness turned out to be caused by an alien civilization, that would be way, way cool. But before we jump to conclusions, we should explore more mundane explanations; given the unusual observations, it should still be very interesting, whatever the cause.
The article suggested possibilities, including comets. And reasons why it might not be that. And it included aliens, and some things that would be expected if it was that. All depending on more data which the article explained, they are waiting to collect.
As with everything, they're looking for more data.
Given the author of the paper is doing a proposal to point a radio telescope at the star says to me that chances are decent enough to justify further investigation.
Also, I don't think just any passing star would produce the effect they're talking about. They mentioned the star being significantly dimmed by matter that must be very close. A star passing through the Oort cloud wouldn't have done that, it would throw a few (maybe thousands?) comets closer in, but not into a tight orbit around the sun.
I don't think you're really giving enough credit to how rare this scenario is.
Moreover, I think it's good to spark the public's imagination through informed speculation. Yes, maybe what lies over the horizon is not a mysterious land full of strange wonders but -- you know what? -- maybe it is. So to all those out there who feel it is their duty to defend the orthodoxy that we're alone in the universe from the human imagination I say just let others have their dreams. One day you may live in a very different, more wondrous world because they refused to accept the limits you seem so eager to impose on them.
"Citizen scientists catch cloud of comets orbiting distant star"
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28191-citizen-scienti...
The paper. Basically Kepler, or to be more precise the Planet Hunter crowdsourcing effort, found a star with a rather strange light curve and the Atlantic jumped the gun and babbels of aliens.
After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.»
It would also be an extraordinary coincidence if we find another planet with life on it, so quickly after humans started to look for it. 150'000 stars is a narrow band of universe, cosmically speaking.
Assuming one civilisation within a sphere 1000ly in diameter, that makes 16000 in our galaxy alone!
It's much weirder than that; after all, there's been life on Earth for at least 3Bn years, but space-going life for only the past 57 of them! Stack it all up: if this is some sort of life-created megastructure then it's not just evidence of life, but of presumptively-multicellular tool-building life that can get off its planet and survive in an intensely hostile environment that it didn't coevolve with.
With an estimated 100Bn stars in our own galaxy alone, this would suggest we can expect to see on the order of a million interplanetary-capable life forms in the process of carrying out mega-engineering projects, and yet none of them have come calling on us? Fermi Paradox calls bullshit.
For a hot and fast civilisation like us to exist for serious amounts of time in space, it's going to have to adapt to living in space --- because, as you say, it's intensely hostile. One of the key adaptations is to stop being hot and fast. If you can live on small energy budgets you're way more likely to survive. If you live slowly then travel becomes much easier, as well as costing less.
But if you become a cold and slow civilisation, inner solar systems aren't going to be very hospitable --- hot, radioactive, space is so bent that travel is enormously difficult, everything's at the bottom of cripplingly expensive gravity wells... why bother? The gas giants are rich, but are even more expensive (to get from low orbit around one of the moons of Jupiter to low orbit around another takes about 10 km/s. You can launch from the surface of Earth for that). But further out... the Kuiper and Oort clouds are peaceful, cheap, hospitable, and chock full of light elements with interesting (if slow) chemistry.
Estimates of the Oort cloud density predict that there'll be a 20km body every 30 light seconds or so, and that there's about five Earth masses in Sol's Oort cloud alone. And Oort clouds of neighbouring stars overlap...
So I'm expecting any successful civilisation to start colonising the spaces between the stars, rather than the star systems themselves.
In this model, our own solar system could already be colonised, and we'd never know. They'd probably have noticed our radio transmissions by now, but it may not have occurred to them to answer yet. They may not bother; if we survive long enough to adapt to space, we'll be out there soon. Or they may not be able, depending on their energy budget. Or maybe they are, and we just haven't noticed. (New Horizons has a 12W transmitter and we would have to be looking in exactly the right direction to spot it. And it's way closer than the Oort Cloud.)
Of course, this doesn't explain why our hypothetical civilisation has built a hypothetical megastructure around this star. I wouldn't know why they'd want to do that (except for noting in passing that interstellar travel for hot-and-fast creatures like us basically requires a Dyson sphere for the energy requirements).
I'm planning a book. Can you tell?
Before you start writing your book, you might want to familiarize yourself with the prior art in the field: start with the short story "Swarm" by Bruce Sterling, then the novel "Permanence" by Karl Schroeder, "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, and maybe "Diaspora" by Greg Egan. That's assuming that by "planning a book" you're thinking in terms of fiction rather than SETI-oriented non-fic, but even if you're writing non-fic it's worth noting that we SF authors have been all over the topic for decades. (As for non-fic, the prior art goes all the way back to J. D. Bernal's "The World, The Flesh, and The Devil", if not further: I don't read Russian but I gather Nikolai Federov wrote on the subject, as did Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.)
Here's the paper that crystallised the idea for me:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2687v1.pdf
Also, yes, fiction --- I'm not enough of a scholar for non-fic.
It's also possible that more advanced civilizations are paying attention but are waiting for us to get over our kill-it-with-fire stage in response to large-scale visitation :)
Fermi Paradox assumes ET would like to communicate, or be allowed to be detected in some way.
That's a very big assumption, given how many unknown unknowns exist out there.
It's worth noting that KIC 8462852 is an F3 star very similar to our own, which is a G2.
The actual light graph looks a hell of a lot more like a comet breakup to me than a swarm of solar collectors around the star.
Makes you wonder if Dinosaurs would have evolved to the point of becoming some sort of highly intelligent reptilian species similar to us. That is, if they hadn't been destroyed. :D
There's also species' such as Parrots and Dolphins that are both considered to be quite intelligent. So maybe intelligence is a fore-gone conclusion and that final step that "snowballs" their intelligence is just another roll of the dice occurrence.
You're half right. Dinosaurs have evolved[1][2] to become highly intelligent[3], but not reptilian and only similar to us in the sense that they are the only other species that makes hooks to catch food[4].
[1] "The scientific consensus is that birds are a group of theropod dinosaurs that evolved during the Mesozoic Era." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds
[3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-understand-a...
[4] http://io9.com/the-mysterious-tool-making-culture-shared-by-...
The paper says it's 12th magnitude so it's way, way dimmer than is visible to the human eye.
On the other hand, if I was some ancient super advanced civilization, I'd have probes all over the galaxy, and they'd report as soon as anything interesting happened with evolution on a planet. So they could know what life was like on Earth about 1500 years ago, and extrapolate from that.
Not that I can guess what a super advanced civilization would think like :P
Another cool citizen science project was the observations of the epsilon Aurigae transit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Aurigae
Discovering a previously unknown natural phenomenon would indeed by insanely cool, and I would want to know all about it in as many frequency bands as possible.
But alien megastructures are just about the most interesting thing I can think of short of proof that we live in a hologram, or a simulation, or some new and robust fundamental theory of matter.
> Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an
> alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long
> suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial
> civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting
> other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern
> is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light
> collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
Larry Summers recently shared his opinion on the topic https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-global-economy-i....
Am I missing something?
> Economist: But I have to object to the statement that growth must stop once
> energy amount/price saturates. There will always be innovations that people
> are willing to purchase that do not require additional energy.
So the last, albeit minor, argument is that there would be a point where there isn't anything to invest in to grow, which essentially describes the ultimate form of secular stagnation. I think the economic counter-argument goes something like the money supply isn't inherently finite. I could see that being an interesting argument.
we should be able to pick up that high energy stream with current technology, but we'd need first to guess at which frequency it transmits to (if it's there)
edit: ok scratch that I stand corrected I was still thinking in earthling terms
Assuming that 'live' is a useful term; thing about aliens is that they're going to be alien. Star Trek has conditioned us to think of aliens as humans in rubber suits, but real aliens are going to be anything but. We don't even know if it's a 'they'; it could be an 'it'.
If this is an artifact, then all it tells us is that they (or it) builds tools and likes energy. This suggests an inner-solar-system species like us, as living where things are fast and hot. But that's not necessarily a given. It could be a cold and slow outer-solar-system species doing something uncharacteristic. Or a plasma-based solar species. Or maybe it's something that's actually weird.
I know this is going to turn out to be rocks moving oddly, just like everything else, but I'm still really interested to see what the results of the radio telescope survey's going to be...