Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in some solar type stars | Hacker News Reader

Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in some solar type stars

arxiv.org

50 pointsokket12 comments

This is about as legit of ETI search as there can be (real data, experimental design, and publication). Nice to have some sanity in the search (albeit, their enthusiasm is clear).

At best they find ETI, at worst they discover some strange chemical compositions of galatic halo stars.

>> At best they find ETI

"At best"?

Consider for a moment that if we ourselves ever get to advance our technological civlisation to the point where we are capable of interestellar travel we're very likely to start sending out signals to other civilisations on planets around stars that could support human life not to make friends with those civs but to make it easier for us to find and colonise those planets.

"Colonise" as in take over, exterminate their native species and live happily ever after. As any intelligent species with an ounce of brain is bound to do to other intelligent species dumb enough to respond to such a signal.

Luckily, this is most probably just some weird star phenomenon and we're all safe, for now.

But how can such a baiting civilization know that it's more powerful than the baited civilization, and that it itself is not falling into a trap?

Ermanno Borra, who first speculated that periodic Extra-terrestrial signals could be detected using Fourier transform analysis on all those old piles of astronomical spectra data we have lying around, also states that "technology now available on Earth could be used to send signals having the required energy to be detected at a target located 1000 light years away"! I vote we try running that experiment for a more conclusive answer to age old conundrum: are we truly alone in the universe?

My vote is for not running experiments when we may not like the results. (But we won't do it anyway - our votes do not matter.)

There are plenty of passive ways to gather the same data, that don't broadcast our existence into a galaxy we know nothing about. Let's use those first, and after we learn, decide if we want to talk back.

Agreed. Based on billions of years of living in a multi-species planet, observation and intelligence-gathering is both prudent and non-violent. Running with our arms waving, yelling "Hey guys! We're here!" without further information about who we are talking to is an extremely, extremely bad idea.

We've got millions of years to figure out what to do. There's no rush. It would be amazing to finally know we're not alone. That's a great first step.

Something interesting to think about is we live on a G-sequence star so detecting life mostly in G and K stars won't take much argument WRT G.

However one interesting idea WRT K series, is as a dwarf, I bet a "nearby" sufficiently bored, yet paranoid, civilization could mess with a K series by periodically blasting it remotely with a truly huge laser/maser and mirror system. I'm not talking about bored ham radio operator level of commitment but a suitably high tech advanced civilization could possibly pull this off. "Well, we're building a solar system wide asteroid defense system anyway, so letting the scientists do research 1% of the time when nothing else is going on, won't hurt too much"

So possibly the G series civilizations are rather psychologically optimistic, or pessimistic about physics anyway, and K series stars are reflected/enhanced light from a troll civilization located within 500 light years or something. Perhaps the K series stars are reflectors for a nearby G series civilization.

In that case maybe the ratio of G/K reflects some kind of galactic intelligence level of average paranoia.

Or for that matter vice versa. Perhaps we're the odd men out and most galactic civilizations are K series and find it hilarious to "frame" innocent G series stars.

I suppose extremely detailed planet searches will be performed on these interesting stars, regardless of natural or SETI cause the results are likely worthwhile.

>> Based on billions of years of living in a multi-species planet, observation and intelligence-gathering is both prudent and non-violent.

Very possibly every other intelligent species in the universe has figured this out already and that explains the Fermi paradox. Species that were too dumb to figure it out have just become extinct, so we don't hear them either.

SETI@home has responded to this [1]. TL;DR don't get your hopes up. However, Breakthrough Listen will look at the stars using their Automated Planet Finder [2]

- [1] http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=80378

- [2] (PDF) https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf

I have seen many papers on arxiv that are typeset without latex turned out to be a shoddy research work. I don't know there might be a correlation.

there is a response from berkeley SETI: https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf

Seems like they jumped really quickly to 'aliens' as an explanation and I don't find it particularly convincing.

The end of the abstract is funny:

> Although unlikely, there is also a possibility that the signals are due to highly peculiar chemical compositions in a small fraction of galactic halo stars.

Talk about "unlikely"...

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