Broadcasting from Deep Space, a Mysterious Series of Radio Signals
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This bit is particularly interesting:
But you can safely bet that aliens are not the cause of FRBs. Why? The bursters are seen all over the sky, that’s why. The same sort of signal is coming from galaxies that are generally separated by billions of light-years. So how could aliens organize so much of the universe to engage in broadcasting the same sort of signal?
Not only is there likely an ideal, optimized way of sending information long distances, I suspect there also a very limited number of things a matrioshka brain would care to broadcast or receive, like the values of some fundamental constant.
Saying "hi" for fun to other civilizations isn't even something we do on our own planet with our own people. We only talk to people for specific reasons, even if we're unaware of those reasons. We'll go out of our way to avoid a homeless person's greeting rather than risk learning something about/from him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forge_of_God
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anvil_of_Stars
Anvil of Stars is often said to be the weaker of the pair, but it haunted me for several reasons, not least the extremely spooky ending!
In the books game theory means that the most prudent way to deal with a competitor species is to obliterate it immediately on discovery. The answer to Fermi’s Paradox is that everyone is keeping their heads down and and hoping no one notices them.
Humans, on the other hand, are merrily broadcasting away without a care in the universe...
Your point doesn’t really hold up if the effort to destroy a civ is basically zero, while the cost to defend is approximately unachievable.
For all we know, the universe is jam packed full of Predator-like aliens who are the dominant species on their planet specifically because their society is built around dominating everything they can.
Actually, ham radio operators do exactly this. They literally send out messages out into the ether with the hopes of someone replying.
QSL: https://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur-radio/operating...
We do that all the time, in as many ways as we can think of. From the top of my head:
- amateur radio
- sending lasers signals to the moon and waiting for it to get back
- chatting with random strangers on internet
- the Arecibo message on space
- SETI is basically trying to catch an alien "hello"
- sending "messages on bottles"
Really, sending "hi" in imaginative ways for no reason is a very human thing to do
Like plaguing Picard and crew on the USS Enterprise.
Er, inter-galactic empire?
If we're going to start imagining aliens with hyper-advanced super-technology, why stop? We can imagine aliens that can do anything they like.
Then again, there is nothing that says some alien species can't have a lifespan of a few billion years, enough to make the trek from one galaxy to the next, with time to spare for lunch. Perhaps those bursts are their inter-galactic Skype, sending selfies back home: "Me standing in front of that hot new Supernova we just spotted!".
Like I say, we can imagine anything we like.
My uneducated guess: Their version of an atomic clock?
(I warned you it was an uneducated guess...)
/edit or a cellphone network
I mean, it only took me 5 seconds to come up with some technically not impossible (though improbable) hypothesis. What if that is the signature of a worm hole drive kicking in? That would explain why it's everywhere.
But there are plenty of sources for the Wow signal, for example.
Do scientists keep this kind of data secret nowadays?
Did you look at the papers? I would assume the data is in there. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0867-7
See page 12.
Since then there have been many papers about FRBs. Typically you can find them on arxiv.
>Models suggest that several observed astrophysical phenomena could be related to the black-to-white-hole transition [8]. Among these are fast radio bursts (FRBs) and certain high-energy cosmic rays
However, since this particular FRB case is one that repeats (most of them are one-time events), I'm wondering if this theory still applies. Black holes seem like too "clean" of an object to have diverse behavior.
That's an insane amount of energy.
Which implies that the energy being used is even more insanely huge and these massive bursts are the relatively trivial overspill, or that it's a natural phenomenon which doesn't care about efficiency.