Short-lived light sources discovered in the sky | Hacker News Reader

Short-lived light sources discovered in the sky

sciencedaily.com

88 pointslelf44 comments

Argh! That really long Peter Hamilton novel is coming true!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga#Pandora's_St...

Or maybe it's the Alien Message (highly recommend if you don't know it yet) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...

This book and its sequel are AMAZING

(Spoilers for the first page and a half or so): The plot point that kicks the whole thing off is when astronomers discover a star suddenly winking out of view. It turns out someone enclosed the star.

But who? The inhabitants to hide / protect themselves? Someone else who wanted to trap the inhabitants?

Everyone with any interest in sci fi should read these two books

> That really long Peter Hamilton novel

I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific! ;)

"The one with all the sex."

I'm currently reading a Hamilton novel. First in a while... but based on my vague recollection, I suspect that isn't specific enough either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_2EwdT--bc

768 pages? I have not read any book that long in ages..

Also there's a sequel, which is basically part of the same book. I'm pretty sure he just split it up because the publisher wouldn't let him publish a 1500 page novel.

Don't think of it as a long book, focus on a chapter at a time, like reading several tiny books.

Here’s the paper on Arxiv:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05068

I often wonder what’s the best humanity can do. Maybe we will never go lightspeed. Maybe we can’t build a wormhole. But I think that we can watch all of the sky, all of the time and in high-resolution. We can get there.

Is it possible that the disappearing stars are really just fictitious entries designed to catch copycats?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

In the scientific literature? It had better not be.

It's the OnOff star from Deepness in the Sky :-)

That one had a slow switch-off process, tho, right? It was the light-up that was abrupt.

Is gravitational lensing ruled out (i.e. the idea that when these sources were found, their images were abnormally brightened or displaced through lensing by an object relatively close to Earth (close enough that relative motion and parallax accounts for the disappearance.))

Could that account for 8-9x magnitude shifts? Seems unlikely.

There is also recurring novae (objects that have been seen to experience multiple nova eruptions), and the idea that our sun might be one of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae

red stars?

"Captain Christopher Pike takes emergency command of the Discovery and explains that the Enterprise was investigating seven mysterious red signals when it was catastrophically damaged. All but one of the signals have disappeared,..."

"Oh, those. You see, there's actually a very coherent and canonical explanation for the super space suit/ship that produced them, which is clearly well beyond any known technology, Federation or not.

Unfortunately, no one shall speak of it under penalty of death. Yes, we just introduced death penalty to Federation law."

Do we really need to bring ET into every unexplained observation, just for the PR bump maybe?

TL;DR: some appearing/disappearing objects were found using old sky images. New stellar lifecycle ideas may be required.

And why not? Extraterrestial life is a hypothesis just like many other possible explanations. I had hoped we've long past the anthropocentric attitude, at least the discovery of exoplanets should finally end it.

Human exceptionalism seems to have a lot of cognitive inertia behind it, regardless of how educated we are. What do you do when first contact is made? There are a lot of mental hurdles to overcome trying to answer this question.

I don't think the answer will ever get anywhere beyond, "we'll see." Even if you attempted to build a guidebook for the what and the how, it will never be what we expect it to be.

It will be same shit different planet, trust me.

The way I see it humans are the stupidest possible animal that can form planet-spanning civilization (in a sense that other homo primates failed to do so despite being very close to us in mental capability). There is absolutely no reason to think that the scale of intelligence does not extend further beyond humans. One problem is that since we are stupid and we don't know anyone qualitatively smarter we do not have the tools to reason about super-intelligent behavior.

Even the smartest chimp performs incomparably worse in most mental tasks than a median human, even the smartest human will perform incomparably worse than median super-intelligent being in most mental tasks. At least chimps can learn to avoid poachers since they have experience with humans, despite not being able to reason about reasons why poachers do what they do.

Or, humans are so stupid that they decided to cover the planet, shit all over it, destroy their habitat, and pat themselves on the back.

The reason other animals on Earth didn't do it is not because these animals made a choice to not pollute/destroy habitat/etc. There are very real very significant mental deficiencies in all other animals relative to humans.

Whether smarter beings might act differently is entirely a hypothetical; it is unreasonable for us to think we can imagine the thought process of a super-intelligent being. Maybe resource consumption + migration is optimal for some objectives, maybe conservation and reuse is optimal for some other objectives, etc.

Not going to disagree that there are clearly differences in intelligence. However, the same intelligent humans managed for tens to hundreds of thousands of years to not destroy their environments until all of a sudden that became their imperative. In numerous parts of the world during the last 10,000 years there have been plenty of humans living within their means until they were assimilated or eradicated into the culture that dominates and destroys.

People hopefully say, "at least we're becoming a space-faring society." As if we're really going to be able to outgrow this planet and move on and destroy another one. We're definitely an exploring species, and for that space is gratifying, but there is no indication that there will be another Earth to colonize anytime soon.

Re: environmentally conscious primitives. It is a myth that early/primitive societies didn't destroy their environments. Basically all recent (past 100k years) megafauna extinctions were driven by human migration. Plenty of fragile environments (eg Easter Island) were wrecked by early/primitive societies. The only thing that prevented previous generations from wrecking the environment the way we do now is the same thing that prevents chimps: lack of capability.

Re: space as the new frontier. I agree that resource net positive space exploitation is a long ways away. So long away that we might have critical resource/environmental catastrophe here on earth before space can bail us out. I am not super positive on human long term survival (heck, even 1000 more years; we're too dumb and have too many ways to kill ourselves), but if our descendants do live in a million years, I am fairly certain space exploitation will be part of the equation.

I'm not sure what your position is. That we're very smart? Smarter than the "primitives" who also destroyed their habitats? But definitely smarter than the humans who managed to live in their habitat for at least a hundred thousand years until our culture came along?

I can agree we are more capable than chimps, but only in the sense of being able to plan and make tools, that sort of thing. But chimps are adapted to their environment, at least until it gets upset by habitat loss or change.

By ET it’s not clear to me they mean beings but rather objects outside our solar system....

That said sure, when evidence suggests such rather than as the immediate hypothesis to grab it, given the odds.

The specific initialism used in the quote was "ETI," or extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Could even be a huge plant branching out into stellar orbit. Panspermia is a Von Neumann probe after all.

It's not anthropocentric to ignore the least likely possibility until presented with evidence to the contrary.

> And why not?

Occam's razor. Until now zero ET have been found, thus it has the same likelihood as being Santa Claus.

I don't think that's how probability works.

There are lots of things that are hypothesized, and later found to exist (sometimes after explicitly searching, sometimes not). Comparing to Santa Claus without taking into account things like laws of physics/magic/supernatural doesn't make a lot of sense.

Also, "zero ET" have been found because, although we are speaking of life, you have explicitly defined it as excluding the one example of life we know about, that on Earth. That seems a bit unfair. Given that we know of one example, hypothesizing another example isn't that extreme.

> I don't think that's how probability works.

It actually is. Currently the empirical distribution for the likelihood of ET sightings stands as a big ass step function that reaches 100% at zero sightings. It's exactly equal to the likelihood of seeing santa. There is no way around it.

> Comparing to Santa Claus without taking into account things like laws of physics/magic/supernatural

Your assertion is simply wrong. So far the odds you come across an ET is a big fat zero. That's because in reality zero ETs have been confirmed to exists. There is no way around it. You may argue that there might be theoretical models that suggest X or Y but reality does not lie and ETs are as frequent as flying spaghetti monsters and santa claus, thus it makes as much sense to pin the blame on santa claus and the flying spaghetti monsters as ETs.

That must be technically incorrect, because the theoretical amount of ETs is infinitely bigger than the theoretical amount of Santa Clauses (which his capped at 1) :^)

On the other hand, our best available information is that Santa Claus has a surprising ability to appear in many locations within a short period of time (at least on one night per year). Also, these are red and Santa Claus is red.

> Also, these are red and Santa Claus is red.

Rudolph's nose, most likely.

Yes, when Rudolph turns away from us the light goes out, and when he turns toward us, the light abruptly appears.

> because the theoretical amount of ETs

You're referring to a theoretical model which is not backed up by any empirical proof other than the fact that there is life on Earth.

Thus the model is yet to be validated, thus as far as we know it outputs nonsense.

Until then we only have empirical proof, and so far the count of proven alien contact is zero.

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