[1] https://www.space.com/six-sub-neptunes-found-100-light-years...
In spite of the title no one is wondering if aliens moved planets around to park them in special orbits. It's infinitely more likely the resonances developed naturally.
Also, none of the planets are in the habitable zone, so it's unlikely there's life on them.
Which is a shame, because if the star was much dimmer and they were in the habitable zone, the views would make a stunning tourist attraction.
Why would somebody want to live on the arms of a clock??
Taken another way: Venus’ atmosphere would get more “tame” further out. That might make it more conducive to life. But would its atmosphere still form at those distances? (Clearly it’s not impossible.)
Maybe they built the system, and being lazy like we are they chose some simple numbers
> b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?
Alien intelligence may be less likely than a natural effect, but alien intelligence in this system is much more likely than in a random system.
So there are these great big buildings in Egypt...
Ok, I'll bite. Says who?
From the photos I have seen, the blocks look hand cut, not laser cut. I understand the blocks were cut with copper chisels and that archeologists found copper chisels in the quarries.
It is entirely believable that hundreds of men using ramps, ropes, grease and rollers could move these large blocks.
Moving planets out of existing orbit is another level. I can only imagine this is possible for a race who can plan multi million year projects and thus you can probably use rockets to do small gravitational slingshots each day and rely on some compounding effect.
I'm in school for digital design at the moment, and stuff like oscillators and frequency dividers are at the very base/root of almost all electronic circuits.
One guess could be that alignments of planets in specific ways could be used to generate specific impulses of gravitational waves, the way we generate signals in binary. Imagine an alien race who uses gravitational effects from orbiting bodies as the basic building block of their "mega processors" that are the size of galaxies. So one solar system that has a division cycle of "2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4" could be their representation of a value/"bit pattern" but written with planets in orbital mechanics, just like how we represent decimal 10 in binary 1010.
as an aside, it is very easy to also ask "why would humans spend so much energy taking silicate sand and turning it into intricate patterns at the size of angstroms and nano meters just to consume power? wouldn't it be easier to just let the sand organize itself into components as needed?" of course, the answer seems obvious to us, but the question is analogous to yours.
If one alien entity/organism is actually the size of a galaxy, a single solar system would be on the scale of maybe a transistor at 20-30 nm to us.
At that scale it's no longer performance art, but maybe a small part of a engine of some sort.
What I'm saying is thought patterns like "what is it for" "this is inefficient" or "that would be way too big" ... etc is only defined from our point of view.
You can fly something massive near a target planet, while using some kind of engine to keep a distance. Gravity will do the rest. It may take some time of course, but all you need is to do maintainance on an engine regularly.
> Like, wouldn't they be shooting a bunch of mass out of their system to even attempt this?
It depends on a type of an engine. If you use solar sail for example it is not the mass but light will be thrown out.
> one could build a Dyson sphere, is that more difficult or less difficult than engineering a system like this?
Sphere seems to me more difficult. Not in a sense of energies involved, but from a standpoint of engineering.
Could you please explain what you mean by this, as to my layman's ears that sounds like either a confusingly-worded sentence, or an impossibility (multiple planets in the same location at the same time). Do they just all pass through one specific same location once per orbit but at different times? Or something else I'm not imagining?
The researchers hypothesize that this is sufficiently improbable to point toward an embodied intelligence as the cause.
We used to think shells and flowers must have been made by gods because they have patterns.
[1] https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/DEAyqYXn7pfD7ZboApakhe-120...