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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

It's obviously a Kardashev Type III[1] civilization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Or a weird lens effect. Gravitational lensing has a logarithmic effect doesn’t it? Theres the old joke about fitting a line to log scale data with a fat enough pen. These galaxies aren’t perfectly circular to each other.

I think the fact that the arc has a similar focus to the ring is going to turn out to be something.

This was my first thought also, and there's no mention of whether or not this possibility has been investigated.

Cool insight. Anyone with more knowledge care to weigh in? Some supermassive dark matter there? Also, on what timeframe might this change if so? Note to self to Google this topic in a year.

While I doubt that explanation will hold, it is true that cosmological distances are where we should be looking for ET civilizations, as at those distances one can avoid the Fermi argument (although such a discovery would be pretty firm evidence we'll never achieve FTL travel.)

I don't know, cosmological distances might be too early for biological life to form and evolve intelligence and expand across galaxies. My understanding is that there weren't necessarily enough of the basic chemicals of life formed until relatively recently. (Phosphorus particularly is a problem, I'm less sure about the others) And doing anything visible across light years also takes a long time, especially if FTL is impossible, which it almost certainly is.

That's all true, to some extent, but at least it's not ruled out by Fermi.

It's not just one galaxy. It's a ring of galaxies.

I'm reading Stephen Webb's book (If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY), and he describes how a partial Dyson sphere can turn a star into a spaceship which blew my mind (just cover all but one side, the released energy will push it the other direction). Imagine doing that at the Galactic scale.

>just cover all but one side, the released energy will push it the other direction

What is to stop the star from just crashing into the sphere?

In the book he discusses the shkadov thruster which reflects the energy so the shell would move, too.

Obviously if it's not reflective you could absorb the energy and use it as needed

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine

Type IV or V, more like.

Adjust some galaxies in the early timeline and changes would appear downstream as if they were always there. For affected lifeforms, these structures (e.g. a smiley face or whathaveyou) would appear upon waking in the present morning to the data, yet when the affected search their memories, the structure would have always been there.

Unlikely configurations could be interpreted as communication from beings more advanced than typically imagined, or as cosmic engineering projects, or perhaps more likely, the shape of the universe is just different than previously imagined.

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