Cosmic radio burst finally seen in real time
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
How did they know to point the telescope in the right direction?
If these bursts last for a significant amount of time do they have an alert system set up monitoring for the event and then kick the telescope into gear? They were able to get other telescopes to observe the area of the burst, but it seems like they were too late, as they didn't even observe an after glow from the burst. This suggests the bursts do not last for any reasonably long amount of time.
Maybe they were just lucky? Normally the telescope's use is highly contested for so it would be quite serendipitous if they happened to observe the burst by chance.
Here's a paper that goes into that estimate in much more detail: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.447.2852K
2) If elsewhere = several thousand to million+ years closer to the bigbang than Earth, then implies civilization is aprox that much older/more advanced than us.
3) If we went from horse and buggy to travelling at 20,000 km/h in space in the course of 3 centuries, to say nothing of discovering Newtonian theory all the way to quantum mechanics, then it is plausible they have even far more advanced theories (of everything?), if they are a mere few hundred years more advanced than us, nevermind if they are 10,000 or 1 million+ more years more advanced.
4) Anything after 500 years would look like magic to us. It is thus not impossible (though yes it is impossible by our incomplete quantum theories today), that they have managed to not only figure out how to travel across however many hundreds or thousands of light-years to us, but also that they've managed to figure out time-travel, whether physically or "read-only", only.
5) Once "4)" is a reality, at least half the thousands of UFOlogy "crazy" reports becomes plausible if not some variant of truth/reality (i.e. ancient aliens, space craft that appear out of nowhere, craft that can travel 10,000 miles/hour then do a 90 degree right turn, human abductions for genetic experiments/ ongoing species hybridization, etc ).
In other words, humanity may have been created/started by intelligent design (or not - perhaps we really did start from monkeys) and then continued on its own via Darwinian evolution and/or accelerated along the way by our alien overlords. In either case, intelligent design (or "alteration" if only half way through) thus becomes possible
As the saying goes: "If you're one step ahead, you're a genius! If you're two steps ahead, you're insane!"
PS. Queue the downvoting...
I used those words because i could think of no other way to say it and seem like i was not trolling. Alien technology? Super beings making stop lights out of cosmic phenomena? The ripples from the horrible atrocities committed in the Gear Wars?
In truth, i do not think it is anything so special as that, but what i think is irrelevant. What is relevant is that using the data gathered as well as the data already held 'we' should be able to eliminate a few possibilities. To reiterate, i have no idea how one or ones would go about this process of elimination; i was just wondering if there was a simple fact or basic set of facts that would negate the possibility of the phenomenon being designed by an intelligent creature or creatures.
So i guess that leads me to the next level of questioning. What known cosmic events need to be ruled out before intelligence behind the event gets on the list of probabilities, say somewhere in the top 20?
What kind of predictive power does intelligent design have in regards to the pulse?
What does intelligent design have to say at all, in regards to very high energy cosmic ray bursts?
Was the crux of your question regarding the statement, "Their source is a mystery," which you took as "scientists don't know something," thus intelligent design?
God needs no proof; absolutes are the authors of their own demise.
Asking what can or could be, is useless unless it leads to something that connected to something that is.
Saying something needs no proof(and by that I simply mean a substantial amount of supporting evidence coinciding with a decided lack of evidence to the contrary) is the ultimate intellectual cop-out, although it is one that I understand.
An idea, concept, person or thing which "needs no proof" is in every way identical to an infinite amount of things that could be, but that which we do not know to exist/be true.
I can look around at the world and come to the rather well supported conclusion that gravity exists, even though gravity is invisible because gravity interacts with the world around us in a predictable and consistent manner. But what if I want to make a conclusion of what kind art a hypothetical alien living in a distance galaxy would make, I would be very unlikely to be correct.
Put another way, let's say there is a finite of things-that-exists, and an infinite amount of things-that-do-not-exist. Let's say you put a white marble in a great big infinite pot for each thing-that-exists, and a black marble in it for each thing-that-does-not-exist, then pick a single marble. What are the chances of getting a white marble? Infinitesimally small. Coincidentally, this is the same chance some thing which "needs no proof" being true.
Getting back to the original point, and sorry for the detour, but I must ask again, why do you think this cosmic ray burst says anything about the possibility of intelligent beings? Gamma Ray Bursts hit earth every day, and a great deal of them are well explained by science, it's just that if science finds something not well explained by current theories, it can't just make something up, it has to say, "I do not know why this thing is, but I will do my best to find an explanation." Of course, scientists are people too and do bad things like make up stuff, but they are very often exposed because made of stuff is very difficult to reproduce(read: impossible).
I guess my question came from ignorance then. I did not realize just how common these bursts are. I guess my imagination jumped in when i read the article. i saw a bunch of science types from a different part of the Bubble figure out that it would be more efficient to launch starbombs at a collapsing neutron star to create a binary calling card then seeding their galactic region with crafted objects. I love to tell stories, but i try to ground them in truth when i can. So i wanted to ask at what point does intended and controlled cosmic event start turning from a black marble into a white one [excellent concept delivery by the way]?
Edit 01: Artificial bugs me. Who are we to draw a line between artificial and natural? It may seem unlikely, but everything we know of as 'natural' may just be really well crafted machines that were made to iterate on their own. That is why i shied away from 'artificial' or 'alien'. With the possibility of simulated universes, i feel like there is a lot more possibility on the table as it were.
Interesting numbers like pi and the golden ratio occur so often in nature that we would incorporate them into a naturalistic explanation rather than supposing they had an intelligent origin. And there are probably still many fundamental numbers/relationships that we haven't discovered yet, so they would look like noise (as would the digits of pi if we weren't already familiar with it). Broadcasting fundamental constants wouldn't work. Likewise if they were to broadcast more complex information such as their genetic sequence. However, someone on Earth might eventually recognize a signal containing a human genetic sequence.
That sort of leads up to a vague theory I have about communication: There is no way to encode information that guarantees an arbitrary intelligent being, no matter how smart, would be able to interpret it. We will have to develop a common language over time through deliberate interaction and feedback.
http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-...