Alien Structure or just rocks? I'm thinking rocks..

[YellowSubmarine]

False dilemma. Alien structure and rocks aren't necessarily different things.

We once used just bare rocks and stones and boulders for our structures, we may go back to those (and go back more than once) after we venture into space.

So it's just rocks. The aliens, on the other hand... I am clueless about the probability of alien life, of consciousness, and of the feasibility of megastructures. I literally have no idea how likely the expected end result is, so for all I know it might turn out to be the simplest explanation here. It doesn't feel like the simplest, so I am placing my bets it is not aliens, and I am publicly scratching my head at the suggestion. But I am privately imagining things.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Never mind the 70,000+ stars we've examined so far using KST, we've studied a lot of variable stars. The variability of this star isn't like any other that we know of and it's really hard to explain its behaviour. However, it's a Main Sequence class F star of about 1.5 solar masses so it's only 3 billion years old at most and it kicks out more UV than the Sun. If life exists there, it probably didn't evolve around it. I gather that there is a class M dwarf about 1000 AU distant but we don't know if it's gravitationally bound (implying a similar age) or if it's just passing through.

It would be so great if this were due to aliens but that's also a bit terrifying in a way if they can dismantle planets to harvest stellar energy. Let's hope they have a Prime Directive and don't just want our Gold/women/organs/water. They could have Justin Bieber though...

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

A lot of people would remain in denial...

Perhaps...


If this is a structure we are seeing it maybe 1500 years in the past if it is that many light years from Earth. Which begs the question what if in that timeframe they are on the way here?

We wouldn't even know ..

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

If you can capture a great deal of stellar energy, you can use that energy to generate antimatter (very inefficient), which could be used for propulsion or you could power a light sail as also suggested by Dyson.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...Ch3Umwdz#v=onepage&q=dyson light sail&f=false

Anyway, this might yet be a new type of variable star or systematic error. There is the R Coronae Borealis variable star class, whose light signatures can vary by several orders of magnitude at irregular intervals before recovering. KIC 8462852 isn't one of that class as they're carbon-enhanced extreme helium stars -- but perhaps it has weird metallicity that would cause photospheric obscuration.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Well if they're like the Espheni at least now we know they're dumb as a box of rocks and will kick their ass

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

An alien culture as imagined by second-rate hacks - I doubt it.

ETA: KIC 8462852's metallicity is the same as the Sun's within experimental error, so nothing obviously unusual there. http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03622

 

[RJDiogenes]

Even if KIC 8462852 harbours aliens, they're so far away that they might as well be rocks. If we could establish definitively that the phenomenon is artificially induced, which is a big if, perhaps the most useful impact it might have is to belittle our puny ambitions and achievements as a species.

Or inspire us with what we will then know is possible.

I personally do not believe in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life.

At all?

However, it's a Main Sequence class F star of about 1.5 solar masses so it's only 3 billion years old at most and it kicks out more UV than the Sun. If life exists there, it probably didn't evolve around it.

Why do you think that? I don't see any reason why it couldn't.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

However, it's a Main Sequence class F star of about 1.5 solar masses so it's only 3 billion years old at most and it kicks out more UV than the Sun. If life exists there, it probably didn't evolve around it.

Why do you think that? I don't see any reason why it couldn't.

You might be correct.

The general consensus until recently was that type F stars don't last long enough for multicellular life to evolve. The habitable zone is also blasted by high levels of UV that would dissociate complex molecules.

However, some think that the UV could actually help speed evolution by inducing a higher rate of mutation.

http://www.space.com/25716-alien-life-hotter-stars.html

So maybe we're slow developers. We can perhaps afford to be lazy because the Sun is going to last us a few billion years more...

ETA: The time spent in years on the Main Sequence by a star can be estimated as 10^10 * (Mstar/Msol)^-2.5 where Mstar and Msol are the masses of the star and the Sun.

Therefore, a star such as QA011570207GB with Mstar/Msol = 1.43 has an expected Main Sequence lifespan of 4 billion years. The estimate is valid for this example as the metallicities are believed to be identical within measurement error and core-surface energy transport is expected to be very similar based on well-established theory and computer modelling.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I personally do not believe in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life. If this was proven to be a Dyson's Sphere then that would definitely be pretty neat.

Isn't that a paradox? You can't have a dyson sphere without some kind of life to build it..

 

[Amaraen]

I personally do not believe in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life. If this was proven to be a Dyson's Sphere then that would definitely be pretty neat.

Isn't that a paradox? You can't have a dyson sphere without some kind of life to build it..

It would mean that I am wrong. I would consider myself sort of "agnostic" about extra-terrestrials. I don't believe they exist, but if it was truly proven I would not deny it.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I personally do not believe in the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligent life. If this was proven to be a Dyson's Sphere then that would definitely be pretty neat.

Isn't that a paradox? You can't have a dyson sphere without some kind of life to build it..

It would mean that I am wrong. I would consider myself sort of "agnostic" about extra-terrestrials. I don't believe they exist, but if it was truly proven I would not deny it.

Ah.......

That's actually a good way to look at it..

I'm on the fence. I want to believe but I want some kind of proof first..

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Given the size of the universe and the fact that we know that intelligent life is possible, the odds strongly favor other intelligent species, to put it mildly. I do, however, think that, while life is common, intelligence (of the technological sort) is rare. If there really is a Dyson Something only 1400 light years away, technological civilizations must be far more common than I would have thought.

However, it's a Main Sequence class F star of about 1.5 solar masses so it's only 3 billion years old at most and it kicks out more UV than the Sun. If life exists there, it probably didn't evolve around it.

Why do you think that? I don't see any reason why it couldn't.

You might be correct.

The general consensus until recently was that type F stars don't last long enough for multicellular life to evolve. The habitable zone is also blasted by high levels of UV that would dissociate complex molecules.

However, some think that the UV could actually help speed evolution by inducing a higher rate of mutation.

They're also not taking into account the range of possible environments. A super-Earth at the extreme limit of the habitable zone may have an atmosphere thick enough to filter the UV while while still being able to maintain liquid water. Or a terrestrial-sized moon of a brown dwarf farther out would receive reduced UV from the star while getting additional infrared from its primary. Or, as you say, life may simply be able to evolve in that environment.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

You are wise not to dismiss such possibilities, sir.

However, if we've examined 80,000 main sequence stars so far out of the total of 145,000 sampled by the KST, and actually found one megastructure, that implies that there might be as many as two and a half million such structures in a galaxy that contains roughly 200 billion similar stars. It's unlikely that we just happened to point the KST at the 0.25% of the sky that contains the only example. The number might be even higher as I'm assuming that a megastructure is much more likely than a planet to be observed transitting a star so orientation relative to us doesn't limit the number we can observer significantly.

So why do they never visit or phone (aka Fermi Paradox)? It makes me think the Great Filter might lurk out there rather than arise from within.

 

[Romo Lampkin]

I think technologically advanced life is very rare, consider the fact that humans are the only species to exist on this planet that have 'advanced' technology. This study would seem to disprove the existence of Dyson spheres

http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...izations-absent-from-100-000-nearby-galaxies/

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Or they're very good at degrading the heat signature until it looks like a black body at the CMB temperature of 2.7K or they shunt the IR photons into a black hole, which re-emits the energy eventually as Hawking radiation. Don't want to attract the Beserker AIs after all...

The fact that the research mentioned in the SciAm article was funded by the Templeton Foundation makes me somewhat suspicious.

 

[RJDiogenes]

However, if we've examined 80,000 main sequence stars so far out of the total of 145,000 sampled by the KST, and actually found one megastructure, that implies that there might be as many as two and a half million such structures in a galaxy that contains roughly 200 billion similar stars. It's unlikely that we just happened to point the KST at the 0.25% of the sky that contains the only example.

Exactly. My own feeling (which is based on extrapolating from one example of a living planet, so subject to revision) is that the vast majority of life-bearing planets have only single-celled life forms. And that only a tiny minority of worlds with multicellular life have technological civilizations. So a nearby Dyson Whatever would contradict that.

Of course, it may simply be Dyson-Class Objects that are rare. After all, building something like that would likely require dismantling the planets in the system and perhaps most intelligent life is too sentimental for that. There's no way that would happen here, that's for sure. So perhaps we're looking at evidence of "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic." Those shadows may be giant hives.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Hives -- so I expect there will be plenty of honey still available for tea.

Perhaps only machine, reptile, or insect intelligences would build on such a grandiose scale. All us touchy-feely, emotional mammals would get too bogged down in congressional hearings to even get started. Don't know about the amphibians and birds, or other miscellaneous, unknown clades...

I'm itching to see new data on this phenomenon. It'd be cool if it were something as extraordinary as a megastructure but I suspect it's going to be turn out to have a mundane explanation.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Hives -- so I expect there will be plenty of honey still available for tea.

Perhaps only machine, reptile, or insect intelligences would build on such a grandiose scale. All us touchy-feely, emotional mammals would get too bogged down in congressional hearings to even get started. Don't know about the amphibians and birds, or other miscellaneous, unknown clades...

I'm itching to see new data on this phenomenon. It'd be cool if it were something as extraordinary as a megastructure but I suspect it's going to be turn out to have a mundane explanation.

Run for the hills it's the Xindi

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Watch out, Florida. We just need to blow up their spheres and we'll never hear about them again.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Watch out, Florida. We just need to blow up their spheres and we'll never hear about them again.

Maybe they would like living in Florida, after all it's hot and humid there isn't it? They like that.