Meh. Probably like the guy with canals on Mars, but less Italian.
Yeah, I'm in the "if you look at enough star systems, eventually you'll see one going through something weird and transient" boat.
(The fact that we've looked at enough star systems to see one of them go through something weird and transient is still pretty amazing.)
It's true, my leading diagnostic for whether someone sounds non-crazy is whether they have well-defined expectations for what alien civilizations will or will not do.
Well, we know they'll have record players, and be fond of Jodie Foster. But that's hard to measure!
Mine is that they don't start sentences with "Sure he's arrogant, but you have to admit Trump has a lot of good ideas."
"Sure we have a bunch of different possible explanations given what we've already observed of the universe, but all of them would mean that something unlikely had happened," say the scientists about the feature of the one star in billions they have observed it in, "so we think it could totally be something we've never seen even the slightest evidence of before but really really wish was there!"
Strictly as a plot point for the 21st century, it would be really good to discover aliens.
I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.
I like stories like this. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence continues, and the likelihood of detecting it becomes exponentially higher with new technology. If the astronomers are actually going to recognize it when they see it, they have to be looking for clues. Seth Shostak wrote a good book about it recently.
I hope to know before I go. The idea that there isn't any other intelligent life in the universe is the WORST IDEA EVER, cause it means a really evil God.
I vote aliens. Aliens is so much cooler than not aliens.
And maybe now people will stop bitching about that stupid Fermi paradox.
I mean, what are the chances this is another "Gravity Waves! Whoops, dust on the lens...." scenario? Slim to none, I say.
That wasn't gravity waves, that was faster-than-light particles, I think.
No, the faster than light thing was because the Swatch they were using to keep time was wound too tight, and so it was running too fast. Except it probably wasn't a Swatch, but like an atomic clock or something.
Although, I am reminded: Warp Drive was invented earlier this year. Maybe we could use that to go visit the aliens.
15 System works by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container.
The burrito drive.
1: the guy with canals on Mars was Percival Lowell, you racist. Schiaparelli said he thought he could see "canali" which just means "channels" - no implication of their being artificial - and Lowell mistranslated him and got totally carried away.
I am kind of inclined to 2 because the thing about vast alien megastructures is that you shouldn't be finding just one of them, any more than you should stumble across a lost city consisting of one building. There should be some round nearby stars too. Though they might have been destroyed during the War against the Precursors.
20: I thought stars were normally round. Wait, are all stars ancient alien megastructure?! Mind blown.
They're generally round but sort of spiky in places.
And I'm glad to see ajay noting the responsibility of Lowell for the "canals on Mars" stuff so I didn't have to. He was totally wrong, of course, but he did put Flagstaff on the map. Also, Pluto.
In other geographic parochialism, I was glad to see that the VLA is being used to evaluate the alien hypothesis in the OP.
I mean, Schiaparelli was wrong too, but he didn't get carried away, being a stoic, level headed Italian, not like these excitable Boston Brahmins.
TBH, given a choice of Ringworld (which is what the article appears to be hinting at) vs. Not Ringworld, I would go with Not Ringworld every time. Niven could spin a good yarn, but nothing about his world building ever struck me as remotely plausible.
Well, you can't build Ringworld, if I remember, because the required tensile strength is greater than the strength of the interatomic bond, so it is literally impossible to build something that big spinning that fast. What they're suggesting is more like a partial Dyson sphere - a swarm of collection structures occluding a significant percentage of the sun's output, implying a civilisation between level one and level two on what I heard described once as the Kardashian scale.
I thought stars were normally round.
They're cylindrical. It's just we're seeing them all end-on.
I am kind of inclined to 2 because the thing about vast alien megastructures is that you shouldn't be finding just one of them, any more than you should stumble across a lost city consisting of one building.
It's like you haven't even read Excession.
Everyone goes straight to advanced alien intelligences but just as likely it's giant space moths.
I vote for natural causes because weird natural stuff is common as dirt. This is just the Hallucigenia of star systems.
I'm as certain as a non-crazy person can be that the universe teems with life, I just think intelligent life is rare and intelligent life capable of being detected across light years is rarer still. IOW the last few coefficients in the Drake equation are really tiny.
Well, one out of several million stars _is_ pretty rare.
I keep forgetting this is still a thing. I have incontrovertible proof of intelligent life in other solar systems, but I never find the time to write it up.
34: If only we didn't provide Moby with so many opportunities to make puns and other witticisms!
34: now, Moby, we all agreed that there are several very convincing models of how urple could have evolved in a terrestrial environment.
I am kind of inclined to 2 because the thing about vast alien megastructures is that you shouldn't be finding just one of them, any more than you should stumble across a lost city consisting of one building.
This is a common misconception, the idea that we should be finding a bunch of aliens all at once instead of a single signal. We are only looking in a tiny subset of the universe at any one time, and we are constantly shifting our focus from one spot to another spot to another spot.
5: That's alien, all right, Moby. It's just not civilised.
16: the burrito drive's already been invented
TBH, given a choice of Ringworld (which is what the article appears to be hinting at) vs. Not Ringworld, I would go with Not Ringworld every time.
Agreed. Ferris Bueller's Day Off is way better than Sixteen Candles.
This is just the Hallucigenia of star systems.
Hooray, +1 for mentioning my dear friends from the Cambrian explosion.
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Sorry to bust this up with a job hunting bleg, but: a family member is updating her resume and lists "social media" (+ some verb or whatever) as a capability, followed by a list of platforms. Will someone looking at this resume immediately try to pull up her FB, Twitter etc. profiles? She doesn't have any personal accounts except FB; she's done all this on behalf of organizations. Is it going to seem dubious to claim these skills if she doesn't have a carefully curated social media brand? I imagine reactions will vary among hiring organizations, but still. My gut feeling is that if you claim to be a social media [word expressing mastery, ninjutsu, etc.] you will be expected to back it up. She is legitimately busy as fuck and doesn't have time for personal tweets, so I hope I'm wrong that this could cost her. Thanks a lot for any input.
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42||: Can she point to any org feeds for which she's been responsible? I understand your concern, but IMO as long as she's not being hired primarily for social media presence, all you need to demonstrate is acuity, not mastery.
Everyone should set their personal social media to private before going on the job market, even if one claims expertise in social media. If one has experience as social media creator for an organization, list the organization's page or hashtag or whatever on the resume so people look up the legitimate work-related experience ("managed twitter feed for political advocacy organization 2010-2015. #NAMBLA").
Thanks. That's reassuring and seems sensible. She is definitely savvy enough to control settings on personal FB and so on.
20, 38 - Also, it's entirely possible that a civilization with enough energy etc. to totally rebuild its solar system from the ground up might still not be able to travel between stars in any meaningful fashion.
46: it would take a hell of a lot more energy to disassemble a solar system. I mean, interstellar travel is imaginable for us now in theory. Megaton class Orion ships plus generational ecosystem. Impractical maybe but at least conceivable. I can't even imagine the sort of technology you would need for a Dyson sphere.
It's just a big metal sphere. We can make a metal sphere, it's just a question of scaling up.
I hope you've sent your resume in to Bernie for head of NASA.
For unrelated reasons, I'm updating my resume as we speak.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise, which is basically just scaled-up bottle rocket.
I'm much more impressed with myself now that I've read my resume. I should do this more often.
Self-replicating probes are also conceivable with modest technological progress, and then you can rapidly explore the entire galaxy.
I can't even imagine the sort of technology you would need for a Dyson sphere.
I don't know, they seem pretty high tech, but not exactly unfathomable.
I sort of planned on living the rest of my life in this city, not because it's great but because moving is such a shitty thing. It turns out that an alarmingly small number of dollars per hour is more attractive than death.
59 is a slightly alarming career choice to have to make.
Hallucigenia of star systems
I suspect that this analogy (sorry) will hold even to the point that further investigation of Hallucigenia showed that it was a lot less weird than it appeared at first sight.
It's just a big metal sphere. We can make a metal sphere, it's just a question of scaling up.
Well, it's not just a metal sphere. Inherent in the concept is that the energy is captured and put to use, so presumably it needs pretty sophisticated and logistically complex electricity (or whatever) generation and transmission tech.
Thank you for pointing out the tiny flaw in my otherwise sound plan to encircle an entire star with metal.
Not for certain. Probably not even more likely than not. Just pondering.
are you deburghing?
Sounds either painful or gross.
66: I sincerely hope whatever happens you land on your feet.
67: it's the leading cause of the transmission of Primantis.
Have you no sympathy for my poor ankle.
A "Dyson sphere" not only wouldn't, but can't, be an actual solid spherical shell. The reason is that there's no net gravitational force on a solid spherical shell from any object inside the shell, so the sphere wouldn't stay in place and would smash into your planet. Lots of smaller objects works much much better.
would smash into your planet
You mean into the sun? I thought the planets had probably all been disassembled into materials for the sphere.
Thing should be called a Stapledon sphere, anyway.
I think you just run a couple of sticks between the sphere and the sun to keep it locked.
The Dyson Sphere is the awesomest vacuum cleaner ever! No more space junk!
71: At first I wasn't convinced, but then I started thinking about it--I thought sufficiently fast rotation would ameliorate it, essentially simulating an orbit for each point on the surface. But the strength maintaining the spherical (or ring-like, for that mater) shape would pull the points on the sphere/ring out of their orbit, so it could be fixed by making it flexible enough to deform a bit. And take that to the limit and you're back to a Dyson swarm. Cool.
I think us doing this research now is really just a favor to the engineers of the 28th century, for when they have to explain to the autocratic ruler of the earth that we've long known that their white elephant prestige project isn't going to work.
63.--Yesterday I reread the Wikipedia article on Dyson Sphere about four times before realizing that the question of harvesting the energy from the collectors was left as an exercise for the reader.
I think at this point in history there's enough data on human nature that we can safely say that different engineers would be using it to explain to journalists how the engineers who built it for the autocratic ruler should have known it would end in catastrophe.
76: Spinning doesn't work but not because deformation; there is still no net force on the sun. The interior gravitational potential due to the sphere is constant.
Why do you need net force on the sun? Can't it just orbit whatever the sun is orbiting (galactic center or whatever)?
Maybe you could stabilize the sphere by interacting with the solar wind, or steer it by changing the reflectivity of parts of its interior.
Or poke at the sun with a giant stick.
White elephant projects CAN work, if these nerds would just work a little harder.
You have to think like the commies did when building canals. The actual movement of goods by water is a secondary aim.
79: I don't think we're disagreeing. I was saying that deformation--relaxing the sphericity requirement--is the solution, not the problem. And it really only solves it when you completely relax that requirement.
That's what pissed me off about the whole "bridge to nowhere" thing. Bridges to nowhere are exactly what we SHOULD be building! What's the use of having the rich world's largest incarcerated population if we can't get some monumental architecture out of it? Why do we need anyone, anywhere to be unemployed when they could be building sky-elevators or giant triumphal arches in our major cities?
74: Seriously, you're a cinch for this NASA job.
83: Halfordismo is ready to hit the ground running.
Building a Dyson sphere with prison labor would be like if the USSR tried to launch Sputnik by having gulag inmates stand atop each others' shoulders until the top one is in space. It requires much more energy than the state (even assuming a very huge future state) can extract from regular humans.
Or alternatively, really everyone needs to be available to be prison labor. I guess you do need people to put together the individual components and mine Neptune for methane or whatever. Probably faster and cheaper with Von Neumann machines, though.
WRONG. Say what you will about Stalinist prison labor, but it could do things like create the world's best-named road, the Road of Bones. I'm sure we could "incentivize" the subscriber list of Reason Magazine properly to build the space-dome you guys are talking about.
You'd run out of libertarians. Feature not a bug, I suppose.
Speaking of Dyson, apparently he's a climate change...nihilist? "Truther" and "denialist" aren't quite right.
I'm just surprised to learn that Dyson's still alive. (Maddeningly autocorect kept wanting to change the "s" after the apostrophe with an "a". What is that even?)
Do you often write Arrakisian on your phone while still technically in English mode? That might be throwing off what it expects comes after an apostrophe.
I knew that about Dyson. But honestly, why should it be surprising that someone like Dyson thinks that the best way to deal with climate change is planet-sized engineering projects? I mean he is the Dyson sphere guy. I also think that a certain amount of pessimism that it's too late to do anything on the emissions side anyway is pretty reasonable, the weird thing about Dyson is his optimism that we'll be able to deal with it in other ways. (Presumably he doesn't really care if 100 million people's lives are ruined in Bangladesh, so long as we eventually colonize the solar system. So there's an (a)moral aspect to his point of view as well.)
96 Not that much but that could be it. I also bought my phone here and there are these regional specific things.
Do you often write Arrakisian
Chakobsa!
the question of harvesting the energy from the collectors was left as an exercise for the reader.
You could probably just plant kudzu, and hack it down with giant space-mowers from time to time. Then, I don't know, turn it into ethanol?
97: You're going too easy on Dyson. Like a number of other important people in Princeton, he thinks he's just so much smarter than climate scientists that random pronouncements he pulls out of his ass are more accurate than their published papers. There's no excuse for this kind of arrogant dismissal of real science, especially when the stakes are so high.
