Alien Megastructure

Well, whatever the reasons for the odd fluctuations in that star's output, they're likely to be interesting ones.

Personally, I was a little surprised by this part:

WaPo said:

Boyajian, Wright and Andrew Siemion, the director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, are now working on getting access to the massive radio dishes they can point at the star in search of the kinds of radio waves usually emitted by technology.

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Our own tech progression seems to be away from big beacons of broadcast, and towards wired (think cable TV, fiber Internet) and more range-limited / point-to-point broadcasts (think cellphones, wide-area WiFi, microwave line-of-sight links) and sophisticated frequency-hopping stuff that probably looks like noise without a lot of study and maybe knowledge of the protocols used.

If this really is a culture that's built a Dyson-esque structure around its sun, I'd expect them to be advanced enough that their transmissions aren't likely to be all that obvious to us using radio telescopes? Point-to-point X-ray masers? Neutrinos? Quantum-entangled "magic"?

Or am I being too pessimistic or naive here?

They might not be intending to look for information transmission. A lot of technology generates radio waves as a by-product. Electric motors, for instance, can be pretty noisy if not properly shielded.

http://time.com/4074957/flickering-star-aliens/?xid=fbshare
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/
This is the actual paper (I have not yet read it)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf


I got the impression that there might be two or more collections of mass on a similar orbit. One collection appears to be a large object, and the other one appears to be a collection of small objects. I think that the idea of it being an artificial construction was easier for some people t
han saying that they didn't know what it was.

The authors of the paper seem to think it most likely that there was a collision between two planets, similar to what is thought to have created the Moon, or something like that.

Maxx said:

Things other than Alien Megastructures do seem more likely -- after all we've never seen any alien Megastructures (unless this is one or two). It's also interesting to see what the first hint of real possible aliens might be like.

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Yes, and there is a small chance that it is an alien structure.

Whoa. Slim chance but imagine if something like this was verified, irrefutably, and how it would affect our cultural psyche.

Not only knowing we were not alone, but what our galactic competitors could do.

The appetite for space, and it's economics could change over night.

WriterDude said:

Whoa. Slim chance but imagine if something like this was verified, irrefutably, and how it would affect our cultural psyche.

Not only knowing we were not alone, but what our galactic competitors could do.

The appetite for space, and it's economics could change over night.

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If it were found to be an actual alien structure, then it might have some effect on those people who believe that there are only humans for intelligence animals in the universe. There are many people who think that we are just one of many intelligent animals, and the star is about 1500 light years away, so it would be a matter of interest, but not fundamentally important for this segment of the population. I will be impressed when Klaatu lands on the WHithe House lawn, not before.

But the market for Space Opera would skyrocket.

Introversion said:

If this really is a culture that's built a Dyson-esque structure around its sun, I'd expect them to be advanced enough that their transmissions aren't likely to be all that obvious to us using radio telescopes? Point-to-point X-ray masers? Neutrinos? Quantum-entangled "magic"?

Or am I being too pessimistic or naive here?

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I've wondered the same thing. The odds of "catching" the transmissions of a civilization that left their planet during the 100 year or so period in their long history when radios might be used seems very, very long. It's one answer to the Fermi paradox.

Another is that civilizations tend to destroy themselves and revert to low tech (or go extinct entirely) once they get to a certain technology level, and again, the odds of catching the transmissions of a great alien civilization when they're at their peak is pretty small.

Given the age of the universe, the odds of overlap between our civilization and another would be very small, even if they did last thousands of years. And if a 20th-21st level "high tech" civilization phase only lasts, say, 2-3 centuries before species blow themselves back to the stone age (or worse), then what are the odds of us ever finding the transmissions of one?

Another intelligence out there would be soooo cool and way beyond the dream of anything I've hoped to see in my lifetime. I'd be ecstatic over a simple spectrum analysis that detects free O2 in the atmosphere of one of the planets out there, because that would mean photosynthesis of some kind exists, which means life. But if we detected signs of an advanced civilization that survived long enough to build sun-dimming structures in space, well, that would be huge beyond belief. It would be a sign that it is maybe possible to surmount the challenges we're facing right now as a species.

Roxxsmom said:

Another is that civilizations tend to destroy themselves and revert to low tech (or go extinct entirely) once they get to a certain technology level, and again, the odds of catching the transmissions of a great alien civilization when they're at their peak is pretty small.

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Well, we don't know that. Humanity has had some close calls, but having avoided them, we're tending--as a species, not as individual nations--to continually improve and reach greater heights. We still face the issue of not poisoning our own petri dish, i.e. wrecking the planet's ecosystem, but that is potentially something we might figure out a way to avoid too.

Also, humans are social animals but we aren't perfectly social animals, and some of our assumptions about how alien life would behave is based on what's common on Earth and common for us. It's possible the aliens are better social animals, and the problems of violence and competition that we have don't exist with them.

Roxxsmom said:

It would be a sign that it is maybe possible to surmount the challenges we're facing right now as a species.

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I'd be relieved, too, that stupidity is not an insurmountable force in the Universe.

jjdebenedictis said:

Well, we don't know that. Humanity has had some close calls, but having avoided them, we're tending--as a species, not as individual nations--to continually improve and reach greater heights. We still face the issue of not poisoning our own petri dish, i.e. wrecking the planet's ecosystem, but that is potentially something we might figure out a way to avoid too.

Also, humans are social animals but we aren't perfectly social animals, and some of our assumptions about how alien life would behave is based on what's common on Earth and common for us. It's possible the aliens are better social animals, and the problems of violence and competition that we have don't exist with them.

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Also, they might not have radios. The most we can assume from what we saw is that they have Dyson spheres, and that's a very theoretical design to begin with - we don't even have those, and we actually have been proven to think them up. I find that assumption rather amusing - not that it might be an alien superstructure, but that it would be that alien superstucture. The more specific the assumption, the more unlikely it becomes.

We still don't know enough about what's normal or expectable in solar systems - after all, we only know one of them to some detail. Those things out there could be anything - somebody suggested ice formations. Most of the other theories sound more likely than an alien superstructure because we've seen them work in principle. (We've also seen one example of a space-traveling civilisation, but while that does affect its probability, I'm still going with Some Geological Formation.) Whatever it is though, it can't hurt to take another long, intense look, even if it's just to rule out the alien superstructure theory. Whatever it is, we're sure to learn something worthwile from it.

Maxx said:

I agree. If some aliens have had megastructures for quite a while and we can somehow verify that there are Alien mega structures out there (perhaps acting as a giant semaphore saying Hello in some alien lingua franca), that would be pretty interesting, but things would get much, much more interesting if we found some kind of infocube or adapter assortment drifting around over Mars or something.

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For reasons of safety I doubt that any alien culture is flashing any sort of greeting. Dyson spheres, if they can be made habitable with gravity generators on the outside, then they would wall in communications and effectively hide the culture from the rest of the universe, and that might their greatest advantage. Putting something on Mars or some similar location would be as much notice of my world's existence as I would want to give. Earthlings might be regarded as food or as too dangerous.

One thing the presence of alien mega structures dotted about the galaxy might tell us, is that it's easier to engineer a star system than it is to move to another. Interstellar travel might be too difficult for everyone, regardless of technological advancement.

If there are any out there.

Alas.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/34926314/nasa-may-have-solved-the-alien-superstructure-mystery

Well, we knew that was coming. The fun is in the conjecture, but eventually Occam's razor comes along to cut the party short.

Well, the strange star in question may not have variable brightness due an alien megastructure, but apparently it's unlikely to be caused by a swarm of comets either.

Star’s bizarre optical antics go back at least a century

Ars Technica said:

For over a century, a star's bizarre behavior has been hiding in plain sight. Now, after unusual fluctuations in its light were spotted in the Kepler data, a researcher has gone back and looked at old photographic plates and found that its behavior has been unusual since some of the earliest images. The new findings make any mundane explanations for the star's erratic behavior even less likely.

...

That's not something that this type of star normally does. Schaefer reasons that if one star displays both strange behavior in the short term and strange behavior on the scale of centuries, there's probably a single cause. So, he analyzed some of the leading explanations for the star's short-term behavior to see how they could account for the century-scale dimming.

In general, they can't. Things like comets and dust clouds would require a prodigious source of new material in order to slowly dim the star over these time scales. For what it's worth, the idea of aliens building a Dyson sphere around the star would face the same trouble—the aliens would have to be adding to the structure at an astonishing pace.

So, the mystery of KIC8462852 has gotten a bit deeper. It will undoubtedly get more telescope time in the upcoming years, including at wavelengths not imaged by Kepler. But, at 1,480 light years away, there's not much we can do other than watch closely for the time being.

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