[GregT]

So there might actually be an intelligent species somewhere in our universe. Great news! I'd pretty much given up all hope.

[SeaGypsy]

I think your 200 year science conversation is off by at least a factor of 10. If you don't think making & perfecting glass requires science, you are deluded & the Egyptians spent nearly 2000 years before Christ working out the details before Romans invented the Iron blowpipe around 50 AD. Have a gander at the 'Portland Vase'. Science is a great long conversation, as prone as any other to cultural bias.
I prefer to take the quantum position on these matters with a wee pinch of organic sea salt. The fatalists are both right & wrong depending on your view of the unknowable total- they want to keep their view, their language, their power structure etc so they call it inevitable- ie. The MIC is a natural & unavoidable affect of intelligence- they are fucking idiots & they can fuck off & live on KJs feigging doughnut- dick heads.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Keith_McClary', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'I')'d like to hear more exact detail about the transits.
...
The articles posted on this are bit light on detail and explanation, but if I'm understanding it right aren't they saying they looked at the star for 4 years and then NOW these things show up? So that wouldn't be a planet. It's something that just went into orbit around that star (new alien construction, or traveling aliens). Unless it's got a 4 year orbit, but that's not possible, nothing so far out to have a 4 year orbit could be blocking its star by 22%!

[Newfie]

MODS, ANY CHANCE YOU COULD MERGE THE TWO THREADS?

[ sjn - done ]

[Gsearch]

I think interstellar and interplanetary travel will be much easier and simpler than we think. It's a risky endeavor, and we all know how the more complex something is, the weaker, more inferior, more likely to fail it is. If your machine breaks down you're basically dead.

It will probably have something to do with electromagnetism induced gravity and perhaps harnessing cosmic radiation and converting it directly to energy. It's probably very, very simple and easy to make. There have been too many reliable eyewitness sightings of UFOs all around the world for some governments, probably Nazi Germany, USA and Soviet Union not to have had them.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Apneaman', 'O')nly 1500 light years away?


light year
noun ASTRONOMY
a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 1012 km (nearly 6 trillion miles).

If they somehow managed to survive their technological infancy, they might be aware of us. I saw a picture the other day of light from a galaxy from 13 billion years ago and were still in diapers. Imagine if a highly technological species had been that way for a million years? I bet they could beam us solutions but they hate Ferengies, so were on our own.

[Cid_Yama]

It could have been something passing closer to us, between us and the star system. It didn't have to be in that star system, meaning it didn't have to be that large.

If it happens again, first guess would be something in our system, like an undiscovered planet or large asteroid.

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', 'I')t could have been something passing closer to us, between us and the star system. It didn't have to be in that star system, meaning it didn't have to be that large.

If it happens again, first guess would be something in our system, like an undiscovered planet or large asteroid.

[Sixstrings]

There's a chance it could be some previously unknown phenomenon, like how when pulsars were first discovered. If it were a dyson shell, like the pic below, that would block the light in "complex" and strange patterns:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')RE THOSE REALLY ALIEN MEGASTRUCTURES? HOW ASTRONOMERS PLAN TO INVESTIGATE
THERE'S SOMETHING WEIRD HAPPENING AROUND A FARAWAY STAR.


Illustration of a Dyson Shell

Siemion and his colleagues Jason Wright and Tabetha Boyajian think there's a chance that a structure like that could be blocking the light from KIC 8462852. And it wouldn't necessarily have to be solar panels either, says Wright. If there's a structure there, it could be a telescope or some sort of habitation.

To test their hypothesis, the team hopes to listen for the tell-tale signs of life around KIC 8462852. They've applied for time on the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. They'll be competing with other scientists who want to use the giant telescope to answer other research questions. If their application is selected, next year the team will point the telescope's 100-meter dish toward KIC 8462852 and scan the radio signals emitting from that region.

“If we heard narrow-band modulated radio emissions coming from that star, I can't imagine any other explanation,” says Wright, an astronomer at Penn State. No known natural phenomenon creates a radio signature like that.

...

Jon Jenkins from the Kepler team says he's never seen anything like what's happening at KIC 8462852, but "it’s not unusual for new phenomena to be greeted with an explanation calling for extraterrestrials that later prove to be due to more mundane but novel natural phenomena."
Siemion himself points out that when the first pulsar was discovered in 1961, it was given the designation LGM-1, for “little green men.” Like lighthouses of the universe, these rotating stars emit radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation at regular intervals.
http://www.popsci.com/alien-megastructures-how-astronomers-plan-to-investigate

[Cog]

Perhaps there is a forum there called Peak Dyson Sphere, where people have argued for millions of years about the damaging effects of the sphere and how it would have been better to never have built it.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'P')erhaps there is a forum there called Peak Dyson Sphere, where people have argued for millions of years about the damaging effects of the sphere and how it would have been better to never have built it.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cid_Yama', 'I')t could have been something passing closer to us, between us and the star system. It didn't have to be in that star system, meaning it didn't have to be that large.

If it happens again, first guess would be something in our system, like an undiscovered planet or large asteroid.

[Plantagenet]

Perhaps we can learn something from Kepler's apparent discovery of a technologically advanced alien artifact.

If aliens successfully built a Dyson sphere to capture solar energy and power their civilization, perhaps we should be thinking seriously about doing the same thing.


The solution to peak oil?

[Cog]

I'm having difficulty understanding how a Dyson sphere has gravity except if it rotates on its axis and that would only be at the equator of the rotation. And what about a breathable atmosphere? Wouldn't that breathable atmosphere burn up when it contacted the star? Wouldn't a race capable of creating a sphere that large just create new planets that circle the star at a habitable distance?

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'W')ouldn't a race capable of creating a sphere that large just create new planets that circle the star at a habitable distance?

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Cog', 'I')'m having difficulty understanding how a Dyson sphere has gravity except if it rotates on its axis and that would only be at the equator of the rotation. And what about a breathable atmosphere? Wouldn't that breathable atmosphere burn up when it contacted the star? Wouldn't a race capable of creating a sphere that large just create new planets that circle the star at a habitable distance?

[Cog]

From the article, this array would be larger than Jupiter. Just how much energy do these energy hog aliens have to use on their planet? Do they run their air conditioners all the time? They sound just like Americans so I am starting to warm up to them already.

[vox_mundi]

That 'Alien Megastructures' Star Continues to Defy Explanation

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he leading theory has been that the star is periodically occulted by a huge cluster of comets that block out light from our perspective—sometimes as much as 20 percent.

But Bradley Schaefer, a prolific astrophysicist and professor based at Louisiana State University, has thrown a wrench into the comet hypothesis with a paper published last week on arxiv.

It is not just Schaefer’s conclusions, but his methods, that make this new research so interesting. By sifting through Harvard College Observatory’s collection of historic glass photographic plates—an archive that dates back to the 1880s and consists of about 500,000 samples—Schaefer was able to reconstruct the history of KIC 8462852’s light fluctuations as far back as the 1890s.

[vox_mundi]

I’m STILL Not Sayin’ Aliens. But This Star Is Really Weird.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '.').. check out the Graph from Schaefer, 2016
http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03256

That’s… bizarre. Tabby’s Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun. These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium. If they change, it’s usually on a timescale of millions of years, not centuries. Schaefer examined two other similar stars in the survey, and they remained constant in brightness over the same time period.

The long-term fading isn’t constant, either. There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that’s hardly steady.

So it appears Tabby’s Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries.

... Now, again, let me be clear. I am NOT saying aliens here. But, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that this general fading is sortof what you’d expect if aliens were building a Dyson Swarm. As they construct more of the panels orbiting the star, they block more of its light bit by bit, so a distant observer sees the star fade over time.