Live data from Hacker News

'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

space.com

81–90 of 347 posts

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#81
> radio waves from satellites and telescopes beaming out in the plane of our solar system

Surely radio telescopes don't "beam out" radio waves? They receive them. If they are configured to transmit, like the Deep Space Array, they don't beam in the plane of the solar system; they beam at whatever spaceship they are trying to communicate with.

Satellites even less; they have to conserve power, so they don't send radio waves into outer space. Their antennae point at the Earth.

Also, the sentence containing that fragment has no main verb, so I had to read it several times to figure out what it meant.

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had any real intelligence, they would keep quiet about it!

Makes me think about the blunder from the first season of Star Trek: Picard . A mysterious, unknown star system, hidden deep in Romulan space[0], with 8 stars and a habitable-ish planet suspended in the middle. Clearly engineered. But I can't imagine how it could stay hidden; I'd expect it to stick out like a sore thumb from across the galaxy on any star survey, even with present-day telescopes... -- [0] - An antagon…

(Haven't seen it)

Engineered when? Just because they can send information and travel faster than light doesn't mean that the light from there has reached federation space. A survey would have to have been done nearby to see it

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#83

Reminds me of a bit from a novel I read (won't be naming the title to avoid spoilers) where one of the minor twists is that the gigastructure of galaxies that we observe in the universe - the thing that's conducive to things like "star formation" and "life" - is an art project by intelligent species who've been alive since around the time of the Big Bang. (No, it's not part of the Xeelee Sequence :P)

If you would recommend it, could you email the title to j@justus.ws? I’m on a sci-fi kick lately and always looking for good recs.

Will do. I also recommended some authors in another comment in this thread, and I try to keep my Goodreads mostly up to date, including ratings: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4016206-pavel-lishin

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dyson spheres are probably really rare. It's just bad strategy, everyone within your galaxy knows you're there pretty much immediately when a star just up and disappears one day. Granted, the non-K2s just stare in awe maybe, but the other K2s will fuck your shit up. Can't exactly pack it up and run either, not with a medium-sized star in your suitcase.

Temporal displacement fields: Wrap you star system in one of those and remove from the normal universe with a time shift of a couple of seconds! Let those pesky K2 Dyson Sphere civilisation figure that out!

Tried that, it didn't work; that's how I ended up stuck in this insane reality where JavaScript ate the world, and my nickname is all I have to show for it.

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#86
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not convinced until they find a Dyson sphere...

Dyson spheres are probably really rare. It's just bad strategy, everyone within your galaxy knows you're there pretty much immediately when a star just up and disappears one day. Granted, the non-K2s just stare in awe maybe, but the other K2s will fuck your shit up. Can't exactly pack it up and run either, not with a medium-sized star in your suitcase.

I would assume it takes more than a day to build a Dyson sphere. But more to the point from a distant observer's viewpoint the star isn't going to just blink out. The Dyson sphere has to radiate just as much energy as the star produces, so it would probably appear just as a red dwarf. Unless the alien civilization has some way to destroy energy it will be in a constant battle to avoid cooking the inhabitants of the sphere.

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#87
post #2

Just your regular resonant planetary system...Nothing to see here...Call me back when you find one where they orbit the star with periods that are a sequence of prime numbers.... "Resonance in the planetary system HD 110067" - https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2023/04/six-planets-in-res...

I’m not sure I want to meet the alien species that can arrange a star system into a prime sequence.

The longer time you get to do that the less energy is required

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to look into every resonant system shouldn't we start with the moons of Jupiter?

Are we not looking already?

Jupiter has moons? /s

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#89
post #47
post #17

What is the "mathematically perfect" aspect of this system? I don't see it in the article.

As detailed in the companion article [1], for every 54 orbits of planet 1, planets 2..6 orbit 36, 24, 16, 12, and 8 times respectively, giving successive ratios of 2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4. After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the same relative position. [1] https://www.space.com/six-sub-neptunes-found-100-light-years...

> After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the same position.

Could you please explain what you mean by this, as to my layman's ears that sounds like either a confusingly-worded sentence, or an impossibility (multiple planets in the same location at the same time). Do they just all pass through one specific same location once per orbit but at different times? Or something else I'm not imagining?

Re: 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for potential alien tech

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory mention of Spaceballs incoming... I just don't want the reverse function on my home vacuum.

IDK, I miss those old vacuums that could run in reverse - they're perfect for building hovercrafts for kids. Make a big disk, punch the vacuum cleaner's pipe through it, put a blanket over the whole thing, add a chair on top. Turn power on, you have a hovercraft. A staple of city science fairs where I live.

THAT is a great idea! Would one of those leave blowers work? Ideally a battery powered one?
Post reply on HN