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

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

#241

Post by samatman »

ars wrote: post #234
thereisnoself wrote: post #133

I've often thought planet TrEs-2b [0], the darkest planet ever discovered orbiting a star, would be the best candidate for extra terrestrial life. My theory is that its darkness is down to the fact that the civilisation there has figured out a way to harness solar energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson sphere [1]. [0] https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/1716/tres-2-b [1] https://en.wikiped…

> My theory is that its darkness is down to the fact that the civilisation there has figured out a way to harness solar energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson sphere That doesn't work quite the way you think. If you harness all the energy your planet will start to glow, first red, then white. Eventually becoming as hot as your star, at which point you stop gaining energy. Unless they are somehow con…

Harvesting energy is a misnomer, what we want is the syntropy: the available work.

If we turned the Earth into a black body and used all Solar radiation to run computers or move stuff around at the theoretical limit, we'd still need the surrounding space to radiate off the heat as our cold well. So the temperature would be at whatever that equilibrium condition is, but wouldn't steadily increase. The equilibrium condition could be all over the place and would be largely determined by the composition of the atmosphere.

For the record I'm not in favor of paperclipping the planet like this. If anyone was wondering.

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

#242

Post by psychlops »

jl6 wrote: post #240
tim_hutton wrote: post #235

Two orbital things we might look for: 1. Activity in geostationary orbits. 2. Orbits where the planet's year is exactly divisible by its day, eliminating leap years.

Are you suggesting #2 is sufficiently unlikely to occur naturally that it becomes a likely technosignature of an alien race whose programmers got so fed up with calendrical calculations that they megaengineered their planet’s rotation as a way of streamlining their datetime libraries?

Programmers with that amount of political power are definitely a sign of an advanced race.

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

#243

Post by LinuxBender »

hermitcrab wrote: post #198
tromp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is not at all clear to me why the harmonics makes it any more worth searching for aliens than any other solar system. a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this? b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?

I would lean towards this as well. There are countless examples of interesting mathematical patterns in nature. One can get pulled down this rabbit hole by watching some of Randall Carlson's videos [1] and I can see why people could be intrigued by the intelligent patterns. Having said that I am not discounting the possibility of something or someone creating these patterns only that they are replete throughout the universe and even found in natural objects on Earth. There is probably a formula one could use if the mass and composition of the star and planets were known that would explain the orbits.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@TheRandallCarlson/videos

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #66
tromp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

If a K1.5 wanted to do that just for shits and giggles, is there a viable way to slow down or speed up orbits of rocky planets? Like, wouldn't they be shooting a bunch of mass out of their system to even attempt this? If one could build a Dyson sphere, is that more difficult or less difficult than engineering a system like this? The sphere/swarm has some absurd amount of mass all in a very uniform orbit around the su…

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by barkingcat »

hermitcrab wrote: post #198
tromp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It is not at all clear to me why the harmonics makes it any more worth searching for aliens than any other solar system. a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this? b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?

"Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this" Is a very similar answer to why humans would make microprocessors out of logic gates.

I'm in school for digital design at the moment, and stuff like oscillators and frequency dividers are at the very base/root of almost all electronic circuits.

One guess could be that alignments of planets in specific ways could be used to generate specific impulses of gravitational waves, the way we generate signals in binary. Imagine an alien race who uses gravitational effects from orbiting bodies as the basic building block of their "mega processors" that are the size of galaxies. So one solar system that has a division cycle of "2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4 and 3/4" could be their representation of a value/"bit pattern" but written with planets in orbital mechanics, just like how we represent decimal 10 in binary 1010.

as an aside, it is very easy to also ask "why would humans spend so much energy taking silicate sand and turning it into intricate patterns at the size of angstroms and nano meters just to consume power? wouldn't it be easier to just let the sand organize itself into components as needed?" of course, the answer seems obvious to us, but the question is analogous to yours.

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

#246

Post by whatisthis9 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #214
hermitcrab wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not at all clear to me why the harmonics makes it any more worth searching for aliens than any other solar system. a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this? b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?

> a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this? Maybe they built the system, and being lazy like we are they chose some simple numbers > b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect? Alien intelligence may be less likely than a natural effect, but alien intelligence in this system is much more likely than in a random system.

Maybe we are looking at a case of alien artificial intelligence, e.g. the classic hollywood scenario where an alien society was eventually replaced by sentient AI(e.g. kaylons, cylons, etc).

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

#247

Post by yencabulator »

jl6 wrote: post #240
tim_hutton wrote: post #235

Two orbital things we might look for: 1. Activity in geostationary orbits. 2. Orbits where the planet's year is exactly divisible by its day, eliminating leap years.

Are you suggesting #2 is sufficiently unlikely to occur naturally that it becomes a likely technosignature of an alien race whose programmers got so fed up with calendrical calculations that they megaengineered their planet’s rotation as a way of streamlining their datetime libraries?

Based on our experience on Earth so far, that seems to be the easier route to correct code.

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

#249

Post by epolanski »

barkingcat wrote: post #245
hermitcrab wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not at all clear to me why the harmonics makes it any more worth searching for aliens than any other solar system. a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this? b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some sort of resonance effect?

"Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to engineer this" Is a very similar answer to why humans would make microprocessors out of logic gates. I'm in school for digital design at the moment, and stuff like oscillators and frequency dividers are at the very base/root of almost all electronic circuits. One guess could be that alignments of planets in specific ways could be used to generate specific impul…

Super interesting answer, thank you for that.

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

#250

Post by CapeTheory »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #109
swores wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The planets have nice harmonics, so that rather than planet 1 and planet 2 having some irrational ratio (planet 1 goes around every 2.64782362 times for planet 2) it's round fraction like 1/2. When you string the whole thing, the lowest common multiple of revolutions is 54, so that only every 54 planet-1-years, realignment returns. The researchers hypothesize that this is sufficiently improbable to point toward an em…

The Devs thought this solar system was outside our render distance, so they used default placeholder values for everything. Should be patched in the next release.
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