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Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

news.mit.edu

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Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#111

Post by antepodius »

0ld wrote: post #82
tlow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more about these nanotech slugs please?

I believe they are referencing James S. A. Corey The Expanse [0] series [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)

Haha, nah, it was more the general idea. An amalgam of sci-fi. Greg Egan had a story where an advanced civ sends a gram-sized slug into the gas giant of a solar system, which bootstraps to machinery that 3d prints people and machinery, which is a plausible enough inspiration that I can give it here. Just remove the implausible 'nobody just decides to go bacteria-mode' aspect from Egan's far-future stories.

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#112

Post by antepodius »

gota wrote: post #94
antepodius wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.

This seems a reasonable and straightforward scenario and I'll prepare accordingly

Make yourself intra-universally interesting enough that the alien construction management AI might instantiate a simulation of you from the cached info at some point. It's a strange sort of Darwinism, but it's all we've got.

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#113

Post by cgriswald »

beamatronic wrote: post #87
lumost wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What protocol do you use to represent the sequence? Bytes, Morse, Amplitude modulation, frequency modulation? All of these combinations may appear random to one without the right codec.

I wonder if this could be accomplished with a train of satellites. All in the same orbit. Just spaced out like this: xx xxx xxxxx xxxxxxx So they just go around and around, including the light, from the point of view of a far away perspective

You would need to set up the satellites in such a way that anyone receiving your message is viewing their orbits edge on. Your satellites would also have to be extremely large and fairly close to your host star. And there’d have to be no dust between your star and the receiver.

As a method to communicate with people you don’t know exist, it’s not very good because chances are they won’t be viewing your satellites edge on. For people you know are there, it’s needlessly complicated and expensive.

If you’re going to go to the trouble, you’d be better off making a Dyson swarm and cloaking your star completely. You’d get energy back and be just as detectable for a civilization that thought to compare visible and IR sources (which some Earth scientists have done, with negative results).

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#114

Post by PoachedSausage »

huntermeyer wrote: post #57
dogma1138 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be TV broadcasts as I’m guessing everyone here seen Contact. Ironically in 1948 when FM was standardized and countries were assigned spectrums Germany wasn’t really invited as it wasn’t a state for that short period and wasn’t assigned a spectrum so they started broadcasting in VHF because that wasn’t covered by the Copenhagen Agreement. A few years later people realized that VHF was supper efficient for F…

This is why I come to HN! Thanks for sharing this.

You may be interested in a history of Philips TV Tuners:

https://www.maximus-randd.com/tv-tuner-history-pt1.html

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#115

Post by DrBazza »

jrichardshaw wrote: post #61
DrBazza wrote: post #21

If it's periodic, it's something orbiting something. If it's powerful enough to be seen 500 million ly away, one of the two orbiting objects is going to be a black hole.

There's a few ways to do it (and the press release is surprisingly good and mentions most of them), but certainly one of the more obvious explanations is that the emitting object, is in a binary system with some other object, and that modulates the emission mechanism somehow. I don't think either needs to be a black hole though. What I consider the most plausible candidate for emission is probably magnetars (i.e. neu…

Interesting.

This galactic magnetar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGR_1806%E2%88%9220) affected the Earth's atmosphere.

Just how luminous can an extra-galactic one be? Is the FRB an axial emission?

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#116

Post by antepodius »

tlow wrote: post #79
antepodius wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.

Can you say more about these nanotech slugs please?

Imagine you're arbitrarily close to the physical limits of technology. You do or could understand how living things work, down to the molecular level, for example, and know how to engineer self-replicating machinery analogous to DNA. At the very least, you could build a 'spaceship' that can grow something at least as efficient as people, who can replicate however and disassemble earth for raw materials. Presumably, you can do much better, and you end up with something like a self-packaged deployable technological superintelligent ecosystem.

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#117

Post by johnwangdoe »

jrichardshaw wrote: post #54

One of paper authors here. I'll try and answer some of the questions in the comments. It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the arXiv, but I guess the press embargo just ended.

WHat do you think about Contant the movie in relations to your job?

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#118

Post by redis_mlc »

reedwolf wrote: post #65
magicMonkeyPaw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you looking forward to reading all the crazy people's takes on why it's actually aliens that you found?

I haven't seen the original paper (maybe that should've been linked instead?), but the MIT press release is dripping with "Not it's saying aliens..." innuendo. It's kind of hypocritical to use nod-wink-aliens-clickbait to drum up media attention, then ridicule the first rube who asks if aliens could possibly be involved.

> It's kind of hypocritical ... ridicule the first rube

That's why I always ridicule the mars colonization and alien contact scifi fanbois on HN, who actually believe in that nonsense.

Here's a question for them. The History channel used to have documentaries, but now it has alien fiction videos. Is that your fault?

Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

#119

Post by ganstyles »

vmladenov wrote: post #40
EamonnMR wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should broadcast the coordinates of a distant star to see what happens.

There are a lot of cool concepts in those books, but the sophon faster-than-light communication that props up a lot of the story was a bit too much for me.

The theory of quantum entanglement is sound though, and it took a while for a single sophon to arrive before the FTL communication. Layman here, but I thought it was relatively had science/speculative fiction.
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