The search for aliens within aliens just insane. They've communicated with us for years. The idea itself a communication. It's matter of time until we get more civilized.
Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
121–130 of 186 posts
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess is a nanotech slug impacting earth and turning us into grey goo/a matrioshka brain factory.
I think there was a HN thread not that long ago about speculation that (at least some) viruses come to earth from space, so perhaps it is happening all the time.
This seems such a "flat earth" type of hypothesis. I mean viruses depend on their hosts 100% so them coming from somewhere with no hosts and successfully slotting in with new hosts just seems immeasurably unlikely.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there was a HN thread not that long ago about speculation that (at least some) viruses come to earth from space, so perhaps it is happening all the time.
This seems such a "flat earth" type of hypothesis. I mean viruses depend on their hosts 100% so them coming from somewhere with no hosts and successfully slotting in with new hosts just seems immeasurably unlikely.
Well, you assume there are no hosts.
I'm sure others have written more, and more intelligent things, but my general thinking about panspermia is:
- it seems like a universal rule there are more small things than large things
- there are more small red stars than stars like our sun
- there should probably be more brown dwarfs than small stars
- there are more small planets than large ones
- planets can and do form without stars
- planets should outnumber stars, and planets without stars should outnumber planets with stars
- there are probably more oceans below the surface of objects in our solar system than on the surface
- the universe existed for a long time before the solar system
...so it kind of seems intuitive to me that life should have developed underground where there's warmth from radioactivity and water, on countless free floating planets over billions of years and occasionally one of those gets blown to bits and something like that seeded our unusual planet.
...and it doesn't seem entirely implausible to me that there should be so much biological material in space that we get a certain amount all the time like micrometeoroids.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should beam back our commercials at them... they may just change their mind and switch to ads-free alternative.
Oh no, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
Just finished reading this yesterday. Such interesting concepts! Highly recommended for fans of hard sci-fi.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you say something about how you are now, or might later, coordinate fast follow up observations in other wavelengths or with other instruments?
This is a good question. FRBs pose a lot of challenges for follow up because most of them are not observed to repeat (this doesn't mean they don't repeat, just that they haven't been seen to). So you see them for a few seconds and then they're gone. To follow up, you need to know where exactly to look, and most of the instruments like CHIME used to discover FRBs don't have the resolution to see exactly where on the s…
Thank you. I had been slightly familiar with fast follow up for SNs (that were detected optically), but their follow up times are much more forgiving than FRBs. The localization issue is also interesting.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#126One 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.
Assuming that it is aliens, for a moment, we can not know if these aliens are friendly or hostile, right? So, given that there is a 50/50 chance of them being hostile, and given their awesome show of strength, the precautionary principal dictates that we not advertise our presence too loudly.
They wouldn't know about us for 500 million years, assuming we could emit a strong enough signal for them to detect that far away. Any aliens that could actually pose a threat would probably be close enough to pick up our emissions anyway.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#127Earlier 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…
> I’m guessing everyone here seen Contact. More than once
Alien dad goes windsurfing with SETI daughter, but the only evidence he leaves that it's not the hoax of some rich bald dude is 18 hours of static, so the audience can have both their faith and science, but no blackhole for Matthew McConaughey.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#128One 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.
Whats the most annoying question you get when you bring up this research paper?
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#129Sad we won't be able to visit for a least 450 million years. Nice of Canada to give us all that juicy data.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Perhaps we are an instance created by an alien construction management AI that is wondering if we will become self aware before the timeout.