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Question for you Timex Eclair, can I use a star as the engine for my megaship? Pointing all the photons in direction?
You can you use a giant mirror, that directs light to your ship's sail.
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This is speculation. There are all kinds of examples we have of "ancient" technology that are still in everyday use today - knives, for example. There's no reason to think that something else would abandon using EM as a transfer of communication.
That's not what I said. Tune a general-coverage receiver to the frequency of an HDTV station, and what you hear is what the SETI folks will hear, whether there's a signal there or not.
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Spectral type isn't 1-1 correlate with the star estimated life. Depends on the star mass. Our Sun was one time a F type star.
Question for you Timex Eclair, can I use a star as the engine for my megaship? Pointing all the photons in direction?
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IMHO the aliens will not be specifically seeking life that is intelligent. Singularities and interstellar traveling alien civilizations share a problem. If one is in essence immortal the only purpose that can endure forever is the pursuit of new knowledge. Even if alien entities are able to learn all there is to know about all the other sciences, biology will be inexhaustible as the novel patterns that can be produce…
>> biology will be inexhaustible as the novel patterns that can be produced by evolution are effectively infinite But why do you assume they would be interested in observing the patterns that actually have been produced, instead of running high-precision evolutionary emulators that can generate patterns that could be produced at a much higher rate, and maybe even some automated filters to condense it down to "interes…
A counterargument to that would go along the the similar lines as to why we don't, and can't, resolve wars by e.g. playing chess (or StarCraft). Even if all nations mutually agreed that the shall will be won bloodlessly by some other kind of competition, the first nation to nuke its enemies would be a winner. In conflict situations, you want to seek as much advantage from the "most real" reality as you can get. So, in your recursion example, you'd travel up the call stack...
In her TED talk [1] Tabby explains how comets could be an explanation for this phenomenon, she even says that it is consistent with their observations, but then she goes on to say "but it 'feels' a little contrived". Sorry what did I miss here? I thought we were discussing science and coming up with theories that support our evidence using data, how does feeling fit into this picture? Why would it be so unlikely that…
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There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out. > That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is. > The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that…
You just need a big enough ship. A while back I had a plan for a science fiction setting: an inter galactic ship is approach Earth. The people who sent it thought big, and as a result the ship has at its core an enclosed star (a miniature Dyson Sphere) as a gravitational anchor and power source, and round it is orbiting a vast swarm of asteroids and habitats with a few million times the living space of Earth, inside…
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can it be easily ruled out? Yes: parallax breaks it. If something's colinear with a star today (and occults it), it won't be colinear 6 months later, when the Earth's on the other side of the sun. At 2 light years for instance, that spacecraft would trace an apparent ellipse 3.3" in diameter, while Tabby's star (1,480 ly) would be stationary (0.004" parallax). In comparison, the star's apparent disk is just 30 μas wi…
If I'm doing that math right, it works out that to not be ruled out by parallax, the object would have to be almost 2 AU in diameter if it was within a few light years of Earth. That seems pretty ridiculous--now we have them not only building a megastructure, but flying it to Earth! However, I wonder if there is a way to save the idea without requiring a ridiculously large spacecraft? Suppose instead of one ginormous…
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Reddit user sigbjoernwilderness's idea is pretty wild... can it be easily ruled out? > Is this the last remaining explanation after Montet/Simon? > The dimming comes from the shadow of a spaceship traveling on an (almost) straight line from KIC8462852 to Earth. The slow continuous dimming results from the increase of the apparent size of the approaching ship while Earth/Kepler is in the penumbra. The irregular dips h…
There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out. > That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is. > The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that…
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You can you use a giant mirror, that directs light to your ship's sail.
I really wonder what would happen if you really had a giant mirror reflecting all the Sun's energy back to itself
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There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out. > That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is. > The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that…
It could be a way to announce their arrival passively.
The corollary: if there are aliens around KIC 8462852 they don't care that what they're doing is visible for 1500 light years around them.