>500 million light years away
How are they able to know how far it's coming from?
Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
131–140 of 186 posts
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually looks like Shriharsh, one of the folks in the collaboration has already done it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc8FsImLUEU I guess he probably didn't talk about this because of the press embargo though.
Am I the only one that needs an RSS feed to follow a podcast channel? Maybe I'm using the wrong app?
Try antennapod, it's libre software
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you happen to remember which story? I like Greg Egan and that one sounds interesting.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#134Earlier 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.
An instantiation of me from a backup, however accurate, would be no use to my sense of having survived as I would have ceased to exist and not even be aware of the copy.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#135Earlier 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)
Available under Creative Commons!
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#136Does it sound like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCkbekhUdw4 Yes, you know what it is. :D
Without clicking on it, my guess is either the signal from Contact, or Rick Astley.
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#137Let's run wild some imagination. So 500 million light years as distance, meaning it started at least 500 millions years ago. Dinosaurs weren't existing back then. Imagine a civilization which has this energy output that is detected 500 million light years away. Wasn't some quote where a type 4 civilization technology is indistinguishable from natural phenomenons?
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#138>500 million light years away How are they able to know how far it's coming from?
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
An instantiation of me from a backup, however accurate, would be no use to my sense of having survived as I would have ceased to exist and not even be aware of the copy.
That's fine! People with your philosophy of self will just cease to exist, as they presumably will refuse to optimize for likelihood of being simulated, and those with a more permissive notion of self-identity will be the ones willing to adapt to the hellish computational circumstances.
(Of course, you could say that everyone's ceasing to exist, here, because your rules of what counts as a person and what's their copy applies to everyone. But please realize that, from the point of view of those who think having a copy survive is better than all of them dying, and is partial survival in some sense, that being simulated is a form of winning, even if you think both the person and the copy are deluding themselves.)
(Though I do wonder how you go about the day without having a nervous breakdown, given that your evolving state is probably quantized, or at least sliceable, meaning there's no great physical difference between your pattern shifting from one [smallfractionofa]second to the next, destroying the old one and replacing it with a new one, and your old pattern being destroyed and replaced somewhere else. It's not like your past self is aware of your future copy in normal life, either!)
(I'm not saying you're wrong; just that the situation is a lot worse than you think it is, and that we should all be living (and repeatedly dying) in absolute existential terror.)
Re: Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wit…
I was recently browsing my uni's master's projects, having to pick one. One of the projects was titled "did COVID-19 come from space?"
I sort of regret not picking it; it's too funny. I'll definitely be reading it when whoever got it's done.