Spectral signal in halo stars, ETI suspected.
these folks went looking for a signal, and found it. Hidden in noise, it is a simple beacon, but you have to use a Fourier transform to pick it out.
The really strange thing is that is only found in the same spectral class stars as our sun.
To the authors, this suggests a beacon for contact.
To me, this suggests a targeting light, a probe wavefront that marks a system as biologically active, and marked for destruction by a machine culture. There is location info in the database, so it could be modeled, to see if it looks like a bootstrap wave, and would be curious if there is a string of supernovas behind it.
Since most of the found signals are in halo stars, it is more likely an invasion from another galaxy, then a local population.
Don’t shout in the jungle at night....
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-stars-strange-aliens-contact.html
Signals probably from Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Analysis of 2.5 million SDSS spectra found signals predicted in a previous publication in only 234 stars overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range
https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03031
And there are weird things happening in galactic clusters too. As i posted in the open thread, a super dense cluster is the only way to stop a hypervelocity attack on a home base whether a planetary or Dyson structure. You can’t hit something something at a % of C, if there are a bunch of stars in the way.
Astronomers discover densest galaxy ever
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130924141701.htm
Ultraluminous X-ray bursts in two ultracompact companions to nearby elliptical galaxies. Nature, 2016; 538 (7625): 356 DOI: 10.1038/nature19822
The rise times of all of the flares were less than one minute, and the flares then decayed over about an hour.One source flared once to a peak luminosity of 9 × 1040 erg per second; the other flared five times to 1040 erg per second.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v538/n7625/full/nature19822.html
This is ridiculous. Arguing that 234 stars is a tiny number and therefore it was aliens…
On the contrary, 234 is 234. If something has been found in 234 stars, it is a naturally occurring phenomenon.
This is exactly as ridiculous as ID in human biology. In fact it is the same thing, just applied to a different area.
Intelligence is a natural phenomenon.
There are many reasons to be wary of the linked data analysis and of the ETI hypothesis of the cause if the analysis is correct (and the additional wild speculation that Morganism layered on top of it should be completely ignored for multiple reasons) but that is not one of them.
(I should comment in detail at some point when I have time, I’ve read the paper and a related clutch of papers from the same authors and find it interesting even if it is poorly written and look forward to seeing if anyone can reproduce it at all...)
Yeah, third time i had written it, and lost it trying to post, so just blurted this out.
But,
As the paper points out, this is about 1 in 10k stars, a realistic number to punch into the drake equation, and they are all full spectrum types.
i have convinced myself that the only truly “universal language” in the universe won’t be binary, decimal, or duodecimal, but spectral. You have to be studying stars to really understand what they are telling in red/blue shift. Chemistry of elements is only to teach you the letters of the alphabet. I don’t know what that language would look like, but, as a contact language, it would be a universal base, at least.
These are mostly halo stars, and it would make sense if you were coming in just sub-c, that you wouldn’t aim at the densest part of the disk, but take the “high ground”, and take instrument readings, “below”, as you did a local survey of likely targets in the area you are in now. You could also “see” which areas have recently been cleaned out by supernova and other extreme events, and know where to focus the search to other areas.
The galactic invaders, and the machine culture are spec, but that is where reason takes you, if you follow the lead.
from Atomic Rockets:
The great silence (i.e. absence of SETI signals from alien civilizations) is perhaps the strongest indicator of all that high relativistic velocities are attainable and that everybody out there knows it.
The sobering truth is that relativistic civilizations are a potential nightmare to anyone living within range of them. The problem is that objects traveling at an appreciable fraction of light speed are never where you see them when you see them (i.e., light-speed lag). Relativistic rockets, if their owners turn out to be less than benevolent, are both totally unstoppable and totally destructive. A starship weighing in at 1,500 tons (approximately the weight of a fully fueled space shuttle sitting on the launchpad) impacting an earthlike planet at “only” 30 percent of lightspeed will release 1.5 million megatons of energy—an explosive force equivalent to 150 times today’s global nuclear arsenal… (ed note: this means the freaking thing has about nine hundred mega-Ricks of damage!)
I’m not going to talk about ideas. I’m going to talk about reality. It will probably not be good for us ever to build and fire up an antimatter engine. According to Powell, given the proper detecting devices, a Valkyrie engine burn could be seen out to a radius of several light-years and may draw us into a game we’d rather not play, a game in which, if we appear to be even the vaguest threat to another civilization and if the resources are available to eliminate us, then it is logical to do so.
The game plan is, in its simplest terms, the relativistic inverse to the golden rule: “Do unto the other fellow as he would do unto you and do it first.”...
When we put our heads together and tried to list everything we could say with certainty about other civilizations, without having actually met them, all that we knew boiled down to three simple laws of alien behavior:
...
Your thinking still seems a bit narrow. Consider several broadening ideas:
I agree with most parts of points 2, 3, and 4. As for point 1, it is cheaper than you think. You mention self-replicating machines in point 3, and while it is true that relativistic rockets require planetary power supplies, it is also true that we can power the whole Earth with a field of solar cells adding up to barely more than 200-by-200 kilometers, drawn out into a narrow band around the Moon’s equator. Self-replicating robots could accomplish this task with only the cost of developing the first twenty or thirty machines. And once we’re powering the Earth practically free of charge, why not let the robots keep building panels on the Lunar far side? Add a few self-replicating linear accelerator-building factories, and plug the accelerators into the panels, and you could produce enough anti-hydrogen to launch a starship every year. But why stop at the Moon? Have you looked at Mercury lately? …”
End Transmission.
The problem with ID in biology is not that it is assigning a cause which is not “a naturally occurring phenomenon.” ID advocates will no doubt say that their cause does, in fact, occur in nature, whether or not that you believe that it does. The problem with ID in biology is that 1) we know vast amounts of biological organizations that came to be without being caused by intelligence, and 2) we know that there lots of other biological organizations that might have come to be without intelligence, and 3) we have not yet seen any case which clearly was caused by intelligence. Given those three facts, if you come upon some organization and do not know how to explain it, it is more likely than not that the true explanation does not involve intelligence.
All of these factors apply to the case the supposed extra terrestrials.
It is true, of course, both in this case and in the case of ID advocates, that they might be right. It is just very unlikely.
Could fast radio bursts be powering alien probes?
paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-fast-radio-powering-alien-probes.html
“They argue that the most plausible use of such power is driving interstellar light sails. The amount of power involved would be sufficient to push a payload of a million tons, or about 20 times the largest cruise ships on Earth.
“That’s big enough to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances,” added Lingam.
To power a light sail, the transmitter would need to focus a beam on it continuously. Observers on Earth would see a brief flash because the sail and its host planet, star and galaxy are all moving relative to us. As a result, the beam sweeps across the sky and only points in our direction for a moment. ”
(appended because the only SETI post i remembered putting up....)
and Centuri Dreams does an in depth look...
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=37307
Seth Shostak is convinced that SETI is prob a machine intelligence, and suggests they would be found in high energy areas.
http://www.space.com/34713-intelligent-aliens-machines-seti-search.html