ET Found At Last?

Apparently the Kepler telescope has found something around a distant star that may, repeat may, be artificial. Fascinating.

Me too, but I keep remembering the initial reaction to the discovery of pulsars.

DAMN! Right between Cigna and Lyra - that's always the last place you think to look! I bet my extra set of car keys is there too.

Intriguing, but I'm not satisfied with the suggestion that a comet spewing star passing through is too unlikely. Given the number of stars in the universe, such an event is probably happening somewhere at just about all times, even if it is so rare as to only be one place at a time.

99.9% likelihood that it's some natural phenomenon that we just haven't anticipated or some weird measurement error.


But, oh, that 0.1% chance...

BREAK OUT THE NUKES AND WILL SMITH!

DON'T LET THE ALIENS TAKE OUR JOBS!!!!!!!!

Iain Banks agrees.

It would be so infinitely awesome were what's been seen to turn out to be built by aliens!

But I remain skeptical

And shit just got weirder.

Its been doing this for over a century.

ET text home.

I just read this update myself. There is definitely something unusual going on at that star. Probably we ought to focus more attention on it.

Let's say these beings are capable of building this.....do we really want to piss them off? Granted they probably don't have the ability to travel this far but still. Anyway what sucks is let's say today they discovered us and tried to send a communication signal of any type - it would take 1,500 years to get here, barely beating the post office on their best day.

Partial dyson sphere?

Hey Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum are still alive, so we should be fine.

What's that, aliens? You won't cure cancer for us unless we kill Trump?

Don't forget, whatever we're seeing out there happened over 1400 years ago. So, you know . . . It's either all done or vastly different in "real" time.

One article said that since the star they use is only last 2 billion years before burning out there's no way any civilization could have evolved so fast. Excuse me but what's the guarantee that their planet's evolutionary path would be the same as ours, and take as long? Even if there is a common general thread or pattern to the final product of intelligent beings, it could play out hundreds of different ways.

And, assuming that we're seeing evidence of aliens (which I've no idea if we are or not), the final product will probably be something so far beyond our imagining that we'll be unable to wrap our tiny little heads around it.

No, this is just a star's version of "holding my breath until I'm blue in the face". Ignore it and it'll stop.

Totally agree! The odds that any civilization will be at about our level of intelligence are slim to none. Being off by even a couple of millenium even here on earth might be the different between the stone age and Star Wars. So imagine a civilization magnitudes above ours! It's really mind boggling.

Throughout the Universe, & time as well, there have probably been, are, & will be literally countless civilizations spread across the Universe. And probably a good percentage of them are a type of life that we at present probably can't even begin to envision, & based on completely & radically different elements for starters.


And the reverse applies as well!

Yep - that chemistry set dished out to the universe can be manipulated a million different ways, and probably is.

Y'know, something like Starkiller Base could actually explain Tabby's Star. Maybe this is the doomsday weapon that the galaxy's most advanced civilization uses to wipe out potential competitors - an artificial, steerable gamma ray burst. It would be very effective. At 1500 light years away, it wouldn't have to be terribly powerful to wipe out surface life on Earth. The star's lost 20% of its brightness over the last 100 years, right? A Dyson Swarm being supplied with new bots continuously could account for that. Say it's not providing energy for its home planet, but rather collecting energy to power the galaxy's biggest gamma laser? If we ever see Tabby's star regain a whole bunch of brightness before gradually decreasing again, we should be very, very worried. It'd mean the weapon fired and wiped some other poor civilization out. At least if it is aimed at us, we'll never see it coming. Perhaps whatever the steering mechanism is is the thing capable of the transient 25% dips.

If we can't confirm it's a natural phenomenon anytime soon, we should definitely not try sending radio signals toward it.

You're just a fountain of optimism, aint'cha?

He says, as he prays for the asteroid to wipe us all out

....but yeah, I'm gonna go w/ O2C on this one.

And it just keeps getting weirder.

This star makes me want to take Hubble and point it at it and not look at anything else for a long time.