Possible Evidence of an Advanced Alien Civilization

[Lance]

It's actually real this time! Have you heard?

NASA has actually released Kepler data that may potentially support evidence of a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization. They have discovered what may be evidence of a Dyson sphere orbiting a star some 1,500 light-years away.

This is far from a done deal at this point but how fucking cool is that?

Or it could be rocks...

Has Kepler Discovered an Alien Megastructure?

NASA's Kepler Space-Telescope Data Yields a Bizarre Star --"Is It Orbited By a Swarm of ET Megastructures?”

Have We Detected Megastructures Built By Aliens Around A Distant Star?

[Enzo]

The old Dyson sphere.

The first question I have about those is this: Where does the material come from to make it? If we took all the solid material in our solar system, all the planets except ours, and assume we could use it all as structural material, it wouldn't be nearly enough just to make a thin ball around the sun. Let alone all the systems and equipment on it to gather and transmit the energy it collects. I suppose ther is a lot of material in the Oort cloud and such, but unlike the planets, collecting those widely scattered small bits would itself take up a lot of resources. I still doubt it adds up to enough.


But.... if I imagine a solar array that was planet sized, or even just a huge sheet of aluminum foil out there. It would seem it ought to be fairly close to the planet. Energy dissipates exponentially at a distance, so having it close in is efficient, whereas if it were at a lagrange point, it might suffer far more losses than they would like getting power back to their planet. So it seems to me that any solar diminutions we might detect would also likely include the planet itself. hard to separate the two.

I suppose we could detect such things, but I am squarely in the horses, not zebras camp on this.

[Мастер]

Energy dissipates exponentially at a distance

Not quadratically?

[Lance]

Yeah, I agree there are a lot of problems with Dyson spheres as described. Some kind of passive reflector system would only need to be in the plane of your own orbit though, not completely spherical. That could be very large but only atoms think.

Of course, any civilization advanced enough to engineer something on that scale is probably using technology we can't even imagine yet.

[Мастер]

Assuming I did this right, about 0.000000046% of the sun's energy output hits the earth. This assumes that the sun's energy is radiated equally in all directions, and although I suspect that is true, I'm not really sure.

We're currently having some issues with the rapid release of large amounts of solar energy that accumulated as storage in chemical form. If you had a lot of new energy to the planet, that it's not currently receiving, one would need to figure out how to get rid of some of it when the work is done, no? Maybe turn hydrocarbon combustion products back into oil. I can't help but wonder whether dealing with the output of energy consumption is going to be a far more difficult problem than finding new sources of energy.

There's lot's of energy lying around on earth - much of it is more expensive to tap than current sources, which makes sense (one would normally access the cheapest sources first). At least at current levels of technology, there's lots of energy on earth that we're not using now, that's going to be cheaper than building a solar collector in space. Technology for building space structures may improve, but then again, so might technologies for extracting energy from earth-bound sources. But either way (bring in lots of new energy, or tap currently untapped sources), it's going to get a bit hot if we don't figure out some way to get rid of it.

Of course, this thread is about some potential energy-capturing structure around a different star, so conditions on earth might be a bit different.

[Lance]

We're currently having some issues with the rapid release of large amounts of solar energy that accumulated as storage in chemical form. If you had a lot of new energy to the planet, that it's not currently receiving, one would need to figure out how to get rid of some of it when the work is done, no? Maybe turn hydrocarbon combustion products back into oil. I can't help but wonder whether dealing with the output of energy consumption is going to be a far more difficult problem than finding new sources of energy.

I'm not sure I completely follow you here. If we use the energy directly, or by converting to, say, electricity, what are the byproducts? We're not releasing from a stored state, we're just consuming it.

There's lot's of energy lying around on earth - much of it is more expensive to tap than current sources, which makes sense (one would normally access the cheapest sources first). At least at current levels of technology, there's lots of energy on earth that we're not using now, that's going to be cheaper than building a solar collector in space. Technology for building space structures may improve, but then again, so might technologies for extracting energy from earth-bound sources. But either way (bring in lots of new energy, or tap currently untapped sources), it's going to get a bit hot if we don't figure out some way to get rid of it.

But sources are not unlimited. As time passes and resources are depleted, production costs go up. You have to keep tapping more and more expensive sources. At some point, it may become cost-effective to take on even such a large project. It might even become a choice a civilization has to make or risk perishing.

Of course, there could be more to it than just energy. We now know that energy can be converted to matter. With significant advancement, it may become easy and commonplace. This would answer how such a civilization could gather the materials to construct such a mega structure in the first place.

Of course, this thread is about some potential energy-capturing structure around a different star, so conditions on earth might be a bit different.

Isn't speculating about this kind of stuff fun?

[Мастер]

We're currently having some issues with the rapid release of large amounts of solar energy that accumulated as storage in chemical form. If you had a lot of new energy to the planet, that it's not currently receiving, one would need to figure out how to get rid of some of it when the work is done, no? Maybe turn hydrocarbon combustion products back into oil. I can't help but wonder whether dealing with the output of energy consumption is going to be a far more difficult problem than finding new sources of energy.

I'm not sure I completely follow you here. If we use the energy directly, or by converting to, say, electricity, what are the byproducts? We're not releasing from a stored state, we're just consuming it.

Ultimately, it ends up as heat. If we use it to drive cars, there is the internal friction of the engine (and other parts), which produces heat, the friction of the brakes, of the tyres with the road, and air friction. All of these produce heat. When we drive a car up the hill, the energy is stored as potential energy, not heat, but when we drive back down the hill, it's back out. As far as I know, there is no theoretical limit to how efficient we could make cars, but if we succeed in making ultra-efficient cars, then the need for energy goes away along with the waste heat.

If we heat homes, that's direct production of heat, which eventually leaks out through the doors, windows, walls, etc. Air conditioners produce heat. When we use energy to take some molecules and turn them into other molecules (so sometimes when we manufacture stuff), that can absorb energy. But unless we keep stockpiling more and more of these goods, without ever throwing them away, they'll eventually revert to their original form (or some other form), releasing the energy. Sources that were going to turn into heat anyway (solar, hydroelectric, wind?) seem like they wouldn't add to the heat, but I'm guessing that by the time you're building energy-capturing structures in space, you've probably already tapped these sources about as well as you can.

When I think about it, I did misspeak a bit - when we burn fossil fuels, the problem is not so much the direct release of the energy, but production of gasses that reduce the planet's radiation of heat. But I'm not sure that that really changes anything. If the additional energy obtained from one of these spheres is a very small fraction of what already hits the earth, then building a space structure is probably not the optimal way to get the additional power. If it's a lot, and you beam it back to earth (if it's consumed in space, that's a different story), then that's a large amount of additional incoming energy, that's eventually going to turn into heat. It must be got rid of somehow, as the default is that the earth heats up and radiates away, isn't it?

There's lot's of energy lying around on earth - much of it is more expensive to tap than current sources, which makes sense (one would normally access the cheapest sources first). At least at current levels of technology, there's lots of energy on earth that we're not using now, that's going to be cheaper than building a solar collector in space. Technology for building space structures may improve, but then again, so might technologies for extracting energy from earth-bound sources. But either way (bring in lots of new energy, or tap currently untapped sources), it's going to get a bit hot if we don't figure out some way to get rid of it.

But sources are not unlimited.

True enough, but demand is also not unlimited. The earth will exist for a finite amount of time. But, projecting the world's energy needs for a few hundred million or billion years, I suspect, will necessarily involve some uncertainty.

As time passes and resources are depleted, production costs go up. You have to keep tapping more and more expensive sources.

That is already happening (alright, we're on a several year holiday from rising energy prices, but I suspect that's not permanent). That's why civilisation collapsed, as per rational analysis conducted at astronomy boards.

At some point, it may become cost-effective to take on even such a large project.

It might, although we're quite far from that point.

It might even become a choice a civilization has to make or risk perishing.

If by "perish", we mean cease to exist, I think that's going too far. They can downsize their energy consumption to what comes off if the local star. But if they were living at a level of energy consumption far beyond this level, then downsizing might turn their civilisation into something unrecognisable.

Of course, there could be more to it than just energy. We now know that energy can be converted to matter. With significant advancement, it may become easy and commonplace. This would answer how such a civilization could gather the materials to construct such a mega structure in the first place.

That would be the reverse of nuclear power . But isn't the exchange rate really bad? That is, huge amounts of energy make only tiny amounts of matter? If so, and your problem is you don't have enough energy, this might make the problem worse rather than better.

Has someone managed to do this in lab conditions?

Of course, this thread is about some potential energy-capturing structure around a different star, so conditions on earth might be a bit different.

Isn't speculating about this kind of stuff fun?

Not on days when I'm typing on a tablet device

[Lance]

I'm not sure I completely follow you here. If we use the energy directly, or by converting to, say, electricity, what are the byproducts? We're not releasing from a stored state, we're just consuming it.

Ultimately, it ends up as heat. ... It must be got rid of somehow, as the default is that the earth heats up and radiates away, isn't it?

Ah, okay. That makes sense.

I guess I was thinking along the lines of using the same amount of energy but from a completely different source. But that doesn't make sense either. If you have all that energy you will certainly consume it. So yeah, getting rid of it is a problem.

But sources are not unlimited.

True enough, but demand is also not unlimited. The earth will exist for a finite amount of time. But, projecting the world's energy needs for a few hundred million or billion years, I suspect, will necessarily involve some uncertainty.

Yeah, there's that.

Our own non-renewable fuels have what? A few hundred years left at most?

As time passes and resources are depleted, production costs go up. You have to keep tapping more and more expensive sources.

That is already happening (alright, we're on a several year holiday from rising energy prices, but I suspect that's not permanent). That's why civilisation collapsed, as per rational analysis conducted at astronomy boards.

At some point, it may become cost-effective to take on even such a large project.

It might, although we're quite far from that point.

Of course, but in 10,000 years? I don't think we are advanced enough now to even begin to imagine a project such as this. Much less to try to do something. By the time we advance enough to be able to something like this it might not be such a big deal. Look at how far we've come in the last 10,000 years.

It might even become a choice a civilization has to make or risk perishing.

If by "perish", we mean cease to exist, I think that's going too far. They can downsize their energy consumption to what comes off if the local star. But if they were living at a level of energy consumption far beyond this level, then downsizing might turn their civilisation into something unrecognisable.

Yeah, meant become unrecognizable. Let's say they have far greater non-renewable resources than we ever did but their opportunities for renewable energy were very limited. For example, no large moon(s) so no tidal or wave generators. And perhaps wind power isn't viable in sufficient quantity for some reason. If you don't find a way to satisfy your energy needs in the long term you will revert to something primitive.

Of course, there could be more to it than just energy. We now know that energy can be converted to matter. With significant advancement, it may become easy and commonplace. This would answer how such a civilization could gather the materials to construct such a mega structure in the first place.

That would be the reverse of nuclear power . But isn't the exchange rate really bad? That is, huge amounts of energy make only tiny amounts of matter? If so, and your problem is you don't have enough energy, this might make the problem worse rather than better.
Has someone managed to do this in lab conditions?

Apparently so. I'd just done a quick Google search about it.

Of course, this thread is about some potential energy-capturing structure around a different star, so conditions on earth might be a bit different.

Isn't speculating about this kind of stuff fun?

Not on days when I'm typing on a tablet device

Oh, sorry.

It's easy to speculate on the cost for benefit of a project like this based on our own ways of thinking, but an alien environment may be motivated completely differently. Perhaps there is no economy. Maybe they are very resource rich and everyone lives comfortably, easily, with no need to compete and no greed. There might be no "cost" associated anything. Projects are just something to do to benefit the greater good.

[Enzo]

Or they have a totalitarian hive mentality. Or just a state centric culture as opposed to an individual-centric one. Greed assumes there is something to be greedy for. They could have a culture like a hamster cage, the state provides a wall outlet for food and water (or its equivalent) that all citizens can access at will. No point in amassing food or water as all you ever want is freely available at all times.

We tend to think of our energy resources as fossil fuels and nuclear and some fringy stuff like wind and solar. But the whole interior of this earth is molten iron and rock, and that won't cool down for eons, lasting probably longer than human beings. tapping that extends our resource curve way into the future.

[Lance]

Or they have a totalitarian hive mentality. Or just a state centric culture as opposed to an individual-centric one. Greed assumes there is something to be greedy for. They could have a culture like a hamster cage, the state provides a wall outlet for food and water (or its equivalent) that all citizens can access at will. No point in amassing food or water as all you ever want is freely available at all times.

Exactly. A communist benevolent dictatorship with unlimited, easily available resources would be interesting. There are probably many ways to put a society together that would be better than ours. Of course, there are also the guys from Independence Day.

But we can't make it too easy I guess. You need pressure to drive evolution and once you have an intelligent, technically capable civilization you need pressure to drive innovation. So we have to figure out how to allow for this without causing competition and greed to develop.

We tend to think of our energy resources as fossil fuels and nuclear and some fringy stuff like wind and solar. But the whole interior of this earth is molten iron and rock, and that won't cool down for eons, lasting probably longer than human beings. tapping that extends our resource curve way into the future.

Doesn't Iceland use almost exclusively geothermal energy? This could be an interesting discussion in itself. What would it take to exploit the Earth's inner heat on a scale large enough to be a viable resource? And if you start extracting heat to power a large city, do you create local "cool spots"? Do you have to go wider and deeper to maintain a certain level? If this conversation goes anywhere we can split it out to its own tread.

This may not be an alternative on our alien world though.

[Lance]

I suppose we could detect such things, but I am squarely in the horses, not zebras camp on this.

I think it is already clearly not a horse. So far, there are no mundane explanations for what has been observed. But that doesn't meant it must necessarily be an alien mega structure either. No, it's a zebra alright. What remains to be discovered is what type of zebra.

There is a paper describing how the observations could be explained by a massive comet that got too close to the star and was captured and broken up. Perhaps... A 22% dip in light output is pretty fantastic though. A "mega Jupiter" sized planet only dims a star but a small fraction of 1%.

They are planning radio observations using the Green Bank Telescope and the VLA for next year, hopefully as early as January. Maybe we can pick up their early episodes of "I Love Glacknoq".

[Enzo]

Not convinced. Remember the microbe fossils on a mars meteorite some years back? Wound up not being them. I still am thinking horse. Maybe we are so used to seeing brown horses that an albino shows up and we think it is a unicorn. We cannot let ourselves go down the path of "I can't think of an explanation, therefore it must be Aliens." Not until we have real evidence. The History channel has been taken over by this thinking. "We can't think of how the Egyptians built the pyramids, so it must have been ancient aliens."

[Lance]

Not convinced.

I think our metaphors are the problem. I think we're actually on the same page.

Remember the microbe fossils on a mars meteorite some years back? Wound up not being them.

Yeah, ALH84001. You do know it didn't end there. It is currently undetermined and still being studied and argued over. Seems that (thank you, Monty Python) those who disproved it were later disproved.

I still am thinking horse. Maybe we are so used to seeing brown horses that an albino shows up and we think it is a unicorn. We cannot let ourselves go down the path of "I can't think of an explanation, therefore it must be Aliens." Not until we have real evidence.

But that's not what I'm saying, and this is where the metaphor isn't working. Everyone, including NASA, is saying that what ever it is, it is strange and bizarre. To me, that makes it a zebra. But I'm not saying it's an alien zebra. Just a plain old ordinary zebra. If it does end up being an alien mega structure, that'll be a unicorn.

So we do have evidence of something very unusual. And on one hand, we have as much evidence that it is a massive, broken up comet as we do that it is an alien mega structure. But on the other hand, we know comets exist, so that is a far more likely explanation. Something strange is happening in the vicinity of KIC 8462852. That we do know.

The History channel has been taken over by this thinking. "We can't think of how the Egyptians built the pyramids, so it must have been ancient aliens."

[Lance]

Enzo, have you read any of what's being published about this?

What does that mean? It means we're allowed to get a little bit excited! Not because aliens are a likely possibility, but because we're in the middle of an awesome mystery the likes of which we haven't seen before in the history of space exploration. (Emphasis added)

Scientists can’t explain what huge object is blocking the light from this distant star

They say we actually need to consider the possibility of aliens.

15 OCT 2015

It’s not every day that we have permission to throw "Aliens?" out there in relation to a confounding astronomical discovery - in fact, I don’t think we ever have. But the discovery of a strange pattern of light surrounding a distant star called KIC 8462852 has seen even the most sensible astronomers throw their arms up with a, "Sure, why not?" arguing that the possibility of advanced alien technology can’t reasonably be ignored.

"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build," Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University in the US, told The Atlantic. more...

[Lance]

Here is the actual publication:

1509.03622v1.pdf

(3.22 MiB) Downloaded 229 times

[Enzo]

I will, but no, I have not. Generally the big announcements I see on the MSN home page or similar, I let slide. Once it shows up in Nat Geo or Scientific American, I start to listen. Or if buzz starts without the shallow hype.

perhaps it is discussed, but so far, have we seen a pattern? Like whatever it is reliably comes around in orbit on a regular basis? otherwise it can be hard to tell the difference between a huge thing there or a much smaller thing MUCH closer to us transiting the view. Like the well known small bug in front of a camera lens that LOOKS like a huge UFO in the distance.

[Arneb]

Here's the Bad Astronomer's take on it. I find his thoughts quite plausible.

[Lance]

I will, but no, I have not. Generally the big announcements I see on the MSN home page or similar, I let slide. Once it shows up in Nat Geo or Scientific American, I start to listen. Or if buzz starts without the shallow hype.

This one actually went the other way. The PDF I attached a few posts back is the actual published journal article. It took a few weeks before it hit the main stream media. There is a NOVA special being produced about it that will hopefully air soon.

perhaps it is discussed, but so far, have we seen a pattern? Like whatever it is reliably comes around in orbit on a regular basis? otherwise it can be hard to tell the difference between a huge thing there or a much smaller thing MUCH closer to us transiting the view. Like the well known small bug in front of a camera lens that LOOKS like a huge UFO in the distance.

Dude, lol! How Kepler Finds Planets

[Enzo]

Have not yet had a chance to read your article, but a glance through the Phil Plait note tells me they have NOT yet detected a pattern.

He also ruled out sunpots, one of my suspects.

[Lance]

At this point, the bottom line seems to be that there are several ideas, none of which completely fit the observed data, and that alien technology cannot be ruled out at this time.

What makes this different from the typical woo is that main-stream astronomers are saying that. It's not just Giorgio Tsoukalos.

Edited to add:

Popular Science has a good article: Are Those Really Alien Megastructures? How Astronomers Plan To Investigate

[Lance]

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is now scanning KIC 8462852.

Search For Intelligent Aliens Near Bizarre Dimming Star Has Begun

[Lance]

The SETI Institute has a published protocol for how to handle events if a real, artificial signal were ever to be detected. There would be no announcement. There would be a call to other radio observatories to observe and attempt to confirm the signal. There's a lot more to it than that but it's been a long time since I read it.

The SETI Institute began observing KIC 8462852 last Friday, October 16th, using the Allen Telescope Array. As of now, they are requesting other radio observatories interrupt their normal schedules and focus on observing KIC 8462852 as soon as possible. Also, the American Association of Variable Star Observers has issued an Alert Notice requesting all available observatories, both amateur and professional, optical and radio, to immediately begin observing the target and report their findings.

Whatever this ends up being, I think this is an exciting time.

[Arneb]

And it shows what the scientific community will do if something intriguing comes their way. No hushing up, no shrill statements how this is most certainly not ever an artificial signal, etc. They get something exciting on their hands (if it isn't artificial, it's an phenomenally interesting and, so far, unique, natural process), they fire at it from all positions, down to the last C8 amateur telescope from a Virginia backyard. That's the way to go.

[Enzo]

They have the poise to ask other astronomers to verify their observation, good. They SAY they will make no announcements or do anything that might spook the public, good. And IF IF IF they somehow can determine that this really is evidence of far away civilization, do any of us REALLY believe the lid will be kept on this? Did Wikileaks learn us nothing? We might trust the brain trust running these programs, but do we really think all the little junior players will forego the opportunity to be the ONE who tells the world?

And we are not the world. Vladimir Putin has scientists too, and they may sign on to protocols, but I am not so confident that an opportunity to make mother Russia first would be passed by for protocol.

And then MUFON gets involved, and it all degrades into nobody knows what's real or not.

[Мастер]

Did Wikileaks learn us nothing?

Probably because of what has happened to Manning, Snowden, and Assange, the person leaking the drone documents seems to have learned that it's a good idea to remain anonymous.