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SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Compendium / Miscellaneous

To Serve Man would be a very tricky book to write, since human biochemistry is almost certainly toxic or at least inedible to almost all alien species. Still, some of them might relish the challenge.
 
To Serve Man would be a very tricky book to write, since human biochemistry is almost certainly toxic or at least inedible to almost all alien species. Still, some of them might relish the challenge.
Like those connoisseurs who think it's cool to eat poisonous fish!
 
Well, we humans do eat some toxic foods too. Pufferfish, cassava, etc.
There are ways to treat these items to make them edible.
An alien would find a way, if determined enough.
 
The 'jihad' scenario is actually quite realistic. A suitably advanced civilisation might still have ideological enemies, and whichever contacted us first might attempt to convert us to their version of the 'truth'. And if they are sufficiently advanced, and sufficiently persuasive, we might willingly join with them.

And the 'truth' they espouse may even be fairly congruent with Islam. Stripped of all its Dark Ages cruft, the theology of Islam is pretty sensible; it is almost exactly the same as Judaism, and doesn't have the bizarre Jesus-cult aspect of Christianity. If any aliens have developed monotheism independently, it could well resemble Islam most closely of all human religions.
 
Will advanced aliens still be following a religion? Won't they have left all that guff behind?
 
I think it's fair to say America is one of the most technologically advanced societies in our world. They seem to thrive on religious belief. A culture with such a belief might be more inclined to unite against other cultures, thus more likely to take control of resources and technology on their world. There's no reason to believe in a god given our modern understanding of the Universe, yet that belief persists.
 
But that's just stupid humans. We're still primitive.
 
But that's just stupid humans. We're still primitive.
I suspect we have very little essential changes left to go through. Even if a culture, even human society, abandons religious belief, I image it remains perfectly capable of instilling political philosophy or moral philosophy with the same fundamentalist ideals. We could just as easily find ourselves forced to convert to some restrictive code of behaviour.
 
The search for extraterrestrials goes intergalactic

THOSE who look for intelligent life on other planets usually confine their efforts to listening for radio signals from stars that are, on the cosmic scale of things, fairly close by. The resounding silence so far does not deter enthusiasts, who point out that there are 100 billion stars in Earth’s home galaxy, the Milky Way, almost all of which have not yet been examined.

He who lives by the billion, however, may also die by it. For another number measured in billions is the Milky Way’s age in years. Habitable planets have probably been present in it for at least 10 billion years, which is more than twice the span of Earth’s existence. And a spacefaring civilisation, even one relying on craft travelling at far below the speed of light, would be able to colonise the entire galaxy in a few hundred million years. It therefore follows that if intelligent, technologically capable life forms had emerged elsewhere in the Milky Way, they would probably have done so long enough ago that they would, by now, be everywhere—which evidently they are not. This line of reasoning suggests humans really are the only intelligent life in this particular galaxy.

Perhaps, therefore, the search for aliens is looking in the wrong place. The calculation that intelligent life will rapidly colonise its entire home galaxy—first made by Michael Hart, an American astrophysicist, in 1975—suggests it is not other solar systems which should be scoured for little green men, but other galaxies. And this is just what Roger Griffith, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, has done. ...

http://www.economist.com/news/scien...terrestrials-goes-intergalactic-infra-digging
 
Maybe they are keeping a close eye on us.

The Zoo Hypothesis as Thought Experiment
by PAUL GILSTER on JUNE 26, 2015

Imagine a civilization one million years old. As Nick Nielsen points out in today’s essay, the 10,000 year span of our terrestrial civilization would only amount to one percent of the older culture’s lifetime. The ‘zoo hypothesis’ considers extraterrestrials studying us as we study animals in controlled settings. Can a super-civilization study a planetary culture for the whole course of its technological development? Nielsen, an author and strategic analyst, runs a thought experiment on two possible courses of observation, asking how we would be perceived by outsiders, and how they might relate us to the history of their own development.

by J. N. Nielsen

In 1973 John A. Ball wrote a paper published in Icarus called “The Zoo Hypothesis” in which he posited an answer to the Fermi paradox involving the deliberate non-communication of advanced ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence) elsewhere in our universe:

“…the only way that we can understand the apparent non-interaction between ‘them’ and us is to hypothesize that they are deliberately avoiding interaction and that they have set aside the area in which we live as a zoo. The zoo hypothesis predicts that we shall never find them because they do not want to be found and they have the technological ability to insure this.” [1]

Suppose we were being observed at a distance by alien beings. We already have a chilling description of this from the nineteenth century in the opening passage of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds: ...

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=3...al&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
 
The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy

Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.

In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”

Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.

The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler’s science team couldn’t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler’s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.

The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.

And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/
 
This. Is most intriguing. Must check the link. How about artificial satellites, or alienprogenic space debris???
 
This could be a partial Dyson Sphere or necklace- a ring of independently orbiting megastructures collecting the light from a star. Some of the more realistic versions of the Dyson swarm intercept only a tiny fraction of the total starlight- but that fraction is still significantly more light than the Earth intercepts.
Here are a few images I have made of megastructures to give a taste of what might be possible.
med_cogdyson.jpg

med_frunobulax.JPG

med_JenkinsDysonSwarm.jpg


I've been excited about this possibility for about forty years, since I read about the mysterious object orbiting Epsilon Aurigae in a book by Patrick Moore. Turns out this was an unusual star after all, one surrounded by a dust ring .
EPSILONAURIGAE.jpg

(I made this image too).
 
...lead author Tabetha Boyajian went looking for other explanations, and consulted on the findings with Jason Wright, an astronomer who specializes in searching for signatures of alien civilizations. According to Wright, a Dyson sphere constructed by an advanced alien civilization would be consistent with the findings. Most plausible conceptions of a Dyson sphere consist of hundreds of thousands of solar panels orbiting the star rather than one huge structure, so it's possible that an alien civilization living on a nearby planet is in the middle of building one. If part of the star is surrounded by oddly-shaped panels at any one time, then their orbit could cause these erratic dimming patterns.

Wright and Boyajian are now proposing to search for radio signals emitted around the star, as this alien civilization would be advanced enough to emit radio waves that would be detectable from 1500 light years away. This explanation is probably highly unlikely, as even Wright admits that we should "approach it skeptically." But it is an undeniably strange astronomical phenomenon, so there may be an equally strange explanation, and it's worth investigating.

http://www.outerplaces.com/science/...-evidence-of-an-extraterrestrial-dyson-sphere

This is potentially mind-blowing! The idea that we have detected advanced ET engineering a mere 1500 light years away!
 
The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

My first thought that maybe the inner planets of this system have been destroyed (natural disaster, meteor strike, inter-planetary war, death star type scenario etc...), long enough ago that there'd be no record of this event being observed. Or is this too simplistic?
 
My first thought that maybe the inner planets of this system have been destroyed (natural disaster, meteor strike, inter-planetary war, death star type scenario etc...), long enough ago that there'd be no record of this event being observed. Or is this too simplistic?
Nothing's too simplistic. If you survey enough extrasolar systems, eventually you'll come across some extraordinary natural phenomena, something that might be incredibly unlikely but is bound to be happening somewhere. Of course, we should be cautious and sceptical, because of the huge potential significance of the data, and the need to maintain perspective. Still fascinating, though, whatever it turns out to be.
 
rynner2 said:
Most plausible conceptions of a Dyson sphere consist of hundreds of thousands of solar panels orbiting the star rather than one huge structure, so it's possible that an alien civilization living on a nearby planet is in the middle of building one. If part of the star is surrounded by oddly-shaped panels at any one time, then their orbit could cause these erratic dimming patterns.
This is an image I made of this sort of structure, about ten years ago. It represents a star surrounded by sheets of light-supported statites, very light-weight structures with minimal mass
statites.jpg


http://www.outerplaces.com/science/...-evidence-of-an-extraterrestrial-dyson-sphere

This is potentially mind-blowing! The idea that we have detected advanced ET engineering a mere 1500 light years away!
This image from that article is one of mine as well - I've given a couple of people permission to use it, and now it seems to be public domain. It would be nice to be credited, though...
dyson-sphere-artist.jpeg
 
My first thought that maybe the inner planets of this system have been destroyed (natural disaster, meteor strike, inter-planetary war, death star type scenario etc...), long enough ago that there'd be no record of this event being observed. Or is this too simplistic?

This paper (mentioned in the above article)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf
goes into some alternatives and why they may or may not fit. it's a PDF so I can't copy/paste the relevant bits. You'll have scan to near the bottom of the paper to find it. It's pretty technical though (I can't pretend I fully understand it myself) but it might help answer your question.
 
If it were destroyed planets or a young protoplanetary disk that has somehow survived into the stars' middle age, then there should be more infra-red flux than there is, from the dust. Instead there seems to be several discrete objects, some of which appear to have a non-spherical cross-section.

Perhaps it is a deliberate attempt to send signals to the universe using statites - an idea I also investigated at Orion's Arm a few years back..
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48fa7379af7e0

med_gripler2.jpg
 
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Nothing's too simplistic. If you survey enough extrasolar systems, eventually you'll come across some extraordinary natural phenomena, something that might be incredibly unlikely but is bound to be happening somewhere. Of course, we should be cautious and sceptical, because of the huge potential significance of the data, and the need to maintain perspective. Still fascinating, though, whatever it turns out to be.


Thanks Mr Spock :p

wait a minute! :mad:
 
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