There is still a possibility of KIC 8462852 being a Dyson Sphere
61 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Zyler;49549607]Communication wouldn't (necessarily) be a problem. Quantum Entanglement in quantum computer based communication networks could, in the future, be used to communicate signals between two linked systems any amount of distance away from each other instanteously. The only problem is physically getting the receiver there in the first place.[/QUOTE]
No, it couldn't. This is not how quantum entanglement works. Observing the spin state cannot be used for communication, we only know that if two particles are entangled and we observe the spin in one axis how the other particle is spinning. I'm tired as fuck and can't think how to explain more sooooo
:johnnymo1:
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=markg06;49549188]Now that NASA has loads of money they need to research and build a super engine so we can see what it is.[/QUOTE]
NASA doesn't exactly have loads of money, but got the majority of their programs funded. Not enough excess to fund further research into FTL travel. Currently, the nicest propulsion we have (in terms of acceleration and the like) is the VASIMIR engine which is being tested on the ISS this year.
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Bat-shit;49549576]And where was this exactly? Because 1,500 years doesn't sound dick to me.
Add in a thousand or two years more because light speed limitations, and then we're probably at around 5,000-8,000 years at least to reach some nearby star system, which still doesn't sound like a bad idea to construct a big number of sub-light speed colonization ships, and send them all over the galaxy to predetermined destinations.
Communication between these colonizes, and the Earth, could probably be established as well, but otherwise they would be effectively isolated, until we come up with...something faster.
Or, would that be suicide?[/QUOTE]
Venturing into interstellar space barring further advancements is effectively suicide. One must consider a fuel source to last that long, how to get spare parts, general consumables, the danger of enclosed environments of people, micrometeorite impacts causing reactions more to do with Einstein than newton, issues with radiation in space, and on and on.
Krasnostav tubes [I]miiiiight[/I] be a possiblity as in they are one of the few concepts for FTL that doesn't [I]completely skullfuck[/I] causality, like most other FTL propositions.
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
further edit on FTL communication: barring the fact that observation collapses the waveform (or something I forget exact words here), we cannot actually affect the state the particle encodes into. Oh, and it too violates relativity and the like. I can attempt to give a better metaphor of how this process isn't actually equal to communication, but its probably pretty awful.
[QUOTE=Zyler;49549607]Communication wouldn't (necessarily) be a problem. Quantum Entanglement in quantum computer based communication networks could, in the future, be used to communicate signals between two linked systems any amount of distance away from each other instanteously. The only problem is physically getting the receiver there in the first place.[/QUOTE]
Not true in the least. Quantum entanglement doesn't actually allow for the transportation of information per se (what exactly constitutes 'information' in a rigorous sense is actually a very important question in physics, however we'll avoid that for now).
Entangled particles, if kept sufficiently isolated from the rest of the universe, are merely statistically correlated in such a way that knowing information about one allows you to infer information about the other. For example, if you broke a composite particle with spin-0 (spin just being a property of particles which obeys certain rules) into two constituent particles then the net spin, barring any unwanted interactions with the environment, would have to sum up to 0. So if you measure one particle and find it to have -1/2 spin, then the other one must have +1/2 spin (assuming you haven't fucked up and exposed one of the particles to a huge magnetic field and forced the spin to flip or something).
Entangled particles are actually part of a [I]single[/I] system. They're not two interacting systems of single particles, and this is an important distinction.
The study is all over the place. Averaging plates from 1890 to 1990 n 5 year bins?
Are you shitting me?
And then there is the conformation bias:
[quote]Schaefer saw the same century-long dimming in his manual readings, [/quote]
And in the original study
[quote]episodes of unique
and inexplicable day-long dips with up to 20% dimming.
[/quote]
Averaging over 5 years to explain day-long dips? WHat?
Or is the 5 years a new phenomenon? But then why 20% on both?
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
[quote]The century-long dimming and the
day-long dips are both just extreme ends of a spectrum of timescales for unique
dimming events, so by Ockham’s Razor, all this is produced by one physical
mechanism. [/quote]
No it's fucking not.
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
[quote]The star KIC8462852 (TYC 3162-665-1) is apparently a perfectly normal star, with no
spectral peculiarities, appearing in the original Cygnus/Lyra field studied with the Kepler
spacecraft. But then, the Planet Hunters project discovered in the Kepler light curve that
KIC8462852 displays a unique series of aperiodic dips in brightness (Boyajian et al. 2015)[/quote]
I'm sorry but a brightness change without a spectral change is absolute fucking trash data.
Are you saying that it's not produced by one physical mechanism, or, they are not both at extreme ends of a spectrum in terms of time scale for unique dimming events?
I'm saying that the proposition is wild speculation.
My food gets cold within hours, the northern hemishere gets cold within 12 months.
By Ockhams Razor both of them are produced by the same physical mechanism, a giant fridge.
I recommend people look up the "speed of information" if they think entanglement is some cosmic 4G mobile carrier service.
[QUOTE=Killuah;49549704]The study is all over the place. Averaging plates from 1890 to 1990 n 5 year bins?
Are you shitting me?
And then there is the conformation bias:
And in the original study
Averaging over 5 years to explain day-long dips? WHat?
Or is the 5 years a new phenomenon? But then why 20% on both?
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
No it's fucking not.
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
I'm sorry but a brightness change without a spectral change is absolute fucking trash data.[/QUOTE]
fucking hell
this is shit data. and an insult to occams razor.
[QUOTE=Killuah;49549704]The study is all over the place. Averaging plates from 1890 to 1990 n 5 year bins?
Are you shitting me?
And then there is the conformation bias:
And in the original study
Averaging over 5 years to explain day-long dips? WHat?
Or is the 5 years a new phenomenon? But then why 20% on both?
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
No it's fucking not.
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
I'm sorry but a brightness change without a spectral change is absolute fucking trash data.[/QUOTE]
Nobody here actually read the article.
[QUOTE=Novangel;49548163]I don't think a star ending its life cycle is very high on the priority list for an alien architect[/QUOTE]
The point I was making is that Dyson Spheres aren't very portable, and would require a massive amount of power to disassemble and move when a star is ending its life cycle, and you would also have to get the presumably trillions of inhabitants of the sphere to evacuate incase something goes wrong and the dyson sphere somehow implodes during the disassembly process due to the suns gravity. Its just a huge mess and it would probably cost whatever alien race there is less of whatever they trade for things to just leave the dyson sphere there.
[QUOTE=Antlerp;49549572]What else do you do when you've maxed out everything???? you build a dyson sphere. It's a great endgame "might as well" structure.[/QUOTE]
Something that doesn't require multiple planets worth of titanium and sextillions of dollars (atleast in earth money) for a small amount of energy compared to what it would take to build one in the first place.
I'd expect any sort of aliens to be pretty damn efficient at this point, if we haven't gotten 1 sign of any aliens since we've started looking for them, building a dyson sphere at a star we can detect is pretty dumb of them if they've been hiding their traces from us everywhere else.
[QUOTE=Toro;49551106]The point I was making is that Dyson Spheres aren't very portable, and would require a massive amount of power to disassemble and move when a star is ending its life cycle, and you would also have to get the presumably trillions of inhabitants of the sphere to evacuate incase something goes wrong and the dyson sphere somehow implodes during the disassembly process due to the suns gravity. Its just a huge mess and it would probably cost whatever alien race there is less of whatever they trade for things to just leave the dyson sphere there.
Something that doesn't require multiple planets worth of titanium and sextillions of dollars (atleast in earth money) for a small amount of energy compared to what it would take to build one in the first place.
I'd expect any sort of aliens to be pretty damn efficient at this point, if we haven't gotten 1 sign of any aliens since we've started looking for them, building a dyson sphere at a star we can detect is pretty dumb of them if they've been hiding their traces from us everywhere else.[/QUOTE]
stars burn for millions of years so by the time it runs out they would easily have the capacity to move to another solar system with more resources
[QUOTE=Killuah;49549704]The study is all over the place. Averaging plates from 1890 to 1990 n 5 year bins?
Are you shitting me?
And then there is the conformation bias:
And in the original study
Averaging over 5 years to explain day-long dips? WHat?
Or is the 5 years a new phenomenon? But then why 20% on both?
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
No it's fucking not.
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
I'm sorry but a brightness change without a spectral change is absolute fucking trash data.[/QUOTE]
Yeah Killuah, you show them. It's obvious you know more than these fools with certification
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
Also your fridge analogy would only make sense if you stored your food all over the globe.
You know what I mean.
[QUOTE=Killuah;49549741]I'm saying that the proposition is wild speculation.
My food in the gets cold within hours, the northern hemishere gets cold within 12 months.
By Ockhams Razor both of them are produced by the same physical mechanism, a giant fridge.[/QUOTE]
This analogy is so brilliant I want to frame it on my wall. I'm not trying to be sarcastic here.
[QUOTE=wewt!;49551949]This analogy is so brilliant I want to frame it on my wall. I'm not trying to be sarcastic here.[/QUOTE]
Agreed. I hate it when my food in the gets cold.
[QUOTE=mecaguy03;49549286]Would have to either warp space or surpass the speed of light, because this star is 1480 light years away, sadly.
Gotta get them wormholes[/QUOTE]
Either that or discover how to transition "sideways" into planes of existence where things could travel way, WAY faster than in our slice of reality. If there are indeed multiple universes, it probably wouldn't be proper to assume that they all work exactly like ours does.
[QUOTE=HybridTheroy;49551334]Yeah Killuah, you show them. It's obvious you know more than these fools with certification
[editline]17th January 2016[/editline]
Also your fridge analogy would only make sense if you stored your food all over the globe.[/QUOTE]
No, but did you expect anything else from any of the science enthusiasts, physicists, or engineers of FP? we're buzz Killington in all we do.
It was a fair point. You really can't make that large of a leap in logic, and their position does not leave them free of questioning. Killuah is as entitled to call them out as anyone else is. They can, in turn, end up slapping him down just as hard if they rectify their data or turn out right.
Science is founded in questioning. Occams Razors was used to move away from the Aristotelian model of physics, which was the de facto model only because people didn't like to question it very much and those who did tried too hard to adhere to it. Ever heard of Tychos model for the solar system?
I hope to be shot down but reading this study just makes my inner scientist go all itchy.
Dispute is good.
Believing in "certifications" is not.
[QUOTE=Killuah;49552765]I hope to be shot down but reading this study just makes my inner scientist go all itchy.
Dispute is good.
Believing in "certifications" is not.[/QUOTE]
I'm not trying to imply what you think I am, I'm just saying that these people are certified enough that they most likely have taken simple things like confirmation bias into account.
But the paper hasn't.
I don't know what's a bigger stretch - that we found an alien megastructure, or that a completely separate species would just so happen to construct a megastructure that we conceptualized in our science fiction stories.
[QUOTE=Zeke129;49554092]I don't know what's a bigger stretch - that we found an alien megastructure, or that a completely separate species would just so happen to construct a megastructure that we conceptualized in our science fiction stories.[/QUOTE]
well, a dyson sphere isn't really that hard to conceptualize, its literally just a giant hollow sphere around a star, intercepting and collecting all of the energy it releases.
[quote]“Either one of our refutations has some hidden loophole, or some theorist needs to come up with some other proposal.”[/quote]
I'm pretty sure that the only proposal to that case and even the answer itself is 42.
Stars aren't even very efficient at converting hydrogen to energy. We could (with resources and time) build a fusion reactor that's a small fraction of the size while outputting more power. That may even be cheaper than a sphere made of solar panels. Or we could build a huge dynamo around a rotating black hole. The only thing a sun has going for it is that it's a lump of already-collected hydrogen, so we don't have to fly around and scoop it up from interstellar medium.
So tl;dr I don't think Dyson spheres are that good at what they do.
[QUOTE=gman003-main;49547510]A Dyson sphere is a specific type of megastructure, and [b]since we obviously didn't make it[/b], it would be an alien one.[/QUOTE]
where is the proof
[QUOTE=Ezhik;49554598]where is the proof[/QUOTE]
I also need proof, it could be the Illuminati building a death star from that online petition!
[QUOTE=Zeke129;49554092]I don't know what's a bigger stretch - that we found an alien megastructure, or that a completely separate species would just so happen to construct a megastructure that we conceptualized in our science fiction stories.[/QUOTE]
A star at the center of a civilizations galaxy would produce enough energy for all an aliens needs and then some - so it's possible that an advanced alien race would build such a thing
[QUOTE=TrulliLulli;49554889]A star at the center of a civilizations galaxy would produce enough energy for all an aliens needs and then some - so it's possible that an advanced alien race would build such a thing[/QUOTE]
Stars produce an absolutely ridiculous amount of energy, but this isn't going to be a structure. It doesn't make much sense, and while analyzing the logic of beings that would be COMPLETELY alien from us is futile, I have the feeling that taking the most efficient path to solving a problem is something common to all species. So this wouldn't be a structure built for the pure sake of "POWER!".
If anything, it would be out of hubris, aesthetics, or for the sake of just building a megastructure. There are better ways to get power. Like fusion. If you can build a dyson swarm, you could probably build fusion power.
I still think its a swarm of cometary fragments, or a long destroyed rocky/watery planet. Maybe even a rogue planet from extrasolar (their extrasolar) space that got shredded by tidal forces or something. Its far too aperiodic to make any sense.
also, the difference between a civilizations galaxy and a civilizations solar system is tremendous. Its possible they built this, but at that point we're getting into things so hypothetical we can state "anythings possible!" and be correct.
[editline]18th January 2016[/editline]
oh, and for fucks sake. The person who published this paper also states this:
[QUOTE]What about those alien megastructures? Schafer is unconvinced. “The alien-megastructure idea runs wrong with my new observations,” he says, as he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn’t be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. What’s more, such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as heat, but the infrared signal from Tabby’s star appears normal, he says.[/QUOTE]
[editline]18th January 2016[/editline]
A molniya orbit of a large aggregate body of various matter could explain this phenomenon quite handily- it deserves further investigation. I hope NASA turns the JWST this way when its completed, because something weird is happening here, but I would stop hedging your bets for aliens. I honestly hope we don't encounter aliens in the cosmos.
[editline]18th January 2016[/editline]
Okay so having just read the paper here is what is going on: Schaefer went back and manually inspected each plate for magnitude variations. He's quite experienced at this- 9 papers out with this technique involved. This data was also compared to the digital data collected, and showed that the digital data was also a-ok. The 5 year binning was done due it being difficult to pick out magnitude changes smaller than 0.25mag, and he made sure to calculate error and uncertainity for this data as well. The data collected for KIC 8462852 was checked against five other F6-type stars in the same region over the same time period, and the data (collected and normalized in the same method) showed these five stars to be within normal margins.
furthermore,
[QUOTE]
The light curve displays highly significant variations, with a clear trend for fading from
early to late times. A chi-square fit with a flat light curve yields χ2=197.7, while a sloped line
yields χ2=37.8. A chi-square fit for a linear trend has a slope of +0.165±0.013 magnitudes
per century. The check star light curves do not have any significant slope, and this proves
that systematic errors are not creating the slope for KIC8462852
My by-eye light curve also has an obvious slope. A chi-square fit to all 131 magnitudes
from 1890 to 1989 yields a slope of +0.310±0.029 magnitudes per century. This is formally
different from the slope that I get from DASCH, and I attribute this to the happenstance
that my sampling of the available plates included few from 1900-1909, when the light curve
was relatively dim and pulling the fitted slope to smaller values. The critical point from
my by-eye measures is that KIC8462852 does indeed have a highly significant variation,
manifesting as a secular fading from the 1890s to the 1980s. This proves that the secular
trend is not due to any issues with the DASCH procedures, measures, analysis, or selection.[/QUOTE]
So. KIC8462852 shows bizarre changes in brightness, but it has show an overall decrease in magnitude over the past century. This removes the possibility of it being just some error in Kepler (which was already adequately dismissed in another paper), but also means that it probably wasn't just an anomaly causing the dimming that kepler witnessed. That is his usage of Occams Razor- that the chances of KIC8462852 experiencing two different stellar events causing short aperiodic dimming and long-term linear dimming is tiny.
[QUOTE]KIC8462852 displays two types of unique dimming episodes (the dips from Kepler and
the fading from Harvard) and these must be causally related and coming from the same
mechanism. That is, Ockham’s Razor tells us that it is very unlikely that one star will
suffer two different mechanisms that are unique to that star and that both are only manifest
in dimming the starlight by up to 20%. The timescales differ greatly, from a day for the
Kepler dips up to a century for the Harvard light curve fading. However, dimming events with
intermediate timescales are also seen (e.g., the 1900-1909 decade and the last hundred days of
the Kepler light curve), so apparently there is a continuum of timescales available for the one
dimming mechanism. So if the day-long dips are caused by circumstellar dust occultations,
then the century-long fading must also be caused by circumstellar dust occultations.
[/QUOTE]
Nonsensical, and I agree with him now. The comet idea doesn't work for the century-long dimming, so thats right out the fucking window. Dust is weird too, I have a wicked fucking headache and so much hw to do so I'm not going to go into that further or try to math it out. But here's his bit about comets:
[QUOTE]With 36 giant-comets required to make the one 20% Kepler dip, and all of these along
one orbit, we would need 648,000 giant-comets to create the century-long fading. For these
200 km diameter giant-comets having a density of 1 gm cm−3
, each will have a mass of
4 × 1021 gm, and the total will have a mass of 0.4 M⊕. This can be compared to the largest
known comet in our own Solar System (Comet Hale-Bopp) with a diameter of 60 km. This
can also be compared to the entire mass of the Kuiper Belt at around 0.1 M⊕ (Gladman et
al. 2001). I do not see how it is possible for something like 648,000 giant-comets to exist
around one star, nor to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star
within the last century. So I take this century-long dimming as a strong argument against
the comet-family hypothesis to explain the Kepler dips.
[/QUOTE]
So yeah, it would have to be 650k comets with a total mass of 0.4 solar masses. Wut? Not to mention the nightmare of the orbit required to cause this- a regular stream of comets through the space there or something. And here's the graph of the brightness. Diamonds are the 5-year binned data from the digital measurements of magnitude. These were (partially) binned because there were a fuckload of em. The solid line is one best-fit type, and the dashed is another. Both show steady decreases in brightness of the star.
[t]http://i.imgur.com/RJ0PoDb.png[/t]
So honestly, what the FUCK is happening to this star? I am completely boggled and now really interested. I [I]really[/I] hope JWST looks at this thing hard. Oh, and that article fucking sucks.
[QUOTE=TrulliLulli;49554889]A star at the center of a civilizations galaxy would produce enough energy for all an aliens needs and then some - so it's possible that an advanced alien race would build such a thing[/QUOTE]
And for all we know, the trillions-strong civilization would probably be linked in to the sphere as part of some sort of Matrioshka brain, all connected in a simulated reality where all needs are serviced and all thoughts are passed around, dreaming for aeons until the star can no longer remain in its "yellow phase".
At which point they'd have to abandon the sphere before the star's core doesn't have easy access to hydrogen anymore and blooms into a red giant. Unless of course the sphere is designed to accommodate a red giant, in which case they'd be able to sleep a bit longer. They'd still need to leave eventually, though, since the core would keep on fusing heavier elements until it starts trying to fuse iron, which is bad news bears, especially for naturally-larger stars.
I love topics like these ones. No real answer for anything. Purely speculative across the board. I started reading this thread and had to comment. I am no scientist pre sa, but I like to think outside the box.
I think to apply limited human knowledge to explain say a mega structure and speculate on thier motives is absurd. Mankind has only explored our own solar system in the past, what? 60 or 70 years? If this anomaly is in fact alien, it would be safe to presume that their technology is vastly beyond ours. Such a species would dazzle us this marvelous physics that defy our own understanding. Does that mean it is not possible? Or that mankind has yet to harness and discover these technologies. 100 of years ago, flight was impossible, and now we have jets that break the sound barrier times over. Seems that we have made some real progress in a short amount of time.
Fast forward a million years. Colonizing other planets and moons would be nothing for us. In fact I remember a very well known physicist that says the last step in a civilization evolution would be to harness the power of stars. So really, it could be possible. If this were an alien race, they could be experimenting with stars. Possibly trying to refuel a star as to last forever.
There is also a theoretical model that I forget at this time, but it involves setting up power stations around a solar system and beaming that energy to other power stations. I want to say, with microwave technology but I could be wrong on the method of transmission.
However, it is foolish to think mankind knows it all. To say, it would stupid to build such a mega structure is ignorant. I for one think mankind has a VERY long way to go when it comes to technology. Its always fun to speculate, but I think when we do, we sometimes should think outside the box. To say we possibly know the entire contents of the galaxy, and could predict every scenario with our current technology is terrible.
Lastly, the use od nuclear and or fission power are great alternatives to solar power or anything else we know of right now. However, we also know that these techniques have consequences. I would like to believe after millions of years, or maybe a billion years of evolution, a species would stray from these technologies, for the environment. I do however do believe in aliens, and I also believe that they dont like us using nuclear power, with vast sighting around the cold war era, etc.
Well just my thoughts. Thanks for hearing me out.
[QUOTE=Toro;49554155]well, a dyson sphere isn't really that hard to conceptualize, its literally just a giant hollow sphere around a star, intercepting and collecting all of the energy it releases.[/QUOTE]
It's easy to conceptualize for us because for all of human development our societies have been limited by the amount of energy we can collect. We always want more energy, so it makes sense to us to harvest a star.
But the whole "alien dyson sphere" thing makes the mistake of assuming that an alien species would have the same motivations as us, which just adds a whole new layer of improbability to something that's already improbable.
Maybe they don't need that much energy so it never occurs to them, or maybe they found a way to get all the energy they could ever want "early" in their development, maybe they're a bunch of hippie alien elves who live and frolic in nature, etc.
There's an infinite number of ways aliens could be [i]not[/i] like us, surely that's more likely than aliens so similar to us that our science fiction is their reality.
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