Water on Mars? Bleh. Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures'

[Wilikon]

A star identified by the Kepler Space Telescope may harbour structures which could point to an advanced technological civilisation



A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would "expect an alien civilization to build", astronomers have said. 

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.

But KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets.

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

In 2011 the star was flagged up again by several members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team – a group of ‘citizen scientists’ tasked with analysing the data from the 150,000 stars Kepler was watching.

The analysts tagged the star as “interesting “ and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mess of matter in tight formation.

This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star wasn’t young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself.

Boyajian, who oversees the “Planet Hunters” project, recently published a paper looking at all the possible natural explanations for the objects and found all of them wanting except one – that another star had pulled a string of comets close to KIC 8462852. But even this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence.

That’s when Wright, the astronomer from Penn State University and his colleague Andrew Siemion, the Director of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) got involved. Now the possibility that the objects were created by intelligent creatures is being taken very seriously by the team.

The three astronomers want to point a radio dish at the star to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilizations. And the first observations could be ready to take place as early as January, with follow-up observations potentially coming even quicker.

“If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner,” Wright told The Atlantic. “If we saw something exciting… we’d be asking to go on right away.”


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/forget-water-on-mars-astronomers-may-have-just-found-giant-alien-megastructures-orbiting-a-star-near-a6693886.html



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I wonder if the Wow signal came from that direction...

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[1aguar]

Water on Mars was disclosed in 1991 in Phoenix Journal #33:

"Mars has grown very much older [than Earth]. It still has water but oxygen-dependent life is nearing its end upon it. Deserts take up a large area of it and it is more oblate than the earth."

Introduction to the writings:
http://www.phoenixsourcedistributors.com/html/gch.html
Discussing the origin of these writings on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/3dhrs4/no_idea_where_else_to_post_this_anyone_here_know/
The Journal in point; also available via Google Books:
http://www.phoenixsourcedistributors.com/html/j033/

[Wilikon]

Forget and ignore this thread.

Go here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1208846.0

[vero]

There are aliens out there, just as there are on Earth.... but they are much smaller than we think. Please stop dreaming in cloud cuckoo land and get back to the real world. Doing our bit for the country is much more important than gazing into space blankly.

[chennan]

What the hell??  I just posted this topic on here last night, and when I woke up it was gone...

Anyways, I think this is really cool.. but won't get much attention from the media, until they actually do find radio frequencies, and/if the government won't shut them up in time for them not to go public with the discovery.

[Wilikon]

What the hell??  I just posted this topic on here last night, and when I woke up it was gone...

Anyways, I think this is really cool.. but won't get much attention from the media, until they actually do find radio frequencies, and/if the government won't shut them up in time for them not to go public with the discovery.

Check out post #3 for the link for your post. Your thread was created minutes before mine so I told everyone to support your thread instead. After that people are free to chose.

So your thread is not gone. I just tested the link.


I have a feeling this structure was discovered a while back. The water on mars, and pluto, etc, were, maybe, meant to smooth this story in...?

Water = life = Hey! Look! A Dyson sphere!

[Spendulus]

What the hell??  I just posted this topic on here last night, and when I woke up it was gone...

Anyways, I think this is really cool.. but won't get much attention from the media, until they actually do find radio frequencies, and/if the government won't shut them up in time for them not to go public with the discovery.

....

I have a feeling this structure was discovered a while back. The water on mars, and pluto, etc, were, maybe, meant to smooth this story in...?

Water = life = Hey! Look! A Dyson sphere!

Maybe, because the story isn't new...

[StratusOakmont]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

[chennan]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

What do you mean "level 2" .. how would you go about grading the progress of a civilization, if we ourselves don't know how far we can come along as man?

[Spendulus]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

The variations in the stellar output that are the subject of this inquiry are indeed odd.  Intervals of variation in brightness of 22 and 14% for example.  Large amounts of light are being shielded.  This is not the work of typical planets, those being tiny compared to the output of a sun (yet we detect those small variations, and calculate orbit from dopplar effect, and mass of the planets). 

A gas cloud with an orbital periodicity could exist around a star for a period of time.  Lets say max a few thousand years.  Might be a few million years, many factors influence it.

The gas would aggregate, and either fall into a gravity well of a planet or form one.

This is evidence of "odd" but not exactly evidence of "et."

Now if the periodicity of the variations formed a code that enabled the unlocking of encrypted data streams in what was previously thought to be natural noise of the Hydrogen spectra from the vicinity of the star in question, why that's huge.

[Gronthaing]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

What do you mean "level 2" .. how would you go about grading the progress of a civilization, if we ourselves don't know how far we can come along as man?

He is talking about the Kardashev scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale it is based on how much energy a civilization can use. So a type 2 can use all the energy of their star. While we aren't even a type 1 yet.

[StratusOakmont]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

What do you mean "level 2" .. how would you go about grading the progress of a civilization, if we ourselves don't know how far we can come along as man?

Sorry for my mistake, humans currently at 0.74 level. It would takes 100 to 200 years to reach Level 1.

Type I

    "Technological level close to the level presently attained on earth, with energy consumption at ≈4×1019 erg/sec (4 × 1012 watts)."[1] Guillermo A. Lemarchand stated this as "A level near contemporary terrestrial civilization with an energy capability equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth, between 1016 and 1017 watts."[3]

Type II

    "A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star (for example, the stage of successful construction of a Dyson sphere), "with energy consumption at ≈4×1033 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization capable of utilizing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. The energy utilization would then be comparable to the luminosity of our Sun, about 4×1033 erg/sec (4×1026 watts)."[3]

Type III

    "A civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy, with energy consumption at ≈4×1044 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization with access to the power comparable to the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy, about 4×1044 erg/sec (4×1037 watts)."[3]


Type IV

   Beings who can control or use the entire universe.


Type V

who control collections of universes. The power output of the visible universe is within a few orders of magnitude of 1045 W. Such a civilization approaches or surpasses the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible.

    Zoltán Galántai has argued that such a civilization could not be detected, as its activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of nature (there being nothing to compare them to).[23]

[Spendulus]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

What do you mean "level 2" .. how would you go about grading the progress of a civilization, if we ourselves don't know how far we can come along as man?

Sorry for my mistake, humans currently at 0.74 level. It would takes 100 to 200 years to reach Level 1.

Type I

    "Technological level close to the level presently attained on earth, with energy consumption at ≈4×1019 erg/sec (4 × 1012 watts)."[1] Guillermo A. Lemarchand stated this as "A level near contemporary terrestrial civilization with an energy capability equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth, between 1016 and 1017 watts."[3]

Type II

    "A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star (for example, the stage of successful construction of a Dyson sphere), "with energy consumption at ≈4×1033 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization capable of utilizing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. The energy utilization would then be comparable to the luminosity of our Sun, about 4×1033 erg/sec (4×1026 watts)."[3]

Type III

    "A civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy, with energy consumption at ≈4×1044 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization with access to the power comparable to the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy, about 4×1044 erg/sec (4×1037 watts)."[3]


Type IV

   Beings who can control or use the entire universe.


Type V

who control collections of universes. The power output of the visible universe is within a few orders of magnitude of 1045 W. Such a civilization approaches or surpasses the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible.

    Zoltán Galántai has argued that such a civilization could not be detected, as its activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of nature (there being nothing to compare them to).[23]

I don't believe a Dyson sphere is capable of being built and maintained, physically.

Interesting concepts though.

[subSTRATA]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

What do you mean "level 2" .. how would you go about grading the progress of a civilization, if we ourselves don't know how far we can come along as man?

Sorry for my mistake, humans currently at 0.74 level. It would takes 100 to 200 years to reach Level 1.

Type I

    "Technological level close to the level presently attained on earth, with energy consumption at ≈4×1019 erg/sec (4 × 1012 watts)."[1] Guillermo A. Lemarchand stated this as "A level near contemporary terrestrial civilization with an energy capability equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth, between 1016 and 1017 watts."[3]

Type II

    "A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star (for example, the stage of successful construction of a Dyson sphere), "with energy consumption at ≈4×1033 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization capable of utilizing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. The energy utilization would then be comparable to the luminosity of our Sun, about 4×1033 erg/sec (4×1026 watts)."[3]

Type III

    "A civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy, with energy consumption at ≈4×1044 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization with access to the power comparable to the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy, about 4×1044 erg/sec (4×1037 watts)."[3]


Type IV

   Beings who can control or use the entire universe.


Type V

who control collections of universes. The power output of the visible universe is within a few orders of magnitude of 1045 W. Such a civilization approaches or surpasses the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible.

    Zoltán Galántai has argued that such a civilization could not be detected, as its activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of nature (there being nothing to compare them to).[23]

I don't believe a Dyson sphere is capable of being built and maintained, physically.

Interesting concepts though.

not yet to out extent of knowledge at least. given a few hundred years into the future, im all for the possibilities of having something like this exist. now if the megastructure nasa found was indeed a dyson sphere the possibility of a type 3 civilization somewhere doesnt seem all too impossiible.

[Gronthaing]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

What do you mean "level 2" .. how would you go about grading the progress of a civilization, if we ourselves don't know how far we can come along as man?

Sorry for my mistake, humans currently at 0.74 level. It would takes 100 to 200 years to reach Level 1.

Type I

    "Technological level close to the level presently attained on earth, with energy consumption at ≈4×1019 erg/sec (4 × 1012 watts)."[1] Guillermo A. Lemarchand stated this as "A level near contemporary terrestrial civilization with an energy capability equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth, between 1016 and 1017 watts."[3]

Type II

    "A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star (for example, the stage of successful construction of a Dyson sphere), "with energy consumption at ≈4×1033 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization capable of utilizing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. The energy utilization would then be comparable to the luminosity of our Sun, about 4×1033 erg/sec (4×1026 watts)."[3]

Type III

    "A civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy, with energy consumption at ≈4×1044 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization with access to the power comparable to the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy, about 4×1044 erg/sec (4×1037 watts)."[3]


Type IV

   Beings who can control or use the entire universe.


Type V

who control collections of universes. The power output of the visible universe is within a few orders of magnitude of 1045 W. Such a civilization approaches or surpasses the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible.

    Zoltán Galántai has argued that such a civilization could not be detected, as its activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of nature (there being nothing to compare them to).[23]

I don't believe a Dyson sphere is capable of being built and maintained, physically.

Interesting concepts though.

Why not? The idea of a completely solid shell maybe not. It could have too many problems and maybe not worth doing compared to other structures. But other types of dyson spheres are probably possible and not hard to maintain. Like the one dyson was originally talking about. Many independent segments around a star instead of a rigid shell.

[christycalhoun]

Do they have any images of this discovery available. I would need to see it to believe it.

[d-trix]

I really do believe that there are alien civilizations out there who are far more technologically advanced.

[Spendulus]

Dyson Spere can be created by level 2 civilization and above. And that we see today happen 1500 years ago. Humans civilization is only level 0.1 - 0.2 .  We will be in trouble if they know we are here.

What do you mean "level 2" .. how would you go about grading the progress of a civilization, if we ourselves don't know how far we can come along as man?

Sorry for my mistake, humans currently at 0.74 level. It would takes 100 to 200 years to reach Level 1.

Type I

    "Technological level close to the level presently attained on earth, with energy consumption at ≈4×1019 erg/sec (4 × 1012 watts)."[1] Guillermo A. Lemarchand stated this as "A level near contemporary terrestrial civilization with an energy capability equivalent to the solar insolation on Earth, between 1016 and 1017 watts."[3]

Type II

    "A civilization capable of harnessing the energy radiated by its own star (for example, the stage of successful construction of a Dyson sphere), "with energy consumption at ≈4×1033 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization capable of utilizing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. The energy utilization would then be comparable to the luminosity of our Sun, about 4×1033 erg/sec (4×1026 watts)."[3]

Type III

    "A civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its own galaxy, with energy consumption at ≈4×1044 erg/sec."[1] Lemarchand stated this as "A civilization with access to the power comparable to the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy, about 4×1044 erg/sec (4×1037 watts)."[3]


Type IV

   Beings who can control or use the entire universe.


Type V

who control collections of universes. The power output of the visible universe is within a few orders of magnitude of 1045 W. Such a civilization approaches or surpasses the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible.

    Zoltán Galántai has argued that such a civilization could not be detected, as its activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of nature (there being nothing to compare them to).[23]

I don't believe a Dyson sphere is capable of being built and maintained, physically.

Interesting concepts though.

Why not? The idea of a completely solid shell maybe not. It could have too many problems and maybe not worth doing compared to other structures. But other types of dyson spheres are probably possible and not hard to maintain. Like the one dyson was originally talking about. Many independent segments around a star instead of a rigid shell.

The one that dyson originally proposed is ridiculously unfeasible.  Large numbers of independent segments essentially work against each other's gravitational fields hence require energy inputs and propulsion to maintain their orbits.

Interestingly, the exact amount of energy for such offsets can be calculated at lest to a first approximation.  I doubt it would be a significant fraction of the solar output collected by the surfaces deployed in the orbits, but how would such thrust be done?

1.  Ion engines.  Really?  You are going to throw huge numbers of ions into the system, essentially gas it up?
2.  Chemical thrust.  Impossible, and worse than #1
3.  Some method we are currently not aware of.
4.  Solar sails?

[StratusOakmont]

We are like primitives compared to this advance aliens who may have evolve and build civilization million years ahead of us.

I'm sure we would have a hard time understanding their technologies much like the human primitives understanding our current technologies now.

[Vod]

We are like primitives compared to this advance aliens who may have evolve and build civilization million years ahead of us.

I doubt there are any civilizations that are millions of years ahead of us. 

They would eventually destroy themselves.  How would they get past AI?