Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky

[Bear]

Interesting. The star gets weirder and weirder.

A long-term dimming trend is exciting at first blush, as it would correlate to continued construction of a Dyson swarm. However, a Dyson swarm under construction would be accompanied by an increase in infrared radiation, and there seems to be no such increase. It appears to be dimming all the way across the spectrum. and the RATE at which it's dimming has shown fluctuations on the years-to-months scale - sometimes fast, other times slow. But while its brightness is up and down in the short term, it seems to be always dimming in the long term.

So.... what is a chaotic process (it would have to be chaotic, otherwise we'd see more patterns) natural process that could reduce the mass of a star in the long run, or block its radiation at an increasing rate? Without a corresponding infrared increase, it has to be at a substantial distance from the star. But if it's at a substantial distance from the star it's got to be a whole lot of unbelievably large somethingorothers.

Hmmm.... what if there's a big reflective somethingorother with flat planar surfaces (crystal lattices break on planar surfaces) that's tumbling chaotically (implying at least two other orbiting bodies in mutual orbit) and sometimes reflecting additional light back at us? But over the very long run the reflective surface is decaying (or going matte) due to microimpacts and ionizing radiation? That would be.... Hmm. That would have spectral absorption lines for the crystalline element. Anybody know whether they've got a good set of spectral data?

[Bear]

They've got a model that seems to indicate starlifting underway.

Holy shit. But there's no evident radio chatter.

If there is ANY way to rule out starlifting and explain this in terms of natural phenomena, I want to know what it is.

From a Fermi-Paradox view, if they're advanced enough to be starlifting at Tabby's star, wouldn't we see evidence of construction at other stars in the neighborhood? I'm imagining that you don't get as far as starlifting until you've been spacefaring for a while and probably already built a dyson swarm in the home system.

[Drashner1]

They've got a model that seems to indicate starlifting underway.

I've seen an article on that. IIRC the model would seem to indicate an equatorial extraction process - although a bit different from the versions of that I've seen mentioned before. Which may be neither here nor there.

Holy shit. But there's no evident radio chatter.

Couple thoughts on this:

a) We increasingly encrypt even civilian comms for various reasons - and I've heard it said that a really efficiently encrypted signal would be indistinguishable from noise.

b) If this was something artificial and it was using optical comms or other tight beams, then it might be very very hard to detect.

From a Fermi-Paradox view, if they're advanced enough to be starlifting at Tabby's star, wouldn't we see evidence of construction at other stars in the neighborhood? I'm imagining that you don't get as far as starlifting until you've been spacefaring for a while and probably already built a dyson swarm in the home system.

Starlifting and dysons are generally considered to be approximately equal levels of engineering - Type II civ stuff basically. So it could be an either/or kind of thing.

That said, one of the things that usually gets left out of these kind of discussions (megascale engineering of this type) is the issue of time.

Specifically, even if you can create dyson or do starlifting 'easily' - how long does it actually take and how often do you actually have to do it? RL starlifting strategies speak in terms of a 300 million year process. OA assumes that improvements in the state-of-the-art cut that down to 1-3 thousand years. But with the full mass of a star to play with - do you do this to stars like we dig ditches - or only do it every few million years (or longer) and then live off the results in the interim. If we are looking at the timescales originally proposed for starlifting, it could be a matter of a process starting in the home system and operating for hundreds of millions of years followed by trillions of years of living cozy.

It may also be that only a few civs ever have a need or want to engage in engineering on this scale - possibly to support a population, possibly for some specific project.

Another thing that rarely gets discussed in SETI discussions is birth control - a civ might be very long lived, and advanced and spread across their solar system - and have a very stable population that makes it unnecessary to do much more than that for very long periods of time. So things like starlifing or dysons might be even more rare.

Just some thoughts,

Todd

[stevebowers]

Birth control does not necessarily imply birth suppression; that is to say, a sufficiently competent civilisation could allow controlled replication until a desirable population level was reached- and that desired level might be surprisingly high. If a larger population of sophonts (or maybe an increased number of independent processing entities, in a post-biont civilisation) would allow a larger number of highly competent and imaginative entities, then the utility of that civilisation would be increased by growth towards (but not over) a certain limit.

I call this 'Mozart Optimization'. If a population has one Mozart per several billion entities, then a population with hundreds of billions of entities would have many more Mozarts. Of course utilitarian calculations of this kind have their problems- if you maximise the size of the population to increase the overall positive utility (happiness, intelligence, number of Mozarts) you run the risk of increasing the unhappiness as well (and the number of Hitlers).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repug...onclusion/

[radtech497]

On the other hand, if a civilization chooses to adopt a policy by which each of its members receives an equal share of the available resources, it might conclude that increasing population beyond a certain level is counter-productive, in that every new citizen beyond that limit reduces the standard of living for everyone.

Radtech497

[tmazanec1]

Here is the reddit page on this star:
https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/
And here is cosmoquest's:
https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthread....00-LY-Away
And SETI@HOME:
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_th...p?id=78328

[tmazanec1]

I (as a contributor) have just received a report on KIC 8462852 by Boyagian from Kickstarter.

[tmazanec1]

Just heard there is a big dimming in progress now!
If the dimming is caused by a solar power megastructure in a 750 day orbit, what Kardashev Level would this imply? I figure 1.4...am I right?

[Drashner1]

Just heard there is a big dimming in progress now!
If the dimming is caused by a solar power megastructure in a 750 day orbit, what Kardashev Level would this imply? I figure 1.4...am I right?

It would depend on what the hypothetical megastructure 'is':

a) If it is a (near) finished structure in its own right, perhaps intended to beam energy around or boost beamrider starships or whatever, then a Type 1.X is certainly plausible. The exact value of X would be harder to determine because I'm not sure that there is any widely accepted standard for what the various decimal values would represent in terms of capability.

b) If it is a structure that is still under construction and will eventually result in a Dyson Sphere or equivalent structure, then we are essentially talking about a Type 2 civilization either in the act of being born or engaging in build another such structure.

c) If it is a construct that won't intercept most of the entire solar output, but is the product of a civ that could do/has done such a thing elsewhere, it is Type 2 technology, although it might not be a dyson or equivalent.

d) If it is a construct that won't intercept most of the entire solar output and actually doing that would be beyond the capacities of the civilization that created it, it is Type 1.X.

My 2c worth,

Todd

[tmazanec1]

Come to think of it, as this star is supposed to have dimmed by quite a few percent since 1890, that implies something more like 1.9.