[ExI] tabby's star dimming again

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of Stuart LaForge
Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2017 7:51 AM
To: Exi Chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] tabby's star dimming again

Sorry if this is a double post but . . .

Spike wrote:

>>... That's way too much to be a planet. It might be comets, or maybe an 
> alien-made Dyson swarm...
> leads them to think that some as-yet-undiscovered phenomena is 
> happening around this star.

>...The only evidence ruling out aliens is the supposed lack of a heat
signature and radio waves...

Indeed not, sir.  The lack of a IR signature rules out most, or perhaps all,
configurations of a natural accretion disk.  The lack of radio waves:
perhaps only a mild counter-indicator of ET.  Think of how much radio
clutter there was in the 1970s, when everybody had to have CB radios in
their trucks.  Every channel was crammed full of inane jabber and the power
those old devices radiated could drain a car battery if one used it enough.
Compare to today, how we have even more communications, but the power is so
low a tiny lithium battery will last for hours.  Perhaps ET uses a
directional communication channel, something like radio-frequency laser or
something.

>...But seriously, you and Keith have both made the point that vectoring
waste heat would be the most efficient form of entropy exaust. What if they
don't have their exhaust pointed along the galactic plane. That seems to
make sense from an interplanetary security stand point...

It would unless they want to avoid advertising their presence, ja.  It could
go either way: they could use vectored entropy exhaust as a signal beacon,
the Horton Hears a Who argument.

>...Furthermore, like you mentioned, perhaps they have some ingenious
technology that enables them to harness heat energy too. If their
thermodynamic efficiency approached 1.0 then, we might have to look for
radiation with frequencies downshifted to near CMB levels...

Stuart I am going to stand down on that comment for now until I can do some
calcs.

>...A good test for this possibility would be to overlay the position of KIC
8462852 with WMAP data. If they are dead smack in the middle of a hotspot,
then that cranks my Bayes-o-Meter up a few probability points on the alien
hypothesis.

Now you're thinking!  Good show, me lad.

>> Go there, go now, explain please!

>...More important than going there is hedging against them coming here.
They might already be on the way...

Why here?  What were we doing 1300 years ago that would attract their
attention?

>... I sure hope Trump or whoever else thinks they are in charge of this
rock at least has a plan for dealing with the possibility...

Oy, at least a couple things there: Trump is not in charge of this rock.
Having all those nukes has put the US in a defacto position as the world's
police.  That isn't a good place to be.  Next, we wouldn't need to deal with
it for a few thousand years hence at the soonest.


>...  I can't help but think of the Aztecs that saw Cortez's ships from
miles off and refused to believe in them until they were "taken by
surprise".  Stuart LaForge
_______________________________________________

The Aztecs could have played that smarter.  If any alien civilization has
the tech to get allll the way across 1300 years of space, we don't want to
fight em, we want to love em.  We want to get their tech, or if we do fight
them, we recognize there is no supply line: that one whatever they come in
is on its own devices.  If they run into trouble it takes 1300 years just to
phone home.

Had the Aztecs thought it over, they could have easily defeated the
Spaniards in spite of their iron breastplates.  But they needed to think it
over carefully and recognized that those six hundred guys were all there
were.   Xicotencatl needed to have his boys gaze at that ship and figure out
why it stayed on the surface and why it went where it was pointed, and why
it was pointed that way.  The Aztecs had good minds.  They could have
figured it out how to defeat the Spaniards, without a front-on battle.  The
Spaniards were at the point of mutiny already on a mutinous mission.  The
strategy was divide and conquer.

If any alien spaceship comes to town, we don't want a full frontal assault.
First we want to figure out how they got here.

But I digress.  Previous measurements of Tabby's star suggest an asymmetry
in the leading edge of the dimming vs training edge.  Some sources are
saying now that this week's dip is as high as 3% (oooooh cool) and if so, we
will learn much this time.  We have jillions of telescopes on it right now
with measurement devices so this will be the best dataset ever.  My guess is
there is a whole buttoad of comets doing this, with bigger comas than we
normally see, perhaps from a passing body breaking up an icy planet and
sending them in a highly elliptic orbit.  I can't easily explain why there
isn't more IR in that scenario, but perhaps if the icy body started way out
there away from the star and the vaporization carried away most of the heat,
some variation of that scenario feels most likely to me.

We might find out soon.  

Where's John Clark?  I saw him here yesterday posting about trivialities.
Nobody cares about that stuff.  John!  To hell with sex and politics!  To
the real world, me lad!  We need your physics expertise here man!

spike