[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


>
>> ...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...

>...Ok, I am looking forward to hearing about them.

Ok, well their efficiency can go way high but if they are radiating heat way
down the temperature scale the radiators are enormous.  The best I can do is
imagine planar radiators turned sideways from our line of sight and the star
as it transits.  But then if they do that, I can't come up with a plausible
way they could be blocking nearly 3% of the light from the star.  Most
puzzling.

The second law is a cruel son of a bitch, but it is absolutely right.  I
have more confidence in that one than any physical law I know.  Recall in AC
Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, right at the end there where Rama threw away
Newton's third law.  I was annoyed.  But had Clarke thrown out the second
law of thermodynamics instead, I would have tossed the book in the trash
without reading the last page.  The second law is right.  Too bad for us:
regardless if we work out cryonics somehow and do marvelous tech miracles,
heat death will eventually get us, and local heat death will get us billions
of years before that.

With radiators, you very soon get to increasing investment (of metals) with
diminishing returns (of only a little additional energy and most of what you
save is lousy high entropy energy, thin gruel indeed for doing anything
useful. 

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

>...Is this something you could do? Didn't you used work on WMAP? Do you
still have access to the data?

Didn't and don't, but I am pretty sure they made all that data available
somewhere.  Does anyone here know?


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

>...Because we are a yellow star similar to theirs and within their reach.
Nothing personal, they just want our rocky planets, metals, rare earth
elements, and the like as part of a von Neumann probe diaspora. Think
dandelion seeds not an invasion fleet.

Ja, could have already arrived and we are they.  I am having a hard time
imagining they would recently notice us after we have being looping around
out here pretty much in our current configuration for several billion years.
The best I can do is conjecture that they are recent.




>> But I digress.  Previous measurements of Tabby's star suggest an 
> asymmetry in the leading edge of the dimming vs training edge.

>...Yes, you can see the asymmetry in these graphs of the data:

http://www.science20.com/indepth_analytics/blog/kic_8462852_models_that_fit_
kepler_observations_quite_well-180403

They had a SETI talk on that paper, but all is not well with it methinks.
The only way I could make it plausible is if the debris cloud is very recent
and waaaay the hell back away from the star.  I came away thinking we need
another several good transits.  This one counts.  So now we need to wait for
fresh papers taking into account this latest dip.


>...Interestingly, Solorzano shows that the asymmetry of the flux curve fits
really well with the Monod equation, at least in previous brightness drops.
The Monod eauation is from biology and describes the growth of
microorganisms like bacteria or yeast. Do you you think it is a coincidence?
Stuart LaForge

Ja.  If something is blocking the light, that something gets warm and we
could see it.  Unless... it is radiating directionally, and I think (I could
be wrong on this) an S-brain doesn't need to do that.  An M-brain does, but
this doesn't look M-brainy to me.  I can't figure out why a young M-brain
would need to be clumpy, and if it is, it probably doesn't need to radiate
directionally.

Oh that last comment is screaming at me in the distance.  Perhaps there is a
reason to make an M-brain clumpy, such as local reduction of signal latency?
And to remove the necessity of throwing away perfectly good low-entropy
energy?  Humanity is clumpy: we scatter out all over the globe, but clump in
a few big cities, then radiate our waste toward sparsely populated regions.
Perhaps M-brains do that too in a sense.  

spike




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