[ExI] Alien Civilizations May Only Be Detectable For A Cosmic Blink Of An Eye

[John Clark]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2025 at 1:28 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> *> How do you distinguish dust from computronium discussed on this list
> since sometime in the 1990s?*


*Occam's razor. If simple and very common dust particles can explain the
observed phenomenon, and it can, then why conjure up exotic and ultra
complex computronium?*

*John K Clark*




>
> Best wishes,
>
> Keith
>
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2025 at 3:36 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Oct 17, 2025 at 11:35 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >>> >>"That's why I think, at least in the observable universe, we are
> alone. "
> >>
> >>
> >> > That's what I thought until the astronomers found almost 2 dozen
> blinking stars in a 2000 ly volume around Tabby's Star.
> >
> >
> > That's an old claim from 2019, and even then the paper says the question
> of whether the 21 stars are really "Tabby-alikes" requires further
> investigation, but as of 2025 the claim remains unconfirmed and is now
> considered dubious by nearly all professional astronomers. The paper about
> the odd behavior of those 21 stars was based on data from a ground-based
> telescope over a period of just 11 months, but the data about Tabby's Star
> came from the Kepler space telescope over a period of 9 years and 7 months,
> so there was insufficient data to say that the two phenomenon were the
> same. And those 21 stars were "close" to Tabby in that they were near to it
> in the night sky as seen from earth, but that doesn't necessarily mean they
> were close to it physically.
> >
> > And the theory that the dimming of Tabby's Star is caused by an uneven
> cloud of small dust particles orbiting the star explains observations quite
> well, but the theory that the dimming is caused by a megastructure built by
> ET does not. In short, that 2019 paper has been largely superseded by
> subsequent astronomical research and astronomers have moved on to more
> interesting things.
> >
> > John K Clark
> >
> >
> >>
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > That makes absolutely no sense to me! What does AI have to do with
> it? It makes no difference if the brain that develops Drexler style
> Nanotechnology is wet and squishy or dry and hard because then they could
> make a von Neumann probe, and even if they couldn't move them faster than
> 0.001 C, which they almost certainly could, they could send one to every
> star in the galaxy in less than 50 million years (a blink of the eye
> cosmically speaking) and then a blind man in the fog bank could tell that
> the galaxy had been engineered. But even with our most powerful telescopes
> we've never seen a hint of such a thing. That's why I think, at least in
> the observable universe, we are alone.
> >> >
> >> >  John K Clark
> >> >
> >> >
>
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