[ExI] Fwd: Google Alert - Tabby's Star

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2026-07-16 20:22, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote:
> 
>  Tabby's Star: The Light That Shouldn't Flicker - YouTube [2]
> 
>  YouTube
> A star 1470 light-years away dims in ways no one can explain.
> Scientists are still searching for answers. What do you think is
> hiding in the dark?
> 
> So I responded:
> 
>  It may be natural, but about 2 dozen stars in a 1000 light-year
> sphere also flicker the same way. If it were only one, I can imagine
> it is natural, two dozen clustered this way looks like a civilization
> expanding into space at maybe 1/3 of C. If this is the case, what we
> may be seeing is data centers out in the relatively cold
> "computational zone" where the low temperature keeps down
> computational errors. From the depth of the dip and the time of
> crossing, it is in an orbit about as far out from the star as Jupiter
> is from our sun, and the orbit would take about 19 years. Why would
> aliens build such a thing? As a guess, they live in a data center,
> hundreds of times as large as the Earth, as uploads. As another guess,
> if we can resolve planets that far away, there is a planet in the
> habitable zone around Tabby's star where they originated biologically.
> The closest star that shows this behavior is only 511 ly from Earth,
> so if you live a very long time, they may come here and process the
> asteroid Vista into a data center.. Why don't we see any propulsion
> lasers or hear any radio waves is a mystery. They probably don't have
> FTL or they would have been here a long time ago.

I don't know about transforming Vista into a data center, as ET might 
have to fight Musk over that, but Beatriz Villarroel et. al. examined 
old photographs from the First Palomar Sky Survey and found transients 
that are clustered in triangular or linear formations show up in one 
plate, but are not there the next time that part of the ski surveyed.

Interestingly, these transients never showed up in earth's shadow (at 
22-sigma significance) suggesting that they are metallic objects 
reflecting sunlight. This was years before Sputnik or any artificial 
satellites were launched. Moreover, they seemed to increase in frequency 
on the photographic plates around
periods of nuclear testing and newspaper-reported UFO flaps.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe
Abstract
Old, digitized astronomical images taken before the human spacefaring 
age offer a rare glimpse of the sky before the era of artificial 
satellites. In this paper, we present the first optical searches for 
artificial objects with high specular reflections near the Earth. We 
follow the method proposed in Villarroel et al. and use a transient 
sample drawn from Solano et al. We use images from the First Palomar Sky 
Survey to search for multiple (within a plate exposure) transients that, 
in addition to being point-like, are aligned along a narrow band. We 
provide a shortlist of the most promising candidate alignments, 
including one with ∼3.9σ statistical significance. These aligned 
transients remain difficult to explain with known phenomena, even if 
rare optical ghosting producing point-like sources cannot be fully 
excluded at present. We explore remaining possibilities, including fast 
reflections from highly reflective objects in geosynchronous orbit, or 
emissions from artificial sources high above Earth’s atmosphere. We also 
find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within 
Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow 
coverage at 42,164 km altitude. The deficit is still present though at 
reduced significance (∼7.6σ) when a more realistic plate-based coverage 
is considered. This study should be viewed as an initial exploration 
into the potential of archival photographic surveys to reveal transient 
phenomena, and we hope it motivates more systematic searches across 
historical data sets.
------------------------------

So maybe they have visited us. Extraordinary claims require 
extraordinary evidence. There is no smoking gun, but some intersting 
evidence is accumulating.

Stuart LaForge