[ExI] Interstellar Empire or Star Fungus?

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2023-08-10 20:32, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote:
> Since I used to manufacture UFOs (early 60s) and know of others who
> did the same, I can't take the LGM idea seriously.

Since the UFOs you made could not outperform 1960s era jet fighters, I 
doubt you would have sparked a Congressional hearing and a new slate of 
UFO laws on the books. Then again, Foo Fighters which are phenomenon 
where a trained military pilot sees lights or shapes that outperform 
their planes during maneuvers have been reported since 1944. While I 
have trouble taking the LGM idea seriously, I also have difficulty 
believing that veteran pilots fresh from a war would try to engage the 
planet Venus or a cockpit reflection in a dogfight. The government's 
possession of biologicals of non-human origin has been sworn to under 
oath by Grusch, but that could just as accurately describe cat vomit as 
LGM.

I don't believe that Grusch is lying or crazy, but he is autistic, 
studied physics at university, and is an intelligence analyst for the 
three-letter-agencies of the deep state with top secret clearance. The 
only reason I harbor doubts about what he alleges is that as an intel 
analyst, he only ever gets second-hand information and analyzes it. 
Science requires data and hard facts.

> But as there are hearings in Congress about an impossible cover-up,
> astronomers have found what can (in my opinion) only be an
> extraterrestrial civilization.  The paper is too long for the list, so
> you will have to find it yourself.

While the government allegedly having saucers and LGM on ice might be 
impossible to cover up, I think it is a fairly standard psychological 
warfare procedure that if a secret cannot be contained, then it is 
buried in an avalanche of disinformation. Start a bunch of rumors 
related to the secret and perpetrate some hoaxes, then discredit the 
rumors and debunk the hoaxes. After that, nobody will believe the secret 
you are trying to cover up. You can't stop the signal, but you can drown 
it out with noise. And when it comes to UFOs, there is certainly a lot 
of noise.

> I don't jump to such a conclusion lightly.  My former view was
> consistent with "An analysis by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby
> Ord suggests "a substantial ex ante probability of there being no
> other intelligent life in our observable universe".[85]"
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Skepticism is healthy, but it should be noted that while humanity has 
been around and intelligent for hundreds of millennia, it is only in the 
last couple of centuries that we have had the technology to make changes 
to the planet visible from space.

> However, now we have observations of Tabby's Star, where the light
> curve dips are consistent with the passage of an object in orbit that
> is 400 times the area of the Earth.  OK, it might have an explanation
> like a disrupted planet, though none of the ideas holds up well to
> analysis.

A disrupted planet would block all wavelengths, not just the higher 
frequencies. It has to either be dust or a metamaterial like  perovskite 
semi-transparent solar-panels:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.0c00417#:~:text=In%20this%20Focus%20Review%20we%20provide%20the%20most,contact%20that%20makes%20the%20solar%20cell%20fully%20semitransparent.

> However, a recent examination of nearby stars shows that there are 15
> of them doing the same thing.  These are all normal F and G-type stars
> in a cluster.  What it looks like to me is the expansion of a species
> that has moved beyond the biological and is spreading out in a way
> short of a Dyson Sphere (a K2).

Actually there are more than 15. Originally Schmidt (2019) found 15 
stars that behaved like Boyajian's star, and noticed that 8 of those 
stars formed a clump with Boyajian's star. In his follow up paper 
(Schmidt, 2022) he found 15 more stars in the same clump as the 8 from 
his previous paper. So there are a total of 24 periodically dimming 
stars in the clump including Boyajian's star with an additional 7 stars 
that dim but are not part of the cluster.

> If this is correct, there are good points, bad points, and strange
> points.  The good thing is that we seem to have an example of a
> species that got through the "filters" (though they could be an AI
> offspring).  Tapping that much of the output of their star certainly
> solved energy problems as well.  The bad thing is that we have
> competition.

Competition is the lathe of creation; it is the fount of all innovation, 
art, erudition, and gentility. We owe everything to holy competition. I 
will take competition over complacent decadence any day. It keeps us on 
our toes. It keeps us strong.

> 
> The strange and unlikely thing is that we have such a civilization (or
> Star Fungus, or whatever you want to call it) within 1500 LY and doing
> something we can observe.

Interestingly enough, Star Fungus is a legitimate possibility. Fungi are 
remarkably adaptive and hardy. Given a carbon source like the organic 
molecules belched out by carbon stars, a water source like cometary ice, 
and ionizing radiation, a radiotrophic and photosynthetic fungus could 
thrive in certain stellar orbits with or without a planetary body. 
Radiotrophic fungus has been studied since a thick black fungus was 
discovered growing on the walls of the Chernobyl reactor chamber in 
2006, using melanin to absorb and harness UV and gamma rays.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16063-z

Curiously, the absorption spectrum of melanin is not dissimilar to 
perovskite.

Earlier somebody, I think it was Bill Wallace, asked to see how these 
dimming stars were distributed in space. I took the liberty of plotting 
the coordinates for the stars given by Schmidt (2022) in 3-D graphing 
software and have included the resulting pattern in an attachment to my 
post.

https://04533034747756402167.googlegroups.com/attach/37057d7122575/Schmidt%20Periodic%20Dimming%20Star%20Cluster.gif?part=0.1&view=1&vt=ANaJVrE00mbLT8qmRAg_HvVMMjM0hlGyx81kGGa11QCS9qIusQRTRbPUfErX3s_yJicr2oLG0S3CZanDZFkAPlHZ_FfCBbkeme-kyh94uBMdrbBcvFQFIVw

For reference I have labelled the Earth with an E at coordinates (0,0,0) 
and Tabbitha Boyajian's star with a T at (415, 77, -137). The 
coordinates are centered with the Earth as the origin and the numbers 
are in parsecs so multiply by 3.26 to get light-years. As can be seen in 
the graph, the closest dimming star to Earth is 7642696 at (72, 35, 127) 
which is located only 156.77 Pc or approximately 511 light years from 
Earth. Interestingly it seems that Earth could be at the edge of the 
cluster and there are several stars in the same plane as the Earth.

Schmidt, E. (2022). A Search for Analogs of KIC 8462852 (Boyajian’s 
Star): A Second List of Candidates. The Astronomical Journal, 163:10

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context=physicsschmidt

I agree with Schmidt and Keith that these stars should be a priority 
target for SETI observation.

Stuart LaForge

P.S. Exi-Mod, please delete the posts from me awaiting moderation for 
overly large attachements, as I have figured out how to get Google's 
servers to host attached images instead of ExI's servers. :)