
The ‘Alien Megastructure’ Star Is Dimming Again - robteix
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/tabbys-star-alien-megastructure/527382/?single_page=true
======
scrumper
So reading the article, this is the first opportunity we've had to observe a
dip in real time. This means that we will be able to capture spectra of the
occluding materials and then perhaps be able to figure out what they're made
of. Pretty exciting.

~~~
ianai
Douglas Adams would write they found the spectra of alcohol and olives.

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bglazer
It's been enormously exciting to watch all the developments around KIC8462852
happen in real time.

There's been some monumentally terrible "it must be aliens!!" style reporting
around this, but I feel like the reporting and the messages coming from the
scientists involved have been remarkably high quality. They've conveyed that
they basically don't know what's going on, but that this is the most exciting
part. Discovery!

Anyways, I'm really pumped for the spectral analysis of whatever is occluding
Tabby's star. Even if it's not aliens (I hope it's aliens), there will
certainly be more unanswered questions and lots of interesting follow-up
analysis.

~~~
mbfg
If it were aliens, it was them 1300 years ago, so probably dead _.

_ Assuming they are as dumb as we are and will destroy themselves.

~~~
ianai
If they're occluding a stars output enough to be detected 1300 ly away they're
not as dumb as we are.

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placeybordeaux
It would seem to me that the dark forest theory [1] and building
megastructures large enough to dim your star like this are largely
incompatible.

It would be really neat if not only this demonstrates existence of life
outside of earth, but relieves one of the theories that suggests we shouldn't
contact said life.

[1]: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Dark-Forest-Theory-of-
the-...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Dark-Forest-Theory-of-the-cosmos-
which-is-a-response-to-the-Fermi-Paradox)

~~~
pavement
The Dark Forest Theory has some substantial flaws that render it little more
than a simple conceptual gambit, rather than an actual strategy for crafting
interstellar civilization.

Destruction of all peers, to achieve the safety of solitude, is something to
expect from the simplistic gropings of a jellyfish. As intelligent life, we
can take up better angles of a approach to meet this sort of dilemma.

The speed of light will probably stump any emerging civilization, but
declaring it's barrier to be an impenetrable prison that transforms all
intelligent life into deadly adversaries feels like an idea ripe with
fallacies.

If such a thing were truly inevitable, ancient human cities and colonies would
have behaved the same way, due to centuries of primitive technology incapable
of breaking the sound barrier.

Imagine the idea that we should always plan to kill each other because we
can't run faster than the sound of our own voices. The Law of The Jungle might
have some truth to it, but one expects technology wielding social organisms to
transcend such anarchy.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I think fears about both alien and AI intelligence amongst particularly white
male engineers are a side effect of a general belief in supremacism.

Imagine someone, and I'm not saying this is you or anyone on HN, but imagine
in the extreme someone who believes that they are generally smarter than
women, dogs, religious believers, children, insects, proto-humans, slaughtered
indigenous people, office managers, schoolteachers, people with bachelors
degrees in the social "sciences", etc... their sense is that they are at the
top of the social hierarchy because they're just smarter than most people, and
they are in a flawed but generally meritocratic system.

Let's also say that person's primary skill is building software and exploiting
capitalist power structures to undermine established cultural practices.

When that person imagines what we know is coming, which is intelligent
autonomous software with access to capital... that would seem pretty scary. If
I'm the smartest kind of person around, and this software could be better than
me at what I do, what hope is there for us?

Elon Musk's greatest fear is an Ur-Elon Musk, because he really believes in
his own Ur-awesomeness.

But I'm not sure that's actually a solid understanding of reality. Is Elon
Musk really smarter than an ant? Is he really smarter than the people of a
slaughtered indigenous culture? Is he really smarter than a black ex-felon
with a 2nd grade education?

Maybe. maybe.

But I take the opposite position. Which is that the biological world is
actually extremely intelligent, and the humans at the top of hierarchies are
not-particularly-noteworthy pawns of powerful memes. But that the entirity of
the biological world, from insects to primates has found solutions to complex
problems that Elon Musk could only dream of solving. That there is
breathtaking intelligence there that white male engineers tend to forget
about. And that all human beings are actually extremely intelligent, it's just
that civilization puts up barriers that corral that intelligence in different
ways, making race-, gender-, nation- species-, etc-based intelligence
differentials look bigger than they actually are.

Which means to me: AI intelligence will actually be quite retarded, and not
particularly better at genocide or extincting species than we are. Which means
our worst enemy will still be ourselves.

And any alien intelligence that has advanced beyond us will still have all of
the intelligence of the natural world, plus human intelligence and then some.
Which means they'll be better at not genociding and not extincting other
species than we are.

The alternative to supremacism is diversitism, which is a pretty beleaguered
idea in tech circles. Is there one best kind of thing, or are all things good
at being themselves and the togetherness of things is stronger than any one
thing could ever be? Still an open question in 2017 human discussions.

------
ams6110
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in
your philosophy.

~~~
ianai
We hope*.

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briga
I'm not an astronomer, so could someone explain why everyone's assuming this
is an 'alien megastructure', rather than, say, a regular planet?

~~~
valuearb
Because of the irregularity of the dimming. A normal planet should dim the
star in a consistent predictable pattern, such as once an orbit and the orbit
should take the same time each time.

Something like _ _ A _ _ A _ _ A _ _ A

Multiple planets should do the same, the nearer planets dim it more often, the
farther less often, but the same time between the same planet's occultation
and a predictable pattern.

Something like _A _ _ B A _ _ _ A _ _ B A _ _ _ A _ _ B A

