
Short-lived light sources discovered in the sky - lelf
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/12/191212105854.htm
======
rsynnott
Argh! That really long Peter Hamilton novel is coming true!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga#Pandora's_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga#Pandora's_Star)

~~~
mongol
768 pages? I have not read any book that long in ages..

~~~
rsynnott
Also there's a sequel, which is basically part of the same book. I'm pretty
sure he just split it up because the publisher wouldn't let him publish a 1500
page novel.

------
danhon
Here’s the paper on Arxiv:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05068](https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05068)

------
beamatronic
I often wonder what’s the best humanity can do. Maybe we will never go
lightspeed. Maybe we can’t build a wormhole. But I think that we can watch all
of the sky, all of the time and in high-resolution. We can get there.

------
viggity
Is it possible that the disappearing stars are really just fictitious entries
designed to catch copycats?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry)

~~~
ddevault
In the scientific literature? It had better not be.

------
arethuza
It's the OnOff star from _Deepness in the Sky_ :-)

~~~
rsynnott
That one had a slow switch-off process, tho, right? It was the light-up that
was abrupt.

------
mannykannot
Is gravitational lensing ruled out (i.e. the idea that when these sources were
found, their images were abnormally brightened or displaced through lensing by
an object relatively close to Earth (close enough that relative motion and
parallax accounts for the disappearance.))

~~~
captainredbeard
Could that account for 8-9x magnitude shifts? Seems unlikely.

------
77544cec
There is also recurring novae (objects that have been seen to experience
multiple nova eruptions), and the idea that our sun might be one of them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova#Recurrent_novae)

------
fsiefken
red stars?

"Captain Christopher Pike takes emergency command of the Discovery and
explains that the Enterprise was investigating seven mysterious red signals
when it was catastrophically damaged. All but one of the signals have
disappeared,..."

~~~
ASalazarMX
"Oh, those. You see, there's actually a very coherent and canonical
explanation for the super space suit/ship that produced them, which is clearly
well beyond any known technology, Federation or not.

Unfortunately, no one shall speak of it under penalty of death. Yes, we just
introduced death penalty to Federation law."

------
imglorp
Do we really need to bring ET into every unexplained observation, just for the
PR bump maybe?

TL;DR: some appearing/disappearing objects were found using old sky images.
New stellar lifecycle ideas may be required.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
And why not? Extraterrestial life is a hypothesis just like many other
possible explanations. I had hoped we've long past the anthropocentric
attitude, at least the discovery of exoplanets should finally end it.

~~~
ganzuul
Human exceptionalism seems to have a lot of cognitive inertia behind it,
regardless of how educated we are. What _do_ you do when first contact is
made? There are a lot of mental hurdles to overcome trying to answer this
question.

~~~
pts_
It will be same shit different planet, trust me.

~~~
ivalm
The way I see it humans are the stupidest possible animal that can form
planet-spanning civilization (in a sense that other homo primates failed to do
so despite being _very_ close to us in mental capability). There is absolutely
no reason to think that the scale of intelligence does not extend further
beyond humans. One problem is that since we are stupid and we don't know
anyone qualitatively smarter we do not have the tools to reason about super-
intelligent behavior.

Even the smartest chimp performs incomparably worse in most mental tasks than
a median human, even the smartest human will perform incomparably worse than
median super-intelligent being in most mental tasks. At least chimps can learn
to avoid poachers since they have experience with humans, despite not being
able to reason about reasons why poachers do what they do.

~~~
projektfu
Or, humans are so stupid that they decided to cover the planet, shit all over
it, destroy their habitat, and pat themselves on the back.

~~~
ivalm
The reason other animals on Earth didn't do it is not because these animals
made a _choice_ to not pollute/destroy habitat/etc. There are very real very
significant mental deficiencies in all other animals relative to humans.

Whether smarter beings might act differently is entirely a hypothetical; it is
unreasonable for us to think we can imagine the thought process of a super-
intelligent being. Maybe resource consumption + migration is optimal for some
objectives, maybe conservation and reuse is optimal for some other objectives,
etc.

~~~
projektfu
Not going to disagree that there are clearly differences in intelligence.
However, the same intelligent humans managed for tens to hundreds of thousands
of years to not destroy their environments until all of a sudden that became
their imperative. In numerous parts of the world during the last 10,000 years
there have been plenty of humans living within their means until they were
assimilated or eradicated into the culture that dominates and destroys.

People hopefully say, "at least we're becoming a space-faring society." As if
we're really going to be able to outgrow this planet and move on and destroy
another one. We're definitely an exploring species, and for that space is
gratifying, but there is no indication that there will be another Earth to
colonize anytime soon.

~~~
ivalm
Re: environmentally conscious primitives. It is a myth that early/primitive
societies didn't destroy their environments. Basically all recent (past 100k
years) megafauna extinctions were driven by human migration. Plenty of fragile
environments (eg Easter Island) were wrecked by early/primitive societies. The
only thing that prevented previous generations from wrecking the environment
the way we do now is the same thing that prevents chimps: lack of capability.

Re: space as the new frontier. I agree that resource net positive space
exploitation is a long ways away. So long away that we might have critical
resource/environmental catastrophe here on earth before space can bail us out.
I am not super positive on human long term survival (heck, even 1000 more
years; we're too dumb and have too many ways to kill ourselves), but if our
descendants do live in a million years, I am fairly certain space exploitation
will be part of the equation.

~~~
projektfu
I'm not sure what your position is. That we're very smart? Smarter than the
"primitives" who also destroyed their habitats? But definitely smarter than
the humans who managed to live in their habitat for at least a hundred
thousand years until our culture came along?

I can agree we are more _capable_ than chimps, but only in the sense of being
able to plan and make tools, that sort of thing. But chimps are adapted to
their environment, at least until it gets upset by habitat loss or change.

