
Discovery of peculiar modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars - mhandley
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-stars-strange-aliens-contact.html
======
gh1
A much more balanced take on the subject is offered in the link at the bottom
of the article
[https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf](https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf)

I am quoting from there: "The international SETI community has established a 0
to 10 scale for quantifying detections of phenomena that may indicate the
existence of advanced life beyond the Earth called the "Rio Scale". The BSRC
team assesses the Borra-Trottier result to currently be a 0 or 1
(None/Insignificant) on this scale. If the signal were to be confirmed with
another independent telescope, its significance would rise, though an
exhaustive analysis of other possible explanations, including instrumental
phenomena, must be performed before supporting the hypothesis that
artificially generated pulses are responsible for the claimed signal."

~~~
Udo
Thank you for that link.

phys.org - as usual - barely mentions what the signal even is, and contains no
information about the structure of those pulses (instead they chose to show
one of the least relevant bar graphs I've ever seen twice, probably because it
looks "signally").

So this is the actual paper:
[http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/128/969/...](http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/128/969/114201/meta;jsessionid=090356AEFE87C5CBA9816AAAEF31A53B.c1.iopscience.cld.iop.org)

I'm going to have to read that now, but if these pulses are as stupidly
regular as hinted, there is probably nothing to see here.

~~~
tgflynn
From the abstract:

 _Signals having the same period were found in only 234 stars overwhelmingly
in the F2 to K1 spectral range._

Why would they expect signals from 100's of different stars to have the same
period ? Doesn't this suggest some sort of instrumental or analysis artifact ?

~~~
empthought
Why would we expect a subset of supernovae to have exactly the same peak
luminosity no matter where they are and what stars they occur in? Instrument
artifact, or previously-unknown outcome of the physical laws of the universe?

~~~
cyphar
The difference is that asteroseismology (which comes from hydrodynamics)
predicts that the oscillation frequencies of stars are determined by several
factors intrinsic to the star. We therefore don't expect many different kinds
of stars to have similar oscillation frequencies (though the oscillations
themselves may have similarities such as the scaling relation for solar-like
oscillators).

I don't know much about the actual physics behind supernovae but I'm fairly
sure that the maths makes the power predictions that we observe.

------
M_Grey
My bet? Stars are strange. What we don't understand about stellar evolution
really can't be overstated. Even where examples of it exist, we only get
snapshots of the process which takes a great deal of time, and those snapshots
are often utterly obscured by dust.

------
dimino
Why aren't they including random chance into the possible explanations?

I might not understand this correctly, but out of 2.5 million stars, the ~240
they found to match their expected pattern could just be the random hit rate
of this pattern among stars, .0096%.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Random chance of what, though?

------
lucideer
"Better reign in the headline writers", the article concludes. I guess the
headline writer here didn't read the full text...

~~~
pklausler
s/reign/rein/, sigh.

------
zamalek
> It may be a bit of a red flag when scientist's find the very thing they
> predicted they would find.

This is how science _actually_ works.

~~~
kylek
"Settled science" is hard to overcome.

------
cyphar
Here's a link to the paper:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03031](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03031)

Ignoring the quite unconventional formatting (single column, figures at the
end with the references), I'm not entirely convinced by the plots at the end
of the paper. Specifically, their examples of "odd" Fourier transforms look
quite normal. Specifically, the noise level (how it looks like a power
function) is related to the "granulation background" of the star and is
predicted by asteroseismic stellar models (the equations are ugly but they do
exist). Normally you remove them from your transforms before you do anything
with them. To be fair, they did say they "subtracted a smooth spectrum" but
the noise level doesn't look flat enough to me. Also, their Fourier transforms
are in super funky units -- in asteroseismology you generally want to use PSFs
(Power Spectral Frequency, where the y axis is P/Hz).

------
Jun8
This ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5986](https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5986)) is
his 2012 paper where the method used here is justified. Also gives a short
summary of SETI efforts in the introduction. He discussed the energy
requirements to send a signal of the type described so it can be detected at
1000ly, which seem reasonable.

------
lambdasquirrel
Are all the star systems blinking in much the same way? If so, that suggests a
natural phenomenon. Or there is a vast interstellar empire with a fascination
for sending out the same kind of pulsed signals. Which pretty much tips it
towards natural phenomenon.

------
ythl
Anytime a headline presents two alternatives - one supernatural/mindblowing,
and one ordinary, it's almost always the ordinary.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

"Are 234 aliens trying to contact us??"

~~~
sakopov
What's supernatural about the possibility of life among ~500 billion galaxies
with hundreds of billions of stars in each?

~~~
sosborn
Nothing, but it would be mind blowing, which was the other option.

------
noetic_techy
Does anyone understand the chart enough in the original paper to correlate the
plate ID's with specific named stars? I'm curing to know the distance some of
these stars are to us.

------
sidcool
A similar strangeness was observed in a star which dimmed inexplicably. A
Dyson sphere is suspected, aka a super advanced civilization

~~~
ebcode
Any chance you can point to the research on that?

~~~
photogrammetry
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852)

~~~
ebcode
Thanks! I was imagining a star suddenly going dim and _staying that way_. This
does not appear to be that.

------
pavel_lishin
If it _is_ an ETI sending out laser signals, what are the odds that 234 of
them would hit us?

~~~
tuzemec
We are in the spotlight of a weird alien reality show?

~~~
Ar-Curunir
That would explain this election year

~~~
MrZongle2
More like the last 20-25, I think.

------
youdontknowtho
You know what they (physicists and astronomers) say...Its never Aliens.

------
gjolund
ET should always be the hypothesis of last resort.

It is the modern equivalent of blaming the gods for a natural disaster.

~~~
api
No, it's not.

While I agree that it should be a late-stage hypothesis for simple Ockham's
Razor reasons, there is absolutely nothing irrational nor supernatural about
ET. Everything we know about life and about the universe, including the
prevalence of Earth-sized and possibly Earth-like planets around other stars,
makes ET an inductively obvious and very likely reality.

It's not confirmed yet, but it's a hypothesis that belongs in the same
category as the Higgs Boson prior to the LHC: according to rest of what we
know ETs should exist and we should expect to find evidence of this in some
form someday.

It could come in the form of microbes or fossils on Mars, Titan, or Europa, or
it could come in the form of a signal or even a probe or a spacecraft from the
stars. The latter is IMHO no less likely. We exist and we send signals and
space probes and pretty soon spacecraft. While we don't _yet_ send these
things very far, if we continue to develop as we have been we probably will
someday. If we are a product of natural processes and those same processes are
happening elsewhere (naturalistic metaphysics plus Kepler data says yes) then
other things capable of sending signals or craft should exist elsewhere. Due
to the age distribution of stars, some of them may have been around longer and
therefore have had longer to evolve.

If anything the persistent _absence_ of ET would suggest to me that modern
science's fundamental understanding of reality may be incorrect. Either the
theists are right, we're in a simulation (which is virtually identical to
theism when you think about it), or something else profoundly strange is going
on.

I attribute the intense skepticism of ETs to the silliness of much of UFO
mythology. It's important to realize that the Rael cult and the abduction myth
and so forth are a cultural phenomenon that has zero bearing on science one
way or the other. Culture will take scientific ideas and hypotheses and run
with them, and that's fine, but it shouldn't distract from reality or provoke
an irrational backlash. Do we stop looking into "weird" possibilities in
quantum physics because there are new agers who say silly things about QM? No,
and we shouldn't dismiss aliens either. If we do we are actually letting
pseudoscience and non-science dictate (in the negative) where science is
willing to go.

~~~
pklausler
If ETs are expected to be found, where are the Bracewell-von Neumann probes?

If any tech civilization ever launches a self-replicating interstellar probe,
it would only take a few million years for the probes to reach every system in
the galaxy. The observed lack of B-vN probes implies that no tech civilization
has ever done so. And the probability of any civilization capable of launching
B-vN probles actually doing so seems very high -- we'll be able to do it
ourselves pretty soon.

You have to explain the lack of B-vN probes if you want to argue that ETs
are/have been common.

(Scarier thought: if B-vN probes are inevitable, so are berserkers.)

~~~
api
Oh no I started a Fermi paradox thread!

I don't have time for this but I'd suggest looking into other discussions on
this. The Fermi paradox opens an entire monstrous tree of possibilities, but
it's not quite as simple as "there are no VN probes therefore there are no
aliens."

My two favorites are:

(1) Interstellar travel might just be too damn hard. Going fast enough to get
there in a reasonable time seems to require insane physicists' nightmare
propulsion systems like antimatter or fusion rockets or artificial black hole
drives, while taking too long means cosmic radiation has too much time to cook
both organic matter and electronics... or you can't build a power source that
will last that long, etc.

(2) The "uniform cooling hypothesis" \-- maybe life is common but
intelligences able to build (or become) VN probes are so far incredibly rare.
Since the entire universe is (according to the leading theory) the same age,
such things simply haven't happened yet.

(1) and (2) could work together-- maybe there are pretty advanced aliens
everywhere but so far _very few_ are advanced enough to attempt interstellar
flight. If the probability of interstellar flight is less than, say, once per
galaxy per billion years, then we would not see VN probes.

Neither (1) nor (2) rules out signals at all.

~~~
pklausler
I don't buy (1). B-vN probes don't care about transit time or cost.

(2) is arguing for some kind of middle ground between "it's just us" and "lots
of tech civs"; i.e., that life can get to the point of sending signals way
easier than it can get to the point of launching a probe. But in our case the
delta's just going to be a couple centuries, so no, that doesn't work for me
either.

~~~
brenschluss
If you use the earth as an analogy: why isn't every island on the earth
populated with people, since humans are probes, self-replicating beings that
communicate with others?

There's a lot of reasons there. Certain areas are unhabitable, or at least
annoying to create a habitat (the arctic tundra, for example). Beings may want
to cluster together (cities). There may be no interest in going to one
territory over another - why bother spreading to all places, where there's so
much out there?

Finally, you could have situations in which a probe or a highly advanced
civilization could deliberately not contact a lesser-advanced civilizations.
How do we know that we're not the less-advanced civilization? See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples)

~~~
pklausler
The thing about B-vN probes is that it _just takes one_.

~~~
disconcision
I'm not sure how this is a counter to the human analogy? I'm assuming you're
assuming probes reproduce and propagate perfectly, but if we assume a 'human
reproductive unit' (be it a pregnant individual, a couple, a minimum viable
population, whatever) has perfect genetics which can be perfectly replicated,
then 'it just takes one' as well. While some sort of b-vn scenario seems
plausible, at this point in technological development the practical
contingencies of such a scheme are pretty up in the air. I mean, look at it
from the other end. If we assume arbitrary technological progress, it's
possible probes are everywhere, but we wouldn't even recognize them as
technological artifacts if we were starring directly at them.

------
ChefDenominator
Another science/tech philosophical breakdown. Stars are. Only human perception
can be "weird".

~~~
thingexplainer
Saying "something is weird" certainly implies "this does not match my
expectations."

~~~
ChefDenominator
You are pretty much spot-on with matching up to my statement. Implicit in your
claim is that science has an expectation, which is a gross conceptual error.
The down-votes suggest you are not the only one.

