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Short-lived light sources discovered in the sky
- imglorp 7y agoDo 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 7y agoAnd 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.
- mc32 7y agoBy ET it’s not clear to me they mean beings but rather objects outside our solar system.... That said sure, when evidence suggests such rather than as the immediate hypothesis to grab it, given the odds.
- ganzuul 7y agoCould even be a huge plant branching out into stellar orbit. Panspermia is a Von Neumann probe after all.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y agoThe specific initialism used in the quote was "ETI," or extra-terrestrial intelligence.
- ganzuul 7y agoHuman 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.
- grenoire 7y agoI don't think the answer will ever get anywhere beyond, "we'll see." Even if you attempted to build a guidebook for the what and the how, it will never be what we expect it to be.
- pts_ 7y agoIt will be same shit different planet, trust me.
- ivalm 7y agoThe 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 7y agoOr, 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 7y agoThe 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.
- rumanator 7y ago> And why not? Occam's razor. Until now zero ET have been found, thus it has the same likelihood as being Santa Claus.
- jstummbillig 7y agoThat must be technically incorrect, because the theoretical amount of ETs is infinitely bigger than the theoretical amount of Santa Clauses (which his capped at 1) :^)
- adrianmonk 7y agoOn the other hand, our best available information is that Santa Claus has a surprising ability to appear in many locations within a short period of time (at least on one night per year). Also, these are red and Santa Claus is red.
- imiric 7y ago> Also, these are red and Santa Claus is red. Rudolph's nose, most likely.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoYes, when Rudolph turns away from us the light goes out, and when he turns toward us, the light abruptly appears.
- rumanator 7y ago> because the theoretical amount of ETs You're referring to a theoretical model which is not backed up by any empirical proof other than the fact that there is life on Earth. Thus the model is yet to be validated, thus as far as we know it outputs nonsense. Until then we only have empirical proof, and so far the count of proven alien contact is zero.
- robbrown451 7y agoI don't think that's how probability works. There are lots of things that are hypothesized, and later found to exist (sometimes after explicitly searching, sometimes not). Comparing to Santa Claus without taking into account things like laws of physics/magic/supernatural doesn't make a lot of sense. Also, "zero ET" have been found because, although we are speaking of life, you have explicitly defined it as excluding the one example of life we know about, that on Earth. That seems a bit unfair. Given that we know of one example, hypothesizing another example isn't that extreme.
- pc86 7y agoIt's not anthropocentric to ignore the least likely possibility until presented with evidence to the contrary.
- fsiefken 7y agored 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 7y ago"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."
- rsynnott 7y agoArgh! That really long Peter Hamilton novel is coming true! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga#Pandora's_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga#Pandora's_St...
- jbattle 7y agoThis book and its sequel are AMAZING (Spoilers for the first page and a half or so): The plot point that kicks the whole thing off is when astronomers discover a star suddenly winking out of view. It turns out someone enclosed the star. But who? The inhabitants to hide / protect themselves? Someone else who wanted to trap the inhabitants? Everyone with any interest in sci fi should read these two books
- comboy 7y agoOr maybe it's the Alien Message (highly recommend if you don't know it yet) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien...
- mongol 7y ago768 pages? I have not read any book that long in ages..
- ASalazarMX 7y agoDon't think of it as a long book, focus on a chapter at a time, like reading several tiny books.
- rsynnott 7y agoAlso 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.
- paulmd 7y ago> That really long Peter Hamilton novel I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific! ;)
- arethuza 7y agoIt's the OnOff star from Deepness in the Sky :-)
- rsynnott 7y agoThat one had a slow switch-off process, tho, right? It was the light-up that was abrupt.
- beamatronic 7y agoI 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.
- danhon 7y agoHere’s the paper on Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05068 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05068
- viggity 7y agoIs 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 7y agoIn the scientific literature? It had better not be.
- mannykannot 7y agoIs 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 7y agoCould that account for 8-9x magnitude shifts? Seems unlikely.
- 77544cec 7y agoThere 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