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It comes up every now and then… but there were some theories that these completely random but strong signals could be from a “light sail beam emitter” that is v
by aetherspawn 5y ago
It comes up every now and then… but there were some theories that these completely random but strong signals could be from a “light sail beam emitter” that is very far away and that the randomness just depends on where they’re going.
- shoto_io 5y agoDo you have a source?
- aetherspawn 5y agoThe paper that calculated the rough size of the object that could be pushed by one of these random pulses was fascinating and was posted to Hackers News a few months ago, but I'm struggling to find it. I would like to read it again, and would appreciate if anyone has the link. The gist of the paper was that these beams would be plausible to push an object in the order of magnitude of the size of a spacecraft. But the calculated energy levels of the emitter (as we observe it) would require something like a dyson sphere, which would mean that if it were actually a light sail emitter, we'd expect a highly sophisticated civilization.
- T-A 5y agoThis one estimated a beam emitter "on the scale of a large rocky planet": https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109 https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109 (my highly sophisticated approach to finding academic papers about outlandish alien technology is to search on Loeb).