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Phys.org is reporting on a paper which details some interesting phenomena which could be evidence of advanced civilizations.
From the Phys.org article:
We all want there to be aliens. Green ones, pink ones, brown ones, Greys. Or maybe Vulcans, Klingons, even a being of pure energy. Any type will do.
That's why whenever a mysterious signal or energetic fluctuation arrives from somewhere in the cosmos and hits one of our many telescopes, headlines erupt across the media: "Have We Finally Detected An Alien Signal?" or "Have Astronomers Discovered An Alien Megastructure?" But science-minded people know that we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.
[...] What we're talking about here is a new study from E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, two astronomers at Laval University in Canada. Their study, titled "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars" was just published at arXiv.org. ArXiv.org is a pre-print website, so the paper itself hasn't been peer reviewed yet. But it is generating interest.
The two astronomers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. Of all those stars, they found 234 stars that are producing a puzzling signal. That's only a tiny percentage. And, they say, these signals "have exactly the shape of an ETI signal" that was predicted in a previous study by Borra.
Prediction is a key part of the scientific method. If you develop a theory, your theory looks better and better the more you can use it to correctly predict some future events based on it. Look how many times Einstein's predictions based on Relativity have been proven correct.
The 234 stars in Borra and Trottier's study aren't random. They're "overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range" according to the abstract. That's significant because this is a small range centred around the spectrum of our own Sun. And our own Sun is the only one we know of that has an intelligent species living near it. If ours does, maybe others do too?
The authors acknowledge five potential causes of their findings: instrumental and data reduction effects, rotational transitions in molecules, the Fourier transform of spectral lines, rapid pulsations, and finally the ETI signal predicted by Borra (2012). They dismiss molecules or pulsations as causes, and they deem it highly unlikely that the signals are caused by the Fourier analysis itself. This leaves two possible sources for the detected signals. Either they're a result of the Sloan instrument itself and the data reduction, or they are in fact a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligences.
Are these signals just evidence of some, as yet undiscovered, property of stars, or are these "transmissions" the alien equivalent of an episode of "The Bachelor"?
2012 paper predicting the signals reported on by Borra, et. al.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:50PM
On other sites there are two points not being brought up on this site, so far
1) The ratio of stars where the transmitters (physical) are next to the transmitters (people, for lack of better word) vs where they make the transmissions come from a neighboring star (or distant star) is a measure of galaxy wide cross cultural paranoia and trust in neighborhoods (perhaps a measure of lack of diversity?) at the biological level and perhaps AI assisted psychology. Easily the physically largest psychology experiment I've ever heard of. It'll give optimists and pessimists something to argue about for centuries. Lets say 90% of alien races are paranoid and they troll the galaxy by remotely stimulating stars that any half ass 2400AD level astronomy department can remotely tell has no planets, that means 90% of independently evolved civilizations are paranoid-ish of invasion, either because there is a threat or paranoia is natural and normal (therefore good?) or maybe the other way around who knows.
2) As a related manner our culture is chill with legacy dying broadcast media and is watching the rise of meme image boards and echo chambers and the mental illness of social media progressive holiness signalling spirals and all that. I'm just saying that assuming the culture and mentality of an alien race is much like 1950s American TV broadcasting as a cultural ideal is possible but incredibly unlikely to hold true. This could all be some kind of interstellar /pol/ space alien thing where a bunch of alien NEETs are bored and there's no good posts on /r9k/ or /hc/ so they go to interstellar /pol/ and decide to raid the stupid hairless primates orbiting the Sol system who have been shitposting noisy primitive modulation types for about a century so they know all about us and 234 stars is some kind of trolly number for space aliens (maybe its how many legs they have or ...) like how we'd use the number 42 or 1488 to trigger people (for better or worse of course). They might be Fing with us, they might be sending us Trump memes, this whole thing might be some degenerate advanced form of progressive holiness spiral signalling to give us meme virii like religions or progressivism or cults or who knows.
I'm just saying that we're culturally post-broadcasting media where everyone thinks legacy broadcasters are important although as a percentage nobody watches that legacy shit anymore, and as a world superpower we're pretty chill with the concept of radio broadcasting because nobody shoots 80s era HARM antiradiation missiles at us although we blast everyone else with them (almost universally for decades the victims have been poor non-white people). So I'm just saying that assuming the space aliens are culturally American Brogrammers who just wanna go out for cheezeburgers and have some jocular locker room talk about grabbing female anatomy is theoretically possible but ridiculously over the top provincially anthropomorphic and the aliens culture and motivations are almost certain to actually be a total WTF, whatever they may turn out to be.
The transmission could decode to something like this: "Hi mai name is qhehdet sjlpdfh (H1B name) and eye R an alien, a real space alien not a mere undocumented mexican, and looking at the last century of your shitposts you've been broadcasting to the whole universe, that we all have to hear like a tactless man farting in an elevator, BTW, not cool man cut that shit out, and seeing as you stupid non-lavender skin colored hairless apes clearly have not discovered the non-aggression-principle given your nightly network news shitposts that we've seen, I'm a gonna demonstrate how I'm more mentally ill err I mean more progressive by shitposting an absolute storm of memes about how I am the holiest of all NAP prophets compared to the other losers who can't shitpost as well as I can and its a double plus ungood thought crime to not like the NAP now stand by for a shitpost storm of memes transmitted in animated .gif format (animated gif because we have a million years of meme evolution on you so we've gone beyond mspaint and .png files like you losers)" We may actually have aliens here on planet earth, I think I've read something like the above on /b/. That explains a lot about /b/.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:53PM
I'm happy enough to say that I know so little about social media and these strange patterns (/pol/?), not to mention NAP, and the rest that I need an alien to help me decode the latter half of your post. If that is what social media is like, man, I'm missing nothing.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Wednesday October 26 2016, @01:14AM
He wasn't talking about social media, but rather antisocial media: the chans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @08:42PM
No worries man, pretty sure that post was just another auto-generated AI WoT. ;)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 26 2016, @03:18AM
>/pol/
>/r9k/
>/b/
come on man, you could complete the shitpost by adding /qa/, /int/, /mlp/, /lgbt/, and /v/.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 26 2016, @02:45PM
Ironically I lurk a lot on /DIY/ and /OUT/ and well, obviously, /POL/
The community on /DIY/ is not just /B/ with hammers, its actually mostly nice bunch of people. /OUT/ in a similar way isn't /B/ with backpacks, /OUT/ is mostly nice people. I do community for those two boards everywhere I go.