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Since their discovery ten years ago, fast radio bursts have confounded astronomers. These intergalactic pulses of radio energy have defied explanation, but a new theory suggests a technological origin, whereby aliens use these beams to propel their ships through space. Extremely speculative stuff, to be sure, but it's an idea worth pursuing given just how weird these pulses are.
The idea that Fast Radio Bursts are produced by advanced alien civilizations in order to drive spacecraft through interstellar space sounds like something a UFO conspiracy site might cook up—but it's actually the serious suggestion of a new paper published by Avi Loeb and Manasvi Lingam from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Of course, much more evidence is needed before we can attribute this unexplained phenomenon to artificial sources versus a natural astrophysical process.
With no good theory to go by, Loeb and Lingam wondered if extraterrestrials might be involved—and not without good reason. In a word, FRBs are weird. Like really weird.
http://gizmodo.com/wild-new-theory-suggests-radio-bursts-beyond-our-galaxy-1793130515
Additional coverage at ScienceBlog.com and Phys.org
Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Journal Abstract: Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails
(Score: 4, Informative) by Dunbal on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:15AM (9 children)
If you want to disprove the giant invisible space goat, you need to come up with a better theory.
Seriously thats fucked up. Science doesn't work that way. The default is not "believe my bullshit or prove it wrong". It's "I don't believe you until you prove it might be right".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:46AM (3 children)
Wrong. FRBs are observed, and someone came up with a hypothesis to explain it. Nobody said you have to believe the hypothesis, but if you can't falsify it or offer a better alternative, your objection is meaningless.
(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Saturday March 11 2017, @11:08AM
Huh? Aside from a very interesting observed phenomenon there are no facts here, just speculation. Nobody is proving shit, ease up. This is something fun to discuss, and it's all meaningless.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Saturday March 11 2017, @02:50PM (1 child)
You are obviously not a scientist. The answer is never "little green men" or "magic" or "god" unless you can show evidence of "little green men" or "magic" or "god". The best possible answer until you can show some evidence of otherwise is "we don't know".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @07:51PM
He's rather more on the mark than you.
A hypothesis formulated on purely hypothetical bodies is still a hypothesis. For instance dark matter was hypothesized, initially, as little more than an explanation for why we see distant orbiting stellar bodies behaving in a fashion that is different than we would expect from the amount of mass present - they're moving faster than they should be given the amount of mass we can detect. And so dark matter was hypothsized on literally nothing more than that. That was around a century ago and has remained the dominant view ever since since it most accurately matches what we see, even if we have no direct evidence that dark matter even exists - let alone what it precisely is.
Like he said, the only thing that needs to be done to remove it as the most viable hypothesis is to offer anything more reasonable. And given the nature of the hypothesis that's not setting the bar particularly high. Any sort of natural explanation would immediately supplant it as the more probable hypothesis.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Saturday March 11 2017, @07:46PM (3 children)
Me: This looks suspect; prove to me that it won't allow the encoder to rotate about its axis.
Him: It's fine. Prove to me that it will.
Me: You're the one making the claim; don't you have the burden of proof?
Him: *shrugs* What can I say? It's my project.
I fiddled with it for a few minutes and found a situation where the mount allowed the encoder would rotate about its axis, introducing large measurement errors. He subsequently came up with a better way to mount it. If he possessed a scientific mindset/epistomology, he would have thought through possible problems with the first mechanism, found them, and tried new ideas until he settled on one he could prove would work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @04:06AM (2 children)
Sounds more like an ego that wants to protect itself. People are more likely to "science" other people's ideas.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Sunday March 12 2017, @04:19AM (1 child)
Sure, but the better route to ego protection is criticizing and testing one's own ideas and then improving them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @10:08PM
no, it's to blame others for causing your failures and then trying to diminish any successes they may have.
wait you're a democrat right
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @04:03AM
I'm curious about this invisible space goat theory.