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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday March 11 2017, @08:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the because-aliens dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:46AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:46AM (#477708)

    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

    by moondoctor (2963) on Saturday March 11 2017, @11:08AM (#477709)

    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)

    by Dunbal (3515) on Saturday March 11 2017, @02:50PM (#477754)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @07:51PM (#477841)

      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.