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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @12:40PM (1 child)
With no good theory to go by, Loeb and Lingam wondered if extraterrestrials might be involved—and not without good reason.
Aliens of the gaps [wikipedia.org] :D
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Saturday March 11 2017, @07:52PM
I think this is an extravagant explanation of what likely is a natural phenomenon. I like the out of the box thinking, but I would not bet any money on this explanation.
My main problem is that powering a solar sail using radio waves seems very inefficient. Beams spread out proportionally to their wavelength and inversely proportional to the diameter of the emitter, so radio requires a big emitter. Doing it using laser—which is what many designs such as the Breakthrough Starshot is aiming at—requires far smaller emitters (a million times smaller) and would waste less energy.
The radiobursts are also broadband. That is very different from efficient engineering design, which would make use of a rather tight frequency range which is both easy to generate and allows fine-tuning the reflectance of the sail to fit it. The authors suggest some ways out (recycling photons or cost efficiency), but they do not strike me as particularly strong arguments.
Of course advanced civilizations might be able to build planet-sized solar power stations to accelerate ships to relativistic speeds. But why would they all—remember, FRBs come from all directions in the universe—make use of an apparently inefficient radio model, merely using a planet-sized launcher instead of a full Dyson swarm or a tiny laser, and have accelerations and temperatures close to terrestrial values? It would not be too hard for a supercivilization to build a different launch system that produced a different kind of FRB, yet we see the same kind of bursts from all directions. Were the generating process or use close to physical limits or resource limits I might have believed they were all constrained to look alike, but the design in the paper can be varied a lot.
Could it be that a lot of what we see in astronomy is actually artifacts of really advanced civilizations? We can never rule it out, but we do understand things like pulsars (briefly thought of as possible messaging beacons), galaxies, dark matter halos, star formation, stellar evolution and planets well enough to say that it is much simpler to explain their properties by natural unplanned phenomena than some alien engineering. By Occam’s razor, alien engineering needs to be a simpler explanation than a natural explanation before it starts to seem plausible.
The universe is full of weird things. Intelligence almost by definition makes things that are even more unlikely than what naturally occurs. But unless we are really, really wrong about the world most odd things out there are natural odd things.