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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: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Saturday March 11 2017, @08:52AM (5 children)
Dafuq did I just read?
(Score: 2) by Demose on Saturday March 11 2017, @09:00AM (1 child)
You read the position of the devils advocate.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday March 11 2017, @05:10PM
As I understand the alcubierre drive concept, on shutdown there should be a massive directional release of high powered radiation.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by Dunbal on Saturday March 11 2017, @10:05AM (2 children)
Popular science. Anyway this would be a new hypothesis, not a new theory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @12:13PM (1 child)
There is evidence of something (radio pulses), and seeing how they've published a paper about it (can't be arsed to read it), you'd think they have some mathematical model of how said hypothesised propulsion system works and have proven that their model is consistent with the observations. Under those assumptions their malarkey qualifies as a theory.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 11 2017, @12:35PM
Did they make any new predictions based on their model? If it doesn't produce predictions, it's not a theory.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @09:00AM (12 children)
It's not a "serious suggestion" published in a new paper, it is fancy speculation published by serious astrophysicist that were bored and had nothing else to publish.
No evidences, no data to prove true or false. There is no falsifiability, there is no science, just entertainment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @09:35AM (11 children)
If you want to falsify it, come up with a better theory to explain FRBs.
(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.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Saturday March 11 2017, @11:42AM
Burden of proof does not rest with us.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @09:52AM (3 children)
Whatever deviates from your experience of the macroscopic world is weird, and of course one should raise the antennas when that happens.
But it is stupid to model things outside the macroscopic scale. Quantum effects are weird? nope, apparently entangled particles react to observation, it is just like late binding in programming. One choice among many. No matter if the universe has or hasn't further meta dimensions (if it is designed or not, basically), all its rules are ultimately arbitrary. Our principles derive from, do not affect, the rules. That means that the weirdness of fast radio bursts is not enough to call them artificial. Especially when existing models are wrong in accounting for detected matter and energy, and call the axis of evil statistical anomaly in the background radiation a coincidence.
Anyway given radio bursts, if the content were quite similar from burst to burst it might be a trace by propellers, but I would first consider them communication. We do just that at smaller scale.
And before some clever guy says communication by radio at interstellar distances is too slow, I ask: a million years is too slow for whom? Meatbags, sure. Aliens? who knows. Self repairing bots? HA, no problem, just remove systemd.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 11 2017, @12:39PM (2 children)
Quite the opposite. We cannot do anything useful with them if we don't have a model.
See? A model. You just did it yourself.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @03:29PM
If I have an apple and an orange and give you the orange, it isnt suprising that someone can know I have the apple when they see you eating the orange later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:03PM
You are using a general definition of model, as GP I meant a model that makes sense for the macroscopic experience. Late binding = quantum is not a model in the second sense.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @12:55PM
Is he married to Yoni?
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Saturday March 11 2017, @01:10PM (1 child)
The article was "published" on arxiv.org.
Arxiv.org provides a valuable service to the community. It does not provide peer review.
Moreover: the authors take the "artificial origin of FRBs" as a hypothesis and investigate if it would make sense from a physics point of view: could FRBs originate from beams? Could beams that are compatible with the detected FRBs provide propulsion for a spaceship equipped with light sails?
Finally, their final paragraph warrants reading:
Although the possibility that FRBs are produced by extragalactic civilizations is more speculative than an astrophysical origin, quantifying the requirements necessary for an artificial origin serves, at the very least, the important purpose of enabling astronomers to rule it out with future data.
(Score: 5, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 11 2017, @01:43PM
From the arXiv page:
So while you are right on the nature of arXiv, this article apparently did pass peer review of some journal. Not being an astrophysicist, I cannot tell anything about the reputation of ApJL, though.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday March 11 2017, @01:30PM (5 children)
I can think of situations where this might make sense, such as pushing a huge cloud of very small objects away from the event horizon of a relatively small black hole or near a neutron star. There, the Oberth effect [wikipedia.org] would have enormous application for bringing objects up to near the speed of light. There maximum delta-v gain from acceleration would happen when the object is deepest in the gravity well of the object and managed enough final velocity to escape the black hole.
Perhaps, to continue this hypothetical scenario, some alien civilization is attempting to clear a debris field/gas cloud of material orbiting the black hole by hitting it with repeated radio wave bursts. They might not be concerned about allowing the material to escape either, they just don't want it orbiting the black hole at a significant fraction of the speed of light right where they're putting in their future engineering project.
Or perhaps, the black hole/whatever is the spacecraft. Then millisecond bursts may just be when the occasional beam of thrust happens to intersect our planet. Beamed light propulsion is rather inefficient from the point of view of power used up for thrust provided, but maybe the source isn't capable of more than that and the aliens have a lot of power.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @02:09PM
concentrated energy burst to open a hole in the fabric of space = wormhole instead of propulsion
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 11 2017, @05:10PM
> some alien civilization is attempting to clear a debris field
Vogons, clearly!
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Saturday March 11 2017, @07:09PM
I wonder if they've checked if this is just our view of a signal that sweeps across us very quickly, as would happen if the signal was aimed at a ship that was moving. It's probably required to determine the approximate prigin anyway, but it would be interesting to see if that was the case somehow. Wonder how to determine how to differentiate out planetary motion versus source motion versus signal targeting.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Sunday March 12 2017, @01:11AM (1 child)
I'll go one level weirder than moving spaceships. Perhaps this energy is being used to move a planet into a different orbit.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 12 2017, @06:02AM
Moving a planet is simple, a bunch of close flybys by a large asteroid or something bigger. Something we should be considering as the Earth has only about a billion years until the Sun increases in luminosity enough to boil the oceans.
Even weirder is disassembling planets, perhaps to build a Dyson sphere. To tear apart a planet, you just need a Dyson Planetary Spin Motor and spin up the planet. Once its rotation is about an hour, it'll fly apart. Takes lots of energy, especially if you want to do it quick (less then 40,000 years) https://spacearchaeology.org/?p=105 [spacearchaeology.org] or http://thelongearth.wikia.com/wiki/Freeman_Dyson_Planetary_Spin_Motor [wikia.com]