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I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's probably not aliens. Yet.
Topic Started: Aug 31 2017, 06:49 AM (843 Views)
Datura
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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2145822-weve-just-seen-15-new-mysterious-cosmic-radio-bursts-from-space/

What do you guys think?
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kusanagi
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Sounds like the WOW signal, which was only recently debunked and yet in the day was the only admissable evidence for alien civilisations. Civilisations which would be leaving Dyson spheres unmissable all over space if they existed, so ether 1) the rare earth hypothesis or 2) civilisations or even species wipe themselves out, maybe taking their ecosystems with them, instead of growing and spanning galaxies. The latter seems more pessimistic, but mass extinctions drive worlds not destroy them. What if humans are Gaia's antibodies? Some self-hating humans never wonder that.
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Flisch
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I've said it before and I'll say it again: We're in the middle of a vast maelstrom of interstellar warfare, unaware of the currents of destruction around us. What we pick up are short emergency bursts. Something out there is plunging our galaxy into chaos and all we can do is listen to the scraps we can detect, oblivious to the carnage that is threatening to consume all life in our universe.

I choose to believe.
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Rodlox
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kusanagi
Aug 31 2017, 07:55 AM
Sounds like the WOW signal, which was only recently debunked and yet in the day was the only admissable evidence for alien civilisations. Civilisations which would be leaving Dyson spheres unmissable all over space if they existed, so ether 1) the rare earth hypothesis or 2) civilisations or even species wipe themselves out, maybe taking their ecosystems with them, instead of growing and spanning galaxies. The latter seems more pessimistic, but mass extinctions drive worlds not destroy them. What if humans are Gaia's antibodies? Some self-hating humans never wonder that.
why would they be unmissable? a Dyson Sphere would give off the same readings as a dwarf star...and those are everywhere we've looked.
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kusanagi
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My point was that the kinds of civilisation that spans and travels the universe would surely leave megaconstruction projects. And this is a prediction when hypothesising advanced, starfaring civilisations and yet there isn't any evidence for aliens leaving these artificial megastructures around deep space. Has anything more plausible than was the Wow signal ever been detected? As it turns out it might not have been debunked after all but suppose it has an alien origin. Still no evidence for starfaring craft so maybe civilisation stalls or dies out before technology gets to that point, or maybe the yet unknowable technology speculated be prerequisite is impossible or at least difficult to implement?

http://naapo.org/WOWCometRebuttal.html

Although people like to distance exobiology and xenobiology from ufology, the evidence for aliens is still controversial for a reason: the supposed proof must remain at most a still-unidentified phenomenon. Be it magnesium from spaceships or strange radio signals from Sagittarius it ends at best with a question mark at most.

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.pe/2010/05/ubatuba-ufo-sample.html

It might be insightful to compare flaps about strange radio signals and the like to other rumours from the Space Age, like the missing Soviet astronauts.
Edited by kusanagi, Aug 31 2017, 10:43 AM.
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Dr Nitwhite
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kusanagi
Aug 31 2017, 10:15 AM
My point was that the kinds of civilisation that spans and travels the universe, would surely leave construction projects we would observe if they existed. This is a prediction of hypothesising advanced, starfaring alien civilisations. And yet there isn't any evidence for aliens leaving artificial megastructures around deep space.
I know that it was shaky from the start, but what about that possible incomplete dyson swarm detected a while back?
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LittleLazyLass
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Dr Nitwhite
Aug 31 2017, 10:24 AM
kusanagi
Aug 31 2017, 10:15 AM
My point was that the kinds of civilisation that spans and travels the universe, would surely leave construction projects we would observe if they existed. This is a prediction of hypothesising advanced, starfaring alien civilisations. And yet there isn't any evidence for aliens leaving artificial megastructures around deep space.
I know that it was shaky from the start, but what about that possible incomplete dyson swarm detected a while back?
I believe we got a disappointing explanation for it.
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kusanagi
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Nitwhite + Little: its Tabby's star or KIC 8462852 in the constellation of Cygnus which like the Wow signal is something of an open mystery. ETH is only falsifiable to a point because falsification requires certainty or at least assumption about what you are testing, and the ETH has to make vague and imprecise predictions by its very nature. If you think about it, ETH proponents actually treat alien activity as their null hypothesis for this reason. So its hard to falsify extraterrestrial civilisations as explanations for poorly known astronomical events, the way you might point precisely to archaeology to test ideas of ancient astronauts on earth, or test the provenance and composition of anything physical in our hands like when someone claimed to have UFO metal. As much as I would like wow signals and Dyson swarms to be true, loose speculation flourishes where there is imprecision of data. Canals on Mars remember.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/814/1/L15
https://astronomynow.com/2015/11/25/comet-fragments-best-explanation-of-mysterious-dimming-star/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canal
Edited by kusanagi, Aug 31 2017, 11:05 AM.
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Rodlox
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kusanagi
Aug 31 2017, 10:15 AM
My point was that the kinds of civilisation that spans and travels the universe would surely leave megaconstruction projects. And this is a prediction when hypothesising advanced, starfaring civilisations and yet there isn't any evidence for aliens leaving these artificial megastructures around deep space. Has anything more plausible than was the Wow signal ever been detected? As it turns out it might not have been debunked after all but suppose it has an alien origin. Still no evidence for starfaring craft so maybe civilisation stalls or dies out before technology gets to that point, or maybe the yet unknowable technology speculated be prerequisite is impossible or at least difficult to implement?
given that the scientists at the tops of their fields can't even agree on what we're looking for in terms of physical objects of advanced societies, that's a strange claim for you to make. what exactly are you looking for, that you say isn't there?

(also, remember how long it takes anything to move through space - even light from stars or constructions)

or the starfaring crafts don't trail their exhausts behind them.
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kusanagi
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True but when you have so much vagueness all you can do is treat the ETH as the null hypothesis of sorts: not something you can test in itself because no one knows exactly what its properties would be. And so its always there like the religious miracle option, when everything else seems to fail. And thats why things like these never die - sure they can't be discounted, nor properly validated, either. I'm not saying its not aliens, but people are eager to believe such things, just because data is incomplete, no? That is the problem - what exactly are you looking for, that you say is or isn't there?
Edited by kusanagi, Aug 31 2017, 09:10 PM.
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Tartarus
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kusanagi
Aug 31 2017, 07:55 AM
Civilisations which would be leaving Dyson spheres unmissable all over space if they existed, so ether 1) the rare earth hypothesis or 2) civilisations or even species wipe themselves out, maybe taking their ecosystems with them, instead of growing and spanning galaxies.
Or 3) Dyson spheres are impossible to build therefore there cannot be any in the universe, or 4) Dyson spheres are possible to build but building them is so impractical and/or too much of a hassle to bother with so hardly of the alien civilisations that could have built them bothered to do so and those that did never built a large number of them.
The notion that a starfaring civilisation "would surely leave megaconstruction projects" is a very dubious assumption as the very concept of megastructures is still extremely speculative and even if we accepted the premise they are possible there's no guarantee every highly advanced civilisation would necessarily even bother with such things. That said the whole Tabby's star mystery still stands as a possible case of a megastructure. I don't think that possibility has been conclusively disproven yet as has been claimed, though at the same time I won't insist its an alien megastructure (if it is though, I think its probably a derelict no longer used one, which would explain the lack of heat radiation emissions).


But anyway, getting back on topic to the article Datura linked, I think its a rather interesting article and I think its possible the radio bursts may be aliens. That being said though, if this is the case it should be noted that the article also said the source was 3 billion light years away. In that case it seems most unlikely we'll ever meet those aliens. Indeed, for all we know these hypothetical aliens could have died out ages ago and we are only just now getting signals some of their activity produced- signals that have traveled across space for 3 billion years.
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peashyjah
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We'll most likely not meet aliens because of cosmic radio bursts that have been going on for like 3 billion years. These so called "Aliens" would probably have been extinct before we even exist.
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kusanagi
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The possibility of alien extinction raises the question of how rare is Earth. And the lifetime of a civilisation. Which may not be very long at all?
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Niedfaru
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I feel this entire playlist is relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU
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kusanagi
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Neither the Drake equation nor the Fermi paradox were meant to be very serious in the first place. The Drake equation was thought up by Frank Drake, not as some profound insight but his way to illustrate the obvious. Fermi made an off the cuff remark once, not a deep philosophical reasoning as it gets twisted into. Fairly or not Drake and Fermi gained significence as representing straw men of a familiar philosophical dilemma. After all the years of discussions about the probability of aliens and such, it boils down to too things 1) absence of evidence =/= evidence of absence and 2) you can't use a mere hypothetical as a null hypothesis, it is an argument from ignorance.
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