Question:
Possibility of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence?
anonymous
2015-10-15 17:01:15 UTC
Alien civilization may have been found!
Search for: "KIC 8462852".
Twelve answers:
Waasi
2015-10-16 05:40:28 UTC
Based on the star's spectral and star type, the star's changes in brightness could not be attributed to intrinsic variability,[1] so a few hypotheses have been proposed involving material orbiting the star and blocking its light. None of these fully explain the observed data.



Researchers think the most likely explanation for the star's odd reduction in light is due to a cloud of disintegrated comets orbiting the star elliptically.[1][6] Under this scenario, gravity from a nearby star causes comets from the star's Oort cloud to fall in towards the star. Evidence to support this hypothesis includes the fact that a red dwarf star already exists close to this star, 132 billion kilometers (885 AU) away. However, the notion that disturbed Oort cloud comets orbiting elliptically close to the star could exist in high enough numbers to obscure 22% of the star's observed luminosity has been doubted.[5]



Another hypothesis for the star's irregular dips in luminosity proposes that the star recently captured an asteroid field.[1]



High resolution spectroscopy, spectral energy distribution and imaging observations have also been made.[1] A massive collision scenario would create warm dust that glows in infrared wavelengths, but there is no observed excess infrared energy, ruling out massive planetary collision debris.[5] Other researchers think the planetary debris field explanation is unlikely, given there is a very low probability that Kepler could ever witness such an event.[1]



Astronomer Jason Wright has speculated that the objects eclipsing the star could be parts of a mega structure made by an alien civilization, such as a Dyson sphere,[6][2][7][8] a hypothetical structure that an advanced civilization might build around a star to intercept some of the star's light for its energy needs.[9] The SETI Institute plans to point radio dishes at the star to check for radio emissions from intelligent extraterrestrial life.
PhotonX
2015-10-15 17:19:31 UTC
And here it is, question number six about KIC 8462852 since yesterday.

.

Did you think to search for the arXiv prepublication source article while you were at it? Here it is: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf There isn't a word about aliens in it, that's the speculation of one overenthusiastic SETI reseacher who has utterly no evidence to back up his claim other than the fact that the findings are unusual. The problem is that 'unusual' does not equal 'aliens'. Which do you think is more likely, a cometary cascade triggered by a passing star, a planetary collision, or aliens building a giant structure?

.

.
Quadrillian
2015-10-15 17:48:53 UTC
Possibility = zero.



This is just "Mars canals", "Face on Mars", Pulsars and "Lights on Ceres" all over again.



Apparently the idea is that as soon as something is discovered that does not have an immediate explanation, then it "must be aliens".



This is exactly like those doomsday stories. As soon as there is something unusual, like a lunar eclipse, then it "must be the end of the world".



Perhaps those dips in the light curve of this star are secret code for "Doomsday is here".



Cheers!
anonymous
2015-10-16 04:16:54 UTC
It is a RingWorld around KIC 8462852; just like Larry Niven wrote about. It might have a surface area 3 million times that of Earth's. To build that those Aliens must have technology that is a million years more technologically advanced than ours. And they probably have us out numbered at least 3,000,000 to 1. If they notice Earth and can get here we are all dead. God help us all!

http://larryniven.wikia.com/wiki/Ringworld

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringworld

http://www.techspot.com/news/62438-astronomers-they-have-discovered-star-may-orbited-giant.html#commentsOffset
Brigalow Bloke
2015-10-15 22:27:23 UTC
Anything a bit unusual about some exoplanet the cheap and nasty end of the media like Fox goes doolally. Sells the channel which sells advertising. The people that are attracted by stories like that will believe almost anything, which is why advertisers love them.
?
2015-10-15 17:18:47 UTC
Wishing thinking unfortunately, if any do exist the possibly of them being humanoid is extremely remote, for all we know it could just be alien sea life, or alien bugs
?
2015-10-15 18:00:57 UTC
Yes
anonymous
2015-10-15 17:49:35 UTC
So obviously you didn't actually read the information in the link you provided.

How very sad.

I guess some people just choose to remain uninformed.
anonymous
2015-10-16 20:26:41 UTC
Possibility of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence? Earth is flat; stands on 3 pillars (the Most Holy Trinity); pillars stand on water at zero Kelvin. Zodiac is planetary prison of demons; don't believe in horoscopes or you'll exhibit the traits of the trapped demons. Most thoughts and dreams are from demons; demons never do good. Sleep fully clothed; pray the Jesus prayer. Pray to your guardian angel to have normal sleep. Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov was the last prophet before Enoch and Elijah return to preach against the antichrist. According to Ruski Orthodox Christian Vyacheslav Krasheninnikov: Humans were created about 7525 years ago.



Birds participate in time creation. It's a sin to kill birds. Dinosaurs live under our level. They will get out through sinkholes and lakes. To kill them, go for their nerves. Save the birds; but kill the dinosaurs. First dinosaur will come out of Volga River in Russia. Demons grow human skin (from a sample taken during abduction) and put it on so as to look like us. Demons will invite people to be healed inside their UFOs; those who go will be like zombies after. Gov't provides demons with diamonds and allows demons to abduct people. If you're being abducted, slowly pray the Jesus prayer.



Don't panic. Demons use diamonds and souls to power their UFO craft. The bigger the diamond, the more it lasts. Demons have 4 UFO bases: 1)Moon 2)Inside fake mountain Kailash in Tibet 3)In lake Baikal in Russia 4)In Atlantis which is underneath the Mariana Trench in Pacific Ocean. There are no aliens. Nobody lives on other planets. Airplanes that go down are hit by demons because they need the airspace to fight Jesus. Antichrist is pale with red eyes. He's possessed by Satan since he's 12 years old. He flies. He wears gloves to hide long nails. He's surrounded by demons who appear as angels of light.



Don't go into a UFO to be healed by demons. 666 is given by isotope rays on wrist or forehead when people stretch hands to receive small plastic grey card with no name on it (World Passport). Police will microchip and isotope ray people on highways. Food stores will isotope ray people too. Antichrist will also release prisoners to mark people. Reject 666 at all cost. If you're about to be marked, pray the Jesus prayer. Hide with Orthodox Christians to escape 666; leave all electronics behind so that antichrist's minions can't track you. Give to charity in the name of Archangel Michael; he rescues people from hell twice a year (or brings them up a level, that is, to a level with less punishment; eventually, people are freed). Feed the pigeons; when pigeons bow down, people are saved from hell. Forgive me.
anonymous
2015-10-15 18:05:34 UTC
I would say not.

this article may help you:

It’s not every day that we have permission to throw "Aliens?" out there in relation to a confounding astronomical discovery - in fact, I don’t think we ever have. But the discovery of a strange pattern of light surrounding a distant star called KIC 8462852 has seen even the most sensible astronomers throw their arms up with a, "Sure, why not?" arguing that the possibility of advanced alien technology can’t reasonably be ignored.



"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build," Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University in the US, told The Atlantic.



First up, though, a little about the star in question: KIC 8462852. Located about 1,500 light-years away between the Cygnus and Lyre constellations of our Milky Way galaxy, KIC 8462852 is brighter, hotter, and more massive than the Sun.



It was first discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, and scientists have been tracking the light it emits ever since, along with the light of another 150,000 or so newly discovered stars. They do this because it’s the best way to locate distant planets - slight, periodic dips in a star's brightness signal the fact that it might have one or more large objects orbiting it in a regular fashion.



These brightness dips are usually very slight, with the stars dimming by less than 1 percent every few days, weeks, or months, depending on the size of the planet’s orbit, says astronomer Phil Plait at Slate.



What makes KIC 8462852 such a strange star to study is that not only are there way more dips of brightness than expected, these dips are highly irregular. There’s no periodic orbiting going on here, just a bunch of strange, light-blocking shapes with no discernible pattern to them.



And these dimming effects are significant. Scientists are reporting that at one point, the amount of starlight dropped by 15 percent, and then at another, 22 percent. And this tells us a whole lot, says Plait:



"Straight away, we know we’re not dealing with a planet here. Even a Jupiter-sized planet only blocks roughly 1 percent of this kind of star’s light, and that’s about as big as a planet gets. It can’t be due to a star, either; we’d see it if it were. And the lack of a regular, repeating signal belies both of these as well. Whatever is blocking the star is big, though, up to half the width of the star itself!"



The most obvious explanation for hundreds of irregular dimming events is that KIC 8462852 has a mass of space junk - all kinds of rocks and dust of varying shapes and sizes - circling it in tight formation, says Ross Andersen at The Atlantic. The only problem is that this only occurs when a star is young, and the evidence points to KIC 8462852 being mature. "If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light," says Andersen. "There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star."



"We’d never seen anything like this star," one of the researchers, Tabetha Boyajian from Yale University in the US, told him. "It was really weird."



So what’s going on here? There are a number of reasonable possibilities to consider, and yep, aliens is actually one of them. First off, the scientists have already ruled out the possibility that the information they’re working with is faulty. "We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out," says Boyajian.



The best explanation we have is that at one point, another star passed into KIC 8462852’s system and the disturbance of gravity caused a huge mess of comets to be pulled in towards it before being expelled again. And there just so happens to be another star close enough to KIC 8462852 to make this a possibility.



"But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking," says Andersen.



And then there’s the question of the 22 percent dimming. Could a mass of comets really block that much light? When astronomer Jason Wright from Penn State got a look at the data, he said we need to consider that perhaps we’ve caught an advanced alien civilisation in the process of building something massive near KIC 8462852.



Plait points to the so-called Dyson Sphere from several science fiction stories: a gigantic sphere made of solar panels that completely encircles a star. And he’s not opposed to the idea:



"I actually kinda like it. I’m not saying it’s right, mind you, just that it’s interesting. Wright isn’t some wild-eyed crackpot; he’s a professional astronomer with a solid background. As he told me when I talked to him over the phone, there’s 'a need to hypothesise, but we should also approach it skeptically' (paraphrasing a tweet by another astronomer, David Grinspoon), with which I wholeheartedly agree."



What does that mean? It means we're allowed to get a little bit excited! Not because aliens are a likely possibility, but because we're in the middle of an awesome mystery the likes of which we haven't seen before in the history of space exploration. Word is that SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute scientists are considering devoting their time to it, and hopefully more research teams will get involved too. We seriously cannot wait to see what they come up with.
anonymous
2015-10-15 17:04:08 UTC
Possibly, but no one is sure if it's an alien megastructure or something else
quantumclaustrophobe
2015-10-15 17:08:20 UTC
While it's possible.... we need more than shadows.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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