[HN Gopher] 'Mathematically perfect' star system being investiga...
___________________________________________________________________
'Mathematically perfect' star system being investigated for
potential alien tech
Author : pixelesque
Score : 273 points
Date : 2024-02-28 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.space.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.space.com)
| belter wrote:
| Just your regular resonant planetary system...Nothing to see
| here...Call me back when you find one where they orbit the star
| with periods that are a sequence of prime numbers....
|
| "Resonance in the planetary system HD 110067" -
| https://www.dlr.de/en/latest/news/2023/04/six-planets-in-res...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Or one with three planet sharing the same orbit, perfectly
| spaced!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, perfectly spaced is the only way 3 planets can share
| the same orbit.
|
| And if we go for a gas giant and two small planets, there are
| probably many of those out there. We almost got one such
| trio.
| hinkley wrote:
| Perfectly spaced is not a stable orbit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
|
| You want L4 and L5 for that.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| That applies to a small body with two large ones, not
| three similarly sized planets.
| Retric wrote:
| L4 and L5 are unstable unless there is an extreme, as in
| many orders of magnitude, difference in the masses
| involved.
|
| At equal mass the separation increases until they are all
| equidistant from each other assuming a completely
| circular orbit.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Tell that to Janus & Epimetheus:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_(moon)
| bloopernova wrote:
| 3 planets orbiting a common barycentre would be very cool. I
| think something like that was mentioned in the Peter F
| Hamilton "Night's Dawn" trilogy of sci-fi books.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Larry Niven's Known Space features a series of planets
| orbiting a common center like that; it's a grand engineer
| project, and a lifeboat of sorts.
| Zanni wrote:
| A pentagonal form of a Klemperer rosette (first thing I
| thought of also):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or a planet with 13 moons evenly-spaced on the same orbit?
| C.f. Ilus IV / New Terra in _The Expanse_.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I just wonder so, if there are multiple planets in equal
| distance between them, would we be able to tell the
| difference between three planets and one on a fast orbit?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That sounds like aliasing issue in signals; we should be
| able to distinguish between them as long as we sample
| more often than half the actual orbital period (i.e. with
| a sampling frequency larger than the Nyquist frequency).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist_frequency
| hef19898 wrote:
| Another question, is there something like a max. rotation
| speed for a planet in a certain distance to a sun of a
| certain size?
|
| Edit as a general response: Question answered, multiple
| times, thank you! Also, there my basic physics knowledge
| resurfaces, thank you for that as well!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes, but that would be dictated by how fast can it spin
| before shattering into pieces. So mostly
| gravity/composition thing, I'd imagine. Many things in
| solar systems are (postulated to) derive from the
| rotation of the protoplanetary disk, via conservation of
| angular momentum - however, planets can also get spun up
| or down after forming by e.g. collisions with other
| objects, including extra-system objects.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Just realized, I meant orbit speed and not rotation
| aeound the planets axis. Shouldn't write in parallel to
| meetings... Your answer was very interesting so, thank
| you!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I see! In the other case, the answer is: velocity vector
| determines the orbit. For any given point at any given
| orbit, there's only one valid velocity vector relative to
| the star (direction and magnitude) - tweaking it tweaks
| the shape of the orbit.
|
| One of the best way to get an intuition for orbits is to
| play Kerbal Space Program for a few hours :).
| hef19898 wrote:
| Going back to my buried physics knowledge, that is quite
| logic. Thanks again!
|
| I am just afraid to touch Kerbal Space Program, I really
| cannot afford another time sink at the moment!
|
| As one time ovner of a Star Wars RPG PC whos secret super
| weapon was his tremendous Astrogation skill, I really
| should so I guess!
| thfuran wrote:
| For a given stellar mass and orbital radius (assuming a
| circular orbit), there's not really any wiggle room on
| how long the planet's orbital period is. Speeding up or
| slowing down the planet requires it to orbit at a
| different distance. If you meant the speed of a planet's
| rotation about its own axis, I guess the limit would
| basically be the point at which it tears itself apart by
| spinning so fast that its gravity no longer holds it
| together.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| There is only one stable speed at which a planet can
| orbit in a circle; any slower, and it'll start falling in
| toward the star, and any faster and it'll start to move
| away from the star.
|
| The only way to vary the speed is a powered orbit, and
| that's not likely to happen with a planet.
| qup wrote:
| I respect that you reserved some room to be surprised.
| rob74 wrote:
| Not convinced until they find a Dyson sphere...
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| If aliens have vacuum cleaners, I hope they're better than
| ours tbh.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Mandatory mention of Spaceballs incoming... I just don't
| want the reverse function on my home vacuum.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| IDK, I miss those old vacuums that could run in reverse -
| they're perfect for building hovercrafts for kids.
|
| Make a big disk, punch the vacuum cleaner's pipe through
| it, put a blanket over the whole thing, add a chair on
| top. Turn power on, you have a hovercraft. A staple of
| city science fairs where I live.
| hef19898 wrote:
| THAT is a great idea! Would one of those leave blowers
| work? Ideally a battery powered one?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| They built a ring world in order to harness enough solar
| power to continue and sustain their proof of work economy.
| Alas, when even that was not enough their world collapsed
| and the successors to their race returned to the trees.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Dyson spheres are probably really rare. It's just bad
| strategy, everyone within your galaxy knows you're there
| pretty much immediately when a star just up and disappears
| one day. Granted, the non-K2s just stare in awe maybe, but
| the other K2s will fuck your shit up. Can't exactly pack it
| up and run either, not with a medium-sized star in your
| suitcase.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Temporal displacement fields: Wrap you star system in one
| of those and remove from the normal universe with a time
| shift of a couple of seconds! Let those pesky K2 Dyson
| Sphere civilisation figure that out!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Tried that, it didn't work; that's how I ended up stuck
| in this insane reality where JavaScript ate the world,
| and my nickname is all I have to show for it.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Ah, sucks when this happens, doesn't it?
| thfuran wrote:
| >but the other K2s will fuck your shit up.
|
| [Citation Needed]
| asoberbeck wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| > Can't exactly pack it up and run either, not with a
| medium-sized star in your suitcase.
|
| If you're K2 just take the star and solar system with
| you. Stellar engines can be used to move stars.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
| ben_w wrote:
| Eventually.
|
| Shkadov thruster:
|
| > After a period of one million years this would yield an
| imparted speed of 20 m/s, with a displacement from the
| original position of 0.03 light-years. After one billion
| years, the speed would be 20 km/s and the displacement
| 34,000 light-years, a little over a third of the
| estimated width of the Milky Way galaxy.
|
| Caplan thruster:
|
| > Caplan estimates that the Bussard engine would use
| 10^12 kg of solar material per second to produce a
| maximum acceleration of 10^-9 m/s2, yielding a velocity
| of 200 km/s after 5 million years.
|
| Svoronos Star Tug:
|
| > The Svoronos Star Tug can, in principle (assuming
| perfect efficiency), accelerate the Sun to ~27% the speed
| of light (after burning enough of the Sun's mass to
| transition it to a brown dwarf).
| jandrese wrote:
| I would assume it takes more than a day to build a Dyson
| sphere. But more to the point from a distant observer's
| viewpoint the star isn't going to just blink out. The
| Dyson sphere has to radiate just as much energy as the
| star produces, so it would probably appear just as a red
| dwarf. Unless the alien civilization has some way to
| destroy energy it will be in a constant battle to avoid
| cooking the inhabitants of the sphere.
| foofie wrote:
| > Unless the alien civilization has some way to destroy
| energy (...)
|
| If the point of a Dyson sphere is to collect energy,
| wouldn't it be enough to just use it or store it?
| ben_w wrote:
| To use, not to collect. And thermodynamics appears to say
| you can't just store it.
|
| A stellar mass black hole might be an interesting "cold
| end" in this regard... if you can find or make one, but
| to do that you'd need to start with a Dyson swarm.
| foofie wrote:
| > To use, not to collect. And thermodynamics says you
| can't just store it.
|
| I don't think these semantic games are productive.
| Thermodynamics says you can transform energy. "Collect"
| in this context means using energy in a way that allows
| you to retrieve it in the future. For example, charging a
| battery or condenser with light with a PV panel, powering
| a motor that accelerates a flywheel, coiling a spring,
| heating a material, etc.
| ben_w wrote:
| Anyone with only mildly better tech than we have now, can
| see your ecosystem changing over the course of the
| seasons before you invented fire, let alone built a Dyson
| swarm. We're _just_ starting to have this capacity
| already in special cases, though we 've not found any
| sign of an ecosystem, just "boring" diamond rain etc.
|
| A Dyson swarm will keep you safe from any threat smaller
| than another Dyson swarm -- and while you may not be able
| to "pack it up", you can use one to run to other
| galaxies... in fact, almost all of them... at close
| enough to the same time that light cones matter... and
| get the settlers moving at a significant fraction of the
| speed of light... and have a lot of redundancy.
| arethuza wrote:
| I think Culture style Orbitals are more elegant - no need
| for shadow squares to create day/night cycles.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Orbitals - The Tiny Houses of solar scale structures
| ben_w wrote:
| Every megastructure is an invisible dot compared to the
| next size up.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvKSRKT0nzM
| arethuza wrote:
| There is also The Ring in the Xeelee universe - which is
| millions of lightyears across:
|
| https://xeelee.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ring
|
| Mind you it might not count as it's a means of escape,
| not a place to live.
| mapt wrote:
| This is dynamically unstable; Any miniscule imperfection ends
| up being magnified by the forces involved. The angular
| momentum of the system is conserved, but resonances build
| chaotically and are likely to eventually concentrate enough
| in a smaller body to throw it off past escape velocity.
|
| Spaced-out resonant triplets of bodies in the same plane are
| often dynamically stable - an imperfect ratio is damped by
| various orbital forces until it approximates a perfect ratio.
| SamBam wrote:
| That's why it would require alien technology to keep it
| perfect.
|
| Why they'd do this, though, would be a mystery.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| seems like it'd be a primitive way (in one way, obviously
| not in the tech sense) of displaying power
| BirAdam wrote:
| So, like, the aliens elected a lizard version of Donald
| Trump? Make the planets gold and it all tracks.
| SamBam wrote:
| Perhaps it's just a giant advertising billboard.
| angiosperm wrote:
| They offer no hint why transiting the star could help us pick
| up radio transmissions. If they mean the planet going _behind_
| the star (being "occulted") would cut off the radio signal
| while it is back there, they should say that instead.
| martinclayton wrote:
| The piece seemed a bit wooly to me. This bit caused a little
| twinge of pain:
|
| Signals from such a transmitter placed on a planet spinning
| around a foreign star would drift in time when observed from
| Earth, "the same as when an ambulance goes past you, the
| sound of it shifts from very high to very low"
|
| What's wrong with saying Doppler, frequency, or pitch maybe?
| angiosperm wrote:
| So, it is nothing about transiting, and all about us being
| close to the ecliptic plane of the system. Being a little
| off the ecliptic, so there were no transits or even
| occultations, would barely affect Doppler measurements.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| If we're going to look into every resonant system shouldn't we
| start with the moons of Jupiter?
| vonjuice wrote:
| Are we not looking already?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Jupiter has moons? /s
| jjk166 wrote:
| We're under strict instructions to attempt no landing on
| Europa.
| z3phyr wrote:
| Disregard them cadet, you have my go ahead.
| hammock wrote:
| Why?
| jedberg wrote:
| It's a reference to the movie/book 2010: Odyssey Two, by
| Arther C. Clarke.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010:_Odyssey_Two
| trumbitta2 wrote:
| Or one where vertically aligning planets is easy with CSS
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Flexbox will be seen by aliens as alien technology, our peak,
| our absolute pinnacle before collapse.
| spacecadet wrote:
| LOL, better then them finding the industry 10 years ago.
| dkarl wrote:
| I would love to see a movie where aliens show up to help
| us with the looming crisis that is about to destroy our
| civilization, and it's CSS.
| ijidak wrote:
| Or even better, node_modules.
|
| "We have come to warn you. In your effort to create space
| for node_modules, you will consume the galaxy."
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| It's the year 2200. The world's machines are now all AI-
| designed, prototyped, refined, produced, and distributed.
| The supply chain hasn't received human interference in
| over fifty years, and increasingly-accurate weather and
| tectonic predictions generated by computer algorithms
| have made supply chain errors obsolete.
|
| But humanity is dissatisfied. With no existential threats
| arising, people cannot find value in life. AI-generated
| entertainment satisfies no one, and because no algorithm
| can quantify "originality," no machine would ever advise
| additional human involvement.
|
| There is only one area of human civilization where AI is
| not involved, and that's designing the CSS specification.
| "But what if I want to position this element so that the
| ultraviolet radiation is displayed with variable
| additional intensity based on the size of the 3d
| projection on the latest gen virtual assistant, but only
| on Tuesdays? You can't possibly make me use _javascript_
| to account for something that common, " bemoans one forum
| poster.
|
| What follows is chaos. Everyone has an opinion, some
| thinking that the treatment infrared got in 2190 was
| unfair to people with unmodified vision, others believing
| that the accessibility option prefers-visible-spectrum
| more than makes up for it. Still others want more
| robustness than simply prefers-visible-spectrum; there
| should be a native way to specify the exact wavelengths
| of light that one can see. Minimalists argue that when
| experiences are delivered directly to your brain, none of
| this matters, but no one likes that argument.
|
| The world hasn't experienced this large a conflict in
| hundreds of years, and it is unprepared. As people flock
| to the Great CSS Debate, they finally find a cause to
| believe in, even if they have no real opinion on the
| matter. Tempers escalate and battle lines are drawn. The
| AI don't possess enough training data to deal with the
| situation.
|
| In the midst of the final collapse, a package is
| delivered late. Just one package, and just one hour late,
| but such a thing is unheard of. Distracted from the CSS
| Wars, people flock to real-time trackers of all mail
| delivery. Are the weather models breaking down? Did
| Moore's Law finally stop, and as a result the AI
| infrastructure cannot keep up with the power needed in
| today's world?
|
| This new drama captivates the world's population so
| deeply that the apocalypse is avoided. And the scientific
| outpost of the Vrexon goes back to observation mode to
| await the next crisis.
| muttled wrote:
| Find an old webserver in the wreckage. Never able to see
| what it serves because it requires Flash.
| spacecadet wrote:
| wow downvotes?! Forget this community, signing off.
| btown wrote:
| Cascading Stellar Sheets: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/
| 10.1086/379854/fulltext/2...
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I'm not sure I want to meet the alien species that can arrange
| a star system into a prime sequence.
| arein3 wrote:
| The longer time you get to do that the less energy is
| required
| Keegs wrote:
| Especially if the universe really is a dark forest. Although,
| if you wanted to stay undetected, why would you advertise
| your solar system like this?
| smegsicle wrote:
| honeypot
| aqme28 wrote:
| Are we more likely to find alien tech in a "mathematically
| perfect" star system? Why?
|
| The article doesn't mention it.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| if you don't mention why - it can't be under scrutiny!
| dwighttk wrote:
| Trying to find a signal in the noise
| kekebo wrote:
| I'm guessing the assumption is that it was manipulated by an
| intelligent actor into the described 'perfection'.
| RockCoach wrote:
| The implication is that is the star system had potentially been
| artificially modified or even designed. Any entity capable of
| performing such a feat that must logically possess advanced
| technology. That's all.
| Lance_ET_Compte wrote:
| If they had any real intelligence, they would keep quiet
| about it!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Makes me think about the blunder from the first season of
| _Star Trek: Picard_. A mysterious, unknown star system,
| hidden deep in Romulan space[0], with 8 stars and a
| habitable-ish planet suspended in the middle. Clearly
| engineered. But I can 't imagine how it could stay hidden;
| I'd expect it to stick out like a sore thumb from across
| the galaxy on any star survey, even with present-day
| telescopes...
|
| --
|
| [0] - An antagonist space empire in the franchise.
| 3836293648 wrote:
| (Haven't seen it)
|
| Engineered when? Just because they can send information
| and travel faster than light doesn't mean that the light
| from there has reached federation space. A survey would
| have to have been done nearby to see it
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
| and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star
|
| If they are brave they might build something like that in
| order to attract attention, it is starting to look feasible
| to not just inspect solar systems in detail but to send and
| receive messages using methods like
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
| tossit444 wrote:
| Seems like they're missing something, eh?
| riskable wrote:
| They might not be planets but planet-sized, artificially-
| created cities/machinery/engineered objects. Think about it: If
| you were tasked with creating a planet-sized thing why would
| you give it anything less than a perfect orbit? You'd also put
| it in orbit around a super stable dwarf star to maximize the
| useful life of the project.
|
| Even if they are planets, imperfect orbits lead to problems in
| the _looooooong_ term. An alien civilization may forcibly alter
| the orbits of the planets in their solar system in order to
| stabilize it. E.g. before turning their star into an engine
| that moves everything along with it across the universe (e.g.
| out of the way of an incoming problem like a black hole or to
| prevent an astronomical collision).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Makes me think of how the Puppeteers in Niven's _Known Space_
| escaped the explosion at the center of the galaxy by moving 5
| planets in this configuration
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klemperer_rosette
|
| with an inertialess drive that (I think) they bought from the
| Outsiders.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I thought they mortgaged the drive, and were more than a
| little upset at how onerous the terms were.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| This title is pure clickbait which preys on peoples ignorance
| about astronomy + millennia of unscientific ideology about the
| Golden Ratio.
|
| Orbital resonance is a common phenomenon - the Galilean moons
| of Jupiter are in resonant orbits - and I suspect this system
| is interesting but not unique. In fact a quick search found a
| different system with 5 resonant orbits:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOI-178 Orbital resonance is
| quite common with young solar systems so the interesting thing
| about HD 110067 is that it has remained in orbital resonance
| for billions of years. It is childish to think that aliens
| moved the planets around.
|
| The paper itself[1] only briefly mentions the resonant
| property. Nobody is _directly_ claiming that the aliens caused
| the planets to do this because making such a claim with zero
| evidence is ridiculous. But they certainly understand what they
| 're doing with the clickbait title :(
|
| [1] https://www.space.com/alien-technosignatures-exoplanet-
| mathe...
| BirAdam wrote:
| Upvoted ya cuz you're correct. However, I'd add that while
| nature can absolutely create straight lines, it is often
| advisable to investigate for prior human activity if you
| stumble upon a straight line in a cave or under the ocean.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| My point is that the phrase "mathematically perfect" is
| very misleading because it makes us think of straight lines
| and perfect circles but this simply is not the same kind of
| mathematical "perfection." I suspect this is more like an
| unusually high-quality gemstone than it is an perfectly
| round rock - very rare but not particularly mysterious. In
| particular this is an example of the _six_ -body problem
| and orbital resonance might be a steady state if all the
| planets have similar mass.
| BirAdam wrote:
| The gemstone comparison is quite apt. Hadn't thought of
| it that way. Of course, humans will place meaning in
| anything/everything if they don't train themselves not to
| do so. I'd love someone to do a blog where all it is is
| tearing apart junk articles. That'd be a fun Sunday
| morning read.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Reminds me of a bit from a novel I read (won't be naming the
| title to avoid spoilers) where one of the minor twists is that
| the gigastructure of galaxies that we observe in the universe -
| the thing that's conducive to things like "star formation" and
| "life" - is an art project by intelligent species who've been
| alive since around the time of the Big Bang.
|
| (No, it's not part of the Xeelee Sequence :P)
| philomath_mn wrote:
| You're talking about the ending of Men in Black, right? ;)
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Hermes?
| digging wrote:
| Well, on an unrelated note, do you have any scifi author
| recommendations?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I have _so many_. In real life, this is where I get a very
| intense look in my eye, and about 50% of the time, I can see
| that the person I 'm speaking with has realized that they're
| now trapped in an hour-long conversation with me.
|
| I'll make it a short list of recent authors I've liked:
|
| - Adrian Tchaikovsky. He's best known for his Children of
| Time series, but his other scifi books are also excellent; I
| haven't read the fantasy ones. "The Expert System's Brother"
| is particularly excellent.
|
| - James Cambias. "A Darkling Sea" is a tremendously cool
| novel set at the bottom of an ocean under a moon's icy
| surface. Arkad's World has some very interesting world-
| building & aliens. And Corsair is a fun near-future
| technothriller about near-space and moon mining.
|
| - Stephen Baxter (author of the Xeelee Sequence) writes very
| good books, but just about none of them have a happy ending,
| and they're mostly grim - but very interesting.
|
| - It's not HN if I don't recommend Greg Egan, Peter Watts,
| and Neal Stephenson.
| digging wrote:
| Thanks. I have yet to read the first 3, so I'll add them to
| the list. If I'm lucky, maybe I'll stumble into that art-
| project novel.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| None of those are that novel, but I gave the answer in
| base64 elsewhere in the thread!
|
| That particular novel isn't the author's best work, but
| it's decent - his other stuff is much, much better imo.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Children of Time is such a great series, one of my
| favorites. I really loved the two corvid characters in the
| latest book. Tchaikovsky really is a great sci-fi writer,
| I'd recommend his Shards of Earth trilogy.
|
| I'm also surprised to see somebody recommend A Darkling
| Sea! I don't think I've ever met someone else who's read it
| and recommended it before. The somewhat odd sidestory of
| the aliens who communicate through sex has turned off the
| couple people I've recommended it to from the story, pun
| not intended.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I am desperately trying to find the third book as a
| borrowable e-book at a library, but I'm coming up blank
| :/
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm convinced Tchaikovsky must be a collection of writers
| or using a generative AI heavily because nobody can write
| that many interesting books in such a short time.
|
| I'm working through The Final Architecture series right
| now, it's got some absolutely great SF.
| tekkk wrote:
| That's an interesting point. It seems though the man has
| written many books prior getting published so maybe he is
| just running through his back catalogue. Remarkable
| perseverance to keep going after all the rejections.
| justusthane wrote:
| If you would recommend it, could you email the title to
| j@justus.ws? I'm on a sci-fi kick lately and always looking for
| good recs.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Will do. I also recommended some authors in another comment
| in this thread, and I try to keep my Goodreads mostly up to
| date, including ratings:
| https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4016206-pavel-lishin
| Ecoste wrote:
| Comment the title is base64 to avoid spoilers because ChatGPT
| does not recognize what book this is.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Good idea!
|
| Um9iZXJ0IEogU2F3eWVyIC0gU3RhcnBsZXgK
| awskinda wrote:
| Holy cow. ChatGPT 4 actually decoded this. It went into
| analysis mode, wrote some python, ran it, and gave the
| correct answer.
| z3phyr wrote:
| Its base64. Its not an encryption.
| awskinda wrote:
| Sure, but it's pretty amazing to me that ChatGPT didn't
| just hallucinate a response to a generic request to
| decode a string. It recognized the string as base64,
| wrote a valid program to decode it, and returned the
| correct response.
|
| Maybe I'm just old and amazed, but that seems pretty cool
| (terrifying?) to me.
| vik0 wrote:
| Why are you surprised? Is base64 hard for chatgpt, or am
| I missing something?
| awskinda wrote:
| I basically said "decode this thing."
|
| I'm just surprised it hit all the steps properly rather
| than hallucinating a response.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Base64 encoding is a common way of jailbreaking LLMS. The
| llm just deals with vectorspaces so to it, base64 is just
| another language for the encoding/tokenization layer to
| learn.
| awskinda wrote:
| Yeah - I'm just shocked I didn't get a hallucinated
| response for the query.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I wonder what other code you could get it to execute for
| free.
| philomath_mn wrote:
| It can also decode w/o analysis mode. Try GPT Classic
| award_ wrote:
| Gemini does too, not sure that's all too surprising
| tempaway16741 wrote:
| This article is clickbait
| barbazoo wrote:
| Was this comment worth a new account though?
| tempaway16741 wrote:
| my usual one is locked by the noprocrast setting ; )
| timeon wrote:
| Apparently you need better tool.
| jb1991 wrote:
| What is the "mathematically perfect" aspect of this system? I
| don't see it in the article.
| aliceryhl wrote:
| The caption for the picture says this:
|
| > The six planets orbit their central star HD 110067 in a
| harmonic rhythm with planets aligning every few orbits.
| tromp wrote:
| As detailed in the companion article [1], for every 54 orbits
| of planet 1, planets 2..6 orbit 36, 24, 16, 12, and 8 times
| respectively, giving successive ratios of 2/3, 2/3, 2/3, 3/4
| and 3/4. After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the
| same relative position.
|
| [1] https://www.space.com/six-sub-neptunes-found-100-light-
| years...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If a K1.5 wanted to do that just for shits and giggles, is
| there a viable way to slow down or speed up orbits of rocky
| planets? Like, wouldn't they be shooting a bunch of mass out
| of their system to even attempt this? If one could build a
| Dyson sphere, is that more difficult or less difficult than
| engineering a system like this? The sphere/swarm has some
| absurd amount of mass all in a very uniform orbit around the
| sun, and most of that mass didn't start there... so it sort
| of seems like it's equivalent (but if so, they're much closer
| to K2 than K1).
| neocritter wrote:
| If they have that level of control, they could simply
| arrange for planets to smash each other to bits and reform
| as a Dyson sphere.
| ordu wrote:
| _> is there a viable way to slow down or speed up orbits of
| rocky planets?_
|
| You can fly something massive near a target planet, while
| using some kind of engine to keep a distance. Gravity will
| do the rest. It may take some time of course, but all you
| need is to do maintainance on an engine regularly.
|
| _> Like, wouldn 't they be shooting a bunch of mass out of
| their system to even attempt this?_
|
| It depends on a type of an engine. If you use solar sail
| for example it is not the mass but light will be thrown
| out.
|
| _> one could build a Dyson sphere, is that more difficult
| or less difficult than engineering a system like this?_
|
| Sphere seems to me more difficult. Not in a sense of
| energies involved, but from a standpoint of engineering.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| There's some principle that for a chaotic system, if the
| accuracy with which you can measure it is smaller than the
| largest perturbations you can make to it, you are willing
| to wait many Lyapunov times, and you have enough compute;
| then you can control the system. With this after a few
| dozens of millions of years you could control the small
| bodies of the solar system using relatively small thrusters
| and a big radar installation, and then put them all on
| aldrin cycler orbits to move momentum between the larger
| bodies.
| swores wrote:
| > _After those 54 planet 1 orbits, all planets are in the
| same position._
|
| Could you please explain what you mean by this, as to my
| layman's ears that sounds like either a confusingly-worded
| sentence, or an impossibility (multiple planets in the same
| location at the same time). Do they just all pass through one
| specific same location once per orbit but at different times?
| Or something else I'm not imagining?
| NegativeK wrote:
| They're in the same position they started, at the beginning
| of the planet 1's 54 orbits.
| swores wrote:
| Ahh, thanks
| tbihl wrote:
| The planets have nice harmonics, so that rather than planet
| 1 and planet 2 having some irrational ratio (planet 1 goes
| around every 2.64782362 times for planet 2) it's round
| fraction like 1/2. When you string the whole thing, the
| lowest common multiple of revolutions is 54, so that _only_
| every 54 planet-1-years, realignment returns.
|
| The researchers hypothesize that this is sufficiently
| improbable to point toward an embodied intelligence as the
| cause.
| tejtm wrote:
| The same thing said different. Every 54 planet-one orbits,
| a line from the star to planet-one would continue on
| through the rest of the planets. (* assuming they are
| nominally on the same plane)
| exe34 wrote:
| Same angular offset, i.e they line up.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Easily explained by natural and common resonance. A good
| keyword is entrainment.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| It is not at all clear to me why the harmonics makes it any
| more worth searching for aliens than any other solar system.
| a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to
| engineer this? b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur
| naturally as some sort of resonance effect?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > a) Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required
| to engineer this?
|
| Maybe they built the system, and being lazy like we are
| they chose some simple numbers
|
| > b) Isn't it vastly more likely to occur naturally as some
| sort of resonance effect?
|
| Alien intelligence may be less likely than a natural
| effect, but alien intelligence in this system is much more
| likely than in a random system.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| > Why would aliens expend the enormous energy required to
| engineer this?
|
| So there are these great big buildings in Egypt...
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I would lean towards this as well. There are countless
| examples of interesting mathematical patterns in nature.
| One can get pulled down this rabbit hole by watching some
| of Randall Carlson's videos [1] and I can see why people
| could be intrigued by the intelligent patterns. Having said
| that I am not discounting the possibility of something or
| someone creating these patterns only that they are replete
| throughout the universe and even found in natural objects
| on Earth. There is probably a formula one could use if the
| mass and composition of the planets were known that would
| explain the orbits.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/@TheRandallCarlson/videos
| Animats wrote:
| Neat. Is this something that tends to happen if there are
| large planets close to the star? In our solar system, the
| inner planets are small and the big outer planets are too far
| out to affect each other much.
| neilkk wrote:
| The last ratio should be 2/3 again.
| tromp wrote:
| Actually the ratios are correct [1], but the typo is in my
| inferred orbit count for planet 6 which should be 9, not 8.
| Well spotted!
|
| [1] https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/DEAyqYXn7pfD7ZboApakh
| e-120...
| layer8 wrote:
| All six planets orbit in resonance, with ratios of
| 54:36:24:16:12:9, or three times 3:2 and two times 4:3.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_110067#Planetary_system
| redder23 wrote:
| "alien" is just clickbait. I believe in aliens out there
| somewhere but nothing any human has ever seen.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I don't understand why "alien" is clickbait. If the system was
| artificially created, do you think it is more likely that
| humans are doing it?
| redder23 wrote:
| Neither humans nor aliens created it, obviously.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I mean, that's literally what they are investigating. It's
| an article about the search for intelligent life, if you
| think that's nonsense, that's fine but it doesn't make it
| "clickbait".
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| tldr:
|
| 1. Star system 100ly away.
|
| 2. Piqued interest of astronomical community, because "The six
| planets orbit their central star HD 110067 in a harmonic rhythm
| with planets aligning every few orbits"
|
| 3. No accurate data on masses of planets.
|
| 4. No radio signals or other "technosignatures" detected.
|
| So, super unclear what #2 means and why this is interesting at
| all / whether it's uncommon.
| GordonS wrote:
| This may be a silly question, but is it even possible to detect
| radio signals from 100ly away?
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| The short answer is no. Not even from Alpha Centauri 4ly
| away. A lot of people have misconceptions that we would
| immediately detect these signals - we would not. MAYBE from
| Alpha Centauri with a LOT of additional funding and effort,
| but not as is. Details here:
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/22617/can-we-
| commu...
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Is the implication that we're seeing the actions of a species
| that can alter the orbits of planets?
| doktrin wrote:
| I think that's the only reasonable implication here. The
| alternative would be to speculate that "mathematically perfect"
| star systems are inherently more conducive to the development
| of life - which doesn't really track.
| SamBam wrote:
| I remember reading a book by some kook with "PhD" in the author
| line, proving that the pyramids were alien technology.
|
| One of the key pieces of evidence was that the three great
| pyramids perfectly line up in the way that the three stars in
| Orion's Belt line up.
|
| The three stars are such a perfect straight line that they
| _must_ have been pushed into position by a hyper-advanced alien
| race. (You know, to get them to line up perfectly from the
| Earth 's perspective, which clearly would be important.)
|
| But wait, that's not all. Not only are they so _perfectly_
| lined up, but they also put ONE of the stars just out of
| alignment, to show us exactly which star they came from, so we
| could go visit them.
|
| Even as a twelve year old I was like, wait... _any_ three
| points form a "perfectly straight line with one point out of
| alignment..."
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Probability.
| seanhunter wrote:
| From what I have heard, pretty much every star system
| astrophysicists look at is investigated for potential anomalies
| given how big a deal it would be to actually find strong evidence
| of alien tech.
| orblivion wrote:
| Do the philosophical arguments against "Intelligent Design" as a
| field of scientific inquiry apply here?
| saalweachter wrote:
| No, maybe, yes.
|
| The philosophical argument against intelligent design is
| unfalsifiable (any evidence could have been created by an
| omnipotent creator for ineffable reasons), it is unnecessary to
| account for any of the evidence we have so far, and its
| proponents are not arguing in good faith.
|
| "Could X be an alien megastructure?" isn't necessarily
| unfalsifiable, could be an attempt to account for evidence that
| doesn't fit in current theory, and could be in good faith, but
| it could also be proposed by people who just _believe_ there
| are aliens out there in cases where there are obvious
| explanations and will just move on to a different "but this is
| definitely aliens" if the first doesn't pan out.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > radio waves from satellites and telescopes beaming out in the
| plane of our solar system
|
| Surely radio telescopes don't "beam out" radio waves? They
| receive them. If they are configured to transmit, like the Deep
| Space Array, they don't beam in the plane of the solar system;
| they beam at whatever spaceship they are trying to communicate
| with.
|
| Satellites even less; they have to conserve power, so they don't
| send radio waves into outer space. Their antennae point at the
| Earth.
|
| Also, the sentence containing that fragment has no main verb, so
| I had to read it several times to figure out what it meant.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| Not to mention if we did pick up an alien signal it would have
| been sent a very very very long time ago
| Kubuxu wrote:
| We use some radio telescopes for radar astronomy.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_astronomy
| calebm wrote:
| This is a great video on why planetary orbits tend to sync up:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyn64b4LNJ0. Ultimately, it comes
| down to the concept of entrainment (the same reason metronomes on
| the same surface tend to sync up).
| onetimeuse92304 wrote:
| I think the authors do not understand how planetary resonances
| work and how precise (or imprecise) the orbits need to be for the
| resonance to hold.
|
| Resonances are very common. We have lots of resonances in our
| Solar system in all different places between bodies.
|
| For the resonance to be stable, two bodies do not need to have
| mathematically precise orbits in relation to each other. There is
| quite a wide margin for error. Once two planets are close enough
| to the resonance, the resonance may become stable due to
| feedback. What happens is planets will exchange energy back and
| forth on each orbit in a way, that preserves the resonance. A
| substantial input needs to be provided to break up the resonance.
|
| What is actually interesting about this particular system is the
| long chain of resonances. But that is also nothing super special
| -- once you know how resonances form you can see how all of the
| planets, when they are close enough to the resonance, will
| transfer energy between themselves to snap into it and then
| continue on their resonant orbits.
|
| There is absolutely no reason to suggest that a resonance like
| this must have come from unnatural origin. It would be like
| saying that because the period of our Moons rotation is so
| precisely the same as period of its orbit around Earth that it
| always faces Earth with one side, that somebody must have put the
| Moon on the orbit. That's obviously false, these resonances form
| easily and naturally.
| bilekas wrote:
| > It would be like saying that because the period of our Moons
| rotation is so precisely the same as period of its orbit around
| Earth that it always faces Earth with one side, that somebody
| must have put the Moon on the orbit
|
| I don't think that's the implication though. Life on earth
| would not be the same without the moon's orbit to provide
| stable ocean current rides. I would imagine not having that
| would add extra complexities to establish long term growth of
| "life"?
| darkmarmot wrote:
| He's saying that tidally locked bodies are products of simple
| physics and you can't extrapolate deeper meanings from them.
| bilekas wrote:
| Ah okay and I agree. I was just saying that they do seem to
| promote the growth of life easier from what we can study at
| least.
| aptwebapps wrote:
| The article does not claim anything like that even though the
| headline could be interpreted that way, and maybe that was not
| accidental.
|
| Scientists are investigating the system simply because it has
| properties that might make it easier to detect signals from.
| rendall wrote:
| What is the mechanism by which orbiting bodies exchange energy?
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Gravitational waves.
| jerf wrote:
| Gravitational waves from planets are undetectably small.
| They do it through gravity directly, as sandworm101 says.
| You can model it with pure Newtonian gravity and get
| resonance effects just fine.
|
| See for instance:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qyn64b4LNJ0
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| The reason they're _actually_ looking at that system is that
| we're looking directly down on it so we can see the orbits of
| all the planets at once. It has nothing to do with thinking the
| orbits are unnatural.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Are you sure? TFA states "HD 110067 is viewed edge on from
| Earth", which doesn't sound like what you're describing. Of
| course they could have made a mistake; I don't know either
| way.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| >HD 110067 (TIC 347332255) is a bright K0-type star with a mass
| about 80% that of the Sun, located at 12h39m21fs50,
| 20deg01'40farcs0 (J2000). Breakthrough Listen (BL) is observing
| additional targets selected from the Exoplanet Follow-up
| Observing Program for TESS (ExoFOP-TESS) in addition to the
| nearby star sample described by Isaacson et al. (2017). HD
| 110067 is valuable as a technosignature target not only because
| of its interest for biosignature searches. First, Earth views
| the system edge-on, which increases the likelihood of detecting
| radiation from any transmitters present whether intentional
| (Traas et al. 2021) or resulting from planet-to-planet
| transmissions which could be observed by their "spillover"
| during planet-planet occultations (Ashtari 2023); second, the
| large number of planets regardless of their position in the
| star's habitable zone increases the likelihood that an advanced
| civilization could have spread technology to neighboring
| planets, as has happened in our own solar system (Wright et al.
| 2022).
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ad235f
|
| Nobody is suggesting the resonances are unnatural. The edge on
| aspect helps the search in other ways.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I think the authors do not understand ...
|
| The authors are scientists from SETI, Berkeley, Oxford, and
| NASA. Probably they understand anything you (or I) understand
| about the topic, and quite a bit more. (A funny phenomenon is
| that if they posted here, starting their comment with 'SETI
| researcher here ...', we would all listen to them and ask
| questions. If they 'post' a paper to a journal, a paper they
| spent years researching and revising, alongside other
| scientists, we disregard them.)
|
| Like many similar HN comments, I think there's a valid question
| in there. IMHO it's a mistake to immediately conclude that,
| perceiving some inconsistency, the other person must be wrong,
| obviously ridiculous, etc. That doesn't make sense unless I am
| omniscient: the inconsistency between my idea and theirs could
| just as easily be a problem on my end - much more easily when
| comparing my ideas of orbital physics with those authors. Here
| is how I have learned to think of it (using this example):
|
| _To me, it seems clear that planetary resonances explain the
| observed phenomenon. Obviously the authors thought of that; how
| did they address that issue?_
|
| Humility is truth, unless you are a god.
| DrBazza wrote:
| To paraphrase Pratchett: million to one chances happen nine times
| out of ten.
|
| Space is big, really big, etc. so it's no surprise we've found
| something like this just through chance alone. One of the planets
| is probably Bethselamin.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Yeah... feels like someone isn't familiar with the law of large
| numbers...
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| I think it's mostly that people didn't read the article. The
| planets are interesting to study because of the angle we're
| looking at them and for no other reason. They happened to be
| aligned in such a way that we can get interesting
| measurements from them.
| UberFly wrote:
| Yea the headline is misleading making it sound like the
| planet orbits were engineered.
| the_shivers wrote:
| Reminds me of Omphalos by Ted Chiang.
| kloch wrote:
| Wiki page for the star system:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_110067
| alienicecream wrote:
| Imagine there are no aliens intelligent in the way humans are,
| and nature doesn't care about us any more than it cares about a
| species of gnat, and that knowledge and discovery is not the
| purpose of life.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Reminds me of Titius-Bode law[1], where simple equation correctly
| gave orbits of all the known planets, while predicting one more
| in asteroid belt and correct distance to Uranus. Only was
| considered disproven when Neptune didn't work.
|
| I would not trust these relations even existing (other than by
| pure chance). Even less I'd trust any intelligent design behind
| it
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titius%E2%80%93Bode_law
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > other than by pure chance
|
| Barring intelligent design, there's an extremely good chance
| that at least _one_ of these systems exist, and an equally good
| chance that _only_ one exists, and we 're just lucky enough to
| have observed it.
| beambot wrote:
| Why would it be an equally good chance that _only_ one
| exists?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I don't understand how one follows from the other there?
| firebaze wrote:
| I'd suppose the astronomers behind this study know that "law"
| also, and ruled it out.
|
| Not very far fetched, in my opinion.
| primer42 wrote:
| What is a "mathematically perfect" orbit?
| seanhunter wrote:
| It obeys Kepler's laws really really well. As opposed to those
| mathematically imperfect orbits that sometimes get the signs
| wrong when they do integration by parts and end up sending the
| planet spinning off in the wrong direction.
|
| But seriously others in the various threads above have
| explained but it's to do with the orbital periods forming
| precise ratios so the planets align very pleasingly every now
| and then.
| thereisnoself wrote:
| I've often thought planet TrEs-2b [0], the darkest planet ever
| discovered orbiting a star, would be the best candidate for extra
| terrestrial life. My theory is that its darkness is down to the
| fact that the civilisation there has figured out a way to harness
| solar energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson
| sphere [1].
|
| [0] https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exoplanet-catalog/1716/tres-2-b
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
| dmazin wrote:
| That's an interesting exoplanet, though not sure how someone
| would live on a gas giant.
| thereisnoself wrote:
| I don't think it makes sense for a humanoid species, but
| silicon based, perhaps? Iain M Banks' The Algebraist [0] has
| a near immortal species called Dwellers that manage it
| somehow :)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algebraist#:~:text=Dwel
| ler....
| dekhn wrote:
| this is one of my favorites by Banks. Really mind-twisting.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Presumably gas planets have a layer dense enough that a solid
| would float.
| dotancohen wrote:
| And not melt?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Maybe they don't. They might live on a rocky planet further
| out and just use TrES-2b as a place to run their solar farm
| because it's extremely close to their star and (due to being
| uninhabited) didn't have any NIMBYs opposing large-scale
| construction projects.
|
| Note how far out from the planet's orbit NASA expects the
| habitable zone. We aren't very good yet at finding planets
| that aren't huge or nearly hugging their star, so there might
| be planets out there.
| exe34 wrote:
| To be fair, if your solar farm can be in orbit around a
| planet that's not your legal address for tax purposes, it
| can just orbit the star?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Maybe building on the planet had some advantages during
| construction, like easier delivery or being able to use
| local resources. Or maybe the atmosphere helps with
| thermal management. Or being on a planet is useful for
| the infrastructure that does something with all that
| power (beaming it to other planets, producing solid,
| liquid or antimatter fuel for export, refueling space
| ships or robots, etc). Tax purposes. Diplomatic reasons,
| maybe there are established protocols for owning planets
| but large scale light blocking installations in orbit
| would upset a neighboring nation (though you suspect
| their opposition has more to do with simmering tensions
| over the Agreppo peninsula than with concerns about the
| impact on agriculture). There are plenty of plausible
| reasons, probably all wrong.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Could be legacy reasons. Maybe they initially built it
| around this planet, or maybe they're from a moon in or it
| around it, and now it provides more than enough energy
| for their needs. I find people looking for aliens always
| expect them to be doing the most efficient thing and
| forgoing any semblance of history.
| exe34 wrote:
| Aww man would be so cool to meet aliens and they show us
| around their stuff, and it all seems really dumb and
| convoluted, and they hate it too, but it would be too
| expensive to rip it all out and start over...
| exe34 wrote:
| In accelerando by Charlie stross, they live on raft that
| covers a large percentage of the planet's sky.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Maybe they live on a moon or two.
| julienchastang wrote:
| The NASA exoplanet visualizer is very cool. Did not know about
| that. Thanks for sharing. I imagine those hypothetical
| visualizations will improve over time as our understanding of
| the exoplanet data gets better. It is amazing what you can
| derive from a single pixel of light.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Not sure why, but the visualizer is giving me a strong urge
| to boot _Outer Wilds_ again.
| h4x0rr wrote:
| Love that game
| lisper wrote:
| > My theory is that its darkness is down to the fact that the
| civilisation there has figured out a way to harness solar
| energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson sphere
| [1].
|
| Very unlikely, in light of the fact that "the air of this
| planet is as hot as lava".
| bloggie wrote:
| Isn't that the expected outcome when energy production
| eventually outpaces the planet's ability to dissipate energy
| into space?
| lisper wrote:
| No. The temperature of the atmosphere has nothing to do
| with whether or not aliens are harvesting the energy. At
| equilibrium, all of the incoming energy has to get radiated
| back out into space eventually whether there are aliens
| harvesting that energy or not.
|
| The problem with an atmosphere hotter than lava is that
| very few materials are solid at those temperatures, and
| it's hard to imagine how a civilization could build an
| energy harvester without solid materials.
| theossuary wrote:
| This is a great video that touches on your point, the
| Earth must radiate the heat it receives to stay in
| equilibrium, even if it uses it to do work in the
| process.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA
| im3w1l wrote:
| If we extract the maximum possible entropy of the
| incoming radiation wouldn't that mean we radiated at
| high-intensity but low-temperature?
| landryraccoon wrote:
| What does that mean?
|
| Everyday objects don't work like that. Saying ice cubes
| are cold is roughly equivalent to saying that they
| radiate less heat than the objects around them. If they
| radiated at "high intensity" then they wouldn't be cold
| anymore.
|
| "A cold object that radiates heat at high intensity" is a
| contradiction.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Only for black body radiation do we have a perfect
| correspondance between spectrum and intensity. But there
| can be other ways of radiating. Non-black bodies.
| Antennas. Lasers.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| Secondarily, thermodynamics and other effects make many
| processes much less efficient at higher temperatures,
| examples including engines and solar panels.
| 11101010001100 wrote:
| Sure, energy in equals energy out at equilibrium, but
| another option is to have a steady state solution where
| energy is generated leading to potentially large
| temperature gradients.
| ebcode wrote:
| They could be using iridium. When we're talking about
| aliens, we're already in the realm of hard-to-imagine,
| but it's worthwhile, I think.
| mianos wrote:
| Those liquid green aliens are probably looking at us and
| going "how can life exist with so much matter in solid
| form and so cold".
| goatlover wrote:
| The protomolecule was able to build structures on Venus.
| Then again, if your civilization was over a billion years
| old, all sorts of things might become possible.
|
| That being said, it's never actually aliens in astronomy.
| So far, anyway.
| awesomeideas wrote:
| Well, it's not going to outpace it, exactly. Unless the
| temperature is actually increasing (or decreasing), the
| energy in matches the energy radiated away, less the non-
| heat work.
| jdmichal wrote:
| > less the non-heat work.
|
| Doesn't all the non-heat work eventually just become
| heat? Or am I misunderstanding your usage? Like a car
| with a solar panel still ends up radiating work as heat,
| by either air resistance (heat) or brake friction (heat).
| aylmao wrote:
| I wonder how temperature is measured for an object this far
| away. If it's calculated based on the expected energy
| absorption of a planet with this level of reflectivity, the
| measurement would be wrong anyway, assuming alien tech.
|
| Instead of the energy being absorbed as heat by the planet,
| it'd instead be stored in some other form or used for
| interstellar travel, construction etc, right?
| holoduke wrote:
| That would be a strong alien to deal with 1.5 Jupiter gravity
| :)
| ars wrote:
| > My theory is that its darkness is down to the fact that the
| civilisation there has figured out a way to harness solar
| energy to near 100% capacity, along the lines of a Dyson sphere
|
| That doesn't work quite the way you think. If you harness all
| the energy your planet will start to glow, first red, then
| white. Eventually becoming as hot as your star, at which point
| you stop gaining energy.
|
| Unless they are somehow converting that energy to matter, the
| laws of thermodynamics mean that all that energy eventually
| becomes heat.
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Take incoming energy and make antimatter. Store for use
| outside of the sphere. That will be my premise for the book I
| am writing. ;)
| samatman wrote:
| Harvesting energy is a misnomer, what we want is the
| syntropy: the available work.
|
| If we turned the Earth into a black body and used all Solar
| radiation to run computers or move stuff around at the
| theoretical limit, we'd still need the surrounding space to
| radiate off the heat as our cold well. So the temperature
| would be at whatever that equilibrium condition is, but
| wouldn't steadily increase. The equilibrium condition could
| be all over the place and would be largely determined by the
| composition of the atmosphere.
|
| For the record I'm not in favor of paperclipping the planet
| like this. If anyone was wondering.
| uiuiiuiui wrote:
| This is about as exciting as the Face on Mars, and for the same
| reasons
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydonia_(Mars)
| kypro wrote:
| What's the reasoning to suspect aliens here?
|
| Are we hypothesising Aliens could be anal for mathematical
| perfection, or is it that there's some utility in having a
| mathematically perfect star system such that an advanced alien
| civilisation might decide to engineer their star system in this
| way?
| duxup wrote:
| We make a lot of observations, doesn't it make sense that we
| would see some improbable stuff?
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Yes.
| cal85 wrote:
| Yes, and it makes sense that we take a closer look at the
| improbable stuff in case it's aliens.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| For those saying that resonance explains the phenomenon, the
| paper doesn't seem to say that the 'mathamatically perfect'
| orbits are signs of intelligence:
|
| _... the star HD 110067 has six sub-Neptune planets, all of
| which orbit their host star in a stable resonant chain. As the
| brightest star known to have at least four planets, with all
| planets in a remarkably ordered orbital configuration, HD 110067
| offers an unprecedented opportunity to study the orbital
| evolution of planetary systems and the atmospheric compositions
| of sub-Neptunes. Three of the planets have low densities which
| suggest large, hydrogen-rich atmospheres. Sub-Neptune planets are
| one of the most common types of exoplanet discovered to date, so
| the question of whether they could support liquid water is
| crucial for target prioritization in the Search for
| Extraterrestrial Intelligence._
|
| ...
|
| _... HD 110067 is valuable as a technosignature target not only
| because of its interest for biosignature searches. First, Earth
| views the system edge-on, which increases the likelihood of
| detecting radiation from any transmitters present whether
| intentional (Traas et al. 2021) or resulting from planet-to-
| planet transmissions which could be observed by their "spillover"
| during planet-planet occultations (Ashtari 2023); second, the
| large number of planets regardless of their position in the
| star's habitable zone increases the likelihood that an advanced
| civilization could have spread technology to neighboring planets,
| as has happened in our own solar system (Wright et al. 2022)._
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ad235f
| tim_hutton wrote:
| Two orbital things we might look for:
|
| 1. Activity in geostationary orbits.
|
| 2. Orbits where the planet's year is exactly divisible by its
| day, eliminating leap years.
| jl6 wrote:
| Are you suggesting #2 is sufficiently unlikely to occur
| naturally that it becomes a likely technosignature of an alien
| race whose programmers got so fed up with calendrical
| calculations that they megaengineered their planet's rotation
| as a way of streamlining their datetime libraries?
| psychlops wrote:
| Programmers with that amount of political power are
| definitely a sign of an advanced race.
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