Fwd: Google Alert - Tabby's Star

[Keith Henson]

Starting to get a trickle of MSM articles 

Keith

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From: Google Alerts <googlealer...@google.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 10, 2024 at 7:00 PM
Subject: Google Alert - Tabby's Star
To: <HKeith...@gmail.com>

	Tabby's Star Daily update ⋅ August 11, 2024
	NEWS
	A Dyson sphere might help capture all available energy - The Oklahoman The Oklahoman In 2015, astronomer Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian discovered a star that displayed light dips of up to 22 percent. Astronomers dubbed it Tabby's Star. Flag as irrelevant
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[Stuart LaForge]

Assuming the dark forest hypothesis is true, then it would be a selective advantage for a technologically capable species to build Dyson swarms that would be camouflaged to look like dust clouds to the casual observer. The dark forest hypothesis assumes only that evolution by natural selection is universal and that there is life out there.

Stuart LaForge

[Keith Henson]

The thing that kicked me over from "don't know, but it must be natural" to "it is aliens" was the astronomers finding 24 blinking stars in a cluster.  The closest one is 511 lightyears from here.  That set me off looking at how big the blocking object was and how far out from the star it was.  The only thing that makes any sense is a data center for uploaded aliens.  The reason it is so far out from the star is so it can run cold which reduces the power and keeps down the errors.

Even that far out, it still intercepts a respectable amount of light, around 1.4 million times as much energy as the human race uses.

The AIs estimate they have been in space for 3000 years.  I would guess longer given the distance between stars.  But how low are the odds of another civilization in our backyard?

I need to run that question by Anders.

Keith

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[Stuart LaForge]

Anders would probably tell you that it would depend upon your Bayesian priors. So if you believe that life started de novo here on earth via abiogenesis, then the odds would be rather low. On the other hand if you believe in panspermia or panbiogenesis, then the odds would be really high since the life would have had to drift here from other stars frozen inside of comets or whatnot. Since that would have taken millions of years even for the closest of stars, then the odds that inhabited star systems would cluster would be much higher. Here is a map of your blinking stars. The star labelled E is our sun and the start labelled T is Tabby's star.

https://04533034747756402167.googlegroups.com/attach/37057d7122575/Schmidt%20Periodic%20Dimming%20Star%20Cluster.gif?part=0.1&view=1&vt=ANaJVrGUk6Hf96y2ICncUtt1J8AK_l8UrSly-WWML081y1_FFIEEKQqDfMtq2aruciI2KcHhoPTSMO80Kkd8k7nh-3etR8ptfKR93fuBxByvXX_zV6noV4Q

Stuart LaForge

[John Clark]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 3:48 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The thing that kicked me over from "don't know, but it must be natural" to "it is aliens" was the astronomers finding 24 blinking stars in a cluster.  The closest one is 511 lightyears from here. 

511 light years is next door astronomically speaking, there must be millions of stars like that in the Milky Way alone, but we can only see the closest ones; our solar system probably looked like that for millions of years during the time after the sun formed but before the planets did. What I don't understand is why discovering other stars that are similar to Tabby's Star increases your confidence that ET made them. It increases my confidence that it's a natural phenomenon, and I'm not alone. The overwhelming consensus of professional astronomers, astrophysicists and even the SETI Institute say ET almost certainly has nothing to do with Tabby's Star.

  John K Clark

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 11:05 AM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

Anders would probably tell you that it would depend upon your Bayesian priors. So if you believe that life started de novo here on earth via abiogenesis, then the odds would be rather low.

Why would you say this?  It's just one of a bunch of factors.

 

On the other hand if you believe in panspermia or panbiogenesis, then the odds would be really high since the life would have had to drift here from other stars frozen inside of comets or whatnot. Since that would have taken millions of years even for the closest of stars, then the odds that inhabited star systems would cluster would be much higher. Here is a map of your blinking stars. The star labelled E is our sun and the start labelled T is Tabby's star.

High tech aliens uploaded into a data center does not happen by itself.  I would expect somewhere near the center of that cluster of stars that there is one with a habitable zone planet in it where they evolved like we did.  My expectation would be that we are seeing one species of high tech aliens who have spread to 24 stars and probably many others (since we only see blinking if the local ecliptic plane is pointed right at us).

Keith

 

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[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 1:59 PM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 3:48 AM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > The thing that kicked me over from "don't know, but it must be natural" to "it is aliens" was the astronomers finding 24 blinking stars in a cluster. The closest one is 511 lightyears from here.
>
> 511 light years is next door astronomically speaking, there must be millions of stars like that in the Milky Way alone, but we can only see the closest ones; our solar system probably looked like that for millions of years during the time after the sun formed but before the planets did.

Kepler found only one star that acted this way. We could see this
kind of blink for a very long distance.

> What I don't understand is why discovering other stars that are similar to Tabby's Star increases your confidence that ET made them.

It looks like life spreading out, the way life does.

> It increases my confidence that it's a natural phenomenon, and I'm not alone. The overwhelming consensus of professional astronomers, astrophysicists and even the SETI Institute say ET almost certainly has nothing to do with Tabby's Star.

Part of the reason I think we are looking at shadows of technological
objects is all the work I did on power satellites and thermal
radiators. For example, a dust cloud in thermal equilibrium would be
about 210 K and not the measured 65 K. This implies directional
thermal radiation which is not natural.

If it is aliens, there are good points and bad ones. The good is that
they made it through their local singularity so maybe we can. The bad
thing is that we don't need the competition. I would be happy to be
wrong.

Keith

> John K Clark

>
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[John Clark]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 12:19 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> 511 light years is next door astronomically speaking, there must be millions of stars like that in the Milky Way alone, but we can only see the closest ones; our solar system probably looked like that for millions of years during the time after the sun formed but before the planets did.

> Kepler found only one star that acted this way. 

I thought you said there were 24.  

 

> We could see this kind of blink for a very long distance.

Perhaps we could if we used our very largest telescopes to closely observe a particular star over a period of several months, but there are many billions of stars in the galaxy and there is no way to know beforehand which one is likely to exhibit this peculiar dimming. Telescope time for world-class instruments is very expensive. 

Also, at least in this solar system the planets started to form only a few million years after the sun did, and that was many billions of years ago. So there's only a very narrow window of opportunity for anybody to observe it. Thus it would be rare to find a star like Tabby, particularly if it was much further away than Tabby and thus much dimmer. And Tabby would need to be 450 times brighter to be visible with the naked eye.  

> a dust cloud in thermal equilibrium

Dust clouds are very complex systems and a lot of them are not in thermal equilibrium, the Boomerang nebula certainly isn't.  

> would be about 210 K and not the measured 65 K. 

I don't know where you got that 65K figure. Maybe you've seen something recent that I haven't, but from what I know even the best measurements of the temperature of Tabby's dust cloud have huge error bars, they give a range of 200 to 500 K.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

rp1

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 11:55 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 12:19 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> >> 511 light years is next door astronomically speaking, there must be millions of stars like that in the Milky Way alone, but we can only see the closest ones; our solar system probably looked like that for millions of years during the time after the sun formed but before the planets did.
>>
>>
>> > Kepler found only one star that acted this way.
>
> I thought you said there were 24.

Later search, looking at stars near Tabby's Star.

>> > We could see this kind of blink for a very long distance.
>
> Perhaps we could if we used our very largest telescopes to closely observe a particular star over a period of several months, but there are many billions of stars in the galaxy and there is no way to know beforehand which one is likely to exhibit this peculiar dimming. Telescope time for world-class instruments is very expensive.

Depends on the telescope. Kepler looked at a some rather large number
of stars all at once.

> Also, at least in this solar system the planets started to form only a few million years after the sun did, and that was many billions of years ago. So there's only a very narrow window of opportunity for anybody to observe it. Thus it would be rare to find a star like Tabby, particularly if it was much further away than Tabby and thus much dimmer. And Tabby would need to be 450 times brighter to be visible with the naked eye.

Not sure of your reasoning here.

>> > a dust cloud in thermal equilibrium
>
>
> Dust clouds are very complex systems and a lot of them are not in thermal equilibrium, the Boomerang nebula certainly isn't.
>
>> > would be about 210 K and not the measured 65 K.
>
>
> I don't know where you got that 65K figure. Maybe you've seen something recent that I haven't, but from what I know even the best measurements of the temperature of Tabby's dust cloud have huge error bars, they give a range of 200 to 500 K.

In any case, dust clouds just will not account for it because they
don't last very long. The dust is blown out by light pressure like a
comet tail.

Eventually, the truth will be known. If I am right, I will gain
status along with people like Jason Wright. But as I say, I hope I am
wrong.

Keith

> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> rp1
>
>
>

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[Lawrence Crowell]

This is not likely to be a Dyson sphere. It is always best to consider the most probable explanation first. This likely is due to some strange configuration of dust clouds or lanes around this star. Without getting into any Bayesian analysis it is not hard to see this, say a strange array of dust clouds, is more probable than a Dyson sphere.

Our experience with technological systems is that they generally last at most a few decades, some bigger ones maybe a century or so. A Dyson sphere dwarfs by many orders of magnitude anything we have ever built.I would tend to think that a Dyson sphere would take a very long time period to build and to get the benefit from it would have to run for a very long time. 

What we are finding about planets is that they come in a vast diversity of physical and chemical forms. Extrasolar planet data on nearly 4000 planets indicates that very few have any possible analogous conditions we find on Earth. It is quite possible that life is fairly common, but planets with complex life in an extremely complex network like we see on Earth are probably quite exceptional. Then given that Earth has had us as technological beings for 2 centuries, a little over one century with radio technology, over the course of 4 billion years this is a Bayesian prior that suggests technically capable intelligent life is extremely rare. 

I think the speed of light is a firm invariant that we, nor can any other ETI, can circumvent. Warp drives and the like are science fiction. This is even with the Alcubierre warp drive that is a solution to the Einstein field equation. If you warp faster than light it is completely unstable. The closest ETI may be on the other side of the Virgo cluster some 50 million light years away. That would be far too distant to communicate between and transport is virtually impossible. We are then FAPP alone. This is far more probable than invoking some practice or scheme that putative ETIs would engage in. We have no idea whether all possible ETIs would be utterly silent and noninterventionist, or there is a dark forest or some other agenda. Different ETs probably think and act in radically divergently different ways.

LC

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[John Clark]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 7:47 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In any case, dust clouds just will not account for it because they don't last very long. 

Yes, such dust clouds don't last very long, just a few million years, a blink of the eye astronomically speaking. And that's why every star doesn't look like Tabby's star. 

> The dust is blown out by light pressure like a comet tail.

The dust cloud around Tabby's star is FAR denser and many trillions of times more massive than a comet's tail. There is no way light pressure could accelerate that much mass to solar escape velocity before gravity caused the cloud to condense and become even denser; if that was not true then there would be no planets anywhere in the observable universe.

 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

ooo

 

[Stuart LaForge]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 10:19 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 11:05 AM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

Anders would probably tell you that it would depend upon your Bayesian priors. So if you believe that life started de novo here on earth via abiogenesis, then the odds would be rather low.

Why would you say this?  It's just one of a bunch of factors.

You asked what the odds were of a galactic civilization in our backyard. I said that the odds would be much higher of us belonging to a cluster of inhabited star systems, and therefore a potential galactic civilization, if life arose on earth by panspermia which is the notion that nigh indestructible microbial life similar to the bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans,the fungus Cryptococcus neoformans, and the tardigrade Macrobiotus areolatus seeded life on Earth by hitching a ride here frozen in icy asteroids or comets formed by the ejecta of asteroid impacts or the planetary debris surfing shockwaves of supernovae. If origins of life on Earth were extraterrestrial as suggested by Francis Crick and other proponents of panspermia, then it stands to reason we would belong to a cluster of inhabited star systems.   

If life started from scratch here on Earth, then there would be a much broader and sparser spatial distribution of inhabited star systems. Therefore, galactic Goldilocks zones aside,  a galactic civilization would be no more likely to be in our vicinity than on the other side of our galaxy or even in another galaxy. 

That is all I was trying to point out.

Stuart LaForge

 

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[Stuart LaForge]

The problem with "dust" theories is that Tabby's star is supposed to be a main sequence Type F star that has been around for hundreds of millions of years. There is no evidence of any protoplanetary disk and any such primordial planet forming dust should have coalesced or blown away long ago. Which leaves catastrophic planetary collisions and similarly catastrophic events as one of the few remaining sources of dust.

Another issue is that any explanation would have to account for long-term gradual dimming. According to photographic plates maintained by the archives of the Harvard Observatory, Tabby's star has dimmed by 15% between 1890 and 1989. In addition, the Kepler mission determined that its average brightness dimmed about 4% between 2009 and 2013. So any dust cloud has to be getting bigger and darker and not coalescing or blowing away.

Stuart LaForge

 

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 9:02 AM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem with "dust" theories is that Tabby's star is supposed to be a main sequence Type F star that has been around for hundreds of millions of years. There is no evidence of any protoplanetary disk and any such primordial planet forming dust should have coalesced or blown away long ago.

The protoplanetary dust theory is not the only explanation that I think explains observations much better than ET, another idea is that the dust cloud was caused by a collision between two planets. Even our solar system is not entirely gravitationally stable, billions of years from now it's possible that things may become chaotic and the planet Mercury could crash into the Earth.  

> Tabby's star has dimmed by 15% between 1890 and 1989. In addition, the Kepler mission determined that its average brightness dimmed about 4% between 2009 and 2013. So any dust cloud has to be getting bigger and darker and not coalescing or blowing away.

Most dust clouds are not homogeneous, they have structure, some parts are more opaque than others. And Tabby's star is not the only one that has shown this sort of dimming, so has the star Betelgeuse, but that star is only about 8 million years old, not nearly long enough for intelligent life to have evolved,  so I don't see how it could be surrounded by a Dyson Sphere.  

 John K Clark  

 

[Stuart LaForge]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2024 at 5:06 PM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

This is not likely to be a Dyson sphere. It is always best to consider the most probable explanation first. This likely is due to some strange configuration of dust clouds or lanes around this star. Without getting into any Bayesian analysis it is not hard to see this, say a strange array of dust clouds, is more probable than a Dyson sphere. 

I think there are other types of megastructures possible other than a Dyson sphere. I think Keith is saying it is an orbiting data center without necessarily giving a credence to one design or over another.

 

Our experience with technological systems is that they generally last at most a few decades, some bigger ones maybe a century or so. A Dyson sphere dwarfs by many orders of magnitude anything we have ever built.I would tend to think that a Dyson sphere would take a very long time period to build and to get the benefit from it would have to run for a very long time.

The James Webb Space Telescope is one of my favorite technological systems of all time. It is amazing that within days of taking a picture, stunning photos of all manner of astronomical wonders can be delivered to the public like the first direct observation of an exoplanet or the weird concentric dust rings kicked up by a Wolf Rayet binary system. But last August, a year ago, the Stiavelli, Massimo group finished a 5.9 hour observation of Tabby's star with the JWST. I had been wondering why they have been taking so long to publish their findings. So I did some digging and I found the raw data from the JWST feed and suddenly I understand why they are reluctant to publish:

https://jwstfeed.com/PostView/FeedPost?ci=1691322045_jw02757-o004_t001_miri_f2100w_i2d

How do you explain the existence of a near perfect hexagon around Tabby's star but not around the other stars in the telescope's field of view?

What we are finding about planets is that they come in a vast diversity of physical and chemical forms. Extrasolar planet data on nearly 4000 planets indicates that very few have any possible analogous conditions we find on Earth. It is quite possible that life is fairly common, but planets with complex life in an extremely complex network like we see on Earth are probably quite exceptional. Then given that Earth has had us as technological beings for 2 centuries, a little over one century with radio technology, over the course of 4 billion years this is a Bayesian prior that suggests technically capable intelligent life is extremely rare. 

Yes. I think it is often overlooked that mere intelligence is not enough to develop a technological civilization. Opposable thumbs or similarly dextrous appendages are also necessary. How many brilliant dolphin philosophers have died in obscurity for lack of the physical ability to write down their thoughts?

 

I think the speed of light is a firm invariant that we, nor can any other ETI, can circumvent. Warp drives and the like are science fiction. This is even with the Alcubierre warp drive that is a solution to the Einstein field equation. If you warp faster than light it is completely unstable. The closest ETI may be on the other side of the Virgo cluster some 50 million light years away.

So you are a proponent of the local abiogenesis theories for the origin of life? FTL is not necessary for colonization, only imperialism. The time dilation of relativistic speeds would make it a one way trip. There is unlikely to be postal  service so galactic empires are out of the question. But simple colonization and starting a new life elsewhere? That is possible even without FTL or warp drive.

 

That would be far too distant to communicate between and transport is virtually impossible. We are then FAPP alone. This is far more probable than invoking some practice or scheme that putative ETIs would engage in. We have no idea whether all possible ETIs would be utterly silent and noninterventionist, or there is a dark forest or some other agenda. Different ETs probably think and act in radically divergently different ways.

 

I see your point, Lawrence. 

Stuart LaForge

 

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[Stuart LaForge]

Come to think of it, an icosahedron would look like a hexagon.

Stuart LaForge

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 8:43 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Opposable thumbs or similarly dextrous appendages are also necessary. How many brilliant dolphin philosophers have died in obscurity for lack of the physical ability to write down their thought 

Dolphins can't write down their thoughts and they can't speak their thoughts either because they don't have a language, or if they do it's data transmission rate must be much much lower than English. I also think it would be much harder for a sea based animal to develop a technological civilization. We were able to look into the sky and discover Newtonian mechanics but a dolphin doesn't have that advantage. And a dolphin would say that  "an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force" was not just wrong it was utterly ridiculous, any fool can see that if you start pushing an object it will stop moving immediately. As for quantum mechanics, I don't think it was a coincidence that it was discovered at about the same time as our ability to produce high-quality vacuums was invented, and developing a vacuum in the sea would be much more difficult than in the air. Also, fire is important in technology but you can't have fire underwater.

> How do you explain the existence of a near perfect hexagon around Tabby's star but not around the other stars in the telescope's field of view?

Almost certainly because a great deal of magnification was used and, because of the construction of the James Webb telescope (more specifically because of the struts that hold its secondary mirror in place), it always produces 6 diffraction spikes around bright objects. And Tabby's star was by far the brightest object in that 5.9  hour long photographic exposure. By the way, you can always tell the difference between a Hubble telescope photograph and a Janes Webb photograph, due to differences in their construction Hubble produces  4 diffraction spikes but Webb makes 6.

For me the six sided hurricane surrounding Saturn's north pole is much stranger (see below), it's got me stumped, but I don't think ET is involved with that either. There is no disgrace in saying "I don't know" but proposing a theory that is almost certainly wrong ....  

John K Clark

[Will Steinberg]

I have a feeling that during the discovery of electricitt, or atoms, or quantum mechanics, John and Lawrence would have been the ones to say “That’s bullshit, nothing ever changes.”  Or heliocentrism, or the scientific method “That’s bullshit, it’s God.”  I think the “that’s bullshit” people are important.  It usually is bullshit.  But sometimes it’s not.  And without the “maybe it’s not bullshit” people, we would make ni advancements, ever.

You can think of the it’s bullshit people like the force of death, yin, natural selection, providing pressure for dumb ideas to die.  And the hopefuls are yang-like burgeoning infinite life, and the truth rises to the top like cream.

So I do appreciate the curmudgeonly nature of you two, in a way.  Just could never be me.  

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[Lawrence Crowell]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024, 9:38 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a feeling that during the discovery of electricitt, or atoms, or quantum mechanics, John and Lawrence would have been the ones to say “That’s bullshit, nothing ever changes.”  Or heliocentrism, or the scientific method “That’s bullshit, it’s God.”  I think the “that’s bullshit” people are important.  It usually is bullshit.  But sometimes it’s not.  And without the “maybe it’s not bullshit” people, we would make ni advancements, ever.

You can think of the it’s bullshit people like the force of death, yin, natural selection, providing pressure for dumb ideas to die.  And the hopefuls are yang-like burgeoning infinite life, and the truth rises to the top like cream.

So I do appreciate the curmudgeonly nature of you two, in a way.  Just could never be me. 

There are much more profound things to think about and work on than idle speculations over Dyson spheres.

LC

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 8:32 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 8:43 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Opposable thumbs or similarly dextrous appendages are also necessary. How many brilliant dolphin philosophers have died in obscurity for lack of the physical ability to write down their thought 

Dolphins can't write down their thoughts and they can't speak their thoughts either because they don't have a language, or if they do it's data transmission rate must be much much lower than English. I also think it would be much harder for a sea based animal to develop a technological civilization. We were able to look into the sky and discover Newtonian mechanics but a dolphin doesn't have that advantage. And a dolphin would say that  "an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force" was not just wrong it was utterly ridiculous, any fool can see that if you start pushing an object it will stop moving immediately. As for quantum mechanics, I don't think it was a coincidence that it was discovered at about the same time as our ability to produce high-quality vacuums was invented, and developing a vacuum in the sea would be much more difficult than in the air. Also, fire is important in technology but you can't have fire underwater.

> How do you explain the existence of a near perfect hexagon around Tabby's star but not around the other stars in the telescope's field of view?

Almost certainly because a great deal of magnification was used and, because of the construction of the James Webb telescope (more specifically because of the struts that hold its secondary mirror in place), it always produces 6 diffraction spikes around bright objects. And Tabby's star was by far the brightest object in that 5.9  hour long photographic exposure. By the way, you can always tell the difference between a Hubble telescope photograph and a Janes Webb photograph, due to differences in their construction Hubble produces  4 diffraction spikes but Webb makes 6.

For me the six sided hurricane surrounding Saturn's north pole is much stranger (see below), it's got me stumped, but I don't think ET is involved with that either. There is no disgrace in saying "I don't know" but proposing a theory that is almost certainly wrong ....  

John K Clark

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[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 10:38 AM Will Steinberg <steinbe...@gmail.com> wrote:

 > I do appreciate the curmudgeonly nature of you two, in a way.  Just could never be me.  

I don't know about being a curmudgeon, but I think it's worth remembering that the easiest person in the world to fool is yourself.  That's why we need the scientific method. 

John K Clark

... 

[Stuart LaForge]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 5:32 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 8:43 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> Opposable thumbs or similarly dextrous appendages are also necessary. How many brilliant dolphin philosophers have died in obscurity for lack of the physical ability to write down their thought 

Dolphins can't write down their thoughts and they can't speak their thoughts either because they don't have a language, or if they do it's data transmission rate must be much much lower than English.

Well, there is data suggesting that dolphins do have a language. For example they take turns vocalizing and don't interrupt one another. Also they intermix whistles with clicks indicating that there is overlap between their "speech" and their echolocation.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405722316301177

 If that is the case, then a dolphin's communication bandwidth could be much higher than spoken English. So it is possible that rather than saying, "There is a shark at our coral reef trying to poach our shoal of sardines!" it simply clicks and the other dolphins see the echo return of that whole scene. It is the sonar version of painting a picture worth a thousand words. Their sonar is capable of achieving a resolution of about 1 centimeter per 10 meters distance.

 

 

I also think it would be much harder for a sea based animal to develop a technological civilization. We were able to look into the sky and discover Newtonian mechanics but a dolphin doesn't have that advantage. And a dolphin would say that  "an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force" was not just wrong it was utterly ridiculous, any fool can see that if you start pushing an object it will stop moving immediately.

Actually I would have to say that this 600 lb dolphin and this 6 ton orca (really just a bigger species of dolphin) have at least a rudimentary understanding of Newtonian mechanics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxzXDvnKOg0                      (0:23s)

And this pack of orcas hunting a seal seem to display a keen grasp of Newton's first law, wave mechanics, hydrodynamics, and the ability to communicate it with one another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NURfU7u0G7o         (1:20s)

But for some reason, they never hunt the skinny pink seals on their plastic ice floes . . . those are forbidden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5YZRMDfqWg                     (1:01s

 

As for quantum mechanics, I don't think it was a coincidence that it was discovered at about the same time as our ability to produce high-quality vacuums was invented, and developing a vacuum in the sea would be much more difficult than in the air. Also, fire is important in technology but you can't have fire underwater.

John, here you are just proving my point that there can be intelligent and social animals that are unlikely to evolve a technological civilization despite using water and air as tools every day. And yeah, fire is hard for a dolphin.

 

> How do you explain the existence of a near perfect hexagon around Tabby's star but not around the other stars in the telescope's field of view?

Almost certainly because a great deal of magnification was used and, because of the construction of the James Webb telescope (more specifically because of the struts that hold its secondary mirror in place), it always produces 6 diffraction spikes around bright objects.

Where are the diffraction spikes? I was expecting to see them. All I see is a hexagon whose vertices are not even particularly sharp. Furthermore, why is there a dark ring between the star's disk and the hexagon?

Notice that in the following pictures, the diffraction spikes are clearly spikes. Not all stars have spikes, but all the stars have clearly visible spikes or nothing at all. None have dark bands and a hexagon.

The following picture clearly shows all 8 (not 6) diffraction spikes as well as overexposed photo sensors causing black pixels on the stars' disks. Notice they are toward the middle of the star where it is brightest and not in a circle around the periphery. And none of the stars, big or small show hexagons.

And Tabby's star was by far the brightest object in that 5.9  hour long photographic exposure. By the way, you can always tell the difference between a Hubble telescope photograph and a Janes Webb photograph, due to differences in their construction Hubble produces  4 diffraction spikes but Webb makes 6.

Did you even look at the metadata? That was not a 5.9 hour long exposure, that was a 133 second exposure. That total observation time of 5.9 hours was over a three month period using multiple wavelengths and sensors. They are sitting on gigabytes of data relevant to one of the most important existential questions in all of history, while I am having to search for their picture scraps one at a time. Data the MY tax dollars paid for! If it is just a big fat nothing  burger then why are they taking so much time?

 

For me the six sided hurricane surrounding Saturn's north pole is much stranger (see below), it's got me stumped, but I don't think ET is involved with that either. There is no disgrace in saying "I don't know" but proposing a theory that is almost certainly wrong ....  

What theory am I proposing? I am simply showing pictures and asking questions. Questions like why Tabby's star looks different from every other star in the JWST photo gallery? Why does it have a dark ring around it surrounded by a hexagon? Why are there no dust clouds visible? And why hasn't my tax-dollar funded space telescope and research grants produced a publication in a publish or perish academic environment after over a year? It is like ordering food in a restaurant and having to go to the kitchen to get it yourself!

Stuart LaForge

[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 11:28 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> John, here you are just proving my point that there can be intelligent and social animals that are unlikely to evolve a technological civilization despite using water and air as tools every day. And yeah, fire is hard for a dolphin.

Whenever I say that I think we are the only intelligent species in the observable universe I always make sure to add that I am operationally defining "intelligence" as the ability to make a radio telescope.

> Did you even look at the metadata? 

No I did not. 

> That was not a 5.9 hour long exposure, that was a 133 second exposure.

OK, I stand corrected. However I still say it is a photographic artifact caused by either the struts supporting the secondary mirror or the 18 smaller hexagonal mirrors that make up the primary mirror. But whatever you're looking at in that picture it certainly can't be a Dyson sphere, I say that for the following reason:

The angular size of a hypothetical Dyson sphere with a radius of 1 AU around Tabby's Star, which is 1470 light years from Earth, would be 0.0044 arcseconds.  However the James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared telescope that can detect very tiny amounts of heat, but it was never designed to have great resolving capacity, it can only resolve things about 0.1 arcseconds apart (by comparison the Hubble telescope can resolve things 0.05 apart). Thus a Dyson sphere would be much too small for the Webb Telescope, or even the Hubble Telescope, to resolve.

> why hasn't my tax-dollar funded space telescope and research grants produced a publication in a publish or perish academic environment after over a year?

In your previous post you said you understood the answer to that question, you said "I understand why they are reluctant to publish". So what is the answer? 

John K Clark

[John Clark]

On Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> why hasn't my tax-dollar funded space telescope and research grants produced a publication in a publish or perish academic environment after over a year?

>> In your previous post you said you understood the answer to that question, you said "I understand why they are reluctant to publish". So what is the answer? 

> Simple. The astronomers doing the study don't know what to write. 

They could have done what the astronomers who discovered that the universe was not slowing down but accelerating did (and received a Nobel Prize for doing so), they could've said we have found something strange but we don't know how to explain it. But they did not do that despite the fact that scientists love nothing better than reporting on something they found that is strange. Therefore I conclude that they did not believe they had found anything they thought was strange.  

> It is possible that the government has classified their research for national security,

Oh come on now!  

> but if that is the case, then why would the raw data still be available in their camera feed?

Good question.

John K Clark

[Keith Henson]

I agree that the hexagon in this photo is an artifact. We are looking
at this edge-on to the local ecliptic or we would not see the dips.
Also, simple math applied to the largest dip gives you an orbital
velocity corresponding to about 7.8 AU.

I don't think Dyson spheres at one AU make sense for computation, they
are too warm.

Keith

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[Stuart LaForge]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2024 at 5:20 AM John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 15, 2024 at 11:28 PM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> John, here you are just proving my point that there can be intelligent and social animals that are unlikely to evolve a technological civilization despite using water and air as tools every day. And yeah, fire is hard for a dolphin.

Whenever I say that I think we are the only intelligent species in the observable universe I always make sure to add that I am operationally defining "intelligence" as the ability to make a radio telescope.

> Did you even look at the metadata? 

No I did not. 

> That was not a 5.9 hour long exposure, that was a 133 second exposure.

OK, I stand corrected. However I still say it is a photographic artifact caused by either the struts supporting the secondary mirror or the 18 smaller hexagonal mirrors that make up the primary mirror. But whatever you're looking at in that picture it certainly can't be a Dyson sphere, I say that for the following reason:

The angular size of a hypothetical Dyson sphere with a radius of 1 AU around Tabby's Star, which is 1470 light years from Earth, would be 0.0044 arcseconds.  However the James Webb Space Telescope is an infrared telescope that can detect very tiny amounts of heat, but it was never designed to have great resolving capacity, it can only resolve things about 0.1 arcseconds apart (by comparison the Hubble telescope can resolve things 0.05 apart). Thus a Dyson sphere would be much too small for the Webb Telescope, or even the Hubble Telescope, to resolve

You had a good point so I did a bit more investigating, and now I have a better handle on what is going on. According to the JWST's user's guide it has different instruments with different resolutions. Their Near Infra-Red Camera or NIRCam is the highest resolution with a resolution of 0.031 arcsecs/pixel at the smallest wavelengths of IR that it can detect, which makes it better than the HST.

The instrument that took the picture of Tabby's star that I found in the feed, however, was taken by their Mid Infrared Instrument or MIRI. According to MIRI's user's manual, MIRI's resolution is only 0.11 arcsecs/pixel. Since as you say, at 1470 Ly, 1 AU would be 0.0044 arcseconds, each pixel in the following zoom in on Tabby's star is 25 AU. That means that the white disk that I mistook for Tabby's star is actually 350 AU in diameter which is roughly about the size of the sun's heliosphere. The orbit of Keith's data center at 7.8 AU radius would be about 2/3 of a single pixel in diameter.

This means that whatever that is a picture of, it is way bigger than Tabby's star itself and relatively hot, so it could be the dust cloud in question. The hexagon could be what the diffraction spikes look like at the larger wavelengths that MIRI detects since most of the publicized images of stars with the sharp spikes are from NIRCam at a much smaller wavelength. So what about the dark ring? Would that be some sort of quantum interference minimum? 

Stuart LaForge

 

[John Clark]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2024 at 12:28 AM Stuart LaForge <stuart....@gmail.com> wrote:

> So what about the dark ring? Would that be some sort of quantum interference minimum? 

I'm just guessing but it might be related to the Arago spot  phenomenon.  Or it might be an interference effect caused when an opaque disk (or a speck of dust?) is illuminated by a point source, such as the light from a distant star. See picture below, note the bright spot at the very center: 

John K Clark