Extra-Terrestrial Megastructures detected around a star?

I suppose things might end badly for us after a few thousand years, but remember, we see them now. They won't see us for at least another 1500 years. And even then, unless they can travel faster than light, they wouldn't be able to get to us for another 1500 years. And 3000 years from now, we might be Class II or Class III ourselves, especially if we started snooping on Class II "table scraps" transmissions and had a thousand years to study them.

If either we or they become Class III, that means contact between our civilizations, because in order to get to Class III level, a civilization will have had to develop a Dyson Sphere around every star in the galaxy.

I strongly suspect that the speed of light can not be broken, although relativistic effects could make the passage of time bearable for colonists who are heading on a one-way journey.

Another thing to consider is the probability that our universe is actually just a computer simulation. If we manage to figure this out definitively and then learn how to hack our own universe, that could give us an advantage over a civilization that does not realize this even if they are otherwise vastly more powerful than us.

The definition of super cool comes into play here. Many of the early contact aboriginal cultures thought the Spanish or French were super cool because they saw in them a military power to overawe or even to conquer their enemies. The first tribesmen who encountered Columbus lead him on to what we call the Greater Antilles because they considered the Spanish to be more than a match for the Caribs, who routinely exploited them as a source for food and female breeding stock. The first successful French attempt at establishing a colony was at Fort Caroline, located at what came to be known as Cape Canaveral in Florida. They passed on the offers of local aboriginal chiefs to be military allies, which was probably the balance of wisdom. When Champlain joined the Ottawa in an attack on a large raiding party from the Iroquois Confederation, he unwittingly made inveterate enemies who became obsessed with destroying the French, and attempted to do so for the next 150 years.

Cortés successfully exploited the animosities of the city states of central Mexico to provide him the armies he needed to defeat the Aztecs, whom the other states referred to as the "Mezicans" or Mexicans (from Mexica, the name the Aztecs' neighbors applied to them). Such an attempt by local tribal leaders lead to the death of Magellan, who had no business attempting military ventures.

Who is super cool, and the biter bit are things not to be predicted if the history of the contact of Europeans with aboriginal societies is any guide.

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Also, (c) works for us as well. Im assuming as they were a class II or III, their EM effluvia would have been in transit for maybe a few K years before we detected their own energy network.There are several levels of forensics that we employ to let us "eavesdrop" on emerging life. All depend on the limits of (c) and our own abilities to detect and decipher these tiny changes of a planets signal, (like emission of spectral signals that detect methane and some enzymes , or even components of nucleic acids.
I find that even bigger limitations are our own abilities to "detect" all this evidence and
"How long will it take us to focus on an entire span of the whole "sphere" of the surronding universe as it talks back to us??". As we scan further out, we seem to be scanning at ever and ever finer focus .Were actually learning more and more about less and less area. At this rate, itll take us a coupla thousand years to get a good idea of even whats out there
I recall that, when they "ganged up" the radio telescopes at Greenbank W Va into "interferometry machines", we then quickly began to increase our signal inputs by orders of magnitude because we began "hearing" changes in the sounds of the universe in a sort of audio "3-D". We are now only going back to some of those early interferometer "Hits" with more advanced scanners and tools mounted on deeper space telescopes and sensors.

We are making our own transition to becoming a classII. Once we reland on the moon and begin exploiting the Helium in store and using microwave to transmit energy , we will have made the early steps of our own growth.

I like your ideas of being allowed, by virtue of our own detector abilities, to peek in at the effluvia of some advanced civilization to garner up some scaps of advanced science. Thats how the Germans made a leap in liquid fuel rocket technology and got the very idea for multi stage rockets. They searched the trash of patent applications by a New England professor who was experimenting with liquid fuel rocket engines 20 years before Penemunde exploited the idea. Imagine what we could learn from spectra of some class II or III's microwave "packet' or chemical fingerprints as they exploit a solar system. They may be using an unknown type of signalling but Im sure the chemistry will remain the same and we are smart enough to decipher what a continuing spectrum of methane and dichlorethane versus one of pulses of alinine and guanine will mean.

As far as I know we're not even Class I.

A Class I civilization consumes the energy equivalent of all solar energy to strike the earth.

Only by Sagans equation , in which we are a level 0.85 by 2015. By Kardashev himself, we are clearly a Level I since he doesnt only consider our energy needs but from where we are capable of deriving it. We exceed the energy needs by several Terawatts.

If this does turn out to be aliens, I note a couple interesting things about their choice of location.

One is that they are apparently satisfied with being around a single star. Whatever it is that we've detected, we've not detected it around any other stars in that area.

This might be due to the limitations of the speed of light. If they colonized separate stars, the great distances between them would mean that each population would eventually evolve into separate species. By staying within a single star system, they can remain a single species.


Another interesting thing is what type of star they've built around. I've always assumed that when our sun dies in a couple billion years, humanity will go find a very small red star to build a Dyson structure around, the reason being that such a star would last a very long time before we had to then move to yet another home.

However this star is a bit larger and shorter-lived than our sun. Perhaps the increased energy output is worth the trouble of having to migrate to a new star every billion years.

I think were jumping to conclusions . The other hypotheses are even more evidence based.

One of the big differences with an extra terrestrial contact implied by a situation like this is that it would be a "read only" type of interaction. We would not be able to interact with that far away civilization for at least 1500 years and possibly forever. And that includes the trade of goods or anything physical. The only thing we would receive from such a discovery would be information.

I'm trying to think if there are any analogous situations in history and I can't think of any. The only thing that comes close is archeology, in which we learn about other cultures which are now gone and which have no way to affect us other than with our knowledge of them.

The impact of archeological knowledge on modern society is profound and ubiquitous (from language to science to religion), but because we absorbed it slowly over time and because we were a result of that history, the information we gained was never violent of shocking to our societies.

With an intergalactic contact like this would be (if the mega structures turned out to be real), we might find ourselves suddenly exposed to radical leaps in knowledge which could easily shake up our civilization. I believe this type of potential is completely unique in history and human experience. At least I can't think of anything in history which would be analogous.

I agree and I think this is an often overlooked potential from any discovery like this. Even though that far away civilization won't see us for at least 1500 years even if they are looking, and we won't be able to talk to them, we can still peep in on what they are doing.

Merely knowing that mega structures like that can be built is more information that we currently have. And as you say, we might also discern artificial changes in the chemistry of the star or data streams with qualities to them that we've never seen before.

The potential for advancement in knowledge is so great that I suspect private industry would begin diverting billions to studying any Class II structures were we ever to discover any.

Maybe it's not their star. Maybe they knew activities like this would be detectable from a long way away and decided to do it around a different star. Or maybe it's a signpost intended to draw attention without giving away the location of home base.

I was just responding to Oralloy's question. I agree completely, there is no historical example of the sudden intake of knowledge . . .

. . . unless you count the effect of the crusades, and especially of the reconquista in Spain. Europe was suddenly exposed to the knowledge of the ancients. One of our member here, a graduate student in history and a university level instructor pointed out that many of those books were in European monastic libraries already. I pointed out to him that those books went un-regarded and unread. There was much new knowledge, too. There were papers written, for example, in Arabic, about gun powder. One of them written in the 11th century, listed 30 different recipes, and their uses. Cannon were not used in Europe, however, until the late 13th century. It was not until the late 15th century that cannon played a decisive role in a battle (Castillon, in 1453). Whether the reintroduction of the ancients, or new material, it took time to absorb and use the "new" knowledge.

So, as you have intimated already, we might get a lot of information which we are not able to immediately apply.

Say we can detect a whole suite of compoinds associated with these structures (IM playing along that we suddenly discern that they are alien tech). Our present state of knowledge would let us know who is making a nuclear device by the "sewage " seen from labs. Id say that we are clever enough beings to be able to see a huge fingerprint of Helium and lithium as a sign that they are heavily into fusion power and we could "Back engineer" what methods they use just from the signatures of the waste streams in space.

Now, if theyve discovered some sort of way to reclaim 99.99% of all their stuff, I say wed still be seeing the same stuff but would see a gradient where the older fusion energy nodes would have emitted dtuff and that we would see this decline in the spectra as we scamnned closer to the source.
Like fingerprints, nothing is really lost, it just floats around in space.

Like you sqid, noone would suddenly make a huge leap without any steps up to that level. That probably works for the aliens too.

Understood. And I didn't mean it as a direct response to your post, so much as an interesting line of thought that your post put me on. Also I was curious as to your viewpoint as a history buff. Up until now I hadn't given much thought to "read only" cultural interactions throughout history. Obviously an extra-terrestrial contact would be unique in many ways, but it's also unique in that we wouldn't be able to interact with this culture, or probably any others which we might stumble across in this fashion.

Radio astronomy at this point in our civilization is purely an exploration of the natural universe. But if we ever did discover transmissions from other intelligent civilizations I bet that a bulk of radio astronomy activity would turn toward data analysis in an attempt to mine valuable physics knowledge from the data stream(s).

I submit that, unless we would keep up some governmental control of the data, that we would sic all sorts of technologies and arts to study and analyze these stray signals. Itd be like the Dead Sea Scrolls and Rosetta Stone where maybe wed only get a few scraps of unconnected transmissions for several millenia . That wouldnt stop us from devoting research programs to the signals.

I think It would be quite exciting. At least folks like us would be able to catch a brief glimpse of a future contact before we leave the planet.

I agree, it would be extremely exciting. Unfortunately I think that January is going to roll around and SETI is going to focus their eye on that star and shortly thereafter announce that they've discovered a rare new pattern of orbital debris.

Sagan's views makes more sense. Kardashev judged Class II and III by looking at the maximum energy level a civilization could produce with that amount of resources. For Class I, he just pronounced us a Class I civilization.

Sagan considered Class I the way Kardashev considered Class II and III, by looking at the maximum energy level a civilization could produce with those resources.

If they aren't harvesting most of that star's energy to run their society, then they aren't a Class II civilization and they are just blocking all that light for no reason.

Unless they are beaming all the energy through space to a hidden base. But it seems like such a powerful beam of energy would expose the secret location.

microwave transmission to make a WARP DRIVE possible

I like the idea of read only cultural interactions. Grenada fell to Queen Isabella on January 2, 1492. There had been a university there which took students from all over Europe and North Africa--christians, jews and muslims. That sh*t ceased right away. Isabella then required all Moors (i.e., muslins) and Jews to convert to christianity or get out of Spain. Read only indeed . . .