Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown

Obviously a rotating source.

Typical Romulan pattern.

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Obviously a rotating source.

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That is indeed, an astute observation.

Ra-Sun
Dio-Ronnie James


mystery solved

Thanks my friend. Thats a good read !

(With so many scenarios on the table, I couldn’t resist asking astronomers about the option at the very edge of possibility, unlikely but also impossible to rule out: aliens. I admit that, despite knowing better, when I learned that astronomers had detected a distinct pattern emanating from outside the solar system, my mind jumped to Contact, the ’90s classic starring Jodie Foster as Ellie Arroway, a scientist obsessed with extraterrestrial life. When Li told her colleagues about the signals she saw, did they sprint from console to console in an operating room like Arroway did, scrambling to turn up the signal louder, clearer?

No, because the story with FRBs—the story with most mystifying astrophysical phenomena—is that it’s never aliens. Although, people more qualified than I am are also considering that, okay, maybe, these might, on the off chance, be alien signals: Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist known for entertaining ET explanations, this week drew a connection between Li’s FRB and a planet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun. The planet takes 16 days to orbit its star, the same period observed in the FRB’s behavior, and Loeb suggested that perhaps the radio waves come from that planet, whose inhabitants have figured out how to harness and beam starlight, when their world turns our way.

But although the newly found FRB is indeed weird, it’s probably not a beacon from an advanced civilization. “This shares a lot of properties with other sorts of FRBs, which are not regular at all, so we don’t have any reason to believe that this one in particular is special,” Vikram Ravi, an astronomy professor who wasn’t involved in the research but who has discovered several FRBs, told me. )

If evolution is the same everywhere, and there’s no reason to think it isn’t, then intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe became the apex life form the same way we did: Eat or be eaten.

We should expect that any aliens who come to earth will likely be more interested in eating us than educating us. After all, that they will have gotten here indicates that they are far more technologically advanced and won’t need anything we have other than our flavor.

We have humans, an intelligent species, that eats other mammals and considers their babies to be delicacies, such as veal and even slink veal which is unborn calves. There’s every reason to think that an advanced species might consider us to be their favorite dish and the occasional human infant and/or fetus might be prepared for special events.

Yes, deliberate messages have been sent into space. The first one was sent in 1974. It’s now almost 46 light-years out from earth.

Other nations, such as China and Russia, may be actively sending messages as well. China now has the biggest radio telescope in the world. It went online in 2018 and can send signals as well as receive.

Of course, we’ve been sending unintentional signals for over 100 years. Aliens may be able to detect them but they’re too weak to decipher. Even at Alpha Centauri they become too weak.

The Arecibo message may be detectable at 100 light years, however. Humans now have the ability to send decipherable messages out to about 400 light years.