Cool science stuff

Ehhhhh ... "Probably" is pushing it.

 

That is wild, but I'm going to wait a lot more vetting on that one.
We were all skeptical of em drive once, and that is beginning to appear more viable.
This one needs similar levels of scrutiny.

 

Seems a little unlikely an intelligent species would use pulses of visible (to us) light as signals since it makes a lot of assumptions/ expectations about the receiving species. Presumably if you're sending signals with the intention somebody is going to detect them, you'd make them as "universal" as possible.

 

Could be full spectrum light, I suppose. Seems pretty universal, but I guess that's hard to say.
There are a lot of what Rumsfield would call 'unknown unknown's' involved.

 

Consider the source. Newsmax.

 

Yeah, there is that.

In any case, if ANY species has developed a way to manipulate the emissions of the stars themselves to emit pulses of any kind of energy, be it visible light, radio/EM waves, whatever, their technology is eons beyond us.

So essentially us trying to figure out the communications of such a species would be pretty much like ants on the anthill in Africa trying to decrypt advanced Internet transmissions.

 

A few things:

1. Yes, the headline is hyperbole.

2. Newsmax is not the source of the story. The source is a paper by astronomers Ermanno F. Borra and Eric Trottier from Laval University in Quebec that apparently has been accepted for publication in a scientific journal (according to the astronomers' arxiv.org post). In fact, this story is all over the place, with some outlets more skeptical than others: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-stars-strange-aliens-contact.html, Strange signals from 234 stars could be ET – or human error.

3. The premise is not that these supposed aliens are manipulating the stars to emit pulses of light. Rather, it's that they are emitting laser-type pulses from their nearby planet. In fact, one of the paper's authors says the technology to send those signals already exists on earth now (it's in the New Scientist piece).

4. This is not a claim that is being dismissed on its face. There will be followup, notably by Breakthrough Listen, a SETI organization backed by, among others, Stephen Hawking. That said, there is obviously skepticism. Breakthrough Listen's statement includes the reminder, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and says, "It is too early to unequivocally attribute these purported signals to the activities of extraterrestrial civilizations."

 

Exactly, and skepticism is a necessary and appropriate part of the scientific process.

I hope it turns out to be true, but I'll be awaiting some more corroboration before I get to excited about it.

 

Saturn has become the Golden Dome!!

http://qklnk.co/ityfde

Preemptive quibble on the headline: while it is accurate that Saturn's north polar region has changed color, the story explains that we do pretty much know why.

 

Very cool, but weirdly alarmist hed and tone to the story.

 

Latest on the EmDrive. According to a peer-reviewed paper to be published in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics journal in December, NASA's Eagleworks lab has duplicated inventor Roger Shawyer's original experiment and determined, with all measurement errors and other factors accounted for, the EmDrive does indeed produce thrust. We know this because a copy of the paper has leaked and was posted on several websites. Most have taken it down, but Next Big Future still has a link to the paper and diagrams. There is apparently also a video, which I believe is embedded in this post from IBTimes (the video is the second one down, not the one at the top of the page):

EmDrive: Leaked Nasa paper reveals 'Star Trek' microwave thruster does work

There seems to be some concern among EmDrive enthusiasts that this version of the paper is not the one that will be published. But there have been a number of other indications that Eagleworks measured an actual thrust and that will be the conclusion of this paper.

 

The question now is, of course, can the EmDrive be scaled up to where it can economically move a payload in space?