Peering upward and outward - alien megastructures? Fusion rockets and more.

Discovery.com reports on the recent attempt by the SETI Institute’s Allen Array to examine KIC 8462852, the star with an anomalous set of transit brightness dips that may be due to swarms of comets… or else conceivably a convoy of orbiting alien mega structures. 

I wouldn’t put any money on the latter, unless given great odds. Moreover, preliminary negative results obtained by a couple of Allen Array SETI scans set (rather high) upper limits to the radio activity of such a civilization cluster. Later scans are planned. Still, the ensuing public interest and conversations have been vivid and interesting.

It’s worth noting that we’re talking about a very large, co-orbiting swarm of purported alien structures that presumably collect and utilize sunlight (hence blocking our view of the star, part of the time). This would be be a substantial step — by perhaps a few percentages — toward a Kardashev Type II civilization, utilizing large fractions of the star’s emitted energy.  At one extreme this would become a “Dyson Swarm or Sphere.” 

The way you look for such an advanced system is by finding one with a huge excess in the infra-red, radiating waste heat into space. No such profound infrared excess is observed at KIC 8462852 — another crack in the alien civilization hypothesis. 

Only hold on a second. One fellow I know -- long time space power systems promotor Keith Henson -- has pointed out that such co-orbiting mega structures would orient their cooling systems the way we do, on the International Space Station, so that the radiator panels line their edges toward the sun, and their big, flat faces either north or southward, orthogonal, or at ninety degrees away from the hot star. 

Envision the situation.  We are observing these objects (whether comets, planets or cities) transiting — passing between us and the star — precisely because we are lined up with their orbital planes.  So any heat dissipation radiators would likewise be edge-on to us, as well!  And hence we would be unlikely to see much infra-red excess, even if these are prodigious, Kardashev-type structures. 

Hence, the lack of an infra-red excess may not be meaningful after all.  The jury is still out.  So stay tuned. Keep watching and listening to the skies! And meanwhile, let’s stay quiet ourselves.

Oh... and no these are not Kardashian structures.  Remember the topic is intelligent life.

== Interesting! ==

Among the cool projects seed funded by NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group is Helion Energy - they received a $3.8M DoE grant for fusion energy production and are an outgrowth directly from a NIAC grant! The Fusion Driven rocket (FDR) represents a revolutionary approach to fusion propulsion where the power source releases its energy directly into the propellant, not requiring conversion to electricity. 

I am proud to serve on NIAC's board of external councilors. We just gathered at NIAC's symposium -- under the Seattle Space Needle -- and I'll have more to say about that in-future.  Meanwhile...

Do you have the right stuff? NASA is accepting applications for future space missions. 

See the latest roundup on the Billionaires' Bet on new approaches to manned spaceflight, from SpaceX to Blue Origins to Virgin Galactic and so on.

One of the best TED talks ever. My colleague Michelle Thaller takes you on a tour of galactic gravitational lensing and Dark Matter and just about everything else. Hugely enlightening!  

== Exploring the Solar System ==

New results from NASA's MAVEN mission indicate that massive solar storms and shocks obliterated the early atmosphere of Mars.

NASA is eyeing potential landing sites on Mars for a future manned mission.

All right, the headline in the Daily Mail is (typically) lurid: “Could bombing Mars make it habitable? Nuclear warheads would heat the red planet to make it more Earth-like, claims Elon Musk.” 

Hmmm. I dig the heck out of my friend Elon, but in this case my physicist instincts call the proposal iffy.  I know a better way.  Develop techniques to use tiny nudges to send comets plummeting into the polar ice and permafrost.  That pasting would be orders of magnitude cheaper to produce and orders of magnitude more powerful in outcome, and without radioactive fallout.   Heck we almost had an example, had comet Siding Springs passed just a wee bit closer to Mars, last year.  See this comparison detailed here. 

To be clear, I’d not want this done till we had a major civilization working in space, in order to detect and easily stop anyone from using the same method… to settle grudges on Earth.

Micro-satellite capture: A new, NASA-funded device will draw as well as repel satellites at the same time, meaning it will hold a satellite at a distance and won’t allow it to move away or toward the capture device. This will enable the capability to capture and possibly manipulate micro-satellites or other objects without making physical contact with them.  Based on Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA) technology, a more efficient way to transmit electromagnetic energy. Strategic applications of MFA technology and the use of its hover engines include structural isolation, recreation and entertainment, industrial automation, and transportation.  

The Comet Hitchhiker concept: NASA is developing plans to hitch rides on passing comets, using tethers and harpoons. This started as a project we funded at NIAC!

A wonderfully innovative lander explorer for small bodies in the solar system… the “hedgehog” uses flywheel momentum to spin and flip itself over any obstacle. We got to play with this and it is so cool. Go NIAC.  Go us! 

Oh my. Pluto is so gorgeously strange. Cryovolcanism: NASA's New Horizons finds evidence for ice volcanoes on the dwarf planet. See the latest images from New Horizons. WE DID THIS. YOU HELPED PAY FOR IT. A couple of bucks. Worth it. 

Rosetta probe reveals Comet 67's complex water cycle: "The data suggest that water ice on and a few centimeters below the surface ‘sublimates’ when illuminated by sunlight, turning it into gas that then flows away from the comet. Then, as the comet rotates and the same region falls into darkness, the surface rapidly cools again. However, the underlying layers remain warm owing to the sunlight they received in the previous hours, and, as a result, subsurface water ice keeps sublimating and finding its way to the surface through the comet’s porous interior. But as soon as this ‘underground’ water vapor reaches the cold surface, it freezes again, blanketing that patch of comet surface with a thin layer of fresh ice. Eventually, as the Sun rises again over this part of the surface on the next comet day, the molecules in the newly formed ice layer are the first to sublimate and flow away from the comet, restarting the cycle."

To Scale: The Solar System   On a dry lakebed in Nevada, a group of friends build the first scale model of the solar system with complete planetary orbits: a true illustration of our place in the universe. 

== And the cosmos ==

Giant ring-like structure spans the cosmos: A survey of gamma Ray Bursts (GRB) – among the most energetic events known – has revealed an unexpected pattern in the sky which suggests some kind of bubble structure up to 5 billion light years across.  Not mentioned in the article – rings of such scale could indicate causal contact with “other universes.” 

Mapping the universe: The Department of Energy has approved the start of construction for a 3.2-gigapixel digital camera – the world’s largest – at the heart of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). 

What happens when black holes smash together? A pair of co-rotating quasar black holes 3.6 billion light years away may be only a few light weeks apart, spiraling toward imminent collision that will send gravitational waves pounding across space.  "The pair of black holes was initially discovered last winter, by a team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, through the flickering lights called quasars that black holes produce as they burn through the gas and and dust around them. Typically, quasars illuminate sporadically. When two black holes are about to collide, however, the quasars brighten at regular intervals. These particular quasars, PG 1302-102, were found to brighten by 14 percent every five years."

Alien oceans could be detected by looking for surface glint.

== Life in the cosmos? ==

At a conference of the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) in Leeds, a straw poll of the group's 20 members were split down the middle over the issue of beaming yoohoo messages into the cosmos. "We did a show of hands and we were perfectly evenly split," said Dr Anders Sandberg, speaking to journalists at the British Science Festival in Bradford. I'm very explicitly in favour," Dr. Jill Stuart, who studies space law and policy at the London School of Economics.

Yes, but I have a standing offer of a wager.  That such conclaves will always shift toward less willingness to transmit, after they are exposed to detailed facts in a debate between "message" zealots and those calling for caution.  It happens every single time.  Which is why the zealots so strenuously avoid such debates.

Remember (above) talking about Kardashev type 2 (or lower) civilizations. Well we've been looking also for something a wee bit bigger.

Co

No Signs of Galactic Super-Civilizations: Have astronomers eliminated the possibility of Kardashev Type 3 civilizations in the universe? A group at Penn State, Jason Wright and colleagues Matthew Povich and my longtime compatriot Steinn Sigurðsson have been conducting the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies (G-HAT) project, which scans data in the infrared from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission and the Spitzer Space Telescope. In their sampling: “…out of the 100,000 galaxies that WISE could see in sufficient detail, none of them is widely populated by an alien civilization using most of the starlight in its galaxy for its own purposes,” reports Paul Gilster.

Another group -- M. Garrett of Leiden University and his team -- have searched through the G-Hat data for galaxies emitting the kind of infrared excess that might come from billions of stellar systems surrounded by Dyson spheres or swarms, sucking in nearly all of the high energy photons and re-emitting waste heat. No blatant “type 3 signatures” were found.

Fascinating news.  Though my gut-check guesstimate is that they've only eliminated type 3 down to maybe 2.7… (on a Richter-like logarithmic scale)… where a majority of stars are left alone and less than a third are surrounded and dyson-sorbed...which is pretty much the situation I described in Heaven's Reach. 

In fact, a full Type 3 seems silly, because it leaves no room for creation of new generations of sapient life at nursery worlds.  Such monomania would be seen as threatening by other type 2.5 civilizations. who might step in, deeming the type 3s to be insatiable perverts.

Finally, the Ig Nobel prizes for this year: studies that make you go "Huh?"