Okay so I skimmed Ch.9 Section 4 of his paper. I'm not really qualified to say whether he knows what he is talking about, but it sounds valid. Furthermore: holy crap, it would be so incredible if he were right. On a different level: I'm really inspired by this article, because I didn't even know there were people out there who were thinking about problems like this. It really gives me hope for my own intellectual ventures as well as for the future of humanity.
Vidal and I had a chance to discuss his ideas in depth for a couple nights in Brussels. It was fascinating and I think he convinced me that this is something worth investigating. Really ingenious idea. I KNOW! The implications for our future are even more profound.I'm not really qualified to say whether he knows what he is talking about, but it sounds valid.
holy crap, it would be so incredible if he were right.
This makes me wonder. If there are intelligent species out there, then it's likely that their planets have ecological systems of life like our does. If there were enough intelligent species within proximity of one another, and there were many such clusters, it would be interesting to see if any patterns of interaction emerged.
Definitely - if we were able to empirically demonstrate that they were intelligent systems - would would also likely be able to decode the patterns of non-random information that should be emerging from their system. It could be that they are communicating with other systems and we just can't understand their messages. But we have to first determine conclusively that they are astrobiological in nature - and not astrophysical.If there were enough intelligent species within proximity of one another, and there were many such clusters, it would be interesting to see if any patterns of interaction emerged.
The comments are absolute gold 1) 2) 3) Oh Internet.The Allies of Humanity have been monitoring the Alien Presence in our World for over 20 years, They have had this happen in their worlds and wish to Warn Humanity, They can not interfere as this would once again put their worlds in jeopardy. They have given Humanity a set of Briefings To Warn, Prepare and Protect our Race, World and Solar system. The Briefings are free.. http://alliesofhumanity.org, there is so much more to the bigger picture of what is really going on. Worth Investigating.
I know that this seems crazy, but perhaps within the interior of every star is a hole in space through which we may transmit a modulated beam of energy that transmits to every other star in our universe in real time.. Perhaps these starivores are advanced hyper-space transceivers. We should be transmitting and receiving intelligent galactic messages to and from our Sun if this is true. Our Sun could be one big energy beam radio transceiver. All we need to do is separate the modulated energy beams from the natural energy pulses coming from our Sun.
Vidal sounds good to me, Civilizations that have advanced well passed a Type 1 civilization. He calls these hypothetical civilizations starivores. I believe in God and I believe that when we leave we will be assigned to a planet (place) to live and work according to our work or sins on earth.
Haha, it's a great platform - just hard to deal with the quality of comments. Makes me grateful for the hubski community.
The first one is my favorite. I love that kind of level of craziness on internet comments. He feels no need to back up his claims whatsoever, just expects people to either believe him and change their whole outlook on life, or to already know that since it is obvious and important.
My only complaint about his research is how awkward of a term "starivores" is. pg. 258
OH WOW. I see where he's going with this. I love systems theory.Only then it makes sense to migrate to the nearest –
preferably single– star, and to continue. The density of the evolved Earth is now
comparable to the one of a white dwarf –which indeed are Earth-sized– , and the new
binary we form resembles a cataclysmic variable.
It really is a unique combination of philosophy and systems theory. I know that as soon as I developed an understanding of systems theory, it seems to attract most of my intellectual attention. If you are studying anything smaller than a systems scale - it seems to just be noise and details. The system is what is important.
Interesting... If we are to observe intelligent life in our lifetime it seems as if this route is more likely than direct contact. That sad truth about the universe is that you can't go faster than the speed of light. So if you assume that intelligent life takes roughly about the same amount of time as our civilization to form and develop space ships it may be impossible to have reach us by now or impractical to. This works the other way around too. If we are looking at a binary star system that might have intelligent life we are really looking X years into the past where X is the number of light years they are away. Adding to the problem that it might take a long time for highly intelligent life to form and reach the kind of state suggested. It's an interesting question to pose, what telltale clues could you infer from a binary star system that would suggest there is life on it. I suppose when analyzing the metabolism of these binary star systems you would want to look for something that looked more like an engine and less like a firework to truly determine if there is life out there.
Hi, Thanks for your interesting comments. Colonizing the galaxy is actually not that impractical. Colonizing several or all galaxies is harder though. See this recent paper for the math: Armstrong, Stuart, and Anders Sandberg. 2013. “Eternity in Six Hours: Intergalactic Spreading of Intelligent Life and Sharpening the Fermi Paradox.” Acta Astronautica 89 (August): 1–13. doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2013.04.002. http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Arm... Indeed, that is the main challenge here. Interesting suggestion. For more info, you can have a look at this news item about black holes in binary systems: "How black holes change gear", http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120607142254.ht...
What do you think? Astrophysical or astrobiological phenomenon? I also wrote a short working paper summarizing a metabolic argument for the existence of starivores: Vidal, C. 2013. “Starivore Extraterrestrials? Interacting Binary Stars as Macroscopic Metabolic Systems.” Working Paper. http://student.vub.ac.be/~clvidal/writings/Vidal-Starivore-B.... Best,
Clément Vidal.It's an interesting question to pose, what telltale clues could you infer from a binary star system that would suggest there is life on it.
I suppose when analyzing the metabolism of these binary star systems you would want to look for something that looked more like an engine and less like a firework to truly determine if there is life out there.
The title is meant to mean that we are actually studying physical objects in great detail that are actually intelligent in their nature. If this is the case we are trying to apply astrophysical models to systems that are actually "super global brains" or "starivores" as Clem Vidal would call them. This would be quite different than a scenario where there are intelligent civilizations elsewhere in the universe but we had yet to identify their systems.