“It was kind of unbelievable that it was real data,” said Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. “We were scratching our heads. For any idea that came up there was always something that would argue against it.”
She was talking to the New Scientist about KIC 8462852, a distant star with a very unusual flickering habit. Something was making the star dim drastically every few years, and she wasn’t sure what…
To Wright, it looked like the kind of star he and his colleagues had been waiting for. If none of the ordinary reasons for the star’s flux quite seemed to fit, perhaps an extraordinary one was in order.
Aliens.
Or, to be more specific, something built by aliens — a “swarm of megastructures,” as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with solar panels to collect energy from the star.
Many argue against it, but you never know. Wherever the aliens are, I’ll bet at some point in their evolution there was a battle. On the one side were the K-strategists who would evolve the civilization and the species into a paragon of honor, morality, and greatness, and on the other side were the r-strategists who’d periodically devolve the civilization and the species back into a hedonistic orgy of idiots and imbeciles demanding tolerance for all of the defectives – all while calling their slide “progress.”
I can sympathize.
I saw a comment on this story to the effect that a truly civilized species wouldn’t clutter up its solar system with enormous light collectors; they’d limit their population, use less energy, and live in harmony with nature.
Uh, no, that’s what naked savages do. Civilized people think big.
Exactly
My humble opinion, FWIW, is that Earth holds the only intelligent life in the universe. Possibly the only life above maybe amoeba. Although looking at much of the humanoid race, “intelligent life” is relative.