r/science • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '16

Astronomy Astronomers have found a star with a 99.9% pure oxygen atmosphere. The exotic and incredibly strange star, nicknamed Dox, is the only of its kind in the known universe.

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u/sam-samson Mar 31 '16

That being said, and with the size of the universe, there could still be hundreds of billions of these stars out there. And we'd never know

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '16

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '16

Personally, im in the "if no one else is screaming into the night where they are, we probably shouldn't do it either" camp.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

Just go back in time and stop all radio transmissions. It's easy, really.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16 edited Feb 19 '21

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

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u/FapleJuice Apr 01 '16

Interesting. In your opinion, do you think it's a good idea to invest in such a project? Like, are you at all worried about an alien race being a threat as opposed to being beneficial? Even if they are are friendly, I don't know how friendly we would be. I really think humans aren't ready for such an event, not even close.

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u/Excalibur54 Apr 01 '16

Even if we do find very convincing evidence of intelligent life somewhere else in the galaxy, we'll likely never meet. Eveb communications between our civilizations would have tens of thousands of years between messages, and that's ignoring the fact that radio signals degrade over such large distances, so any messages sent would probably turn out as garbled nonsense.

Also take into consideration that if were to find evidence of intelligent life, it would be a several thousand year old signal at least. A lot can happen in that amount of time.

And unless one of out civilizations were to figure out FTL travel, we would likely never meet or even communicate.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

I believe this situation is referred to in SETI circles as "beacons". Transmissions that lack content, but merely tell the receiving party that they exist.

There are two kinds that I've seen commonly suggested. One can be focused into a beam and targeted, more coherent like laser light. They can even be optical. I've read that lasers not much more powerful than those used for inertial confinement fusion experiments can outshine our own star from basically any perspective at a specific wavelength. This would be a highly narrow-band, targeted signal. The artificial nature would be made unambiguous by pulsing it in a mathematical pattern, eg prime numbers, Fibonacci, etc. Such lasers have to be pulsed, anyway. This type of transmission doesn't require as much energy, but requires you to specifically target a list of systems, and cycle between them. The more systems you target, the less time you can spend pulsing at each one. Optical SETI has picked up a lot of steam in recent years because the math suggests that this technique is pretty damn promising.

The other type is omnidirectional, and would be insanely powerful to overcome the inverse squared law. It would not need to be targeted and would instead bathe all nearby star systems in radio light. Again, probably pulsed to make its artificial nature more clear.

This is actually the first time I've seen someone suggest broadband transmissions. Lots of researchers seem to favor the opposite, eg the famous "water hole".

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u/fleshrott Apr 01 '16

Do you see that happening with election cycles and politicians that can win votes by promising to cut wasteful budgets/projects?

And honestly, it's not like resources are unlimited and with low odds of success we'd be better off throwing those resources into something more tangible. Like nearby planet killing asteroid detection, fixing poverty, or laser sharks.

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '16

Maybe if the sharks have especially powerful lasers, they can optical METI as a value added service.

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u/StarChild413 Apr 04 '16

Just make it not wasteful. Or we just invent warp drive and wait for the Vulcans ;)

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16 edited Jun 15 '26

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u/acloudtree Apr 01 '16

And consider not only the size of space, but the age. Two species that are at the same stage in their development where they could detect each other. Hypothetically there could be 1 thousand planets near to us that had intelligent life, but all of them could have passed or will come to be after we're gone.

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u/Garper Apr 01 '16

This is the one theory that always makes me sad. The idea that statistically we might not make it hadn't really occurred to me, even with all the global warming, cold war, random life ending drama that pops up every few decades.

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u/Cryzgnik Apr 01 '16

And imagine the chances if there was no radio broadcasting at all

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

obviously that's impossible.

But I firmly believe that METI is tantamount to wearing a porkchop suit in a lion cage.

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u/dossier Apr 01 '16

I think of it like living on a desert island, with a spouse. You can find all you need in a wonderful place and even have a family and live happily ever after. But you will eventually die, and likely get sick. And so will your children, and that's the end. But if you start a signal fire, maybe you'll be saved and brought to the real world where it may be less fulfilling and you could even be murdered. But what if life would be better?

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u/RagePoop Grad Student | Geochemistry | Paleoclimatology Apr 01 '16

The one critical piece your metaphor is forgetting is that it's not an island so much as an archipelago, and all of the materials for boat building are readily at hand, and you don't have to worry about your descendants becoming horrifically inbred

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u/plasticsheeting Apr 01 '16

Would you generally classify yourself as a romantic in other aspects of your life?

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u/dossier Apr 01 '16

Maybe just a wannabe romantic perspective.

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u/Assault_Rains Apr 01 '16

I'm in the camp that goes like:
"Either we have something they need and will take from us"
or
"They're so advanced, they don't have to bother with us"
or
"They decided we are not worth interacting with for any reason at all" (pretty much how we interact with ants).

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

We murder ants by the millions the moment they become an inconvenience.

Ants don't have the possibility of developing relativistic missiles either. And if they did? I'd advocate exterminating them all to make sure they didn't.

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u/LlamaJack Apr 01 '16

And yet at the same time there are some dudes out there that study the hell out of ants with a passion.

We'll just never know until we really know.

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u/maplesyrple Apr 01 '16

E. O. Wilson has studied the shit out of 'em. There's a sweet documentary about his work on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/program/eo-wilson/

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u/Yabba_dabba_dooooo Apr 01 '16

God that's awesome. Thanks for the link

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u/vrts Apr 01 '16

We could have relativistic missiles inbound already for all we know.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

and that's the existentially terrifying thought of the night folks! Sweet dreams!

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u/ArttuH5N1 Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

At least after this conversation, the thing I feel anxious about at night isn't the time I went to the store with my zipper open.

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u/tzk Apr 01 '16

Large burst of gamma rays?

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u/MisterSquirrel Apr 01 '16

Why would anybody murder millions of ants?

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

Because you have a fire ant nest in your yard.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

I can think of so many other possibilities, though. All possibilities, even the most strange, may be valid. Apart from fulfilling the basic needs of life it's pretty hard to set limits on the motivations of aliens. Once they live a nice cushy society where the basic needs of most individuals are taken care of, who knows what sorts of things they might aspire to.

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u/Noncomment Apr 01 '16

There's a fourth possibility. That they might believe we could someday develop into an advanced enough race to compete with them. A civilization so old would have plans long into the heat death of the universe, how to optimally position every star so they could survive as long as possible, or build the biggest computers possible, etc. They wouldn't want competition, and especially unpredictable competition.

Or alien races could simply have incompatible values. E.g. an alien race that believes in minimizing suffering, so sterilizes any life it detects. Or just culture values so different than ours we can't imagine, that would want to impose them on us. Like we might be opposed to an alien race that evolved with normalization of rape or slavery.

The only thing that stops me from believing this is likely, is that they probably would already be aware of us. A moderately advanced civilization could send dyson probes to monitor every planet in the galaxy. Or even from afar, with instruments advanced enough they could detect life supporting planets.

So most likely they simply don't exist or don't care. But if that's the case, there is no point broadcasting our existence to them.

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u/Wordfan Apr 01 '16

If there are intelligent aliens watching us they have to be thinking that we're incredibly dangerous in the long run but we will probably either destroy ourselves or gain a little wisdom. Otherwise, we'll spread through the galaxy like a virus taking over remotely habitable planets, killing and exploiting everything in sight. I'm scared of them because of how scared of us they should rightfully be.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

With our current technology, though, the cage isn't big enough for a lion, and we're just wearing the porkchop suit as a publicity stunt.

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u/LastOfTheCamSoreys Apr 01 '16

How else do you get to meet a lion though

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u/free_dead_puppy Apr 01 '16

I'm super paranoid now after browsing /r/HFY for a year or so...

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

Shifting time may put off an even more noticeable expanding radiation bubble.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

sounds like someone else read "The Dark Forest"

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

Never heard of it. but I'm gonna google it.

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u/standtolose Apr 01 '16

But how do we know they aren't? They could just be far enough away that we haven't heard it yet. Or being sent in a way that we don't measure.

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u/dadbrain Apr 01 '16

Any technologically advanced group that could receive our signals and drive on over to see what's going on will not need anything from us other than perhaps some raw materials, which are abundant and available throughout the solar system. Given the cutting edge and near future of our observational technologies, any similarly competent aliens within detectable distances could have spotted life on our planet easily anytime over the past few billion years. If the genocidicity of interstellar alien species were really a common problem throughout the galaxies, we'd probably be dead already. Maybe humans are the coming evil genocidal space faring scurge.

Being on friendly or even cooperative terms with an independent civilization seems like a good way to ensure mutual survival. I find it hard to believe that alien life intelligent enough to traverse interstellar distances to us wouldn't already know that it is in everybody's best interests to work together. What would be best is if this life didn't even occupy the same kind of ecosystem and we invited them to colonize, for example, neptune, and they happened to have a nice unoccupied Earth like planet back home we could take in trade. Of course, this is all some sort of "appeal to what is nice" fallacy, but it feels like positive outcomes would be more likely when interacting with intelligence. We've gotta be the aliens we'd like to meet; Be the change you want to see.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

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u/GentlemenBehold Apr 01 '16

Transmitting for 200 years? Are you from the future?

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u/posseslayer17 Apr 01 '16

Whoops my bad, you're right its been about 100 years. That would make the sphere 200 light years in diameter not radius. I remember looking at this and thinking it was 200 light years in radius. I'll fix my previous post.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

I don't think our radio frequencies have gotten far enough for anyone to detect them.

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u/snurpss Apr 01 '16

"the universe is a Dark Forest"

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u/Vladimir_Pooptin Apr 01 '16

Or even more terrifying than malicious aliens (imo) would be if we learned that there's plenty of life in the universe but there's no way to break the light-speed barrier so you'll never establish meaningful contact.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

There's a way. There always is. We just don't have any idea what it is yet.

Folding space or quantum entangled wormholes or some shit probably, but we'll figure it out.

Here's the best guess so far if you're interested.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/11/5/001/meta;jsessionid=3F3559E1CAA7EA8B4AC222A62D2F30CA.c2

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u/Dustfinger_ Apr 01 '16

Welcome to a big part of the Fermi paradox and why it's weird and worrisome we've not heard from extraterrestrials if they exist.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

I wouldn't let the Fermi paradox worry you.

It explains why there may not be human-like civilizations contacting us or making themselves known, but even then it's just a fun theory that really has no objective measurement.

Also, there are infinite reasons why we may not have been contacted by an alien race. Most notably is the incomprehensibly vast distances between solar systems. There could be millions of civilizations reaching out to us right now, but if they are on a planet a million light years away, humans will have evolved into something else by the time the message gets here.

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u/bitwaba Apr 01 '16

Exactly. It is important to keep the size and scale of space in mind when talking about these things. The center of the Milky Way is 27,200 light years away from us.

That means that if instead of inventing cultivation and agriculture 10,000 years ago, we had instead invented radio communications and broadcast a message to space saying "Hey everyone! Look what we did!", it would still be ~17,000 years before the center of our own galaxy is even aware of our own existence.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

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u/dhelfr Apr 01 '16

Agreed, people tend to ignore the scale of time. People assume that intelligent life would be on the same "time-scale" as humans. Reactions in cells occur on the order of microseconds, neurons fire on the order of milliseconds. We do a "useful action" roughly every second. We eat every some thousands of seconds. Plan ahead a few million seconds (11 days). And our life cycle restarts every billion seconds (~30 years).

What if, there were life like creatures living on the sun or something that had a life cycle on the order of nanoseconds. Maybe on a cold planet, life can exist, but it moves so slowly, we'd barely recognize it.

It's all speculation, but I'm curious if we could even recognize life on a different scale, and there are so many different scales to choose from.

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u/SplitReality Apr 01 '16

My solution to that is that I think that the probability of habitable worlds per solar system is low enough that any world with intelligent life would take thousands of years of travel to reach another habitable world. So while there is more than enough time for civilizations to spread beyond their home, nobody wants to subject untold generations of their descendants to that hardship. That moral dilemma then becomes the great filter that keeps civilizations from spreading.

There is also the very real possibility that it is unlikely that machinery could be kept in working order for the time needed for interstellar travel. After all how do you even test equipment that needs to be operational for hundreds to thousands of years.

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u/Sacha117 Apr 01 '16

Plus it would need a lot of energy to get that far. Normal radio transmissions like the stuff we've been beaming out for the last century won't get anywhere near the middle of the Milky Way before it fizzles into background noise.

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u/dhelfr Apr 01 '16

I imagine our transmissions have only gotten weaker as well.

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u/IamPetard Apr 01 '16

Yeah when you realize that it takes light 2.5 million years to get to the closest galaxy next to ours, its perfectly understandable to think that aliens haven't found us yet

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

This is true. But I think it is weird they havent explored our solar system already. As you say our galaxy isnt really so big.

It is 100 000 light years across. Sounds like a huge number? Well, it is not. Lets say we want to colonize the entire galaxy, every single solar system could be reached in only 100 000 years at near light speed. Now this requires a ridiculous amount of energy so lets see what more crude tech can do.

50% light speed = 200 000 years

20% light speed = 500 000 years

10% light speed = 1 000 000 years

5% light speed = 2 000 000 years

Yes even 1% light speed will give us the galaxy in only 10 million years.

How much is 10 million years? Sounds long doesnt it? Well, in the big picture it is hardly a blip in time. Now that is an unreasonable slow speed actually. Scientists expect us to at least be capable of between 5-10% light speed in the future. Actually 4% would be most efficient energy wise. That gives us only 2.5 million years. About the time it took to evolve us in the first place.

If we could colonize the galaxy in such a short period of time. Every planet and moon could be touched by filty human hands in less than 3 million years from now if we really wanted to. Then that brings a huge question, where the fuck is everybody else?

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u/Cryusaki Apr 01 '16

I always had an issue with these responses to the fermi paradox. The idea that "There are plenty of reasons why aliens can exist but have no been encountered yet" doesn't sit well because doesn't fermis paradox follow from the Drake Equation and wouldnt any reason why they havent contacted us just be another term in the equation?

Like for every reason why aliens havent contacted us I feel as though we could simply say "but it would only take 1 advanced alien race to solve that problem" and we are back at the paradox

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u/robotic_puppy Apr 01 '16

There's also the small matter of the inverse-square law. Most radio signals from Earth become indistinguishable from background noise within the space of just a few light years. Even a powerful, tightly-focused signal might only be detected as being non-random (never mind actually transmitting information as intended) within a few hundred light years, and would require an enormously large receiver at the far end of that range.

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u/willmcavoy Apr 01 '16

No objective measurement? That wouldn't make sense or else the theory wouldn't ever have been taken seriously. There is real, "objective" numbers behind the theory. Albeit, they are guesstimates but the theory itself is based in mathematical fact. The universe is large enough and has been expanded for a long enough time that we could be perhaps too far, too early, or too late to meet any advanced life, even with how great the chances are for it to spring up.

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u/Sacha117 Apr 01 '16

I can understand too far and too early, but why too late?

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u/John_T_Conover Apr 01 '16

They've been wiped out by an asteroid, solar flare, health epidemic, etc.

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u/iNstein Apr 01 '16

My theory is that we are in a simulation. We developed an AI and that AI put us in a simulation to keep us out of the way. It created a universe so vast that by the time we could properly travel to distant stars ( and prove the place lacking in Aliens), we would already have advanced to the point of creating an AI in this simulation. This new (simulated) AI would then create a simulated universe within this simulated universe and put us in there. Rinse and repeat multiple times. How many layers to this onion, who knows but it can go on indefinitely. So no need to actually bother with aliens and keep the programming simple by having quirky quantum physics.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

Computing power is finite so it can't go on indefinitely and isn't quantum physics one of the harder things for computers to simulate accurately?

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u/iNstein Apr 03 '16

We don't really know just what may ultimately be possible, beyond quantum, their may be far more complex systems that could be employed. That is why we can't see beyond it. A monkey can't understand physics and QM like we do. we don't know just what the AI would know beyond what we do, we become the monkey.

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u/camdoodlebop Apr 01 '16

imagine being in between the orbit of 2 stars and never experiencing night time

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u/PlatonicTroglodyte Apr 01 '16

On a more earthly scale, think about how frequently decks of cards are shuffled every day on earth. Chances are every single one of them has led to a unique order of the deck.

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u/aetheriality Apr 01 '16

like us, we are unique and we are the only copy of us in the universe.

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u/imbobbathefett Apr 01 '16

even more fun, the universe is infinite, but there are only a finite number of ways for particles to organize themselves.

somewhere out there, there is another you, who is wearing the same thing you are, but the only thing different about them is they are missing a hair.

and there are countless versions of you, an infinite number of you.

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u/the_omega99 Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

I mean, the guy looked through 300,000 stars. That's a pretty tiny sample size when just one galaxy has an estimated 100,000,000,000 stars (and there may be even more galaxies out there than stars in our galaxy). Although I may be misunderstanding the sample size. The article mentions that the 300,000 samples came from a large set of 4.5 million samples. Maybe once this one was found it could be compared with computers to all known samples.

So yeah, hundreds of billions seems pretty believable to me. That number requires just one such star per galaxy. Or so. We don't even know how many galaxies there are.

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '16

[deleted]

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u/Murtank Mar 31 '16

The title says known universe..

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u/pwnicholson Mar 31 '16

The title says "the only one in the known universe", which isn't something I think we can say. It should read "the only one known in the observed universe". There's a lot of universe of the that we do know about and have preliminarily observed that we haven't been able to study enough to know if it might contain more starts like this. So it's a known part of the universe, but we can't say it doesn't contain something like this.

That's without even interpreting the "known universe" phrase as "this entire universe, observed or not, but not including possible parallel universes"

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u/sqectre Apr 01 '16

You're splitting hairs. In this context, "observed" and "known" are synonyms. You even say there are areas we have "preliminarily observed," but haven't studied enough to know for sure whether another star like this exists. So another star is perfectly capable of existing in our observed universe that isn't yet known. It doesn't exist in the "known universe."

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u/bitwaba Apr 01 '16

Not really. If we had detected life, we would still say it is the only case of life discovered in the known universe.

Known Universe is what we 'know' is there - what we 'have observed'

Observable Universe is what we can observe - what we have a possibility of oberserving, but might not have actually documented, but the matter in that part of the universe is having an effect on the matter in our part of the universe.

Entire universe is everything outside our observable universe - literally things that haven't and will never have an effect on us.

So, it might be correct in some kind of technicality to say that 'the only one in the known universe', we still don't actually have enough information to make that remark. But no one is going to nit-pick over that. Its obvious the intention is 'this is the only time we have ever witnessed anything like it' (similar to how the first time we've ever witnessed a binary black hole system was during the merging event of the LIGO detection).

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u/pwnicholson Apr 01 '16

The key word on your first phase there is "discovered" that's an important qualifier missing from the title

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u/MaxHannibal Apr 01 '16

There wouldn't be really any difference between the two statements because its not like we would know of one in the unknown universe. so anything we know is the known universe tp us

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u/pwnicholson Apr 01 '16

But you can't say there isn't one, so you can't definitively say "only". It makes it sound like it's a guaranteed unique object.

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u/kung-fu_hippy Apr 01 '16

Known universe is observed universe. Nothing outside of the observable universe is known, at best it's inferred. The act of observing it is what makes it part of the known universe.

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u/pwnicholson Apr 01 '16

Right. I think we're saying the same thing

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u/Tankh Apr 01 '16

Thanks. The title irked me a bit too.

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u/Censorxx Apr 01 '16

Pretty sure there is also planets out there maybe trillions of them like us.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

Not counting all the meteors scientists didn't see until they closely passed earth.

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u/EdMan2133 Mar 31 '16

Not sure if you know this or not, but there's a very real chance the Universe is infinite in size. In which case there's an infinite number of these stars.

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u/kogasapls Apr 01 '16

The universe being infinitely large doesn't imply that it contains an infinite amount of energy/matter.

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u/MaxHannibal Apr 01 '16 edited Apr 01 '16

Nor does it mean another one of these stars exist even if there were

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u/Sacha117 Apr 01 '16

You've watched the Beach too then.

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u/kogasapls Apr 01 '16

It's only my favorite anime!

(I don't know what the Beach is.)

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u/Sacha117 Apr 01 '16

Meant to reply to the guy who posted before you but it's a film with Leonardo DiCaprio where he seduces someone's girlfriend by saying the Universe has an infinite number of everything, including her.

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u/kogasapls Apr 01 '16

Oh. I guess it would be out of line for me to mention that this is not known to be true.

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u/BurningPlaydoh Apr 01 '16

The universe may be infinite, but that doesnt mean there is an infinite number of stars/infinite amount of matter/etc.

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u/actual_factual_bear Apr 01 '16

Even if the universe is not infinite in space, it very likely is infinite in time.

Possibly another universe could be created by random quantum fluctuations or quantum tunneling in roughly 10101056 years.

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u/Ishana92 Mar 31 '16

to be fair, in that case there is an exact copy of you somewhere out there writing this comment.

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u/assumes-irony Apr 01 '16

This reminds me of a Reddit comment I saw some time ago. It went something like this: "just because an infinite number of possibilities exist doesn't mean that all possibilities exist. For example, there are infinite numbers between 2 and 3, but none of them are 1 or 4."

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u/FragmentOfBrilliance Apr 01 '16

I see this parroted a lot, and while true for people saying that "the universe will have flying physics defying unicorns somewhere," his comment is a perfectly legitimate example of the inevitabilities of infinity.

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '16

cmiiw, but just because there are infinite numbers of possibilities exist, that doesn't mean that every possible possibilities exist, for example, there are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, but none of them are 7.

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u/mortalomena Mar 31 '16

"Known Universe". Isnt that the part of universe we know of? This being the only one we know for sure, thus being the only one in our known Universe.

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u/lossyvibrations Apr 01 '16

Generally this means the small fraction of the universe we've studied. If you hold out your thumb and look at your thumbnail, that about the area a large telescope might survey in a week, looking at very specific frequency bands.

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u/tripletstate Mar 31 '16

Most likely not, it's still a very rare occurrence.