curiousOne is that the star may naturally not be putting out the usual smooth amount of light, which seems unlikely. It could be a very rare phenomenon, but stars have behaved in pretty predictable clusters of light emission.
Perhaps slightly more plausible than aliens is that a large rogue planet collided with a local one and created a debris cloud. Enormously rare, but there are lots of stars and junk out there.
More depressingly, this also matches the kind of "gunsmoke" cloud you get when someone uses planetbuster bombs to reduce a solar system to rubble. (A sunkiller bomb is also a possibility but unlikely because most of those work fairly fast.) This is particularly a concern because one reason for the Drake Equation yielding a sum of zero detections is if L is a very short timespan -- to wit, aliens share the human tendency to blow themselves up.
Other ideas?
Re: Hmm...
October 14 2015, 22:20:15 UTC 5 years ago
Re: Hmm...
October 14 2015, 22:40:17 UTC 5 years ago
Could there be a reason they're doing this? Is the reason that we haven't heard from other civilizations that they're all either holing up in their own spheres or dead due to some unknown agency? It'd inspire me to redouble our national efforts to get actively into space... Sending a probe makes sense but only as the capstone of a general space initiative toward being able to deploy our own sphere.
I'd say we need more sensitive space telescopes to be able to analyze what they're building... Maybe there's a clue about why they haven't sent colonizers outward.
Or they may have sent colony ships out already, and this is just the next stage of their home solar system efforts. Either way, hard to do much from at the bottom of the gravity well!