"It has also been hypothesized that the changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm; however, further analysis based on data through the end of 2017 showed wavelength-dependent dimming consistent with dust but not an opaque object such as an alien megastructure, which would block all wavelengths of light equally."
I wish we contact some kind of highly intelligent alien life soon. I can't think of any other single impulse that might actually help us to broaden our horizons and stop destroying our only home and focusing on development that matters and generally coming out of our short-term/parochial obsessions.
Boyajian’s star is 1470 lightyears away according to Wikipedia. As a sci-fi concept: Imagine we detect an expanding civilization at this distance, and they travel at a significant fraction of c. We have a few millennia, at most, what do we do?
Use the millenia to develop as best as we can, and try to spread out in the opposite direction from them. A few millenia are a long time for a technologically advancing species. No knowing what we might accomplish within that time.
Although movies like to portray a hero doing something completely unexpected and saving the day, with odds like this (a species that is technologically advanced as they are, and they will keep advancing in the intervening years), I very much doubt we could do anything. Rig the world with nuclear bombs and detonate if they do something we don’t like? We just don’t have much leverage.
Asteroid mounted railguns (unmanned,) and on the moon, and on picket platforms. Massive kinetic projectiles moving at a significant fraction of c should be effective unless ftl or force fields are possible. 1000 years of collective effort to prepare could riff off of technology we've got at hand. Nuclear power and building material could be lifted from earth, but it'd be far more effective to mine asteroids.
Of course, if we mine asteroids, things on earth would be possible that are too expensive now, and we could see exponential technological progress.
That’s all true, but unless you assume technology peaks, the aliens would have passed those points and counter acted all of that a 1000 years earlier. Maybe they have million mile wide EMPs that destroy all our electronics. It’s very hard to catch up when the other side is advancing at a similar rate. The situation already shows they are very bright and motivated.
about this clustering, what's the average distance between the stars in lightyears?
so the suggestion is that because these stars have similar as of yet unexplained features and are clustered together that these features could be artificial?
I would agree that is implied in the call for SETI to target them.
The implication is the spread of a civilization to "nearby" stars
could be responsible for the observations.
Without anything but wild guess to go on
much closer transient (natural) obstructions
in our line of sight could cause dips in a small region too.
I would like to think we have some way to rule this out.
Or further fetched,
common formation seeded them with "something peculiar"
and they are still neighbors.
But again much like the GP question of what is the avg dist between
what is common about their size age, composition etc,
other than they seem to (slowly) dim?
The author is careful not to suggest that in the paper, but the implication is that this is a stellar empire with ET's transforming the systems that they are colonizing. The author is also quite clear about the results not being significant and that the cluster is of "questionable reality".
And further "Using this as the probability of randomly drawing a star in the clump area, the bionomial distribution yields a probability of randomly drawing at least 12 stars in the clump out of 15 in the Paper I field of 0.07."
That I believe is approx 1 in 20 of seeing the observed distribution. Suggestive.
It could have something to do with theories about how solar systems form.
If you find a bunch of systems with similar attributes, in the same neighborhood, maybe it's because they all formed from the same dust cloud. Maybe swirling eddies in the cloud each became a solar system.
"It has also been hypothesized that the changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm; however, further analysis based on data through the end of 2017 showed wavelength-dependent dimming consistent with dust but not an opaque object such as an alien megastructure, which would block all wavelengths of light equally."