Charles, I'm a huge fan, but your thinking is backwards on this. We expect to notice advanced life far earlier than the more common forms, because it is far easier to spot from incredible distance.
Also, Fermi would like to speak with you about your prior odds.

Human civility is an endemic character of what is a fundamentally social creature. I don't know what historic rupture you speak of (in terms of "civility") or what work that does for you Charles.

Charles Mudede thinks it can't be an alien civ because there aren't alien ACLU lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits.

@2: I think you and Charles likely agree on the length of the civility, but you are thinking on different time scales. Charles' scale is the universal one, which is more important here. Cities are incredibly new. If we are looking at the cosmic calendar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Cal…), human civility appears in the final minutes of the year.

@2: I realize that I made a mistake, Charles is referring to civilization, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilizati…, which has been around for even less time.

ayy lmao

The star in question is old enough and has enough Earthlike planets such that an advanced alien civilization isn't out of the question. Not by a long shot.

Part misreading or otherwise semantic nitpickery on my part. I do not equate population density or urbanity with "civility", and we are and have always been at "human scale". That's my reading of that terms and their scope, not Charles'.

nevermind

because of science? it does seem crazy - copernicus was only 500 years ago. that's less than 10% of the world's 6000 year history.

@9 Slog is Charles' tickle machine. Dimwit trolls like yourself are being played to a degree completely beyond your understanding.

But carry on - we know you have nothing better to do, and that it makes you feel superior. Who am I to take that from you?

To answer your (presumably rhetorical) question, Charles: because any civilization advanced enough to have survived for several score of millennia is inevitably going to need more than a single planet to live on, which means a greater capacity for utilizing resources on a system-wide scale, and the ability to harness the commensurate energy requirements that entails. So, perhaps we're seeing the manifestation of a highly-developed intersystem civilization, something akin to a burgeoning Type II on the Kardashev Scale.

Or maybe it's just a bunch of rocks that happen to be orbiting a star roughly 1,500 light years away in a peculiarly distinct formation. Or dust clouds. Or maybe the star is manifesting a previously unseen variability. In other words, they're not saying it IS a nascent ring-world or the beginnings of a Dyson Sphere; they're just saying their observations don't fit what we currently know about how planetary systems form, and that this being evidence of a technologically-advanced off-world civilization is just one of a number of possible explanations, as they make clear in their abstract.

The universe is a big place, and it's as likely the astronomers studying KIC 8462852 have simply stumbled onto a natural phenomenon that just hasn't been seen by anyone before.

I guess Charles has never heard of the Tkon Empire or of the major shit going down a long time ago someplace far, far away.

Good Evening Charles,
" Astronomers Think They Have Found a Star System With a Civilization"? You got my attention all right. I only think you should have included a ? after your posting title. Like you, I don't think a 'civilization' has been discovered. I don't even believe 'life' has been discovered elsewhere in the universe. Therefore, I extremely dubious a 'civilization' has been discovered. I would imagine 'life' comes before 'civilization'. At least, that's what I think.

I'm just flabbergasted. Thank you for discussing this, Charles. I share your skepticism, but not out of misguided mistrust or ignorance of science. I'm skeptical that we're looking at evidence of a Type II civilization (thank You! @13) because we've "only" looked at about 200,000 mature star systems.
That being said... I've looked at 1000's of light curves from Kepler and never seen ANYTHING like this. Usually you have something that looks like a messy EKG, with tiny dips downward that you can BARELY detect* above the noisy static, even if you push and pull on the axes and squint real hard. And even a huge round sphere passing in front of a star produces tiny, irregular-looking lumps (at regular time intervals) in the light curves. This structure, however, is Huge AND extremely regular in shape. Like a giant Borg cube. Or a big, rectangular sheet of something completely opaque. To my eyes, it looks nothing like a cluster of comets or exploded planet fragments, which would produce a signature with holes in it and be irregular and all fuzzy around the edges. Not to mention much smaller. Nope, this looks like an orbiting Dyson structure.

*that's why they need human eyes to interpret the light curves; the curves are way too messy and confusing for computerized image analysis. http://www.planethunters.org/

@15, see @1. We can't see bacterial life from 1000's of light years away; we can only see planets or superstructures like space-stations.
We have telescopes pointed at distant stars that are close to ours in age and size so that we can see what is orbiting those stars. It turns out a lot of solar systems look like ours. They have several planets orbiting the star, some big, some small. Some planets are made of rocks (like ours), some are made of gases (like Jupiter). Some are up close next to the star (like Mercury), while some are far away, like Neptune. So far the Kepler project has told us that our solar system is not that unusual. THEN YOU HAVE THIS... a one-of-a-kind humungous object passing in front of its star that literally looks like nothing else we've ever seen before.

Does anybody know how common it is to even observe a planet crossing between their star and our telescopes? For example, in the case of Earth wouldn't a distant observer only be able to see our planet in front of the Sun once a year... and only if they happen to be on the correct axis?

Borg...it's the only logical explanation. And apparently we haven't been worth assimilating which should all give us pause.

@18 - It is becoming increasingly common as astro-boffins now have better telescopes and computer-aided observation. I can't give you exact numbers, (+/-2000 planets have been found) but search for "exoplanet" and you'll find a lot of info. --- But your point stands that the planet(s) in question have to pass between a distant star and our 'scopes; yes that is true. There are plenty of planets we'll never be able to see using current tech, which is based on regular dips in the light emitted from said star.

Dyson Sphere? Naah, it's a cloud of comets, sorry to disappoint.

As to Charles' point: The Universe is estimated at 4billion "years" old, and we're learning more and more about star formation that defies what we've previously assumed, meaning many many stars are much older than our ol' Sun here. Which, in turn, means that it is perfectly possible for another civilization to be further advanced than ours, why not? We've just taken 5000 years to organize cities, launch satellites, and build the internet. If an alien civ had, say merely 10,000 more years on us, who knows what they would have been able to do by now.

Speaking of life on other planets, have y'all seen this cautious speculation about fossilized microbial mats on Mars? Can't prove it yet, not w/o samples, but it is veeery tantalizing, esp. with the recent confirmation that water-cycles currently exist on the Red Planet.

5 minutes after proof of alien life, the Democrats will immediately implement plans to grant the aliens American citizenship.

"There's no need for a quarantine period. We trust that their micro-organisms are similar enough to our own that the slight risk is worth the great rewards of diversity", said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. She reportedly donned a pink biohazard suit and left the press conference by helicopter.

Did all y'all know that the Chinese have had a telescope on the dark side of the moon for the past 18+ months?

@22, I'm not surprised that a Pink Floyd album would get left on the desk propping up a telescope for that long.

Just a note to the more hysterical types that are going to worry about an invasion from space... Just as we can only now have the ability to even notice if another planet could build massive structures, we've also only recently been able to build our own cities that could be seen from space. Since barring light speed travel it would still take many many years to get anywhere, I doubt that we'd even be sought out for a visit if it were even possible. Think about it... you'd have to build a space going biosphere where only the 20th generation of the crew's descendants would even have the remotest chance of arriving somewhere. It would be like Columbus taking off for the new world and only his inbred distant descendants getting there now. I think we have a few hundred more years before anyone out there would even be able to notice us.

@21: why are you such a peevish dick in every post? are you mad at your dad or something?

Perhaps the timeline isn't surprising, but this anomaly was simply low hanging fruit.

And especially what @24 said. It seems likely in the vastness of the universe there are advanced lifeforms, but regardless of how advanced, the laws of physics as we know* them make interplanetary contact of any sort extremely unlikely.

*I don't want to hear about this wormhole shit, and matter can't travel faster than light. It's just the way it is.

@25: I don't think he's being peevish. I think he thinks he's really clever and that his comments are all bon mots of an Oscar Wildeian caliber.
I think he's having a blast.

And I think he just got ban hammered again. Oh sad face....

This headline is completely ridiculous. Astronomers have found NO SUCH THING. It is a star with a peculiar light curve, meaning that its brightness changes in an unusual way. There are several potential natural explanations for this. We are NOWHERE NEAR CLOSE to concluding this is the result of life.

Day 75:

The first physical exam of the alien specimen revealed the species to be asexual, breeding only with the assistance of some tertiary species resembling the common house cat.

"Unbelievable. Not only are they capable of harnessing the tremendous energy of their star directly, they also appear to be post-gender", Mayor Murray announced at his Seattle press conference, after dodging pointed questions about political corruption and rampant crime.

@30: ayy lmao

ayy lmao

@16: That's really neat! Thanks for the info!

@22

No, didn't know. That's pretty cool!

I would like to propose Doctor Memory's Corollary to Betteridge's Law of Headlines: if a headline starts with the phrase "scientists believe" or "scientists think", it is axiomatically true that not a single actual scientist living or dead in all of human history thinks or believes such goddamned nonsense.