Number of fish in the sea has dropped by nearly half since 1970, report says

Depressing? Yes, but at least we didn't die in "Blood Super Moon" asteroid doomsday prophecies

still plenty there imo

Keep your eyes on KIC 8462852. Kepler data shows something periodically occluding up to 22% of the star's light. That's the kind of anomaly that will likely reveal the existence of a new unknown natural structure (like the radio telescope anomalies that brought the discovery of pulsars) or could even be signs of construction of a Dyson sphere (no one can tell the crazies 'No' yet at least).

WheelsFellOff wrote:Keep your eyes on KIC 8462852. Kepler data shows something periodically occluding up to 22% of the star's light. That's the kind of anomaly that will likely reveal the existence of a new unknown natural structure (like the radio telescope anomalies that brought the discovery of pulsars) or could even be signs of construction of a Dyson sphere (no one can tell the crazies 'No' yet at least).

this is cool to read about, but space.com's website is bad and barely works on a PC and crashed my phone's browser in about 5 seconds

http://www.space.com/30855-alien-life-s ... cture.html

great. a dyson sphere. Will probably work just about as good as a generic sphere but at 3x the cost

Laugh it up Buckminster

i call mine not spheres but BALLS

colloquial perhaps but certainly it isn't inaccurate.

If it "only" periodically occludes 22% of the star's light, it's not a Dyson sphere. Unless the sphere is mostly transparent. It might however be a Ringworld. But the orbit of a ringworld (at least one like Larry Niven imagined) is unstable.

It's Halo.

TenuredVulture wrote:If it "only" periodically occludes 22% of the star's light, it's not a Dyson sphere. Unless the sphere is mostly transparent. It might however be a Ringworld. But the orbit of a ringworld (at least one like Larry Niven imagined) is unstable.

I don't work for Kepler, but I'd imagine a ring crossing the face would give a different signature as it would bisect the star. Intelligent life isn't the leading theory of course, the sphere talk was that it might be one under construction and there wasn't anything readily visible in the data to rule it out.

Why would anyone need over 100 quadrillion square miles?

legroom

But think about it--assume no real limits to technology--first, you make do with your home planet. Next, you'd either build space stations, mining asteroids for raw materials and such, or maybe colonize those asteroids and nearby planets. Probably both, in whatever order seems easiest. Then, maybe, you build a ringworld. Only after all that's done do you really need a Dyson sphere. I think the existence of such a sphere though is evidence that interstellar travel is impossible--a civilization advanced enough to build such a thing would have likely developed the capacity for interstellar travel first, thus obviating the need for the Dyson sphere in the first place.

Unless...a civilization has in fact already build lots of Dyson spheres all over the galaxy and this is just the latest one. Just in terms of the land area such a civilization has built and likely occupies blows my mind.

This is what we should be looking at, not developing stupid apps for our phones.

Don't think of them as landmass, think of them as energy collection. That is the thing that technology can't always obviate .

None of you have any clue what you're talking about.

Fine Mr. Dyson sphere engineer. Explain it to us.

I wish I had a Dyson sphere. Only a few of you guys would be invited, even if it was a quadrillion miles across.

Bucky can come because I need the funnies. And doll is mine can come because I don't want to exclude the gays. Everyone else will need to apply.

You couldn't handle your own Dyson sphere

I know my Kardashev scale, bro.