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Comment by isoprophlex | Hacker News Reader

Imagine it's coming from a bunch of alien networking gear, sending packets of data across galaxies...

The thing with these is that they have to be very directional to even reach us, and (in the article), it mentions the bursts have the energy of a century of our sun's output; if it is alien networking gear, they'd have to be able to generate that power somehow. Dyson spheres wouldn't cut it.

Dyson galaxies. Also appears to us like dark matter.

Intriguing; Is this actually serious? Like, is it possible that the unaccounted for matter (what, ~98%) is simply locked within dyson galaxies?

No. Because of thermodynamics they would necessarily emit some thermal radiation and we’re not seeing it.

Could it be, hypothetically, that there are so many layers in the swarm that the radiation that will get eventually be emitted is outside of what we can detect?

No, given that we can map the dark matter density in galaxies - having a bunch of dark matter galaxies wouldn't explain the shapes of what we actually observe.

There are current telescopes that detect everything down to the universe thermal radiation, and a bit bellow. There's no place to hide there.

Thermodynamics doesn't require isotropic radiation. If you're going to shed a lot of waste heat, why not aim it out of the galactic plane, so as to avoid calling unnecessary attention to yourself?

No. One of the issues with current understanding of galaxies is that our understanding of gravity does not fit the rotation of the galaxies we are observing. To explain this, and other effects, we use dark matter.

There was a theory that the reason for the discrepancy is that our understanding of gravity is wrong, and that it is in fact a calculation error on galactic scales. The problem with this is that apparently there are galaxies which seem to have very little dark matter and are much closer to expected behavior than other galaxies. So we are left with the dark matter explanation so far.

What made you come to the conclusion that these have to be directional? Assuming from the power output? I don't think that's a given.

If they weren't directional they wouldn't blink, they'd just look like a type of star.

I don't understand. You have a source of light far away - it blinks. How do you know if its a lamp or flashlight?

The flashlight fits Occam's Razor much more neatly. A pulsing lamp that goes from nothing to nova intensity with a nice neat period requires a lot more assumptions.

Something highly directional is much more likely to be something intelligently-designed, so the razor cuts both ways here. Not trying to argue btw, genuinely just discussing.

Not necessarily, we already have a lot of natural directional phenomena, like pulsars in particular. The really strange thing about this is the long period.

What kind of latency would that have ... !

Maybe their consciousness runs a lot slower than ours..?

They invented latency so ask them ;)

Hexapodia is a Key insight :-)

"A for Andromeda" by Fred Hoyle develops this concept further.

then it hits the planet Earth and then package is now dropped

It's UDP; they don't have to care.

Or, you know, it's addressed to a giant spaceship that just happens to be hanging around near Earth.

in that case it might just be dolphins.

The cavemen ate our packages again! Need to clean up that pipe at some point.

It obstructs my view of Venus!

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