Good question. According to this article, the process going on with Betelgeuse does sound like the same or very similar to the process described in OP’s article.
The great dimming [of Betelgeuse] was caused by the star spitting out a lump of gas and dust, like chewing gum: or what scientists call a “surface mass ejection” caused by an “anomalously hot convective plume”.
OP’s article doesn’t say that the Old Smokers they found are red super-giants but since they called them old smokers, I’m inclined to think that they are. Also because they say that smoke contains much higher levels of heavy elements than is common in the region which would also be consistent with older stars. The article doesn’t say whether or not the stars puff out smoke on a regular schedule like Betelgeuse does, but then maybe they haven’t been watching them long enough to see a pattern yet.
It does seem like they found a bunch of older stars that are pre-supernova, just like Betelgeuse is, and burping out clouds of gas and dust.
I missed it at first as well. The second paragraph implies they are red giants. However, there is a distinction between a red giant and a red super-giant, if that is what you mean.
The “peculiar” puffing behavior of these stars has never been seen before in such red giants, astrophysicist Philip Lucas told AFP.
So, in my typical nature, I went right to the source and shot off an email to Professor Philip Lucas from the University of Hertfordshire. He was one of the primary researchers for the original paper. (P.W. Lucas et al.)
The laser array is expensive but if it’s continuous and spread out enough you could keep sending newer probes. Or if it’s not continuous you could use it for different directions!
According to Scott Manley’s video on the topic the probes would need to arrive at the correct time in order to form what is effectively a huge phased array antenna.
Only then is the combined transmission power of these tiny probes large enough to be received on earth.
My personal take is that there’s some kind of anthropomorphic fallacy in thinking life should tend towards “civilization”.
Life will tend towards reproductive success and it seems entirely plausible to me that reproductive success doesn’t at all imply the use of radio waves.
The dinosaurs were a very intelligent life form that never tended towards civilization and some of their bird ancestors can be smarter than most mammals etc. Expecting the trait of civilization to emerge seems unfounded and against available evidence.
Space travel seems impossible. I realize you can back of the envelope it in a way that makes it seem within grasp but there’s no economic benefit in colonizing another star and only some marginal mining benefit in even visiting the nearby planets so I don’t think it will ever happen.
No, rare intelligence and to a lesser extent rare earth remain as convincing as ever. Potentially habitable does not mean life sustaining, and given the lack of strong biosignatures on any of the examined near earth exoplanets, I’d say that there is indeed increasing evidence that life of any kind really is that rare, much less intelligence.
It is just absurdly hard to get conditions right for microbes to form on a reasonable timeframe is a solution after all.
What do you mean after all? Wasn’t it the consensus since forever that there was basically 0 chance of anything actually colliding because galaxies are mostly empty space? I’m pretty sure I read about that when I was a child.
What I like about this image is that this is probably the biggest object that I can compare to something I know, that I can “comprehend”. With 6 km wide, it is about the same size as Grenoble, a city I have seen from above while hiking. I can understand how far the picture looks from it, how small a human would be on it
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