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Sci-Fi Science

The Search For Starivores, Intelligent Life That Could Eat the Sun 300

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-life-jim-but-not-as-oh-god-it's-eating-the-sun dept.
sarahnaomi writes: There could be all manner of alien life forms in the universe, from witless bacteria to superintelligent robots. Still, the notion of a starivore — an organism that literally devours stars — may sound a bit crazy, even to a seasoned sci-fi fan. And yet, if such creatures do exist, they're probably lurking in our astronomical data right now.

That's why philosopher Dr. Clement Vidal, who's a researcher at the Free University of Brussels, along with Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick, futurist John Smart, and nanotech entrepreneur Robert Freitas are soliciting scientific proposals to seek out star-eating life.
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The Search For Starivores, Intelligent Life That Could Eat the Sun More

The Search For Starivores, Intelligent Life That Could Eat the Sun

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  • Starivore? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:20AM (#48752603)

    Is "Black Hole" not fancy enough anymore?

    • Re:Starivore? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:22AM (#48752613)

      Astrophage

      • I like it.

      • Re:Starivore? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LQ ( 188043 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @04:27AM (#48752961)

        Astrophage

        Or stellavore if you prefer Latin to Greek.. But "starivore" is an abomination. if you're going to make up new compound words, you should stick to the same language for each component. "Star-eater" would be ok.

        • Re:Starivore? (Score:5, Funny)

          by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @04:38AM (#48753001) Homepage Journal

          if you're going to make up new compound words, you should stick to the same language for each component.

          I agree, a man on the television said so.

        • Re:Starivore? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Ihlosi ( 895663 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @05:01AM (#48753057)
          But "starivore" is an abomination. if you're going to make up new compound words, you should stick to the same language for each component.

          Unless you're an engineer. Then words like 'automobile' and 'television' are perfectly fine.

          • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

            by Anonymous Coward

            I dunno; those words have a certain "je ne sais what" about them.

          • Re:Starivore? (Score:4, Informative)

            by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @08:44AM (#48753667)
            It may depend on whether you're combining established loan words or just creating a fancy neologism. "Mobile" and "vision" had been established in English (and perhaps not perceived as foreign anymore) before someone combined them. Ditto for auto- as a prefix, even if to a lesser degree, perhaps, since it also fits about anywhere. -vore, on the other hand, appears to only appear in newly coined specialist terms where indeed it is customary to juxtapose words from the same language. If both parts are distinctly foreign and neither is in already in common use in the target language, *then* someone will take care to match them properly, but otherwise, that's not likely to happen. That has nothing to do with engineers.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by MouseR ( 3264 )

          Undead Blackhole (+1)

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by sootman ( 158191 )

          They're called hybrid words [wikipedia.org]

          Just a few favorites from their list of fifty...

          Automobile - a wheeled passenger vehicle, from Greek _ (autos) "self" and Latin mobilis "moveable"
          Biathlon - from the Latin bis meaning "twice" and the Greek _ (athlon) meaning "contest"
          Claustrophobia - from the Latin claustrum meaning _confined space_ and Greek _ (phobos) meaning "fear"
          Dysfunction - from the Greek _- (dys-) meaning "bad" and the Latin functio
          Genocide - From the Greek _ (genos) meaning "race, people" and the Latin c_

        • I prefer "stellaraptor"?

    • Look for what you can see. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Immerman ( 2627577 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @03:44AM (#48752849)

      The principle is simple enough - searching for life in the cosmos is *hard* to the point of near impossibility. If an identical twin sister-civilization was orbitting the nearest star, it's unlikely we could detect it from here. *Maybe* we could detect their military radar pulses. Maybe.

      So, what do you do? You either give up the search completely, or you confine it to looking for things you might actually be able to detect with your current technology. That is - you look not for things that are particularly likely to exist, but for things easy to detect. Because those are the only things you have *any* chance of spotting. Star-eaters would qualify I think.

      • Re:Look for what you can see. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by N1AK ( 864906 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @04:15AM (#48752917) Homepage
        There was an interesting, short, interview about Kepler's observations of other earth like planets. One thing mentioned was that we can now analyse the atmospheres of planets reasonably close to us if we can observe the light from the star they orbit going through it. Because there are elements in our atmosphere that couldn't be their naturally, another species doing the same thing to us could tell that there was, or had been, life on our planet.

        • Well, at least not under the current geochemical theories. When we've found a few other planets with such indicators, and confirmed that they do in fact harbor life, then I'll consider taking such claims as more than under-informed hypothesis.

      • Re:Look for what you can see. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @07:08AM (#48753315) Journal
        But if you saw one then would you recognise it? If they travel faster than light then you won't see them except when they're feeding. If they don't, then most of their life is likely to be in a dormant state as they spend a few thousand years between stars. Then there's the question of how they eat. If they eat the entire star at once, then you'll notice a star vanishing, but we don't have continuous observation on most stars, so there's a good chance that we'd see something odd in the data but not be able to tell what. If they eat in a more plausible way, then how would we tell it apart from, for example, a star near a superdense non-alive object that is drawing matter away from it?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          I think we need to look for the obvious. Any life form that eats gets gas. So all we need look for are giant gas plumes in the Universe. I see we have several candidates so the problem is essentially solved and we can get back to doing real science.

          Why in Kentucky, we have a museum showing humans riding dinosaurs. Naturally, dinosaurs would not take kindly to being ridden, so that probably is unrealistic. What would be realistic is to see a caveman lighting a match at the wrong time.

          • What would be realistic is to see a caveman lighting a match at the wrong time.

            Nah, that's unrealistic too: the earliest match-like devices were invented only about 1500 years ago (by the Chinese).

      • Re:Look for what you can see. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by rastos1 ( 601318 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @08:02AM (#48753503)

        That is - you look not for things that are particularly likely to exist, but for things easy to detect.

        So for example rather then trying to find factorization of a 2048-bit RSA modulus (which exists but is hard to find), you try to find 2048-bit prime that is even and bigger than 2 (that does not exists but is ridiculously easy to detect). Totally makes sense. Huh.

  • Do it in your free time (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Karmashock ( 2415832 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:22AM (#48752611)

    Kindly do not suggest to the public that you're just screwing around on the public dime. What you do on your own time is your own business.

    • Re:Do it in your free time (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:39AM (#48752649) Homepage Journal

      yeah.. maybe, somehow, it happened in 1 galaxy out of billions.

      but really, such a creature would more likely be what's commonly called a "civilization".

      there's quite a few hurdles between starting as a single cell life and evolving into something that eats stars. - big, BIG jumps necessary - more likely such that they're much more likely to be done by groups of intelligent beings - or such a being would have to have been created on purpose.

      like, the creature would first need to eat up the place it evolved in - but before that think/find/somehow have a way to get the next star, no small feat on it's own.

      giving them public money would be a total waste. especially when if such existed, detecting it would come for free from the observing we're doing currently.

      • What about for something that started life as a star, black hole, nebular standing wave, etc? Cellular life is after all only one of near-infinite possibilities. Just because it's the only kind we've ever seen doesn't mean we should assume it's the only kind that exists - we have after all only seen one tiny corner of one apparently utterly unspectacular galaxy. (Maybe our existence makes it spectacular - but we'd need to determine, experimentally, the average sentient life load of a galaxy before we coul

  • Calling Star Trek (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:26AM (#48752621)

    We found your stoned script writers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      Not Star Ttrek - Superman. Suneaters were a thing in the Superman books, IIRC - heck, didn't he have a pet suneater at some point, or was that only in the animation?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jiriw ( 444695 )

      Neverness, prequel to the 'A Requiem to homo sapiens' trilogy, by David Zindell, has star eating as one of its background themes. I quite liked the read. Still need to read the actual 'A Requiem to homo sapiens' trilogy 'though.

  • I think... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Guy From V ( 1453391 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:37AM (#48752645) Homepage

    "Stellarvore" would be the correct Latinisation. N'est-ce pas?

    • And he doesn't know the singular of phenomena. Fail.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      doesn't matter, the people proposing to get money for this are all.. how to say... professional bullshitters or more nicely put storytellers(with fancy titles that boil down to being a storyteller).

      (though one of the guys has maybe perhaps done a practical application, since he has a patent for it. quick search proved fruitless though on if that method was actually used in practice.. that is, if it really works or not- most publications from him as well seemed to be "what may be possible").

    • I wonder if this guy is a meativore or a plantivore.

    • I'm guessing it was derived as a portmanteau of "star" and "carnivore."

      • I'm guessing it was derived as a portmanteau of "star" and "carnivore."

        The word you want is stellarvore. Because Latin and Latin. HTH. HAND.

  • It's on a wordpress subdomain for fuck's sake.
  • Eating the sun seems like the ultimate "fire challenge"
  • If there was such a creature, would Galactus orbit around it?
    • No, Neil deGrasse Galactus is a destroyer of Planets, not Suns.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hughbar ( 579555 )
        Yes, I immediately thought of Galactus too. But the research could prove or disprove whether Galactus is a small brother or cousin of the star eater? Perhaps the star eater evolved from Galactus-like life forms because someone [a fool] irradiated it?

        We would need to engineer Silver Surfer++ AKA Platinum Surfer or Very Rare Earth Surfer etc. etc.

        Obviously, all that would be incredibly useful, it gets MY research money vote.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ashshy ( 40594 )
      I just came to look for the mandatory Galactus reference. Thanks.

  • Just give *me* the money (Score:3)

    by Bitmanhome ( 254112 ) <bitman AT pobox DOT com> on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:47AM (#48752669)

    And I'll create a starivore for you. It'll take a while, but should be more fun than staring at empty space.

  • Even more useless than politicians (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:50AM (#48752677)

    Philosopher, astrobiologist, futurist, nanotech entrepreneur.

    WTF do astrobiologists actually do besides suck at the government teat?

    And futurists... gah. Those idiots are Miss Cleo rejects.

    • Well, they do just what the name says. They study space-based biology. You know, all those millions of off-world life forms we've found. Oh, yeah, um...seems like a "future job" that may exist one day but not yet.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Trepidity ( 597 )

        Some are less sci-fi than others though. An astrobiologist studying the possibility of life on Mars at least has some pretty concrete work they can do: there is new data coming in, there are experiments that can be performed with probes to confirm or rule out some theories, etc. An astrobiologist studying the possibility of star-eating lifeforms in deep space has... less concrete work to do.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Nutria ( 679911 )

          An astrobiologist studying the possibility of life on Mars

          But wouldn't that be just a regular biologist who specializes in "a-thermal" extremophiles? Or maybe the kind of geologist that studies things like stromatolites?

      • No-one should try and study anything until after we discover it! Of course it might mean it's harder to discover things.

    • My first response to this article was, "Oh ffs, give it a rest." I read the article and that's still my response.

      There's conclusive evidence that star-eating life in our galaxy does not exist: Our sun is still shining bright. Unless you're seriously stupid enough to think that somehow star-eating life would leave us alone for some reason. Or even more stupid and think that over billions of years it wouldn't have reached us.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by The Rizz ( 1319 )

        Our sun is still shining bright. Unless you're seriously stupid enough to think that somehow star-eating life would leave us alone for some reason.

        (1) Why would it single out our star for eating, when there's a sky full of them?
        (2) Why do you assume that it would be "eating" stars at an easily noticeable rate? Something big enough to eat a star would be too massive to build up speed very fast - odds are it would take millions/billions of years to move from one star to the next.

        • Wrong, and wrong.

          1. It wouldn't single out our star. That's the entire point. Such life would be devouring all stars in the galaxy.
          2. This isn't about a single star-eating being/lifeform/civilization. If you read the article, the premise is that there are millions of these things. Which there must be, if they are to exist at all. The only thing stupider than a galaxy full of star eaters is a galaxy with only one star eater.

      • As is often the case when talking about space you have made the typical mistake of underestimating just how mind bogglingly big it is.

        • Nope, I haven't.

          With current technology we have the means to push spacecraft to 60 km/s. This isn't hypothetical tech, it's stuff that's sitting in the shed. At such velocities, craft could traverse the milky way galaxy 20 times over during the (current) lifetime of the galaxy (estimated at around 13 billion years). The galaxy is big, but it's not that big, not compared to the time scales involved here.

          • Space does not solely consist of our our galaxy. In fact it's not even possible for us to reach 97% of the other galaxies even if we had a light speed drive.

    • WTF do astrobiologists actually do besides suck at the government teat?

      Apparently he writes books [stevenjdick.com].

  • Calling BS (Score:3)

    by captainpanic ( 1173915 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @02:58AM (#48752703)

    Organisms using energy stored in star: PLANTS
    Organisms devouring stars (as in taking away actual mass of the star): how? It's a high energy plasma out there, how will you get any structure in that?

    Are we done yet? This is just some toy of some people who definitely need more hobbies, making 500 euro available for a good joke.

    • I don't know but the comparison image is really great [wordpress.com].

      Hey, the current prize pool is at 500 euros! [wordpress.com] Submit your proposal today!

    • It's a high energy plasma out there, how will you get any structure in that?

      Actually, the sun has a lot of structure in its magnetic field. This is not just complex in the way Earth's weather is, meaning is is unpredictable. It has long term structures, such as the 11-year sunspot cycle.

      I really doubt if these magnetic fields are sentient at all, and certainly not sentient as we understand it. The world's phone system has a similar complexity to the human brain, but if that was sentient, it would be hard to imagine what it thought about, as it has no obvious eyes and ears.

      Howe

  • BS by non-scientists (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @03:01AM (#48752717)

    Really, does it get more stupid than this? Whenever somebody claims to be a "futurist", you already know they have no clue but a big ego. The others in this group are hardly better. Now the thing to do is to _not_ give these people any attention, because if they get any, they will come up with even more ludicrous claims.

  • Gravity well? (Score:3)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @03:34AM (#48752815) Journal
    Wouldn't the gravity well of all but the most pitiful excuses for stars require technology indistinguishable from magic (or at least the ability to make local modifications to gravity on a practical basis, which is pretty close) to exploit anything aside from whatever radiation you can capture, and perhaps the occasional coronal mass ejection or solar prominence?

    The sun isn't even a terribly heroic specimen, if conveniently close for our purposes, and it has an escape velocity of what, almost 60 times that of earth? It seems that the hypothetical organism, even if astonishingly heat resistant, is going to have a brutal time dining on a star; while (if it instead 'engulfs' stars, like some giant space amoeba) also not being able to 'eat' too many stars before its own mass would annihilate any sort of 'organism' structure and result in one of the outcomes that befall ordinary stellar cores of considerable mass, whether it be some billions of years of fusing heavier elements, a collapse into some sort of exotic neutron soup, an event horizon, or some other life-incompatible fate.

    I don't generally discount the ability of life forms to survive harsh environments and metabolize seemingly inedible things(I am a fungus after all); but eating something with so much mass that your gravitational death-throes will ignite self sustaining fusion in your corpse seems a bit more challenging than the usual lineup of metabolic challenges.

    • There was a head of IT at one place I worked who, when asked where the weight goes when a person diets, answered that it's due to the nuclear fusion inside a person's cells. So hey, apparently that already happens, np.

  • Wasn't the idea of a Dyson sphere proposed years ago? That would be the closest thing to something astronomical sized 'creature/civilisation' that would consume stars?

  • Telephone sanitizers (Score:3)

    by LordWabbit2 ( 2440804 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @03:48AM (#48752861)
    Telephone sanitizers are more useful than this wunch of bankers.
  • I think we're more likely to find signs of stellar engineering or other megascale construction - doesn't have to be a complete Dyson sphere, but a star that radiates more in the IR spectrum than physically plausible, has a peculiar/abnormal spectrum or does not evolve the way normal stars do.

    And please, don't call it "starivore". Call it "astrovore" or, if you're an engineer, "astrophage".

  • On the deirious mode a really well developped being would eats the whole universe and and in passing eats all gods. Consequence: it would enter an infinitie loop of eating itself, no need to look for food again.

  • There's no reason (such as I see it) that animals wouldn't exist in outer space, or near various atmospheres. We just don't know them yet, because they could probably not survive our conditions.

    Have any of you guys seen that footage that Nasa officially released of all their satellite cams have picked up over the years? It was some 2 hour footage with lots of interesting stuff, you may want to look at that. PS. go to the source, don't look at the many fakes from unofficial sources found on youtube.

  • Free University? (Score:3)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @04:51AM (#48753035) Journal
    There are two universities in Brussels. Université Libre de Bruxelles (French for Free University of Brussels) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Dutch for Free University of Brussels). Translating the name of either into English makes it impossible to tell which institution he is a member of.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Livius ( 318358 )

      Especially when 'non-denominational' would (originally at least) have been a better translation.

  • So.. it eats stars, farts nebulae and poops dark matter. Makes perfect sense to me.

  • Oh Noes, it's a Mutant Star Goat! (Score:3)

    by Irate Engineer ( 2814313 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @05:49AM (#48753161)
    To the B Ark, quick!

  • Too heavy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zawash ( 147532 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @05:56AM (#48753179)
    But then - wouldn't the organism necessarily be so large and massive that it would collapse under its own weight, and spontaneously self combust? Or "self fusion", as it were?

  • Civilizations of course have energy needs, but devouring stars seems a bit excessive. For strict survival it would make more sense to minimize your resource requirements. A human brain needs 500 calories per day, and our sun outputs 3.8 x 10^26 watts. So efficient use of our own sun's energy could presumably sustain on order of 10^25 human-level intelligences as is. If your appetitite for energy is more rapacious than that, I think it's a good guess it's effectively infinite. In which case, maybe it wo

  • Some people find Mexican food hard to tolerate. This thing would need some *really* powerful indigestion medicine after that meal.

  • Kardashev (Score:5, Informative)

    by Livius ( 318358 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @07:25AM (#48753365)

    So, instead of looking for a Kardashev type II civilization, we should look for a Kardashev type II, um, organism, or something?

    Maybe there is such a thing, but it would be so different from life on Earth that I'm not sure it would even make sense to try to distinguish an organism from a technological civilization (especially when even on Earth that distinction can sometimes be a little bit blurry).

  • The iron in your blood can in some infinitesimally small way kill a star faster. And there's your power trip for to today.

  • This is all sort of Solaris stuff - and like Lem suggests, we would have no ability to communicate with an organism of that order. (John C Lilly points out that we wouldn't be able to communicate meaningfully with Whales, let alone planetary organisms).

    And when imagining living beings that are larger than planets, how can we even be able to begin to define them as alive?. Why aren't stars alive in the first place? If not, what makes them not so? Just because their method of reproduction involves their own d

  • I, for one, welcome our new star guzzlin' overlords.

  • Medium (Score:4, Informative)

    by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @07:52AM (#48753459)

    I read this and was like "WHAT?"
    That doesn't makes sense at all. It doesn't even pass as a terrible SciFi book.

    Then I saw the link... medium.com... Oh....
    Stop posting these stupid pay-for-link adds. That site sucks. It's like a bunch of Valley girls are trying to figure out what nerds would be interested in and getting it very very wrong.

  • Anything that eats stars must surely need to take a massive dump. So all we need to look for is a big pile of digested and expelled star materials.

  • Would this not fit the description of a star eater?

  • Karadashev Type II Civilization (Score:3)

    by pz ( 113803 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @09:41AM (#48754049) Journal

    Aren't these folks just looking for a Karadashev Type II civilization? That was defined, oh, about 50 years ago, now. By an astronomer.

    Talk about not bothering to look at what people in a given field have done before impinging upon your own self-important program. If anyone bothers to read the linked article (I do not recommend wasting your time), it's full of blatheringly idiotic statements about how major advances in science come about. I'm a scientist, in a different field, and we are pushing the boundaries as hard as you can imagine. We look at anything and everything that we can find that is relevant to help us succeed at our, frankly, audacious, high-risk work. And there are one or two people in the field who are blathering idiots like this who keep on talking about pie-in-the-sky visions they have for how things should work ... and they contribute nothing. Meeting after meeting, they provide the same drivel without doing any work, rehashing old ideas. Sure, they have entertainment value, but given the level of commitment and intensity to success that others have in the field, they are an unnecessary distraction and serve only to dilute the efforts, not build upon them.

  • This is great work (Score:3)

    by Skarjak ( 3492305 ) on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @09:42AM (#48754061)
    When they're done with this, I hope they start investigating the very serious problem of the monster under my bed.

  • deep thoughts... (Score:3)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Wednesday January 07, 2015 @03:31PM (#48758351)

    necessary

    We have a general rule about life: anything that eats must also shit. As this entity wanders the galaxy in search of our sun it will leave a trail for us to follow. We will be able to track the brownian motion of this trail with our new b-ray telescopes. Our best defence may be to ship all of our stored airborn pollutants to a point between the entity and our star. The sun will appear so dim that the entity will choose another victim.

    alternately

    We already know of such a star eating phenomenon: black holes. We shouldn't jump to the conclusion that they are alive, much less intelligent, but hey nobody messes with them so they must be pretty smart. Fortunately they don't seem to be too mobile so they won't come to us. But they might expand and suck us in...

    conversely

    A mini hole, smaller than a donut hole, with the mass of a Wolf-Rayet star that mercilessly sucks in anything in its path as it dances around the universe. So small as to be invisible to our instruments, so massive that it warps space time making it even harder to detect. Intelligence? It's just a mindless bully bent on destruction. No smarter than that punk kid dealing drugs on your corner.

    obversely

    We know that virii can survive extreme heat, cold and even outer space. Even the corrupt environment of your body can host one or more virii. Who's to say the sun is immune? A cozy warm environment with no discernible bacterial competition and a virus could have its way with our sweet sun.

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