Re: KLR You Experienced? Err, kinda not really.
Consider this -
A society's intelligence and level of advancement can be measured by how much of its star's energy it stores and uses. To whit, the Kardashev Scale was developed to determine this measurement as follows -
Type One - A civilization that harnesses and uses all of the energy that falls on its planet from its solar system's star
Type Two - A civilization that harnesses and uses all of the energy that radiates from its solar system's star
Type Three - A civilization that harnesses and uses all of the energy created by its fucking galaxy
Earth, and us rabble on it, store and use about 1% of the sunlight that lands on our planet. So we're a long, long way off becoming a Type One civilization. And that kind of explains a lot. Interstellar space travel is still a pipe dream for us, and we still can't figure out how to fix pot holes once and for all. Space faring civilizations would need some serious rpm's to break free of the fossil-fuel confines that us humans find ourselves shackled by, and getting a load more wattage out of the parent star would go some way towards explaining how they tame the mysteries of serious interstellar road trips.
So anyway, a bunch of astronomers were doing their thing, looking up into the sky with their telescopes when they found something pretty fucked up. Apparently the way they look for solar systems with potentially habitable planets is by studying the light emitted from the system's parent star and looking for dips in the light emitted from the star - caused by a planet orbiting in front of it. These solar systems are literally thousands and thousands of light years away - they can't "see" the stars or planets but they can figure out a lot of shit about them by looking at the telemetry from these observations. Dip in light, good indicator of a planet orbiting the star.
These dips in light can be studied remarkably accurately, so I'm told. Importantly, they can also be used to ascertain the shape of the object moving in front of the star as well. A regular, spherical-shaped object (like a planet for example) leaves a very smooth signature in the telemetry.
So, back to the astronomers. They were looking at this one particular star, called KIC 8462852, and discovered that whilst the light emitted from the star was indeed dipping (indicating something moving in front of it), these dips were highly irregular in both shape and spacing. Planets were ruled out, as were comets and dust clouds - something weird was moving in front of the star, but they were hesitant to say what.
And then someone had a proposition - the astronomers had found the first recorded evidence of a Type Two civilization (a civilization that harnesses and uses all of the energy that radiates from its solar system's star), in the form of a Dyson Sphere. A Dyson Sphere is a shell or matrix constructed to enclose a star and farm all of the light emitted from it. The constructs are unfathomably huge, and constructed - hypothetically - by self-replicating robots using materials mined from nearby planets. To give an idea of scale, the smallest of the "panels" used in the sphere's construction would have an edge length one hundred times the distance between the earth and the moon, or 38 million kilometres. Not insignificant.
Therefore, if the Dyson Sphere was still under construction there would be many irregular gaps as it rotated around the star, and the telemetry we receive here on Planet Earth would translate this as irregular dips in the light emitted from the star.
It's enough to get you thinking on a Monday morning.
Anyway, I'm going to start a Dyson Sphere build thread after this. Fuck it.