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[bloop_bleep]

Probably double, triple, and quadruple check your measurements plus confer with a bunch of other experts

In this publish-or-perish environment? Not a chance.

[smjjames]

Probably double, triple, and quadruple check your measurements plus confer with a bunch of other experts

In this publish-or-perish environment? Not a chance.

Looking bad when you get found out that you made a mistake on such a major thing might be a motivation.

I also saw some stuff about how the density of them among the stars would be too low or something for one to swing by or for us to spot it, or something, also, nobody was actively looking for it, it was discovered by pure chance.

It's a 'sample size of one' problem, if you're trying to look at a population of things, one data point tells you nothing about factors outside of that one data point.

[Max™]

We've been expecting them for years and always kinda had an eye out just in case but part of the problem is we've got so many asteroid spotting systems aimed out in the disc, while the solar system is moving kinda like a thrown pie

Not that it's likely, but what would we do if we did find that it's probably artificial? Would be quite hard to actually go catch it at this point.

If we had the ability to catch it, we'd be able to just launch missions off to other stars too, think the delta-v needed was 50+ km/s or something absurd like that when we're still plunking stuff around with chemical rockets mostly.

[Egan_BW]

Yeah, but the potential of looting alien technology seems like a good excuse to build an interstellar-scale mission, no?

[bloop_bleep]

Yeah, but the potential of looting alien technology seems like a good excuse to build an interstellar-scale mission, no?

I'm not sure the aliens with access to said advanced technology would take kindly to that.

[Greiger]

Posting to watch, and just a little comment.

I like science. I consider myself more scientifically minded than the average middle class american, and can usually keep up with forum posts and the odd science magazine or casual conversation involving engineering, biology, chemistry and a bit of physics.

But leave it to bay 12 for me to skip to a few pages before the end of a thread to be up to my neck in diagrams, relativity, what I assume is theoretical physics, and the word 'in-vitro'.  I am confident if I watch this tread and read a few posts every day I might learn something. 

[wierd]

Given the shape, and since we are talking about "Maybe aliens!"--  Just dropping this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama

Maybe I am too nerdy.

(Do *I* think it is "Aliens!" ? No. Most likely not. Its very unusual shape is interesting though. It would be neat to get samples from it. Given extreme amount of time it has been in interstellar space, analysis of the surface material would reveal lots of interesting things about space weathering that could be useful for creating interstellar probes/spacecraft.)

[TD1]

PTW

[Doomblade187]

Given the shape, and since we are talking about "Maybe aliens!"--  Just dropping this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama

Maybe I am too nerdy.

(Do *I* think it is "Aliens!" ? No. Most likely not. Its very unusual shape is interesting though. It would be neat to get samples from it. Given extreme amount of time it has been in interstellar space, analysis of the surface material would reveal lots of interesting things about space weathering that could be useful for creating interstellar probes/spacecraft.)

That was an excellent book. Also, apparently the surface is red due to being exposed to just ambient space radiation and such. We could probably learn a lot from that for shipbuilding.

[kingawsume]

Yeah, but the potential of looting alien technology seems like a good excuse to build an interstellar-scale mission, no?

I'm not sure the aliens with access to said advanced technology would take kindly to that.

Hey, if it's a Type III civilization, what do they have to lose? A couple of terrajoules of energy in an infintely large universe? Technology that can be replicated in a matter of moments? Perhaps it was even meant to be "stolen;" a gift from beings of a higher existence?
The world may never^tm know...

[martinuzz]

A team of scientist from the universities of Dresden, Vienna and Heidelberg have completed sequencing the entire DNA of the axolotl.
It's already called a 'milestone in the research of regenerative tissue'.

Axolotls are capable of regrowing full limbs, complete with bones, muscles and nervous system. Axolotls kinda need that, because they have a tendency to bite off each others limbs.

It is also the largest complete DNA sequenced in the world, so far.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25458

https://newatlas.com/axolotl-genome-sequenced-regeneration/53119/

[wierd]

They also have a strange habit of turning terrestrial semi-randomly.
http://www.axolotl.org/tiger_salamander.htm

The thing that is interesting about them in terms of tissue regeneration is the formation of the blastema.  This is a structure that has some analogs to a scab in humans, however, the inter-cellular communication and coordination between fibroblasts in humans required to form a blastema, and then regenerate whole lot tissue systems (like whole arms) does not occur. Instead, the fibroblast migration and integration is chaotic and random, producing scar tissue.

There was some work done a few years ago about this, and many of the genes involved in why humans and other mammals create scar tissue instead of regenerating the way the axolotl does, are actually key tumor supressing genes that combat a variety of cancers.

This strongly suggests that the mechanisms employed by the axolotl would be very difficult to induce safely in a mammalian host.

[Il Palazzo]

They also have a strange habit of turning terrestrial semi-randomly.
http://www.axolotl.org/tiger_salamander.htm

This calls for the Axolot Song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxA0QVGVEJw

[Starver]

That's not a moon...  It's three Moons!

[Reelya]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/mutant-crayfish-clones-europe.html

This is actually an amazing read. Some home aquarium owner in Germany noticed a pet crayfish he bought overbreeding, they ended up having way too many of them and were soon giving them away to all their friends. It turns out that a mutant crayfish was born with 3 sets of chromosomes instead of two (e.g. the parents sperm or ova didn't divide properly), e.g. the kind of thing that normally happens with plants. But somehow the extra chromosomes didn't kill it, they made them grow larger than normal and pump out absolutely massive loads of eggs, which happened to also self-fertilize, due to the extra chromosome.

So the things just pump out clones like proverbial Tribbles without needing to mate, they ended up in every pet store, and of course, some idiots eventually dumped their excess crayfish into the wild, and these oversized mutant baby-pumping crayfish are now spreading across Eurasia, even to Madagascar and Japan. Technically, they're a completely new species (since they can no longer breed with the parent species), that came into existence instantly due to a copying error in one sperm or ova cell back in the 1990s. A whole new species coming into existence in a flash is something that's not uncommon in plants (e.g. some plant hybrids can breed with the same hybrid, but not the parent species), but I haven't heard of that in animals before.