Littlefish

The quest for an unriggable secret ballot. Suppose we used electronic voting machines that gave a printed receipt with the selected candidate along with a twenty digit random number that would also be included on the ballot. After the election, the list of vote numbers would be published so that voters could check that their vote was credited properly. If the names of all the voters was also published then it would be very difficult to pad the record with imaginary ballots. That's my idea for accurate elections. Can you see any weaknesses? Does anybody else know of ways to bullet-proof the election system?

Bernie filled stadiums like Trump does and in a fair system he would have been the official candidate. Right now there's a choice between the two least popular contenders in history but Bernie doesn't have that problem. His weakness is exposure in a debate, hence the ruse. If they can sneak him past the debates he would be very likely to win, I believe. There are a couple of campaign anomalies that my speculation also explains. 1. Most people would agree that Hillary's universal hate meme was a major mistake, but I see it as my favorite chess move, the queen sacrifice: It looks like the queen left herself vulnerable, but when you capture her the bishop swoops in with a checkmate. 2. What did Obama say to BLM during their hours-long whitehouse meeting that made them accept Bernie's unjust defeat so gracefully? Why didn't they riot? Whatever he said worked like a charm, and when something looks too good to be true there's usually a trick involved. Either they were promised riches or a backdoor win. What else could pacify them?

Absurdity, or a masterful chess move? I wanted Trump to do that debate for the educational effect it would have on the moderate Bernie supporters. Now I suspect that turning down the debate was Trump's fatal mistake. I realize that the debate is still a few days off, but if Hillary stepped down today they'd take more than a week to resolve the crisis. But she won't do it until it causes Bernie to miss the second debate too. That's my guess.

Why did the social engineers arm Bernie Sanders with the SJWs and a numerical win over Hillary, then have him back down with so little fight? Could it be that they're planning on slipping him in at the last minute when he can avoid debating Trump? He's already avoided one debate, and if Hillary delays dropping out for a few more weeks he'll miss the second debate too. Sanders might win easily if Trump can't debate communism in front of his less radical fans. Bernie once offered Trump a debate but was turned down. Now he'll have the moral high ground when Trump makes a fuss about the lack of debate. Is that a checkmate? What move could Trump make?

I was a color-blind woman-lover until I watched too many feminist, BLM, and SJW videos. Now I see racism and sexism all around me. It's all pointing at me, a white male. I had thought that color-blind woman-loving men were the very thing that would eliminate racism and sexism, but apparently not being racist or mysogynistic is now a racist or mysogynistic act. Guilty by sex and skin color. Too bad Larry Elder didn't make Dave Rubin squirm more in that excellent video. What systemic racism? I would bet that he's said it again since then.

It turns out that Tabby's star is only 1400 light years away. That's very close and nowhere near the edge of the visible galaxy where it would most easily be interpreted as progressive dark matter. Give me time and I'll think of more arguments against this silly and unwelcome hypothesis.

Yes that study was originally debunked, but the debunkery itself has since been debunked by the big modern telescope at the Kepler Observatory which also records it fading over time. The Kepler space telescope, The Kepler Observatory's telescope, and the photoplates all show the same thing. I don't understand your remark about alien unions. What changes did they suddenly make? It seems most likely that the star has been fading in the same chaotic fashion all along. Accept the fact that the star is fading rapidly. Do you have a more likely explanation than a dyson sphere? Correction: It seems that there is no Earth based Kepler telescope, and that wikipedia's reference to data from the Kepler Observatory was actually referring to the space telescope's data. So that's the only modern telescope that has measured the fading of Tabby's star.

The wikipedia entry for Tabby's star provides details on two long term studies that both show it dimming over time. A century long study of photographic plates found that the star dimmed 19% compared to neighboring stars on the same plates. A modern 4 year study by the Kepler Observatory recorded the star dimming a few times faster. I'd like to see a hypothesis that can account for that within the framework of known physics.

A few weeks ago that was true. Now there's no longer any doubt that the star has been fading for 100+ years. None of the proposed explanations except a Dysonsphere can account for that. I'd like to hear what you think is a more likely hypothesis.

In late 2015 Tabby's star became famous for having impossibly large, cold objects orbiting it. If the profile of the largest object was a circle it would be about 2/3 the diameter of our sun, which is also the diameter of the largest class of red dwarf stars. Within months a study of photographic plates reported a gradual 19% dimming of the star from 1890 through 1989. Then someone thought to check all 4+ years of Kepler data and found that Tabby's star had dimmed 3%, with 2/3 of it occurring during a 200 day period. Kepler watched only 150 thousand stars out of 150 billion in our galaxy. That means there must be around a million stars in our galaxy currently going dark like Tabby's star. Many more fading stars must be recorded on those photo plates, and in fact the authors of the photo plate study identified other stars that appear to be fading, according to Popular Science magazine. If those special stars take 500 years to fade, as the photo plate and Kepler studies suggest, and there are currently a million fading in the galaxy, then we can estimate that 2000 stars start their fade every year. That's far more than the three luminous solar masses born in the galaxy each year. At that rate, the entire galaxy would be dark in a mere 75 million years. Unfortunately, this might not be as far fetched as it sounds. If Tabby's star completely fades away it could become indistinguishable from dark matter. The only way we would be able to detect it from a distance would be by its gravitational pull on luminous stars. While the Milky Way is currently about 83% dark matter, a galaxy the same size was recently discovered that's 99.99% dark. Are those ratios stable over time? Maybe that galaxy is a picture of what ours will look like someday. What if the darkening of galaxies is natural and our star is doomed to start fading at any moment? Fortunately, the rate of dimming of Tabby's star is far too high to be natural. Star's contain enough free photons to remain bright for many thousands (some say millions) of years even if fusion stops, and since they move about randomly the photon density of a star would remain uniform even as it cooled. Star dimming can only be slow and uniform. The only way to dim a star rapidly is to grow a mega structure around it. For that reason, Tabby's star seems to be unequivocal evidence of a super technology bottling a star. What if all the dark matter, 85% of the matter in the universe, is bottled stars! The biggest problem with the shrouded stars idea is that the stars aren't producing enough radiation for us to measure. Where's the waste heat from the 750 billion shrouded stars in our galaxy? Their energy is missing from the environment. Similarly, the objects dimming Tabby's star by at least 22% from our perspective are not emitting the infrared radiation we would expect. Where's the energy going? There's only one reasonable way to account for the missing heat that I can think of: Photoelectric panels tuned for infrared radiation could recycle waste heat as electricity. Although we can't do that yet, our technology is still young. However, the use of heat recycling technology would imply that all the radiant energy of the stars is being used or stored somehow, possibly by being converted into matter. That's a bit hard to believe. The stars in our galaxy and most others are all moving as if they were part of a much larger invisible galaxy that extends outward from the edge of the visible part in a region called the halo. That's the evidence for dark matter. We don't know the geometry of the dark matter distribution, but I picture the spiral arms being six times longer with the outer 5/6 dark. Similarly, Hubble data has recently been used to calculate a dark matter ring surrounding an entire group of galaxies. Dark matter seems to avoid the places where the highest densities of matter and radiation are found, yet it also tends to concentrate near them. If we were colonizing the galaxy we'd probably head straight to the fringes where it's safest from collisions and supernovas, and then work our way inward. Dark matter prefers the same places we would. Theory and simulation predicts that our galaxy should be orbited by hundreds of luminous dwarf galaxies but we only see eleven. The missing dwarf galaxies problem is currently unsolved, but I suspect that they actually do exist and are simply dark now. Dwarf galaxies would be the most coveted real estate in the universe. How can we prove or disprove the bottled-star hypothesis? Tabby's star seems to be a star in the process of being bottled, but until more of it disappears we won't know if it's really destined to become cold like dark matter. If Tabby's star and those other stars suspected of fading were all found to be near the edge of the visible galaxy, that would be strong circumstantial evidence that luminous matter transmutes to dark matter. The 99.99% dark matter galaxy is interesting because its few visible stars are not clustered near the core as expected but are spread-out through the entire mass. For that reason they call it a fluffy galaxy. If aliens darkened that galaxy, why did they skip those ten million stars? Could those be the ones that independently produced life? Are they the home systems of a federation or a zoo? Similarly, there are visible stars within the dark matter halo of our own galaxy. If those stars were chosen to remain visible, they may reveal a statistical anomaly by being heavy in certain types of stars. A final thought about this far-fetched scenario. If dark matter really is a great number of shrouded stars, perhaps their purpose is to convert the stars' luminous energy into dark energy, the force that pushes galaxies apart. I can understand that aliens might want to avoid the big crunch at the end of time, if it wasn't too much trouble. -------------------------------------- The most mysterious star in the galaxy https://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/47251-the-most-mysterious-star-in-the-universe/ Tabby's star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852 The fluffy galaxy http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/234672-found-a-fluffy-galaxy-made-from-99-dark-matter Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/controversy-still-brewing-over-alien-megastructure-star Dark matter ring http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/news/dark_matter_ring_feature.html Another fading star

The missing waste heat signature is a good argument against the alien mega structure hypothesis for the KIC 8462852 mystery, but only if it's assumed that the missing sunlight energy is being used within that solar system. If the structures were simple mirrors reflecting sunlight to a distant place then there would be no waste heat at the star to observe. The giant hypothetical mirrors could be part of a low-tech galactic mining program. Solar sails from many stars could be blown to a central point and reshaped into space colonies for an ever expanding population. I have an earlier post in the "Libertarianism, Anarchism and Economics" forum titled "Automation Tech - Force Majeure?" It explains why we'll have the power to launch our own galactic mining operation in a few decades and asks what our society might look like in the automation age.

Today's automation technology is capable of eliminating all the workers from industry and agriculture. No additional science is required, just a lot of engineering. John von Neumann, the famous mathematician, once called self-replicating industry "the inevitable destination of automation technology." We'll achieve it without even trying to achieve it. In 1980 NASA proposed landing a fully automated industrial seed on the Moon and having it build more seeds. In their scenario, the seed would mass 100 tons and replicate itself in one year. Since the population of seeds would double every year, lunar industrial output would surpass Earth's in less than 25 years (2^years*100tons). NASA's proposal is an obvious solution to the environmental crisis, and since orbital space colonies could be produced faster than we could fill them, automated industry would also delay the population crisis for another 1000 years. That assumes we would use one of Jupiter's giant outer moons as raw material to build colonies for a thousand trillion people. Imagine a tin can 50 miles long and 20 miles in diameter, spinning on its axis to create pseudo-gravity. Its 3,000 square miles of inner surface would be sculpted into cities, parks, lakes and wilderness areas. With a population density of only 1000 per square mile it would comfortably house three million people. Standing on the inside and looking up, the entire living surface would be spread across the sky (20 miles away), and at night the porch lights of a million homes would shine in the sky like stars. With panoramic skies, mild weather, zero-gravity play areas, and low-gravity housing for the elderly, space colonies would be popular among all age groups. Without earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, or background radiation they'd be safer than Earth. Anyway, that's the way I like to imagine the future. It's full of free stuff and endless room to form unique communities. On the downside, it requires a large investment and a significant amount of delayed gratification. The free-stuff future seems to make capitalism and communism obsolete. Without scarcity would there be any purpose for government force beyond the policing of violent crime? I imagine that without scarcity a pure democracy might be possible, so a participatory democracy might take the place of "honorable" work. It seems like this idea could be promoted to the social justice class since it solves some of their major issues, while the objectivist class may like it for the positive outlook it might generate among today's youth. Could this idea be capable of inspiring hope and uniting people behind a common cause? References: Advanced Automation for Space Missions http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19830007077.pdf Space Colony Art (no copyright but needs color enhancement) http://www.nas.nasa.gov/About/Education/SpaceSettlement/70sArt/art.html Notes: 1. NASA's study "Advanced Automation for Space Missions" is a large book that cost twelve million dollars to produce in 1980. It's still considered the most detailed study of self-replicating technology. 2. An important aspect of NASA's study is that it proposed a dumb, centralized control architecture that could not become a frankenbot nightmare. 3. The study was quietly swept under the rug. Today, only one NASA web page links to a copy of the study, not counting the ntrs index. https://www.google.ca/#q=site:nasa.gov+%22advanced+automation+for+space+missions%22 4. Included with the study is a twenty year timeline detailing the development phase. If the project had been started immediately and the timeline achieved, there would now be about 3 million tons of industry on the moon.