David Kipping

So you could follow the prime number sequence of these.

And so there'd be a clear indication that someone had manufactured those, but they don't require any energy source because they're just sheets of material in front of the stars.

They would eventually degrade from micrometeorites, and maybe their orbits would become destabilized, but they should have lifetimes far exceeding the lifetime of any battery or mechanical electronic system that we could, at least without technology, conceive of building.

And so you can imagine then extending that, and how could you...

encode not just a prime number sequence, but maybe in the spatial pattern of this very complex light curve we see, you could encode more and more information through 2D shapes and the way those quotations happen.

And maybe you could even encode messages and in-depth information.

You could even imagine it being like a

a lower layer of information, which is just the prime number sequence.

But then you look closely and you see the smaller divots embedded within those that have a deeper layer of information to extract.

And so to me, something like that would be pretty compelling.

Unless it's just a very impressive hoax, that would be a pretty compelling evidence for this civilization.

Yeah.

I mean, to some degree, it's just building bigger aperture in space.

The bigger the telescope, the finer ability to detect those minute signals.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, there's 200,000 stars that Kepler monitored and it monitored them all the time.

It took a photo of each one of them every 30 minutes, measured their brightness, and it did that for four and a half years.

And so you have already, and Tess is doing it right now, another mission.

And so you have already an existing catalog and people are genuinely scouring through each of those light curves with automated machine learning techniques.

We even developed some in our own team.