Posthuman Blues

Radio Burst Flags Celestial Oddity

An odd radio burst that seems to signal a previously undiscovered astrophysical phenomenon is now on the scene. Culled out of archival data gathered from the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the burst may signal something exotic indeed, the last stages of the evaporation of a black hole. Another candidate: A collision between two neutron stars.

Sometimes I wonder if some of the "odd bursts" emanating from deep space could be inadvertent ET signals spawned by megascale industrial processes. Like Michio Kaku, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we could be essentially blind to the activities of any sufficiently advanced extrasolar intelligence.