tabby's horror.

Tabby's horror.

         Tabby's star, (kic8462852) made the news in 2015. A star whose brightness could drop by more than a fifth needed explaining. The idea of a Dyson swarm was suggested and dismissed. Other explanations were offered to try to explain what was observed.

         This is my guess as to what's happening with tabby's star. Nothing! Tabby's star is just the plain boring star that people thought it was before it started eclipsing.
         But. In the cold dark radiation-soaked waste of interstellar space there is the broken wreck of a massive space ship; tumbling and falling and spinning as it travels a line from there to here. It is already more here than there. It eclipses the star when the earth is in a position to see it and the ships long axis is in just the right place, otherwise, it's undetected and undetectable, because it is as cold and dead as any one of the hundreds of frozen corpses dismembered body parts and shattered ship bits that form a halo around it.
         The ship itself is small, a few kilometers in circumference, and about three times as long. Barely enough to hold the entire population of a desperate civilization. It is made of hundreds of vast cargo holds of all shapes and sizes, loosely fastened together.
         Taking a closer look at one of these broken holds. And the tangled mass corpses block the hole. their twisted appendages, contorted by the horror of their deaths. They each of them have the same injury, their throats or what passes for their throats have been cut, and the sliced ends of their bloodedness pulled out and left exposed.
Looking at the hold itself, it could never have been pressurized. It probably only served to keep the meat together and to stop it from being spoiled by the warmth of the sun/starlight before they set off.

         I can Imagen sentient creatures, naked and afraid, huddled in a cold room. Breathing pure oxygen at reduced pressure. Such that they become dehydrated as well as hypothermic. Easily lead.
         When there are completely docile. They are lead to their slaughter. passing through a series of airlocks. First, they are suffocated with a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gasses. The carbon dioxide causes them to panic. Causing them to gasp at the air. Air that offers them no relief. The hydrogen sulfide poisons the ability of their cells to process oxygen. The result is total cell death.
          Their lifeless corpses are thrown into another airlock so that the valuable gasses can be sucked back out of them. At the same time two quick slashes to the upper thorax. One horizontal, one vertical, a hook is shoved in to rip out the major vessels. Black blood; frothing as it congeals, as it freezes, as it boils, in the now hard vacuum. open the airlock and dump the meat in the hold.

         At some point as it falls towards us the light and warmth from the sun will cause the ship to briefly become active. Course corrections will be calculated and made, then it will go dark, dead again. And if we are lucky this course correction will mean that it picks up a gravity assist and is accelerated on to its next star. Just as happened at tabby's star! Otherwise, it will use gravitational or atmospheric braking to throw it into a long elliptical orbit.

         Four billion tortured desperate souls, coming to stay. With no option but to keep coming. Four billion souls desperate enough to throw their corpses into interstellar space. To face the torture of their death and the unimaginable agonies of the revival process. To be brought back to starvation, with nothing to eat but the dead flesh of their brethren who failed to be revived. Four billion!

         Please when you criticize this pick the one or two points that most distract from a clear understanding! The idea is for me to get better at expressing myself in writing! The lack of detail about the aliens was deliberate, they are as you imagine them!

Next week a philosophical musing entitled.
All mathematicians lie