Nature reports on an astronomy professor from Hawaii who thinks that aliens might have been sending us messages by manipulating the behavior of variable stars.
So, oh great Internet brain, which science fiction writers have beaten him to the punch by suggesting something similar. I’m sure that there must have been some. The idea of doing semaphore by twinkling stars is just too Space Opera to not have been done before.
Might I suggest that a civillization which can modulate solar emmisions for communication purposes is going to want to talk to us about as much as we want to talk to guinea pigs?
(-“emmisions” +”emissions” *sigh*)
Doesn’t one of Banks’s Minds send a message by deliberately occluding stars, or something…?
Chaz: That’s the sort of thing I was thinking of.
DrJon: But maybe they would do it in the hope of contacting minds equal to their own. We send out messages that a planet of guinea pigs would not understand.