Another Idea on the barnacles origin
Sit down, this is gonna take a while.
First of all, this is all built on the assumption, that the barnacles are alien space probes of some sort. Maybe they're not, but they might aswell be.
If humans build space probes, they mark them with all kinds of symbols and stuff, so why wouldn't other civilisations do the same? Humans don't just plant pictures of earth on their probes, but also mission specific stuff, like the mission target. For example, take a look at the mission logos of Apollo 16 or the Mars Science Laboratory (aka the Curiosity Rover), displaying the Moon and the Mars:
This leaves me considering, what if the symbols on the barnacles don't depict their origin, but rather their destination? Furthermore, if the (hypothetical) creators of the barnacles printed the Pleiades Nebula on them (their obvious destination, because that's where we found them), they would print it how it looks from their point of view. I spent some time staring at the Pleiades Nebula in the ingame Galaxy Map from different angles, and it somehow resembles the shape of the barnacles' symbols if you look at it from the approximate direction of the California Nebula (you need a bit of fantasy though, but this is as close as it gets):
What makes this interesting, is that the California Nebula, the Pleiades Nebula, and the bubble form an approximate line, with the Pleiades lying between the California Nebula and the bubble.
If there was indeed an alien civilisation living in the California Nebula, or any nebula, and they were looking for other intelligent life, where would they logically expect to find it? In other nebulas. Therefore, an alien civilisation living in the California Nebula receiving human signals, unaware of the existence of the bubble, might expect the signals to come from the Pleiades Nebula. Thus, thats where they'd send their probes.
Additionally, the unknown artefacts are known to align themselves pointing towards Merope, in the Pleiades Nebula, forming a shell around it with a radius of about 130 to 150 lightyears. They are also known to scan ships, and they used to be scanning stations and celestial objects, which makes them look like some sort of surveilance tool for monitoring activity in the Pleiades Nebula, suggesting that they too are probes sent by an alien civilisation searching for intelligent life.
There's a lot of player activity in the Pleiades Nebula, since the barnacles showed up, and we've even built a station in the Maia system, so if any alien civilisation looking for intelligent life was indeed monitoring the region, they would have probably noticed us beeing there and they would either try to establish contact soon, or choose to ignore us for whatever reason. Maybe they would even ignore us, because they'd consider us too violent to contact us, since we've been shooting the barnacles and abducting the unknown artefacts, but there's not much else to do with them, so who could blame us.
Anyway, if theres any truth to this theory, I see two options for further procedure: Wait for the aliens to contact us, which might never happen, or ivestigate the California Nebula for signs of civilisation.
So, has anyone, by any chance, found anything interesting in the California nebula?
for sure anything you do find first will have been well earnt.
