Aliens? Why does every body keep saying it's aliens?
My money is on it not being aliens! It's well within range of even the none-FTL missing, none of the tech looks decidedly non-human (ok, it glows, but so does patches of the ground in the vicinity), and the only thing that at any point mentions 'alien' rather than 'ancient' is the description of the Ancient Totem which says "A statue depicting some kind of alien figure' - and that to me no more means that it's an alien site, than finding a totem of an eagle would mean that the people who lived at the site had feathers, a beak and could fly.
Anyway, time to get the crackpot theories in before the update comes out and all is revealed!:
- It covers different time periods and possibly different owners/occupiers
- The ground works originally formed a reservoir and a liquid processing/refinement facility (The evidence to suggest this is the profile of the walls, the blue liquid which has been reported seeping out of the ground in places, the way the liquid would move in the site due to the unusual movement of the moon.)
- The end product was Quirium
- Galactic hyperdrives were manufactured here
- The symbolism of the main structure is to indicate an intergalactic jump (from our galaxy - main circular area) to another galaxy (small circular area which looks a bit like a bar galaxy)
- The octagonal shape and smaller circular structure are just symbolic and don't represent a map to a specific destination
- As the supply of the blue liquid dwindled the production slowed, and the operation was cut back before finally being abandoned.
- Many years later the site was re-opened as a museum. Tours were available and you could see the site, learn what it had been for, how it worked, and what life had been like for the people who lived and worked there
- With the eventual complete loss of Quirium based drives, travel to the site stopped being viable, and it was left and eventually completely forgotten
- Over the years since, without any maintenance, time has taken it's toll and things have begun to break down. Some parts of the plant have exploded, destroying sections and damaging others, and the odd metoerite strike or two has caused further damage and knocked up dust which has settled over parts of the site, covering some of it in a thick layer and concealing the actual orginal structure
Or, kind of as above except:
- An early generation ship had arrived at the system. To their despair, the system was barren. That's what they signed up for though, they knew the risks.
- All the great effort and long journey appeared to be in vain but nevertheless they continued with their observation of the system, and noticing the unusual orbits of the second moon of the first planet and its own moon, out of curiosty they moved in for a closer observation.
- To their suprise small areas of blue could be seen on the moon, it couldn't be water could it? Not at those temperatures?
- No it wasn't water, but their spectographic analysis showed it was something even better - Liquid Oxygen.
- The Liquid Oxygen would provide them with the air the needed to breathe, and combined with hydrogen would give them water. Their hydrogen fuel supplies would never be enough to make it across the light years to another system, but there would be enough to provide them with water for generations.
- Landing their ship, they built a great reservoir to store the liquid oxygen, and then deconstructed their ship and rebuilt it into habitats and the facilities needed to process the liquid oxgen and give them their air and water.
- They thrived for generations, but ultimately it was only a moon, and the supply of liquid oxygen could not last forever. They had always tried to conserve as much as they could but leaks, accidents and meteorite strikes always took their toll.
- When the liquid oxygen began to run out they knew the inevitable would come. Knowing there was almost no hope, they built a new ship with stasis facilities, and deciding that their best hope for survival was humanity having spread further into space since they had left Earth, they set a course for Sol and set off into the long long night. They knew of course that they were almost certainly doomed and that if they died, all knowledge of them would be forgotten, so before leaving they built archives and data repositories and left them in the hope that one day they would be found and they might, even if only in the history books, in some small way, live on.
(I may have slipped over into writing a bit of a sci-fi short story in the end there rather than having a pure description of the site, but hey ho, I hope everyone enjoys the tale!)
This was my thinking, but, there are two things to remember to this: first, there are multiple lights (two?) Second, what if it's not just binary all on, all off? As I said before, my suspicion is that it seems to have too many actual brightness levels. It looks more like pulse code modulation or something else like that (presumably kept simple.)
Oh my good, it will be impossible for me to keep track of everyone of them and all the images...
Do not rely too much on fresh datas about these scans on the Front Page...
Hoping some brave CMDRs will help collecting all of them, me alone cannot for sure...
Give me two hours and you'll have a new automated database
