I've found the discussion and speculation around Tabby's Star intriguing. This is the one where a near-steady ~ 0.3 - 2% dimming per year is being observed, with intermittent, near instantaneous 1%-22% dips in brightness being observed anywhere from a month to a couple years apart. Many theories have been posed and many debunked. My favorite theory / debunk combination is that there is a vessel approaching us from Tabby's star; however the parallax as observed across the span of Earth's orbit would show the "vessel" only intermittently occluding the Tabby's Star's disk as seen from Earth. (Or otherwise we have to imagine an "impossibly" sized vessel, but more realistically perhaps one leaving a very largely expanding trail of exhaust behind it, especially since the effects would be cumulative along a straight-line path towards us . . . )
So I decided to imagine another theory that i've since seen only a little discussion of - that of a large amount of interstellar traffic - e.g. commercial traffic, between two stars whose joining pathway occludes our observation cone to Tabby's star. Unfortuntely I don't have a map of the stars in our view to Tabby's Star (i e in the constellation Cygnus or its neighbors) to be able to propose which two stars could be playing that role. Or perhaps Tabby's Star itself is one terminus to that path (or even a central, i.e. transhipment, hub to many stars?) .
The traffic could simply be so voluminous in nature (or emit sufficient exhaust as in the "approaching vessel" case) as to measurably occlude the light from Tabby's Star. The steady increase in dimming could be attributed to the same kind of typically steadily increasing growth rate of economic flows that we see in simple commerce here on Earth. Intermittent significant dips could be due to whatever the interstellar equivalent is of the odd freight train passing through, as contrasted with the more frequent small truck in this analogy.
What criteria to propose to debunk this theory?
