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Science From your kid's science project to relativity, this is the place to discuss it. |
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#1
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![]() Here's an interesting project in the works: http://www.breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/1
A massive multi-tiered and multi-faceted search for any kind of indication of intelligent life in the nearest one million stars in our galaxy as well as the 100 nearest galaxies. I suppose it's a sign of the times that it isn't set up by any official space agency, university or any kind of academic entity but simply by a single billionaire (a Russian called Yuri Milner) although it's backed by very prominent scientists (Drake, Hawking, Witten, Rees, etc.). The outcome of this will be quite significant whether its result is positive or negative. If it's positive the consequences speak for themselves but almost as interesting would be a negative outcome. In that case the upper limit for the probability of intelligent life elsewhere will become very, very low, which means that either there isn't anyone out there, or only very, very rarely or that technological societies have very, very short livespans in an astronomical context. FWIW, my money is on the latter given the behaviour of the single known data point. Some might argue that we don't actually know what to look for or that we have no way of recognizing very different activities of intelligent life to our own but that argument ignores that the physics are the same everywhere, that the mathematics are the same and that the chemical composition of the environment is roughly the same everywhere whether you're a uppity biped or a five-headed lobster. Only ten years before we will know the outcome of the investigation. Mark your calendars ![]() |
#2
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__________________
Remember what the dormouse said: Feed your head! |
#3
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"The Sun is the closest star to Earth, about 93 million miles away. The Sun’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is actually a triple-star system —three stars bound together by gravity. Alpha Centauri A and B are two bright, closely orbiting stars with a distant, dim companion, Proxima Centauri. The binary appears to the unaided eye as a single star, the third brightest in the night sky, but it lies 4.37 light years from the Sun — Proxima Centauri claims the honor of being our true nearest neighbor at only 4.24 light years away."http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/far-closest-star/ |
#4
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![]() So in 10 years there'll definitely be some big news, whether the outcome is positive or negative?
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#5
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![]() Seti is a part of this. Several directors and researchers of SETI are on the board (if you can call it that) of this project. SETI was always limited in what it could do because it uses data from the Arecibo observatory which is all but fixed in position (see picture) and thus can only observe a rather narrow band of the sky. It's also limited by computational power which is why Seti@home was devised.
Anecdote: I used to run the Seti@Home client on any computer I could get my hands on including the servers of the companies and organizations I worked for ![]() ![]() ![]() |
#6
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![]() I suspect that if it fails to find anything, in 10 or 15 years from now, we will have SETI v3. That being said, finding some radiological trace of some alien civilization that went extinct a few million years ago doesn't seem all that interesting or useful. ![]()
__________________
Remember what the dormouse said: Feed your head! |
#7
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__________________
"It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize." Theodore Roosevelt |
#8
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Apart from answering the age old fundamental question of whether we're alone in the universe, nah, not really. |
#9
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Yes, many people do crave certainty. I think the probability math is pretty solid on this one. If there is anything is this universe that truly approximates the idea of infinity, it is the universe itself. If life could develop here according to seemingly random elements combined with particular conditions, then statistically, it is very likely that it will have happened somewhere else as well. Maybe not people per se, but certainly lots of fungus and algae and bacterial lifeforms have to be out there.
__________________
Remember what the dormouse said: Feed your head! |
#10
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![]() We had pretty thoroughly proven the Higgs Boson on paper. Should we have not gone looking for it?
__________________
"It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize." Theodore Roosevelt |
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