tech geeks Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence

[W_L]

I am surprised no one has started this topic yet.

 

The reason why many people venture out or keep a telescope or radio dish aimed at the stars isn't just to find strange new world alones, we also seek "new Civilizations", which would prompt the boldly go where no man has gone before line

 

Astronomy and Space explorations serves this fundamental purpose of seeking out "alien" life, perhaps its exo-biology and search for life on Mars, Titan, or Europa. Maybe, it's SETI and listening in to radio signals for alien broadcasts.

 

It's also a controversial topic, some claim it would remove the uniqueness of human species if we find other alien life forms beyond our little blue orb among the billions of planets in the universe. Some fear it would pollute humanity to non-terran cultures and beliefs.

 

Still, as the first poll of GA's Tech forum, I'd like to ask readers and writers alike, what are your opinions of this search for life and intelligent life at that.

 

Recently NBC brought this up as a news story for the manned mission to Mars,,is the risk of exploration for this cause worth its implications to humanity?

 

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/debate-heats-over-search-life-mars-ncna800376

 

If we find martian microbes, what will change on earth? Is that discovery worth endangering life?

 

Also, the bigger question, after searching for so long, why haven't we found anything or anyone found us?

 

I share a similar view to Carl Sagan, we're not ready yet for contact or joining a larger galactic community. We are still too young and self-destructive as evident by recent social, political, and religious issues to be able to accept a larger universe of potential. In time, if we don't blow ourselves up, we may become a species worth a conversation, some of us are already there, but it will take generations for that to be a norm if at all.

 

 

[Drew Espinosa]

WL, thank you for starting this topic!  

 

51 minutes ago, W_L said:

Also, the bigger question, after searching for so long, why haven't we found anything or anyone found us?

The search hasn't been for "so long." I mean, on the geological scale, we humans are still the new kids on the block.

 

Radio signals travel at the speed of light, and since we've only had the technology to transmit those signals for only the last hundred years or so, ours have only travel 100 light years from earth, which sounds like a lot, but our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so in the grand scheme of things the distance covered by our transmissions is pretty small. 

[W_L]

23 minutes ago, Drew Espinosa said:

WL, thank you for starting this topic!  

 

The search hasn't been for "so long." I mean, on the geological scale, we humans are still the new kids on the block.

 

Radio signals travel at the speed of light, and since we've only had the technology to transmit those signals for only the last hundred years or so, ours have only travel 100 light years from earth, which sounds like a lot, but our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so in the grand scheme of things the distance covered by our transmissions is pretty small. 

 

True, but if we estimate the time of life forming on earth and the time that the universe has existed, wouldn't you think someone out there has already heard us and think, "Nah, too primitive."

 

Of course if you believe in UFO guys, they moved from "too primitive to speak" to "let's have some fun probings" Now if that's true, does that mean intelligence is gay sex are linked

[William King]

I loved that film ...

 

[JamesSavik]

The Alien Observatory --“Extinction is the Cosmic Default for Most Life That Has Emerged in the Universe" (WATCH Video)

September 26, 2017

Daily Galaxy

 

 

Something Enrico Fermi overlooked: scientists from the Australian National University’s Research School of Earth Sciences think the reason we haven’t found signs of advanced technological life might be because all the aliens went extinct. “Extinction is the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged,” the authors of the study write.

In a 2016 study published in the journal Astrobiology, Aditya Chopra and his colleagues do a good job detailing something already well established but not necessarily articulated enough among the scientific community at large: the window is too short to allow that life to evolve fast enough where they can survive in the long run.

 

"The universe is probably filled with habitable planets, so many scientists think it should be teeming with aliens," said Dr Aditya Chopra from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences and lead author on the paper, which is published in Astrobiology. "Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive. Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable."

About four billion years ago Earth, Venus and Mars may have all been habitable. However, a billion years or so after formation, Venus turned into a hothouse and Mars froze into an icebox.

 

 

Early microbial life on Venus and Mars, if there was any, failed to stabilize the rapidly changing environment, said co-author Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver from the ANU Planetary Science Institute.

"Life on Earth probably played a leading role in stabilizing the planet's climate," he said. The ESO image above is an artist's impression of Mars some 4 billion years ago with it's northern ocean.

"The mystery of why we haven't yet found signs of aliens may have less to do with the likelihood of the origin of life or intelligence and have more to do with the rarity of the rapid emergence of biological regulation of feedback cycles on planetary surfaces," Chopra said.

Wet, rocky planets, with the ingredients and energy sources required for life seem to be ubiquitous, however, as physicist Enrico Fermi pointed out in 1950, no signs of surviving extra-terrestrial life have been found.

A plausible solution to Fermi's paradox, say the researchers, is near universal early extinction, which they have named the Gaian Bottleneck.

"One intriguing prediction of the Gaian Bottleneck model is that the vast majority of fossils in the universe will be from extinct microbial life, not from multicellular species such as dinosaurs or humanoids that take billions of years to evolve," said Associate Professor Lineweaver.

 A copy of the paper can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/gaianbottleneck.

The Daily Galaxy via Australian National University

[Brayon]

"Imagine yourself standing in your living room, and it's the entirety of the universe. Over on the pillow on the couch, is a button. That button is our local group of 140 galaxies. On the very edge is our galaxy, and on a fraction of a thread, a piece of lint really, is Earth. You're going to tell me, in all this *motions around the room* we're the ONLY life there is?" - Me in my College Speech class.

 

Yes, I believe life is out there, and I do believe we've been visited before. I'm not some conspiracy, tinfoil hat person, but that is my belief.

[JamesSavik]

 

[W_L]

On 10/1/2017 at 10:20 AM, jamessavik said:

 

 

So in the grand scheme of things, we're like 3 years old and the rest of the universe are teenagers and adults.

 

Dang, no wonder no one answers our calls from the Seasme Street toy phones

[JamesSavik]

56 minutes ago, W_L said:

 

So in the grand scheme of things, we're like 3 years old and the rest of the universe are teenagers and adults.

 

Dang, no wonder no one answers our calls from the Seasme Street toy phones

 

Or have been long dead since Sparta was was top dog in Greece or Rome was in her heyday. 

 

Extinction is the Cosmic default. We're talking about billions of years of time and humanity has really only been civilized for a few thousand years,

[W_L]

16 minutes ago, jamessavik said:

 

Or have been long dead since Sparta was was top dog in Greece or Rome was in her heyday. 

 

Extinction is the Cosmic default. We're talking about billions of years of time and humanity has really only been civilized for a few thousand years,

 

Or they've evolved into Godlike entities aka Babylon 5 Vorlons, or Spider creatures Shadows

 

 

So James, who do you serve among the godlike elder races?

 

After several billion years, I'd imagine they'd figure out ways to build wormholes, utilize singularities as energy generators, and communicate on a non-verbal ways, like computer code.

 

We're just too young as a species for them to communicate or share technology with, imagine an adult trying to talk to a toddler offering candy, the interstellar community probably wouldn't like that.

[JamesSavik]

Morden was a putz.

 

If I had been working for the Shadows, we would have stuffed those nauseating Vorlons into a convenient black hole.

 

 

[W_L]

If you want to measure human achievement to that of advanced species among the stars:

 

 

[JamesSavik]

 

Astronomers Hunt for Oldest Stars in Our Solar Neighborhood --"May Harbor Planets with Ancient Civilizations"

November 20, 2017

 Source Link: Daily Galaxy

 

"Finding old stars could also lead to the discovery of new planets. Maybe we can find some ancient civilizations around these old stars," said Dr. Wei-Chun Jao, lead author of a new study and research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Georgia State. "Maybe these stars have some planets around them that we don't know about."

The Milky Way is nearly 14 billion years old, and its oldest stars developed in the early stage of the galaxy's formation, making them about six to nine billion years old. They're found in the halo, a roughly spherical component of the galaxy that formed first, in which old stars move in orbits that are highly elongated and tilted. Younger stars in the Milky Way rotate together along the galaxy's disc in roughly circular orbits, much like horses on a merry-go-round.

Just like humans, stars have a life span: birth, youth, adulthood, senior and death. This study focused on old or "senior citizen" stars, also known as cool subdwarfs, that are much older and cooler in temperature than the sun.

In a new study, published in the November 2017 edition of The Astronomical Journal, astronomers conducted a census of our solar neighborhood to identify how many young, adult and old stars are present. They targeted stars out to a distance of 200 light years, which is relatively nearby considering the galaxy is more than 100,000 light years across. A light year is how far light can travel in one year. This is farther than the traditional horizon for the region of space that is referred to as "the solar neighborhood," which is about 80 light years in radius.

"The reason my horizon is more distant is that there are not a lot of senior citizens (old stars) in our solar neighborhood," said Jao. "There are plenty of adult stars in our solar neighborhood, but there's not a lot of senior citizens, so we have to reach farther away in the galaxy to find them."

The astronomers first observed the stars over many years with the 0.9 meter telescope at the United State's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. They used a technique called astrometry to measure the stars' positions and were able to determine the stars' motions across the sky, their distances and whether or not each star had a hidden companion orbiting it.

The team's work increased the known population of old stars in our solar neighborhood by 25 percent. Among the new subdwarfs, the researchers discovered two old binary stars, even though older stars are typically found to be alone, rather than in pairs.

"I identified two new possible double stars, called binaries," Jao said. "It's rare for senior citizens to have companions. Old folks tend to live by themselves. I then used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to detect both stars in one of the binaries and measured the separation between them, which will allow us to measure their masses."

Jao also outlined two methods to identify these rare old stars. One method uses stars' locations on a fundamental map of stellar astronomy known as the Hertzsprung-Russell (H-R) diagram. This is a classic technique that places the old stars below the sequence of dwarf stars such as the sun on the H-R diagram, hence the name "subdwarfs."

The authors then took a careful look at one particular characteristic of known subdwarf stars -- how fast they move across the sky.

"Every star moves across the sky," Jao said. "They don't stay still. They move in three dimensions, with a few stars moving directly toward or away from us, but most moving tangentially across the sky. In my research, I've found that if a star has a tangential velocity faster than 200 kilometers per second, it has to be old. So, based on their movements in our galaxy, I can evaluate whether a star is an old subdwarf or not. In general, the older a star is, the faster it moves."

They applied the tangential velocity cutoff and compared stars in the subdwarf region of the H-R diagram to other existing star databases to identify an additional 29 previously unidentified old star candidates.

In 2018, results from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which is measuring accurate positions and distances for millions of stars in the Milky Way, will make finding older stars much easier for astronomers. Determining the distance of stars is now very labor intensive and requires a lot of telescope time and patience. Because the Gaia mission will provide a much larger sample size, Jao says the limited sample of subdwarfs will grow, and the rarest of these rare stars -- binary subdwarfs -- will be revealed.

The image at the top of the page is from the movie Prometheus, set in the late 21st century and centers on the crew of the spaceship Prometheus as it follows a star map discovered among the artifacts of several ancient Earth cultures. Seeking the origins of humanity, the crew arrives on a distant world and discovers a threat that could cause the extinction of the human species.

The Daily Galaxy via Georgia State University

 

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May also harbor ruins of past civs or advanced fungi with a grudge since we like mushroom gravy