Arch2008

Airbrush-Except that "Rare Earth" would have to be the understatement of the century. "Snow-flake Earth" would be more apt, as no two snow-flakes are supposedly exactly alike. Hundreds of thousands of galaxies with billions of stars and no one is available to open a hailing frequency. It's possible. Or we could be the first intelligent species. So why is intelligent life nearly singular in its apparent occurance? http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8479 This is a snippet of an article that argues that life, like everything else, must happen for a scientific reason. If this is the case, then life should be lots of places that meet the criteria. On Earth, we've had several candidate species that could use tools, the precursor to technology, so perhaps intelligence is not special either. So, where are the others? Perhaps, the most intelligent members of any advanced species eventually create technology that the most foolish of their species misuse to destroy themselves.

As I already posted, each star is a source of energy. Any material orbiting a star can be used to make Bernal spere-type habitats and Dyson rings/spheres. So every star would be colonized. That's what a Type III civ does. An interstellar ship that is a microcosm could travel anywhere. Stars are occassionally ejected from galaxies, so there would be stars between galaxies. These would form an archepelago of colonies linking the galactic hubs together. Also, traveling near the speed of light, the crew would not experience the passage of millions of years due to time dilation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernal_sphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation Not everyone in this culture would have to do the colonizing. Even a small fraction of explorer types would account for trillions of beings. Von Neumann probes could get everything up and running at the destination so that the travelers would essentually arrive and move in. It would be just like home. We are already predicting that it is possible to "correct" our Genome so that our ancesters would never grow old and die. So a trip of a million years would not mean much to a species that has already done this. Materials held together by the Strong nuclear force with computer chips the size of molecules embedded into them, might last forever. When you put the pieces together, it is very hard to explain how no species in half a million galaxies has been able to do this.

I can't tell you how a culture a million years more advanced would travel through space. However, the physics we understand says that you cannot travel at 7/6 c, but that there is no scientific reason that you can't travel at 1/6 c. That's all that I am saying. They would have the energy of all the stars in their home galaxy at their disposal. We're talking googolplex-joules. Either there is some unknown reason that makes interstellar travel impossible, or I am quite cretain that they would figure it out.

FYI my earlier post, it's actually more like five hundred thousand galaxies, not fifty thousand. It's unlikely that we live in some kind of an experiment or a simulation, so either the universe is much more dangerous than we can imagine (SNs and GRB's) or technology is a one-way trip to extinction.

Again, Copernicanism is scientific fact versus conjecture. There is no scientific reason that they could not travel at 1/6 c, or 5/6 c for that matter. This would be a pan-galactic culture that is probably a million years into the space colonization business by the time they start seeding near-by galaxies. Von Neumann probes could pave the way so that the "seed" ships would arrive with the colonists ready to move into the finished Dyson rings. What might we do in three billion years? As for round trips or two-way communication, my ancestors never went back to Europe and e-mails to Alpha Centauri would take many years for an answer. So I guess we'll just have to forget about space colonization? These would be explorers. Anything that can be organized, can be done. Why should aliens come here just to do a few anal probes and then go back home or only send us a message in cryptic galactican? Either an advanced civilization actually colonizes as much as possible in order to increase their survival chances, or they end up huddled around a single dying White Dwarf Star for eternity. So, where are they?

There are something like 50,000 galaxies within half a billion light years of us (approximately five quadrillion stars). If interstellar travel is possible at even a fraction of the speed of light by spaceships that are essentually enclosed microcosms, then a technologically advanced civilization that evolved over the first few billion years of the universe could have easily colonized that entire volume by now. (Galaxies were created after about 500 million years, allowing 10 billion years for one single, advanced, space-faring civilization to evolve anywhere and 3 billion years for them to colonize the 50,000 galaxies with simple, exponential growth cycles). Colonization would not mean looking for any specific type of planet. A star is a useful and practical source of energy and any material orbiting a star would be used to construct more microcosms around it (Bernal Spheres, etc.). Thus, every star would be colonized. So you wouldn't need radios or laser detectors (BTW, SETI Australia is using laser detection) to listen in to their messages, because they would/should be right here in our solar system where they would have been living on their Dyson ring for the past several million years. Further, a civilization that chose to stay only around its original star would eventually be doomed to a supernova or a GRB, so advanced civilizations must expand or die out completely. This is the reasoning behind the FP. This Type IV civilization is the subject in, "Where are they?"

Unfortunately, not yet Martin. We're having a lot of electrical storms in Ohio today. Maybe tomorrow. Spoke too soon. I have found this. Apparently HD16760 b is one of the Habitable Zone alumni of Exoplanets. http://www.planetarybiology.com/hz_candidates/ If you click the "Home" link in the upper left corner of the page, this seems to be a really interesting site.

FYI, four more exoplanets were posted today. Again, these seem to have been found without the aid of Kepler. http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/atlas/atlas_search.cfm?&Sort=DiscDate&SortDir=DESC

Well I haven't read it all yet, but it seems that he is attempting to separate philosophical belief from scientific observation. That is what Copernicanism is all about, really. People who insist that there must be ETI need to find a way to prove it and not just pen into the edges of the map of the universe that "Thar be intelligent aliens!". In a more desparate sense, for some people SETI is actually a search for extraterrestrial mentors. They don't see much hope for hairless apes with nuclear arsenals or the ability to destroy the environment. Imagine nineteen terrorists had crashed five spaceliners into the Earth at 90% of the speed of light (good-bye civilization). If greater technology really means that a small group can now do incredible harm, then it would be advantageous to find someone else to tell us how to get by this point in our history (the "been there, done that" factor). The most important transmission for SETI to receive is simply that some species, somewhere made it. So the interstellar silence has a gnawing OMG factor that cannot be ignored.

You are most welcome, Martin. I usually check the Planetquest site, so you can imagine my surprise at the addition of so many planets on one day. I thought that they might have been discovered by the Kepler mission, but apparently not. I found one paper from the discovering team of some of the planets and they didn’t mention Kepler. http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/0906.1804 (Which Widdekind may find interesting) As you may have noticed, BD20 2457 b and c are quite large. They are arguably brown dwarfs and not planets at all. I suppose that they are large enough to have caused a “wobble” in their parent star.

Well I am certainly not an expert, but I’ll do my best to get the discussion started. Secondary planets refer to planets formed by the debris of a stellar explosion. http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8291 The first planets are blasted to rubble and the debris that does not reach escape velocity from the resulting neutron star forms a disk. This dusty disk can coalesce into secondary planets as seems to be the case with the planetary system of PSR 1257. So are debris disks formed when a star evolves to white dwarf stage? http://eis.jpl.nasa.gov/planetquest/TPF-I/evolutionCosmicRecycling.cfm “Recently, the Spitzer Space Telescope had detected infrared excess emission from about 15 to 20% of old white dwarf stars near the Sun (Reach et al. 2006; Mullally et al. 2006). This emission indicates the presence of debris disks consisting of mostly large-solid particles that have resisted being dragged into the central white dwarf by the Poynting-Robertson drag for the age of the white dwarf. Such debris disks surrounding aging white dwarfs may trace the remnants of planetary systems that were destroyed during the post-main-sequence red-giant phase of their parent stars.” One could argue that such disks might also merge through collisions into secondary planets. A recent article in Astronomy magazine discusses such a possibility. These planets would supposedly be carbon rich worlds like Titan. However, I know of no evidence that such secondary planets have actually been discovered. (My 100th post, woohoo!)

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/atlas/atlas_search.cfm?&Sort=DiscDate&SortDir=DESC FYI, five new exoplanets were posted today, for a total of 19 so far this year.

This should clarify some questions that have been posted. http://www.seti.org/Page.aspx?pid=558#a1 Ragbir Bhathal is looking for possible ET signals from lasers as part of the Australian search effort, but the SETI in the U.S. is not yet. The original effort was formed on the premise that an ETI would want to be heard. Hopefully, their engineers would know as we do that the EM spectrum is quite noisy and they would also know that the band around the range 1,000 MHz to 3,000 MHz, with a frequency resolution of 1 Hz is relatively quiet and would be the best candidate for sending a signal. Any accidental signals from their entertainment/information industry would be too weak for most receivers, as would our own. Only after the intended signal was discovered, could funding for an antenna array to actually receive intelligible discourse be constructed. So right now we would only be able to receive a “Wow” type repeating beep, not an actual message. Intelligent observation is what science is all about. NASA is looking for signs of life on Mars and SETI is looking for signs of technological life somewhere else in our galaxy. Just as there were parameters set on what NASA would look for on Mars, so the Drake equation sets parameters on what might be pertinent to SETI’s search. That said, our species has been around for about two hundred millennia and two hundred millennia from now we could easily have colonized the entire galaxy. The Milky Way formed billions of years ago, and yet there is not one single pan-galactic ETI, because their Dyson Sphere would be right here. “Wow” My Drake equation still yields one.

Besides, it will be another 1201 years before the world will most likely end. The year will then be 3-2-1-0…

As a consequence of this refinement to the Hubble constant, the derivation of what dark energy might be improves as well: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/hstimg_ngc3021.html

“The physicists do belief that this phenomenon can only be explained if the satellites were created a long time ago through collisions between younger galaxies.” Think of the dark matter ‘cloud’ around a galaxy as a motor vehicle and the galaxy itself as a passenger. When two galaxies collide, then the galaxies themselves get ejected and the dark matter cloud is separated. There was an image of such an empty area of deep space that lensed background stars by its gravity, like DM would. So Professor Kroupa and his colleagues ‘believe’ that the 11 dwarf galaxies they studied are such galaxies formed by collisions that have no DM. The contradiction is that these dwarf galaxies spin rapidly as though they did have DM. However, galaxies can also form directly from a cloud of gas and so would not lose their DM in any collision mergers. If the scenario one describes creates a contradiction, then most likely this is because it is based on a belief. http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html http://www.uslhc.us/LHC_Science/Questions_for_the_Universe/Dark_Matter

Thanks Martin. This outdoes the earlier 12.8 billion year old GRB discovery. Swift is an amazing tool. I can hardly wait for Kepler to start discovering planets.

Swift satellite has imaged the oldest object in the universe: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/cosmic_record.html

Here’s a sort of minute by minute account of what Kepler has found so far: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/keplerMission.cfm I’m sure that we are going to get some numbers up fairly soon. It's kind of a 'watched pot' that is really going to boil.

This was reported in "The Sun": http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2133475.ece and the German magazine "Bild". Not exactly an overwhelming argument. Perhaps they are just trying to drum up support for the $50 billion dollar manned mission to Mars. If Mars were littlered with diamonds it still wouldn't be worth it to go there. But bringing back a billion microbes that would weigh less than a postage stamp might make sense. They could be studied at the ISS and never threaten the Earth with an Andromeda strain.

This year is the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009). Here is a list of some of the upcoming events: http://www.astronomy2009.org/ I can hardly wait!

http://space.about.com/cs/employment/ht/becomeastronaut.htm Send yourself into space. See your future, be your future.

It's like reading a great crime novel and seeing the threads of evidence come together.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20081106/sc_space/mysteriousdarkmattermightactuallyglow “A new computer simulation of the evolution of a galaxy like our Milky Way suggests it might be possible to observe high-energy gamma-rays given off by dark matter.” This seems to be what the computer models had predicted. Marcus and I discussed this at http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=36258 Curious, that White’s prediction wasn’t mentioned by Atkinson in her report. It would be interesting to see if the source is toward the center of the galaxy, as White also predicts.

Here's a link to the IR image of HR 8799 b,c and d. http://oklo.org/