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jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2734 Gender: Male |
 Posted: 20-05-2012 23:43 Post subject: |
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What if we do reach ET?
Let's face it...they're not even making a contingency plan for Greece coming out of the euro.
I'm just going to start working on the assumption that the world is a hell of a lot less well-ordered than we think. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 21-05-2012 00:06 Post subject: |
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| jimv1 wrote: | What if we do reach ET?
Let's face it...they're not even making a contingency plan for Greece coming out of the euro.
I'm just going to start working on the assumption that the world is a hell of a lot less well-ordered than we think. |
Maybe it'll turn out like BSG. The Aliens have links with Ancient Greece and make the Greeks Satraps of Earth. |
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| jimv1 Great Old One Joined: 10 Aug 2005 Total posts: 2734 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 21-05-2012 00:19 Post subject: |
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| That all turned out rushed, badly written and rather disappointing. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 21-05-2012 00:52 Post subject: |
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| jimv1 wrote: | | That all turned out rushed, badly written and rather disappointing. |
Don't be too surprised if the Cylons come for you and they won't be sending a blond. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 27-05-2012 19:13 Post subject: |
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Yeah, right, they just want to serve us...
| Quote: | Aliens don't want to eat us, says former SETI director
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-aliens-dont-seti-director.html
May 25th, 2012 in Space & Earth / Space Exploration
SETI's Alien Telescope Array (ATA) listens day and night for a signal from space. Credit: SETI
Alien life probably isn’t interested in having us for dinner, enslaving us or laying eggs in our bellies, according to a recent statement by former SETI director Jill Tarter.
(Of course, Hollywood would rather have us think otherwise.)
In a press release announcing the Institute’s science and sci-fi SETIcon event, taking place June 22 – 24 in Santa Clara, CA, Tarter — who was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the film “Contact” — disagreed with both filmmakers and Stephen Hawking over the portrayal of extraterrestrials as monsters hungry for human flesh.
“Often the aliens of science fiction say more about us than they do about themselves,” Tarter said. “While Sir Stephen Hawking warned that alien life might try to conquer or colonize Earth, I respectfully disagree. If aliens were able to visit Earth that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food, or other planets. If aliens were to come here it would be simply to explore.
“Considering the age of the universe, we probably wouldn’t be their first extraterrestrial encounter, either. We should look at movies like ‘Men in Black III,’ ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Battleship’ as great entertainment and metaphors for our own fears, but we should not consider them harbingers of alien visitation.”
Tarter, 68, recently announced her stepping down as director of SETI in order to focus on funding for the Institute, which is currently running only on private donations. Funding SETI, according to Tarter, is investing in humanity’s future.
“Think about it. If we detect a signal, we could learn about their past (because of the time their signal took to reach us) and the possibility of our future. Successful detection means that, on average, technologies last for a long time. Understanding that it is possible to find solutions to our terrestrial problems and to become a very old civilization, because someone else has managed to do just that, is hugely important! Knowing that there can be a future may motivate us to achieve it.”
On the other hand, concern that searching the sky for signs of life — as well as sending out your own — could call down hungry alien monsters would make a good case for keeping quiet. And a quiet search may not get the necessary funding to keep going. I can see where Tarter is coming from.
Let’s just hope she’s right. (About the eating part, at least.)
Source: Universe Today |
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| Anome_ Faceless Man
Great Old One Joined: 23 May 2002 Total posts: 5377 Location: Left, and to the back. Age: 45 Gender: Male |
| Posted: 27-05-2012 20:02 Post subject: |
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| ramonmercado wrote: | | Yeah, right, they just want to serve us... |
It's a cookbook!
We have enough problems working out cultural differences between nations here on Earth, I don't think we stand a chance sorting out the motivations of aliens. Assuming that they want to conquer, eat, have sex with, or just study us requires an understanding of them that I don't think we can really justify at this stage. |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
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| Jerry_B Great Old One Joined: 15 Apr 2002 Total posts: 8265 |
| Posted: 28-05-2012 12:44 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | If aliens were able to visit Earth that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food, or other planets. If aliens were to come here it would be simply to explore. |
Hmm - if human beings are anything to go by, then sophisticated technological capabilities do not necessarily exclude one group from preying on and subjugating another. The Americas would have had a much different history up to the present, for example  Space is big, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stuff one culture needs is widespread enough to not warrant taking it from some other planet.
Then again, aliens may be (and IMHO probably are) far too different from us for us to even contemplate any sort of motives, exploratory or otherwise. And the Earth may be extremely inhospitable to them - i.e. as is the case in Hal Clement's Iceworld. |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 28-05-2012 12:51 Post subject: |
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| Jerry_B wrote: | | And the Earth may be extremely inhospitable to them - i.e. as is the case in Hal Clement's Iceworld. |
Or in the case of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. |
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| Jerry_B Great Old One Joined: 15 Apr 2002 Total posts: 8265 |
| Posted: 28-05-2012 14:09 Post subject: |
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| In that story, the planet is for the greater part inhospitable to humans... |
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| Mythopoeika Boring petty conservative
Joined: 18 Sep 2001 Total posts: 9109 Location: Not far from Bedford Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 28-05-2012 14:15 Post subject: |
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| Jerry_B wrote: | | In that story, the planet is for the greater part inhospitable to humans... |
My point was that aliens may find this planet inhospitable because of its gravity. |
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| rynner2 What a Cad!
Great Old One Joined: 13 Dec 2008 Total posts: 21365 Location: Under the moon Gender: Male |
| Posted: 10-06-2012 08:38 Post subject: |
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Search for alien life hit by the recession
Once, it was just described as the 'global' recession. But now, it seems that hard times around the world may also be felt on other galaxies.
By Jacqui Goddard, Miami
7:43PM BST 09 Jun 2012
Astronomers scanning the universe for signs of extra-terrestrial activity are facing a financial crisis that threatens to stall the 52-year search for intelligent life beyond Earth.
The respected SETI Institute in California, which scours for clues to the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe, will be forced to curtail its radio telescope operations, which sweep the heavens for signals from other worlds, unless it can plug a multi-million dollar funding gap.
The institute, whose initials are an acronym of the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence", descrbes the hunt for aliens as "the most profound search in human history".
The news comes despite the institute having steered itself out of a financial black hole last year, when it was forced to shut down its sophisticated Allen Telescope Array for seven months.
This time, warns alien-hunter-in-chief Jill Tarter - the director of the institute, on whom actress Jodie Foster's character in the 1997 alien thriller movie Contact was partially based - it could be permanent. 
"It's at very great risk," she told The Sunday Telegraph. "We need to stretch what we have as far as we can, but it's imminent that we could be looking at SETI Institute no longer being able to use the very telescope we pioneered. That's a future we don't want to see,"
A convention being held in California later this month will bring together leading figures from the world of astronomy and astrobiology to discuss the future of the hunt for cosmic company and to promote SETI's work.
Guests will range from real astronauts to television astronauts, scientists to science fiction writers, examining topics including the fundamental question: 'Are we alone?' and capitalising on the heightened public interest caused by the recent release of sci-fi films such as Prometheus and Battleship.
[..SETI history..]
"There's definitely a crisis now," said Dr Tarter, who has resigned her formal position as director of the institute to save it her salary costs. She plans to continue as a fundraising figurehead to prove that the search for life off our own planet has almost infinite potential.
"If we try and size up space and say how much we have observed so far, the ratio is like taking eight ounces - a glass of water - out of the world's oceans," she said.
"If your experiment was to find if there were any fish in the ocean, and you looked at that glass and didn't see any fish, your first reaction wouldn't be 'Oh darn, there aren't any fish in the ocean.'" 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9321846/Search-for-alien-life-hit-by-the-recession.html |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 07-09-2012 11:47 Post subject: |
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Images at link. Should help popularise SETI.
| Quote: | SETI’s First Artist-in-Residence Transports Viewers to Alien Worlds
BY JAKOB SCHILLEREMAIL AUTHOR 09.06.12 6:30 AM
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/09/setis-first-artist-in-residence-transports-viewers-to-alien-worlds/
CARBON installation at the Dennos Museum, Michigan. 10- by 30-foot print.
Charles Lindsay’s gigantic, sometimes 60-foot-long, black-and-white and color prints from his CARBON photo series are enigmatically provocative. Are they high-resolution scans from an electron microscope? Manipulated images of far-off planets captured by the Hubble telescope?
The photos are actually created through a special process Linsday invented that involves spreading a carbon-based emulsion onto plastic negatives. The resulting images are then digitally scanned and printed in several ways.
It’s an approach that has yielded unusual results and stuck a strong chord with audiences, earning him not only a Guggenheim fellowship, but also the first-ever spot as an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute.
“A photograph normally suggests reality, our initial read is that its protracting something real,” says Lindsay. “But in these photos there is a lot of ambiguity and that’s one of the things that I respond to strongly in art; it’s a necessity.”
For two years now Charles Lindsay and scientists at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have been collaborating and finding new ways to mix art and science in an effort to help stretch the public’s mind about the possibilities of the world and space around us.
“Here at the SETI Institute we are trying to get people to put themselves in a different frame of reference, to step back,” says astronomer Dr. Jill Tarter, who holds the Bernard M. Oliver chair at the Institute. “And Charlie’s art encourages us to think in those terms.”
For nearly three decades the SETI Institute (Tarter points out that SETI is a verb, the SETI Institute is a noun) has been exploring the cosmos in search of other life forms. As part of their work they’ve had to ask a lot of big questions and have proposed some radically new ways of thinking about life. In the process they’ve had to try and translate that approach to a sometimes skeptical public and Tarter sees Lindsay’s work as one more way to help deliver the message.
For example, she says, even though Hollywood has created thousands of alien prototypes, probability and evolution point to the fact that they’ve only skimmed the surface of what an extraterrestrial being might actually look like.
“So far we haven’t gone very far afield,” she says. “Mostly what we’ve been doing is just projecting ourselves and our fears [onto our alien creations] and the real thing is likely to be significantly different.”
In Lindsay’s photography, Tarter says she sees a playfulness between reality and imagination that breaks out of these narrow barriers and allows us to think more freely about the nearly infinite shapes aliens might take on.
“He didn’t set out to portray alien beings but he is providing us with images that are sort of familiar but kind of not, and I think that tension is a helpful exercise in conceiving of something that is utterly different,” she says.
Lindsay says he purposely wants his work to pose questions instead of provide answers.
“Disassociate is a word that comes to mind,” he says. “In certain ways I’m trying to take you out of one world and into another.”
The ambiguous scale in Lindsay’s work also parallels space exploration’s tension between the very small and the very large. When viewers stand in front of his photographs they are often unsure of whether they are looking at something microscopic or enormous. This re-thinking of scale is important for the SETI Institute because their canvas is the universe, an unimaginably large expanse that necessitates some creativity to put into perspective.
Based on statistical equations, for example, Tarter says it is going to be difficult for our technology to detect another society. Space is so big that it makes the odds relatively small. But, on the chance that a signal is indeed detected, she says, that proves that whoever, or whatever, sent the signal had enough staying power to send it for a long enough period that it beat the odds and founds its way into our detectors.
“Unless technological societies have staying power, they are never going to be two technological civilizations close enough in space and lined up in time so that they overlap,” she says.
Tarter says she hopes these same odds might motivate us to find a way to make our technology, and our social relations, more sustainable. At the current pace she says human civilization might disappear — be it from war, ecological disaster or some kind of other global problem — before our signals and our receptors have been on long enough to have a fighting chance within the equations that currently define our view of the universe.
She hopes just the possibility of contacting another civilization — even if it doesn’t happen for another thousand years — will help us figure out a better way to live with and harness the advances we’ve already made.
“If we detect a signal it would provide us with the knowledge that there is a solution because someone else did it,” she says. “And even in the absence of the signal we want the world to get involved with the SETI Institute because it helps us internalize this cosmic perspective.”
For Lindsay, that perspective has become important during his time at the SETI Institute and in many ways represents a kind of full-circle in the evolution of his art. During his career he’s spent time in some of the most remote places on the globe, including a 10-year period where he spent several months of each year living with a stone-age tribe in Indonesia. Now, with the SETI Institute he does things like broadcasting the sounds of a Costa Rican rain forest through a NASA wind tunnel to observe its effect.
In addition to the CARBON prints, Lindsay has gone on to create entire multimedia installations that bring in sound and sculpture. The point, he says, is to enhance the experience of disassociation and exploration that he’s become known for.
At the SETI Institute he’s had the opportunity to partner with scientists, who like Tarter, are trying to push conceptual boundaries and he’s taken full advantage of the environment that the institute creates.
“All the scientist at the SETI Institute are engaging unique forms of exploration and it’s been wonderful to be under the same roof with them because exploration will always be at the heart of what I do,” he says.
Charles Lindsay will be speaking and performing in San Francisco on Sept. 18 at Swissnex as part of the ZERO1 ‘Seeking Silicon Valley’ arts biennial. Lindsay will also debut CARBON-X, a new dome formatted surround audio visual work, Sept. 22 and 25 at Getting off the Planet and ISEA2012 in New Mexico. |
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| ramonmercado Psycho Punk
Joined: 19 Aug 2003 Total posts: 17933 Location: Dublin Gender: Male |
| Posted: 21-09-2012 22:16 Post subject: |
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To tweet ET or not tweet ET; there could be the rub out for us,
| Quote: | Romantic or Reckless? The Plan to Message Aliens with Twitter
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/09/tweetsinspace-messaging-aliens/
By Jason KeheEmail Author September 21, 2012 | 12:45 pm
If you’ve ever pondered what you would say to an alien, you may get that chance between 7:30 and 8 p.m. PT tonight.
That’s the goal of Tweets in Space, a project — sorry, “performance art piece” — by two guys with starry, starry eyes. As part of this year’s International Symposium on Electronic Art in New Mexico, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern will spend 30 minutes capturing every tweet with the hashtag #tweetsinspace for later transmission into the (much) wider Twitterverse.
Using a radio transmitter in Florida, they plan to beam our messages to GJ667Cc, an exoplanet that might, just maybe, possibly, have the required attributes that would allow it to theoretically support life (as we know it). Four to six weeks after Friday’s event, the planet will move into alignment (just barely) with the transmitter. And that’s when Kildall and Stern, a multimedia artist and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, will hit send.
“It all goes,” says Kildall, the new media exhibit developer for the Exploratorium. “Even political positions I don’t agree with: ‘Vote for Romney,’ ‘Vote for Obama.’” (All except hate speech, he added. We might not want to betray our baser nature to the ETs.)
But it’s a long shot in more ways than one. The target is 22 light-years away. That means 44 years minimum before we know if they’ve succeeded.
If there’s even a chance. Reality check, say radio astronomers: There isn’t. “We have absolutely no hope of actually being heard,” said James Benford, founder of Microwave Sciences and longtime skeptic of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He did the math for Wired. With the Deep Space Communications Network’s Florida dish, which is small and low-power by industry standards, the signal might be detectable up to seven times the distance to Pluto, assuming the aliens have the same technology we do.
“That’s nowhere,” Benford said. “That’s not getting anywhere near interstellar distances.”
But Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, says it’s theoretically possible that the theoretical aliens on the target planet could pick up the signal from Florida. “If they have a receiver the size of Nebraska, then they can pick this up,” he said. “You have to hope the aliens have spent more money on their antennas than we have on ours.” (Incidentally, a receiver the size of Nebraska would cost in the hundreds of billions. In U.S. dollars, that is. “What’s your currency/exchange rate, aliens? #tweetsinspace”)
What’s more, most astronomers put the estimate for nearest ETI at no fewer than hundreds of light years away, and it’s probably closer to thousands. Twenty-two would be miraculous. We’d have far better odds of floating a message in a bottle from San Francisco to China.
But even if their project’s more stunt than sound science, Kildall and Stern are (unintentionally) participating in an ongoing, still-controversial debate: whether or not we should be actively messaging aliens in the first place. Could it endanger Earth and the fate of mankind? That’s not such a kooky, far-out question. People like Benford, along with sci-fi author David Brin, UCLA professor and best-selling author Jared Diamond, and Stephen Hawking, have argued for years that we should be sitting silently in our cosmic corner, biding our time and weighing risk factors before we go flamboyantly yoo-hooing to the entire universe.
If the aliens are sufficiently advanced to receive and translate our messages, shouldn’t we be afraid they’d also have the technology to warp to our location, eat our children, and blow up this precious planet?
The other camp, which includes the SETI Institute and the historically optimistic, pro-METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Russians, argues that we’ve already given away our position a thousand times over, thanks to decades of signal leakage. As Shostak put it, “If they’re looking our way, they will already know.” So we might as well continue. Heck, we might as well start sending them everything. Encyclopedias! Beatles songs! The Google server!
Benford disagrees. In a recent paper, he showed that no signal, not now or 50 years ago, could ever be detected by ETI. That doesn’t mean the prospect of METI doesn’t worry him. In a century, we’ll have the technology (and plenty of bored trillionnaires to fund it) to build radio transmitters big and powerful enough to send detectable messages. Just as likely, Benford says, we’ll be sending energy to and from satellites, a practice that could considerably brighten Earth’s position in the cosmos. The thought worries him. He wants us to stay dark and silent. At least until we know better.
The conversation continues. Shostak is publishing a paper now on whether transmissions to space are dangerous. (“No,” in brief.) Benford is similarly engaged from the other side. The two men, though old colleagues, can still be heard gleefully bad-mouthing each other, both privately and in public forums.
Though Kildall and Stern remain optimistic that their Tweets in Space have a chance of succeeding — they believe they have better odds at this than winning the lottery — they also allow for occasional moments of realism. “It’s working with potential and imagination, rather than actuality,” Kildall eventually conceded.
Shostak, for one, has no problem with projects like this, of which there’ve been a few in recent years. He sees it as an introspective exercise. “It’s interesting not for the aliens. It’s interesting for us,” he said. “What do people want to say?”
Find out tonight. Or don’t. The aliens will never know. We think. |
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| eburacum Papo-Furado
Great Old One Joined: 26 Aug 2005 Total posts: 1587 Gender: Unknown |
| Posted: 28-09-2012 14:02 Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Using a radio transmitter in Florida, they plan to beam our messages to GJ667Cc, an exoplanet that might, just maybe, possibly, have the required attributes that would allow it to theoretically support life (as we know it). |
GJ667Cc is not really very Earth-like; it is probably tidally locked, with a surface gravity of around 1.6 gees. It probably has a quite thick atmosphere and (possibly) deep oceans with no land surface. I'm not sure that life as we know it would thrive there, or that if it did it would be able to build radio telescopes to seach for our message. But you never know. |
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