HOME |
RSS | 
Scientists meeting for a SETI conference have been told that recent developments in communications technology are rendering the Earth less detectable to alien civilizations.
In the past, TV and radio programmes were broadcast from huge ground stations that transmitted signals at thousands of watts. These could be picked up relatively easily across the depths of space, astronomers calculated.
Now, most TV and radio programmes are transmitted from satellites that typically use only 75 watts and have aerials pointing toward Earth, rather than into space…
“Very soon we will become undetectable,” he said. In short, in space no one will hear us at all.
People will react in different ways to this news, depending on whether one’s vision of alien life is that of a Reese’s Pieces-munching E.T., an all-knowing elder race, a Grey, a Predator, or any of an endless number of other possibilities.
How clueless are bureaucrats of our nation’s school system? They fired an IT worker for installing the popular freeware SETI@Home on school computers, claiming that it’ll take more than $1 million to uninstall it!
The program, known as SETI @ home, uses Internet-connected computers worldwide to analyze radio telescope data in an experiment to find extraterrestrial intelligence.
But Superintendent Denise Birdwell told the East Valley Tribune that the program also bogged down the district’s system and interfered with technology use in classrooms.
Birdwell said it will take more than $1 million to fix the problem, including removal of the SETI software. She says police are conducting a broader investigation.
Quite possibly the best Halloween prop ever.
via UniqueDaily.
On August 20, 1974, scientists at Cornell University and the National Science Foundation used the radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico to beam a message into space. Encoded within the binary digits of the message was information related to the Solar System, our number system, basic chemistry, and human DNA.
1679 digits were used for the message on the presumption that “any sentient being” would recognize the number as the product of two prime numbers (23 and 73), allowing the digits to be then rearranged from a linear binary stream into a graphic format (depicted at left, enhanced with color for clarity).
The message has been traveling through space for 25 years and is not due to arrive at its destination for another 24,975 years. Curiously, however, a reply was received in 2001, in the form of a crop circle near the Chilbolton radio telescope, in Hampshire, UK. The “return message” inserts the element silicon into the vital chemical elements of life, and incorporates an extra strand in the DNA double helix. The size of the creature depicted in the reply is approximately 3’4″, consistent with earthly reports of extraterrestrial visitations.
Those who need help to work their way through the information in the original message will find guidance at the University of Utah’s Physics and Astronomy Department, or at Wikipedia. More information re the reply and its implications at Crop Circle Research dotcom.
Is life on Earth special? Not according to Carnegie Institution’s astronomer Alan Boss. The author of the new book The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets
[Boss] made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" — planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter — discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.
Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.
"Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.
"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."
The following is reprinted
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Most of the time we're willing to shovel down the popcorn and watch Yoda
lift X-Wings out of the swamp using nothing but the Force and a smattering
of questionably parsed English, or let Jean-Luc Picard get the Enterprise
out of a scrape by the convenient discovery of yet another type
of particle beam. But every once in a while we just have to vent about
some of the truly egregious "fiction" in science fiction.
1. Sounds in Space
The tag line from Alien got it right: "In Space, no one
can hear you scream". The reason no one can hear you scream is that
sound needs air to travel in, and there's none in space.
Most of space is a hard vacuum, with a molecule or two of hydrogen floating
around in every cubic meter - not nearly enough to transmit sound. Every
sound in the movies, from photon torpedoes and laser beams to exploding
starships and hyperspace booms, would never happen in real life.
For that matter, you'd never see laser beams in space either, since in
a vacuum there's no medium to reveal them. So a real-life laser dog fight
in space would be really boring to watch.
2. Faster-Than-Light TravelWarp drives and hyperspace are very useful in science fiction, but there's one catch. According to Einstein, the speed of light isn't just a good idea, it's the law. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light in a vacuum (that's about 186,000 miles per second). Even inching toward the speed of light is difficult - immense energy is required to get to even a fraction of the speed of light, and the closer you get to the speed of light, the more energy is required. The amount of energy you'd need to achieve the speed of light is infinite (i.e., more than you've got, even with those supercool long-lasting batteries). So just tossing in a few more dilithium crystals into the warp drives isn't going to make it happen. There are loopholes in our understanding of the physics that make faster-than-light travel theoretically possible. For example, it's theoretically possible to create a "bubble" of space that breaks itself off from other space and moves faster than light relative to that space (all the while everything inside both "spaces" moves no faster than the speed of light). This is known as an Alcubierre Warp Bubble. The catch (there had to be one) is that these bubbles require the existence of exotic matter that has negative energy, and wouldn't you know, there isn't really any lying around, and it's not clear that any actually exists.3. Laser Bolts You Can Dodge Aside
from the issue of Imperial Stormtroopers being bad shots, let's review
a fundamental fact of light (which is what lasers are): It travels at
186,000 miles per second. So the idea of ducking before the laser hits
you is just plain silly.
Not to mention (of course) the idea of a laser bolt being visible as
a streak that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you were zapped
by a laser from a laser gun, it would look like a single stream of light,
with one end attached to the barrel of said gun, and the end attached
to whatever portion of your head had not melted yet (assuming you're having
a laser battle somewhere where there is enough air around to illuminate
the entire beam).
Most "laser" beams in science fiction movies travel slower
than bullets do today. Let's see Obi Wan whip his light saber around fast
enough to stop the spray of a Mac-10 (and let's not even begin
to talk about all the things wrong with a sword made of light).
4. Human-Looking Aliens This
is endemic on the various Star Trek series, where creatures from
entirely different sectors of the universe look just like humans except
for the occasional bulging ridge on their foreheads. Yes, this is the
result of having only humans at casting calls, but in a large sense, all
these "humanoid" variations ain't gonna happen.
Look, humans evolved on earth and shared a basic body format (four limbs,
one head, side-to-side symmetry) with just about every other vertebrate
on the planet. It's a form that works fine for this planet, but not even
every vertebrate sticks with it (see: snakes, whales, seals, etc).
Given that any planet with life on it will have that life evolve in it's
own way, the chances of the universe being stocked with chesty alien princesses
who crave human starship captains is slim at best.
Related to this is the following.
5. Half-Breed Aliens Humans
don't even interbreed with other species here on earth. Our DNA is simply
too different from other species to allow such a mating to produce offspring.
Given this, what are the chances of successful mating with an alien species
that may not even have DNA as its genetic encoding medium?
Also going back to the idea that aliens probably won't look like Humans,
how would you do it anyway? It's not exactly the "Insert Tab A Into
Slot B" proposition it would be here at home.
6. Brain-Sucking Aliens
The
Good News of an Alien Facehugger Attack T-Shirt, art by Mike
Jacobsen
Ditto aliens that control your body by using your brains, or gestate
in your chest, or whatnot. Let's posit that any creature that controls
the brain of any other creature (not that any exist here on Earth) does
so only after a few million years of what's called "speciation"
– i.e., one species eventually enters a symbiotic relationship with
another species. This relationship would have to be pretty specific, as
symbiotic relationships are here on Earth.
Which is to say just because you're in a symbiotic relationship with
one species doesn't mean it transfers over to another species, especially
an alien species, who's body chemistry, DNA, brain wiring, etc., isn't
even remotely close to your own. So don't worry about the "Puppet
Master" scenario too much, or that you'll be nothing more than a
glorified egg sac for some nasty breed of space monster.
7. Shape-Shifting Aliens Shape-changing
aliens are all very well, but there's a tiny problem in having a roughly
human sized lump of alien protoplasm turning itself into, say, a rat,
to scurry around in the ventilation shaft: Where does rest of the alien
go? You can't just make 99% of your mass disappear into thin air (or reappear,
as the case may be); it has to go somewhere.
Unless that "rat" is running around with a highly compressed
mass of a human-sized object (which presents its own problems), shape-shifting
in to different sized objects is not very likely (one of the smart things
about Terminator 2 was that the T-1000 only shape shifted into
things of roughly the same mass, like human beings or a floor).
8. Time Travel Got
an itch to spend time in the Arthurian England? Or perhaps Gettysburg
during the Civil War?
The same relativistic principles that keep us from going faster than
light also keep us rom traveling backward in time and messing with the
past. It's possible to slow down time - the closer you get to
the speed of light, the slower time moves for you relative to your original
frame of reference - but to get the clock spinning in the other direction
would require you to go faster than light, and you can't do that.
Again, there are theoretical loopholes that could allow it - worm holes,
actually, which are "tunnels" in the fabric of space-time that
could possibly allow travel back in time. but once again, keeping these
wormholes open would require exotic matter with negative energy. Got any?
Neither do we.
9. The Planetary Gravity ScamEverywhere you go in science fiction, people are walking around like they weigh just what they do on Earth. Chances of that happening in the real universe? Slim. Consider our own solar system. On Mars, a 180-pound man would weigh just 70 pounds; on Jupiter, 424 pounds (not that you can walk on Jupiter, as it has no solid surface). That man on the moon? Just 30 pounds. The man's mass is the same, it's just that different planets have different gravitational pulls. The idea that all the planets that humans might visit would exactly match Earth's own gravitational profile is a little much. As is, alternately, the idea that all alien creatures would be as comfortable in our gravitational field as we are.10 The Planetary Sameness Principle
Tatooine looks just like the |
|
 |
The article above is reprinted with permission
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular
books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure
yet fascinating facts.
If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom
Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
 |
Has anyone ever had that moment when you ran into someone you knew from way back in the day like high school, work or that one night stand you kind of regretted having and the meeting/conversation gets a little awkward? Well, those times can be a bit embarrassing…or in this guys case a bit unnerving and creepy. I do hope Plan 9 doesn’t effect my plans for the weekend.
If Little Green Men are one day discovered they’re certainly not going to speak fluent English. Scientists fear this may make any alien contact impossible to understand and could create some very awkward circumstances for the rest of us.
Leeds Metropolitian University’s Dr. John Elliott has devised software he believes will decipher the structure of any alien’s language which would be the first step in understanding what the potential invader of Earth may be saying, declaring or demanding. Elliott’s program is
designed to compare an alien language to a database of 60 different known languages in the world and search for ones that have similar structure.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.
Psst! Wondering what you should get for your geek for Chistmas? Take a look at this article that our very own Jill Harness wrote for Inventor Spot.
This one to the left is the Inka, the alien coffee press, by designer Guido Venturini (if that isn’t an alien’s name, I don’t know what is) for Italian design studio Alessi.
| FEATURED ITEMS FROM THE NEATOSHOP | |
 |
Mustache Bottle Opener |
 |
My Cryptozoological Family - Family Car Stickers |
 |
Zombie Hand Bottle Opener |
View more: New Items &
Best Sellers |
|
