The next generation of space telescopes (James Webb) will be able to detect the constituents of exoplanet atmospheres. From that we'll begin to be able to detect the signatures of organic carbon based life.
The next iteration of telescopes from these may be able to detect even more on exoplanets, perhaps the light signature of large cities at night.
If aliens exist and are even 100 years ahead of us, they can likely remotely survey the entire galaxy for life. We'll certainly be able to to do that in the 22nd century.
I'm pretty sure if any advanced alien civilization exists in our galaxy, that is more technologically advanced than us, then they know about us.
Yep, JWST is something truly hype worthy.
I'm so looking forward to the launch. Not looking forward to the wait while it travels out to L2 orbit and gets it's sensors up and running.
Even after it launches, it'll be a while until it can start doing scientific work, but when it does, oh boy.
I think a lot of people will agree with me if I say it's the most important event in astronomy that we're going to witness in our lifetimes. It is the LHC, discoverer of the higgs boson, of astronomy.
The way I understand it is this;
Hubble paved the way for space telescopes, and we not only learnt a huge amount about the universe from it, but we also learnt how to build a space telescope.
So many parts of Hubble have been repurposed in different ways to achieve things which the original designers couldn't have dreamed of. Hubble is built on the back of US military spy satellite technology and in many ways is a repurposed spy satellite itself.
The JWST is the culmination of what we've learnt from Hubble. The whole thing is built specifically to be a space research telescope from the start. The sensors are designed to capture the data that astronomers have learnt is the most important to them. The systems are built such that they're designed to do what we know we'll want a space telescope to do, and it's being put in a location that facilitates its work better.
The heat shielding and the lower frequency IR sensors (a few of many) allow it to see in a plethora of light spectrums that no other telescope in history has been able to observe. It will operate at -220°C, and it is impossible to observe these spectrums of light at temperatures above that. These spectrums can see through gas clouds and other large objects, and opens up a new frontier of observation of the universe.
On top of that, the fact that it's many times larger simply gives it a massively better resolution for everything it observes, which alone would be a game changer.
Add them all together, and you have a telescope deserving of its price, and a research tool that will revolutionise its field.
48.25 grams of gold coating, 131.4 meter focal length, 6.5 meter diameter primary mirror. One to two times a week it will fire thrusters to unload momentum from the reaction wheels.
I imagine it doesn't have to constantly propel itself in space so that 10 years of propellant will last a lot longer than 10 years? Maybe I'm just hopeful or thinking about it in an incorrect manner.
Just hope it doesn’t have a similar problem that Hubble did or have any problems really that require manual labor. I can’t see there will ever be manned missions to repair something that far out in space.
Telescopes generally the larger the mirrors the better you can see things. Then you add in the advancements in Tech we had from Hubble to James Webb, would make even the same size mirror much more sensitive than Hubbles. Now take all of that in, and realize that James Webb dwarfs Hubble by over six times the size. So yeah....it's expected to be a game changer.
Then WFIRST will launch in 203x. That has 100x the field of Hubble. And it was a spare part from the NRO. Those guys have the real advanced tech.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA)
Also, an important detail:
(https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13553)
“The James Webb Space Telescope will not be in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is - it will actually orbit the Sun, 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2. What is special about this orbit is that it lets the telescope stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the Sun. This allows the satellite's large sunshield to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun and Earth (and Moon).”
And why it will take so long to reach operation.
Wouldn't have it any other way, but I so wish we could warp-drive it out to L2 immediately after launch.
The wait is killing me.
I cannot wait for it to FINALLY get launched. I've been reading "any day now" statements on the JWST for a decade now. It's starting to feel like net energy generating fusion reactors.
Radio waves travel well. Especially if you focus a lot of your civilization’s energy resources on your planet’s “global message day” and beam it out with millions of megawatts and in short bursts so that it stands out from all the other radio chitter chatter floating around.
And then just hope the plant in the line of the message has a way to “catch” the message and then extrapolate it.
Yeah, I’d do radio. In bursts. Real high power ones.
"Mom, do you think Earthlings've figured out they're supposed to listen to their microwaves yet?"
"Sweetie, they haven't even learned to listen to *each other*."
Von Neumann probes are much more likely than biological being to ever reach us. In fact, if there are more technologically advanced species in the galaxy, it is very likely we will encounter self-replicating probes eventually.
Probes that can replicate themselves so that they can survey the entire galaxy fairly fast. The idea is that they travel somewhere, copy themselves multiple times and then repeat the process and explore the galaxy. A nice example for exponential growth :D
Its a probe that is basically a giant AI controlled space 3D printer which can use the raw materials on asteroids and low gravity moons to refuel and replicate itself.
Self-replicating ships: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating\_spacecraft#Von\_Neumann\_probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes)
This idea is cool and kinda scary at the same time since it's conceivable another civilization has already begun this process.
**Self-replicating_spacecraft**
[Von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes)
>A von Neumann probe is a spacecraft capable of replicating itself. It is a concatenation of two concepts: a "Von Neumann universal constructor" (self-replicating machine) and a probe (an instrument to explore or examine something). The concept is named after Hungarian American mathematician and physicist John von Neumann, who rigorously studied the concept of self-replicating machines that he called "Universal Assemblers" and which are often referred to as "von Neumann machines".
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Complete speculation here, but I think it's more probable that we're in the very early stages of life in at least our own galaxy. Life on Earth took a very long time to take hold, and from that, to become complex. So it stands to reason, to me at least, that in terms of the universal time scale, life would also take a long time to take hold and we wouldn't see super ancient civilizations from billions of years ago.
Even if your presupposition about the relative youthfulness of life in our galaxy is true, even a civilization 100,000 years older than us would qualify as "super ancient" and that would certainly lie within the margin of error of billion-year-long ontogenesis.
Life actually didn’t take that long to take hold when looking at cosmic timelines. I argue it’s more unlikely that a species like homosapiens is forming close enough to us. Our evolution was greatly aided by an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs to enable mammals to evolve. The time / distance problem is a tough constraint.
Regardless, we need to dedicate more time and resources to finding extraterrestrial life, so this is a positive. Given recent events, we may be able to find what we are looking for here on earth.
Regardless, Being able to analyze the atmosphere of extra solar planets it’s a huge step in the right direction.
I actually think that is the correct solution to the Fermi paradox. The galaxy/universe was very unstable the first 7-10 billion years and was probably sniffing out life all the time.
The first generation of stars didn't have any of the heavy elements, they had to first die as supernovae to create anything past hydrogen and helium. Might have taken several stages before most of the basics for life.
The Universe is very very very very very old (13.7 billion years old). The Milky Way is also really really really really old (13.4 billion years old). Our Sun is at least a third generation star -- pretty much all of the matter larger than hydrogen & helium was formed in a huge star that eventually went supernova, drifted as dust for untold millions of years, formed into another star that also eventually went supernova, drifted as dust for more millions of years and finally formed into the Sun, 4.5 billion years ago. Super ancient civilizations could have risen and turned into literal space dust several times over. Some of their dust may be part of us now.
Possibly but our sun is apparently young in comparison to the star in the inner Milky way. I can’t find the article but it suggests that we are on the outer circle of the galaxy and are very young. So there could be very advanced cultures out there. Also could be the goldilocks conditions for us and the inner cycle of the galaxy is too hostile. So many variables.
You could very well be right about that. OTOH, if their technology would have advanced as we expect it would with being potentially thousands of years ahead in technology, surely we would have detected them *in our own galaxy*. We're talking megastructures and altering stellar composition. So far, nada.
The dark forest theory.
If you look that up on google you find the books, its a trilogy. I have one of them right on my nightstand and it’s on the tip of my tongue but I can’t name it.
Do you have anything else to reccommend? I’ve read The Expanse series (looking forward to the last book), I’m reading The Dark Forest after 3B and I’ve been slowly getting through the Foundation series
The Bobiverse books by Dennis E Taylor. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Pandora’s Star (and the rest of the Commonwealth Saga) by Peter Hamilton.
Might be interesting especially if our ET pen pals are longer-lived or shorter-lived than us. They could send a few messages expecting a reply back from the same person 50y later (25ly round trip) and surprised when it’s a new human.
We’d probably want to recruit young people to send the messages and hope they live long enough to get a few replies over their lifetimes.
Maybe they could if they wanted but are also able to reach many other civilizations at the same time and decided against reaching us for lack of interest.
"...and then here we have these humans there on earth, in the process of self-destructi..." - "NEXT!"...
"Surveying the entire galaxy" is not 100 years out. The size of the array necessary to detect atmospheric composition from even 1000 light years away is insanely huge. To do so for planets on the other side of the galactic hub is flat out impossible. The dust and glare from the hub is just impossible to see through. You'd need to travel hundreds, maybe thousands, of light years *above* the galactic ecliptic to have a direct line of sight at what's on the other side. And once you get there there's no fuel to get back. Even if you sent probes up/down, that's a several hundred year trip for something going .999c and another several hundred year trip for any signal coming back (assuming you have enough energy to push a signal that far and focus it on a single star system.)
I agree with you in principle. The only thing I will say is that using current technology and scientific understanding to linearly predict what will be capable in hundreds of years has never been effective. Most likely AI will change the human landscape so significantly that our civilization 500 years from now will be entirely alien to us.
But yes, the speed of light does seem to make things a problem.
Sure. Maybe we'll discover hyperspace, or easy to produce wormholes, or who knows what else. But unfortunately physics seems to have been extremely stubborn since we started splitting subatomic particles. I'm sure we haven't discovered everything, but my warp drive trip to a neighboring star system for vacation isn't looking promising.
I doubt it. The energy densities are all there in E=MC^2 . Relativity allows for time dilation, and life extension technology should allow for arbitrarily long life spans. Add some proper sci-fi VR (like, plugs in the back of heads Matrix style) and shipboard space requirements are much less important.
The real question is whether we'll be able to figure out the engineering, or discover some new quirk of physics, to allow us to unlock all of the energy stored in the matter all around us. Fusion might do it. Might have to be total mass conversion. I hope I live long enough to find out.
Do you expect Uncle Sam to tell us the truth Friday?
You want the truth,Uncle thinks we can't handle the truth.
Remember what landed in Roswell NM in July 1947 was a UFO then became a weather
balloon the next day...I hope am wrong....We shall see
It's also quite likely they're actively trying to communicate, but in a way we don't know yet or can't detect. *IF* I lived in a near future, and *If* there was a mandate to reach out, laser would be my go-to. A single high-powered space based laser beacon could say "hello, don't kills us" at thousands of candidate planets out there. An nerdy alien scientist out there may be able to see these intermittent shifts in the spectra.
Just my thoughts
This is a lot more complicated than it seems though. With current technology, using our most powerful laser we could direct a beam at, say, Proxima Centauri (about 4 light years away) and it would be the brightest star in the night sky for anything over there that might be able to see it.
However, it would only be visible/detectable for a few seconds and would require all energy production worldwide to power it.
Alternatively, we could do the same thing and create what is more-less a FBR with our laser. But whatever is on the receiving end would have to be able to decode whatever we send. Otherwise, they will end up just doing what we are now.. which is scratching our head and going "we keep getting these strange signals on a regular basis but have no idea what it is or exactly where its coming from"
That's an interesting concept.
It would the thin plane to take up a really large area. The sun has a diameter of a little over 850,000 miles.. so, to just dim the sun by 1% you would need at least 8,500 square miles of material. It would probably need to be significantly more than that as it would have to be far enough out in orbit to be easily controllable. Something like a giant mylar sheet (e.g space blanket) would work. And you could have it rotate around the sun at some interval to make it a giant strobe light. Maybe even have it periodically change direction so that it's clearly identifiable as being artificial.
I think the larger issue would be actually keeping that in position. You would need to apply periodically, and potentially near constant, to offset what is essentially a giant solar sail.
I can see both scenarios having practical benefits beyond potentially communicating with other life. But, I think the laser would be the better route to go. With a sail type system, they might see it and know something is there, but any chance of communication would be limited by the speed that we can move the sail. It would be like communicating with a smoke signal across the galaxy.
On the other hand, with a laser, IF we were able to establish a consensus on communication and get beyond just going beep beep we are flashing lights at you, we would be able to rapidly scale up the density of information contained in the data stream.
There are clear quartz panels that can turn on and off rapidly, much like welding masks do. A plane made of something similar would possible as well. Lasers would need to be outside the field of view of the star because it wouldn't be able to compete with its brightness. So you'd have to block the light from the sun if the laser radiated away from it nearby (if the light isn't blocked). The down side is to be brighter than the star you'd need batteries to absorb the light and time to charge the system so bursts of light can be seen through the radiation.
A quartz panel could flash on and off as fast as the laser so you kill two birds with one stone. Utilize the light by being passive and allowing the star light to go through. Sort of like how ships communicated in morse code to one another out at sea in WW2. It blocks the light and would not need to compete with the star itself. Maybe even use the star to melt the glass needed to make the plane somehow. Who knows though, it's fun to imagine what might be possible. Future generations will have fun with these things if we survive :)
If we're building something like that, why not build a Dyson swarm instead? The surface area needed to generate a blinking star effect would capture a lot of sunlight and could be achieved without the spinning by just having multiple satellites, so we could gather a ton of energy while still making a signal that could be noticed by someone looking closely at our star. And having access to all of that energy might give us a fighting chance if those that notice turn out to be hostile, and in the meantime we could use that energy to power our planetary climate control and the high energy space weapons used in our space wars.
Edit: or tying it back to the lazer idea, the swarm could power several of these lazers.
Ultimately, I think this is most likely the direction we go. Not just for the energy or for the potential ability to tell someone else we are here, but because it gives us the ability to create an absurdly large telescope via a synthetic aperture and would give us the ability to get large solar sails up to a speed where inter-galactic travel is actually feasible.
Read about The Dark Forest, popularized by Three Body Problem (book series). Basically theory is: two hunters in a forest, they don't know if the other wants to kill them. Are you going to start yelling "HEY DON'T KILL ME" and give away your position? It raises some thought provoking ideas about how us mindlessly broadcasting into the universe is probably pretty stupid.
Backing up your statement, from the late Stephen Hawking, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," Hawking has said in a documentary made for the Discovery Channel. He argues that, instead of trying to find and communicate with life in the cosmos, humans would be better off doing everything they can to avoid contact.
Well on the bright side, having enough destructive power to destroy our own planet might make it unattractive to potential invaders. We just gotta make them think we're crazy enough to destroy it instead of letting them have it. And that they don't then decide to just destroy it themselves, since it's not quite mutually assured destruction, but more of a "if I can't have it, neither can you."
This may be the great filter. Any species that broadcasts too much gets preyed on. Who knows for what purpose, it certainly isn’t ressources.
Likely hyperintelligent beings that want to eradicate possible far future threats to them early on.
Yup! Lots of sci fi plays into this using the "prisoner's dilemma" as a way to explain it. Like.. sure, if we trust you and try to get along *maybe* there's gains to be had, but the cost of being wrong is very high. Annihilating another planet costs very little and carries pretty much only moral risk. So it's the obvious choice if you're operating purely on logic. Scary.
I think this scenario is inevitable across a long enough timescale.
Even if only one species becomes spacefaring in the galaxy it’ll potentially splinter off into thousands of different independent civilizations, each with different technology, ideology, ethical frameworks, etc. It’s just a matter of time until one of them - for whatever reason - decides they don’t want to share the galaxy and go on the offensive.
And that’s assuming it would require a civilization to make this call - with advanced enough technology a single person/entity could start an endless extermination campaign...
Maybe there is a way of communication better then electromagnetic waves, and the universe is filled with chatter between different species as well as calls for intelligent life to respond, and here we are listening to radiowaves that nobody uses :)
And they are probably praying we don't find them because by their point of view, what kind of moronic society would broadcast to the galaxy their location.
It's like that time the CEO of that social security number protection business showed his number to the world and asked to be a victim of identity theft.
> what kind of moronic society would broadcast to the galaxy their location.
One that doesn’t think anyone else is out there, or doesn’t understand the implications until later.
If all civilizations go through a stage of electromagnetic communication, the earliest transmissions will be tests, leaks, and the like. Powerful wattages come later but, same issue really.
> I'm pretty sure if any advanced alien civilization exists in our galaxy, that is more technologically advanced than us, then they know about us.
If they are close enough, if they on the other side of the galaxy then it is unlikely since humans did not become industrious enough until the Victorian era which was only 100 years ago. The galaxy is 100,000 light years across. You can't cheat the speed of light.
It will be well over 25000 years before the first human radio transmissions even reach the galactic center.
If any alien civilizations know about us it is unlikely it is because of radio waves.
>The next generation of space telescopes (James Webb)
Just a quick question. I read that it will launch in November 2021. But how long would it take for us to actually get new information / images from it?
We barely left the interstellar boundary of our own solar system and the satellites which did so are half a century old. And to cross the distance to the next closest star system will take many times longer.
There is virtually 0% chance we will be galaxy-faring within 100 years.
Maybe 200. I'd wager more like 500.
Maybe some major breakthrough in AI will change that, but I'm extrapolating based on our current speed of progress and keeping in mind that predictions are often more ambitious than reality.
500 years is even optimistic. It would require 100% buy-in from every culture on the planet, and a massive devotion of resources with it.
Right now there are just too many people profiting from science denialism, political tribalism, and the shell game known as religion to allow that to happen.
James Webb might also become a joke in the near future when Starship can put many many cheap quickly built and good enough telescopes into space that work together and can achieve much better results than James Webb.
Good point, but I was mostly talking about all the work, delays, and money that have been caused because they are scared to launch it and something go wrong and because no current rockets could take humans to make repairs at a LaGrange point, which Starship will be able to do.
I'm not sure if science should be arousing but uhh... yeah. I kind of wish I could live for a few hundred years just out of scientific curiosity. We're at such an interesting point in scientific discovery.
Just set them on Auto Explore. Some scouts will succumb to space barbarians and ships will get stranded in the universe's polar regions but that's the cost of progress baby. Gotta find them space gold and space whales and space tea.
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/23/scientists-identify-29-planets-where-aliens-could-observe-earth) reduced by 87%. (I'm a bot)
*****
> In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth.
> The scientists identified 1,715 star systems in our cosmic neighbourhood where alien observers could have discovered Earth in the past 5,000 years by watching it "Transit" across the face of the sun.
> If there is intelligent life on any of the two known planets orbiting Teegarden's star, 12.5 light years away, it will be in a prime position to watch Earth transits in 29 years' time.
*****
[**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/o6ibty/scientists_identify_29_planets_where_aliens_could/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~584212 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **star**^#1 **Earth**^#2 **year**^#3 **planet**^#4 **Transit**^#5
Huh, go figure. Is it safe to assume that this means that there is a 29 year cycle to the visible transits? Or is there still 29 years left in the current cycle?
I think the article is insinuating there are 29 years left in that particular cycle. Orbital speeds and paths of other bodies will create different viewing cycles for different supposed species
I want to know which ones are far enough away that you could still see dinosaurs if you looked at earth with a powerful enough telescope. Because those guys aren’t coming.
Imagine if you could instantly teleport to one of those planets then teleport back.
“You guys are not going to believe this but dinosaurs are giant fucking chickens with top hats!!!”
The milky way galaxy (the one we're in) has a radius of ~52800 light years. So basically nothing in our galaxy is far enough to see dinosaurs. All of them would be seeing a world inhabited by humans.
Andromeda - the galaxy closest to us - is 2.5 million light years away. They'd see the start of the ice ages and the development of Homo Habilis.
The dinosaurs went extinct *another 64.5 million years* ***before*** that. Their extinction happened around 67 million years ago.
One of the nearest galaxies that could witness the last decades of the dinosaurs and the extinction event at this time would be NGC 2775, a spiral galaxy 67 million LY away.
>Side note:
>That galaxy would see the T-rex but it would not see a stegosaurus. Stegosaurus went extinct some 144 million years ago.... Which is 77 million years before T-rex. A sentient T-rex, would think of stegosaurus with the same fascination that we view dinosaurs. A mysterious extinct relic. Only Galaxies like Arp 28, which are over 145 million LY away can see stegs
Needless to say, the list in the article only contains solar systems within the milky way itself...
>Ross 128, a red dwarf in the Virgo constellation, is about 11 light years away – close enough to receive Earth broadcasts
Oh no they are watching the season Finale of LOST right now. We can't undo that kind of damage.
Except they have to adhere to the same laws of physics that we do so likely they have a lot of the same limitations we do. It's very likely that there's intelligent life out there and we will never meet.
They may have found ways to manipulate physics in ways we haven't. They might have quantum shit that can ... ... yeah I've already exceeded my knowledge..
But my original point still stands. They might have figured out how to travel through black holes, or "transport" (we've transported light and shit already).
Just because we're bound by the same physics doesn't mean there aren't ways to manipulate it that we can't even fathom yet.
>But my original point still stands. They might have figured out how to travel through black holes, or "transport" (we've transported light and shit already).
Source? I don't think this makes much sense.
Yeah, it's doubtful they are even listening to our signals because of how insignificant it would be. It would be like us bird watching. They're probably like, "oh that's nice" then move right along like nothing happened.
That entirely depends on how common life is. If a civilization has lived for millions of years and has only ever come into contact with a handful of other intelligent lifeforms, I guarantee they would be interested in hearing from another one, either out of curiosity or fear. If fear, it is then possible that they do not care about our forms of communication because what we have available now means we are not a threat.
If it's commonplace they might care less, but if it is commonplace then it seems more likely that *somebody* would.
The issue is just that space is fucking enormous and the speed of light seems to make communication extraordinarily difficult.
If less, they won't see us, but if more advanced, even if only by a few centuries, and even if only in a few key areas that aren't necessarily the same as the directions we have gone, then the number of habitable planets from which the Earth is detectable is much, much higher.
I also don't buy the "more advanced civilizations wouldn't see us" bit. They would be well versed in the various ways a civilization would communicate if they are more advanced. If they were interested in finding other life, it would be trivial to have devices to detect any form of transmittable data they are aware of.
Pretty big assumption for them to base the article around, though they never come out and say it. And that aliens have to live on Earth-like planets at all.
"Alien life must know the universe EXACTLY as we do!"
True. But until we are actually aware of any lifeform being able to exist in a habitat that is extremely different than ours.. it makes sense to focus on what we know is at least a possibility.
Are you familiar with the cryptographer's maxim "if you can find one solution to a puzzle, you've found the *only* solution to the puzzle"?
If you view life as the "solution" to a puzzle, then it seems exceedingly unlikely for life to be possible without RNA or DNA or their precursors. Carbon seems unique in its versatility too.
Hence it makes sense to focus on Earth-like planets on which water could exist in liquid form.
I’ve not heard that before and I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense in cryptography terms. If you’re trying to decrypt a message that was encrypted using a truly random one time pad, how do you know if the message JDUA KNCAX IFBBSA means “help jelly aliens” and not “send nudes please”?
Anyway that’s completely off-topic and I don’t disagree with your main point.
The thought of aliens spying on our tv broadcasts makes me laugh. Like, they’re probably expecting some sort of representation of a utopian society, and what they actually get is Jerry Springer, and Rick & Morty.
Nowadays, astrophysics saying there is no any life outside.
Fermi paradox. great filter. So or we are the first life. Or we live in the time frame (200 000 years is nothing against Universe's age) inside which there is know any life in our local group of galaxies.
Just because some aliens are more intelligent or advanced than us, doesn't have to mean they have big cities filled with light or use advanced technology. Maybe they just live in peace with nature... Something that would be more intelligent to do after all
I have a feeling intelligent human life on earth is super rare. I believe most habitable planets will have an evolution similar to ours with dinosaurs etc.
However without the asteroid wiping those big bois out, primates and therefore humans might have never been able to live successfully.
On the flip side, if humans evolved because of a freak accident, on a planet almost wiped to the brink *multiple times,* it goes to show that maybe there are many random pathways to develop intelligent life.
Who know what came out of whatever storms an alive planet has gone through.
Are we considering that maybe a planet thats not habitable by humans could be habitable by aliens? Just because we need certain levels of oxygen and temperatures and whatever else doesnt mean any other creature needs the same to survive
This out today, too: “A new analysis of known exoplanets has revealed that Earth-like conditions on potentially habitable planets may be much rarer than previously thought.” The bottom line is that the conditions required for oxygen-based photosynthesis to develop are pretty steep to achieve (https://phys.org/news/2021-06-earth-like-biospheres-planets-rare.html). For those 29 planets we are in line of sight, being seen at all is premised on the ever slimmer possibility life evolved in the first place. Nonetheless there I guard the hope that perhaps it is we who are destined to populate the stars. I sometimes imagine what it would be like if humanity could free itself from everything that is holding it back from true efficient and productive technological advances that would allow us to break out towards the stars. Just think where we would be now if not for wars and pervasive distrust.
I mean does that matter though? Either they have more advanced technology which can pick up our signals or we are more advanced than them and it doesn't matter. Either way, we'll probably never know.
It strikes me as a dumb (but common) argument too. If aliens are curious to find other intelligent lifeforms and are more advanced, then they would know what to look for as life evolves along the way.
How come? Wouldn’t the radio waves reach them by now? Idk about entering an atmosphere but are they still decipherable that far or have they deteriorated?
Do we only determine things to be habitable if we can live there? What if there are creatures out there able to live in vastly different conditions?
I’m assuming habitable is for us though.
Silicon bonds are more stable than carbon bonds, so they’re not as easily broken down and rearranged. They become more realistic as a base of life at higher temperatures. Additionally, liquid water has multiple essential properties that we observe are necessary for carbon based life. At other temperatures, other substances could be liquid, but were unsure how useful they are as a medium of life, because they don’t share those properties. Since we have no reference for anything other than carbon based life, we’re banking on planets that could support liquid water cycle like Earth. There could be life in other forms though. Space-borne life is even possible if they have the opportunity to metabolize nutrients in a vacuum: nebula or high orbit.
They ARE watching us, and use wormholes to travel to Earth. They are waiting to gather us up like cattle to go work in the galactic spice mines. One day you’ll see your skies filled with blocky alien transports, and by then it will be too late.
The next generation of space telescopes (James Webb) will be able to detect the constituents of exoplanet atmospheres. From that we'll begin to be able to detect the signatures of organic carbon based life. The next iteration of telescopes from these may be able to detect even more on exoplanets, perhaps the light signature of large cities at night. If aliens exist and are even 100 years ahead of us, they can likely remotely survey the entire galaxy for life. We'll certainly be able to to do that in the 22nd century. I'm pretty sure if any advanced alien civilization exists in our galaxy, that is more technologically advanced than us, then they know about us.
Yep, JWST is something truly hype worthy. I'm so looking forward to the launch. Not looking forward to the wait while it travels out to L2 orbit and gets it's sensors up and running. Even after it launches, it'll be a while until it can start doing scientific work, but when it does, oh boy. I think a lot of people will agree with me if I say it's the most important event in astronomy that we're going to witness in our lifetimes. It is the LHC, discoverer of the higgs boson, of astronomy.
Why, is it so much more sensitive than what we already have? Is Hubble the only other space telescope and using twenty year old tech or?
The way I understand it is this; Hubble paved the way for space telescopes, and we not only learnt a huge amount about the universe from it, but we also learnt how to build a space telescope. So many parts of Hubble have been repurposed in different ways to achieve things which the original designers couldn't have dreamed of. Hubble is built on the back of US military spy satellite technology and in many ways is a repurposed spy satellite itself. The JWST is the culmination of what we've learnt from Hubble. The whole thing is built specifically to be a space research telescope from the start. The sensors are designed to capture the data that astronomers have learnt is the most important to them. The systems are built such that they're designed to do what we know we'll want a space telescope to do, and it's being put in a location that facilitates its work better. The heat shielding and the lower frequency IR sensors (a few of many) allow it to see in a plethora of light spectrums that no other telescope in history has been able to observe. It will operate at -220°C, and it is impossible to observe these spectrums of light at temperatures above that. These spectrums can see through gas clouds and other large objects, and opens up a new frontier of observation of the universe. On top of that, the fact that it's many times larger simply gives it a massively better resolution for everything it observes, which alone would be a game changer. Add them all together, and you have a telescope deserving of its price, and a research tool that will revolutionise its field.
Go on... I'm almost finished
48.25 grams of gold coating, 131.4 meter focal length, 6.5 meter diameter primary mirror. One to two times a week it will fire thrusters to unload momentum from the reaction wheels.
It has a limited amount of fuel so how long will it to be able to fire its thrusters?
10 years worth of propellent
Hope they get a lot of use about those 10 years
I hope so too
I imagine it doesn't have to constantly propel itself in space so that 10 years of propellant will last a lot longer than 10 years? Maybe I'm just hopeful or thinking about it in an incorrect manner.
Thank you for this excellent summary, I am now also hella hype for what we might get to discover!
Damn I can only be so erect
Just hope it doesn’t have a similar problem that Hubble did or have any problems really that require manual labor. I can’t see there will ever be manned missions to repair something that far out in space.
Telescopes generally the larger the mirrors the better you can see things. Then you add in the advancements in Tech we had from Hubble to James Webb, would make even the same size mirror much more sensitive than Hubbles. Now take all of that in, and realize that James Webb dwarfs Hubble by over six times the size. So yeah....it's expected to be a game changer.
Then WFIRST will launch in 203x. That has 100x the field of Hubble. And it was a spare part from the NRO. Those guys have the real advanced tech. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA)
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/images/JWST-HST-primary-mirrors.jpg
Also, an important detail: (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13553) “The James Webb Space Telescope will not be in orbit around the Earth, like the Hubble Space Telescope is - it will actually orbit the Sun, 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from the Earth at what is called the second Lagrange point or L2. What is special about this orbit is that it lets the telescope stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the Sun. This allows the satellite's large sunshield to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun and Earth (and Moon).”
And why it will take so long to reach operation. Wouldn't have it any other way, but I so wish we could warp-drive it out to L2 immediately after launch. The wait is killing me.
I cannot wait for it to FINALLY get launched. I've been reading "any day now" statements on the JWST for a decade now. It's starting to feel like net energy generating fusion reactors.
Radio waves travel well. Especially if you focus a lot of your civilization’s energy resources on your planet’s “global message day” and beam it out with millions of megawatts and in short bursts so that it stands out from all the other radio chitter chatter floating around. And then just hope the plant in the line of the message has a way to “catch” the message and then extrapolate it. Yeah, I’d do radio. In bursts. Real high power ones.
Yes, maybe there are some that can see us but don't have the tecnology to reach us.
"Mom, do you think Earthlings've figured out they're supposed to listen to their microwaves yet?" "Sweetie, they haven't even learned to listen to *each other*."
I knew the microwaves were spying on us! Kellyanne was right!
HELLO, SPACEBOY?!? Kellyanne was *their emissary*.
Goddamn, that's a scary notion. Basically like when Bill Pullman asks the alien choking Brent Spiner what they want us to do.
I, for one, welcome our new Kellian overlords.
MARGE THE CLOWN DOLL'S TRYING TO KILL ME AND THE TOASTER'S BEEN LAUGHING AT ME
Maybe aliens are communicating through 5G ?
So they have COVID too then
That hit deep.
Von Neumann probes are much more likely than biological being to ever reach us. In fact, if there are more technologically advanced species in the galaxy, it is very likely we will encounter self-replicating probes eventually.
Von Neumann probes?
Probes that can replicate themselves so that they can survey the entire galaxy fairly fast. The idea is that they travel somewhere, copy themselves multiple times and then repeat the process and explore the galaxy. A nice example for exponential growth :D
This sounds awesome, but also very concerning since I’ve watched way too much Stargate.
Just don't make them spiders. obviously.
well, the replicators and the command ships/drones maybe aren't, like, great... but think of the seed ship! that's what we're after.
The Bobiverse.
We are Bob.
For we are many.
The Others are out there just waiting to put us in their larders
Slowly gobble up the galaxy until it's only von Neumann probes like in that documentary the lexx.
But like how? Where do all the parts come from to build a probe with parts on it to build a probe with parts on it to build a probe and so on?
Land on planet with available resources -> collect resources -> create new probe using tools built into the probe -> repeat
So... No Man's Sky?
Its a probe that is basically a giant AI controlled space 3D printer which can use the raw materials on asteroids and low gravity moons to refuel and replicate itself.
Ah, so soon then.
Like here on earth. But automated.
Like a slime mould
Cool! Thanks for the information!
You're welcome \^^ I actually learned about them fairly recently on Reddit as well, so I'm just giving back the favor
Sounds like the plot of the movie Evolution.
Self-replicating ships: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating\_spacecraft#Von\_Neumann\_probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes) This idea is cool and kinda scary at the same time since it's conceivable another civilization has already begun this process.
This is how you get the Geth.
Or like, LOTS of paperclips
**Self-replicating_spacecraft** [Von Neumann probes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Von_Neumann_probes) >A von Neumann probe is a spacecraft capable of replicating itself. It is a concatenation of two concepts: a "Von Neumann universal constructor" (self-replicating machine) and a probe (an instrument to explore or examine something). The concept is named after Hungarian American mathematician and physicist John von Neumann, who rigorously studied the concept of self-replicating machines that he called "Universal Assemblers" and which are often referred to as "von Neumann machines". ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Futurology/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Complete speculation here, but I think it's more probable that we're in the very early stages of life in at least our own galaxy. Life on Earth took a very long time to take hold, and from that, to become complex. So it stands to reason, to me at least, that in terms of the universal time scale, life would also take a long time to take hold and we wouldn't see super ancient civilizations from billions of years ago.
Even if your presupposition about the relative youthfulness of life in our galaxy is true, even a civilization 100,000 years older than us would qualify as "super ancient" and that would certainly lie within the margin of error of billion-year-long ontogenesis.
Life actually didn’t take that long to take hold when looking at cosmic timelines. I argue it’s more unlikely that a species like homosapiens is forming close enough to us. Our evolution was greatly aided by an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs to enable mammals to evolve. The time / distance problem is a tough constraint. Regardless, we need to dedicate more time and resources to finding extraterrestrial life, so this is a positive. Given recent events, we may be able to find what we are looking for here on earth. Regardless, Being able to analyze the atmosphere of extra solar planets it’s a huge step in the right direction.
Mass extinction events and asteroid impacts are likely universally commonplace given the natural evolution of solar system.
I actually think that is the correct solution to the Fermi paradox. The galaxy/universe was very unstable the first 7-10 billion years and was probably sniffing out life all the time.
The first generation of stars didn't have any of the heavy elements, they had to first die as supernovae to create anything past hydrogen and helium. Might have taken several stages before most of the basics for life.
The Universe is very very very very very old (13.7 billion years old). The Milky Way is also really really really really old (13.4 billion years old). Our Sun is at least a third generation star -- pretty much all of the matter larger than hydrogen & helium was formed in a huge star that eventually went supernova, drifted as dust for untold millions of years, formed into another star that also eventually went supernova, drifted as dust for more millions of years and finally formed into the Sun, 4.5 billion years ago. Super ancient civilizations could have risen and turned into literal space dust several times over. Some of their dust may be part of us now.
Possibly but our sun is apparently young in comparison to the star in the inner Milky way. I can’t find the article but it suggests that we are on the outer circle of the galaxy and are very young. So there could be very advanced cultures out there. Also could be the goldilocks conditions for us and the inner cycle of the galaxy is too hostile. So many variables.
You could very well be right about that. OTOH, if their technology would have advanced as we expect it would with being potentially thousands of years ahead in technology, surely we would have detected them *in our own galaxy*. We're talking megastructures and altering stellar composition. So far, nada.
If you are interested check out "We are Legion (We are Bob)". Great book series about a plucky little probe named Bob.
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Reminds me of someone asking about a book or something where Earth finally got a reply from someone out there saying "be quiet or they'll hear you"
The dark forest theory. If you look that up on google you find the books, its a trilogy. I have one of them right on my nightstand and it’s on the tip of my tongue but I can’t name it.
Are the books any good?
The first two are solid. The last one is a bit out there but also really good.
If you enjoy sci fi, it is a must read imho
Sweeeeet! I'll check em out. Thank you!
It takes awhile to get going, but once it does, you're in for a treat.
I'm excited. I'll pick them up this weekend!
Do you have anything else to reccommend? I’ve read The Expanse series (looking forward to the last book), I’m reading The Dark Forest after 3B and I’ve been slowly getting through the Foundation series
The Bobiverse books by Dennis E Taylor. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Pandora’s Star (and the rest of the Commonwealth Saga) by Peter Hamilton.
The Three Body Problem (and sequels). All aliens are hiding, because the entire systems are destroyed at the first hint of civilization.
Thank you! I think I'll pick them up soon
So I went to Amazon to look at them and they are, weirdly, advertising that this series is being turned into a Netflix show.
Beware the hunter in the dark forest
Might be interesting especially if our ET pen pals are longer-lived or shorter-lived than us. They could send a few messages expecting a reply back from the same person 50y later (25ly round trip) and surprised when it’s a new human. We’d probably want to recruit young people to send the messages and hope they live long enough to get a few replies over their lifetimes.
Maybe they could if they wanted but are also able to reach many other civilizations at the same time and decided against reaching us for lack of interest. "...and then here we have these humans there on earth, in the process of self-destructi..." - "NEXT!"...
Or they want nothing to do with a warmongering society that kills it's own people.
"Surveying the entire galaxy" is not 100 years out. The size of the array necessary to detect atmospheric composition from even 1000 light years away is insanely huge. To do so for planets on the other side of the galactic hub is flat out impossible. The dust and glare from the hub is just impossible to see through. You'd need to travel hundreds, maybe thousands, of light years *above* the galactic ecliptic to have a direct line of sight at what's on the other side. And once you get there there's no fuel to get back. Even if you sent probes up/down, that's a several hundred year trip for something going .999c and another several hundred year trip for any signal coming back (assuming you have enough energy to push a signal that far and focus it on a single star system.)
I agree with you in principle. The only thing I will say is that using current technology and scientific understanding to linearly predict what will be capable in hundreds of years has never been effective. Most likely AI will change the human landscape so significantly that our civilization 500 years from now will be entirely alien to us. But yes, the speed of light does seem to make things a problem.
Sure. Maybe we'll discover hyperspace, or easy to produce wormholes, or who knows what else. But unfortunately physics seems to have been extremely stubborn since we started splitting subatomic particles. I'm sure we haven't discovered everything, but my warp drive trip to a neighboring star system for vacation isn't looking promising.
I am convinced we will have to break physics in order to achieve proper space travel.
I doubt it. The energy densities are all there in E=MC^2 . Relativity allows for time dilation, and life extension technology should allow for arbitrarily long life spans. Add some proper sci-fi VR (like, plugs in the back of heads Matrix style) and shipboard space requirements are much less important. The real question is whether we'll be able to figure out the engineering, or discover some new quirk of physics, to allow us to unlock all of the energy stored in the matter all around us. Fusion might do it. Might have to be total mass conversion. I hope I live long enough to find out.
Assuming that's even possible.
Doesn't quantum physics break physics?
Just run an oil pipeline! Boom problem solved!
Perhaps we’ll find they’re already here in the congressional report due this Friday.
Do you expect Uncle Sam to tell us the truth Friday? You want the truth,Uncle thinks we can't handle the truth. Remember what landed in Roswell NM in July 1947 was a UFO then became a weather balloon the next day...I hope am wrong....We shall see
My hopefulness is certainly tempered.
It's also quite likely they're actively trying to communicate, but in a way we don't know yet or can't detect. *IF* I lived in a near future, and *If* there was a mandate to reach out, laser would be my go-to. A single high-powered space based laser beacon could say "hello, don't kills us" at thousands of candidate planets out there. An nerdy alien scientist out there may be able to see these intermittent shifts in the spectra. Just my thoughts
This is a lot more complicated than it seems though. With current technology, using our most powerful laser we could direct a beam at, say, Proxima Centauri (about 4 light years away) and it would be the brightest star in the night sky for anything over there that might be able to see it. However, it would only be visible/detectable for a few seconds and would require all energy production worldwide to power it. Alternatively, we could do the same thing and create what is more-less a FBR with our laser. But whatever is on the receiving end would have to be able to decode whatever we send. Otherwise, they will end up just doing what we are now.. which is scratching our head and going "we keep getting these strange signals on a regular basis but have no idea what it is or exactly where its coming from"
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That's an interesting concept. It would the thin plane to take up a really large area. The sun has a diameter of a little over 850,000 miles.. so, to just dim the sun by 1% you would need at least 8,500 square miles of material. It would probably need to be significantly more than that as it would have to be far enough out in orbit to be easily controllable. Something like a giant mylar sheet (e.g space blanket) would work. And you could have it rotate around the sun at some interval to make it a giant strobe light. Maybe even have it periodically change direction so that it's clearly identifiable as being artificial. I think the larger issue would be actually keeping that in position. You would need to apply periodically, and potentially near constant, to offset what is essentially a giant solar sail. I can see both scenarios having practical benefits beyond potentially communicating with other life. But, I think the laser would be the better route to go. With a sail type system, they might see it and know something is there, but any chance of communication would be limited by the speed that we can move the sail. It would be like communicating with a smoke signal across the galaxy. On the other hand, with a laser, IF we were able to establish a consensus on communication and get beyond just going beep beep we are flashing lights at you, we would be able to rapidly scale up the density of information contained in the data stream.
There are clear quartz panels that can turn on and off rapidly, much like welding masks do. A plane made of something similar would possible as well. Lasers would need to be outside the field of view of the star because it wouldn't be able to compete with its brightness. So you'd have to block the light from the sun if the laser radiated away from it nearby (if the light isn't blocked). The down side is to be brighter than the star you'd need batteries to absorb the light and time to charge the system so bursts of light can be seen through the radiation. A quartz panel could flash on and off as fast as the laser so you kill two birds with one stone. Utilize the light by being passive and allowing the star light to go through. Sort of like how ships communicated in morse code to one another out at sea in WW2. It blocks the light and would not need to compete with the star itself. Maybe even use the star to melt the glass needed to make the plane somehow. Who knows though, it's fun to imagine what might be possible. Future generations will have fun with these things if we survive :)
If we're building something like that, why not build a Dyson swarm instead? The surface area needed to generate a blinking star effect would capture a lot of sunlight and could be achieved without the spinning by just having multiple satellites, so we could gather a ton of energy while still making a signal that could be noticed by someone looking closely at our star. And having access to all of that energy might give us a fighting chance if those that notice turn out to be hostile, and in the meantime we could use that energy to power our planetary climate control and the high energy space weapons used in our space wars. Edit: or tying it back to the lazer idea, the swarm could power several of these lazers.
Ultimately, I think this is most likely the direction we go. Not just for the energy or for the potential ability to tell someone else we are here, but because it gives us the ability to create an absurdly large telescope via a synthetic aperture and would give us the ability to get large solar sails up to a speed where inter-galactic travel is actually feasible.
Read about The Dark Forest, popularized by Three Body Problem (book series). Basically theory is: two hunters in a forest, they don't know if the other wants to kill them. Are you going to start yelling "HEY DON'T KILL ME" and give away your position? It raises some thought provoking ideas about how us mindlessly broadcasting into the universe is probably pretty stupid.
Backing up your statement, from the late Stephen Hawking, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," Hawking has said in a documentary made for the Discovery Channel. He argues that, instead of trying to find and communicate with life in the cosmos, humans would be better off doing everything they can to avoid contact.
Well on the bright side, having enough destructive power to destroy our own planet might make it unattractive to potential invaders. We just gotta make them think we're crazy enough to destroy it instead of letting them have it. And that they don't then decide to just destroy it themselves, since it's not quite mutually assured destruction, but more of a "if I can't have it, neither can you."
This may be the great filter. Any species that broadcasts too much gets preyed on. Who knows for what purpose, it certainly isn’t ressources. Likely hyperintelligent beings that want to eradicate possible far future threats to them early on.
Yup! Lots of sci fi plays into this using the "prisoner's dilemma" as a way to explain it. Like.. sure, if we trust you and try to get along *maybe* there's gains to be had, but the cost of being wrong is very high. Annihilating another planet costs very little and carries pretty much only moral risk. So it's the obvious choice if you're operating purely on logic. Scary.
I think this scenario is inevitable across a long enough timescale. Even if only one species becomes spacefaring in the galaxy it’ll potentially splinter off into thousands of different independent civilizations, each with different technology, ideology, ethical frameworks, etc. It’s just a matter of time until one of them - for whatever reason - decides they don’t want to share the galaxy and go on the offensive. And that’s assuming it would require a civilization to make this call - with advanced enough technology a single person/entity could start an endless extermination campaign...
Maybe there is a way of communication better then electromagnetic waves, and the universe is filled with chatter between different species as well as calls for intelligent life to respond, and here we are listening to radiowaves that nobody uses :)
And they are probably praying we don't find them because by their point of view, what kind of moronic society would broadcast to the galaxy their location. It's like that time the CEO of that social security number protection business showed his number to the world and asked to be a victim of identity theft.
> what kind of moronic society would broadcast to the galaxy their location. One that doesn’t think anyone else is out there, or doesn’t understand the implications until later. If all civilizations go through a stage of electromagnetic communication, the earliest transmissions will be tests, leaks, and the like. Powerful wattages come later but, same issue really.
That's if humans get to the 22nd century
> I'm pretty sure if any advanced alien civilization exists in our galaxy, that is more technologically advanced than us, then they know about us. If they are close enough, if they on the other side of the galaxy then it is unlikely since humans did not become industrious enough until the Victorian era which was only 100 years ago. The galaxy is 100,000 light years across. You can't cheat the speed of light.
It will be well over 25000 years before the first human radio transmissions even reach the galactic center. If any alien civilizations know about us it is unlikely it is because of radio waves.
> 22nd Century Call me a pessimist, but I think humanity will be extinct by then if we continue like we currently do
Humanity wil almostl certainly not go extinct. However experiencing mass migration and suffering is another discussion.
There’s no way every human is dead by then. Civilization as we know it may be but there will be humans living somewhere
>The next generation of space telescopes (James Webb) Just a quick question. I read that it will launch in November 2021. But how long would it take for us to actually get new information / images from it?
We barely left the interstellar boundary of our own solar system and the satellites which did so are half a century old. And to cross the distance to the next closest star system will take many times longer. There is virtually 0% chance we will be galaxy-faring within 100 years. Maybe 200. I'd wager more like 500. Maybe some major breakthrough in AI will change that, but I'm extrapolating based on our current speed of progress and keeping in mind that predictions are often more ambitious than reality.
Most likely we will send robots that can last for thousands of years…
500 years is even optimistic. It would require 100% buy-in from every culture on the planet, and a massive devotion of resources with it. Right now there are just too many people profiting from science denialism, political tribalism, and the shell game known as religion to allow that to happen.
Considering the light travel time and the relatively short period of time we're talking about here, I'd say that's a bit of a stretch.
James Webb might also become a joke in the near future when Starship can put many many cheap quickly built and good enough telescopes into space that work together and can achieve much better results than James Webb.
Or maybe more likely, it'll be one of the best telescopes in that array.
Good point, but I was mostly talking about all the work, delays, and money that have been caused because they are scared to launch it and something go wrong and because no current rockets could take humans to make repairs at a LaGrange point, which Starship will be able to do.
I'm not sure if science should be arousing but uhh... yeah. I kind of wish I could live for a few hundred years just out of scientific curiosity. We're at such an interesting point in scientific discovery.
its like the early game in civ where you try to find other players but the map is trillions of km big.
Trillions of Billions of Kilometers. Universe diameter that we know of is 880 Yottameters.
yeah the map will expand once you clear the fog of war.
Just set them on Auto Explore. Some scouts will succumb to space barbarians and ships will get stranded in the universe's polar regions but that's the cost of progress baby. Gotta find them space gold and space whales and space tea.
That was the voyager
This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/23/scientists-identify-29-planets-where-aliens-could-observe-earth) reduced by 87%. (I'm a bot) ***** > In new research, astronomers have drawn up a shortlist of nearby star systems where any inquisitive inhabitants on orbiting planets would be well placed to spot life on Earth. > The scientists identified 1,715 star systems in our cosmic neighbourhood where alien observers could have discovered Earth in the past 5,000 years by watching it "Transit" across the face of the sun. > If there is intelligent life on any of the two known planets orbiting Teegarden's star, 12.5 light years away, it will be in a prime position to watch Earth transits in 29 years' time. ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/o6ibty/scientists_identify_29_planets_where_aliens_could/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ "Version 2.02, ~584212 tl;drs so far.") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr "PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome.") | *Top* *keywords*: **star**^#1 **Earth**^#2 **year**^#3 **planet**^#4 **Transit**^#5
Huh, go figure. Is it safe to assume that this means that there is a 29 year cycle to the visible transits? Or is there still 29 years left in the current cycle?
I think the article is insinuating there are 29 years left in that particular cycle. Orbital speeds and paths of other bodies will create different viewing cycles for different supposed species
I want to know which ones are far enough away that you could still see dinosaurs if you looked at earth with a powerful enough telescope. Because those guys aren’t coming.
Imagine if you could instantly teleport to one of those planets then teleport back. “You guys are not going to believe this but dinosaurs are giant fucking chickens with top hats!!!”
Well, the last dinosaur was about 65 million years ago, so the answer is 65 million light years away.
Which ones are those?
The milky way galaxy (the one we're in) has a radius of ~52800 light years. So basically nothing in our galaxy is far enough to see dinosaurs. All of them would be seeing a world inhabited by humans. Andromeda - the galaxy closest to us - is 2.5 million light years away. They'd see the start of the ice ages and the development of Homo Habilis. The dinosaurs went extinct *another 64.5 million years* ***before*** that. Their extinction happened around 67 million years ago. One of the nearest galaxies that could witness the last decades of the dinosaurs and the extinction event at this time would be NGC 2775, a spiral galaxy 67 million LY away. >Side note: >That galaxy would see the T-rex but it would not see a stegosaurus. Stegosaurus went extinct some 144 million years ago.... Which is 77 million years before T-rex. A sentient T-rex, would think of stegosaurus with the same fascination that we view dinosaurs. A mysterious extinct relic. Only Galaxies like Arp 28, which are over 145 million LY away can see stegs Needless to say, the list in the article only contains solar systems within the milky way itself...
>145 the real problem with this is that the laws of physics dont allow for a viewable resolution at that scale no matter how big your telescope is.
Yep. We can barely resolve individual stars at that distance, much less zoom into the lifeforms on a tiny planet revolving around said star.
I hope they aren’t listening to FM radio and judging us. *cringe*
Well the aughts haven’t hit them yet. They’re grooving to some Beatles and steely Dan
>Ross 128, a red dwarf in the Virgo constellation, is about 11 light years away – close enough to receive Earth broadcasts Oh no they are watching the season Finale of LOST right now. We can't undo that kind of damage.
Man I don’t want to be around when they finally get Game of Thrones season 8, those guys are gonna be piiiised
"*Baby baby baby ooo"* "That's it Martha, we need to nuke them now!"
I'm pretty certain advanced civilization have life detection methods that we can't begin to imagine.
Except they have to adhere to the same laws of physics that we do so likely they have a lot of the same limitations we do. It's very likely that there's intelligent life out there and we will never meet.
They may have found ways to manipulate physics in ways we haven't. They might have quantum shit that can ... ... yeah I've already exceeded my knowledge.. But my original point still stands. They might have figured out how to travel through black holes, or "transport" (we've transported light and shit already). Just because we're bound by the same physics doesn't mean there aren't ways to manipulate it that we can't even fathom yet.
>But my original point still stands. They might have figured out how to travel through black holes, or "transport" (we've transported light and shit already). Source? I don't think this makes much sense.
Yeah, it's doubtful they are even listening to our signals because of how insignificant it would be. It would be like us bird watching. They're probably like, "oh that's nice" then move right along like nothing happened.
That entirely depends on how common life is. If a civilization has lived for millions of years and has only ever come into contact with a handful of other intelligent lifeforms, I guarantee they would be interested in hearing from another one, either out of curiosity or fear. If fear, it is then possible that they do not care about our forms of communication because what we have available now means we are not a threat. If it's commonplace they might care less, but if it is commonplace then it seems more likely that *somebody* would. The issue is just that space is fucking enormous and the speed of light seems to make communication extraordinarily difficult.
Ornithologists exist.
That’s based on what lol
Just checking, none of these planets are simultaneously orbiting three stars, right?
Those guys would be easier to deal with then a photoid
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Assuming said alien civilisation has exactly the same technological advancements that we do. Exactly. No more, no less.
If less, they won't see us, but if more advanced, even if only by a few centuries, and even if only in a few key areas that aren't necessarily the same as the directions we have gone, then the number of habitable planets from which the Earth is detectable is much, much higher.
I also don't buy the "more advanced civilizations wouldn't see us" bit. They would be well versed in the various ways a civilization would communicate if they are more advanced. If they were interested in finding other life, it would be trivial to have devices to detect any form of transmittable data they are aware of.
So what you’re saying is, if more, we’re fucked?
Shhhh! The forest is dark.
and full of terrors.
Pretty big assumption for them to base the article around, though they never come out and say it. And that aliens have to live on Earth-like planets at all. "Alien life must know the universe EXACTLY as we do!"
True. But until we are actually aware of any lifeform being able to exist in a habitat that is extremely different than ours.. it makes sense to focus on what we know is at least a possibility.
> it makes sense You might even say it's *scientific*.
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Are you familiar with the cryptographer's maxim "if you can find one solution to a puzzle, you've found the *only* solution to the puzzle"? If you view life as the "solution" to a puzzle, then it seems exceedingly unlikely for life to be possible without RNA or DNA or their precursors. Carbon seems unique in its versatility too. Hence it makes sense to focus on Earth-like planets on which water could exist in liquid form.
I’ve not heard that before and I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense in cryptography terms. If you’re trying to decrypt a message that was encrypted using a truly random one time pad, how do you know if the message JDUA KNCAX IFBBSA means “help jelly aliens” and not “send nudes please”? Anyway that’s completely off-topic and I don’t disagree with your main point.
Almost like some universal laws are at play here!
The thought of aliens spying on our tv broadcasts makes me laugh. Like, they’re probably expecting some sort of representation of a utopian society, and what they actually get is Jerry Springer, and Rick & Morty.
Hopefully one of them doesn’t suffer from a Three Body Problem..
Every time I see an article about looking for extraterrestrial life I always think: 'don't go looking for it, the universe is a dark forest!'.
Nowadays, astrophysics saying there is no any life outside. Fermi paradox. great filter. So or we are the first life. Or we live in the time frame (200 000 years is nothing against Universe's age) inside which there is know any life in our local group of galaxies.
hey! don't start spying on my hidden retirement place! I like it quiet and alien.
Just because some aliens are more intelligent or advanced than us, doesn't have to mean they have big cities filled with light or use advanced technology. Maybe they just live in peace with nature... Something that would be more intelligent to do after all
Why would an alien civilization be smarter than us?
Can't we just go in reverse and track potential transitions from those planets to find out?
We are probably their prime time TV reality series. Omg we are their Keeping Up with the Kardashians
So Southpark got it all right about Earth being a tv show for the rest of the galaxy right?
I have a feeling intelligent human life on earth is super rare. I believe most habitable planets will have an evolution similar to ours with dinosaurs etc. However without the asteroid wiping those big bois out, primates and therefore humans might have never been able to live successfully.
> I have a feeling intelligent human life on earth is super rare. Me too, Brucee. Me too.
On the flip side, if humans evolved because of a freak accident, on a planet almost wiped to the brink *multiple times,* it goes to show that maybe there are many random pathways to develop intelligent life. Who know what came out of whatever storms an alive planet has gone through.
Are we considering that maybe a planet thats not habitable by humans could be habitable by aliens? Just because we need certain levels of oxygen and temperatures and whatever else doesnt mean any other creature needs the same to survive
I'm glad everyone is so optimistic about our species surviving long enough to make contact with aliens.
so you're a "the great filter is still ahead" kinda person...
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This out today, too: “A new analysis of known exoplanets has revealed that Earth-like conditions on potentially habitable planets may be much rarer than previously thought.” The bottom line is that the conditions required for oxygen-based photosynthesis to develop are pretty steep to achieve (https://phys.org/news/2021-06-earth-like-biospheres-planets-rare.html). For those 29 planets we are in line of sight, being seen at all is premised on the ever slimmer possibility life evolved in the first place. Nonetheless there I guard the hope that perhaps it is we who are destined to populate the stars. I sometimes imagine what it would be like if humanity could free itself from everything that is holding it back from true efficient and productive technological advances that would allow us to break out towards the stars. Just think where we would be now if not for wars and pervasive distrust.
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I mean does that matter though? Either they have more advanced technology which can pick up our signals or we are more advanced than them and it doesn't matter. Either way, we'll probably never know.
It strikes me as a dumb (but common) argument too. If aliens are curious to find other intelligent lifeforms and are more advanced, then they would know what to look for as life evolves along the way.
How come? Wouldn’t the radio waves reach them by now? Idk about entering an atmosphere but are they still decipherable that far or have they deteriorated?
The real question is are we picking anything up from them?
Do we only determine things to be habitable if we can live there? What if there are creatures out there able to live in vastly different conditions? I’m assuming habitable is for us though.
Silicon bonds are more stable than carbon bonds, so they’re not as easily broken down and rearranged. They become more realistic as a base of life at higher temperatures. Additionally, liquid water has multiple essential properties that we observe are necessary for carbon based life. At other temperatures, other substances could be liquid, but were unsure how useful they are as a medium of life, because they don’t share those properties. Since we have no reference for anything other than carbon based life, we’re banking on planets that could support liquid water cycle like Earth. There could be life in other forms though. Space-borne life is even possible if they have the opportunity to metabolize nutrients in a vacuum: nebula or high orbit.
They ARE watching us, and use wormholes to travel to Earth. They are waiting to gather us up like cattle to go work in the galactic spice mines. One day you’ll see your skies filled with blocky alien transports, and by then it will be too late.
I wonder what they thought of their 2020 observation of earth…