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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE spends this and next weekend highlighting an article titled: “How Much SETI Has Been Done? Finding Needles in the n-dimensional Cosmic Haystack” (2018) by Jason T. Wright, Shubham Kanodia, and Emily Lubar of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, The Pennsylvania State University. This is the most important question of the 21st century, a true game changer for humanity. https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

Required reading on cold winter afternoons. View in LinkedIn

THE FACTS. “However, this is not the case. Despite the passage of nearly 60 years since the first radio SETI searches, very little actual searching has been done, compared to the amount needed to rule out the presence of a even a large number of "loud" beacons.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

EPITAPH ON A TYRANT" "(W. H. Auden - 1907-1973)" "" "“Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after," "And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;" "He knew human folly like the back of his hand," "And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;" "When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter," "And when he cried the little children died in the streets.” https://lnkd.in/dntzTtr View in LinkedIn

ASSUMED THOROUGHNESS. “The term "silence" in the these expressions is sometimes interpreted to mean that we have established that there are no obvious radio or other communicative signals to be found in space—i.e., that we have conducted a thorough search for signals, and concluded that there are very few or none of them.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

THE DETRACTORS. “Other variants on "Fact A" are the "Great Silence" of Brin (1983) and the "Eerie Silence" of Davies (2011), both of which refer to the more general fact that we have not yet found any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligent life in the universe.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

LIMITED SEARCHING. “If we analogously relax Fact A and assert merely that there are no alien machines in the solar system today, then its truth becomes quite uncertain because we have not done much searching for such machines.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

Cross sections through geologic time posted randomly in vertical orientation. View in LinkedIn

COEVOLUTION. “Life has evolved in conjunction with the rest of the universe. We are an embodiment of the same laws that have shaped the universe and our imagination is intimately correlated to it. Consciously or subconsciously we find that we converge towards these laws.” Page 7, Decoding Reality: The Universe as Quantum Information" "By Vlatko Vedral. https://lnkd.in/gH7NMvV View in LinkedIn

ANALOGY. “Wright et al. (2014) noted that his assumption fails for the only technological species we have an example of: humanity. The ratio of the timescales for humans to cross the Earth to the age of the technology that enables such travel is small: today for aircraft, it is roughly 10(-4 ) days over decades, but even a thousand years ago it was under 10(-3) years over millennia. Despite this, most spots on Earth show no obvious signs of humans or our technology. “ https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn