Month: September 2022

Required reading on cold winter afternoons. View in LinkedIn

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

THE TOTAL INVESTMENT for a search for life beyond Earth, by back of envelope calculations, is truly minuscule, and we have amply illustrated the stunning lack of curiosity that the human species has about this subject. It has been suggested that this is due to governments being fearful of the consequences to economies based on non-sustainable technologies but there is no evidence either way on this. https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

ABOUT SAND AND OSTRICHES. The cumulative funding in the entire history of humanity to conduct a thorough, serious, effort to search for life in the universe is under $200 million, or flying a single F-22 Raptor military jet for about one and a half months. Stephen Hawking: “In an infinite Universe, there must be other life. There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer.” https://lnkd.in/dfV6qM9 View in LinkedIn

PREMISE: WE HAVE SEARCHED FAR AND WIDE. “Many articulations of the Fermi Paradox have as a premise, implicitly or explicitly, that humanity has searched for signs of extraterrestrial radio transmissions and concluded that there are few or no obvious ones to be found.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

PREMISE: WE HAVE BARELY LOOKED. “Tarter et al. and others have argued strongly to the contrary: bright and obvious radio beacons might be quite common in the sky, but we would not know it yet because our search completeness to date is so low, akin to having searched a drinking glass's worth of seawater for evidence of fish in all of Earth's oceans.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

FERMI PARADOX. “A particularly trenchant formulation of this inconsistency is that of Hart (1975), who dubs the fact that there are not aliens on Earth now "Fact A." This fact is supposedly surprising because the time for an exponentially growing population to travel to every star in the Galaxy under even rather conservative assumptions of the feasibility of interstellar travel is short compared to the age of the Galaxy. Many have used this and similar articulations of the Fermi Paradox to argue that the entire endeavor of SETI is a "waste of time".” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

PREMISE TO “FACT A”: “One of the central assumptions behind the significance of "Fact A" to SETI is that any spacecraft arriving in the solar system would result in the permanent settlement of the Earth.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv 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