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Girona grafitti, well composed, well executed, interesting theme. View in LinkedIn

BUCKET PROBABILITIES. “Much of the SETI literature is dedicated to guessing or reasoning which haystacks might contain many needles. For instance, if we posit that extraterrestrial species are trying to get our attention and so have created obvious "beacons", then we can focus our efforts on those haystacks or parts of haystacks where needles would most obviously be left for us to find, i.e., we can identify which haystacks represent Schelling points in a game of mutual search—for instance, by guessing at "magic frequencies".” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

FRACTAL WORLD. “Most cells, tissues, organs – in either the animal or vegetal worlds – are systems in which the component parts and unit fragments assemble with different levels of complexity and recursive organization at several orders of magnitude. This means that a single fragment or element may, on various scales, reproduce the whole object from which it is derived; in other words, it is self-similar, albeit in a statistical sense.” https://www.oatext.com/The-living-realm-depicted-by-the-fractal-geometry.php#gsc.tab=0 View in LinkedIn

VARIOUS CRITERIA. “SETI optimists hope that there are many alien needles to be found, presumably reducing the time to find the first one. Note that in this metaphor the needles are the detectable signatures of alien technology, meaning that a single alien species might be represented by many needles.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second and last weekend on a rational approach to searching for extraterrestrial life signals. It is notable that we have been willfully uncurious. We will see if the recently released UFO report in the US is valuable, or, more likely, milk-toast redacted material suitable for children. View in LinkedIn

SUBSET TARGETS. “Also, our haystack definition included vast swaths of interstellar space where we have no particular reason to expect to find transmitters; humanity's completeness to subsets of this haystack—for instance, for continuous, permanent transmissions from nearby stars—is many orders of magnitude higher.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

THE CHALLENGE. “We should be careful, however, not to let this result swing the pendulum of public perceptions of SETI too far the other way by suggesting that the SETI haystack is so large that we can never hope to find a needle. The whole haystack need only be searched if one needs to prove that there are zero needles—because technological life might spread through the Galaxy and/or technological species might arise independently in many places, we might expect there to be a great number of needles to be found.” https://lnkd.in/dKzsrBv View in LinkedIn

Ascent to the cathederal for an agnostic. View in LinkedIn