Sun's Twin Discovered — the Perfect SETI Target? 168
astroengine writes "There are 10 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are the same size as our sun. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that astronomers have identified a clone to our sun lying only 200 light-years away. Still, it is fascinating to imagine a yellow dwarf that is exactly the same mass, temperature and chemical composition as our nearest star. In a recent paper reporting on observations of the star — called HP 56948 — astronomer Jorge Melendez of the University of San Paulo, Brazil, calls it 'the best solar twin known to date.' Using HP 56948 as a SETI target seems like a logical step, says Melendez."
Is it in Gemini? (Score:3, Funny)
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Maybe they'll call it "Germany"
Maybe
Re:Is it in Gemini? (Score:5, Informative)
Exo Plant first (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be a good target to look for an Exo plant first. Then from spectral measurements see if it has the elements necessary for life (water, oxygen, etc...). Then it makes a good target for SETI to scan.
Re:Exo Plant first (Score:5, Funny)
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Wrong, then it makes a good colonization target. Fill the barges with androids and seeds NOW!!1
But leave the sex-bot androids behind. I've been waiting for them to show up on the scene and would hate to see them all shipped off 200 light-years before I can even own one.
Re:Exo Plant first (Score:4, Funny)
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You have to ask?
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Yeah (Score:2)
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
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In fact the first man-made radio signals haven't even reached it yet, assuming they were powerful enough to be detected. And those are travelling at the speed of light, not some miniscule fraction of it.
But they will. So we may need to send "seed ships" out into space, "manned" by software/AI and traveling for centuries/millenia. It is possible, just not in the standard "space opera" sense.
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200ly is obviously absurdly far compared with, say, popping down the shops to buy a pint of milk. But if we're talking about communicating with, observing with a telescope, or sending objects to another solar system, 200ly is about as good as it gets.
If you could travel at 0.08c (which was one estimate of what Project Orion could have managed), it would take 2500 years to travel 200ly. Not exactly convenient, but not the millions of years you'd need to reach most places in the Galaxy.
Re:Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
But if we're talking about communicating with, observing with a telescope, or sending objects to another solar system, 200ly is about as good as it gets.
So you consider having to wait 20 generations (it's a round trip, remember) to hear the answer to your question, if there is an answer, "communicating with" someone? You believe it's possible to "send an object" 200 light years, when it has taken almost 40 years to send an object around 3 light-HOURS away from earth (Voyager 1 is about 120 AU from us now).
I think there is a problem with the wiring of the human brain; when people see the number "200" somehow this is a familiar number used regularly by people. $200 for groceries. $200 for a hotel. $200 here, and there. The brain obviously skips over the difficult-to-understand light year part and just sticks with good old familiar "200".
I argue that 200 light years is as good to us as 2 million light years. We will never get there. Ever. The rest of your argument consists in believing in magic like project Orion which completely ignores passengers being fried by cosmic radiation at 0.08c even if all the other "minor technical details" could be worked out. And then there is the slight problem of a 2500 year trip when compared to an organism that lives at best 70 or 80-odd years with few exceptions. There are only a few structures humans have ever built that have lasted 2500 years or more, and even then they did not endure unscathed. Entire civilizations have come and gone in that time span. What makes you think a complicated space-craft could be kept running for that amount of time?
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So you consider having to wait 20 generations (it's a round trip, remember) to hear the answer to your question, if there is an answer, "communicating with" someone? You believe it's possible to "send an object" 200 light years, when it has taken almost 40 years to send an object around 3 light-HOURS away from earth (Voyager 1 is about 120 AU from us now).
No, not really. You are of course basically right.
The only real benefit of having something "near" like this would be for observation. You'd be far more likely to build a telescope that could resolve these potential exoplanets 200ly away than ones 20,000ly away. Ditto for trying to pick SETI radio signals out of the cosmic soup- nearer the better. Both of which would still be pretty exciting if alien life were involved, even if direct contact is impractical.
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A kilometer-scale Orion ship with a cruising speed of .08c would take 12.5 years to travel 1 light year.
ETAs for a some interesting destinations (ignoring acceleration times):
Alpha Centauri A/B: 54 years 6 months. (1 gen)
Sirius A/B: 107 years and 6 months (2-3 gens)
Epsilon Eridani: 131 years (3 gens)
Procyon A/B: 142 years and 6 months (3 gens)
61 Cygni A/B: 142 years (3 gens)
Epsilon Indi: 148 years (3 gens)
Tau Ceti: 148 years 9 months (3 gens)
Gliese 876: 191 years 3 months (3-4 gens)
Groombridge 1618: 198 yea
Pointless? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless we think a civilization is intentionally sending out beacons to the universe, isn't SETI pointless?
As our communications technology improves, it becomes lowered powered (unlike my old 3W car phone, my curren cell phone only puts out 300mW of signal max) and the leakage from hundreds, or thousands, or millions of point sources of RF signals becomes more and more like "white noise" to someone that doesn't know how to decode it thanks to spread spectrum signals and high bandwidth data encoded in the streams.
The days of 100,000+ watt AM radio transmitters will likely end soon, so there won't be nearly as much leakage to the cosmos.
So there's probably a 100 year window in a civilization's development where its unintentional broadcasts are detectable.
Will we ever intentionally send out a beacon advertising our existence, knowing that it would likely take 100 years or more before any potentially inhabited planet would receive it? And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
Re:Pointless? (Score:5, Informative)
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don't know how to break this to you so i'll just say it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record [wikipedia.org]
I think it's safe to say that Voyager (or Pioneer) probes will never be found. Space is big. Very big. Voyager is small. Very small.
I think the Star Trek scenario of a Voyager probe being used as target practice by a Klingon warship is equally likely as it being found at all.
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Will we ever intentionally send out a beacon advertising our existence, knowing that it would likely take 100 years or more before any potentially inhabited planet would receive it? And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
the answer is yes. a long time ago.
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ok, but that's not what you asked.
Will we ever intentionally send out a beacon advertising our existence, knowing that it would likely take 100 years or more before any potentially inhabited planet would receive it? And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
the answer is yes. a long time ago.
Well, that's not really what I asked. A small piece of low speed space junk that has no chance of discovery is not the same as a radio beacon.
Bonehead's response below is exactly what I asked about, but it's interesting that they directed it at a star cluster 25,000 light years away knowing that in 25,000 years it will no longer be there.
Re:Pointless? (Score:4, Informative)
Don't forget this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message [wikipedia.org]
There have been many intentional messages sent.
Re:Pointless? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is really expecting a lot out of an alien to receive this signal in all the space they could be looking at, determine that the modulation of the signal corresponds to binary digits, then determine this number of bits is semi-prime and can be arranged in a grid to pictorially represent the data, make sure they arrange it correctly, decipher what is essentially a cave drawing made by a species that may have close to nothing in common with them, and actually care enough to write back.
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I like how they mention that the 23 row by 73 column interpretation is "jumbled garbage". The correct image also looks like jumbled garbage. I especially like the image of a human. How the hell is an alien supposed to figure out what that is without having seen a human before?
It is really expecting a lot out of an alien to receive this signal in all the space they could be looking at, determine that the modulation of the signal corresponds to binary digits, then determine this number of bits is semi-prime and can be arranged in a grid to pictorially represent the data, make sure they arrange it correctly, decipher what is essentially a cave drawing made by a species that may have close to nothing in common with them, and actually care enough to write back.
It would be interesting to release that radio stream in some code breaking challenge to see how easy it is for an earthling to decode the message. Though most of the people that would participate in such an event probably already know about this message.
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Basic maths (Score:5, Informative)
I like how they mention that the 23 row by 73 column interpretation is "jumbled garbage". The correct image also looks like jumbled garbage. I especially like the image of a human. How the hell is an alien supposed to figure out what that is without having seen a human before?
The most basic possible message: counting.
Before the human-shaped pixel art, the sequence begins with a simple count, with increasing binary numbers from 1 to 10.
It's a pattern, which is recognizable without any cultural reference, only with some knowledge of math, which is needed to handle the radio signal any way, and this pattern is clearly not a random occurrence. Turn the data the other way around and you don't see any easily recognisable pattern at the begin, so they know it's the wrong way.
If you want to make it clear that a message is a message and not garbage, you try to cram in something that is clearly not random, but that is as simple basic maths as possible :
counting from 0 to some number, list of prime numbers, fibonacci sequence...
Then you could append whatever you want. Life forms at the receiving end might not be able to understand what you mean with your picture, but at least they now they've organised the data correctly because that's the only way where the begining makes some sense in a mathematical way.
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So there's probably a 100 year window in a civilization's development where its unintentional broadcasts are detectable.
Exactly. A civilization will go unnoticed if we don't detect its emissions that originate from the brief instant (relatively speaking) between their invention of radio and their understanding of information theory.
And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
It has, indeed, been pointed out that this is a really bad idea. [scienceblogs.com] Safe to s
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Another one who thinks SETI listens for radio leakage. It doesn't. Let's just leave it at that since you obviously didn't feel the subject is even worthy of a brief google.
Also google for METI [centauri-dreams.org] while you're at it. Whenever your conclusion seems to be that you are far more intelligent than a large group of scientists it may be time to check your premises. It is far more likely that you are the one who is ignorant or stupid.
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I hadn't heard that the heliopause causes so much EM interference? Do you have a reference for that? Is it broadband or does it only affect a narrow range of frequencies?
Would be AWESOME... (Score:5, Funny)
...if what we were seeing was actually ourselves, just 400 years ago. A wormhole, acting as a mirror...floating at the point they're looking at?
C'mon...you can dream, can't you?
Re:Would be AWESOME... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh shit, warn them about Germany.
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I had the same thought. A giant mirror in the middle reflecting everything (not just light). And if the planet appears 200 light years away then the mirror is 100 light years away and we are seeing ourselves 200 years ago, it should start getting noisy fairly soon!
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You fucking idiot. We don't know where they'll be in 200 years because we're moving and they're moving, plus getting a mirror to hit a planet that far away is fucking impossible. Learn something about optics.
Seriously... that's the only hole in that little thought experiment?? You can do much better than that.
Yeah, lets try to talk to them. (Score:2)
"Man the relativistic bombs."
spin up the stargate and dial it! (Score:2)
spin up the stargate and dial it!
Seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, there are 10 billions stars essentially equivalent to our Sun, but you have to go 200 light years to find the closest one?
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It's just a matter of how high your standards are for something to be essentially equivalent. I mean, Alpha Centauri system is about 4.37 light years away, Alpha Centauri A is about 10% more massive than the Sun, Alpha Centauri B is about 10% less massive than the Sun. I say "Eh, close enough".
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Wrong name (Score:4, Informative)
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No, it's really a giant HP printer. It's where all your lost print-jobs have been going.
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Thank you. Target acquired. [wikipedia.org] With a declination of 69 degrees this is definitely a northern star. I won't be able to reach it from my location. Most interesting nearby targets are in the southern hemisphere. This is a rare exception.
In the constellation Draco. Apparent magnitude 8.7. It shouldn't be too hard to find with a telescope in a nice dark sky.
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The star's ID isn't HP 56948
I believe the only authoritative answer to this is what the star reports over its GPIB interface in response to the '*IDN?' command.
Yellow dwarf (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes (Score:3)
Same Age? (Score:2)
But, unless it has terrestrial planets in the Goldilocks zone, it is unlikely to to be a real prospect for SETI.
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...But, unless it has terrestrial planets in the Goldilocks zone, it is unlikely to to be a real prospect for SETI.
If you actually read the paper, it appears from the spectral analysis, the authors conclude that HIP56948 should have about 1/2 the "rocky" material formed around it than our sun, and radial velocity measurements seem to exclude giant plants in the inner planetary region. So, although they cannot be sure there are or are-not rocky planets that are terran like in the Goldilocks zone (we don't have a reliable way to figure that out yet from ground based observations), the available evidence seems to indicat
Schematics (Score:5, Funny)
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To think, we invented the Descolada virus?
Re:Schematics (Score:4, Funny)
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I worry that China is broadcasting the source code for Windows Vista, and 200 years from now some alien civilization will receive it and think they're schematics for something great. They'll build it, nearly destroy themselves and then come looking for us.
No problem. The aliens won't be able to activate their copies of Windows for another 200 years after they install it.
Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development (Score:3)
Think we'll go over there and find a planet just like Earth, but Rome never fell? Or maybe they had an experiment in causing immortality go horribly wrong?
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Think we'll go over there and find a planet just like Earth, but Rome never fell? Or maybe they had an experiment in causing immortality go horribly wrong?
zardoz?
Hodgkin's Law (Score:2)
If Hodgkin's Law holds, there'll be nothing for SETI to pick up yet. Adjusted for the travel time, they're just about getting steam engines.
Has something to do with gingerbread. (Score:2)
Gingerbread? [everythingkitchens.com]
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Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:5, Insightful)
What would be the incentive to organize such an expedition? Even if they are way ahead of us, it will be an enormous enterprise. I'm sure if they are so advanced, they would have to compare it with much better alternatives.
A spot of tea? We'd make great pets? I could think of a million reasons why or why not to visit. Nearly all of the good reasons are non-malicious -- Greed would be a huge limiting factor for the malicious motives... Unless their planet is dying or something.
Think of it this way: Let's say we discovered a TV Signal from an alien race that was less advanced than us? What would we do? Bet your bottom dollar the first (US gov) instinct would be: "Don't tell the public! They'll want to send a message, and that could mean war or our eventual demise." Regardless of the distance, as soon as word gets out to the public, every nerd's mom's sat dish is re-purposed and aimed at the distant planet and beaming them everything from GNU/Linux source code to Otherworldly Erotica. (Heh, here's one now! [slashdot.org])
Public support for NASA to launch a small satellite carrying a message of peace would be huge, regardless of the time it would take it to get there, and the near hopeless chance of it reaching anyone... Were we very much more advanced than we are now, it would be a huge scientific find and you can be sure that some of us would be making plans to stop by and say "hi".
(You've obviously never met an Explorer or Mountain Climber.)
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Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:4, Funny)
"Let's say we discovered a TV Signal from an alien race that was less advanced than us?"
You mean 1000 channels and nothing on?
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What would be the incentive to organize such an expedition? Even if they are way ahead of us, it will be an enormous enterprise. I'm sure if they are so advanced, they would have to compare it with much better alternatives.
Perhaps they desire to serve man?
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:5, Informative)
It's great to go back and watch this particular episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos: Encyclopedia Galactica [hulu.com]. He goes through the basic idea of the Drake Equation, opines on listening/detecting life elsewhere in the galaxy. It's really great stuff, and worth watching whether you've seen it before or not.
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Hopefully they will be advanced enough to know that SETI listens to signals, it does not send anything!
Who knows? Maybe they are so advanced that they can listen to those who are listening !!
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:5, Interesting)
Although passive SETI does not send messages, Active SETI (ASETI) or METI does precisely that. As a planet, we have already sent messages to Gliese 581 and a number of other systems. If I'm successful I will even start sending such targeted messages full time from a 20 meter dish in Argentina. Unfortunately my power levels and antenna size probably limit my messages to a radius of about 50-100 light years, but with very large receiving antennas such messages could travel, much farther, possibly out to 200 ly. My goal is to start a full time. 24/7 targeted beacon. Now that has not been done before, but it's only a matter of time. If I'm not successful in my lifetime surely someone else will be eventually. Even some less cowardly government programs like that of the open minded Ukranians do not shy away from sending messages. They just don't do so as part of a permanent program. I believe that will be left to amateur projects like my own.
Does anyone know the declination and right ascension of this solar twin? I can't find any information on it from googling HP 56948. I'm guessing it probably has another more commonly used name.
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SETI doesn't actually expect to receive radio leakage. So the analog window isn't really an issue. If a twin earth were orbiting Alpha Centauri A even the giant Arecibo dish would not be sensitive enough to receive even fairly loud leakage. The signals are far too weak, generally too low in frequency, and are quite often aimed tangentially to the planet surface and not at the zenith. Omnidirectional signals which might have a greater tendency to travel in the right direction are just too weak. None of it ca
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe they could organize an expedition to colonize this fertile planet 70 percent covered with liquid water, only 200 LY away?
If they're advanced enough to do that then they're advanced enough to have detected our planet and its composition long ago. If they wanted to colonize Earth then the plan would have already been put in place and SETI would have nothing to do with it.
So don't worry. It's only a problem if these aliens are for some reason willing to travel 200 light years just to acquire a bunch of slaves. Maybe we should make it clear in our SETI broadcasts that we are very inquisitive creatures, but also lazy and difficult to train?
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Aliens would not need to come here for water. This keeps popping up in scifi and fantasy but the fact is, there is plenty of water frozen up in our Oort cloud on the fringes of nowhere to make it much easier and more convenient place to get water than bothering to come all the way to the inner planets, worry about stealing it or shooting it out with a bunch of trigger-happy people.
How much frozen water is out there? More than all the water on the Earth, probably by several times over. And that's just o
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:4, Interesting)
If there is a lifeform advanced enough to pick up the SETI signals, chances are they've had the technology for thousands of (earth) years. By contrast, just a couple hundred years ago we were reading books by gas lamps and traveling and sending messages by horse and carriage.
Maybe they could organize an expedition to colonize this fertile planet 70 percent covered with liquid water, only 200 LY away? Of course, by that time the original SETI people would be long dead, having gone to their graves happy in the knowledge that they've advanced understanding between alien species...
I doubt there are any resources a spacefaring civilization could find on Earth that they couldn't find much closer to home. Asteroids and comets good sources of water and many metals and other elements. Unless they want fresh meat.
Probably the only reasons to travel 200 light years to visit a developing culture are to study it, befriend it, or annihilate it so it doesn't become a threat later when it becomes more advanced.
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If we're that convenient to them, it's not very likely they'll be that interested in us.
Re:I think we're one of the first intelligent life (Score:5, Interesting)
First generation of stars create some heavier elements but still nothing for building life. They go nova and what have you. So after the first generation of stars, we're not at what? 5 Billion years?
Massive stars create elements all the way up to iron in their normal life span and all the heavier elements when they go supernova. They have lifespans measured in tens of millions of years.
It doesn't necessarily take a long time to go through several generations of stars. I thought I'd read recently that we'd found extremely old metal-rich stars indicating that they had in fact gone through several generations rapidly.
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Re:I think we're one of the first intelligent life (Score:4, Insightful)
But is tens of millions of years enough to create those heavy elements?
Yes. It is the same fact of being extremely massive that causes them to burn through their hydrogen fuel quickly that allows them to subsequently fuse additional elements up through iron until they undergo a core-collapse supernova.
And were there enough of them early on in the Universe to have created enough heavier elements so that life - especially intelligent life - is relatively common?
Actually the theory is that there were much more massive stars, and more of them, in the early universe, than form today.
Whether that results in sufficient density of heavy elements in some parts of the galaxy to support early development of terrestrial planets, I just don't know.
Almost certainly NOT the first intelligent life (Score:2)
Makes sense. All the matter in the current universe was packed into a much smaller space, the initial hydrogen clouds were likely quite dense with minimal angular momentum and would have collapsed into truly stupendous stars.
As I understand it Sol is believed to be a second-generation star that formed about halfway through the time window in which such stars wou
Re:I think we're one of the first intelligent life (Score:5, Interesting)
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And recalling that the planet has faced quite a few mass extinctions, wiping out all the "progress" (I use the word guardedly, of course) that evolution had made upto that point, even if another planet started off at exactly the same time as us, its equivalent of the dinosaurs could have become sapient 65 billion years ago...
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First, a second generation star could have planets that support life.
Second, the stars that form supernovas don't last long, millions of years, not billions. Many generations of heavy stars had time to form and die before our solar system was formed. A system with similar elemental composition or even heavier could have formed billions of years before ours did.
Third, even if it did take ten billion years before conditions were right for the formation of a star system that could support life, that formatio
Your are correct sir (Score:2)
Re:Maybe I'm paranoid (Score:4, Insightful)
Why does everyone assume that alien species must be so much more advanced than us, technologically? Your logic is immediately flawed in that WE can pick up the SETI signals and we haven't had the technology for thousands of Earth years, so why must every other species?
That's easy -- because the universe is really old it's vastly more likely that aliens evolved and developed civilization millions of years before we did -- or we are millions of years before them -- than it is that they are in the exact same 100-year window of technological development. The odds are literally astronomical.
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I wonder if somewhere far far away, there's a 12 tentacled stand up comedian (except he doesn't have legs, so he sort of squirms a bit higher than usual) saying - at this exact moment - "you know how dumb your average k'nez#brl is? Well 72 perdozquad are even dumber than that!"
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Let me give you an analogy. It is possible that as you post this someone is posting an answer to your question at exactly the same time you hit the 'submit' button. So why don't you expect that your questions will be instantaneously answered as soon as you think them up, making all such posts utterly pointless? It is highly, highly unlikely that our nearest intelligent neighbors developed at exactly the same rate. If they developed even a tiny bit slower they would not have radio technology. So what's the a
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Close. It's our sun, but in the evil twin universe. Or are we the evil twin? Hard to say, really.
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Oh, crap. I have a beard. Guess that means....
Re:it's actually the same sun in a funhouse mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Close. It's our sun, but in the evil twin universe. Or are we the evil twin? Hard to say, really.
Hoping that we are the Evil Twin. The women are always better in the Evil Twin Universes.
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this happens to be one of the few mirrors with the least amount of warp. ain't that a bitch?
What's really going to be a bitch is when Voyager finally smashes into the facet it's heading towards and breaks it into a gazillion shards. 7 years of bad luck at the very least...
Re:Great. So scan it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell us what you find. Until then... who the fuck cares?
Astronomers, people who like astronomy, and people interested in science, just to name a few.
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Re:Great. So scan it. (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly! What was the score from last nights game and what has Britney Britney been up to this week?
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200 light years away would make it a 400 year round trip for radio communications.
Where did you come up with 800?
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)
2) 200 years later..., "Yes we are, is there something we can help you with?"
3) 200 years later..., "Can you give us the secret to faster than light travel?"
4) 200 years later..., "Obviously not."
Total time: 800 years.
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1) Send a message, "Hello, are you out there?" 2) 200 years later..., "Yes we are, is there something we can help you with?" 3) 200 years later..., "Can you give us the secret to faster than light travel?" 4) 200 years later..., "Obviously not." Total time: 800 years.
I forgot (5).
5) 200 years later..., "Ok, never mind then."
Now the total time is 800 years.
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6) ok, you hang up first.
7) no, you hang up first.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
1. "Hello are you out there?"
2. 200 years later, they receive message, send "Yes we are, how can we help?"
3. We receive first response (400 years total now)
4. We send "Can you teach us FTL travel?"
5. They receive the additional response (600 years total now)
6. They reply "thank you for holding, can you verify your phone number please"
7. We receive their message (totaling 800 years now)
8. We hang up in a panic, realizing our entire planet has been outsourced.
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3) We're looking for faster then light drive.
4) no thanks, we all ready got one, you see
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4) 200 years later..., "Obviously not."
Brilliant!
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1) Receive a message "Yes we do"
2) 5 years to decode and decide to send a message "Hello we heard you"
3) Receive a message "clearly not"
4) 5 years later to decode and send a message "It seems you are out there"
5) Receive a message "Stop and think"
6) Ponder 20 years and send "Do you have time travel"
7) Few weeks later "and do you think we'll invent it"
8) 700 odd years later send "why did you stop sending messages to us"
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1) Send a message, "Hello, are you out there?"
2) 200 years later..., "Hello, my name is Julie. Is there something I can help you vith?"
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800 years, and neither of your civilizations has figured out that you can pipeline multiple communications to save time?
Apathetic bloody planets, I've no sympathy at all.