Stephen Hawking Wants To Find Aliens Before They Find Us (cnet.com) 280
Stephen Hawking is again reminding people that perhaps shouting about our existence to aliens is not the right way to go about it, especially if those aliens are more technologically advanced. In his new half-hour program dubbed, Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places, the theoretical physicist and cosmologist said (via CNET):"If intelligent life has evolved (on Gliese 832c), we should be able to hear it," he says while hovering over the exoplanet in the animated "U.S.S. Hawking." "One day we might receive a signal from a planet like this, but we should be wary of answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn't turn out so well." Hawking manages to be both worried about exposing our civilization to aliens and excited about finding them. He supports not only Breakthrough: Listen, but also Breakthrough: Starshot, another initiative that aims to send tiny nanocraft to our closest neighboring star system, which was recently found to have an Earth-like planet.
You'd think someone as smart as Hawking ... (Score:2, Interesting)
would know that TV and radio -- except for AM -- transmitters are designed so as not to radiate energy where it's wasted (like, for example, towards the sky). Plus, of course, the transition to fiber optics reducing EM emissions even further.
If we figured that out pretty soon after inventing radio, it stands to reason that ETs would have also.
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That's a lot of energy being directed into space.
The number of energy sources is great, but at what wattage are they sending them (I bet "low"), and how many are directed beam?
Remember that of all the energy that stars send out (the Sun emits 3.8 x 10^26 watts), only a minuscule fraction of photons reach us. How many photons from a 1,000 watt source will arrive at Gliese 823?
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Oh for heaven's sake, the Hawking knows the planet is a sphere, if you use a vertical dipole sure you don't send a whole lot straight up, and you radiate more of your energy horizontally away from the antenna .... and while the photons head out in a donut away from that antenna, which is poking up from the surface of a sphere, as they move away from their source the ground falls away and any photons that don't hit anything ... radiate away into space in that same donut shape, inverse squaring to infinity (a
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Some of the radiation passes out into space over the horizon, so Earth is certainly visible, even if it at a distance only is detectable as a noise level change.
The limit of many TV transmitters are caused by the fact that Earth is round, and only direct wave is considered. A lot of the radiation at higher frequencies slips out into space except when you have a phenomenon called tropo ducting [dxinfocentre.com] where VHF and sometimes UHF can travel great distances along the surface of the Earth.
Then we can always argue that
Re:You'd think someone as smart as Hawking ... (Score:5, Informative)
I seem to recall hearing that, if an identical society to our own were currently orbitting Alpha Centauri, our current radio telescopes would probably be able to detect any high-power military radar sweeps that pass their horizon in our direction, but not much else. So for now at least it seems unlikely that we'll be able to detect planetary "radio leakage", regardless of vertical attenuation.
And the radar point raises another good one: vertical attenuation probably wouldn't make a huge amount of difference for detection. Even if they somehow transmitted a signal perfectly horizontally, it would still head into space as the planet's surface curved away from it, and transmission frequencies would almost certainly be tuned to the most transparent bands in the atmosphere, so atmospheric attenuation probably wouldn't make a huge difference. We'd only get relatively brief, regular bursts of signal as the the transmitter's horizon aligned with Earth each day, but for detection that's all you need.
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And if we aren't alone but we are the first ones that have achieved a technological civilization? Is that also terrifying? Maybe, because then we might have the potential to repeat our history of colonization.
With all due respect to Mr. Hawking and us... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting. Once you get to that technology, energy and resource problems either have been solved, or become very easily solvable. In addition, given that FTL is far more likely to be developed using AI rather than human intelligence, space faring races (if they bother to be space faring) are more likely to be 2nd order intelligences (i.e. artificial intelligences),rather than 1st order, genetically based naturally developing intelligences).
Bottom line? To space faring AIs, we're squirrels. Our nuts are safe. Really.
Re:With all due respect to Mr. Hawking and us... (Score:4, Informative)
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Uh, yes, well I always suspected that the scientists doing those quantum entanglement experiments were just messing with us for fun.
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There are other theoretical ways to travel that don't involve travelling at or beyond the speed of light. These theories have existed for over a century and have a strong basis mathematically.
At one point flight was not possible, ever. At another point travel to the moon was not possible, ever. Seeing a bit of a trend here? There are many things which were once considered fantasy which are now a reality.
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I guess you missed the first line that says:
"There are other theoretical ways to travel that don't involve travelling at or beyond the speed of light. "
Take particular notice of "don't involve".
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There are no theoretical limits on subjective speed. You can travel to Andromeda in a day, in theory. There's only a rule that everybody will be long dead when you get home.
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In fact, we achieved a manned trip with a successful return less than 1 lifetime after we first achieved controlled, powered flight.
I think about that a lot, I think it's pretty crazy that humans have had some form of civilization for tens of thousands of years, and we only learned how to build a machine capable of controlled powered flight just over 100 years ago, and it was only a little more than 50 years after that when we put people on the moon. It took so long to get the understanding and technology needed for the first steps, and after that it just took off (literally!). It's pretty amazing. It's also pretty amazing that there
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Except when it is possible... Hawking believes worm-holes are likely, which would make both FTL and even backwards time-travel possible, at least in theory.
For the record I'm a complete skeptic of backwards time-travel.
Current physics is just one theory, based on observed evidence, and we already know there are big, gaping holes in it (dark matter, dark energy to name but two). It's more than just possible that a better
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I'm not sure what Hawking's current view on wormholes is, but I know that he is not a believer [wikipedia.org] in backwards time travel. Indeed, it seems to proclude macroscopic stable wormholes, period, since they seem to inherently imply a capability for backwards time travel. They also seem to inherently represent either unfathomably large amounts of energy to form
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No, indeed, but it makes it foolish to clutch on to the current theory as an infallible cornerstone.
Humans have encountered a trivially tiny amount of evidence about the universe, and are prone to misinterpreting or rationalizing what little we do see.
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Maybe not, but we hardly *know* that. Physics is an iterative approximation to reality, not divine truth.
We know our current understanding of physics is imperfect - current QM and GR theories have some fundamental incompatibilities. And we know even small imperfections can contain vast new fields of science - all of QM grew out of some minor unexplained oddities in the behavior of light.
We have also already invented several different theoretical FTL techniques that are completely consistent with our curr
Re: With all due respect to Mr. Hawking and us... (Score:2)
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wrong, most of the universe is receding away from us at faster than light speed.
And drop your religious belief in science, physics is a man-made set of useful models, that we already know don't apply to all situations. We don't know what the laws of nature are. We don't know that making a craft that goes FTL is impossible, in fact our understanding of GR says it IS possible.
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At least given what we know today. But loopholes have been found before in other stuff that was thought impossible to break.
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Uh, FTL travel is not possible. Ever.
There are several ways in which that statement is both true and, at least potentially, untrue at the same time.
True:
1) We have discovered no way to break what we understand to be the highest velocity at which a particle can travel: light speed.
2) No experiment we have ever conceived and/or tested has discredited (1) above.
3) There are several more, but I don't want to articulate them.
Untrue (or potentially untrue):
1) Our best understanding is that matter in the universe moved faster than light during a time
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Not quite. FTL implies the *potential* for time travel - not the inevitability of it. Fly to Andromeda and back in an afternoon, and there will be no time travel involved, you have to jump through extra hoops to accomplish that.
And you're also assuming Relativity is *perfect*. Yes, we have a *lot* of data backing it up, but we had a *lot* of data backing up Newtonian mechanics too, before minor anomalies in extreme situations proved it was flawed, openin the door for GR to replace it. And frankly, we alr
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no, not if you drag a bubble of space-time with you. there is no velocity limit in that case either.
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Science and physics once said fusion and fision were impossible and the sun couldn't possibly exist as it produced more energy than physically possible.
It also couldn't explain how the honeybee flew or heavier than air travel.
One thing that helped with these was that we had working examples that proved it was possible even if we didn't know how but just because we don't have a known working example of ftl travel it doesn't make it impossible.
We already have working theories on bendIng space. Currently they
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Alchemists spent most of early human history trying to change elements into other ones. The concept of the nucleus was discovered at roughly the same time as the discovery that it can change (aka, radioactive decay) - around the end of the 19th century - which immediately launched searches into the possibilities of various means of transmutation. There was no point in time in which the nucleus (aka, a fundamental requirement for either fusion
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Certainly not in the present, or the anywhere-near future. But geological timespans are long. Ultimately, making antimatter comes down to taking plasma, getting it up to high speeds, and colliding it in an environment to extract antiprotons from the resultant "debris". Space has no shortage of energy sources (even plasma sources) of scales numerous orders of magnitude larger than we deal with today.
Antimatter spacecraft anytime remotely soon? Not the slightest chance. But at some point in the future, o
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There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting.
*No* possibility? And you know this how? Through an exhaustive analysis of all the sentient ET species in the galaxy?
Now your arguments are reasonable and I agree that it's quite possible things will be like that. But then maybe not, we just don't know.
I can easily imagine an alien race that is genetically driven to multiply and expand above anything else. Other races to them are just obstacles to be eliminated, kind of like how humans expand into new areas (e.g. Amazon rainforest) and destroy existing life
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I'm making what seem like reasonable guesses based on the assumption that we're completely ordinary as tool using, sentient species go and while individual differences exist, physics and the nature of the problems to be solved will impose very similar restrictions on any sentient species seeking to engage in space travel.
Re:With all due respect to Mr. Hawking and us... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think its possible to predict what a more advanced civilization might want. Are we squirrels? Are we rats to be exterminated? Are we dogs to be bred for cuteness? Is the relationship something we are not capable of comprehending?
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I'm hoping for cats, actually. Better lifestyle and all that.
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It is also impossible for us to hide from them. It requires an immense leap of faith to think that an advanced alien civilization would require us to send an intentional radio signal for them to detect, rather than being detectable from the (much stronger) signal that is the change in the Earth's atmosphere over the last 200 years. If they are even a few centuries (cosmically, a blink of an eye) ahead of us technologically, they will have imaged the Earth and seen our atmospheric nuclear tests in the last c
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Probably true. OTOH, we have no idea of their motives. Why would the humans care if ants eat some of the spilled sugar in the cabinets?
I just think that its better to be the guys on the ships rather than the guys on the shore.
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Christopher Columbus was far more advanced than the Native Americans, but that didn't stop him from a mass slaughter.
For all our theorising about the number of available habitable worlds, we're still not really sure exactly how many there are or what their distribution is in the universe. For all we really know planets like earth might be incredibly rare. They may want to take earth simply because it has life sustaining properties. Or maybe slaughtering primitive species predator-style is a national pass
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Christopher Columbus was far more advanced than the Native American
There are two ways to look at this, technically and genetically. From a Technical point of view, he was marginally better off than the Natives, genetically not so much.
So, the only thing we need to fear are aliens with better weapons that we currently have. And our weapons, while seemingly nasty to us, are probabably like pop guns to any alien who could find us out.
Lets hope "To Serve Man" isn't a cookbook
We are likely to be studied regardless (Score:2)
We are a threat to ourselves and in a hundred years (if we survive them intact) a threat to everyone else in the galaxy. Much of Star Trek on this is plausible. They are likely to intervene at least before we become a threat to them.
Then there's the question of what they might want from us. Do we have any resources here that they might want? Any data? That is harder to understand but we cannot rule it out. For that reason, I agree with Hawking. Why take the risk?
AIien AI may well have fought its creators... (Score:2)
... and thus consider all biological lifeforms inherently dangerous.
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Columbus' motivation was that he wanted to enslave everyone to make money for him. Advanced aliens are certain to have machines that will make better slaves than we can.
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There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting. Once you get to that technology, energy and resource problems either have been solved, or become very easily solvable...
Yes, you go find some squirrels and take their nuts, except for selected docile breeding stock.
Then you teach the now well behaved squirrels to gather and or produce whatever it is you want or need.
Maybe hit the town once in a while to get your tentacles wet doing some probing on the townies...
Being technologically advanced does not imply being kind, compassionate, empathetic or in any way moral.
The fact that they got off their hunk of rock implies they are willing to struggle and sacrifice.
And often s
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Humans find goldfish interesting.
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But we are rarely moved to conquer the entire globe spanning goldfish empire. We might, if they got in our way, but we wouldn't go out of our way to do so.
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Goldfish are carp. Carp are everywhere. We already *have* conquered their empire.
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There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting.
It is impossible for me to get behind a statement like that given that we have (to my knowledge) not learned anything about any such aliens. We can't make such broad generalizations while being completely in the dark.
Perhaps some species capable of FTL travel might find us interesting to hunt, or maybe they'd like to get their hands on Earth for resources ("natural" or labor) or as an outpost near something or someone else they are interested in. Not finding us particularly sexy doesn't necessarily mean
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A lot of the atrocities committed on the natives were indeed for forced labour or resources. But a lot were also committed in the name of religion.
We can certainly speculate on what sort of philosophy aliens might live by, but it would be nothing more than speculation.
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You're making several big assumptions:
1) that FTL would be a far more advanced technology than what we have, rather than a the product of a fundamentally alien physics model,
2) that FTL would necessarily be accompanied by similar advances in energy and resource acquisition
3) that FTL exists and is relevant at all - plenty of ways to cross between stars without it. Just because they won't get here for decades or millenia doesn't mean they couldn't be a huge problem for humanity when they do.
4) that they don
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That's probably true, but we don't know.
FTL may wind up being possible due to some unknown property of physics but it may only be useful for movement through spacetime and not necessarily for the production of useful energy.
I'd wager an FTL capable but also not a free energy civilization is also a civilization that is resource hungry and would likely be exploiting sources of easy to obtain resources. It could also turn out that the atomic elements aren't well-distributed in the galaxy and that one all the
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"... FTL is far more likely to be developed using AI rather than human intelligence..."
Or assuming there is no FTL, then AI will be needed for the small, long-endurance probes. If you think that the latency problem in operating Mars rovers is hard, what are latencies measured in years going to be like?
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Squirrels *are* tasty. But more to the point... traveling 16 light years to catch some squirrels seems pretty expensive.
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Traveling 16 light years to set up a self sustaining squirrel farm, priceless...
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As long as my offspring get to transmit their DNA in relative peace and prosperity...
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As long as my offspring get to transmit their DNA in relative peace and prosperity...
They may get some teriyaki flavor spliced in...
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1) 90% of our cells are bacteria.
2) The other 10% have endsymbionts (aka mitochondria) in them.
3) Much of our DNA has been "infected" by viruses.
4) Most people on the planet are content to live like sheep (do what their fathers did, and their fathers before them, while happily following a strong leader).
Baa-aah.
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4) Most people on the planet are content to live like sheep
It's a validated strategy that has worked for billions of generations
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Squirrels *are* tasty. But more to the point... traveling 16 light years to catch some squirrels seems pretty expensive.
Buying and maintaining a loaded full-size V-8 pickup truck just to drive half a mile to Dairy Queen for some fake ice cream seems pretty expensive too, but people who buy them for other reasons still stop at the drive-through for a sundae when they feel like it. And maybe aliens don't develop FTL with the main purpose being to visit Earth, but that doesn't mean they won't ever drop in when they have some free time or a spare star cruiser. Maybe some are colonial and think we would obviously put up little fi
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9,000 miles (London to Cape Town, a month on a steamship) isn't too comparable to interstellar travel.
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To a lion chasing down a zebra or whatever isn't too comparable to crossing the Atlantic ocean.
The lion doesn't have any clue how to cross the ocean, but people do.
We don't have any clue how to cross large distances in space, but aliens may.
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We don't have any clue how to cross large distances in space
Sure we do. It (generation ships) just takes *lots* of money and a *lot* of time.
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"Here Mr. Blipzerg, have a Trump Steak. It's made out of real Trump."
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Fleshlings eat other fleshlings. Machines probably eat other machines for spare parts. They might land, steal our phones and leave.
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If they can, and they're interested, they are probably already learning about us without our consent. I'm sure we'll make a tidy little entry in a very large database and be used for comparison purposes in some starving PHD candidate alien's thesis. We may even appear near the top of the bibliography.
Think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes sense to guess that the dominant species on other worlds got to the top of the food chain because they're also the most skillful killers. It's wishful thinking to suppose that a more technically advanced civilization would be more peaceful and tolerant. Just like it was wishful thinking for the Aztecs to give the Spanish gold and hope they'd go away.
He's right. We should be careful about broadcasting our presence around the 'verse.
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The Dodos didn't go extinct because we were so skilled at killing them, they went extinct because they were so very easy to kill and didn't adapt to the situation by learning to run away. This didn't make us amazing hunters, it makes them incredibly bad survivalists.
Carrier pigeons on the other hand aren't extinct so that part of your statement makes no sense.
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" they went extinct because they were so very easy to kill... "
The passenger pigeon species had a fatal flaw: it could survive only in large colonies. Man had only to do a halfass job of wiping out large, visible bunches of them resting in trees, and once the hidden tipping point was reached, the pigeon colonies collapsed. Most endangered species can hang on in isolated small colonies until there is a chance to repopulate.
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We should be careful about broadcasting our presence around the 'verse.
I'm pretty sure we haven't and likely won't for a long time. I vaguely remember someone doing the math on how far out into space our radio signals could be detected from the noise of the sun and other radiation sources. As I recall no one is going to hear us if they are outside of the solar system.
Even if that estimate is off by a few orders of magnitude that still doesn't get us a signal out very far. Then we'd have to get their attention long enough to be interesting. Just the time for the signal to t
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It's wishful thinking to suppose that a more technically advanced civilization would be more peaceful and tolerant.
I don't think so, for two reasons.
The first is that our own history is one of increasing peace and tolerance. If you don't believe this, you should read Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature". I won't attempt to restate his arguments here, but there's very compelling evidence that we've become dramatically less violent and more tolerant in step with our increased technology.
The second is that advanced technology is impossible without extremely high levels of cooperation. For one example, the
Likely cover story (Score:2)
We all know that "Mr. Hawking" is in fact an alien, residing on our planet to observe us.
send nanocraft, and one drone (Score:2)
Let them shoot down the drone.
Earth declares war
Earth sends nanocraft with We come in peace post-it
Earth-base prepares 10 megaton warhead for 'signature required priority overnight' delivery
Resolution of the Fermi Paradox? (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually started my analysis of the Fermi Paradox from the other side. What if some civilization wanted to be noticed? Turns out to be a relatively minor problem, which strongly indicates that no one wants to be noticed. Alternatively, they tried it and got shut up quickly. Bottom line is that no one is trying right now (where now includes the 100,000 years it would take to span our galaxy--still an extremely small value of "now" on the galactic scale).
My position has evolved over the years, but I'm basically standing on the position that the synthetic intelligences (ASIs) that replace the naturally evolved intelligences like us are amused. They are watching and probably gambling quatloos on whether we create ASI successors before exterminating ourselves. Longer version at:
https://ello.co/shanen0/post/v... [ello.co]
Again hoping for "funny" or "insightful" comments at Slashdot, but it's a young article, soon to become an obsolete article...
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The flaw in these arguments is always that they assume a species will act as one. Even on Earth, we have idiots broadcasting adverts for unhealthy snacks into space as publicity stunts.
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I think you are talking about non-directional radio and TV broadcasts, but those signals will become unintelligible within a few light years. They would only lead to our detection by a civilization that had seeded the galaxy with detectors, and such a civilization would surely find it easier and more interesting to simply monitor the life-bearing planets more directly and close up.
My analysis assumes a large electromagnetic beacon (probably radio or laser) deliberately focused across the sky in a search pat
Too late... (Score:2)
Some of them are just catching "I Love Lucy" and "Abbott and Costello". Maybe it will keep them occupied for 50 years or so... If they were more advanced than we are, they won't be for long.
We are animals (Score:2)
More alarmist nonsense from Hawking (Score:4, Interesting)
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You have a strange definition of "intrinsic". And "are", for that matter. Particularly given that as you speak there are humans orbiting over your head.
Indians meeting Columbus? Hardly. (Score:2)
Logically, the encounter between us and a more advanced society would be less like "Indians and Columbus" and more like "single-celled bacteria and humans".
Assuming the universe is ~15bn years, and the earth's existence to-date (including the evolution of our stellar system, and the giant star from whose planetary nebula we formed) took about 6bn years to evolve from essentially nothing, that means that a more advanced civilization could be anywhere from 0 to 9bn years ahead of us. Let's assume conservativ
Don't worry. (Score:2)
... shouting about our existence to aliens is not the right way to go about it, ...
I heard that Trump is going to build a Space Wall. Not sure who's going to pay for it though. :-)
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Come on, you know the answer to this one [tumblr.com] ;)
solid advise (Score:2)
Whenever I'm out of my mind enough to look at the world as an outsider, I would advise any aliens to take off and nuke the site from orbit. Though they certainly have some way to just kill off the human species and let evolution try again. Come back in a million years (surely you've managed age) and check if earth intelligence v2.0 is better.
We definitely want to find them first, so we can check if we can conquer, enslave and economically exploit them. If not, to buy us time to improve our military until we
If THEY are more technologically advanced ... (Score:2)
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Whoah. I'm an alien. I'm a legal alien. I'm an Englishman in New York.
Re:What a dumb-ass (Score:5, Informative)
He was the guy who basically married general relativity to quantum mechanics, and catapulted our understanding of stellar phenomenon forward by a substantial amount. Long after your bones are dust, people are going to remember him for his important contributions to science.
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No, he did nothing of the sort. No one has successfully "married general relativity to quantum mechanics", that is beyond present day physics.
He has applied quantum thermodynamics to certain aspects of a black hole, but that is not the same thing.
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He's a mess and he has low ratings. He's a loser and at least an 8-handicap golfer. Sad! And what's with that voice, right? [imitates Stephen Hawking]
When I'm president, you can bet the aliens will know where we are.
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To make America Great Again, we should send all the crippled back to -- where do they come from, again?
Right at the moment, Brazil.
Re:What a dumb-ass (Score:5, Interesting)
No they won't. They'll remember him for being a cripple that speaks with a monotone robotic voice machine.
Hawking is on the lower rung of great scientists, a lot of this theories have been debunked. He just throws out so many that when a couple turn out right, we all give him a standing ovation. If he wasn't crippled, you wouldn't have any idea who he is.
I wasn't sure if you were joking or not, then I noticed you posted this garbage anonymously, so I must assume you were indeed joking. Hawking's greatest achievement may not be his scholarly work but instead the great success he has had in communicating arcane science to the masses and convincing them to think about matters like this in an intelligent, inquisitive way. Guys like Hawking, Tyson, Sagan, and even Bill Nye and Don Herbert have arguably had as big of an impact on society as have Einstein, Bohr, or Tesla. They make otherwise dense and dry topics exciting and interesting, and if there's one thing we need it's more people of all ages maintaining an interest in science, and being open to learning and continuing to investigate the workings of the universe.
You could have said your piece in a less offensive way, too.
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They could have, instead, become curious about the Kardashians' dinner or something.
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"Hawking is on the lower rung of great scientists, a lot of this theories have been debunked. "
Bow before the recipient of the Anonymous Internet Keyboard Prize! Okay, now explain to us why Kepler was a chump, and how the orbit of Jupiter can be explained in epicycles.
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So basically Hillary pulls off the mask and goes from President to Reptillian overlord?
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So basically Hillary pulls off the mask and goes from President to Reptillian overlord?
You are making a few large assumptions that pro-Trump wackos automatically reject.
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"Tactical sanity"? I don't know enough about what you're saying to even be able to tell if it's a joke or not.
If you're not making a joke... no, there's no realistic way for "swinging around a star" to just reverse the direction of a relativistic craft like Starshot. Even with a very close flyby, gravity's effect on its trajectory would be minimal.
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"Or did you not somehow get that E=MC2 obviously has not been beaten and the immense distances that we cant reach with fesible technolgy in the next 1000 years?"
The infeasibility of interstellar travel absent wormholes or other unknown shortcuts has nothing to do with the existence of other species. It only affects our ability to find them.
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Because? Do you think interstellar civilizations are based around burning coal?