Aliens May Have Bugged Co-Orbital Space Rocks To Spy On Earth, Scientist Says (nbcnews.com) 135
dryriver shared this article from NBC News' science blog Mach:
Picture this: A hundred million years ago, an advanced civilization detects strange signatures of life on a blue-green planet not so far away from their home in the Milky Way. They try sending signals, but whatever's marching around on that unknown world isn't responding. So, the curious galactic explorers try something different. They send a robotic probe to a small, quiet space rock orbiting near the life-rich planet, just to keep an eye on things.
If a story like this played out at any moment in Earth's 4.5 billion-year history, it just might have left an archaeological record. At least, that's the hope behind a new proposal to check Earth's so-called co-orbitals for signs of advanced alien technology. Co-orbitals are space objects that orbit the sun at about the same distance that Earth does. "They're basically going around the sun at the same rate the Earth is, and they're very nearby," said James Benford, a physicist and independent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researcher who dreamed up the idea that aliens might have bugged Earth via these co-orbitals while he was at a conference in Houston last year. If he's right, the co-orbitals could be a way to detect alien activity that occurred before humans even evolved, much less turned their attention toward the stars.
To be clear, even SETI researchers who like the idea of checking out Earth's co-orbitals acknowledge that it's a long shot... "How likely is it that alien probe would be on one of these co-orbitals, obviously extremely unlikely," said Paul Davies, a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in Benford's new paper on the idea, published Sept. 20 in The Astronomical Journal. "But if it costs very little to go take a look, why not? Even if we don't find E.T., we might find something of interest...." Seeking signs of intelligent extraterrestrials close to Earth is informative even if the search comes up empty, Benford said. That no one's heard or seen any extraterrestrial signals in 50 years or so doesn't mean much, given the mind-boggling time span of Earth's history. A lack of evidence spanning hundreds, millions or even billions of years would be much more convincing.
"If we don't find anything, that means no one has come to look at the life of Earth for over billions of years," Benford said. "That is a big surprise, a stunning thing."
The search has already begun. In April China's space agency announced plans to send a probe to Earth's nearest co-orbital.
If a story like this played out at any moment in Earth's 4.5 billion-year history, it just might have left an archaeological record. At least, that's the hope behind a new proposal to check Earth's so-called co-orbitals for signs of advanced alien technology. Co-orbitals are space objects that orbit the sun at about the same distance that Earth does. "They're basically going around the sun at the same rate the Earth is, and they're very nearby," said James Benford, a physicist and independent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researcher who dreamed up the idea that aliens might have bugged Earth via these co-orbitals while he was at a conference in Houston last year. If he's right, the co-orbitals could be a way to detect alien activity that occurred before humans even evolved, much less turned their attention toward the stars.
To be clear, even SETI researchers who like the idea of checking out Earth's co-orbitals acknowledge that it's a long shot... "How likely is it that alien probe would be on one of these co-orbitals, obviously extremely unlikely," said Paul Davies, a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in Benford's new paper on the idea, published Sept. 20 in The Astronomical Journal. "But if it costs very little to go take a look, why not? Even if we don't find E.T., we might find something of interest...." Seeking signs of intelligent extraterrestrials close to Earth is informative even if the search comes up empty, Benford said. That no one's heard or seen any extraterrestrial signals in 50 years or so doesn't mean much, given the mind-boggling time span of Earth's history. A lack of evidence spanning hundreds, millions or even billions of years would be much more convincing.
"If we don't find anything, that means no one has come to look at the life of Earth for over billions of years," Benford said. "That is a big surprise, a stunning thing."
The search has already begun. In April China's space agency announced plans to send a probe to Earth's nearest co-orbital.
Or maybe they were less subtle... (Score:2)
Any chance their "small, quiet space rock" arrived about 66 million years ago [wikipedia.org]?
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Any chance their "small, quiet space rock" arrived about 66 million years ago [wikipedia.org]?
There's always a chance, but Occam's Razor has already been satisfied here.
The building blocks of human existence were already here billions of years ago. We can trace evolutionary characteristics in the human fetus back 250 million years, what with lizard hands, gills, and tails. Small mammals already existed back in the late Cretaceous.
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Unfortunately, the orbital chaos of the Solar system is such that looking more than a handful of millennia forward or backward in time is futile. The system just has too much noise.
A corollary of that is that if "the aliens" decided to bomb the dinosaurs, extinguish the ornithischian ones and promote the saurischian theropods (and incidentally, let the mammals increase in size), an
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Oops.
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Boeing designed it
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This makes perfect sense (Score:3)
Since there there are probably less than 50 million objects that meet the criteria for hosting a small surveillance device from an advanced interstellar civilization, it makes very good sense to go start inspecting them looking for it.
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In addition, we should start now. We got a lot of objects to look at. I'll take the first one.
Re:This makes perfect sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at them is good science. The paper in TFA just lists the closest, easiest to get to rocks. We should be studying them just in general, as we've done very little "hands on" work with asteroids, just a couple of probes taking samples.
These are actually close enough to send a probe that returns regolith samples to Earth. Why would you not want to do that science? And while the probe is there, if it happens to bump into another probe, well, won't that be interesting.
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How about you first talk about well, say a hundreds of thousands of years more advanced societies would hide stuff. Not to forget, well we are looking for them, why would they have not been looking for us and the simplest method place a cheap small satellite in orbit of every likely planet to look for clumps of camp fires. Which they well, could have been doing for billions of years.
Well, what happens when they find that clump of camp fires, possibly a species on it's way to colonising other worlds. Very l
Soft Disclosure Continues (Score:4, Interesting)
- The US Navy just confirmed these UFO videos are the real deal [cnn.com]
- TO THE STARS ACADEMY OF ARTS & SCIENCE MAKES GROUNDBREAKING METAMATERIALS ACQUISITION [tothestarsacademy.com]
- NASA chief says we are close to finding life on Mars — but the world won’t be ready for it [nypost.com]
- US10144532B2 - Craft using an inertial mass reduction device - Current Assignee US Secretary of Navy [google.com]
- NSA UFO Documents Index [nsa.gov]
- FBI Records: The Vault - UFOs [fbi.gov]
- CIA Reading Room - UFOs FOIA [cia.gov]
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Here's the conspiracy theory in a nutshell: a variety of government agencies that would get massively increased budgets if information about aliens came to light all are great at keeping that secret, every one of them. Because of there's one thing a government agency would hate, that's a massively larger budget, right?
Dumbest conspiracy theory ever.
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Looks very similar to NASAs nuthouse project group, where they try out every whackjob theory, just in case.
Google patent links (Score:2)
Google patent links [google.com] are fun. They're on the Internet, so they must be true. I don't know if this is an actual patent or not, but apparently the Patent Office did grant some number of patents for perpetual motion machines, and eventually realized that was a bad idea and made it a policy not to grant such patents. Despite that, I've heard that a few still managed to get through as explicit PMMs, and others may have gotten by with wording that obfuscated the PMM aspect of the device.
I suspect they have seeded the galaxy with (Score:5, Funny)
Autonomous probes that are designed to be innocuous, promote the evolution of intelligent life, and wait to both signal their creators of the progress and serve as dimensional gates when the time for a species to transcend occurs.
They tend to be black with an obsidian like finish with the dimension ratios 1:4:9
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and serve as dimensional gates when the time for a species to transcend occurs.
BEEP ... BEEP ... BEEP ....
Wow, that just took forEVER to be ready. OK sun, break out the scythe, let's a-go collectin' before your mom gets mad and explodes.
Or: To Serve Man snippet [youtu.be]
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They tend to be black with an obsidian like finish with the dimension ratios 1:4:9
How naive to think that the sequence ends in three dimensions...
"but if it costs very little" (Score:3)
Well, why don't you pay for it then? Then you will know what "costs very little" really means. Stupidity reigns.
Regardless ... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, even if we don't find monoliths, or even rusted pressure vessels, we'll be surveying the current members of this class of objects. There will be new objects moving into the class, but we'll chew them up in due course. First, deal with the potentially hazardous ones.
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Oh right. Settling the Solar System. Sure.
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I don't know about you, but I get paid to plan redundancy into hazardous activities. Not having all your eggs in one basket is the gist of redundant preparation.
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It is inevitable. The only barrier is cost: no SciFi technology is required, only straightforward evolution of existing technology to bring costs down. And when has humanity ever failed to expand to fill all available living space?
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Really depends on whether we can adapt to living in space. Low or lack of gravity may be a show stopper as one example.
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Sure you can fake gravity in space, somewhat harder somewhere like the Moon. Anyways it was one example that could use more study. The real hard part might simply having a society that works when a simple mistake will kill.
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Uhhhh.... Canada is mostly empty. Center of the US. Great swathes of desert. The Poles. Bottom of the ocean.
In all those places, human population is growing. People live on the poles now (well, the south pole). People live in Death Valley. People live in space. The bottom of the ocean is actually harder to live in than space, which is why we have more people living in space right now than the bottom of the ocean.
But space habitats will actually be nice places to live, once we get to a reasonable scale. Much easier places to raise a family than the poles, or the desert. We just can't afford to build anything
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But space habitats will actually be nice places to live, once we get to a reasonable scale. Much easier places to raise a family than the poles, or the desert. We just can't afford to build anything at that scale yet. The ISS is the most expensive structure ever built by humanity, and it's rubbish.
You are right, we cannot afford to build any sort of habitat where humans can "raise families" for sure for a long, long time. But the belief that they will nicer places to live than a desert (I've lived in one for years) is confusing science fiction and space nuttery with actual evidence, and betraying ignorance about actual deserts.
That ISS project shows that living in space is stressful to humans. The frequent occurrence of signs of retinal deterioration among long term space exposure for example (all 8
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When I say "space habitats", don't think "space stations", think O'Neil cylinders [wikipedia.org] with 100-10000 km^2 living space (the concept is more general than the specific habitat O'Neil proposed). Even at 100 km^2, for most people that's big enough to be someplace you live for a few years while you work there, but not really large enough to be a place to raise a family.
That scale is just a matter of robotic manufacture in orbit. Once you have orbital infrastructure for heavy industry, you don't need to lift anythi
Bracewell probes are an old idea (Score:2)
The monolith from 2001 was an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe>Bracewell probe [wikipedia.org].
Did James Benford this was his original idea or is that bad reporting?
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The paper is actually by both James and his brother Gregory Benford, who you can be certain knows his Clark, and every related SF trope.
We might want to be careful about the search. (Score:3, Informative)
Cf. Theodore Sturgeon "The Sky Was Full of Ships" published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1947
"A man on trial for murder, in this story, tells a strange tale of being led, by the scientist he was supposed to have murdered, to a cave in which there was a machine for measuring atomic fission activity and a radio for transmitting the information into space. It had recorded and transmitted, they decide, the information about the first atomic bomb to a race on another planet so that they could interfere before man got too technologically dangerous. If that were the case, the coroner jokes, they--whoever they are--should be here by now. And they go out to find that the sky is full of ships."
"Modern science Fiction: A Critical Analysis" James Gunn (ed.)
Ok this is dumb (Score:5, Interesting)
They're basically talking about L3, which has its view of the Earth blocked by a giant ball of plasma. So any species that wants to "watch Earth" is going to have be sending out probes on occasion to check out how things on Earth are. At this point though, the question becomes why choose L3 then? The MOON is a better observation platform then. So, it feels like an assumption being made here is that the aliens want to hide their presence to any possible future species, which is fine, but why use L3 then? Any smart species is going to know that Lagrange points are valuable and will go there eventually.
The better solutions IMO are A) put a probe on a highly elliptical orbit around the star, like 400-500 century loops, like some comets B) Setup in the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud. Considering how hard it has been to find a supposed Planet X out there; finding a school bus size probe would be impossible for a long time C) Setup your observation base in a nearby star system with no life, like Proxima Centauri, and just fire occasional probes at the target star. You can even build up a large, autonomous manufacturing system for all of this and as long as its not "mega-structure" scale, no one is going to know its there until they are most of the way to the star. Plus, if your probes are sent often enough, you'll have enough notice for when you need to start dumping your base into the star and getting out of there.
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You didn't read TFA. That's fine, this is Slashdot, but you probably shouldn't call the authors dumb for things you imagine they might have said.
They're not talking about the Earth-Sun L3, they're talking about the asteroids in pseudo-orbits around Earth (technically they all orbit the sun, but the paths of their orbits keep them very close to Earth).
The closest comes within 400 km of Earth, much closer than geosynchronous satellites. There are a handful of asteroids that regularly pass closer than 1 mill
I don't debate comic book plot lines. (Score:2)
Some claim to have found it already (Score:2)
Unless they have physics defying technology to allow faster than light travel, such probes are probably automated. This could also mean they may not be programmed to choose the moon but with some standard programming to put itself into an orbit around the sun as its own isolated object. A moon landing could be more difficult for them to achieve and they may not even know a moon exists so they did not write any programming to land on it. So the lack of stuff on the moon does not mean we should not look at ot
WTH!! (Score:4, Insightful)
"If we don't find anything, that means no one has come to look at the life of Earth for over billions of years," Benford said. "That is a big surprise, a stunning thing."
Umm, that's not how science works. If you don't find an alien device in a very, very small part of the solar system it doesn't mean that aliens haven't come to the solar system.
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Also, finding it when "it's a longshot", and "It will be stunning if we don't", don't work together, either.
Say what? (Score:4, Insightful)
"If we don't find anything, that means no one has come to look at the life of Earth for over billions of years," Benford said.
If that's an accurate quote, then I'm left wondering how such glaringly faulty logical reasoning can exist in the mind of a physicist.
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He must have not seen 2001 (Score:2)
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This is a very unlikely prospect (Score:2)
Considering how complex, expensive and slow an interstellar lander would be, I doubt anyone would make one without a really good reason. The travel speed would necessarily be limited by the lander's propulsive (deceleration) capability, so expect it to take millennia of travel time, and then you're locked into the set of sensors you designed thousands of years ago.
What's much more likely is tiny fly-by probes launched by laser sail or some such, zipping through the solar system at a significant fraction of
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I would like to visit the Cheetoians from Alpha Fritolaie.
Re:sigh, why not the moon? (Score:5, Interesting)
if there is alien tech, it may be on the moon, which is relatively unexplored, now, if we had a moonbase, and a space station, we'd be able to much more in space
The moon has be quite thoroughly mapped form orbit, including detailed radar scans. If there was once a probe there, it's either covered deeply in regolith, or is made of something that we don't know how to look for. Either way, we won't find anything of the sort on the moon.
We've done only the most cursory scans of nearby asteroids. Going there and mapping them carefully is good science to do, probe or no probe. It's also a good first step towards asteroid mining. The asteroids highlighted in the paper all either hang out very close to earth, or approach closely from time to time.
An asteroid 220m across with a closest approach to Earth of 400 km is well within our ability to capture to an orbit near 400 km (a "medium Earth orbit"), if we set our minds to it.
Why not a satellite? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why, when exploring the solar system, we have only ever landed probes on a surface when we specifically wanted to study that surface. The suggestion that aliens would setup remote monitoring stations on asteroids instead of just using artificial satellites makes no sense.
Even less justified is that claim that if we find nothing that nobody has looked at us for billions of years and this would be surprising. Over that period of time, there is a great chance that a meteorite will have taken it out leaving nothing. In addition, we have no idea how common intelligent life is - it took ~0.5-1 billion years for life to evolve but a further 4.5 billion years for intelligent life on Earth so while life may be common intelligent life could be incredibly rare. Couple that with what seems to be the huge time investment for interstellar travel (decades to millennia unless there is "warp drive") and the 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone I would not be at all surprised to learn that we have never been visited.
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Why use any existing body?
Shielding from solar radiation and micro-meteorites.
If you want a probe to survive millions of years, it needs protection. Maybe every thousand years or so, it awakens and slowly pops its head out to have a look at Earth, and update its orbit data.
Tech (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want a probe to survive millions of years, it needs protection. Maybe every thousand years or so, it awakens and slowly pops its head out to have a look at Earth, and update its orbit data.
If you have the technology to detect life on distant planet, then send a probe across thousands of light-years across space and park it in orbit around that planet, you probably have the technology to shield it from solar radiation. If an asteroid makes an ideal shield, then just embed it in a small asteroid in from your own solar system and send it over. It probably has to be protected on the way over, anyways.
In any case, who says the probe even needs to be *near* Earth? If all they want to do is keep an eye on it, they could park a probe in the asteroid belt with a high power telescope. Or a constellation of of them. There are millions of objects in there - if they don't want one found it would be a good place to hide such a probe.
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If an asteroid makes an ideal shield, then just embed it in a small asteroid in from your own solar system and send it over.
Meanwhile, some alien engineer is explaining to his boss why increasing the payload from a few kg to 100 tons is a bad idea, even when you have arrays of terrawatt lasers to propel it.
park a probe in the asteroid belt with a high power telescope.
Think about it. Large telescopes are useless over that distance. We have to send probes to the asteroids to see anything, and no alien technology will overcome the laws of physics. One small telescope hiding in plain sight on a natural asteroid is better. If it is big enough to see us, it is big enough to be seen, so needs c
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Shielding from solar radiation and micro-meteorites.
How does an asteriod probe do that? It has zero atmosphere. At best it shields you from only half (assuming uniform, random trajectories) and at worst the debris from nearby impact on the surface will take out your probe which would otherwise have been missed entirely.
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Maybe every thousand years or so, it awakens and slowly pops its head out to have a look at Earth, and update its orbit data.
At best it shields you from only half...
You don't sit on the surface. You bury yourself to ward off the tiny stuff, and you can predict the motion of the larger stuff well enough to evade.
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You wouldn't want it to be too easily detectable from Earth (or target planet of your choice) until the inhabitants have developed some 'meaningful' level of space presence required to find it. This increases the probability that the target species will be socially mature enough to handle the discovery. You wouldn't want the first discovery crew to return home with samples and have them promptly beheaded by some equivalent of the Holy Inquisition. On today's Earth, that would be a Twittermob.
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If they happen to land in the wrong country, you could still have some sort of inqusition-esque welcome committee. There are still theocracies on this planet, you know...
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Personally, I think that sort of idea is anthropomorphising the aliens too much. We just don't know whether they'll have the same idea of "mature civilization" that we do. There are a lot of assumptions there, based on human psychology / human emotions. Maybe they don't even have anger or fear in the same sense we do, so a lot of our foibles won't even be comprehensible to them. They may lack analogues for religion, warfare in the way we understand them completely. It's easy to comprehend of a machine civil
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You wouldn't want it to be too easily detectable from Earth
A small probe at the same distance to us as nearby asteroids would still be completely undetectable: it would be far too small to see unless you knew exactly where to look. By putting it on an asteroid large enough and close enough to attract attention you are almost certainly making it easier to find unless you have deliberately hidden it there...but if you think that a possibility then you cannot claim that non-observation implies no visits.
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Well, we know aliens didn't put an easily observable probe in orbit, to be discovered by us. Maybe that would make sense, but it didn't happen.
You could hypothesize that aliens put an undetectable probe in orbit, but such speculation is utterly pointless. We could also be in the Matrix. So what?
So the case that has any point in investigating is: aliens stuvk a probe on a nearby rock, to avoid being detected quite so easily. I don't think it's worth looking for on its own merits, but if we're going there
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Does Fermi's Paradox account for the one simple possibility that interstellar travel requires power sources and shielding that just can't work if you want life to come along for the ride?
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Does Fermi's Paradox account for the one simple possibility that interstellar travel requires power sources and shielding that just can't work if you want life to come along for the ride?
This is a significant probability, but that is not going to stop machines. Eventually, humans will be capable of blasting a small probe equipped with a nuclear engine toward another star at a significant fraction of the speed of light, by aiming powerful lasers at it. As the probe nears the target star, it uses the nuclear engine to decelerate. So if we find such a thing in our own system, we will be dealing with an AI or a digitized and stored mind, rather than with biology.
And if the Copernican assumptio
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Doesn't matter, because of Dyson swarms. Unless there's some magical warp drive, it's just easier to use the resources in one system to best effect than to spread to other stars. There's more living space in a Dyson swarm than in every likely inhabitable system in the galaxy.
But we could see such systems from here, and we don't. It's very strange.
But all it takes is one civilization anywhere in the galaxy that decides to send probes to all other stars (which, once you have fully automated manufacturing,
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Unless there's some magical warp drive, it's just easier to use the resources in one system to best effect than to spread to other stars.
Except that doesn't get you in the history books, let you escape a repressive political system, found a society dominated by your belief system, ensure your specie's survival in the event of a massive catastrophe, ...
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It does all of those things, unless it's actually your sun that goes nova, but that itself can be fixed with the tech needed to build a full Dyson swarm.
The very reason people will be eager to migrate to space habitats is to create their own colonies, free from the day-to-day intrusiveness of Earth governments, and able to impose a new, more draconian day-to-day intrusiveness of their own twisted beliefs (just like the Pilgrims!). Also, of course, a bunch of billionaires for whom "private islands" aren't p
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I sense a follower of Isaac [youtube.com].
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Sure, though he's not the only futurist around. His "Dyson Dilemma" that started his channel is really thought-provoking, though (one of his few bits of original work, but a great one).
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It does all of those things
How you you get into the history books for leading the first interstellar colonization mission unless you actually do that?
unless it's actually your sun that goes nova
There are plenty of other catastrophes that could potentially depopulate a solar system, including man-made (alien-made?) ones.
free from the day-to-day intrusiveness of Earth governments, and able to impose a new, more draconian ... Once they get cheap enough, it will happen in droves.
If it's easy for you to get there (and back), you'll be able to influence people under that government and it's also easy for a government to do the same. At the very least they'll want to keep nukes/antimatter/whatever away from the 'wrong' people, and probably
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Well, we know aliens didn't put an easily observable probe in orbit, to be discovered by us.
You are vastly over estimating our ability to detect things in space. A small probe at the same distance to us as nearby asteroids would be undetectable. Indeed, we are actively looking for asteroids at this range and the aim so far is to find 90% of near-Earth asteroids over 140m in diameter. A probe a lot smaller than this would be invisible.
Re:Why not a satellite? (Score:4, Interesting)
Took 4.5 billion years in our one sample. That's 4.5 billion years of a planet being stable along with the star being stable along with how many billions of years before there was enough heavy elements for rocky planets to form.
A lot has to go right for intelligent technological life to evolve, it's doubtful that advanced life is that common that a neighbouring star will have intelligent life on it. And with the huge distances involved and our current understanding of physics, it is also doubtful that many interstellar probes are going to be launched, they're going to be expensive as well as building something that functions for decades to centuries is going to be very hard.
We could build an interstellar probe now for perhaps 10% of GDP but to have it functioning on arrival at the next star might be close to impossible. Need along lasting energy source, likely fission with out tech and that fissionable material is going to have to enriched regularly etc.
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Surprisingly enough, it isn't easier. Two reasons: Three-body problem and atmospheric drag.
Existing objects have solved this problem, at least well enough to last a few thousands/millions of years. So you don't have to.
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Existing objects have not solved the 3-body, or rather n-body, problem at all. This is why we still have meteorites impacting all the planets and we worry about extinction-level impacts from large steroids. Putting the probe on an existing body offers no better guarantee of safety over putting it in its own orbit.
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Seems the smaller the object, the more easier perturbed from its stable orbit.
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A probe that can traverse interstellar distances and then operate for tens or hundred of millions of years is going to have self-repair capability so it may be that it would not need additional protection.
But the inner solar system is (compared to interstellar space) a sand blasting chamber. The erosion rate from dust (and larger) impact is on the order of a micron a year, or a meter per million years. It might be helpful to be buried under a meter or more of shielding material much of this time.
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There are people who claim to have found "stuff" on the Moon, and think the Apollo missions may have documented some of it. Richard Hoagland and so on are such "cranks". You might want to take a look at Of Sound Mind and Body on Youtube as well, which also has stuff on Mars.
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The moon has be quite thoroughly mapped form orbit, including detailed radar scans. If there was once a probe there, it's either covered deeply in regolith, or is made of something that we don't know how to look for. Either way, we won't find anything of the sort on the moon.
It's a fairly good bet that whatever civilization could send a probe to watch Earth also has stealth technology and I doubt we've scanned it thoroughly enough to find something intentionally hidden. And an alien probe could be slumbering for thousands of years between checking burying it in dust, while I doubt it's actually true I hardly think have enough evidence to conclusively say there's no such thing.
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It's entirely pointless to speculate about the existence of undetectable things.
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It's entirely pointless to speculate about the existence of undetectable things.
Except to be inspired to develop ways to detect currently undetectable things, advancing our knowledge. At one time, IR, UV, X-rays, neutrinos etc. were undetectable, and now we routinely use them for great benefit. Alien space probes hanging out for millions of years, though? Seems unlikely, but it may be worth a look, if it's not too expensive.
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But what, exactly, would you do to find an undetectable thing? How does that work? What specific equipment do you put on the probe to see the thing that can't be seen? How much does that equipment weigh? How much power does it consume?
Pointless.
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But what, exactly, would you do to find an undetectable thing?
Sometimes it's simple serendipity and curiosity :"Hey look I put my thermometer near the rainbow put out by a glass prism, and the temperature reading went up!" Curiosity kicks in, and the next thing you know infrared wavelengths are discovered. So in the case of the possible alien probes, use existing tools and look for anomalies. My doubts notwithstanding, this could be an interesting project.
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How else do you think of ways to detect them? Much of scientific progress has involved detecting previously undetectable stuff.
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Religions are basically the texbook example of speculating about the existence of undetectable things.
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Only if you mistake the point of religion. Religion is not science, and the point is not to explain the details of how the world is. Instead, religion tries to answer the question of how to act in the world.
Act as if there's an all-seeing entity who can see everything you do, even when you're alone, and will judge you for every act, because there clearly is: your future self.
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Only if you mistake the point of religion. Religion is not science, and the point is not to explain the details of how the world is. Instead, religion tries to answer the question of how to act in the world.
Most of the world's religions definitely try to explain details of the world - its origins, why naturalistic things happen, and offer ways (they claim) of affecting those natural things. Religious traditions may have given up most of this today (if they believe in science), but "praying for rain" and similar is common in many Christian sects in the U.S. today for example. Definitely not just a matter of answering questions of "how to act in the world" (unless that includes the belief in magic interventions
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Most of the world's religions definitely try to explain details of the world
Why is it hard to understand that this is not the point? The whole idea that explaining details of the world is important, is more than entertainment for children, is pretty new, less than 500 years old. The Enlightenment and Empiricism changed everything, precisely because of the power of that idea.
But before then, it just didn't matter. Whether the origin story of the universe was true or not had no material impact on anyone, at all. It's there to serve as a setting for the stories, and the stories ar
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Any chance you could enlighten about 90% of the religious YouTubers?
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Clickbait YouTubers are just that. Using 5 year old trolls from 4-chan, for the most part. As are the atheism evangelicals, who are just as bad. All better than the annoying flat-earthers, of course. It's all trolls trolling trolls.
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But it's refreshing to watch a video of someone making a complete fool out of himself, especially when they do it with utter seriousness. It's a bit like watching afternoon TV where you can watch deadbeats. lowlives and other failed existences and consider yourself superior because no matter how down you feel, you're still not in that category.
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On the other hand, the moon is an easier and more stable target for remote observation.
If you send out a probe across the galaxies that costs millions of dollars and multiple lifetimes worth of scientists and technicians to track, would you, upon arrival, place it in the middle of an ever-colliding chaotic field of asteroids and hope nothing happens for the next 4 billion years -or- set it on the nearest thing that protects at least 50% of your experiment and has a semi-atmosphere?
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The Earth's moon is likely pretty rare. Certainly there's nothing like it elsewhere in the solar system, and models of planet formation don't really explain a large moon like that. If you were sending probes to millions of inhabitable systems, you might want something more generic.
In any case, we know there isn't a probe on the moon; at least, not one detectable by radar.
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I'd land the probe on the Earth, have it report back what it finds, and care absolutely nothing at all about what happens for the next four billion years. It's ludicrous to imagine that aliens from the past are so invested in our happiness that they predicted us and went to great lengths to leave something for us to find in millions or billions of years.
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Well if we were mass probing the galaxy we'd want to detect four categories of things: (1) planets habitable for our kind of life, (2) microbial life, (3) megafauna, (4) intelligent entities and/or their machines. So I would guess that a much more advanced civ would try for all of those goals. Exactly how they would go about it is another question. They may want to have probes that specialize only in detecting one of those things or they may send out probes capable of detecting all 4. Probably they would ha
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if we had a moonbase, and a space station, we'd be able to much more in space
We have the ISS, and it has had no role in space exploration beyond earth orbit. I don't see how a moon base would help much either.
Re:intelligence (Score:4, Interesting)
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Any aliens we happen to run into probably won't even be biological entities. They will be much more likely to be manufactured intelligent machines. Probably in 10,000 - 100,000 years we will be too. As soon as we figure out how to write DNA code ourselves well enough to make our own artificial biology evolution will no longer be a factor. After that cyborgs and then fully artificial entities seem like rather obvious next steps.
As to whether or not they would consider us a threat or disgusting infestation or
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That's true. No other species is violent or bloody. Good post!
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Oh please, Santa doesn't steal children! It's the tooth fairy that's the alien and it took the teeth it collects during the night back to it's home planet for the scientists to extract the DNA and create clones of the children.
Re: yeah, no (Score:2)
Yes, it's called Fermi-Burgers.
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