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Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#41

Post by angdis »

happyscrappy wrote: post #31
SCHiM wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not think that actually knowing, really knowing, is a worthy cause in and of itself? To have proof that we are not alone? Even if we can't get there I think that certainty would be a very nice thing to have.

I agree that knowing is a worthy cause, but never mind getting there we will not even be able to have anything even resembling a conversation if you have to wait hundreds of years for a response. Edit: Does anyone know the current thinking of the odds that information could be able to travel faster than light, ie a wormhole? As far as I know they are very slim.

Well, if we do detect a signal, we're not going to just transmit "wassup?" and wait for an answer. I think it will be an interesting problem to have a conversation with other beings where the lag time is measured in decades!

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#42

Post by ifdefdebug »

happyscrappy wrote: post #31
SCHiM wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not think that actually knowing, really knowing, is a worthy cause in and of itself? To have proof that we are not alone? Even if we can't get there I think that certainty would be a very nice thing to have.

I agree that knowing is a worthy cause, but never mind getting there we will not even be able to have anything even resembling a conversation if you have to wait hundreds of years for a response. Edit: Does anyone know the current thinking of the odds that information could be able to travel faster than light, ie a wormhole? As far as I know they are very slim.

Anything contradicting relativity is currently out of the scope of science and not backed by any observation whatsoever, so any travel-faster-than-light theory has exactly the odds granted to it by it's own believers, and zero for everybody else.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#43

Post by nogridbag »

Please excuse my complete ignorance - this is something that continues to perplex me no matter how many times I hear it explained and I may sound like a complete idiot here. Can someone explain how this would work in layman's terms?

Let's say that life on another planet 150 million billion miles away wanted to send us a message. So that's 25,000 light years away. They send us one single 1 minute duration message at t=0 and that message travels at the speed of light as an example. And let's just say t=25000 happens to be today. Does that mean that we have a one minute window to intercept part of the message otherwise it's lost?

If so, let's say the life on that planet was persistent and continued to send messages continuously directly to us and no other planets for 500 years. Then I would assume we have a 500 year period to play with. If they started sending signals let's say 10,000 years ago, it seems we have absolutely no chance to receive the message unless this program is operational for the next 15,000 years or so. But our odds of receiving an intelligent signal is vastly higher simply due to the number of planets in our galaxy. Is my understanding remotely correct?

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#45

Post by mrits »

saiya-jin wrote: post #18
jshelly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to think the podcast Radiolab has done more for generating interest in science then any other project I can think of.

sorry to break your perception (or not), but even as a space exploration enthusiast, never heard of that. but then again, podcasts generally are on outer rim of interest of general population

I've never heard of it either.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#46

Post by nicboobees »

SCHiM wrote: post #27
codeshaman wrote: post #17

A very noble endeavour indeed, but I still don't get it. So let's say that by examining the petabytes of data that's received from the telescopes, at some point a signal is detected. Let's say that somehow all the competing scientests and skeptics, religious and opinion leaders magically and peacefully agree: the signal is from an inteligent life form. Somewhere close, just a couple of hundred light years away ... Th…

Do you not think that actually knowing, really knowing, is a worthy cause in and of itself? To have proof that we are not alone? Even if we can't get there I think that certainty would be a very nice thing to have.

Is it worth millions of dollars to know that? Nope.

It's rich people playing with their toys.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#47

Post by pavlov »

sdrinf wrote: post #23
codeshaman wrote: post #17

A very noble endeavour indeed, but I still don't get it. So let's say that by examining the petabytes of data that's received from the telescopes, at some point a signal is detected. Let's say that somehow all the competing scientests and skeptics, religious and opinion leaders magically and peacefully agree: the signal is from an inteligent life form. Somewhere close, just a couple of hundred light years away ... Th…

There are very few pieces of information really worthy of deliberate broadcasts across star-systems in the hopes of someone catching it. One of these few might be a full dump of neural vector-states (or functional equivalent thereof), at an appropriately low-level assembly, which when successfully executed, brings not a message, but the messenger itself.

In fact, any sufficiently advanced digital program can be a "messenger" rather than a "message". But how do we know what kind of execution environment is available at the destination?

Aliens probably use Brainfuck [1], so we need a substantial increase in Brainfuck AI research. Some modern-day Kennedy needs to step up to this challenge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#48

Post by MattConfluence »

nogridbag wrote: post #43

Please excuse my complete ignorance - this is something that continues to perplex me no matter how many times I hear it explained and I may sound like a complete idiot here. Can someone explain how this would work in layman's terms? Let's say that life on another planet 150 million billion miles away wanted to send us a message. So that's 25,000 light years away. They send us one single 1 minute duration message at t…

Sounds about right. Frank Drake created his famous equation [1] to try to quantify the probability of detecting ETI, but you do need to make guesses at some of the inputs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#49

Post by jessriedel »

nogridbag wrote: post #43

Please excuse my complete ignorance - this is something that continues to perplex me no matter how many times I hear it explained and I may sound like a complete idiot here. Can someone explain how this would work in layman's terms? Let's say that life on another planet 150 million billion miles away wanted to send us a message. So that's 25,000 light years away. They send us one single 1 minute duration message at t…

Traditionally, SETI is not specialized to messages intentionally crafted for us (or, in fact, necessarily crafted for anyone). It's just a search for radio transmissions that are unlikely to have been created by natural sources using various statistical techniques.

Even for intentional messages, it's certainly conceivable that another civilization with sufficient power simply transmits the message in all direction continuously.

Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET

#50

Post by codeshaman »

If we really believe in scientific progress, then we must accept that, compared to some time in the future, our current understanding of the Universe is akin to people thinking the world was flat some time in the past.

Maybe the Universe's scale compared to our physical form has a purpose. Maybe it's intended to not be traversed physcally. Maybe that's the most obvious conclusion an intelligent life form might draw from analyzing it's scale ?

Maybe in the future we will understand it just like the aliens we're looking for did a long time ago - that the way to communicate in this Universe does not involve physical travel or physical signals.

Just look up some pictures of Pablo Amaringo - a shaman making drawings of his trips on ayahuasca. Notice the 'aliens' and the galaxies and the the distant worlds that he is visiting while tripping.

Anyone who has been on powerful psychedelic trips would agree that there is a lot of stuff to explain there, besides just the brain reaction to a chemical. Stuff like traveling through time, out of the Universe, into the microcosmos, before and after life, etc.

People did this for thousands of years - they used terms such as 'spirits', 'beings' and 'gods' to describe who they made contact with.

But what if those substances are more than just intoxicants, what if they really trigger some unknown mind-space-time gateway which we haven't yet tapped scientifically, which makes space and time travel possible. What if we could approach this scientifically and actually make these trips predictable and repeatable ?

What if the aliens are actually just high tech savages using advanced psychedelic drugs + mind machines to travel and explore time and space, while sitting in a forest around a fire ?

We should start exploring the inner space just like we are exploring the outer space. When will we see $100m invested in that ? :)

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