seems legit :D
Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
61–70 of 237 posts
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#62Wow. Thank you, Yuri! I suspect even if this is unsuccessful at finding ET, it will do lots of awesome other things. And if it is successful in finding ET, then it's probably the most significant possible discovery.
What "awesome other things" will this accomplish? No research is being done with this, it's just pointing a radio dish at the sky and listening.
Data/signal processing at scale.
Qasar/pulsar surveys.
Other general radio astronomy.
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#63Wow, a colossal waste of money. Space is far, far too vast and the time scale of human civilization far, far too small. To think of what other good uses that time and money could be spent on (that goes for SETI too)
This isn't a direct comment on Hawking's proposed search, but there are things that would have real value for space exploration and life on Earth - new energy sources or efficiencies, life extension, AI, production methods, etc. If we one day want to send von Neumann probes out, we'll need to master these fields and none would have uses isolated to space exploration either.
Yes, space is vast but once upon a time the ocean was too.
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#64Didn't Hawking said that actively looking for ET was reckless and dangerous and that any contact with a more advanced civilization will end up like the colonization of America with us being the natives?
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IANAP, but isn't the only argument against faster-than-light-travel the fact that it contradicts causality?
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#66Didn't Hawking said that actively looking for ET was reckless and dangerous and that any contact with a more advanced civilization will end up like the colonization of America with us being the natives?
He said actively trying to contact was dangerous, vs. actively looking (i.e. passively listening, which is confusing!) No harm in seeing who's out there as long as they don't detect us.
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#67Earlier 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.
Is it worth millions of dollars to know that? Nope. It's rich people playing with their toys.
I think it's worth trillions.
Just imagine what proof that we're not alone would mean for the world. I'm not positive it would galvanize everyone, but it would surely create new industry and untold number of jobs as we, as a world, decide to try to go and meet them.
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know America is supposed to lead the way but Europe is larger and richer and has a space budget one third of NASA.
Better yet, why does it have to be an "individual nation" thing? Why can't all (or even just some) of the developed nations collaborate and pool funding and have a bigger team to work on the problem?
That individual nation thing was the only reason America visited the moon.
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#69Please 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 co…
Even for intentional messages, it's certainly conceivable that another civilization with sufficient power simply transmits the message in all direction continuously.
I think that scenario would imply a relative scarcity of intelligent life: after all, if a space-faring civilization needs to transmit powerful, omnidirectional signals in the blind, it must be pretty lonely. Maybe, just maybe, the fact that we're not seeing much is actually indicative of a fairly rich sea of life in the galaxy, communicating point-to-point with each other. Not so much to randomly overhear in that world.
Re: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100M Initiative to Seek ET
#70I wish someone would instead come up with a project to really capture the public's attention about space exploration. More interest means more funding. The U.S. Budget is measured in billions. The New Horizons project, for example, only cost $700 million. The Lunar X Prize might have been that project but it doesn't seem to be making progress: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize http://lunar.xprize.o…
> I wish someone would instead come up with a project to really capture the public's attention about space exploration.
The imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets has proceeded quickly [1] and in a not-too-distant future we may be able to roughly analyze the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Now, given that microbial life formed on earth pretty much right after the young planet had cooled down, it may not be too far fetched to hope to find a planet with oxygen in its atmosphere, signaling the presence of at least microbial life.
Now that would be something.
[1] http://www.pppl.gov/events/colloquium-adaptive-optics-imagin...