Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 237 posts

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

#81

Post by ifdefdebug »

octatoan wrote: post #65
ifdefdebug wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't know if it's the only one, but it is one Stephen Baxter's novel Exultant plays brilliantly with: the people in that universe discovered means to travel faster than light, but at a high price: causality was gone - and they had to get over it.

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

#82

Post by matthewmcg »

jshelly wrote: post #15
melling wrote: post #14

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

Are there any good space or physical science focused episodes? Whenever I check in on Radiolab it seems like it is all about pop-psychology topics or TED-ish "turns out this counter-intuitive notion is true" stories.

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

#83

Post by adventured »

happyscrappy wrote: post #28
melling wrote: post #14

I 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 know America is supposed to lead the way but Europe is larger and richer and has a space budget one third of NASA.

The US is richer, and has a larger GDP as of now (post Dollar run and Euro drop) than the European Union. The US has about ~40% of all private wealth (globally private wealth is around $270 trillion, with US households holding $86 trillion [1] of that; then furthering that are US corporate assets, which are far larger than European corporate assets).

By comparison private wealth in all of Europe is about $60 to $65 trillion. [2]

[1] http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/Current/z1.pdf

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/01/us-europe-wealth-s...

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

#84

Post by im3w1l »

k8tte wrote: post #3

one week Hawking warns about skynet-style AI. next week he insist of us go hunting it. good troll?

He wants us to to look for ET's, but not reveals ourselves to them: to see but not be seen. So just like in the AI question, his stance is to be cautious.

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

#85

Post by myth_buster »

jahnu wrote: post #4

Hawking wants to find them, but seemingly not reveal ourselves... http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/26/stephen...

Didn't we lose that battle when we sent the Voyager with the Golden Record [1] that carries the exact coordinates [0] (with respect to nearest stars) to the origin of the spacecraft.

  Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a 12-inch golden phonograph record 
  that contains pictures and sounds of Earth along with symbolic directions 
  on the cover for playing the record and data detailing the location of 
  our planet. The record is intended as a combination of a time capsule 
  and an interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future 
  human that may recover either of the Voyager craft. The contents of this 
  record were selected by a committee that included Timothy Ferris and 
  was chaired by Carl Sagan.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#/media/File:Vo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Voyager_Golden...

________________________________________________________

Edit:

Voyager has on board antennas and a sufficiently intelligent civilization would be quite interested in intercepting a spacecraft which seems to be on a mission to somewhere carrying -knows-what.

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

#86

Post by mcdougle »

allendoerfer wrote: post #68
mcdougle wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. And we definitely need some kind of motivation to focus our efforts on space exploration (it's very noticeably become an afterthought ever since we stopped trying to compete).

But if we could somehow find that motivation, it would be far more productive to work together -- we'd have a lot more manpower and a higher budget that way.

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

#87

Post by x5n1 »

charriu wrote: post #78
x5n1 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to build a huge space ship with a fusion engine and send it to the nearest star. But that sort of doesn't make any sense because we have lots of our own solar system to explore.

There might also be the small problem of actually building the fusion engine first. I don't think that's something we're really able to do right now, is it?

I am glad you asked:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Mag_Orion

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

#88

Post by nicboobees »

jessriedel wrote: post #60
nicboobees wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it worth millions of dollars to know that? Nope. It's rich people playing with their toys.

It is definitely, indisputably worth millions of dollars to know that.

Well, agree to disagree. The average person doesn't really care if there is or isn't water on mars, or if someone spent millions of their dollars taking a photo of pluto.

Year after year the news reports another big experiement which cost millions to setup, and which claims to "give us answers as to how the universe was created". I just couldn't be less interested. It's rich people (Or taxpayer funded people) playing with their toys.

It must be great fun if space exploration is your hobby, like explorers of days gone by, but for most people it won't have any impact at all on their lives (Apart from wasting their taxes).

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

#89

Post by S4M »

bhc3 wrote: post #75
RALaBarge wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I am willing to bet that all intelligent life will end up being quite lonely. Unless we find ways to bend space, there is little chance of us ever getting out of our local solar system, let alone galaxy or the local galactic cluster. I am a big fan of science and science fiction, do not get me wrong. I do feel that technology evolves and will surprise even the most tech savvy, but to violate faster than l…

I'm expecting somewhere way down the road, scientists will unlock the secrets to prolonging our lives for nearly forever. They'll stop the telomeres from degrading, come up with ways to address cancer quickly and effectively, etc. At the same time, space travel technology will also have been advanced, allowing for self-sustaining spacecraft that offer protection against the harsh environment of outer space. At that p…

If you want to speculate, how about the possibility of uploading people's mind to a robot? Let's say that we are able to send outer space a bunch of self replicating robots (they can travel to various planets and build a copy of themselves using the raw materials they can find there). After some time, we have lots of robots at many points in space, then you make a copy of your mind and send it at the speed of light to those robots. Because of the self replicating nature of the thing, we can have lots of robots so anybody who wants to can upload his/her mind to one of them. That way we have a non risky an relatively cheap way to explore the galaxy - it would just take couple of thousands of years to have everything set up.

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

#90

Post by stefantalpalaru »

onion2k wrote: post #38
webwielder2 wrote: post #35

Wow, 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)

Firstly, it's not a waste of money because it'll be spent on employing people, building things, developing technology, etc. They're not just pouring money down a hole. Secondly, although it's hugely unlikely they'll find anything, in the event that they do it'll fundamentally change our perspective of who we are and where our place is in the universe. The outcome, while improbable, is so huge it's still worthwhile tr…

> it's not a waste of money because it'll be spent on employing people, building things, developing technology, etc.

The same can be said about digging holes and filling them afterwards.

Post reply on HN