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(Mostly) Confirmed: New Mersenne Prime Found
A reader writes "Distributed computing seems once more to be succesful. The combined effort of many pc's joining Primenet in search for a new Mersenne prime may have found there fifth result. Among them many belonging to /. readers. There is an unconfirmed claim for Mersenne prime #39 of over 3,500,000 digits, for which a considerable amount of money has been awarded. SETI looks for ET's messages, but found none sofar. Mersenne primes are used to tell ET about us. A previous found Mersenne number was used to show the advance of science on our planet in a message send into outer space. " The Primenet list has confirmed that while they still need to totally test it out (which should be done by the 24th), they believe that the number found today is the 39th positive.
First: distributed computing achieving something great. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for SETI, I've got it running on both my machines ... but being able to advance science be it math or cancer research or whatever is astonishingly cool.
... If they're astonishingly more advanced than us they'll look at it as being quaint and if they're not they'll look at it as something they can't understand. How would we react if something landed that proclaimed how smart the sender was?
Second: it's entertaining to think we can prove our intelligence to another species by sending them proof that we've cracked a prime
Of course, if they're "looking" at the wrong frequency or in the wrong band they won't see it at all... so many assumptions... so little time.
I am a leaf on the wind
The assumption is that if ET is out there, he's a lot more technically advanced than we are. Human civilization has been around for, oh, call it 8,000 years. The universe is more than a million times that age. So ET has a big head start.
My theory is that the universe is teeming with life, but everyone else is smart enough to keep a low profile. Only the humans like to broadcast to the universe an exact measure of how technically backwards we are.
Andrew Wiles
a**n + b**n != c**n for n > 2
My theory is that they're gone. I mean, really think about it:
20,000 years ago we were going around grunting at each other and living nomadic lives
10,000 years ago we finally began to make small villages, and practice agriculture
500 years ago we finally got the technology to send ships from Europe to North America
200 years ago people still read by candle light, died of infections from wounds, had no telephones or radio
100 years ago people still got around by horse and buggy
60 years ago people did the most complex math problems by hand
30 years ago NASA sent people to the moon with the computing power probably about what is found in a TI-89 calculator
20 years ago no one had ever heard of the internet, and computers were slow and text-based
10 years ago computers started to be a household necessity
5 years ago the internet took off
1 year ago the human genome was mapped
The point is: find someone from 50,000 BC ago and take them forward in time to 15,000BC. they probably wouldn't see a damn bit of difference
you could keep doing that for people of different ages, and the amount of time you could bring them forward without them really not being able to adjust to the massive changes in society would just get smaller and smaller. the time is getting so short now that a person can span it in a lifetime. we have middle-aged people today who are afraid to use computers.
Now try to imagine 100 years into the future. Pretty tough. Might we have real AI? Humans on the Moon and Mars? Computing implanations? Nanotech? Quantum computers? Yep. Pretty shocking. But now try to imagine 10,000 years into the future. It's impossible. IMO there is a very good chance that there will be no such thing as humans, as we know them, 10,000 years from now. We will have advanced into something better than these meat and bone bodies.
And the 20,000 years(max) from when humans first set down roots, and when they will no longer exist as humans, is nothing in galactic terms. It isn't even an eye-blink.
I think any civilization more than about 500 years more advanced than us might actually be *undetectable*. Maybe they exist as pure energy. Maybe they have transcended this universe altogether. Maybe they are studying us right now, but we don't know it because they are doing it from the 4th dimension(like a 3D being looking down on flatland).
I simply think anything beyond the near-future is impossible to even speculate on. The singularity. The end of history. Whatever you want to call it. It will be the end of the human race as we know it.