Slashdot Mirror
Looking For Intelligence
Calgacus writes "We've all read stories about extra-solar planets being found by gravitational wobbles. The Scotsman has a story here about a planet in the Fomalhaut system being discovered because of its wake through a dust cloud. It's further out than other recently discovered planets and astronomers are saying it means there's an odds-on chance of intelligent life being out there. If only there was more on Earth..."
As far as I can tell, the article has nothing specifically to do with the search for life, much less the search for intelligent life. All it is really about is the detection of a planet with a much larger orbital radius than previous extrasolar planets. According to the team in the article, this makes it "much more likely that other solar systems exist." Well, duh. The only bearing this has on life is as more confirmation that there are indeed extrasolar planets. Which I think we already knew. So, yes, it's an interesting detection technique, but life? Intelligence? Including these references is sensationalistic and dumb.
The simple answer is relativity. Despite worm holes, warp drive, hyper drive, tachyon fields, and all the other SF solutions, nobody has ever come up with a mathematically viable solution to Einstein's limitation on travel speeds in the universe. To put it country simple, if they could have gotten here, we'd be living on a reservation already. The only other obvious answer is that habitable water covered planets are a dime a dozen in the cosmos.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
It's right up there with the (earlier) idea that because we were finding supergiant planets so close to stars, it must mean there aren't many Jupiter-sized planets out there in mid-range orbits to suck up comets in their gravity wells -- so there must be less chance of life, right, 'cause all those comets would scour inner planets clean? That one got floated when they were first finding the big whoppers that caused stars' images to wobble. 'Course, it was based on assumptions about the fundamental role of comets in planetary life -- the whole dinosaur thing was in the news then -- and about how every star system must look like ours, and so on.
We're still in the data collection stage of figuring out extrasolar planets. Our means of seeing them are dependent on flaky situations -- planets that travel through dust trails, planets that are so huge they cause stars to spin funny, stuff like that. We can't say anything really solid about the frequency of different types of planets, because our methods of looking for them are still picking around the edges, seeing the outliers rather than getting any sense of the norm.
(Personally I think some of the outrageously adaptive bacterial life on earth argues pretty strongly for life wherever there's the slightest opening. If you wanna argue the likelihood of extraterrestrial forms, take a look at the conditions bacteria can get by in. Life can get by.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
but it's funny how most people are really trying hard to get to the US.
Nothing new. Particularly Europe, but most of the rest of the world feels a lot of frustration that their opinions are basically irrelevent in what happens in the world. They take this frustration out in foolish (one might say childish) criticisms of anything the US does.
But you know what really galls them? That the US cares so little what the rest of the world thinks. This particularly irritates countries like France who still want to think of themselves as a world power.
Then you factor in the fact that Europe enjoys what freedom they have through the power and defense of the US (they would be speaking Russian right now without the US, and probably would have had several more world wars by now) -- not to mention that we rebuilt the place after WW/II -- and it's inevitable that resentment builds up in many people. Particularly younger people who don't have any historical perspective.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.