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Astronomers Look for Potential Life Zones
js7a writes "An Australian team of astronomers has an article in the latest edition Science describing a 'Galactic Habitable Zone,' which contains about 10% of all the Milky Way's stars including the Sun. Stars within this band are likely to have rocky planets large enough to hold atmospheres, are sufficiently distant from supernovae, and have existed for at least four billion years. They haven't actually found any life or earth-like planets yet, but presumably this zone is a reasonable place to narrow such searches."
That is only if they recognize that the rock is "talking". Who says it will communicate in any way that humans would recognize as communication? Wasn't fuel in the first Starflight game a crystalline lifeform that no one knew was alive?
First I am not affiliated with SETI and I am not a radio astronomer. However those of you wondering, these area's will most likely add these zones to the zones currently scanned by Project Phoenix . It would be rather foolish of them not to, no?
Well, 30 years ago people did say that life was likely to be found on "terrestial planets." That's why the Viking missions to Mars had experiments to try to detect life--and why the Voyager and Pioneer missions didn't.
Now, if we have a near-infinite amount of resources, then narrowing the choices down is silly. But, as you might suspect, if we have a very limited amount of resources--and you'd better believe time on the large telescopes is pretty scarce--then trying to use that small amount of resources on the best canidates is sensible.
I'm glad you mentioned it, as that's what I thought when I saw the graphic. A few comments ...
1. Tas the Transcend, not the Transcent.
2. The Slow Zone excludes only *artificial* intelligence and faster than light travel/networks/etc. The actual sophonts in the Slow Zone are equal in intelligence to those of the Beyond ([spoiler] notice for instance that the maximum number of Tines who can form a pack is the same, 8, in the Slow Zone and the Beyond). The Slow Zone's physical laws are pretty much our real physical laws, if you assume that some time in the next couple of hundred years Moore's Law really will come to a dead stop and computers won't get any faster.
3. The zones are concentric in the strict sense, in that each bounds only two other zones on surfaces which do not intersect with one another; but they are irregular in shape, not exactly circular or toroid, and the boundaries are in constant flux. Even so, the graphic on the story is a good visualization, as you suggest.
4. Vinge got the idea from the fundamental problem that 1. he believes in what is called "the coming technological singularity" - which is what he labels as "Transcending" in the novel - and believes that it will happen, inevitably, on Earth some time in the next 200 or so years, before interstellar travel is possible, so that interstellar travel is something he thinks is typical of Transcendant intelligences, not human intelligences (something based not only on Moore's Law and other observations of technological progress but also I suspect upon Fermi's Paradox; see Lem's *Fiasco* for a good SF discussion of what Fermi's paradox suggests about the Singularity); and 2. he wanted to write space opera, despite the issues of physical law and this whole thing about the Singularity. So he created the zones, allowing faster than light travel in one zone and prohibiting AI in another.
The problem is that we don't have good methodologies for identifying life that ISN'T like us. We're starting with what it would be easiest for us to identify. After all, how could we identify life in another solar system living in the atmosphere of a Jovian?
By the way, the "little solar system in the solar system" description for Jupiter isn't too different from how Galileo described it 400 years ago.
Unfortunately that is not what the "political masters" realised. Congress shifting fundings around missions as the political wind shifts. Suddenly the good idea of the International Space Station turned from an orbiting laboratory to a funding black hole, eating almost every morsels that NASA get in the current political climate. Whatever left get directed mostly at Mars. The Pluto Kuiper Express got cancelled, and when the protests came we get a promise of another, scaled down, delayed proposal. Suffering the same fate was the "Deep Space" series of New Millenium Programme that NASA started - and that was even after the spectacular sucesses of Deep Space 1.
The last thing we need to throw at the politicos is a new bunch of contradicting "this is where we should be looking at" documents - lest the start another round of their favourite shifting the funds around game, every shift wasting a few work-in-progress projects, leaving humanity stuck at low Earth orbit and diverting our eyes with periodic hyped up stories about Mars.
What we need to do is continuing looking, exploring outwards, with eyes wide open and not let "tunnel vision" blind us to what would be obvious otherwise.
I remember reading about (Sagan is ringing a bell in my head for some reason on this) a gathering involving various biological and astronomical experts that happened some years ago, and one of the questions they kicked around was, "If life evolved elsewhere under non-earthlike conditions, what would be its most likely form?" One of their conclusions was that any such life form would be extremely difficult for us to identify _as_ a life form to begin with.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
"Life" is a slippery term, as it was invented and acquired its complelx meaning before science was an organizing principle of our culture. On Slashdot, many of our readers wouldn't recognize a "Life" if they had one :). Meanwhile, intelligence is relatively straightforward to recognize: it is a model of its external environment, in an information feedback relationship with the environment. If that model includes, in turn, a model of the model, that's consciousness. If that conscious model includes a model of its consciousness, that's selfawareness (implying a "self"). And if that selfawareness includes a model of itself, that's starting to resemble a human psyche.
What we want to find elsewhere in the Universe is Intelligence. Intelligence we can communicate with. Otherwise, who cares? Intelligence without communication is an ent falling in a forest with no one to hear. SETI's search for communications signals is sensible, because we're interested in a signaling partner. When we find one, it will think differently than us, unless there's some common intelligence ancestor, or a surprisingly constrained selection criterion for intelligence development. Every possible combination of feedback paths through the multilayered models of intelligence offers a different way of intelligence. Once we find each other, the important question will become how to live together.
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make install -not war
Every time I read articles like this I think of Earth as some crazy old coot who has boarded himself up in his house and peeks through the boards to see if anyone is out there, and if there is, he's gonna yell "go away" and then threaten to shoot em!
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield