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Europe's New ET Life Search Programme
hotsauce writes "The Guardian has a report on Europe's ambitious new programme to search for extra terrestial life. ESA has started a program called Cosmic Visions which will launch a series of satelites, starting with Gaia in 2011, and possibly culminating with the Exo-Earth Imager, a mission consisting of 10.000 3-metre mirror telescopes. The French are leading the charge with Corot in 2008."
...a mission consisting of 10.000 3-metre mirror telescopes.
This is an upgrade to previous versions of the plan that called for 8.735 3-metre mirror telescopes. Adding that 1.265 mirrors really helps I'm sure.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
I guess they got so discouraged by not being able to find any intelligent life here on earth that they just gave up on finding it out there, too. Oh, well, if we had found intelligent life, we probably couldn't have figured out what to do with it anyway.
See what I've been reading.
10,000 satellites...
*Collective shudder from Chinese villagers*
Is because we've been searching using imperial-measure radio wavelengths. Once we switch to metric wavelengths and start decoding in French, we'll finally be able to understand them.
I say the most efficient way is to just wait for them to come invade us. Uses no resources.
Based on the French affinity for frogs, snails, and other unlikely looking edibles, they probably think of this as a chance to try out new recipes with our unfortunate alien contactees.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
And furthermore, why can't you all speak English and have a representative democracy just like ours? Also, please get rid of any parts of your culture that are not identical to my own. Thanks, n1ywb.
> Sir, your margin of error is enough to buy a Big Mac, or were you planning on eating it yourself!
No thanks, but I could go for a Royale with cheese...
Decimated wouldn't be a big deal, 9 out of 10 of us would survive. Annihilated, or completely destroyed would suck.
Decimation was when the Romans would punish the troops for failure by lining them up, and killing every 10th soldier. Thus, decimating means "reducing by 1/10th".
Now, excuse me, I'm off to correct other misuses of words. I just heard some guy down the hall say it's "ironic" that there's no more coffee filters. Now where did I leave that tire iron?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
looks like we need tinfoil hats in europe now, theyre looking for intelligence, us!
You think yours is fast? Mine can do the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs
NB: I always had trouble at school differentiating between time and distance ;)
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
It's projects like these that make you realize a lifetime is too short. I can't wait to see the results of this project in several decades, I just wish I could be around to witness the results of the first manned missions to these planets. If we don't blow ourselves up first. It's great to see all these space-related stories being featured. Hopefully this renewed interest in space exploration will become infectious worldwide. I can only imagine what the world will be like for my kids.
Oh wait.. I think I remember hearing something about getting laid being a requisite for producing offspring.. can anyone confirm this?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
a mission consisting of 10.000 3-metre mirror telescopes.
I'm not sure what's more amazing - the fact that they've projected the number of telescopes they'll need out to 3 decimal places, or that it appears to be a perfect integer. Unless they rounded it off to the nearest thousandth.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Are you kidding ? One look at the A-Team and there's noooo way they'll be wanting to pick a fight with us.. any race of beings than can construct a working atomic battle tank complete with grenade launcher and working DU-round ballistic cannon from the contents of the average henchmans backyard shed is *not* worth going toe to toe with... and I _pity_ the fool who tries to get B.A. up in that spaceship...
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11/2/04 - Isn't there something we should be doing that day ?
You only use 2% of your DNA