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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."
I've heard about new algorithms that are going into effect at the Aricibo telescope that use wavelets to get much better results. Apparently a lot of old data is going to be re analyzed.
For those who didn't know.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
n/t
That's what SI notation is for.
One period to denote the decimal place, and if you want to seperate digits in groups of three, you use a space.
10 000.0 telescopes.
Now they've lowered their sights, and will settle for just life
yup.
They will analyze a light with spectrometer to reveal the presence of gases in atmosphere of palnets.
Oxygen, ozone, carbon dioxide, methane may suggest that on the planet you can find life.
10,434.39 becomes 10.434,39
First, as I really really hope you are aware, Europe is not a single hegemonous country, and neither is the EU (despite their attempts to make it so). Thus, customs will differ between countries.
Second, how is "." for decimal places and "," for separators any less ambiguous?
(if you must know, I prefer no separators myself)
On topic: kudos to ESA! Although I severely doubt that we'll find any ETs, projects like these almost always get a lot of beneficial scientific data as a bonus... and if not, you at least get a few pretty pictures out of it
a problem is that lasers are so rediculously focused
At point of sending, yes, lasers are very focused. However they spread very widely over interstellar distances. Still, from a conservation of energy point of view a laser is much more efficient than blasting radio in all direction.
But I think it depends on the nature of the communiction. If alien civilization #1 at star A already knows #2 is located at star B then laser is absolutely the way to go. Radio is more of a shout in the dark method. Whether you believe there are wolves or other travellers in the dark depends on whether you shout.
I think searching for alien intelligence is overrated, but as long as you're doing it, using radio frequencies is not that bad.
Advanced civilizations would realize that the ability to generate magnetic waves of a particular spectrum would be pretty universal, at least among alien groups with which we'd be able to communicate at all.
sigs, as if you care.
SETI is not flawed, it's designed primarily to intercept signals sent on purpose towards us. Even if ET has long ago stopped leaking radio signals to space, they could easily beam us some messages.
For the past few hundred million years, advanced ET could see that life is present on our planet. This is because of the amount of oxygen and water vapor in the atmosphere. With a large enough telescope ET could even observe continents on Earth.
So it's not far-fetched to think that ET would call us.
Worse, however, would be a message saying "We survived, but all the other civilizations to which we sent this message perished shortly after receiving it. Apparently the very knowledge of sentient life, apart from their own, so violated their religious principles that they self-destructed."
This is, of course, assuming that any ETs actually -have- religious beliefes.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
See this. If "over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology" isn't good enough for you, then start here to research our gov's own documents, and then go here and dismiss these reports with "swamp gas" or "venus" or "a flock of birds". And lastly, read "UFOs and the National Security State", one of the very best and most referenced book on the subject using our own gov's documents once again.
This "we may contact other intelligent creatures someday" is a complete and utter farce.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Yeah, I know, they use periods to deliniate thousands in some countries. I'm sure someone will call me a dumbass though. Hopefully.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Er, no. It's still ambiguous.
Under the old European system, they used a decimal comma. 10,234 is a little bit more than ten to a European. A million dollars is $1.000.000,00 on their side of the ocean, and $1,000,000.00 over here.
Where possible, I try to use the correct SI format, which marks only the decimal separator (comma or point) and uses spaces to group blocks of digits:
Unfortunately, one then has to worry about a line break being inserted into the middle of a number--it's a pain in the neck always having to insert nonbreaking spaces. (Actually, I can't figure out how to insert one in these comments, which is why I put the examples above on separate lines.)~Idarubicin
This is a fascinating discussion of the nature of existence as "ideal" vs. "real" - in which you are trying to have it both ways. The US form of government is "constitutional democracy" - the Constitution defines that, as well as its flavor, "republic", and specific structural details of the processes by which its components interact. The writers and signers of the Constitution (and thereby the Constitution, by proxy) defined the form of the US government, while the politicians define its actual reality. Part of the form is to enforce the form on the content; another part of the form is to modify the form to reflect the content - those are the keys to the US government's stability and longevity. That interaction between form and content makes the more important practice of liberty follow the guide of the ideas of liberty, and update the guide as learned from experience.
Others who claim an older government form, like the Saudis, are wallowing in propaganda - Iran and Saudi Arabia each invoke the Koran, but have very different forms of government, not to mention large gaps in the administration of even the common principles, like when each was under British rule. They get away with declaring their brand's "purity" largely because they train and certify those who interpret history and law for a largely illiterate, antirational population - and kill those who disagree, including each other.
You're the one spinning wobbly definitions to suit your argument. The source code for the Linux kernel is just the "specification" for the binary executable, but the source is the kernel, except in selfserving hairsplitting rhetoric. If you say the structure specified in the Constitution is not the form of government, you have to say that the kernel is the array of charges in your CPU's local cache.
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make install -not war