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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."
ambitious new programme to search for extra terrestial life.
I think any program to search for ET is ambitious.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Nothing is lost with the exchange rate? 10.000 in Europe, may be 9,976 in the U.S.
I glad to see other Nations exploring space, we could all learn something. It could even spark up NASA to get on the ball.
roamingfeet
We search for a pattern in radio signals to find proof of intelligence, yet we look at a strand of DNA and not see it.
sigs, as if you care.
Well in that case it seems pretty important that we find other races first so we can arm ourselves before they "discover" earth. I think we are safe from discovery since we haven't been broadcasting too long and any species that monitors our transmissions for long (especially TV) will be lulled into a stupor too quickly to come get us anyway.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I really wish that some of these vast quantities of capital would be invested the the Search for Asteroids.
It would just be typically ironic for our SETA projects to be succesful just as we're decimated by an asteroid
Do we really want to contact potentially many races that would regard us with at least the contempt, as a species, that we regard "lower life forms?"
Seems to me that we need to first move beyond considering other members of our own species "lower life forms"
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
I wonder whether Europe will, upon discovering "life" across the big pond of space, send missionaries in their grand tradition of civilizing the heathens. Centauran coffee, anyone?
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make install -not war
Many scifi enthusiasts often assume that our outlook on life is primitive, and that alien races advanced enough to be space-faring races would "clearly" be more civilized than us. I have never seen the logic in that.
I believe the reasoning is that if a race manages to survive long enough after the discovery of atomic power, it will be civilized enough, and atomic power should reasonably come centuries before the ability to travel to other stars.
It could very well be that alien races only contact other alien races once they've had the power to wipe out their entire race for a specific amount of time, like half a millenium. If I were the aliens, that would be the policy I'd have anyway.
This shows a deep lack of understanding about what is being searched for.
The pattern being looked for is a pattern that cannot arise via natural processes.
DNA can be explained as a result of natural processes. Note that I said CAN. It is only those processes for which a natural process can not be provided for which intelligence can be inferred.
Consider the discovery of pulsars. They caused quite a stir at the time. But since a natural process was discovered that could explain then, the original thoughts that they might be evidence of intelligent life was quickly discarded.
It is the same with life. At first it was believed to be miraculous, the result of a special creation. But as we learned more about how life actually works, we come to see that it can be explained as the result of natural processes. And thus not evidence of intelligent design.
Of course, since intelligent life is a consequence of physical laws, anything life does can be consdered a natural process ...
SteveM
It all comes back to Fermi's paradox. If there are intelligent (I prefer the term 'sophont') alien life forms out there, why haven't they contacted us?
One solution says 'because they don't want to'. I find that solution very plausible at the current juncture. Odds are that if there is, in fact, a conglomerate of alien nations out there, they've set down a network of powerful signal-dampening sattelites around our solar system (the Oort cloud would be a good hiding place), controlled by a very strong AI which filters the transmissions reaching us, so that only natural phenomena and signals of our own making ever reach us. This could even be standard procedure for worlds below a certain level of technology. This is called the 'Prime Directive' solution, after Gene Roddenberry's Prime Directive from Star Trek.
Of course, another (more Occam-friendly) solution to the paradox is "Because there aren't any"...
The sci-fi assumption of socially advanced/peaceful aliens comes from the idea that if they weren't peaceful, they'd have destroyed themselves long before becoming powerful enough to travel. Which makes a certain amount of sense if you think about it. The cost of destroying humanity decreases as our technology advances - imagine the people of today with their hands on the bio-technology of the future. We'll *have* to advance culturally or we're fucked. Not to be all gloom and doom or anything :p
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
While I don't necessarily disagree, I don't think that we're necessarily looking in the wrong place. Imagine a civilization far in advance of our own using some sort of communications technology we can't even imagine as yet. Surely it wouldn't be too difficult for them to make a massively powerful radio transmitter to call out? In fact, I can see one very good reason to think there might be such a beacon made by an advanced civilization. Think about all the trials and tribulations we're going through right now, all this uncertainty about whether or not humanity will survive - about whether it is even possible *for* us to survive our technology. Then imagine we get a signal from space, from another civilization, one that went through what we did. "We're here, we survived, and you can too. Good luck, and welcome to the universe." Call me sappy, but I can think of no better message we could receive.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
The problem I have with the Predators -- and similar SFnal aliens such as the current Star Trek version of the Klingons -- is that "tribal warrior cultures" might be very good at conquering other planets, but they're unlikely to come up with the technology to do so in the first place. In our own history, warrior cultures have only enjoyed brief success at empire, and usually only when they ripped off useful technology from their more peacefully minded neighbors. Barbarian nomads may be tough, but always bet on the farmers in the long run.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
did a story on the most efficient way to search for extra-terrestrial life
Sending probes is beyond our technology as a way to search for life - you have to either expect a return contact from the more advanced civilization or radio back the findings yourself. We can barely pickup the Voyager signals and they're still in our own solar system.
It's also a pretty hit-or-miss way to contact other life.
Imagine if we were on the receiving end. Say they were shining a laser at us - with a powerful enough laser they can light up the solar system. Every planet in the solar system could see the signal. Any observatory on earth over a year or so would see the signal.
Now, imagine they sent a probe to our solar system. Where would it go? Would it land? On Earth? In a city? On a tundra? Would it be stepped on by a dinosaur or decoded by a physicist?
Maybe it would stay in orbit or a planet, or at a Lagrange point. With our current level of technology if it's not around our planet we would have no idea it's there - we can't even catalog the NEO asteroids and they're alot bigger than a space probe would probably be. If it was in orbit and not known to be space junk would we send a exploratory team?
The point of the NPR spot is really about sending massive amounts of data, but we're still working on the "hello, world" part. Once we've made contact it might make sense as a next step, unless "they" have a better idea.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)