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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?
...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
NPR did a story on the most efficient way to search for extra-terrestrial life, where it would be more efficient (energy/economic) to send craft out to distant solar systems rather than beam signals there. Apparantly the loss in signal strength is so severe (inverse square law) that signals get lost in the cosmic background.
Are these efforts being coordinated with other such programs, such as SETI?
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*
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.
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. What if our brutality is the norm for how most races behave? 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?" At least without making serious moves toward a more advanced state of technological advancement.
I remember an article on TechCentralStation discussed how absurd it was for anyone to assume that there couldn't be a race like the predators from the predator series. Who says that civilizations evolve the same way? A tribal warrior culture might actually thrive better in space than ours...
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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 glad to see other Nations exploring space, we could all learn something. It could even spark up NASA to get on the ball.
roamingfeet
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.
10,434.39 becomes 10.434,39
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.
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
This is about looking for planets, then analysing them to see if they have the conditions to support life (oxygen, co2, methane). SETI is about trying to recieve radio signals created by intelligent beings out there.
In short, this is looking for any sort of possible life, SETI is looking for "ET phone home".
SETI is fundamentally flawed, since even now we on Earth are broadcasting less and less out into space. We're using microwave and lasers to talk to our satellites, and everything on the ground is getting wired, or fed from satellites.
The days of gigawatt broadcasting over radio bands is winding to an end, so we only will have made "noise" for a century or so.
One could assume an intelligent race would outgrow the technology just as we have, or never use it in the first place.
SETI is like trying to find modern Native Americans by looking for smoke signals, when they communicate using the phone or internet these days.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
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
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.
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?
--
make install -not war
looks like we need tinfoil hats in europe now, theyre looking for intelligence, us!
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
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
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
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 $1,000,000.00 over here.
Where possible, I try to use the correct SI format, which marks only the decimal separator (comma or point) and uses spaces to group blocks of digits:
Unfortunately, one then has to worry about a line break being inserted into the middle of a number--it's a pain in the neck always having to insert nonbreaking spaces. (Actually, I can't figure out how to insert one in these comments, which is why I put the examples above on separate lines.)~Idarubicin
did a story on the most efficient way to search for extra-terrestrial life
Sending probes is beyond our technology as a way to search for life - you have to either expect a return contact from the more advanced civilization or radio back the findings yourself. We can barely pickup the Voyager signals and they're still in our own solar system.
It's also a pretty hit-or-miss way to contact other life.
Imagine if we were on the receiving end. Say they were shining a laser at us - with a powerful enough laser they can light up the solar system. Every planet in the solar system could see the signal. Any observatory on earth over a year or so would see the signal.
Now, imagine they sent a probe to our solar system. Where would it go? Would it land? On Earth? In a city? On a tundra? Would it be stepped on by a dinosaur or decoded by a physicist?
Maybe it would stay in orbit or a planet, or at a Lagrange point. With our current level of technology if it's not around our planet we would have no idea it's there - we can't even catalog the NEO asteroids and they're alot bigger than a space probe would probably be. If it was in orbit and not known to be space junk would we send a exploratory team?
The point of the NPR spot is really about sending massive amounts of data, but we're still working on the "hello, world" part. Once we've made contact it might make sense as a next step, unless "they" have a better idea.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
We have all these programs for trying to find patterns in signals from space but are we doing anything to make life easier for anyone that is trying to find us? Sure, we are emitting a bunch of electromagnetic radiation from our broadcasts but how far would it actually reach to be detectable? Wouldn't it be more efficient to send powerful laser pulses that are specifically targeted at "promising" nearby star systems?
Is anybody in the world doing something like this?
When men used to be men