I ran SETI@home many years ago. You had to have a screensaver anyway, and I seem to recall that the screensaver portion looked super cool and science-y, so it was trendy even if you weren’t particularly enthusiastic about the actual project.
Habitability in this usage means "a place where humans can live, either with or without technological assistance". In terms of temperature, this means the range of temperatures where machinery can reliably function. Of the temperatures found in the universe, this machinery-functionable range is actually extremely narrow
There’s not really any data other than a rough distance from its star. The atmosphere could be thick enough and with the right combination of greenhouse gases that the temperature at the equator is 23°C year round. We do know that it’s only receiving ~30% of the energy from its star as earth does from the sun, which is what they’re basing the low temperature estimates on.
And it’s not like once we have the technology needed to travel 146 light years that we couldn’t do something insane like deploy mirror-film solar cells or something to capture extra heat in orbit around the planet and warm the entire planet and terraform it for our usage.
Rising over a frozen valley in the Tatra Mountains, the night sky is dominated by the familiar stars and nebulas of Orion. This striking wide-field photograph, taken last month in southern Poland’s highest mountain range, captures both the rugged beauty of Earth and the structure of our galaxy. Above the snowy peaks, Orion’s bright belt stars anchor a region of glowing interstellar clouds, with the Great Orion Nebula—a vast stellar nursery visible to the naked eye Official Website
The Webb produces some beautiful pictures, as always, but identifying 800k galaxies in an area 2 1/2 times the size of the moon is hard to conceive. Both how good a telescope it is, and the scale of the universe.
Don’t think it says it in the link, but if you assume that all galaxies are randomly oriented, then in the places when the distribution isn’t quite average, you can assume that light has been pulled by gravity’s ‘hidden hand’. And with nearly a million galaxies to analyse, you get a very good picture of how sources of gravity are distributed.
I remember Angela Collier talking about this topic, but basically: the “AI” in question is a different beast from the “AI” in chatbots and image generators. The underlying tech is the same (artificial neural networks), but instead of making the bot mimic human output, you’re asking it to point out stuff.
So for example, you feed it with two sets of data:
a bunch of pics of completely normal astronomical objects
a bunch of pics of anomalous astronomical objects
Then you “ask” the bot to assign new pictures (not present in either set) to one of those sets.
In my opinion it’s one of the best ways to use the new tech. If there’s a false positive, nobody is harmed — the researcher will simply investigate the pic, see there’s nothing worth noting there, say “dumb clanker”, and move on. Ideally you don’t want false negatives, but if they do happen, you’re missing things you’d already miss anyway — because there’s no way people would trial down all those pics by hand.
It also skips a few issues associated with chatbots and image generators, like:
since it’s “trained” for a specific purpose, it isn’t DDoSing sites for training “data”. It’s all from the telescope, AFAIK in the public domain.
no massive training = no massive water/energy cost.
Was thinking more like satellite imagery as background. I feel like there’s no way such faint an object would be visible through the atmosphere. But maybe I’ve just never been far enough away from civilisation.
astronomy
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