The laser array is expensive but if it’s continuous and spread out enough you could keep sending newer probes. Or if it’s not continuous you could use it for different directions!
According to Scott Manley’s video on the topic the probes would need to arrive at the correct time in order to form what is effectively a huge phased array antenna.
Only then is the combined transmission power of these tiny probes large enough to be received on earth.
My personal take is that there’s some kind of anthropomorphic fallacy in thinking life should tend towards “civilization”.
Life will tend towards reproductive success and it seems entirely plausible to me that reproductive success doesn’t at all imply the use of radio waves.
The dinosaurs were a very intelligent life form that never tended towards civilization and some of their bird ancestors can be smarter than most mammals etc. Expecting the trait of civilization to emerge seems unfounded and against available evidence.
Space travel seems impossible. I realize you can back of the envelope it in a way that makes it seem within grasp but there’s no economic benefit in colonizing another star and only some marginal mining benefit in even visiting the nearby planets so I don’t think it will ever happen.
No, rare intelligence and to a lesser extent rare earth remain as convincing as ever. Potentially habitable does not mean life sustaining, and given the lack of strong biosignatures on any of the examined near earth exoplanets, I’d say that there is indeed increasing evidence that life of any kind really is that rare, much less intelligence.
It is just absurdly hard to get conditions right for microbes to form on a reasonable timeframe is a solution after all.
Nice find, and I love that people are finally pushing TESS data with new pipelines like SHERLOCK, but let’s not pretend this is a tidy three-planet slam dunk. The team confirms two transiting Earth-sized planets, the third is still a candidate. Headlines shouting “three Earth-sized” are doing a disservice to the work and to readers who assume confirmed means nailed down.
This is interesting for dynamics though, a binary with planets transiting both stars is rare and tells us something about formation and stability in tight binaries. Still, these are ultra-short period worlds around red dwarfs (2–3.5 day orbits), probably tidally locked, and we have zero masses yet. TESS pixels are big, so ground-based follow-up and precision near-IR RVs or high-res imaging are essential before we start talking about any Earth-like implications.
So yeah, cool system and worth chasing, but chill on the clickbait. Follow-up observations will be the real test, not reprocessed light curves alone.
What do you mean after all? Wasn’t it the consensus since forever that there was basically 0 chance of anything actually colliding because galaxies are mostly empty space? I’m pretty sure I read about that when I was a child.
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