Looks pretty damn cool, but supersonic commercial flights will be ridiculously expensive, pollutive and wasteful, there’s no going around this. There’s zero practical uses for the common man.
Astronomy: “a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos”
I suppose anything that happens in the universe is technically “a phenomenon that occurs in the cosmos” but this seems more suited to !nasa, which could definitely use the content. Would you consider posting it there as well?
I’m not the biggest fan of Lemmyworld, I prefer thematic instances such as Mander.xyz. Maybe we can consider this community as broader than strict astronomy?
I also prefer thematic instances, but try to find appropriate communities within those instances. Just because it’s coming from NASA, doesn’t make it astronomy.
Depending on which aspects of the project you think are important and want to discuss there are a few communities here that might be relevant.
Earth Science includes environment, and environmental impact seems to be the most popular talking point so far.
Noise and other forms of pollution are public health issues and there is a local community for that, although I’m not sure it’s really a great fit there.
Physics might be another choice due to the fact that a lot of physics is going into the engineering of something that reduces sonic booms.
Or maybe you just need to find the right thematic instance. For example, I’m registered on slrpnk for my climate, energy efficiency, and anarchism fixes.
If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth?
In general, no. Most earthly transmissions are too weak to be found by equipment similar to ours at the distance of even the nearest star. But there are some important exceptions. High-powered radars and the Arecibo broadcast of 1974 (which lasted for only three minutes) could be detected at distances of tens to hundreds of light-years with a setup similar to our best SETI experiments.
Every moment adds to our data of course, but the idea that we're at some sort of tipping point in how we should perceive the odds of extraterrestrial civilization is silly. Some of this feels like sour grapes from aging nerds who come to believe that it won't happen in their lifetimes, so it is obviously never gonna happen.
To be fair, the odds of an intelligent civilization arising at the exact same time as us are rather absurdly remote on astronomical timelines. Aliens should be somewhere between a billion years old to at least a few million, and that is plenty of time to colonize vast reaches of space and build telescope arrays in the scale of small galaxies with only known tech.
I agree though, it is rather silly to think that we’ve passed any point of significance in our search recently.
True, and I suppose that's a certain filter of its own. I suppose the main thing that makes me roll my eyes is that having done SETI by half measures for a handful of decades, the article is asking if it's time to assume that the rather presumptuous (though not absurd) zoo hypothesis is "the answer".
This all is what it is. The results so far imply virtually nothing about anything, except I suppose that there is not a very close civilization intentionally listening for our types of signals and eager to communicate back.
I mean i’d argue that the lack of any big sphere of space which is largely dark, save absolutely glowing in IR, does indicate that there is likely no one millions of years more advanced than us anywhere nearby. A K2 or K3 civilization millions of years more advanced than us should absolutely be visible to even our current telescopes if they were out there, and an absence of any massive otherwise explainable waste heat signatures seems to imply that they arn’t.
That is a result which tells us a lot about the Fermi Paradox, but hardly one that proves one solution over another. Similarly, we’ve recently found habitable zone exoplanets are not rare, but have yet to find any with a strong biosigniture. This does indicate to us that the odds of abiogenesis may actually just be that rare.
Negative results are still results, and indeed contrary to what the article thinks complex life being common around us while still lacking signs of intelligence would seem to be a lot stronger evidence of the Zoological Hypothesis than just a lot of dead rocks.
We’d need a sample size large enough to contain a bunch of positive signs of spacefaring intelligent aliens to ‘solve’ the Fermi Paradox though, so until and unless that comes along it’s all just idle speculation around the fact that we just don’t have the data to know.
It will likely be a Greek or Roman name in keeping with tradition. The IAU generally let’s the person/group that discovers have an influence in the decision but they’re the final say on the name.
With two exceptions*, the names are from Roman mythology. So I’d expect the new planet to get a definitive name from the same template. (Please be Janus. It’s the gate of the solar system!)
*Uranus is from Greek mythology, with no good Latin equivalent. Terra is trickier; you could argue that it fits the template for Latin and the Romance languages, but most others simply use local words for soil, without a connection to the goddess. That is also called Tellus to add confusion.
Is this the one they’ve decided exists and then narrow down the parameters as what it must look like every time a survey rules out another patch of sky?
In this case, the carbon and oxygen are coming from a much more mundane source: the solar wind.
When high-energy particles from the solar wind collide with molecules in Venus’ upper atmosphere, they carry enough energy to break some of those molecules into their constituent atoms. Since the Venusian atmosphere is almost entirely CO2, you should expect this process to generate C and O ions — which is exactly what we’ve now observed!
If life is proven to exist on Venus, it would be really exciting. Besides the obvious reason to be excited there’s also my thought: If in this planetary system two planets out of 98 have life on them, then that would mean that life isn’t as rare as we conceived it to be.
Edit: Had the tab open for a while without refreshing before posting, so I didn’t see the comment that says it’s just solar wind. :(
I have such mixed feelings about all the time I spent with my cameras during the event. By time I realized I had no practice with the camera and eq mount for daytime use, it was cloudy the whole time at home. Totality is not something you can reasonably practice anyway. So yeah, I have a few cool totality pictures with varying detail and a couple hundred showing the partial phases… But for what? They’re not as good as many other amateurs, let alone professionals. If there was ever a time to deal with the hassle of raw photos, it was then. Part of why I gave up on most astrophotography is because the best I could possibly do is simply match it to scientific equipment. It’s cool to do it, but there’s no personalization. Instead, I look more for nightscapes or wide angle really detailed starfields. I’m still conflicted as to whether or not I experienced it properly. I got to show the pics to some people passing by after, assuming I was the go-to person for info on what they experienced, something I love about night time astronomy, but those aren’t such time-limited events.
I’ll probably revel in memories whenever I actually flip through the pictures. But, personally, I don’t think it was worth spending so much of my time getting pictures of a black hole in a black background rather than just letting my mark 1 eyeballs observe the hole in the blue-fade skies.
However, the one piece I absolutely would bring every single time again is binoculars. Maybe that’s why I feel like I didn’t see the eclipse. The view in my 10x binos was so incredibly detailed, the memory matches the stacked and tweaked pictures. I could see more than just the big laser-don’t flare on the bottom, I saw at least 3. Just unreal, no sight in my life before could explain it. A cartoonishly large corona with a black hole in a black background. Maybe I just couldn’t comprehend.
The light effects near totality were certainly something to experience. Decades of experience being in sunlight just didn’t jive with what the sun was doing then. It was more akin to a distant white streetlight rather than a sun. It dimmed and crisped shadows unlike a sunset by not turning orange and blurring of the edges.
I’m glad you had the emotional experience I was expecting to have.
Yeah, my photography issues were similar, re: unfamiliar context. I’m still puzzled as to why the quicksetting menu works totally differently when using it in mirrorless mode. But oh well. There’s always… 2044??? Oh, crap.
I admit, other than a better lens with a tighter view, the bits of equipment I really wished I’d invested in were a tracking motor and a shutter remote. I paid zero attention to my camera during totality, but I still had this nagging voice in the back of my head telling me that I should check my centering, and I didn’t need that.
To potentially save you the confusion I had, the next popular one in North America will really be 2045. They’re both in August, but the 2044 TSE is a relatively short, northerly event with totality ending in Montana at sunset. Meanwhile, 2045 is more akin to the 2017 path, passing from California to Florida.
Yeah, not much of an emotional reaction from me, beyond a slightly incredulous laugh and an extended wow punctuated by gawking in awe. Definitely should have brought my 'nocs!
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