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.
I mean, it’s pretty common sense that at some point inertia would be overpowered by the gravitational pull of the black hole. Pretty sure that’s what would happen if the moon got a little too close to us, too.
Of course there’s a point where something cannot escape the gravity. What this article states is that instead of continuing to orbit while perpetually getting closer to the singularity, once the plunging region is hit the light/matter/whatever drops in basically a straight line at the speed of light to the center.
Of course no spider aliens as the clickbait might insinuate.
These are cracks in the ice sheet caused by gases which when released to the surface bring dark material with them is spread on the ground in that manner.
Sunlight causes the carbon dioxide ice at the bottom of the layer to turn into gas, then build up and break the ice sheets on it. The gas explodes in the spring on Mars, dragging dark material to the surface over time and destroying the ice layer as thick as a meter."
Okay, that’s really cool and 25 megabits per second is actually very good compared to what they get back from other probes. At speeds like that, they could send back 4k pictures, which would be extremely high resolution for craft like this.
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