Starlink is causing problems, but it seems to me that this image was made in bad faith to oversell the case. The caption says it’s a combination of 29 separate exposures, but if those exposures were combined properly, you wouldn’t see the satellites (median combination does wonders, and there are more sophisticated techniques which do even better). Some streaks start at one chip edge and extend to another chip edge, without continuity across the focal plane. So it’s not at all clear just how this image was created. And why on earth is it not flat-fielded? Maybe this is just really sloppy image processing, but even amateurs can do far better than this, leaving the final combination with no satellites at all.
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.
“Teen pays 40 dollars to Giant Mirror service to blast sunlight at Chilean observatory destroying 2.5m USD of equipment. Giant Mirror service denies liability.”
I think they are talking but their voices are actually just too high for us to hear. This is why some dogs can be so skittish at times, because they can hear the aliens saying really mean things about us behind our backs
astronomy
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