A very cool idea, however the headline is misleading - NASA has not even remotely committed to running this mission. They’ve selected the swarm project as one of 13 projects in their innovation program and given it up to $175k to study feasibility. That’s roughly a postdoc for two years. This is far, far from committing the hundreds of millions or billions needed for the execution of this mission.
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.
As Universe Today explored in a previous post, it would take between 19,000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Proxima Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology)
Acceleration is a bitch. A manned flight would take longer as it would have to cap it’s thrust to 1-1.5G or risk long term effects. Not to mention having to cancel ALLL of that thrust starting at the halfway point.
Biology is frustrating. We’re built for everything except leaving the immediate area around the sea we crawled out of. Anything beyond that and our bones melt into cancer.
Peregrine 1 is not NASA’s. NASA paid for some payloads on the lander, but the lander itself is from Astrobiotic. It’s an important distinction because it seems like people are trying to blame NASA for whatever went wrong.
That’s frustrating. Anyways, SpaceX! Turnaround record of 3 hours! Something fails, learn from it and launch another one. The ULA invests so much money and time, it makes every mechanical or propulsion failure seem catastrophic.
Farming out to the lowest bidder works well when the guidelines are strict and the client (gvmnt) does good QA.
Lots of stuff was farmed out in the apollo mission and it was still ok. Strict QA was noted as a very important factor in why that mission was a success.
You can read the case study by NASA about this, and you’ll see that they have 1 article just about QA and how they did testing, and another one about testing and deadlines
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.
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.
My theory is that if any ETI exists, our species is under quarantine until we have either grown up or burned ourselves out. They will have seen violent, self-destructive beings in the past and know it is dangerous to let them spread and destroy peaceful society. If they can travel between the stars, they would have to be able to communicate to keep cohesion, this communication could very well include the warning “Avoid this system, there are killer apes on that planet”.
Well the vampires are on the nightly news reports about Wall Street, and zombies are shown in attendance at every tRump rally… so yeah the ETs would certainly know they are quite prevalent here. Don’t see as many werewolves in the news, but they interview a shit ton of ghouls.
given the age of the Universe and the relatively short time it would take for an advanced civilization to spread across the Milky Way Galaxy (650,000 years, by Hart’s estimate), Earth should have been visited by an extraterrestrial civilization (ETC) by now.
It took humans 30,000 years to cross the Atlantic. Using modem propolsion systems, it takes us two years to get to Mars and 40 to reach the edge of the solar system. This seems like an extremely generous estimate considering the Milky Way has a 50,000 light year radius.
I’m as bullish about extraterrestrial life as anyone, and I think a fuller survey of even just the current Solar System has potential. But I have no idea how you get a full galactic survey in so short a time, given what we know about the soft limits on speed of travel and communication.
By Tipler’s refined estimate, an ETC would be able to explore the entire galaxy in “less than 300 million years.”
That definitely feels like it’s more in the ballpark. But, again, it presumes a certain amount of steady cartography by the hypothetical fleet of Von Neuman probes.
There’s a Sci-fi series called The Bobverse that explores the idea of a sentiment fleet of Von Neumans exploring the galaxy, and the various trial and tribulations involved. One point it discusses is that even with a saturation of probes, you don’t get real time communication. So even in a hypothetical universe where alien life did exist and survey earth, what are they odds they’d be watching us at the moment of our development. What would an alien AI be looking for and what would it do when it was discovered?
We could still be too primitive to bare noticing. Or we could be living in between blinks of an alien camera that only reports back every 1000 years.
As we look out at the cosmos, we could be looking at things we don’t understand. After all, what does a star surrounded by a Dyson Sphere look like to a telescope that is searching for glimmers of light, heat, and gravity? SETI is operating purely on conjecture. That’s assuming alien civilizations are even capable of creating these hypothetical superstructures. Or that the structures would function as we intuit.
At some level, I have to question if we know what we’re looking for. Because so much of this feels like we’re searching for humans deep in space. Perhaps the reason we can’t find aliens is that they are simply… too alien.
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