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posted by
cmn32480
on Monday January 02 2017, @04:03PM
from the sorry-for-the-delay-in-our-response dept.
from the sorry-for-the-delay-in-our-response dept.
http://www.astronomy.com/news/2016/12/contact-with-proxmina-centauri-b
Douglas Vakoch, the former Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute, is launching the METI Initiative with one planet in mind: the recently discovered planet around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth (and thus the closest exoplanet.)
Vakoch says that METI has more than a few targets in mind, there are a few advantages to Proxima Centauri b.
"First, it's close to our solar system, keeping the time for a roundtrip exchange as short as possible," Vakoch says. "Second, some have suggested that this exoplanet is potentially habitable."
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Former SETI Human Wants to Send Messages to Proxima Centauri b
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HELP! Man trapped in a human body!
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday January 02 2017, @10:11PM
None of those analogies are truly good though. Anything on Earth can actually *support* intelligent life as we know it. If we aren't sending signals to a planet that at least has water, we might as well be sending signals to parts of deep space where we suspect there is only dark matter. It's unlikely that Proxima Centauri B even supports life.
Although I suspect we may need to dramatically alter our concepts of what intelligence is, and what habitats give rise to them. Considering the vast distances and durations of time involved, it's more likely to win the lottery then to initiate a communication with an intelligent species other than our own.
Our chances of success are fairly low and if we were serious about it, we should develop a much stronger omnidirectional signal. Then hope like hell whatever else is out there listening respects life differently then we do. If it's life very similar to ours in those terms, then we're fucked.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday January 03 2017, @12:05AM
I suspect one reason for the great silence is that there is too much interference and distance to find and recognize intelligent broadcasts. Combine that with a low likelihood of intelligent life being in a say, 100-1000 light year sphere surrounding us, and we get discouraged and presume all civilizations destroying themselves.
If it's water you want, that is very prevalent. There appears to be a subsurface ocean just about everywhere [wikipedia.org] with at least a plausible chance of supporting life (such as microbes that hitch a ride there on an asteroid, and thus do not need ideal conditions to arise in). That list includes the more familiar names like Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and Enceladus, as well as TNOs like Orcus, Sedna, Makemake, and Eris as having possible subsurface oceans. There could be hundreds of more TNOs in our solar system with a size comparable to Orcus or Pluto/Eris and a similar watery composition.
Planets around stars are prevalent. Planets in habitable zones around stars appear to be prevalent [earthsky.org]. If the habitable zone contains gas giants instead of a rocky planet, rocky moons could be considered. 3/4 of Jupiter's Galilean moons have lots of water ice, and we know that a moon can have a dense atmosphere: Titan. Put it all together and it wouldn't be a shock to find 10% or more of stars have a watery habitable rock in the habitable zone.
Within the next couple of years, we will have TESS [wikipedia.org], JWST [wikipedia.org], and CHEOPS [wikipedia.org]. We will increase our known exoplanet count by an order of magnitude, and be able to characterize their atmospheres (biospheres?) using JWST. Detection of vegetation by examining atmospheres is much more likely than SETI*. Give humanity 5 or 10 more years, and then we'll have a little more reason to despair about not finding life.
* Once we have found evidence of vegetation, we have a nice target for next-next-next generation space telescopes that have novel mechanisms of deploying a large mirror or something entirely different [nasa.gov] for purposes of direct imaging of exoplanets at high resolution.
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