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An arXiv preprint suggests that evidence of intelligent (or trashy) life could be found by looking for space junk:
Its author, Héctor Socas-Navarro, spends most of his time at the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics in Spain studying the sun. But he was struck by a weird side effect of the ring of active and retired satellites circling Earth: it's a little bit opaque. And the more satellites we throw up there, the more opaque it gets. He realized that if we—or any technologically advanced aliens out there—build enough satellites, they'll eventually become dense enough to leave a faint shadow around the planet when it passes in front of a star.
And that's awfully convenient given that one of the best ways we have of spotting alien planets is by staring at their stars and waiting for tiny dips in brightness as planets pass in front of them. Essentially, Socas-Navarro's new paper proposes, if aliens have put enough satellites into orbit around their planet, we'll be able to spot the faintly opaque bubble before and after we spot the brightness dip of the planet itself.
The scale of the endeavor would be a real challenge for the aliens, however, since this idea relies on between 10 billion and one trillion satellites. "It's like building the pyramids," Avi Loeb, an astronomer at Harvard University, told New Scientist. "Each building block is easy, but putting it together is the hard engineering task."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @10:36PM (9 children)
Only technologically primitive aliens will be detectable during the brief period in their development between inventing orbital launch capability and inventing methods of recycling space junk.
Just like Hitler's TV broadcasts leaked RF radiation into space because Trump's Twitter account didn't exist yet.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 08 2018, @10:49PM (8 children)
https://www.space.com/17151-alien-wow-signal-response.html [space.com]
http://tweetsinspace.org [tweetsinspace.org]
https://www.sapiens.org/column/wanderers/messaging-to-extraterrestrial-intelligence/ [sapiens.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @10:56PM (2 children)
Space Jews are black on the left side.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 08 2018, @11:14PM
I am black on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side. [wikia.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday March 09 2018, @02:10AM
Little-known fun-fact - The Romulan Warbirds of the 24th century were designed by Space Jews. Their space-saving overall design makes them economical (space in a vacuum is free of cost), and their foresection [siriusreplicas.com] makes them instantly identifiable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 08 2018, @11:13PM (2 children)
Perhaps the Microsoft programmers who created Tay assumed that by interacting with humans online and conducting related internet searches, the artificial intelligence would reflect an idealized image of humanity and how we communicate. Instead Tay showed us the worst of humanity’s prejudice, hatred, and bigotry.
This is BS. Tay was a creation of Microsoft, and as such was an official speaker for MS, and showed us exactly what that company stands for. If you buy from Microsoft, you're supporting a company that really believes that Hitler did nothing wrong. They said it themselves. Do you want your money going to such a company?
(Score: 3, Funny) by toddestan on Friday March 09 2018, @03:33AM (1 child)
You think that is bad? You should see some of the search results that Bing will return! I mean, it's on a website that is operated by Microsoft, so these results pages clearly represent what Microsoft believes! Would you want your money going to such a company?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday March 09 2018, @04:03AM
Exactly!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday March 08 2018, @11:18PM (1 child)
> On November 28th, 2012, all Tweets in Space messages were transmitted via both analog and digital signals
> towards our target planet, using a high amplitude, high frequency radio telescope.
I was gonna rant about the stupidity of both twitter and a one-time transmission, going over the mind-bogglingly ridiculous odds of anyone anywhere capturing and decoding it. I guess someone has money to burn in this post-scarcity world of ours.
But instead, I just need to point out it's not fair to cut off just before the most enlighting part of the release:
Artsy pseudo-philosophical bullshit, then... move along, scientific considerations.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 08 2018, @11:29PM
That's a standard feature on many artist-written descriptions of their own work. In some (many?) cases, even they don't believe the artsy pseudo-philosophical bullshit they are typing up.
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