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The European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced that observations by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submilimeter Array (ALMA) have detected methyl cyanide and hydrogen cyanide in the protoplanetary disk around the young star MW480.
From the ESO press release:
For the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of complex organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in a protoplanetary disc surrounding a young star. The discovery, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), reaffirms that the conditions that spawned the Earth and Sun are not unique in the Universe. The results are published in the 9 April 2015 issue of the journal Nature.
The new ALMA observations reveal that the protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star MWC 480 contains large amounts of methyl cyanide (CH3CN), a complex carbon-based molecule. There is enough methyl cyanide around MWC 480 to fill all of Earth's oceans.
Both this molecule and its simpler cousin hydrogen cyanide (HCN) were found in the cold outer reaches of the star's newly formed disc, in a region that astronomers believe is analogous to the Kuiper Belt — the realm of icy planetesimals and comets in our own Solar System beyond Neptune.
The paper [Full] provides more details about this discovery, for example: "The presence of cyanides in comets, including 0.01% of methyl cyanide (CH3CN) with respect to water, is of special interest because of the importance of C-N bonds for abiotic amino acid synthesis."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday April 10 2015, @10:29AM
With respect to the Great Filter, I believe it's actually worse than stated, because of emergent phenomena.
Let's start with the example of earthworms and soil, as described by Maturana and Varela as an example of "autopoiesis" (pity I can't find that book anymore anywhere!).
Earthworms eat soil. Earthworms breed. So you could make a mathematical model of how many earthworms you have after x years if you have 2 earthworms and sharp sand to begin with.
But you would make an underestimation!
After an earthworm has eaten the soil, the soil itself has become slightly less sharp from passing through the worm's digestive tract. So that after many earthworm generations, the soil is actually adapted by the earthworms to the earthworms, and they thrive better than could be expected from measurements at the beginning.
Next example, the spread of writing in human civilization.
A long time ago there was little contact between the various civilizations, so you could make a mathematical model of "probability 1/x of a civilization that has invented cities and kings to develop writing".
But that model would be wrong, too. Because once the idea of writing was discovered, any (smart) accidental traveller from neighbouring lands could see that it was a very useful invention, and maybe communicate the concept further. So the actual distribution model was discovery in very few isolated places (Mesopotamia and Central America were not in contact) followed by a spread like wildfire (China, Indus Valley and Egypt may have developed it independently but odds are that the concept of writing things down was spread)
Next example, fictional, interstellar communication.
Assuming that lightspeed is a hard limit, there are many other limiting factors to interstellar communication: how do you attract your neighbour's attention that you're trying to communicate, how do you communicate without big fucking expensive lasers, how do you solve the problem that low-bandwitdh communication is tedious and high-bandwidth communication looks like white noise, how do you construct a self-describing language that explains the symbols for the next level of the message?
But!
Assuming many alien civilizations have existed in the past few billion years, and assuming some of them were only a few hundred light years apart, *if* some pair of two distinct alien civilizations communicated, then they could have optimized the process, developing its physical form for signal/noise ratio, its encoding for robustness and error correction, and its semantics coding for optimal transmission of alien cat pictures, alien porno, and oh yes also alien scientific research articles.
And if they were also interested to find out if there were more cultures in the Milky Way, they could make a simplified version of their communication system, geared not towards maximum bandwidth, but to maximum discoverability by curious other aliens (maybe containing the message: "this is not actually the language we use, but if you look at these two sets of coordinates in the great wheel, using this different type of neutrino, at 300 gigabaud instead of 300 baud, then you find us, proud civilizations A and B, inventors of the interstellar radio").
If that would have really happened, the idea would have spread like wildfire, I believe. So either it never happened, or it happened and advanced civilizations suicide even quicker than expected (Great Filter), or there are other factors (neckhair-raising obligatory xkcd.com : Fish [xkcd.com]).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dublet on Friday April 10 2015, @10:52AM
I believe what you're describing is essentially the Network effect [wikipedia.org], which can be taken into consideration when modelling things.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday April 10 2015, @07:03PM
I'm not sure that's what I mean.
The Network Effect is a quantitative effect as far as I understand it, but e.g. the example of the earthworms is more a qualitative effect: generations of earthworms create an emergent property of smooth soil; the one-shot invention of writing creates the spread of the concept that writing is something that you can do; the one-shot invention of effective interstellar communication, I would imagine, means that that technology spreads nearly at the speed of the light cone (not the communications channel between A and B, but the beacon channel, which other discovering civilizations could rapidly copy and transmit to their own local stellar neighbourhood).
In 1000 years I'm sure all civilizations within a 100 ly radius would know if their neighbours are at home and responding to their 100-ly-radius directed sweep, or keep stumm. I mean there's only 1 star at 4 ly from us but within 100 ly there are:
512 G-type stars, 72 F's , about 950 K's, more than 2000 M's (I *love* the informative page http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-ms.htm [solstation.com], very honest). and alltogether 65 exoplanets found so far withing 50 ly, so extrapolating maybe 520 exoplanets within 100 ly?
They could even transmit an ever-expanding directory: "at the transmission time of this message, we, civilization Z, have heard of the location of the following civilizations: (list of A..Z coordinates)"
(Score: 3, Informative) by dublet on Monday April 13 2015, @02:55PM
In my interpretation the Network Effect is essentially saying that something can be more useful with more users. So to take your earthworm example into account, the soil is the network. With only one user/worm, it improves the soil only a small amount. as the number of worms (n) increases, the quality of the soil increases, whether it's linearly, exponentially or whatever. Thus you have a type of network effect.
You should remember that once writing was invented, it didn't necessarily spread to everyone. There were some learned people who spread it but the cost of copying the writings meant there was a lack of material to disseminate. That cost was prohibitive enough to mean few people could read. Only really once the printing press came around did more people become literate, as procuring reading materials became more affordable.
So in that sense, I'm not sure if your analogy holds up.
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"