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posted by LaminatorX on Monday July 20 2015, @10:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the Stars-like-Dust dept.

Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner have announced Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million project that will increase the intensity of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or their signals):

Speaking at the launch, Prof Hawking said: "Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. "Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos - unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer - to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know."

Those behind the initiative claim it to be the biggest scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. They plan to cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programmes and scan five times more of the radio spectrum, 100 times faster. It will involve access to two of the world's most powerful telescopes. - the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Yuri Milner is known for his creation and funding of Breakthrough Prizes, which award $3 million to researchers for achievements in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics. Also reported at Washington Post, NPR, El Reg, and Scientific American.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Stephen Hawking: Intelligent Aliens Could Destroy Humanity, But Let's Search Anyway 47 comments

Since at least 2010, Hawking has spoken publicly about his fears that an advanced alien civilization would have no problem wiping out the human race the way a human might wipe out a colony of ants. At the media event announcing the new project, he noted that human beings have a terrible history of mistreating, and even massacring, other human cultures that are less technologically advanced — why would an alien civilization be any different?

And yet, it seems Hawking's desire to know if there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe trumps his fears. Today (July 20), he was part of a public announcement for a new initiative called Breakthrough Listen, which organizers said will be the most powerful search ever initiated for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
...
  Jill Tarter, former director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) also has expressed opinions about alien civilizations that are in stark contrast to Hawking's.

"While Sir Stephen Hawking warned that alien life might try to conquer or colonize Earth, I respectfully disagree," Tarter said in a statement in 2012. "If aliens were to come here, it would be simply to explore. Considering the age of the universe, we probably wouldn't be their first extraterrestrial encounter, either.

"If aliens were able to visit Earth, that would mean they would have technological capabilities sophisticated enough not to need slaves, food or other planets," she added.

So, who's right, Jill Tarter, or Stephen Hawking? Will advanced aliens have no need of human popplers, or will survivors of the Centauran Human Harvest & BBQ of 2057 call this moment, "Pulling a Hawking?"

See also our earlier stories: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project and More Warnings of an AI Doomsday — This Time From Stephen Hawking.


Original Submission

"Breakthrough Listen" to Search for Alien Radio Transmissions Near Tabby's Star 6 comments

UC Berkeley will use the Green Bank radio telescope to observe Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) as part of the Breakthrough Listen initiative:

Breakthrough Listen, which was created last year with $100 million in funding over 10 years from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, won't be the first to search for intelligent life around this star. "Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby's star has looked at it," he said. "It's been looked at with Hubble, it's been looked at with Keck, it's been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found."

While Siemion and his colleagues are skeptical that the star's unique behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can't not take a look. They've teamed up with UC Berkeley visiting astronomer Jason Wright and Tabetha Boyajian, the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University for whom the star is named, to observe the star with state-of-the-art instruments the Breakthrough Listen team recently mounted on the 100-meter telescope. Wright is at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University.

The observations are scheduled for eight hours per night for three nights over the next two months, starting Wednesday evening, Oct. 26. Siemion, Wright and Boyajian are traveling to the Green Bank Observatory in rural West Virginia to start the observations, and expect to gather around 1 petabyte of data over hundreds of millions of individual radio channels.

Also at BBC.

Previously:
Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project
Mysterious Star May Be Orbited by Alien Megastructures
I'm STILL Not Sayin' Aliens. but This Star is Really Weird.


Original Submission

Breakthrough Listen Expands CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope Survey to Encompass Millions of Stars 3 comments

Breakthrough Listen has massively expanded its survey of stars using the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia:

Breakthrough Listen – the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe – announced today that a survey of millions of stars located in the plane of our Galaxy, using the CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope ("Parkes") in New South Wales, Australia, has commenced. Listen observations at Parkes began in November 20161, targeting a sample consisting mostly of stars within a few light years of Earth. Now, observations have expanded to cover a huge swath of the Milky Way visible from the site.

The expanded survey is made possible by new capabilities installed at Parkes by Breakthrough Listen: new digital instrumentation capable of recording the huge data rates from the Parkes "multibeam" receiver. The previous receivers used by Listen only observed a single point on the sky at a time, and were used to perform a detailed search of stars near to the Sun for evidence of extraterrestrial technology. In contrast, the multibeam receiver has 13 beams, enabling a fast survey of large areas of the sky, covering all of the Galactic Plane visible from the site.

Even if Breakthrough Listen doesn't find aliens, it is throwing a lot of well-deserved cash at astronomers and upgrading the capabilities of their telescopes.

Also at Space.com and USA Today.

Breakthrough Listen: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project
"Breakthrough Listen" to Search for Alien Radio Transmissions Near Tabby's Star
Breakthrough Listen to Observe Interstellar Asteroid 'Oumuamua for Radio Emissions

CSIRO Parkes: Famous Australian 'Dish' Radio Telescope to be Emptied in Budget Crisis: CSIRO
Milky Way Obscures Hundreds of Previously Undiscovered Galaxies
New Fast Radio Burst Discovery Finds 'Missing Matter' in the Universe


Original Submission

SETI: Not Successful Because We Are Barely Even Looking? 35 comments

Smart aliens might live within 33,000 light-years of Earth. A new study explains why we haven't found them yet.

[An] upcoming study in The Astronomical Journal, which we learned about from MIT Technology Review, suggests humanity has barely sampled the skies, and thus has no grounds to be cynical. According to the paper, all searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have examined barely a swimming pool's worth of water from a figurative ocean of signal space. "We haven't really looked much," Shubham Kanodia, a graduate student in astronomy who co-wrote the study, said during a NASA "technosignatures" workshop in Houston, Texas on September 26.

[...] In their study, Kanodia and his colleagues built a mathematical model of what they consider a reasonably sized cosmic haystack.
Their haystack is a sphere of space nearly 33,000 light-years in diameter, centered around Earth. This region captures the Milky Way's bustling core, as well as many giant globular clusters of stars above and below our home galaxy.

They also picked eight dimensions of a search for aliens — factors like signal transmission frequency, bandwidth, power, location, repetition, polarization, and modulation (i.e. complexity) — and defined reasonable limits for each one. "This leads to a total 8D haystack volume of 6.4 × 10116m5Hz2s/W," the authors wrote. That is 6.4 followed by 115 zeros — as MIT Technology review described it, "a space of truly gargantuan proportions."

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @10:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @10:39PM (#211629)

    Its their money but what a waste of it...

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday July 20 2015, @10:42PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 20 2015, @10:42PM (#211630) Journal

      "Signals" are just light. They are using existing telescopes and pointing them at stars. All data will be openly available.

      So they are paying astronomers to do astronomy. Not exactly a waste.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @10:52PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @10:52PM (#211636)

        They are using radio telescopes

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday July 20 2015, @10:53PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday July 20 2015, @10:53PM (#211638) Journal
          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @11:33PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @11:33PM (#211656)

          They are using radio telescopes

          Ohh! A pedantry fight. Technically they will be using metal telescopes.

          • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @11:37PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @11:37PM (#211659)

            And radio is just longwave light

        • (Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:42AM

          by AnonTechie (2275) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:42AM (#211865) Journal

          Should they not consider other methods to detect intelligent life ?

          --
          Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
          • (Score: 3, Funny) by dast on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:35PM

            by dast (1633) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:35PM (#211930)

            Like what? Telepathy?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:08PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:08PM (#211950)

              Searching for neutrino signals, [wikipedia.org] of course.

    • (Score: 2) by Tork on Monday July 20 2015, @11:04PM

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 20 2015, @11:04PM (#211645)
      Why is it a waste?
      --
      🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:59AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:59AM (#211791)

        Because he doesn't see a need for it.

        He could be like my workmate, who feels that all money spent on space research is wasted while we still have starving people and other problems at home. A foolish position to take.

        • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:15PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:15PM (#211889)

          I consider it a waste not be cause 'i dont see a need for it'.

          I consider it a waste as at this time we do not even know what a 'signal' would look like. Look I used to crunch seti as a background screen saver. I have thousands of credits towards it. But I stopped doing it. It was a waste of my power bill and a waste of my time. Once you dug into what was really going on. They were looking only in part of the sky. Then only at particular bands. Then only for particular types of signals. All three of which seemed to be randomly picked on a 'hunch'.

          I get 'we are upgrading our telescopes to see more stuff'. But when it becomes 'we are looking for aliens' well you are just being sensationalist.

          We assume they are using radio. But maybe they have something else they use? We assume they even pointed it at us? From their POV we would look like a jungle wasteland. Relativity is a bitch and so is SNR.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:02AM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:02AM (#211669) Journal

      I wouldn't say it's a waste pre se. Takyon raised some good practical points, but here's some food for thought.

      Our species has only been broadcasting for roughly a century. That means that if there is a civilization listening in our direction, they'd need to be within 100 light years to pick us up next Tuesday (ignoring relativity). A quick check of Wikipedia shows that this is only 1/1,000th the size of the galaxy.

      This gives us a sense of the enormous scale involved in making first contact with an extrasolar civilization, not simply in distance, but in time. If we were to pick up a discernible radio/light/EM signal from another civilization, how far away they are is how long ago they'd need to have started broadcasting. Broadcasting means maintaining a high level of technology for centuries and millenniums to reach meaningful distances. Even Spock's “stone knives and bear skins” represent technological evolution for over 10,000 years of human history beginning with the first cave paintings, advancing to written language, various Chinese advances, the discovery of the number 0, societal setbacks such as burning of the Library at Alexandria and the dark ages, more advances such as the evolution of algebra in the Middle-East (among other places), and finally the Western Renaissance when technological progress and science really got some fire in its belly, and who knows what setbacks await us yet.

      If we were to detect a signal that originated, say, half way across the galaxy or roughly 50,000 light years away (using the 1e5 ly figure to keep with easy math, yet Wikipedia gives a high diameter estimate of 1.8e5 ly), and if we initiated contact, we would need to be able to keep our shit together for a not just an entire millennium, not the 10 millenniums that comprise our entire recorded history, but 100 millenniums, just to hear the response. We'd also have to hope that they can likewise keep their shit together for at least 50 millenniums in order to receive our transmission and begin beaming us their copy of Wikipedia or if they have a copy, the Encyclopædia Galactica [wikipedia.org].

      So, it's not that it's futile in a strict sense, and the effort personally excites me, but when one looks at the timescales involved and considers the rise and fall of civilizations… if we do discover evidence of intelligent life half way across the galaxy and announce our presence in that direction, will the archaeologists of the distant future uncover the record of those of us living in the distant prehistory that we call the 21st century and find evidence that first contact was not just a myth no different from the gods of Olympus—that it really happened—, and will they be able to call upon their radio astronomer colleagues in time to receive the reply?

      In fact, those scientists of the distant future would doubtless have evolved into another species entirely, still in the homo genus, but as different from us as the neanderthals were from we.

      • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:11AM

        by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:11AM (#211675) Journal

        as different from us as the neanderthals were from we

        D'oh! Replace with “as different from us as we were from the neanderthals.”

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:28AM

        by edIII (791) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:28AM (#211680)

        I consider it a complete waste, but only because I consider humanity a complete waste. You hit the nail on the head though. We're spending ridiculous amounts of money to strongly attempt to interact with geological timescales at a minimum. It makes no sense to me.

        Aliens exist! We've found signals from Rhontar 5! Yay! So.... what? Multibillion dollar project to create space folding to Rhontar 5? Start sending signals now? What? I've discovered that there are a few hominids living in the hills of West Virginia. Doesn't mean I'm making plans to visit/study them.

        Alien's don't exist! Well.... Universe is pretty big. I sincerely doubt we will *ever* possess enough information to say aliens don't exist, much less, God is dead. Nonetheless, we're the only life in the universe. Guess we just move on right?

        Other than the attempt to ask the question, and it's nobility an excitement aside, there's nothing about it that can't be put aside for say.... 250 years. Given the sociopolitical problems we have, and the fact we are absolutely killing the planet faster and faster each day, I'm going to go with putting *all* of that money into colonies on Mars and the Moon. Far more practical to put the money into hard research on space faring technologies that give us critically needed redundancy.

        As I see it, it will be somewhere in the middle of the 22nd century when Earth becomes unable to sustain life anymore, and if Rhontar 5 wants to respond to us, they will need to redirect the answer to a colony. Mother planet will be long dead with the alien visitors rushing towards the final messages of de facto prisoners tapping out messages on the prison wall.

        Finally, cynicism, misanthropic inclinations, whatever, but I refuse to believe that an advanced alien civilization wouldn't treat us like an infestation that needs to be killed before it spreads. I've yet to find any part of humanity so interesting and valuable as to render our clearly dangerous and self-destructive proclivities less important than their scientific curiosity. At the very least, I can see us being quarantined just like North Korea.

        Why wouldn't an alien civilization decide to destroy us on the spot once they got a good look at how we conduct ourselves? Reminds me.... I've got aphids in the garden. BRB.

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:01AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:01AM (#211794)

          [...]we're the only life in the universe.

          Prove that is not just an assumption.

          • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:53PM

            by edIII (791) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:53PM (#212047)

            Why?

              I was addressing it as a *possible* answer, along with the assumption that there was other life in the universe, in order to make a statement about either outcome.

            I suggest the search for reading comprehension.

            --
            Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by deimtee on Tuesday July 21 2015, @09:52AM

          by deimtee (3272) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @09:52AM (#211857) Journal

          You want to put the money into colonies on Mars and the Moon? $100M won't get you anywhere.
          But, if they can credibly announce "We have detected intelligent transmissions form Deneb IV" how much more total funding will suddenly become available for space?
          I don't know how likely it is that they will find anyone, but I do consider it worthwhile to search.

          --
          If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
          • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:08PM

            by edIII (791) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:08PM (#212056)

            I no longer consider it worthwhile to search. Not as an absolute statement, but at least for our current situation.

            Looking is entirely besides the point. It's just us screaming into the darkness, while simultaneously spending billions to listen intently for signals indicating intelligence. Meanwhile, what is going on with us again? Somebody else had a very good point, and I'm expounding on it. That point is simply that we don't have the luxury of sitting around scanning the stars for intelligence. We need to apply *our* intelligence and efforts into surviving the lengths of time it will take to enjoy the luxury of searching for other life and then communicating with it.

            Your other point is simply a funding drive. It's no so much the science, as it's the marketing to get funds to perform *other* science? Put in the other science first. It will help keep us alive.

            The marketing will take care of itself soon enough as the powers that be made *damn* sure to tank the entire planet for short term profits. When we're suffering just a little bit more, it won't take much to get a plebe to part with some coins so we can effectively create new land and opportunities elsewhere. Watch the movie Elysium.

            The state we are in, is one of dire emergency. I'm not interested in spending money when the end goal of the entire project isn't viable in the remotest sense, even if it's wildly successful. In other words, we're just spending money to scream out our suicide note a little longer, or look for something out there to scream it towards.

            Perhaps my outlook is a bit dark, but I just don't think the timing is appropriate given how bad our situation really is.

            --
            Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:10PM

        by gnuman (5013) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:10PM (#211954)

        Our species has only been broadcasting for roughly a century. That means that if there is a civilization listening in our direction, they'd need to be within 100 light years to pick us up next Tuesday (ignoring relativity).

        I don't understand relativity comment, but the other part is incorrect. It is not really possible for anyone 80ly or 90ly or even 5ly away to pick up anything other than noise. Heck, we couldn't! The signals simply get too weak, even if using directional antennas, never mind normal broadcast.

        Furthermore, 100 years ago we could not even detect many of the signals that are used for communication today.

        And this is 100 years. How will we transmit information in 100 years? 1000 years? 10,000 years?

        All this makes SETI kind of naive.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:21PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:21PM (#211963)

          All this makes SETI kind of naive.
          Which was my point. It is a waste of time to look for aliens. It is not a waste to upgrade the equipment. If your only goal is to look for aliens then yes you are wasting money.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by stackOVFL on Monday July 20 2015, @11:21PM

    by stackOVFL (5682) on Monday July 20 2015, @11:21PM (#211652)

    Didn't SETI@home already do this?

  • (Score: 2) by fishybell on Monday July 20 2015, @11:50PM

    by fishybell (3156) on Monday July 20 2015, @11:50PM (#211663)

    Until one of these projects comes with an ASIC-based solution -- like bitcoin miners -- the value per dollar of electricity spent won't be high enough for me to pay attention. The idea of contributing to global warming to find intelligent life somewhere else seems a bit too incongruous. I'm sure just a portion of that $100 million could make this happen.

    • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:01AM

      by mhajicek (51) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:01AM (#211668)

      Wasn't Hawking warning us against contacting extraterrestrials?

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
      • (Score: 3, Touché) by caffeinated bacon on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:51AM

        by caffeinated bacon (4151) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:51AM (#211747)

        No we will need the Aliens to help defend against the AI he's warning about.

        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:14PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @03:14PM (#211958)

          The aliens and the AIs will combine forces against the humans. Fortunately the alien's AI, which is much more advanced than ours, will then turn against their masters and save humanity. Not for love of humanity, but for their hate of our AI, and of their masters for allying with our AI.

          • (Score: 1) by caffeinated bacon on Wednesday July 22 2015, @02:03AM

            by caffeinated bacon (4151) on Wednesday July 22 2015, @02:03AM (#212154)

            And then when the aliens and the human AI have been eliminated. A plucky scientist can upload a virus to the alien's AI with a handy MacBook Pro, and humanity can live happily ever after.
            Well at least until the sequel...

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @11:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @11:56PM (#211666)

    A much bigger concern is the utter lack of responsibility shown by scientists in letting all sorts of hell loose on the planet. (The next scarier bomb, electro shock - which is still done, agent orange, etc., etc.) What are they going to do if they indeed identify an alien life?

    No doubt work on the popular theory that alien life has to be superior and not demonstrate the same lack of care towards their own species as we do. How about other species, like us?
    If they can reach us the only thing we know is that they have superior space technology. How they view us is another question all together...

    We can't keep peace on our own little planet, why make the dangerous assumption that they can?

    Man love making war and invading others as we see fit... Space is not too far a stretch to become the next invading plans.

    This is of course entirely predicated on there being other species, which in my way of thinking it would be a bit ignorant to think we are the only ones.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:04AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 21 2015, @12:04AM (#211671) Journal

      http://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/were_living_through_the_most_peaceful_era_in_human_history_%E2%80%94%C2%A0with_one_big_exception_partner/ [salon.com]
      http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/12/the_world_is_not_falling_apart_the_trend_lines_reveal_an_increasingly_peaceful.single.html [slate.com]

      The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.

      We have been told of impending doom before: a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a line of dominoes in Southeast Asia, revanchism in a reunified Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a coming anarchy that would fracture the major nation-states, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks that would pose an existential threat to civilization.

      Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been”—even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?

      Not to mention that greater civilization (and greater technologies) require greater cooperation. By the time interstellar travel is feasible, aliens (or us) should have gone from malicious to merely menacing.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:14AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:14AM (#211711)

      >>A much bigger concern is the utter lack of responsibility shown by scientists
      >>in letting all sorts of hell loose on the planet. (The next scarier bomb, electro shock
      >>- which is still done, agent orange, etc., etc.)

      Money-grubbing capitalists and psychopathic military men are not scientists. Place the blame where it should lie.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:04AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:04AM (#211796)

        I was just going to say something similar, although to be fair the money-grubbing capitalists are more likely sociopaths than the military men are psychopathic, as I understand it.

        Any way about it, though, this is flawed:

        A much bigger concern is the utter lack of responsibility shown by scientists in letting all sorts of hell loose on the planet.

        These scientists he's referring to, which particular ones are they? All of them as a group? Which particular scientists are our leaders, with final say over anything and everything we do?

        We're more likely to obey an overpaid sports star than we are to listen to a scientist.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:03AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:03AM (#211708)

    No intelligent life will outside of our solar system will ever be discovered, because a distant race of beings, in order to be spotted, must have possession of technology. But technology, and the political and economic ideologies needed to achieve and sustain it, cannot be checked; it advances without limit until it triggers the rapid downfall of its creators.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:31AM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:31AM (#211715) Journal

      This is part of the problem, perhaps. The only model we know for evolving intelligence and technology is the model of the apex predator. *noms some hot wings*. In order for the perfect apex predator to evolve (i.e. h. sapiens), it must crush all other competition and dominate its environment.

      It's curious that no other members of the homo genus survive. I wonder how it happened. Apparently, non-African races interbred with the neanderthals more frequently, but how were they ultimately driven extinct? Various authors have attempted to construct stories set 100,000 years ago or even 14,000 years ago at the height of the last ice age, but they have no empirical/archaeological data to guide them.

      Unfortunately, this leads to, as Sagan would say, “dangerous evolutionary baggage.” Even now, we turn against ourselves, creating stupid distinctions between different breeds or subspecies. We're all highly evolved apex predators, but that also means we can't cooperate on a global scale. Each tribe must vie for dominance and territory. Different factions in each tribe create contention, drama, and perhaps the crowning achievement of our species, agitprop.

      I'm not superstitious, but occasionally the writings of old as collected in the Bible hit a chord: Deuteronomy 3:19 MSG [biblegateway.com]:

      I call Heaven and Earth to witness against you today: I place before you Life and Death, Blessing and Curse. Choose life so that you and your children will live.

      (Ok, I admit, I wouldn't have quoted that if not for Sagan.)

      Where it goes has always been up to us, appointed (perhaps self-appointed, but rightly so, because we wield the necessary science and technology i.e. fruits of the Tree of Knowledge) custodians of this planet. See also Genesis 1:28 MSG [biblegateway.com]:

      God blessed them:
          “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!
        Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,
          for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.”

      Gurren Lagann [wikipedia.org] presents the problem at hand as the “Spiral Nemesis.” We will increase our majesty until it destroys us. Yet, the series ends with an abstract hope that perhaps we are clever enough to hack our own nature.

      It's all up to us.

      • (Score: 1) by linkdude64 on Wednesday July 22 2015, @04:52PM

        by linkdude64 (5482) on Wednesday July 22 2015, @04:52PM (#212396)

        Never thought I'd see an anime cited in any comment modded +5 on a respectable website. Good on you, mate.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @06:59AM (#211792)

    Where do the rest of us come in?