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posted by
janrinok
on Monday March 03 2014, @01:30AM
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
from the its-life-Jim-but-not-as-we-know-it dept.
AnonTechie writes:
"What If We Have Completely Misunderstood Our Place in the Universe ? A Harvard astronomer has a provocative hunch about what happened after the Big Bang. Our universe is about 13 billion years old, and for roughly 3.5 billion of those years, life has been wriggling all over our planet. But what was going on in the universe before that time ? It's possible that there was a period shortly after the Big Bang when the entire universe was teeming with life. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb calls this period the 'habitable epoch,' and he believes that its existence changes how humans should understand our place in the cosmos. The full article is here"
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Life On Earth Might Not Be So Special After All
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< nobse> bleh... last night I had a dream... someone NMU'ed vim...
nightmare
-- in #debian-devel
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Monday March 03 2014, @12:51PM
There is a difference between 'intelligent' and 'broadcasts RF signals that can be interpreted'. For most of the history of the human race, we've not been transmitting anything. It's possible that a post-nuclear-holocaust society wouldn't either. Even now, there's a trend towards less radiation. The quest for higher data rates involves higher frequency RF, which doesn't propagate as far.
Contrary to popular SciFi depictions, there's actually very little that we've ever transmitted that would be distinguishable from noise beyond the termination shock. And that's not a matter of insufficiently advanced technology, it's a hard physical limit: if your signal produces less variation in the carrier than the background noise, you can't detect it.
And there's no guarantee that a species will continue to use RF at all. They may use some other communication mechanism, based on quantum entanglement or some theory that we've not yet discovered, which is not possible to intercept. Being impossible to intercept or block also means it wouldn't interfere, so you'd be able to have a large number of point-to-point links in a single space. We're approaching this with multipath RF, which can easily appear to be noise to anyone who is not one of the endpoints. More complex encoding schemes, even on wavelengths that we can detect, appear even harder to distinguish from noise.
You assumption isn't that no one outside of Earth figured out radio, it's that no one figured out anything more complex than pumping insane amounts of power through a spark-gap transmitter.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Monday March 03 2014, @02:10PM
The other thought is that due to the rampant energy use current, post-cataclysmic event energy may not be nearly as freely available as it is now.
How would society evolve now if 10,000 years ago the world's oil, rare earth elements, and easily reachable radioactive element supplies were used up creating a doomsday weapon?
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:06PM
If we have enough sunlight that the planet is not in the worst ice age ever, we have LOTS of power. Mirrors + water + turbines + wire == lots of electricity. Without sunlight, wind power would do well, and keep us from freezing.
Once you've figured out that whole theory of electromagnetics thing, (and SOMEBODY will remember), it's pretty damn easy to start over from there. Once you know what IS possible, and the basics of what's needed to get there, it doesn't take much effort to start again, and tackle the low-hanging fruit that will save profound amounts of labor right away.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.