An exploration of SETI and the possibility of detecting alien von Neumann probes at focal points of stellar gravitational lensing.
http://www.patreon.com/johnmichaelgodier.
Papers:
“A novel SETI strategy targeting the solar focal regions.
of the most nearby stars” Gillon, 2013
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1309.7586.pdf.
Music:
A huge gas giant’s yield of water and carbon dioxide could one day help us understand the atmospheres of planets closer to the size of Earth, scientists say.
Telescopic observations of a “hot Jupiter” gas giant, which is a huge planet hugging in close to its parent star, revealed the first-ever direct measurements of water and carbon monoxide in an exoplanet.
The planet is too close to its star to host life as we know it, and far too large besides. But you can think of this study as a practice round, as measuring gas abundance in a larger planet will help with figuring out how to do so with much smaller planets that are potentially habitable — those that are closer to Earth’s size and potentially able to host water on their surfaces.
Dune Stillsuits — technology review.
How Stillsuits compares to the life-support and recycling solutions on the ISS, and challenges we may face in other planets and moons. A new video I released to Sci and SciFi channel.
Stillsuits is an amazing technological marvel that allow humans to live on Arrakis, a desert planet, deprived of water. Stillsuites are featured in the bestselling book, Dune, which was adopted to a movie multiple times, including a new amazing release in October 2021.
Does NASA have any similar life-support and recycling technologies that can help humans live in the hostile environment of space and on other celestial bodies such as Mars and Titan?
#Dune# Stillsuit #booktube #authortube.
It’s Time to welcome our Space Brothers.
Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? It’s a question that has been debated for centuries, if not millenia. But it is only recently that we’ve had an actual chance of finding out, with initiatives such as Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) using radio telescopes to actively listen for radio messages from alien civilisations.
What should we expect to detect if these searches succeed? My suspicion is that it is very unlikely to be little green men—something I speculated about at a talk at a Breakthrough Listen (a Seti project) conference.
Suppose there are other planets where life began and that it followed something like a Darwinian evolution (which needen’t be the case). Even then, it’s highly unlikely that the progression of intelligence and technology would happen at exactly the same pace as on Earth. If it lagged significantly behind, then that planet would plainly reveal no evidence of extraterrestrial life to our radio telescopes. But around a star older than the Sun, life could have had a head start of a billion years or more.
Even swarms of self-replicating robots.
If alien civilizations exist, they may have opened a Pandora’s box.
It may sound far-fetched, but self-replicating probes from an alien civilization could become a serious nuisance to budding societies like ours. While this is pure speculation, we have an ace in the hole: China’s new massive radio telescope might be capable of detecting swarms of alien probes, also called von Neumann probes, at relatively vast distances from our sun, according to a recent study shared on a preprint server.
“Where is everybody?”
The Fermi Paradox has perplexed scientists for years. We examine the possibility that we haven’t heard from any aliens is because no one is transmitting.
What if none of this is real? What if everything we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and perceive is part of a gigantic simulation designed to keep us contained? And what if the beings who built this simulation are part of a highly advanced alien species that created the simulation so they could study us and keep us under control.
This is the essence of the “Zoo Hypothesis,” which is a proposed resolution to the Fermi Paradox. It is also sometimes referred to as the “Planetarium Hypothesis” as a way of clarifying that the intention of the big simulation is not to protect but to control. Moreover, the zookeepers in this scenario have designed the simulation so that humanity won’t suspect they are living in a cage.