Vatican Astronomer: There’s Life Out There

After a over a Millennium of science oppression and suppression from this organization. They are starting to yield to progress.

When such an announcement is finally made, it is predictable that people will only glance upward from their PDAs for a moment before returning to the pool of self-emulsion of vanity again.

Or, it'll be looked at as a new source of illegal immigrants or voters.

illegal immigrants or voters....same thing isn't it ?

Can see them all swearing to the Democrat oath of Allegiance...

The odds of us finding intelligent life on other planets is very slim....The odds that intelligent life exists on other planets is very high.....but the distances are just too great for us to establish contact....If an intelligent race from outer space was to contact us, they would have to be technologically advanced to the point we would probably be destroyed....Contact would most likely be toxic in one way or another....

True.

Consider the sphere of our radio transmissions now has a radius of only about 100 light years.

Given the Milkyway has a diameter of about 100,000 light years our electromagnetic footprint is essentially insignificant in reach.

That doesn't give any other potential civilizations any chance of discovering us electromagnetically.

That is assuming the propagation is concentric.

It would be more or less.

But in another 100 years, the radius of that sphere doubles and so the volume it encloses increases eight-fold. Yet another 100 years and the volume increases 27-fold.

How many stars does it contain at the moment? Thousands. How many Sun-like stars? Over 500 known ones. How many Sun-like stars with planets orbiting within the stars' CHZs? 28 at least with more being discovered every year? Double the radius and we can expect to find eight times that many. Another 100 years after that, 27 times as many, not including the ones we don't know about yet.

Do we really need to encompass the entire galaxy before the odds begin to favor our finding something?

Or of something finding us?

You need to define "us", Boss. Include me out, would you?

Contact would most likely be toxic in one way or another....Agreed. Here are our options:We could become

• Domesticated pets
• Zoo exhibits
• Food
• ???

The best we could hope for is to trade some of our high-tech gadgets as tourist trinkets...

"It's a cookbook!"

Or perhaps we could sell them Whalesong?

(One of the popular tropes about 'Earth is insignificant in the universe, but we have something unique that the aliens like enough to at least treat us as a sovereign state.')

If the Vatican says so, it must be right

It's a bit late for that, and how would he know? Who is he anyway?

It was actually a bad joke that's visual and starts out as asking about wrestling moves, the half Nelson, full Nelson and father Nelson.

Actually, it is a good joke. There might be a cosmic version of Father Nelson.

I just want to know what the females look like

If binary digits are 'bits,' then trinary digits are ?

Trits of course.

Trits are for kids, silly rabbi.

BSR beat me to it with an awesome answer! Mine, humbly, would have been numnum³.

Just a 'BIT' more....

titbits

Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno, holed up in the same place they put Galileo.

Well 500 years from now, he'll also get an apology too

This just in, It was discovered that Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno was peering into the wrong end of a Newtonian telescope and saw the reflection of his own eye.

As long as the "life" is discovered while it is still on the other planets. It is really annoying to plan a reception party on short notice. If the "announcement" comes from some heavy cloud cover at an ear-splitting volume accompanied by searing laser beams, the public reaction might be different.

As long as Einstein's Theory of Relativity holds, I don't think we have much to worry about it.

I wonder if they've asked themselves whether their GOD also made these alien life forms?

I wonder what religion will claim this miracle.

They're probably avoiding this planet because they noticed its inhabitants refer to themselves as 'civilised' without having the foggiest idea what the word means.

I'm in total agreement with you.

They probably look upon our planet, as being inhabited by a high proportion of blood sucking parasites.

Indeed, we do have a lot of lawyers and politicians.

I'm sorry to say that it doesn't end at those two professions.

I don't think anyone even knows we are here.

Who do you mean by anyone????

Are you a believer?

What made you become a believer?

I don't think it is likely that any other entity is aware of humans on Earth.

Your not a politician are you?

Some entities, my mail carrier for example, are annoyed that there are humans on earth.

<splarf!>

What, nobody answering your CQs again? Could be your rig needs plugged-in. You did say you were into QRP, right?

Not since Uncle Charley shut me down for firing up that AM transmitter I got cheap from some Mexican station. People did not like checkerboard television.

Anon Hero is a ham radio operator with a passion for low-power - QRP - and Skyloops.

My passion is the very bottom of the EM spectrum - the ELF/ULF/VLF bands - and so-called 'natural radio.'

Lots of interesting stuff (man-made and natural) down there. Lots of mysteries, too - like who is transmitting what, using what sort of transmitter, on 2.5 Hz? (yes, that's 2.5 Hertz. No prefix)

Another mystery carrier on 25 Hz that can be heard anywhere in the world. The latter might be for sub communications, maybe? The U.S. used to have a sub comm transmitter at Clam Lake, WI, and one in Michigan, both of which operated on 76 Hz. The antennas - enormous Earth loops - had an input power of 3 MW (megawatts) with an ERP of three watts (when your wavelength is 4000 km - about 1/3 the size of the Earth - it's hard to build antennas that aren't 'electrically short'). The Ruskies still operate their 82 Hz, Zevs sub comm transmitter on the Kola Peninsula. Zevs is located northwest of Murmansk, somewhere near 69°N 33°E. The system uses MSK (minimal-shift keying) to transmit symbols at a rate of several minutes per symbol.

I am not a ham operator but have had the pleasure of knowing many who are. The MARS guys where still active at the end of the Vietnam war.

The Intrepid CVS 11 as an ASW carrier was capable of covering pretty much the whole spectrum. Some they could talk about and some they couldn't. That was back when GPS was used for backup against conventional navigation.

The MARS (Military Affiliate Radio System, for the Uninitiated) was awesome. My 'elmer' - my ham radio 'mentor,' as it were, who introduced me to the hobby when I was 12 - got a great deal of his HUGE collection of radio gear via MARS. I would love to have just 1% of his gear. He's been a Silent Key for some years now. I really miss the guy. Kind of like a second (and better) dad.

If you're Australian, 'Mexican' means "Hecho a mano en Victoria."

I have DX'd some Australian traffic but I had to use an inverter.

One Ham I knew, claimed he talked all the way around on a Flea. He also was good friends with Andrew of the antenna dynasty. Bernie Mack is now a silent key.

Again, no matter how powerful the transmitter, we only have about a 100 light year radius of RF transmission.

That's not a very large footprint in the galaxy, let alone the universe.

Why do you think the footprint must be so large?

The yellow stars seen here are just the G-type stars most like our Sun (not all G-type stars are). The rest (by no means the complete picture, as there are around 20,100 stars within a hundred light years) are within earshot of our radio transmissions. Around 6% of these are known to have planetary systems. In another hundred years the count will have increased to 160,000 stars. In two hundred years, a half a million. Do you really think that none of these star systems besides ours harbors 'intelligent' life? Why? I have my own theory, but it's probably not very popular as theories go:

If they are/were anything like us, maybe 'intelligent' life - as we gauge intelligence - is self-extinguishing, taking the path we're taking now. Maybe that's the reason for the Great Silence?

Perhaps our kind of intelligence is an evolutionary fluke which, by its very nature, is self-correcting and therefore transient; those who survive it are very rare indeed. Perhaps thankfully so, for the sake of true civilisations elsewhere which are truly intelligent and not just clever, toolmaking primates scarcely out of the trees, whose history leaves no doubt that they've nary a clue what it means to be civilised, much less intelligent. Seems to me those two traits are inseparable and, consequently, exceedingly rare.

So perhaps you are right: we'll have to cover a lot of ground to find an intelligent species. Not one like us.

The rational is that the window where intelligent life has an opportunity to technologically transmit a data signature may be small.

We don't have a larger sample size than one, but watching our own development it is pretty clear that we are riding that thin line between prospering and self destruction.

If most societies self extinguish or create a huge setback by its own hand after a few thousand years, there isn't much time for species to contact each other.

Additionally, not all societies will be developing at the same time and rate, so getting two societies to both reach maturity at the same time is probably very low.

So, while there may be a large number of stars in a 100 LY radius, many more things must fall into place for there to be contact.

Even if a society remains viable for a million years, a million years is still a small slice in the age of the universe and it is not assured that another society's golden age will overlap with another - even if they also flourish for a million years.

Lastly, even if there are many planets within earshot, any message received will take equally long to be returned. That assumes that another society hears ours and we happen to catch theirs. We are just getting to the technological point where we will be able to really discriminate electromagnetic radiation that might be of intelligent origin from the cosmic noise floor.

My hunch is that there probably is other intelligent societies out there, but I suspect that the numbers may not be very large and we live in a very large galaxy, which probably puts a lot of distance between neighbors both in time and space.

Three hundred years ago no one would have imagined a thing called radio waves being used for globe-spanning communications. Three hundred years hence? If we're still here, they will probably say the same of us regarding whatever technology they are using then.

Three hundred years isn't much time in the Grand Scheme of Things. Were we to scale the age of the Universe from 13.8 billion years to one, Homo sapiens appeared just thirty eight minutes ago - over someone's extended lunch break. Radio technology? 229 milliseconds - the time it takes to slam on your car's brakes in order to avoid an accident. If just 300 years has seen such marked developments in science and technology, then what might we see in a billion?

There are many sunlike stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, many of them at least a billion years older than our sun and, odds are, orbiting one of those stars is a planet harboring intelligent life that has a billion years' edge on us, and do we think they would communicate with radio waves? A technology which, for them, would be so utterly primitive that it has long since - hundreds of millions of years long since - passed from memory? Yet, we're expecting other civilisations to communicate - or at least betray their presence - with radio waves.

Wow. We're a lot prouder of our cave drawings than I thought!

I think that we are our own biggest obstacle to discovering intelligent life elsewhere, quite honestly. Most of it subconscious Homo chauvanism. We can't seem to stop projecting the limitations of our own knowledge onto other species, implicitly demanding that they be essentially like us at their core, that their technology be like ours and, worse, that they must necessarily have technology in the first place to qualify as 'intelligent' life. But really, what do we, as a species, even know of technology? How long have we had technology - any technology - in the Grand Scheme of Things? A few seconds, at most?

And so, were we to stumble across a billion-year-old civilisation's signals, would we even know what we were seeing? Then how can we be so very certain that we haven't seen them already?

Correction: 38 seconds, not 38 minutes. The time it takes to find an error, plus 15 minutes, and miss the time window for correcting it.

So people at the Vatican are actually looking into the telescope now?

Only after sampling the Altar wine.

Who knows, some of the hat styles worn by the clergy appear to have a somewhat alien influence.

I ran across this from Hawking...

At the 50th anniversary celebration of NASA on October 1, 2008, Stephen Hawking, then Newton's heir as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was asked the question, "Are we alone?" His answer was short and simple: "probably not."
Hawking outlined three possibilities: One, that there is no life out there; and two, somewhat pessimistically, that when intelligent life gets smart enough to send signals into space, it is also busying itself with stockpiling nuclear bombs.

Hawking, known not only for his sharp mind, but his also for his biting sense of humor, prefers option number three: "Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare," he quickly added: "Some would say it has yet to occur on earth. "We should be careful if we ever happen upon extraterrestrial life, Hawking warns. Alien life may not have DNA like ours: "Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance."