The search for extraterrestrial intelligence moves up a gear
economist.com
economist.com
The "Dyson Sphere" notion cracks me up every time. They are advanced enough to build so much space stuff it blocks starlight, but not advanced enough to have fusion power, so have to rely on solar panels? Might as well look for signal flags.
Any actually advanced aliens will live out in the Kuiper belts where useful elements are conveniently frozen. Goldilocks planets are for extreme primitives.
So, copious supplies of frozen light elements will be useful for much longer than one might imagine.
Electronic intelligences living in a virtual world will depend on a reliable supply of both energy and computing substrate. There again, extreme low temperatures are beneficial to reduce signal noise and spontaneous decoherence.
But, what if we develop some other means to communicate in the next 100, 200, or 300 years? It means the window of time that intelligent life uses electromagnetic communication is very, vey short.
Assuming all star systems in our vicinity have inhabitable planets and they all develop such civilizations – what are the chances any of those two windows overlapping?
A billion years pass, the Universe is rich with intelligent life. And they can still detect the echoes of the ones who were first, crying out across the universe in search of companionship.
Or what if the window of time in which life can exist on a planet is so short compared to how long it takes for life to appear on that planet, that it is extremely unlikely for two planets to have life at the same time?
A lot of questions, and a lot of possible answers
Cross all digits, pray to all deities, burn sage, and best hopes it all works.
Okay, I'm gonna explain this real simple. You know polarizing stuff on your camera? When you use a polarizing filter on a camera it lets you, like, see shit, under the reflection and shit, like, but if you twist two polarizing filters against each other, or, like, even a single polarizing filter in front of a screen, because the screen also has polarizing filters in it, it turns completely black at one point, you've seen that? Do you have a polarizing filter? If you had one and put it in front of a computer's LCD screen, if you twist it enough, it turns everything black, it's like the two cancel each other out, the two polarizing filters block light out entirely.
What if we put a huge polarizing filter in front of the sun, and, like, know our sun and this other star's alignment through time, and it doesn't even have to like cover the whole area of the sun, just a big percentage of it, and then start flashing that shit in a pulse, so the very light of the sun, we don't even need to generate the light, it's already being generated behind us, we're going to be doing like fucking smoke signals, man. To all the other suns around us. I MEAN THAT'S CRAZY RIGHT? Hahahahaha!
Ok, ok, Imma bring it down. That's funny though. That's a good idea for SETI, I'm gonna tell them, Yo, we should be looking at everybody's son in like looking for tiny, fucking, but detectable changes. Obviously it's gonna have to be, like, with a telescope like Hubble that's outside Earth's atmosphere. Maybe James Webb's gonna cut it. I don't know. It's good for infrared."
You'd guess that's EXACTLY the kind of shitty behavior that google claims to flag/penalize the website.. but.. here's a google-golf hit for the article:
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+search+for+extraterrestr...
Surely.. only the "excerpt" is served to google right? Nope... click though the cached copy. The article is indexed in full.
Right.
I have nothing against linking paywalled resources, but that's scummy behavior.
Skipped.
It's scummy on the economist's side from a SEO perspective which I absolutely hate in all media outlets that do this.
If the full article is allowed to be indexed by a search engine, the expectation is to be able to get the _same_ result as the search engine is seeing when you click through.
This is clearly a cheap way to rank higher in search results. If you don't want non-paying users to read, then the same excerpt should be shown to the search engine.
Because of that, I think not taking measures against this behaviour is the lesser evil.
(edit: small potatoes)
I have been buying the Economist on paper every week for the last 20 years or so, love it, and I possibly also have the online version, though I never use it. But if the article is meant for public consumption, then let's link it. If it's meant to sell a subscription, please don't.
(i.e. fool's errand to think anyone will subscribe for a single article, but many publishers aren't setup with sophisticated-enough ways to make selected content free, without exposing themselves to cheats e.g. readers simply using incognito mode or second browsers...)