One of paper authors here. I'll try and answer some of the questions in the comments.
It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the arXiv, but I guess the press embargo just ended.
It seems like so long ago the paper actually went public onto the arXiv, but I guess the press embargo just ended.
However, lots of interesting plasma physics effect occur between us and the FRB. The dominant thing that happens is that low frequencies arrive later than high frequencies (as they travel slow in a plasma). This causes the FRB to be smeared over many seconds rather than a millisecond. There's also multi path interference effects and an whole bunch of other stuff that happens. So actual the temporal structure of the burst tells you much more about the intervening medium than it does about the source.
Sorry for the possibly noob question, but why is this? I can't think of an intuitive explanation
Example of this inference, from the Wikipedia on Fast Radio Bursts (but I have seen in many contexts):
> The sources are thought to be a few hundred kilometers or less in size, as the bursts last for only a few milliseconds
Does that make sense?
Though his creative interpretation of higher dimensions was interesting (sending the tiny probe that unfolds on earth).
The most useful follow up has been for repeating FRBs. What happens there is that the discovery telescope tells you were it is roughly, and you know it repeats, so you can point a high resolution radio telescope (something like https://www.evlbi.org) to get a more precise location and then you can follow up with other telescopes.
One thing telescopes like CHIME are trying to do in the near future is to build their own long baseline station to give much higher resolution, such that they can get localisation on bursts which don't repeat, and do better follow up.
I think astronomers often make it worse. I mean, we like thinking about why things are actually aliens as much as anyone else (LGM1 was already mentioned), and while we mostly try to restrain ourselves, every now and again a famous astronomer breaks and lets out a paper about it.
(Of course, you could say that everyone's ceasing to exist, here, because your rules of what counts as a person and what's their copy applies to everyone. But please realize that, from the point of view of those who think having a copy survive is better than all of them dying, and is partial survival in some sense, that being simulated is a form of winning, even if you think both the person and the copy are deluding themselves.)
(Though I do wonder how you go about the day without having a nervous breakdown, given that your evolving state is probably quantized, or at least sliceable, meaning there's no great physical difference between your pattern shifting from one [smallfractionofa]second to the next, destroying the old one and replacing it with a new one, and your old pattern being destroyed and replaced somewhere else. It's not like your past self is aware of your future copy in normal life, either!)
(I'm not saying you're wrong; just that the situation is a lot worse than you think it is, and that we should all be living (and repeatedly dying) in absolute existential terror.)
Of course, one could argue that me having a past is a complete illusion anyway, as I am just some atoms.
Flu-like symptoms are probably just an unfortunate side effect. Things break during updates, it's an unfortunate fact of life. Maybe when a critical mass of people accept the update, they'll start building a giant transmitter for FRB's to let the sender know that the update was accepted.
I'm sure others have written more, and more intelligent things, but my general thinking about panspermia is:
- it seems like a universal rule there are more small things than large things
- there are more small red stars than stars like our sun
- there should probably be more brown dwarfs than small stars
- there are more small planets than large ones
- planets can and do form without stars
- planets should outnumber stars, and planets without stars should outnumber planets with stars
- there are probably more oceans below the surface of objects in our solar system than on the surface
- the universe existed for a long time before the solar system
...so it kind of seems intuitive to me that life should have developed underground where there's warmth from radioactivity and water, on countless free floating planets over billions of years and occasionally one of those gets blown to bits and something like that seeded our unusual planet.
...and it doesn't seem entirely implausible to me that there should be so much biological material in space that we get a certain amount all the time like micrometeoroids.
I sort of regret not picking it; it's too funny. I'll definitely be reading it when whoever got it's done.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)
All his stories are listed here, whether they be published on his website or elsewhere: https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html
It's kind of hypocritical to use nod-wink-aliens-clickbait to drum up media attention, then ridicule the first rube who asks if aliens could possibly be involved.
Also agree that it would make sense to replace the link with the actual paper, or an article about it. University press releases are mostly there to play up their own contribution.
That's why I always ridicule the mars colonization and alien contact scifi fanbois on HN, who actually believe in that nonsense.
Here's a question for them. The History channel used to have documentaries, but now it has alien fiction videos. Is that your fault?
I guess he probably didn't talk about this because of the press embargo though.
Try finding the RSS feed of the channel and adding it to Antennapod, but I am not sure it will work
...unfortunately, it's not a podcast RSS format, so there's no way to load it into Podkicker.
In AntennaPod, it'll subscribe, but won't download or play the episodes...
I'm not super involved on the FRB side of CHIME, so I'm not 100% clear what is public and what isn't. But you can an idea from public info around the internet. I think the last total number made public was over 700 in March this year, and the previous one 30 in October 2018 (https://aasnova.org/2020/03/13/chime-detects-even-more-repea...).