With the recent discoveries from planet searches–Kepler, etc.–it is clear that habitable planets are fairly common. The parameters of the Drake equation are filling in, and making it look likely there are many planets with life in the galaxy. So how to resolve the Fermi Paradox?
One possibility is that while life is common, intelligent life or technological civilization is rare. Certainly, there are no good estimates for this. But let’s assume that this is not the barrier, that say, 1:1000 planets with life develop a technological civilization.
Going past the existence of intelligent life, space is quite big. Likely FTL is impossible. Slower than light travel is expensive, slow, and difficult. So let’s assume everyone stays close to their home star.
How difficult is communication? Reception is fairly easy, but how expensive is transmission? How strong does a signal have to be to get received at 1000 light years, 100k light years? How much energy does it take? Also, the only stars that ‘count’ as communicating are those that can keep it up for a long time–100k, 1M years. Long enough for extended back and forth messaging.
The only potential communication partners we have–stars we can find by searching for messages (SETI)–are those with an active Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) program. That is, technological civilizations that have a long term program sending messages to all the nearby stars
You can run the Fermi numbers and get a reasonable chance there is a communication partner within 10k light years, but the conversation would still be slow, so the effort required is great.
Quid pro quo with a turn around time of 2X light years is very slow. So what form of communication is the most reasonable strategy? I doubt star ‘A’ wants to send a short message, and wait for a reply, leaving the channel closed 99.99%+ of the time. And yet if the star ‘B’ on the other end stops reciprocating, you don’t know for a long, long time.
Building Prototypes Part 4 of 18 (video) by Dan GelbartMachine Shop 1 (video) by Henrik Bak HeydeEverything We Know About Birds That Glow. Owls, puffins, and lots of other flying friends exhibit fascinating patterns under blacklights. by Cara Giaimo
Can intelligence be changed? by Martin Lövdén Broad cognitive abilities, narrow cognitive abilities, General crystallized intelligence (gc), and general fluid intelligence (gf)
For The Win (3rd Ed.) is field-tested to help even the smallest counties assemble a high-energy GOTV program with little money and limited computer skills. by Tom Sullivan
UCHealth: Making pseudoscientific claims about acupuncture. by Orac. Shame on U of Colorado! Michael Hudson: The Vocabulary of Economic Deception by Yves Smith “The income tax was a basic reform back in 1913. Only 1% of Americaís population had to pay the tax. Most were tax-free, because the aim was to tax the rentiers who lived off their bond or stock holdings, real estate or monopolies. The solution was simply to tax the wealthiest 1% or 2% instead of labor or industry, that is, the companies that actually produced something.”
“The Trials of Nina McCall” by Scott Stern “The American Plan. The forgotten initiative had resulted over several decades in the detainment of perhaps 100,000 women or more around the country, all on the mere suspicion of carrying STIs. Many of the women were imprisoned – usually without due process – and forced to undergo painful treatments, typically injections of mercury or arsenic.”
ARS Culture Collection (NRRL) “The ARS Culture Collection is one of the largest public collections of microorganisms in the world, containing approximately 98,000 isolates of bacteria and fungi. The collection is housed within the Mycotoxin Prevention and Applied Microbiology Research Unit at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria, Illinois.” Many beer yeasts!
Ale strains and the S. cerevisiae portion of allotetraploid lager strains were derived from admixture between populations closely related to European grape wine strains and Asian rice wine strains. Similar to both lager and baking strains, ale strains are polyploid, providing them with a passive means of remaining isolated from other populations and providing us with a living relic of their ancestral hybridization…
Recipe:Sweet Potatoes with Goat Cheese Mallows Laced with garlic and rosemary and topped with pecans and goat cheese, this easy casserole gives a savory wink to the traditional sweet-on-sweet Turkey Day staple.
My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles Martin Gardner’s Table Magic Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends Relativity Simply Explained Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?: Discourses on Godel, Magic Hexagrams, Little Red Riding Hood, and Other Mathematical and Pseudoscientific Topics The Universe in a Handkerchief: Lewis Carroll’s Mathematical Recreations, Games, Puzzles, and Word Plays A Bouquet for the Gardener: Martin Gardner Remembered The Last Recreations: Hydras, Eggs, and Other Mathematical Mystifications
Two test pieces. One a 10 cm square, the other a 12 cm square. For both, arranged 3 mm colored pieces over a 3 mm clear base, filled in gaps with medium clear frit. Tacked down the larger pieces with craft glue. COE 90.
Cleaned up frit that had fallen off and stuck to the edges with a Dremel.
Slump smaller square over a 10 cm bowl. Drape larger square over a 10 cm bowl upside down suspended on two small posts. Put kiln paper over the bowls to prevent sticking.
How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation by Alexey Guzey, link. Some insights.
Open Borders Made America Great. For most of U.S. history, all immigrants were undocumented. It’s a fact Democrats should embrace. by Aaron Freedman, link
The three technologies bioinformaticians need to be using right now. by biomickwatson, link BioConda/Docker/Singularity, SnakeMake/NextFlow, Cloud computing
Use a teflon spatula to remove warranty sticker without leaving the ‘void’ mark: youtube Science division of White House office left empty as last staffers depart, link
cǎonímǎ 草泥马 Grass-mud horse tank man.Mascot of Chinese netizens fighting for free expression, symbolizing defiance of Internet censorship.
A teachable moment in why Uber/Lyft can never replace public transportation. That Uber was oblivious enough for this self-goal explains why their stock will soon be worth less than monopoly money. link
True Crimes. Why it’s important to name names when discussing the climate catastrophe. by Billy Wilson.
Syphilis Is Spreading Across Rural America. Back in 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a plan to eradicate the sexually transmitted disease that totaled over 35,000 cases nationwide that year. While syphilis can cause permanent neurological damage, blindness or even death, it is both treatable and curable. By focusing on the epicenters clustered primarily throughout the South, California and in major urban areas, the plan seemed within reach.
Instead, U.S. cases topped 101,500 in 2017 and are continuing to rise along with other sexually transmitted diseases. Syphilis is back in part because of increasing drug use, but health officials are losing the fight because of a combination of cuts in national and state health funding and crumbling public health infrastructure.
In 2008, Johns Hopkins scientists urged doctors to advise parents of asthmatic children to get rid of their gas stoves or at least install powerful exhaust hoods.
The Myth of Fingerprints. by Clive Thompson Nonetheless, the reliability of fingerprinting today is rarely questioned in modern courts. One exception was J. Spencer Letts, a federal judge in California who in 1991 became suspicious of fingerprint analysts who’d testified in a bank robbery trial. Letts was astounded to hear that the standard for declaring that two prints matched varied widely from county to county. Letts threw out the fingerprint evidence from that trial.
