Interesting, but there are other explanations aside from a galactic zoo or that we truly are alone.
There are 2 or 3 civs per galaxy and despite our belief that we are primitive, that the tech of these civs is within a few 100 years of each other. Radio contact isn’t possible at those distances.
There are a few civs out there, but they are far advanced of us and no longer use things like radio to communicate. So we see a silent galaxy and SETI will find nothing. These civs are either busy doing other things (plenty of planets to explore without running into us) and we are just an unfound needle in a haystack.
I’m fond of the filter/ bottleneck theory, that civilizations that get to radio communication are likely to self destruct soon after, possibly due to nuclear proliferation. But that’s just the cold war sci-fi fan in me.
Our Milky way is 100,000 light years (ly) across and we’re about 26,000 ly from the center. What is the density of life and how far away would they be? Radio waves travel at approx speed of light, so depending upon density of life and the speed at which they evolved, and if you take into consideration that radio was only invented 120 years ago, you can see that you are all impatient SOBs.
In addition to 135 shuttle missions we had 6 manned Mercury mission, 10 manned Gemini missions and 12 Apollo mission and we had 3 (Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia) fatal accidents so 3 out 163 awfully close to 2%.
The Soviet Union had 74 manned mission with at least two missions that resulted in deaths.
Russia has flown 48 (I believe) Soyuz missions with no fatalities so that makes 2 out 122 also just under 2%.
Man missions are safer cause there are extra precautions and redundant systems not found in the unmanned.
I’m still hoping to go into space. I’m figuring I’ll go when I’m in my late 60s when the price has dropped considerable, they have more experiences. But also cause I don’t think it will ever be truly safe in my lifetime and if I die in space at the age, I’ll have a good life and I can think of lot worse deaths.
I think the most likely issue is that while there just has to be other life of varying intelligences around the universe given the sheer number of galaxies and stars, the odds of intelligence popping up at the same time are somewhat astronomical.
Our planet’s been around for 4.5 billion years. Homo Sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years. We just started using radio for less than 150 years. There’s a not-negligible chance we may wipe out our own species with engineered disease or war in the next hundred years or so if we don’t get some backup humans off-planet. (Thanks, religious fanatics with modern weapons!) So that’s a mighty short window to broadcast to another civilization.
If you look at history as a 24-hour day, even if two species pop up a couple of seconds from each other, they’ll likely miss the window to communicate with each other.
The only way contact is likely is if intelligent species can survive in a technological era for many thousands of years. That’s going to require other species to be a lot more reasonable than ours is proven itself to be so far.
This has always been my favored hypothesis, though I quibble with the “far advanced” qualifier. We went from carrier pigeon to telegraph to radio in just a few short decades. I honestly think that fifty years from now our descendants are going to be chuckling over the 20th and early 21st centuries and their ridiculous use of electromagnetics for information exchange (“great-grandpa Wisdom says that they had to build line-of-sight towers all over the country!”).
Assuming that I’m right (I am) and that other civs follow a similarly rapid advance, then the chances that we’d be pointing our radioscopes in the right direction to catch the weak, ephemeral wave-front from such a culture during the short time it’s available approaches zero.
The robotic Gaia spacecraft, which launched in 2013, is fitted with a 1bn pixel camera – the largest ever in space – complete with more than 100 electronic detectors. The precision of the measurements is equivalent to measuring the width of your fingernail – but if you were in London and your finger was in Australia.
China has launched a “space lab”. I had no idea until I ran across this article, and went over to space.com for some more detail. It’s meant to be temporary, but still, it’s a space station where a couple of astronauts will stay for a month.
This is the second one - they did something similar back in 2011. And there’s a third planned. All this in preparation for launching a permanent station in the 2020s. Big plans…will be interesting to see if they survive whatever political shifts happen in China over the next decade or so.
And their old station is entering uncontrolled, so could end up anywhere.
Normally, a decommissioned satellite or space station would be retired
by forcing it to burn up in the atmosphere. This type of burn is
controlled, and most satellite re-entries are scheduled to burn up over
the ocean to avoid endangering people. However, it seems that China’s
space agency is not sure exactly when Tiangong-1 will re-enter the
atmosphere, which implies that the station has been damaged somehow and
China is no longer able to control it.
Cryo-volcanoes spotted on Europa. Just the idea of a cryo-volcano is cool. It’s a volcano but it shoots ice instead of fire. There’s ice dragons inside. You need a different gear set to explore it.
As an aside, how am I supposed to take a site seriously when it runs ads like this?
