Posts Tagged ‘stars’
“I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.”*…
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A new computer simulation shows that a technologically advanced civilization, even when using slow ships, can still colonize an entire galaxy in a modest amount of time. The finding presents a possible model for interstellar migration and a sharpened sense of where we might find alien intelligence.
Space, we are told time and time again, is huge, and that’s why we have yet to see signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. For sure, the distances between stars are vast, but it’s important to remember that the universe is also very, very old. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, in terms of extremes, the Milky Way galaxy is more ancient than it is huge, if that makes sense. It’s for this reason that I tend to dismiss distances as a significant variable when discussing the Fermi Paradox—the observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of alien intelligence, even though we probably should have.
New research published in The American Astronomical Society is bolstering my conviction. The new paper, co-authored by Jason Wright, an astronomer and astrophysicist at Penn State, and Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University, shows that even the most conservative estimates of civilizational expansion can still result in a galactic empire.
A simulation produced by the team shows the process at work, as a lone technological civilization, living in a hypothetical Milky Way-like galaxy, begins the process of galactic expansion… Things start off slow in the simulation, but the civilization’s rate of spread really picks up once the power of exponential growth kicks in. But that’s only part of the story; the expansion rate is heavily influenced by the increased density of stars near the galactic center and a patient policy, in which the settlers wait for the stars to come to them, a result of the galaxy spinning on its axis.
The whole process, in which the entire inner galaxy is settled, takes one billion years. That sounds like a long time, but it’s only somewhere between 7% and 9% the total age of the Milky Way galaxy.
…
As noted, the new model is constrained by some very conservative rules. Migration ships are launched once every 10,000 years, and no civilization can last longer than 100 million years. Ships can travel no farther than 10 light-years and at speeds no faster than 6.2 miles per second (10 kilometers per second), which is comparable to human probes like the Voyager and New Horizons spacecraft.
“This means we’re not talking about a rapidly or aggressively expanding species, and there’s no warp drive or anything,” said Wright. “There’s just ships that do things we could actually manage to do with something like technology we can design today… Even under these conditions, the entire inner part of the simulated galaxy became settled in a billion years. But as Wright reminded me, our “galaxy is over 10 billion years old, so it could have happened many times over, even with those parameters.”…
A new simulation published by the American Astronomical Society suggests that aliens wouldn’t need warp drives to take over an entire galaxy in (relatively) short order, as George Dvorsky (@dvorsky) explains.
[Image above: Andromeda Galaxy, source]
* Arthur C. Clarke
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As we spread out, we might spare a thought for Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn; he died on this date in 1922. An astronomer, he used photography and statistical methods to determine the motions and spatial distribution of stars (especially with the Milky Way), the first major step after the works of William and John Herschel. He introduced absolute magnitude and color indexing as standard concepts in cataloguing stars.
Kapteyn was also among the first to suggest the existence of dark matter (which he deduced from examining stellar velocities).
“Loki’d!”*…
January 2, 1961: 100,000 spectators filled Pasadena’s Rose Bowl stadium to watch the Minnesota Golden Gophers take on the Washington Huskies in the New Year’s Day game (played that year on January 2 because the 1st fell on a Sunday). Millions more watched around the nation, crowded in front of tv sets in living rooms, restaurants, and bars.
NBC was providing live coverage of the game. At the end of the first half the Huskies led 17 to 0, and the audience settled in to watch the half-time show for which the Washington marching band had prepared an elaborate flip-card routine.
Sets of variously colored flip cards and an instruction sheet had been left on seats in the section of the stadium where the Washington students were located. When the students heard the signal from the cheerleaders, they were each supposed to hold up the appropriate flip card (as designated by the instruction sheet) over their head. In this way different gigantic images would be formed that would be visible to the rest of the stadium, as well as to those viewing at home. The Washington band planned on displaying a series of fifteen flip-card images in total.
The flip-card show got off to a well-coordinated start. Everything went smoothly, and the crowd marvelled at the colorful images forming, as if by magic, at the command of the cheerleaders. It wasn’t until the 12th image that things began to go a little wrong. This image was supposed to depict a husky, Washington’s mascot. But instead a creature appeared that had buck teeth and round ears. It looked almost like a beaver.
The next image was even worse. The word ‘HUSKIES’ was supposed to unfurl from left to right. But for some reason the word was reversed, so that it now read ‘SEIKSUH’.
These strange glitches rattled the Washington cheerleaders. They wondered if they might have made some careless mistakes when designing the complex stunt. But there was nothing for them to do about it now except continue on, and so they gave the signal for the next image.
What happened next has lived on in popular memory long after the rest of the 1961 Rose Bowl has been forgotten. It was one of those classic moments when a prank comes together instantly, perfectly, and dramatically.
The word ‘CALTECH’ appeared, held aloft by hundreds of Washington students. The name towered above the field in bold, black letters and was broadcast to millions of viewers nationwide.
For a few seconds the stadium was plunged into a baffled silence. Everyone knew what Caltech was. It was that little Pasadena technical college down the road from the Rose Bowl stadium. What no one could figure out was what its name was doing in the middle of Washington’s flip-card show. Throughout the United States, a million minds simultaneously struggled to comprehend this enigma.
In fact, only a handful of people watching the game understood the full significance of what had just happened, and these were the Caltech students who had labored for the past month to secretly alter Washington’s flip-card show…
More on one of the great pranks of all time: “The Great Rose Bowl Hoax,” via The Museum of Hoaxes.
See also this explication of one of the more successful imitators.
* Tom Hiddleston
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As we treasure tricksters, we might recall that on this date in 2006 the City Councils of Reykjavik and its neighboring municipalities agreed to turn off all the city lights in the capital area for half an hour, while a renowned astronomer talked about the stars and the constellations on national radio.
(Ten years later they dimmed again to allow unpolluted viewing of the Northern Lights.)
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”*…
From the good folks at Chrome Experiments, a wonderfully-informative interactive map of the stars in our corner of the universe. Readers can zoom around our galaxy at “100,000 Stars.”
* Oscar Wilde
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As we pause to celebrate the birth of the archetypical “Renaissance man,” quite possibly the greatest genius of the last millennium, Leornardo da Vinci (born on this date in 1452), we might also send starry-eyed birthday greetings to Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve; he was born on this date in 1793. A renowned astronomer, Struve is known both as the founder of the modern study of binary (double) stars, and as the second in a five-generation-long dynasty of great astronomers: he was the son of the son of Jacob Struve, the father of Otto Wilhelm von Struve, the grandfather of Hermann Struve, the great-grandfather of Otto Struve.
Webcam to the stars…
Fall is prime time for the Aurora Borealis. But unless one lives in the higher latitudes of the Northern hemisphere– and bundles up snugly– there’s been no way to see them… until now. A new venture between the Canadian Space Agency, the University of Calgary, and Yellowknife’s Astronomy North educational center, AuroraMAX, takes the frostbite out of the Northern Lights, and lands it right on ones monitor.
(TotH to National Geographic)
As we put on the popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912 that Lewis Boss, an indefatigable observer of the night sky, shifted up and off this mortal coil. Boss, who directed the Dudley Observatory in Schenectady and observed the heavens visible in the north from there, traveled to Argentina to scan the southern skies. The products of his vigilance were two extraordinary books: Preliminary General Catalogue of 6188 Stars for the Epoch 1900 (1910) and General Catalogue of 33,342 Stars for the Epoch 1950 (completed after his death by his son, Benjamin, and and published in 1937).
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