What Would Happen If China Made First Contact With Extraterrestrials?

In January, the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope was declared fully operational in China’s Guizhou province. Beijing’s steadfast commitment to improving the nation’s position as a leader in the basic sciences can be gleaned from the fact that the construction of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) was completed in five years, a remarkable achievement for a project of its technical complexity. The scientific mandate of FAST is many ways quite conventional for a telescope of its size, including detection of “fast radio bursts” – bursts of extremely powerful radio-waves from deep space of varying duration whose origins remains a mystery. (In September last year, FAST detected a significant number of such bursts from a single source, a feat that could only be achieved due to the telescope’s sensitivity.)

It is, however, the inclusion of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in FAST’s scientific agenda that has attracted the most media attention, not always savory. A February 2016 New York Times article on FAST, for example, was headlined “China Telescope to Displace 9,000 Villagers in Hunt for Extraterrestrials.” Other media reporting emphasized the inclusion of SETI in the telescope’s research mandate at the expense of commenting on its potentially path-breaking use to study natural cosmic phenomena such as pulsars (distant geriatric stars made of exotic nuclear matter).

There is also no fundamental reason, as astronomers has now come to see, why detection of alien life may always need radio astronomy. Increasingly, search for “techno-signatures” – signs of advanced alien intelligence – now includes scanning other bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, predominantly infrared waves. But that said, recent revisions of the estimates of the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy alone (up to 300,000) – sharpened by recent advances in exoplanetology – points to the increasing probability of their detection.

China’s SETI road

It is interesting to think of how China and the rest of the world would react if – and this is a mighty “if” – China’s new mega radio telescope manages to detect an alien signal. What immediate steps would Beijing take if this were to happen during Xi Jinping’s (indefinite) tenure? As strategic competition between Washington and Beijing heats up and talks of a new Cold War abound, how would the United States and other allied powers react to the fact that the greatest discovery in human history was made possible through the efforts of an authoritarian, repressive regime? Would this mark an intensification of the rivalry between the China and the West, or lead to its decline?

The irony of this thought experiment of course is in the fact that we are now forced to contemplate the possibility that it is China and not the United States that is in the pole position to detect a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence. And in many ways, this was in the making for some time.

While the American radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico – the second-largest of its kind, after the Chinese dish – became iconic in the public’s imagination when it came to SETI, in 1993 the U.S. Congress terminated all research funding for what one American senator famously described as “Martian hunting season at the taxpayer’s expense.” (The SETI program at Arecibo, which lasted for a year till federal funding for it was stopped, was pioneered by astronomer Jill Tarter, widely assumed to be model for the character of Ellie Arroway, the protagonist of the movie and novel Contact. Early on in the movie version, Arroway’s SETI time on the Arecibo telescope is cancelled by a dismissive federal science administrator.)

This is not to say that American astronomers have stopped SETI research: substantial funding has since flowed from private sources. Most significantly, in 2015 Russian Silicon Valley billionaire (with serious Kremlin links) Yuri Milner announced a $100 million “Breakthrough Listen” initiative to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Milner’s funding continues to help the SETI program through the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Green Bank Telescope, for example.

But private initiatives like Milner’s are international in character. For example, Breakthrough Listen is actively collaborating with the FAST project. While China has advertised FAST as an integral part of international collaborative efforts, it is controlled by the Chinese state directly. The ultimate arbiter of how of the new telescope’s time will go into the search for SETI is Beijing’s prerogative.

If directing state resources toward SETI is not an obstacle for China, could state ideology be so? Marxism-Leninism, the liturgy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has no problems imagining the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Writing in 1980, Soviet astronomer Boris A. Voronstov-Vel’yaminov noted the broad congruence between SETI and his state religion: “Dialectical materialism teaches that the infinite universe harbors an infinite number of inhabited worlds and that life will unfailing spring up where favorable opportunities present themselves.” (While doing so he also took a swipe at the Russian Orthodox Church, remarking that it was, on the other hand, altogether not comfortable with speculations about extraterrestrial life.) At a more concrete level, Soviet astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev were pioneers in detailed theoretical models of extraterrestrial civilizations.

Could there be other reasons why the Chinese may not be comfortable with idea of extraterrestrial intelligence? On this point many have drawn from the writings of Chinese science-fiction phenomena Liu Cixin. In Liu’s telling, the search for SETI may not be such a good thing after all. Based on China’s historical experience – and the “century of humiliation” narrative that finds such a significant place in Xi’s China – he has argued that humanity’s relationship with a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization may be fundamentally adversarial, resembling that of the hunter and the hunted. (Liu serves as an adviser of sorts to the FAST project.)

The Days After First Contact

Irrespective of the beliefs the leadership in Zhongnanhai holds when it comes to extraterrestrial civilizations, what happens if the FAST dish does receive a signal that, after processing, is determined not to have been generated by any natural astrophysical process?

As SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak points out, there are no binding international protocols that would require Beijing to make the discovery internationally known. But if China were to keep the option of non-disclosure open, its astronomical community must analyze the signal and definitely rule out any natural origins of the signal by itself. (Note that, as with recent claims around an unusual star or an interstellar rock that was found in our solar system , the majority of the international astronomical community would vastly prefer natural over artificial explanations.)

Following this, based on China’s recent domestic political behavior and the international environment, one can plausibly posit the following chain of events.

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Leading Small Groups (LSGs) – “coordinating bodies that address important policy areas that involve several different (and occasionally competing) parts of the bureaucracy” – are a Chinese governance mechanism that have grown in importance under Xi Jinping. Given that dealing with the aftermath of the discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence signal is likely to involve getting the science and technology, as well as the national-security bureaucracies to work together, it quite likely that Xi will form one exclusively to deal with it, just as he did for the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

While Xi has personally led key LSGs in the past, whether he himself oversees this one will depend on whether he sees a personal risk in doing so. (For the coronavirus LSG, Xi has let Premier Li Keqiang lead it, perhaps as a way to insure himself should the crisis prove to unmanageable.)

It is highly unlikely that news of this discovery – if not precise details such as its coordinates or content – can be confined to a few in the scientific and political leadership, and impossible if it is a result of an international collaboration using FAST, say with Milner’s Breakthrough Initiative. As soon as words gets out, the CCP will attempt to milk the discovery domestically, arguing that it proves superiority of the Chinese model. This signaling through state-controlled social media such as the microblogging site Weibo will be a further attempt at regime consolidation, especially if the discovery comes at a time when Xi assesses that the Party’s grip over power is slipping. It will be accompanied by aggressive perception-shaping exercise along the line on the discovery the CCP sets.

What about the reaction from the rest of the world? If the details of the FAST signal are not released publicly, there is bound to be Western skepticism – “fake news,” some could exclaim. This reaction will partly be because of the culture of secrecy that permeates Chinese science, leading to an understandable hesitance on the part of many to accept claims from Chinese scientists at face value.

This comes on top of the fact that any suggestions that an astronomical event or object may be artificial is inevitably met with serious skepticism and the discoverer(s) subject to personal attack at times irrespective of their scientific credentials. For Chinese scientists, such attacks may have serious professional and even personal costs, as biophysicist He Jiankui discovered after his claims about the world’s first gene-edited babies were met with international skepticism as well as outrage.

But it could also be due to an ideological backlash: many Western governments may not be readily willing to concede that an authoritarian rival may succeed where they have failed. At a time when the U.S.-China relationship is increasingly acquiring a zero-sum character across the spectrum – political, economic, scientific-technological – and at least one leading American expert has endorsed the clash-of-civilization thesis when it comes to her country’s relationship with China, conceding to the Chinese claim may indeed prove to be politically difficult.

Of course, China’s own stance when it comes to releasing the details of the signal – the coordinates of the source as well as the content of the signal if it was a nonrecurring one-time-only event – will determine much of the international response. Here, the People’s Republic will have two choices, assuming that the discovery was the result of sole efforts of Chinese scientists: release the details to bolster its own credibility (knowing that if the claim was to be dismissed it would do serious damage to China’s international reputation) or keep it a secret. What may ultimately determine Beijing’s choice?

To understand it, note that the ETI signal could be of two different type: a “directed” signal that carries a message (a broadcast, if you wish) or an “undirected” one that could originate from an artificial source but not carry an meaningful information content (for example, energy remnant from some advanced technology of a civilization that harnesses the energy of an entire star or even an entire galaxy – a “Type II” or “Type III” civilization in the Kardashev scale). The difference between the two – whether a signal is part of intelligent communication or simply a technological artifact of alien origin – can be estimated by measuring its Shannon entropy, for example.

If China determines that not only is the signal directed but it has the potential to carry significant amount of information, it may weigh the benefits of keeping the signal secret versus revealing it more carefully for the simple reason that such a message may potentially carry information about very advanced (and therefore useful) technologies. (An advanced technology-blueprint bearing signal was the premise of Contact.) However, note that Chinese scientific achievements are still quite uneven – for example, the People’s Republic was unable to find enough researchers to analyze the FAST data a couple of years ago. It may very well determine that deciphering the message will require coordinated international effort.

Should China indeed release the details of the signal – thereby establishing conclusively that there is intelligent life outside Earth – what would the long-term American reaction be? Just as the Soviet Union’s success in launching the world’s first artificial satellite in 1957 caused the United States to dramatically increase its investment in science and technology, a FAST signal is likely to provoke a similar response especially at a time when American leaders are openly competing with Beijing for technological dominance. But the flip side to this otherwise happy development – just as during the original Cold War – would be the resulting military-technological contest exacerbating already deteriorating US-China relations.

In the 2016 movie Arrival, the worldwide detection of messages from an extraterrestrial intelligence forces the United States, China, and Russia to cooperate despite their individual misgivings – about each other’s as well as the aliens’ intention. The reality, if and when such a time comes, may unfortunately be much more complex.

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{ https://thediplomat.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 22:16 geschreven door peter  

27-12-2020 om 22:00 geschreven door peter  

Linda Moulton Howe interviews Military Whistleblower “John Smith”, retired USAF Sergeant about the secret Alaska underground base that monitors UFOs. 

Assigned to “Murphy Dome” Air Force station in Fairbanks Alaska in 1968

Large underground installation.

“Long stairway underground”…

”main reason we were down there to monitor Russia…”

“Large screen that had a map of the planet”

“Any object in the air came up on that screen”

“...people from some other planet monitoring what we do”

“...the UFOs.. usually traveled in packed of 3 or 6…they would disappear”

“…most of the traffic was south of South America and Africa” 

“…3 to 6 at a time”

  

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 21:36 geschreven door peter  

The farthest galaxy in the universe.

BY AMIT MALEWAR

Using the Keck I telescope, a team of astronomers has measured the distance to the ancient and farthest galaxy called GN-z11. The galaxy is so distant that it defines the very boundary of the observable universe itself.

According to astronomers, this discovery could shed light on a period of cosmological history when the universe was only a few hundred million years old.

Professor Nobunari Kashikawa from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Tokyo is driven by his curiosity about galaxies. In particular, he sought the most distant one to observe to find out how and when it came to be.

Kashikawa said, “From previous studies, the galaxy GN-z11 seems to be the farthest detectable galaxy from us, at 13.4 billion light-years, or 134 nonillion kilometers (that’s 134 followed by 30 zeros). But measuring and verifying such a distance is not an easy task.”

Astronomers measured the redshift of GN-z11. This refers to the way light stretches out, becomes redder the farther it travels. By measuring how stretched these telltale signatures are, astronomers can deduce how far the light must have traveled, thus giving away the target galaxy’s distance.

Kashikawa said, “We looked at ultraviolet light specifically, as that is the area of the electromagnetic spectrum we expected to find the redshifted chemical signatures. The Hubble Space Telescope detected the signature multiple times in the spectrum of GN-z11. However, even the Hubble cannot resolve ultraviolet emission lines to the degree we needed. So we turned to a more up-to-date ground-based spectrograph, an instrument to measure emission lines, called MOSFIRE, which is mounted to the Keck I telescope in Hawaii.”

The emissions from GN-z11 were captured in detail using MOSFIRE. This allowed them to make a much better estimation of its distance than was possible from previous data. When working with distances at these scales, it is not sensible to use our familiar units of kilometers or even multiples of them; instead, astronomers use a value known as the redshift number denoted by z.

Astronomers improved the accuracy of the galaxy’s z value by a factor of 100. If subsequent observations can confirm this, then the astronomers can confidently say GN-z11 is the farthest galaxy ever detected in the universe.

Journal Reference:

1. Linhua Jiang et al, Evidence for GN-z11 as a luminous galaxy at redshift 10.957, Nature Astronomy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-01275-y

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{ https://www.techexplorist.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 18:44 geschreven door peter  

The Main Purpose Of The Apollo-20 Was An Investigation Of The Mysterious Places In Delporte Craters?

During the Cold War, which lasted for decades, the Western and Eastern blocs were overtaking everything they could. Whether it was in propaganda, military power, military spending, or technology. As is often said, during the war, the development of technology is sharply upward, as evidenced, for example, by Nazi death squads V1 or the development of tanks during the First World War. During the cold, the race for the extraction of the universe began, thanks to which the technology went up again sharply. As we know, the first man in the universe was Yuri Gagarin of the USSR and the first visitor to the surface of the Moon, Neil Armstrong. New spaces in space bring with them new mysteries.

After the first landing on the moon surface, missions like Apollo 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and the last flight to the Moon – Apollo 17 (hereinafter referred to as A-XY) took place. However, according to the conspirators, flights like A-18 and 20 were also made, while A-18 was filmed and we have been reviewing it for a long time, but now we can not deal with it. But let’s look at the A-20 mission.

It all began when July 26, 1971, launched Earth A-15, which recorded a monster object reminding the alien ship for the month. After the next years, the A-20 was designed to explore three kilometers long and five-meter tall ships. A few decades later, specifically in 2007, strange videos that „flooded“ YouTube began to spread. On them were short films from the astronauts (from the alleged Soviet-American crew) who shot the landings, the interior of the ship (in which a figure of a woman called „Mona Lisa“ lying), a flight around the ship, and also the views of the alien small town. Videos at first glance look really mysterious and real. A huge extraterrestrial ship and still the remains of an extraterrestrial race somewhere in the month? The conspiracy sites have immediately grabbed this topic.

A 76-year-old man living in Rwanda, Africa, said that the mission was launched on August 16, 1975, and was aimed at ISZAK D at Delporte Craters. This man is called William Rutledge (he changed his identity, resided, moved to the African state) and claimed to have been a member of the secret crew. They were supposed to be a complete Captain Dr. William Rutledge, Dr. Leona Snyder and the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who was the first man in the open universe. The aforementioned William was supposed to add videos to YT under the name Retiredafb, but later, almost all of the videos in the account were deleted, and today we find only one wretched movie. Later, he started to release videos, but this time he called ValValientThor (also a mysterious concept that we will be discussing later).

{ https://dailymysteries.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 18:24 geschreven door peter  

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

27-12-2020 om 18:17 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 18:01 geschreven door peter  

Let’s Search for Alien Probes, Not Just Alien Signals

“Multimessenger” SETI would broaden the quest to find celestial companions

27-12-2020 om 17:39 geschreven door peter  

JUPE

VICTOR TANGERMANN 

Startup Jupe is selling prefabricated portable she

lters that were designed by ex-Tesla and SpaceX designers, Business Insider reports.

The off-the-grid shelters offer 111 square feet of living space and cost $17,500 per pod.

“Jupe is an off-grid escape from the city, whether to the middle of a sprawling desert, a windswept cliff by the sea or your own backyard,” the startup’s official website reads. “Units are easy to assemble anywhere and WiFi-enabled, providing equal connection to the natural and digital world.”

“Experiencing the natural wonders of the world shouldn’t mean being forced to disconnect while staying in a less-than-inspirational living space,” CEO Jeff Wilson said in a press release. “During these times when most of us are craving a true escape, Jupe provides an experience perfectly suited for socially distanced travel.”

Monolith Excitement

According to Jupe’s site, the aluminum-reinforced pods can fit a Queen-sized bed, end tables, a desk and chair — and an “average-sized monolith,” for some reason.

“We turned to ideas that inspired and excited us,” Wilson said. “Remember that monolith from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’? It last sent signals to Jupiter from the moon. It seems that a few of those blueprints were bounced back to Earth. We intercepted them and created Jupe.”

If you’re wiling to spend a little more, you can deck out your Jupe with smart speakers, a locking safe, and even solar panels for the full off-the-grid experience.

Jupes can be pre-ordered for a refundable $99 deposit.

• READ MORE: These tiny $17,500 prefab ‘urban escape pods’ from former Tesla and SpaceX designers are now available to preorder [Business Insider]
  
• More on pods: Young People Are Choosing to Live in “Pods” Instead of Apartments

RELATED PHOTOS AND VIDEO, selected and posted by peter2011

Jupe is made of interconnected aluminium masts that provide support for the geometric shape that’s designed to be reminiscent of an “interstellar shuttle.”

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

The sides are made of fire-resistant canvas, while the floor is wood tiling.

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

---

Jupe designers said that the structure was designed as “a work of art rather than a simple dwelling.”

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

---

Though it’s only 111 square feet inside, Jupe feels surprisingly roomy, with 11 foot-tall ceilings. There’s enough room for a queen-size bed, a desk, chair, and ottoman.

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

---

The floor also opens up into storage cubes, totaling more than 38 cubic feet of storage space.

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

---

The front window can open into a large panorama to take in views.

Jeff Wilson

Jupe urban escape pod.

---

Each unit comes with solar panels, a 200 Ah battery system, and WiFi router, with the option to add on dimmable LED lighting and a Sonos speaker with Alexa.

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

---

The Jupe can be flat-packed down onto the base frame for easy transportation.

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

---

It can be reassembled anywhere, even off the grid, thanks to solar power and batteries.

Sam Gezari

Jupe urban escape pod.

{ https://futurism.com/the-byte }

27-12-2020 om 17:07 geschreven door peter  

The year was 1979, and a man by the name of Robert Taylor was a forestry worker for the Livingston Development Corporation, in Livingston, West Lothian, Scotland. He was a respected war hero, was known as a good, honest worker, and was not prone to spinning wild yarns or getting into trouble, so when on November 8, 1979 he stumbled back from a trip to a hill called Dechmont Law looking disheveled, with cuts on his face, torn clothes, and looking somewhat the worse for wear, people were very concerned. When the visibly shaken man had gotten his head together, he would begin spinning a spectacular tale of bizarreness that has gone on to become a well-known and much discussed piece of UFO lore.

According to Taylor, he had gone out with his dog to do a routine check on the fences, gates, and a sampling project going on in the area. Since there were no direct roads to the remote location, he parked his truck on the nearby M8 expressway and he and the dog made their way into the woods of Dechmont Law on foot. As they progressed through the forest, Taylor says he was startled to see the startling sight of a dark grey metallic “flying dome” around 20 feet in diameter and 30 feet high hovering in the air of a clearing just above the forest floor, apparently kept aloft by an array of “small propellers” around its outer rim. As he looked on in wonder at this bizarre sight, he would claim that the air was pervaded by a smell like “burning brakes.” Very strange indeed, but it was about to get even stranger still.

Taylor claimed that before he had even had time to really process the sheer bizarreness of what he was witnessing, two small spheres detached from the larger craft, which were described as having protrusions and nodules all over them and as looking like “sea mines,” and which started rapidly rolling along the ground to approach the frightened man as they issued a “plopping, sucking sound.” These mysterious spheres reportedly then “grabbed” him with sets of protruding spikes and began pulling him towards the large dome as he struggled against them. He would claim that he believed they had been emanating some sort of toxic gas, as the acidic smell of burning rubber got unbearable and he felt the strength leaving his limbs. The whole time his dog was barking ferociously at the objects.

At this point Taylor apparently lost consciousness, and when he awoke he was lying face down in the clearing, which was now empty and with no sign of the otherworldly dome or its malevolent spheres. He found that his clothes had been shredded and that he had cuts and abrasions on his face and body, whether due to his struggle with the spheres or inflicted directly on him he did not know. Taylor had then made his way back to his truck, but was unable to start it, the engine completely dead, and so had stumbled all the way home on foot. Whatever those objects had done to him was still in his system at the time, because he did not seem to have full control of his body and had trouble speaking. When he came staggering to his home in this rambling, dazed, barely coherent state his wife immediately called the police and an investigation would ensue.

Police at first treated this as a common assault, and wrote up Taylor’s mutterings of UFOs and spiked killer spheres as just the rantings of his stressed mind, but they nevertheless went to the scene to investigate and see if they could get some information about the perpetrator. The area where the dome had allegedly appeared was found to have flattened grass, and to contain 32 anomalous holes in the ground, which were about 3.5 inches in diameter each and formed a strange semi-circular pattern, as well as ladder-like marks that looked like the treads of a bulldozer, which were confined to just the clearing and did not come from or lead to anywhere. Authorities tried to find out what could have made the marks by contacting the Livingston Development Corporation, and one investigator would say of this:

After examining every piece of machinery they had up there, we did not find anything to match. These marks just arrived. They did not come from anywhere or go anywhere. They just arrived as though a helicopter or something had landed from the sky. An object of several tons had stood there but there was nothing to show that it had been driven or towed away. There appeared to be no rational explanation for these marks.

Robert Taylor in the clearing

In the meantime, Taylor’s ripped clothing was examined by forensics experts, who came to the conclusion that they had been torn by something hooking into them and pulling sharply upward, which when taken with the tread marks made the story of domes and spiked discs sounding less and less far fetched by the minute. Police would ultimately log the incident officially as an assault, but there was nothing more they could do except ponder the strange clues surrounding it all. For his part, Taylor would adamantly insist that his story was true all the way up to his death in 2007, and considering what an upstanding citizen he was many people believed him. What has come to be known as the Robert Taylor Incident, Livingston Incident, or Dechmont Woods Encounter, has since gone on to become a much discussed and highly regarded possibly genuine UFO incident, and UFO researcher and author Malcolm Robinson has said of it:

This case stands head and shoulders above any other Scottish case and has the prestigious hallmark of being the only case officially investigated by the police and forensic science laboratories in Great Britain. Most, if not all, British UFO researchers would say that this one case provides the best evidence that something, not of this Earth, occurred in that lonely wood and which today, stands the test of time as being one of the biggest UFO cases in the annals of British UFOlogy.

Of course there are skeptics of the whole thing, and other possibilities have been offered above and beyond that Taylor was attacked by aliens. For instance the strange markings in the ground have been speculated to have been left by the water company that had been laying a cable duct through the area and had been storing a large collection of PVC pipes near the clearing. Taylor’s story of the dome, the spheres, and the physical effects he experienced have been suggested as being the result of him suffering an isolated attack of temporal lobe epilepsy, which can cause the physical symptoms described and cause hallucinations, which could have all been exacerbated by a case of meningitis Taylor had struggled with not long before the ordeal. It could have also been that he had mistaken a nearby water tower for being an alien craft in this disoriented state. Other theories are that he had consumed hallucinogenic berries, that he had suffered a stroke, that he had seen a mirage of the planet Venus, or simply that he just made the whole thing up. There has never been any definitive answer, and considering that the sole witness has passed away we will probably never know for sure, but the legacy of this case lingers on today and probably will for some time to come.

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{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

27-12-2020 om 16:18 geschreven door peter  

We probably aren’t the first civilization in the Milky Way. It’s just that the others are dead

A new study suggests that it is likely that other civilizations have existed before us in the Milky Way -- before they annihilated themselves.

 by Tibi Puiu

Are there other intelligent lifeforms in the universe besides humans capable of founding a civilization? That’s the million-dollar question that people of all walks of life have, to their best of their ability, attempt to answer. There are many theories that attempt to explain the utter lack of, well, alien signals. For instance, one new study concludes that intelligent life may have appeared several times in the Milky Way, however, the vast majority of these civilizations have wiped themselves out already.

Ever since people first realized we are all living on a giant rock orbiting one of many stars, a heartbreaking thought must have crept the mind: we’re not that special after all. But since there are countless stars in the Milky Way, and countless galaxies in the universe, there must be other civilizations out there. This thought comes as a consolation, so we might not be the only ones drifting through the frightening darkness of outer space.

But if it’s true that we’re not that special after all, where is everybody else? Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, thought about this long and hard, and his correspondence with fellow scientists on the subject has remained known in history as the ‘Fermi Paradox’ — the notion that there is a virtually limitless number of stars, but nevertheless you don’t see any life floating around besides us. Where is everybody?

The question is a valid one when considering:

• There’s nothing special about our sun – it’s young, medium-sized and similar to billions of other stars in our galaxy.
• It’s believed there are between 100 and 400 billion planets in the Milky Way. Considering intelligent life appeared on one, it’s reasonable to consider there should be at least some other kind of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy.
• Millions of years of technological progress mean that an intelligent species should have the capability to travel to distant stars and even other galaxies. Just look at how our world has changed in the past 100 years alone.
• According to mathematicians Duncan Forgan and Arwen Nicholson from Edinburgh University, self-replicating spacecraft traveling at one-tenth of the speed of light — admittedly a quick speed — could traverse the entire Milky Way in a mere 10 million years. This means that civilization could potentially colonize the whole galaxy in a mere couple of millions of years. Except it didn’t happen.

Then there’s the Drake equation, first proposed in 1961 by American astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake, which describes the variables involved in fostering intelligent life. This equation estimates the number “N” of civilizations in the Milky Way based on variables such as the rate of star formation, the number of planets in solar systems that may support life, or the necessary technological prowess to signal a civilization’s existence.

Drake’s equation was made famous by the late Carl Sagan, who featured it during an episode of his timeless series Cosmos. But since Sagan first talked about Drake’s equation, much has changed. Thanks to observations by the Kepler telescope, we now have a much firmer grasp of how many Earth-like worlds may be out there.

In a new study, researchers affiliated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, as well as a high school student, have updated Drake’s equation with all the new things scientists have learned in the past decades, including the prevalence of sun-like stars harboring Earth-like planets or the frequency of supernovas that are unfriendly to life.

When they modeled the evolution of the Milky Way, the researchers found that life was most likely to emerge around 13,000 light-years from the galactic centers, where there is the greatest density of sun-like stars. The optimal time frame for the development of alien civilizations was also estimated at 8 billion years after the formation of the galaxy. For comparison, Earth is about 25,000 light-years from the galactic core and complex intelligent life evolved around 13.5 billion years after the Milky Way formed.

In other words, this study suggests that there are other regions of the Milky way where life is more likely to appear than in our corner of the galaxy. What’s more, other civilizations might have had a five billion-year headstart. The problem is they may have had a headstart for their self-annihilation.

According to the researchers, most civilizations that have appeared before us have likely self-annihilated. Other civilizations that are still active in the galaxy are likely young, due to the propensity of intelligent life to eradicate itself. Over a long-enough timeframe, the probability of self-annihilation borders on certainty.

“As we cannot assume a low probability of annihilation, it is possible that intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy is still too young to be observed by us. Therefore, our findings can imply that intelligent life may be common in the Galaxy but is still young, supporting the optimistic aspect for the practice of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence),” the authors wrote in their study that appeared in the pre-print server arXiv.

“Our results also suggest that our location on Earth is not within the region where most intelligent life is settled, and SETI practices need to be closer to the inner Galaxy, preferably at the annulus 4 kpc (kiloparsec) from the Galactic Center.”

The search for alien life is nowhere settled, though. The study’s biggest limitation is its sample size of confirmed civilizations: just one. Humans are biased to think that other civilizations might behave just like us. As such, these inherent biases may cloud our judgment, believing that other civilizations might also nuke themselves out of existence.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 16:03 geschreven door peter  

Two Black UFOs Over Clouds Matching Speed With Space Station, Dec 26, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 26, 2020

Location of sighting: Space Station
Source:

• https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html

Was watching the live cam and noticed two small black objects in the distance below. The objects were matching speed with the space station and there were two of them. At first I thought it could be the ISS shadow...but there are two of them! So I ruled that out. Something is keeping a close eye on the space station. The UFOs speed is equal to the space stations. This is 100% proof that aliens are keeping a close eye on humanity. We shouldn't call them aliens, we should call them watchers. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 14:57 geschreven door peter  

Two Black UFOs Over Clouds Matching Speed With Space Station, Dec 26, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 26, 2020

Location of sighting: Space Station
Source:

• https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/iss_ustream.html

Was watching the live cam and noticed two small black objects in the distance below. The objects were matching speed with the space station and there were two of them. At first I thought it could be the ISS shadow...but there are two of them! So I ruled that out. Something is keeping a close eye on the space station. The UFOs speed is equal to the space stations. This is 100% proof that aliens are keeping a close eye on humanity. We shouldn't call them aliens, we should call them watchers. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 14:57 geschreven door peter  

Three UFOs Near Rocket Launch Then Explosion Over Suzhou, China! Dec 26, 2020, UFO Sighting News.

Date of sighting: Dec 26, 2020

Location of sighting: Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

Source: Email report

 

They guy said he caught sight of something strange over Suzhou, China yesterday. He said it may be a rocket launch, but seemed more like a failed rocket launch. However in the video I can see at 16 seconds into it...there are three glowing objects in the path ahead of the rocket...at 18 seconds...one of them actually comes so close that it may have hit the rocket...at 45 seconds into it...an explosion occurs. It looks like aliens did not approve of the payload aboard this top secret rocket launch in China and the aliens destroyed it. 100% proof that aliens not only watch over us, but watch out for us and keep us safe. 

Scott C. Waring - Taiwan

 

{ https://www.ufosightingsdaily.com/ }

27-12-2020 om 14:52 geschreven door peter  

AMAZING! Cigar-shaped UFO filmed over Andes (Chile)

This really interesting UFO video was filmed from a plane that was flying over Andes in Chile on 11th November 2020.

Witness report: (Google translate from Spanish)

 I present my case, my name is Rodrigo from Chile, on 11/11/2020 on the sky flight H272 from Puerto Montt to Santiago (departure 18:36, arrival 20:14 hours). Approximately arriving in Santiago at 8:00 p.m., I was looking at the landscape (Andes mountain range) the only “cloud” (dark and fat, in the shape of a worm) catches my attention, “rain cloud” style, above the peak of the Montana. From my window at an angle of about 65 degrees.
As the plane was in parallel with the “cloud”, I noticed that it began to be “clearer” (I thought it was “something” normal of the winds and altitude) and it was there that at the right point of the cloud, it made a ” small flash of white light “that caught my attention and amazement (in a matter of second), I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I was stunned, when I turned around and saw inside the cabin if someone was looking at the same thing as me, the person closest to me, I was in an intermediate seat to mine (Mrs. Older) sleeping with masks (I also had the mask on), when trying to take my cell phone that was locked and is unlocked with facial recognition, I lost valuable seconds when using alphanumeric unlock. After enabling the cell phone, I focus on the “cloud” to take a photo and then a video.
As can be seen in the photo “it was no longer a rain cloud”, but it took the form of something solid and clearer. After the first photo, go to video in slow motion format (effect that was used when making videos to my daughter), where “you can see that it is no longer a cloud” but a “solid disk” (it passed all its metamorphosis) It was impressive to see the “UFO” (calmly in my house and thanks to google map, look for the reference hill, when measuring, it showed me that the UFO was approximately 6 kilometers long). Video 1 and Video 2 (use of filter on video)
When the plane moves away from the UFO, at first glance it gives a visual effect of fading on the horizon, it may be an optical effect, but when occupying filters in the video the UFO was still but getting smaller …), at that moment the plane makes a U-turn preparing the landing, at that moment I thought I had already lost sight of the UFO, and to my surprise I see it again at another point of the Andes mountain range, on the horizon, where I take my cell phone , I unlock it for the last photo and video of the UFO …

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

27-12-2020 om 14:43 geschreven door peter  

Ex-CIA boss John Brennan believes there may be life beyond Earth

{ https://nypost.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 23:26 geschreven door peter  

Richard Rokeby claims mysterious lights that started appearing near Burton Dassett, Warwickshire, in December 1922 were UFOs mistaken as the festive ghosts of World War One soldiers

By Berny Torre

Mysterious lights believed to be the festive ghosts of World War One soldiers were in fact aliens, a police detective has claimed.

Mysterious lights believed to be the festive ghosts of World War One soldiers were in fact aliens, a police detective has claimed.

The sightings were attributed to a natural phenomenon known as marsh gas or Will O' the Wisps by a local newspaper.

But amateur UFO researcher Richard Rokeby has penned a book, The Lights Upon The Hills, where he claims the witness accounts show they were actually ETs.

The married dad-of-three wrote: "Following the First World War desperate families wanted to believe that there is a hope of communicating with their lost sons again.

"Therefore, it would be natural at this time to assign any strange phenomena to ghosts and spirits.

"But as we will see if we look at these events through modern eyes, it is very clear that what they are witnessing is an historic Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon event."

He told of how several sightings of "multi-coloured" lights moving at speed were reported by the Banbury Guardian in February 1923.

And insisted the paper's explanation was not "credible" as the lights reportedly spooked horses and exerted "downward pressure".

The author wrote: "What we have here is multiple witnesses saying that they saw strange lights in the sky and above the ground moving in ways that modern aircraft find very difficult to do today.

"I firmly believed that what was actually being witnessed here was a mass Unidentified Flying Object ( UFO) or Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP) event.

"Therefore, over the course of this book I hope to show that what was seen in the winter of 1922-23 was not ghosts or marsh gas, but was in fact a well documented, multi-witnessed, extraterrestrial encounter and that these encounters may have been happening for hundreds years, are still happening today and perhaps a large event is going to occur there again and very soon!"

Top British flying saucer investigator Philip Mantle has published the former Army man's book on the Flying Disk Press.

{ https://www.dailystar.co.uk/ }

26-12-2020 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

Planetary Researchers Create Map of Early Mars’ River Systems

Using data from the Context Camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, planetary researchers have generated an 8-trillion-pixel global map of Mars and performed the first systematic global survey of Martian fluvial (river) ridges.

Mars used to be a wet world, as evidenced by rock records of lakes, rivers, and glaciers.

The Martian river ridges were formed between 4 and 3 billion years ago (the Noachian to Hesperian period), when large rivers deposited sediments in their channels, rather than only having the water cut away at the surface.

Over time, sediment built up in the channels; once the water dried up, those ridges were all that was left of some rivers.

The ridges are present only in the southern hemisphere, where some of Mars’ oldest and most rugged terrain is, but this pattern is likely a preservation artifact.

“These ridges probably used to be all over the entire planet, but subsequent processes have buried them or eroded them away,” said lead author Dr. Jay Dickson, a researcher in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech.

“The northern hemisphere is very smooth because it’s been resurfaced, primarily by lava flows.”

“Additionally, the southern highlands are some of the flattest surfaces in the Solar System,” said co-author Dr. Woodward Fischer, also from the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech.

“That exceptional flatness made for good sedimentary deposition, allowing the creation of the records being studied today.”

The new map allows planetary researchers to explore questions at global scales, rather than being limited to patchier, localized studies and extrapolating results to the whole hemisphere.

In addition to identifying 18 new fluvial ridges, using the map allowed the team to re-examine features that had previously been identified as fluvial ridges. Upon closer inspection, some weren’t formed by rivers after all, but rather lava flows or glaciers.

“If you only see a small part of a ridge, you might have an idea of how it formed,” Dr. Dickson said.

“But then you see it in a larger context — like, oh, it’s the flank of a volcano, it’s a lava flow.”

“So now we can more confidently determine which are fluvial ridges, versus ridges formed by other processes.”

“Now that we have a global understanding of the distribution of ancient rivers on Mars, future explorations — whether by rover or by astronauts — could use these rock records to investigate what past climates and tectonics were like.”

“One of the biggest breakthroughs in the last twenty years is the recognition that Mars has a sedimentary record, which means we’re not limited to studying the planet today,” Dr. Fischer said.

“We can ask questions about its history.”

“And in doing so, he says, we learn not only about a single planet’s past, but also find truths about how planets evolved… and why the Earth is habitable.”

The team’s results are published in the journal Geology.

• J.L. Dickson et al. The global distribution of depositional rivers on early Mars. Geology, published online December 21, 2020; doi: 10.1130/G48457.1

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 22:56 geschreven door peter  

Massive Tsunami Hit the Neolithic Middle East 9,000+ Years Ago

Study may explain why previous archaeological surveys have found no evidence until the Late Neolithic for low-lying coastal villages at Tel Dor, Israel

The small bays of Israel’s Tel Dor.

Image courtesy of University of Haifa-UC San Diego Carmel Coast Marine Archaeology Expedition.

This wasn’t Noah’s flood. But it was still a catastrophic event that profoundly changed the landscape and could have given rise to legends, too. According to a new study from an international team of researchers, a massive tsunami swept over the coastline near Tel Dor, Israel, sometime between 9,910 and 9,290 years ago.

The date makes it the oldest known paleo tsunami in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the paper is by Gilad Shtienberg, Richard Norris and Thomas Levy from the University of California San Diego, with colleagues from Utah State University and the University of Haifa. It is part of an ongoing, long-term project between UC San Diego’s Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology (SCMA) and Haifa’s Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies, directed by paper co-author Assaf Yasur-Landau, to investigate how humans have, over the past 12 millennia, adapted to climate and environmental change along Israel’s Carmel Coast.

The researchers discovered evidence for the tsunami by cutting open sediment cores from their coastal study area at the South Bay of Tel Dor. In these samples, they found an abrupt layer of seashells and sand, dated to between 9,910 and 9,290 years ago, in the middle wetland layers deposited 15,000 to 7,800 years ago. The only way that this marine material could have arrived so far inland, or what would have been inland at that time, the authors determined, was through a destructive wave.

They estimate that the wave capable of doing this would have traveled inland between 1.5 to 3.5 kilometers (about 1 to 2 miles) and would have been between 16 and 40 meters (52 to 130 feet) high at the coast.

Tsunamis are not uncommon in the eastern Mediterranean; historical records and geographic data suggest that a tsunami has been occurring about once per century over the past 6,000 years. For comparison, however, previously documented tsunami events have traveled inland only around 300 meters (or about 1,000 feet). In other words, this Neolithic event was significant. The authors suspect a strong earthquake on the Dead Sea Fault System was followed by an underwater landslide.

If there was a village at the site, this tsunami would have devastated it – and destroyed crop lands, pastures and herds, as well as near-shore marine fisheries and resources.

This event, which occurred during the Early to Middle Neolithic cultural periods of the region, might explain why previous archaeological surveys have found no evidence for low-lying coastal villages in that particular area until the late Neolithic, the researchers said. The evidence for earlier settlement may have been wiped out.

“We can’t know for sure why people weren’t living there, in a place otherwise abundant with evidence of early human habitation and the beginnings of village life in the Holy Land,” said Levy, the paper’s senior author, co-director of UC San Diego’s SCMA and an archaeology professor in the university’s Department of Anthropology. “Was the environment too altered to support life? Was the tsunami part of their cultural knowledge – did they tell stories of this destructive event and stay away? We can only imagine.”

By the Late or Pottery Neolithic period, however, archaeological sites along the coast begin to reappear – and coincide with the resumption of wetland deposition in the core samples from Dor, indicating resettlement and highlighting, Levy said, people’s resilience in the face of massive disruption.

One of those rare Pottery Neolithic submerged sites was excavated at the South Bay of Tel Dor by Assaf Yasur-Landau and Levy’s joint University of Haifa-UC San Diego team as part of the PLOS ONE paper.

To conduct their analysis, the authors of this paper used photogrammetric remote sensing techniques to create a digital model of their study area at Tel Dor, combined with underwater excavation and terrestrial borehole drilling. The dating was locked down using a relatively new radiometric dating technique called Optical Stimulated Luminescence, or OSL, in co-author Tammy Rittenour’s Luminescence Laboratory at Utah State University. OSL dates the last time quartz sediment was exposed to light.

“Our project focuses on reconstructing ancient climate and environmental change over the past 12,000 years along the Israeli coast,” said Shtienberg, the paper’s first author and a Koret postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego’s SCMA, who is studying the sediment cores. “We never dreamed of finding evidence of a prehistoric tsunami in Israel.”

In the future, the researchers hope to do more geophysical research in deeper water and send divers down to test their results and perhaps find evidence of earlier settlements.

The research is supported, in part, by funding from the Koret Foundation (Grant ID 19-0295); the Murray Galinson San Diego-Israel Initiative; the Israel Institute (Washington, D.C.); Marian Scheuer-Sofaer and Abraham Sofaer Foundation; Norma and Reuben Kershaw Family Foundation; Ellen Lehman and Charles Kennel - Alan G Lehman and Jane A Lehman Foundation; Paul and Margaret Meyer and the Israel Science Foundation (Grant ID 495/18).

{ https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/ }

26-12-2020 om 22:33 geschreven door peter  

Archaeologists Find Evidence of Neolithic Mega-Tsunami in Israel

A catastrophic tsunami occurred sometimes between 7,910 and 7,290 BCE with an extreme 16 m (52.5 feet) wave height and 1.5-3.5 km (0.93-2.2 mile) run-up on the Carmel coast of Israel, according to new research published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“Tsunami events in antiquity had a profound influence on coastal societies,” said lead author Dr. Gilad Shtienberg from the Department of Anthropology in the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues.

“6,000 years of historical records and geological data show that tsunamis are a common phenomenon affecting the eastern Mediterranean coastline, occurring at a rate of around 8 events per century in the Aegean region over the past 2,000 years and approximately 10 per century over the past 3,000 years in the Levant basin.”

“Most of these events are small and have only local impacts.”

In the study, the researchers found a large paleo-tsunami deposit (between 9,910 to 9,290 years ago) at the archaeological site of Tel Dor in northwest Israel.

“Tel Dor, located along the Carmel coast of northwest Israel, is a maritime city-mound that has been occupied from the Middle Bronze II period (2000 to 1550 BCE) throughout the Roman period (3rd century CE) while Byzantine and Crusader remains are also found on the tel,” they said.

“The local environment of Dor is characterized by a series of unique embayments/pocket beaches that stand out from the linear morphology of the southeastern Mediterranean littoral shore face.”

To conduct their analysis, the scientists used photogrammetric remote sensing techniques to create a digital model of the Tel Dor site, combined with underwater excavation and terrestrial borehole drilling to a depth of 9 m (29.5 feet).

In their samples, they found an abrupt layer of seashells and sand, dated to between 9,910 and 9,290 years ago, in the middle wetland layers deposited 15,000 to 7,800 years ago.

They estimate that the ancient tsunami had a run-up of at least 16 m and traveled between 3.5 to 1.5 km inland from the paleo-coastline.

The near absence of Pre-Pottery Neolithic A-B archaeological sites (11,700-9,800 years ago) suggest these sites were removed by the tsunami, whereas younger, late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B-C (9,250-8,350 years ago) and later Pottery-Neolithic sites (8,250-7,800 years ago) indicate resettlement following the event.

“We can’t know for sure why people weren’t living there, in a place otherwise abundant with evidence of early human habitation and the beginnings of village life in the Holy Land,” said Professor Thomas Levy, a researcher in the Department of Anthropology and the Levant and Cyber-Archaeology Laboratory in the Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego.

“Was the environment too altered to support life? Was the tsunami part of their cultural knowledge — did they tell stories of this destructive event and stay away? We can only imagine.”

“Our project focuses on reconstructing ancient climate and environmental change over the past 12,000 years along the Israeli coast; and we never dreamed of finding evidence of a prehistoric tsunami in Israel,” Dr. Shtienberg said.

“Scholars know that at the beginning of the Neolithic, around 10,000 years ago, the seashore was 4 km (2.5 miles) from where it is today.”

“When we cut the cores open in San Diego and started seeing a marine shell layer embedded in the dry Neolithic landscape, we knew we hit the jackpot.”

_____

G. Shtienberg et al. 2020. A Neolithic mega-tsunami event in the eastern Mediterranean: Prehistoric settlement vulnerability along the Carmel coast, Israel. PLoS ONE 15 (12): e0243619; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243619

{ http://www.sci-news.com/ }

26-12-2020 om 22:25 geschreven door peter