$100M Hunt for Alien Intelligence

Came across this, thought it was worth sharing.

Stephen Hawking Kicks Off $100M Hunt for Alien Intelligence

More here for those interested

gozert said:

Came across this, thought it was worth sharing.

Stephen Hawking Kicks Off $100M Hunt for Alien Intelligence

More here for those interested

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I heard this briefly talked about on some radio shows recently. I am all in favor of it. The more effort put into this the better, but I am skeptical about success. I can't help but wonder if radio isn't a short lived technology in the history of a civilization, we haven't had it very long and we don't know how long we will be using it before something more advanced is discovered. There could be advanced civilizations near us that aren't using radio anymore.

Alan

Pfft., they keep searching through telescopes and radio frequency when all they have to do is look enough here.

I'm all for it too. Although I think they should invest in a method to travel at much greater speeds than they can right now as well. Sure, they might discover a potentially habited planet with a telescope, but if that planet is a couple hundred years worth of traveling away from us, I doubt we're going to get very far.

gozert said:

I'm all for it too. Although I think they should invest in a method to travel at much greater speeds than they can right now as well. Sure, they might discover a potentially habited planet with a telescope, but if that planet is a couple hundred years worth of traveling away from us, I doubt we're going to get very far.

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Look up the warp drive they are working on. Basically it compresses space in front of the craft and expands it behind the craft. This causes "space" to move past the ship. Theoretically the craft doesn't move, space does. This is how they get around moving faster than the speed of light. The main issue is that they still have not figured out how to avoid "space debris". This is currently the weakest link. Originally the mass of the energy required to perform this would be the mass of Jupiter. Working with the "ring" shape they were able to reduce this to the mass of I believe the Voyager Spaceship. There are a few articles from NASA about this. I'd look but I'm kinda lazy.

This is where deflector shields would be needed. All kinds of junk out there. If they can warp space the junk should just slide under or around the hull like water.

trussmonkey25 said:

This is where deflector shields would be needed. All kinds of junk out there. If they can warp space the junk should just slide under or around the hull like water.

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Let's hope that's the way it works, some days back I was listening to Richard C. Hoagland and he said that the kinetic energy of an object doesn't have a linear increase as the velocity increases, the increase is proportional to the square of the increase in velocity, because of this they were very worried about the probe that recently passed Pluto, it's traveling fast enough that something tiny like the size of a grain of salt could destroy the spacecraft. If that's true at only 35000mph or whatever it was then what about light speed?

Alan

Pi R Squared said:

Let's hope that's the way it works, some days back I was listening to Richard C. Hoagland and he said that the kinetic energy of an object doesn't have a linear increase as the velocity increases, the increase is proportional to the square of the increase in velocity, because of this they were very worried about the probe that recently passed Pluto, it's traveling fast enough that something tiny like the size of a grain of salt could destroy the spacecraft. If that's true at only 35000mph or whatever it was then what about light speed?

Alan

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That's why the deflectors need to be developed as well as the warp drive. Whats an engine without a good boat?

trussmonkey25 said:

That's why the deflectors need to be developed as well as the warp drive. Whats an engine without a good boat?

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