Study finds our galaxy may be full of dead alien civilisations

Katrina?

Jeroen Belleman

My uncle Sheldon had a TV repair shop and he was a real rascal. He'd do a house call, diagnose a bad CRT, take the set back to the shop, and Windex it.

He'd also buy horrible rebuilt tubes, if he had to actually replace one.

That was caused by two man-made stupidities, two dredged spears aiming into the heart of New Orleans: the Industrial Canal and the 17th Street Canal, both with pitiful permeable levees. Complicated by a century or so of building levees and pumping out the groundwater. I grew up in New Orleans, and the inevitable flood was a local joke. From my house, I'd look UP at ships on the Mississippi river.

You don't need a red channel electron gun in your CRT. It's really the laziest one if you think about it. Two should be enough for anyone.

Those were the b+w days. I don't think people rebuilt color tubes.

It's pretty hard to draw conclusions when you only have one example, but even that example shows that evolution of life is possible. If it's possible here, and there are enough similar places, it is likely.

CH

That doesn't follow. It may be an incredibly improbable event, one that we only know about because we're here. The Earth could be the only place in the galaxy to have life. Until and unless we find at least one other example, there are no conclusions to be drawn.

Sylvia.

I didn't draw any conclusions. I only pointed to likelihoods.

True singleton events are incredibly rare. Can you name one?

Well, not sure, but life could be one.

Sylvia.

sult of population growth,

, and 'grow more food'

aches on more

h a

of what

a bigger

. Both

we really want.

future; we can get better

I'm tolerably academic - I have published papers in peer-reviewed journals, and several of them have been cited in more recent publications. And my in sults - mostly not taking John Larkin's pretensions as seriously as he feel s they ought to - aren't third party. They aren't address to him because he doesn't seem to bother reading my posts.

Links to denialist propaganda web-sites aren't useful and ought to be snipp ed. They are convenient to people who want to keep making money out of sel ling fossil carbon as fuel, but anthropogenic global warming is a serious i nconvenience to everybody else, and it's getting steadily worse.

Whit3rd does strike me as somebody who posts more or less sensible observat ions.

John Larkin doesn't.

How about the universe? We've only ever found the one!

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote: ====================================

I bought a re-gunned, 26 inch colour tube in about 1990 - trading in my old one at the same time. The red gun had faded to almost nothing.

Delivered to my door, the tube cost me $140. It was *not* a self converging type, so I spent a while getting that sorted with the aid of a home made cross-hatch generator. Pic came up first class and got ten years use out of it.

BTW

replaced the CRT monitor for my home PC with a flat screen only this year.

..... Phil

No, neither is the case.

Huh? Don't be naiive, there's lots of dangers other than the obvious ones (cold kills) in a climate change scenario, and closing your eyes will never impair MY vision.

So far. Some physicists seem to think that there might be quite a few, but proving it wouldn't be trivial.

Precisely. And so you know the title of one of my as-yet unwritten books. The Singleton.

It seems to be the only singleton. Everything else is a manifestation of its process, connected to (and ultimately dependent on) every other thing along lines that cannot be precisely drawn - they're blurred.

CH.

Though advanced civilisations will invariably move towards efficient high entropy noise like encoding radio systems (or still worse optical fibre). They will still have some characteristic modulation frequency even if they used some self clocking version of Manchester encoding.

Chances are we will only be realistically able to detect them at stellar distances for the brief period where they have mastered high power RF electronics and before they have spread spectrum digital technology or suppressed carrier wave. Maybe only a 50 year RF window of opportunity.

Or when their version of Arecibo happens to have us in the beam when they are radar imaging asteroids.

The pulsar detection specialists have this stuff under constant surveillance if anyone sees an LGM signal it will likely be them. They take in a fair chunk of sky and look for anything repetitive (most times it is a pulsar). They have quite large catalogues of known objects now.

The first one was interestingly discovered around Christmas in 1967:

Merry Christmas to you too.

Is this anything more than the Drake equation? I guess we have better estimates on the number of stars with planets now.... better numbers same equation?

George H.

I've recently read "Introduction to cosmology", by Barbara Ryden Upper undergrad physics level. A nice book. One of the best pieces of evidence for the big bang is the cosmic abundance of deuterium. All the deuterium we see was made in the first few minutes of the big bang... (It is created inside stars, but it is quickly converted to He4.) So what we see (on earth or in space) was made during the big bang. That's pretty cool. I want to buy some heavy water!

George H. (oh it's hard for noise to reproduce the angular power spectrum of the CMB.)

I've read a few books about the origin of life, mostly by biochemists. They all concluded that evolution of DNA-based life from non-living precusrors, primordial soup and such, is improbable to the point of impossible. The numbers don't work.

So Drake's f1 term

fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point

is probably zero.