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So instead of finding tritium deposits on the Moon for our fusion reactors, we should spend approximately 8.7 billion USD on saving the world? If we spent half of the foreign aid on doing this it would be 10+ billion USD. I mean, you describe this as foreign aid right? I just think that defeating malaria or world hunger demands our immediate attention. The only threat from space that we can possibly defeat is one that is decades away and we are doing some things to meet that threat already. http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/

Did you perhaps mean nickel-60 or iron-56? The following does not show an iron-60 isotope to be the product of nucleosynthesis. http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/docs/text/text_stel_6.html

Four new Exoplanet's for August. One is only .08 Jupiter mass, so Earth sized exo's may be posted soon. Go Kepler! http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/atlas/atlas_search.cfm?&Sort=DiscDate&SortDir=DESC It seems that two of these may be in the habitable zone of their stars, but the Planetary Biology site has not been updated yet, so I will reserve judgement. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedTwo more were added in the last few hours. 6 in one day! P.S. Planetary Biology lists 373 exo's now, not 363, so perhaps NASA must catch up. http://www.planetarybiology.com/exoexplorer_planets/

I think that most people who want advanced ETI's to exist just don't consider what they might do. Our solar system has resources that we have never used in all of our history that they most certainly would use and could use wothout ever "interfering" with our development. Their space habitats could have been here collecting sunlight for energy for thousands or even millions of years. I've read that these can be warmed by focusing sunlight with mirrors even out to Jupiter's orbit, so they would hardly be visible to anything on Earth for most of our existence. Why would some super intellect tell sextillions of their beings to leave "our" solar system just because our ancestors started building campfires? So where are they?

About not reaching us yet-When something grows exponentially, (doubles then doubles again) then after ten cycles of doubling it has grown a thousandfold (2-4-8-16-32-64-128-256-512-1024). So one star civilization colonizes another star, then their civilizations both colonize two more stars and so on. Thus, in less than forty cycles, they have colonized all the stars in the galaxy (a thousand colonies-a million-a billion-close to a trillion). Even at the absurd expansion rate of ten million years per colonization cycle (400 million years total), that would still be possible for a civilization that eveloved well within the ten billion year age of the Milky Way. Why would a super intellect declare that no one may interfere with us because interfering is wrong? Wouldn't they have to interfere with everyone else in the universe to enforce that belief? It doesn't take super intellect to see that this is totally contradictory. Besides, a Dyson Ring four hundred million miles from Earth would hardly interfere with us. We've only been able to send a handful of probes out that far in all of our history. We would live on Earth and sextillions of these beings would live out there using the energy of the Sun that we don't.

You are assuming that a half a septillion beings would somehow submit to a super government decision to die on the vine. If any miniscule fraction of this population decided not to play along, then they would continue to colonize. If just a trillion rebels fled from your content society, then the galaxy would still be settled. A civilization that lives in Bernal Spheres/Dyson habitats would have everything they need to colonize. After Spain settled in the America's, many other nation followed. Your assumption must also be perfect to succeed. Not even one single civilization may do what I propose. If the Earth's population doubled only every thousand years, then our power needs would max out the Sun's energy production in less than fifty thousand years. It is not everyone's philosophy that less is more. I am sure that most likely some of the intelligent beings would agree with Mother Theresa that, "Saying that there are too many children is like saying that there are too many flowers."

I thought that the wieners at the IAU decided that there would be no more planets. Plutoids, trans Neptune objects, dwarf planets and perhaps even anet-plays, anything but planets. So X does not mark the spot.

Airbrush-The Sun generates about a hundred trillion times the Earth's present energy requirement. So logically, six hundred sextillion humans could comfortably live in Bernal Spheres or Dyson rings around our Sun. This is a huge number, but far less than an unlimited number. Sooner or later, growth is limited if we choose not to colonize. Besides, a Super Nova within several dozen light years or a GRB pointed at us and it would be extremely hard for even an advanced civilization to survive, not to mention that our Sun will eventually become very inhospitable before settling down as a frigid White Dwarf. Alien civilizations would face this same reality. They must expand or die out. Why should there only be civilizations less advanced than we are? If only one civilization in our ten billion year old galaxy were a mere million years more advanced, then they would be everywhere in the galaxy. They would have been here in our solar system on their Dyson ring since before there were homo sapiens. They could comfortably live on a Dyson ring out to the orbit of Jupiter, where they would arguably observe some "club of advanced species' non-interference policy", but at least they would be here. Only they are not.

This was another of Sagan's comments. Why does it seem that we are alone in such an immense volume of stars? Do technologically advanced civilizations perhaps destroy themselves before reaching out to other star systems? What happens if our intelligence grows faster than our wisdom?

Moontanman-A civilization that colonized 100 billion stars and still kept themselves secret from us is not a super civilization by your reasoning. Got it. iNow-How is it not relevant? I simply asked when a volume stops being a "waste of space"? Sagan's quaint quote implies that there must be more advanced species because otherwise this would be a great waste of space. For the sake of discussion, I merely pointed out that this proves nothing.

iNow-We are most certainly alone as a technological species in the Solar System, so is this enormous volume a waste of space? Is most of the Earth wasted space? I know Carl Sagan liked saying this, but what does it prove? J.C. MacSwell-Why should there only be civilizations no more advanced than ours? The FP isn't about us. Where are the more advanced civilizations? Moontanman-You see no reason to assume super civilizations and then you reiterate how the one I described might be everywhere in the galaxy except here. Which is it?

Here's a link to a site James Kaler has: http://www.astro.illinois.edu/~jkaler/glpa/update08.html "At the top are the GRBs, which are (we think) caused by high mass hypernovae, which, because of their increasingly fast rotation as they collapse, produce focused bi-polar bursts of gamma rays. These in turn light up their surroundings in visual "afterglows." That from GRB 089319B hit an all time record of visual magnitude 5.4 even though 7.5 billion light years away! All things being equal (which of course they are not), the absolute magnitude must have been around -35. Don't get too close. Eta Carinae may blast out an energetic GRB. The rotation axis, however, happily points elsewhere."

IIRC, he just mentioned pressure from the sheer mass of the hypergiant crushing the core to the point that particle-antiparticle pairs were created along with the action of fusion. Of course, the spin and magnetic field of the star are always present, so their effect should be as well. I'll check his book again tonight.

In James Kaler's book, "Extreme Stars", he addresses what he labels Hypergiant stars. The core of a hypergiant is so compact that in addition to normal fusion, particle pairs are also created in abundance. At some critical point, particle-antiparticle pairs are annihilating at such a rate that the resulting gamma rays superheat the star’s core and it erupts (something called pair instability).

Hi Rusty. You can watch whole episodes of "The Universe" again here: http://www.history.com/content/universe/the-universe-video I saw this episode too. I don't recall the designation given to the stars, but they were several thousand light years away. IIRC, most GRBs happen outside the Milky Way, so one in the MW would be of concern. When a huge star collapses into a black hole, creating a GRB, something like the mass of the Sun is converted into energy in one second. I suppose that the beam starts out with a diameter less than that of its star (the Sun's diameter is more than a million kilometers) and then would become more and more diffuse as it propogated toward the Earth. Such a beam would strike at the speed of light with no warning. The beam would be so energetic that the ozone would be depleted, causing mass extinctions as the surface of the Earth would no longer be shielded from the harmful radiation of our own Sun for many years thereafter. Exactly how GRBs form and work has only been discovered in the last twenty years or so, and is a topic of on-going research. The Earth may have already had an encounter with a GRB at what is known as the PreCambrian Extinction event. Just as we are searching for asteroids that are Near Earth Objects and might some day pose a threat, so some scientists are looking at nearby stars for possible GRB threats. The star in the broadcast might be a candidate at some point over the next million years.

Whap2005, I suppose you mean humans were engineered by aliens? The minor variations between humans and other primates can really be explained without aliens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolutionary_genetics I think that Cirkovic is attempting to separate science from this kind of fiction. Let's find some aliens before we ascribe our existence to their handiwork. At some point SETI must be more than an X File.

http://www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/~monnier/Publications/ROP2003_final.pdf This is a very informative paper on optical interferometry. Chapter 5 deals with the near future and mentions resolutions below 0.1 milliarcseconds. Interferometry also involves coronagraphs that "turn off" the light of a star by interphasing the peak and trough of its lightwave to cancel it out entirely.This "nulling" allows the weaker light of nearby planets to be resolved more easily. Software, supercomputers and shere numbers count too, as ten interconnected telescopes are better than six, etc. What might HAL 9000 do with a dozen Thirty Meter Telescopes? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Meter_Telescope

http://www.terrestrial-planet-finder.com/index.html This sounds like what you are talking about. We won't see any aliens but we will see some interesting planets.

Let's review. Dyson, Kardeshev and I are simply saying that an advanced civilization would use the enormous energy of their star and the abundant resources of their star system to create a living space for trillions of their inhabitants. I suppose that not every advanced civilization has to do this. It's even possible that most of the members of any advanced civilization would not want to do this. However, if only one of the advanced civilizations had just a few members do this, then what would happen? The same end result. These members of that civilization would eventually grow to use the entire energy of their star (type II). If even a small percentage of these beings continued to expand to prevent extinction or because they prefer unlimited growth, then they could conceivably grow to colonize their whole galaxy (Type III). Of course, they would stop right there, or continue to expand for the same reasons to Type IV eventually and most likely within billions of years. Even the blind can see that. You are daring to predict exactly any future technology, goals or cultural values that exclude this.

If a Type II was anywhere, then they would grow to a Type IV and be right here. That's how it works if interstellar travel is possible. That is the FP. Page 9 of Cirkovic's paper shows the Milky Way being colonized in 3.75 million years, with technology that we could develop in the next 250,000 years. So it is not just my hellatious assumption that the MW is ours in less than 4 million years. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0907/0907.3432v1.pdf I already posted that a civilization that chose not to expand would doom itself to a SN or GRB or at best be stuck in the minute HZ of a dying White Dwarf Star for trillions of years. That is why they would expand. I get your rhetorical question, but what is your reasoning behind your question? Why would any intelligent species choose death or a bleak, confined future over exploration and survival?

But again, it only takes one. Your point is that no one in a half million galaxies decided to do this over a period of billions of years. In less than 4 million years we could be a type III. Why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we colonize other galaxies? Why would we stop growing and not use energy?

When Dyson proposed that a civilization would find more living room in space habitats than on a planet's surface, it wasn't a human solution, it was the most intelligent solution. When Kardeshev proposed that an advanced civilization would use all the energy of their home world, then their star, galaxy and galaxy supercluster, this was also not just a human solution, but the most intelligent one as well. You might be able to argue that some species wouldn't necessarily do this, but not all of them. It only takes one Type IV and we would have neighbors. Logically, there should be ETI's who are a thousand years less advanced than we, or a million or a billion years. And just as logically, there should be ETI's on the other side of the scale, except that there is no evidence of this, and there really should be. Perhaps we should aspire to becoming the undebatable "wise life".

500,000 galaxies with 100 billion stars each gives me 50 quadrillion, but such a large sampling really is hard to fine tune. Let's say less than a craptillion. These would be a Kardeshev Type IV intergalactic civilization whose million year old Dyson Sphere around the Sun would be a dead give-away.

The FP really means that we shouldn't need to look. The plausible reasons why we haven't encountered anything don't explain why they haven't encountered us. If there is no scientific reason why they shouldn't be here in our solar system after billions of years, but they are obviously not here, then they are indeed rare. According to Kardashev, a Type III uses the energy of all the stars of a galaxy. Advanced civilizations use energy and stars are a great source of that energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale So that is what they do. You have a sample size of 50 quadrillion stars. You have a sample of one star with intelligent life.

Extreeeemely rare. Again, we're talking one in 50 quadrillion stars has a spacefaring race (although we barely qualify). Just for arguments sake, of course, isn't a reason. Why would this be so incredibly rare? We would indeed require an omnipotent diety to make us that unique.