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New Telescope

That's pretty awesome! I really find array telescopes fascinating. And the cool thing is that the more arrays you have, the larger the effective telescope you have.

Unfortunately Elon Musk kinda ruined things with the Star Link satellites. They cause huge lines to show up in images. But perhaps the more of these arrays, the less of a problem they will pose?

I wonder if finally they will track down which planet I'm from?! :smilecat:

I think also recently there was some news about the "Wow Signal". I did bookmark the article to read on my iMac but today I found it had a corrupt hard disk :-( Actually the first time that's happened with a Mac for me. I guess I should probably try and track down the article since this just reminded me about it! :)
 
A lot of people don't really comprehend the size, it's just over 45 miles wide. One telescope.
 
It's remoteness is the big factor in where it's being built. The nearest town with more than a couple of hundred people is over 1000 kilometres away. No light pollution, which these days also includes radio waves such as from phone networks. None of those out in those places.
 
That is massive! The angular size of sky that can be captured would be huge. I can imagine they will need some crazy amount of servers to record the data! I'm pretty sure that petabytes of data are captured with our current telescopes, particularly when working in conjunction with other arrays, in a single day!

I also think I found the article I was talking about...


At least I think it was that one, I usually visit the website each day so I think it's the right one :smilecat:
 
The actual physical antenna array isn't going to cost all that much, not out of a budget of 3 billion, but the computer hardware....
 
I also think I found the article I was talking about...
Thanks for reminding me of SETI, I'd forgotten all about it. I was 12 years old at the time and a science buff. The only history lesson I really enjoyed was when they asked us to write our own predictions on what WW III might look like.

The technology fascinated me and I handed in a truly disturbing report on the state of the cold war, (still current back then) the capabilities of the current technology, the size of the weapons stockpiles, and the futility of the (new at this time) SALT talks.
 
Thanks for reminding me of SETI, I'd forgotten all about it. I was 12 years old at the time and a science buff. The only history lesson I really enjoyed was when they asked us to write our own predictions on what WW III might look like.

The technology fascinated me and I handed in a truly disturbing report on the state of the cold war, (still current back then) the capabilities of the current technology, the size of the weapons stockpiles, and the futility of the (new at this time) SALT talks.
I wonder just how many computers are currently still sifting through data these days as part of the SETI project. I sometimes wonder if the planet has enough spare CPU cycles to actually analyse the data and make a dent. If we are crunching enough data it certainly seems the Fermi Paradox is holding true.

I remember when I first heard of the SETI project and found you could download a screensaver that would help crunch the data while your pc sat idle. I did download it and install it but it used to bring my relatively humble PC to it's knees at the time. I also got some spontaneous power cut outs so I had to forego installing it after windows xp fell apart as usual! :smilecat:
 
That was a big issue back then, they started asking people to help crunch the data back in the 90s but the average PC couldn't cope. At that time I was fully in to the computers in a big way and I knew my beast fell far too short to contribute. But I had my fingers crossed for them.
 
That was a big issue back then, they started asking people to help crunch the data back in the 90s but the average PC couldn't cope. At that time I was fully in to the computers in a big way and I knew my beast fell far too short to contribute. But I had my fingers crossed for them.
I really thought that the project would uncover something in short order. Turns out I was incredibly naive at the time! I really had very little understanding of the herculean task. I even half expected my computer might just be the one to find something.

Ah to be young and stupid again! Actually forget the stupid part lol! Just the young bit perhaps, hold the stupid :smilecat:
 
New Toys! It's what we all live for, isn't it?

A lot of people struggle with truly big numbers, in understanding things like geological time, or in the size of space.

I refuse to believe that we are the only planet that has evolved in this fashion. The numbers themselves state it as an impossibility. But the geological time frames - the likelyhood of other civilizations existing at the same time as us....
 
New Toys! It's what we all live for, isn't it?

A lot of people struggle with truly big numbers, in understanding things like geological time, or in the size of space.

I refuse to believe that we are the only planet that has evolved in this fashion. The numbers themselves state it as an impossibility. But the geological time frames - the likelyhood of other civilizations existing at the same time as us....
Very true! Something to engage the brain in a novel way :)

I got a little obsessed with the scale of things for a while. I tried to find ways of perceiving hard to imagine things, like the sheer scale of the universe. I kinda put things into perspective by watching a star and trying not to blink too much. I wanted to see if I could perceive the rotation of the earth. It took a while but after about 30 seconds it started to disappear behind a chimney on the roof opposite. But it took at least another minute before it was firmly behind it.

So I thought about how that star is maybe the same size as our sun, maybe appearing thousands of times smaller. Then thinking about how far from our sun the earth is.

It made me realise just in terms of our own galaxy, how incredibly small the earth is and just how small I must be to only be barely able to perceive the earth's rotation if I focused all of my attention on that star!

So just by the vastness of the universe alone, I find it very hard to believe there are no other intelligent species on other distant worlds. The question is, would our species ever be able to travel to visit another civilisation? o_O
 
I have no doubts whatsoever that we'll achieve the technology to travel, but once again, to find a civilisation that exists at the same time as us is improbable. We'll find either long lost civilisations or we'll find the local equivalent of a ramapithecine.
 
I have no doubts whatsoever that we'll achieve the technology to travel, but once again, to find a civilisation that exists at the same time as us is improbable. We'll find either long lost civilisations or we'll find the local equivalent of a ramapithecine.
I agree! I even think eventually we will travel faster than light!

I once told someone that and they just couldn't get on board. The way I see it, sure, based on our current understanding, faster than light travel is impossible. On the other hand, putting several tons of metal in the sky was considered impossible at one point. We will find a way, it will just take time.
 
We're getting further and further ahead all the time. A lot of technologies don't seem related at first but they are. Forgive me for a little bit of pride in my country's achievements, we don't get to brag too often. :)

The development of new fuels is a big thing. Australia has been leading the way in this recently, new thrusters running on Iodine, and new internal combustion engines that run on Ammonia.

Bit by bit other people figure out how to start piecing all the new technologies together, it's the theory of evolution at work in the hardware. :)
 
One of my favourite fantasy novels was The Many Coloured Land series by Julian May. I mention that because it relates to discovering of life on other planets.
 
I find it impossible to think we are the only speck of dust with intellectually advanced life, considering the size of the Universe, perhaps multi-verses and parallel verses.

Sure, there are places already gone. Ancient remains.
Others in the process most likely. More to come. And some co-existing.
Just as the stars in the Universe. Some are dead, some are being born and there
are many at the same stage.
 
Great to see others with similar interests, my interest in physics include astronomy to many anomalies starting to come to light, look at what the James Webb is bring forth.
 

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