The music chosen to accompany her father's words is a "beautiful and symbolic gesture that creates a link between our father's presence on this planet, his wish to go into space and his explorations of the universe in his mind", the professor's daughter Lucy said. "It is a message of peace and hope, about unity and the need for us to live together in harmony on this planet."
She added: "The broadcast will be beamed towards the nearest black hole, 1A 0620-00, which lives in a binary system with a fairly ordinary orange dwarf star."
Wait... you're going to take a message of peace and hope and... shoot it into a black hole ?
I don't think you've thought this through.
#Irony
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-44481914
Can we stop beaming "Hi predatory civs! Defenseless, tasty Earth there!" messages everywhere, please? There are better ways to check that particular answer to the Fermi paradox.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you've thought this through
ReplyDeleteIt is fairly safe to say there is nobody on this planet who's thought more about black holes than Hawkins.
Just saying ;)
Elie Thorne then we better stop using electricity, cause the planet is broadcasting an obviously artificial signal across a major portion of the electromagnetic spectrum .
ReplyDeleteOh wait, it's too late.
https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/p/q-a.html#ohgoodgrief
ReplyDeleteThere is a difference between being somewhat visible due to waste emission and other "I wonder how many asteroids are there" beams and powerful, highly directional beams.
ReplyDeleteThat difference may be between detection at a few light years and detection at a few hundred light years. It may also be between "Eh, don't mind that system, it's just random tech-noise" and something paying attention to the very fact that we tried to make them so.
Elie Thorne with our admittedly crude abilities, we're able to discern vast amounts of knowledge about galaxies billions of light years away. any entit(y/ies) terminologically advanced enough to interact with us is pretty much guaranteed to have the ability to pinpoint (hint we can) that random tech-noise
ReplyDeleteRay Bernache The difference may not just be that they can detect us but that, by sending directional info-loaded beams like that, they care about us.
ReplyDeleteAnd if it is out there and still hidden enough that we haven't detected anything, despite anything out there being statistically almost assured to be at least a K3 civ... well, it's probably a very idiotic gamble to make them care about us.
And by very idiotic, I mean Darwin Awards, Special Galactic Edition.
Any civilisation with the technological capacity to get here is going to already have detected us with or without radio transmissions.
ReplyDeleteIsn't there a theorem of some kind, a hypothesis or whatever, which describes the surface of a black hole, the Event Horizon I imagine, as a region in which information from all matter and energy passing through is stored permanently (or at least as permanent as any black hole might actually be), smeared-out as holographically-encoded information ?
ReplyDeleteElie Thorne I'm not sure how to make it any clearer, we've been steadily (omnidirectionally) shouting into the cosmos since before you or I were born, that someone decides they're particular shout in one particular direction will hopefully be picked and translated isn't going to increase our risk exposure.
ReplyDeleteRay Bernache I don't think you've thought this through
ReplyDeleteI find it doubtful that Stephen Hawking himself came up with the notion of beaming this message of peace and hope into a black hole. Consider the context of the thing. A memorial service. His own. The known facts point to the man being horizontal since March 14. So ... no, this is not a plan Stephen Hawking conceived. This was dreamed up by a family member befuddled with grief to the point that shooting a message of peace and hope into a black hole seemed to make sense. Which it does not. And that is the notion Rhys Taylor is questioning.
Are you sure you were really that confused Ray?
William Black Hawkins had lived with the expectation of an early death for most of his life, while he may not have chosen what to send, from what little I know of him, (he was reputed to have a wicked sense of humor) I could see him deciding to send a message towards a black hole.
ReplyDelete