The last of the alternate hominids walked the earth some 40,000 years ago? Imagine if a band of them had survived until today, how modern humans would have interacted with them. Given the way we treat each other with little differentiation among groups, it is scary to contemplate how we would have treated a group of hominids that were significantly different from us physically, but with whom we could have interbred. Look at how modern Australians treated the indigenous population, for example, or how early Americans treated Native Americans. Not a promising situation for long-term survival of the “different” hominids.
If you think The Left isn’t a totalitarian threat to us all, you ain’t paying attention.
Well, I definitely support erring on the side of caution when it comes to sending signals into space advertising the Earth as home to an intelligent species.
A sufficiently advanced alien civilization using mechanical probes could map the galaxy for all its planets, but we don’t have to speed things up.
F: You’re criticizing Australians and Americans. Perhaps you should lay the blame on “Darwin,” i.e., natural selection (formerly known as “survival of the fittest”)?
huxley,
Well, any life forms in a star system within about 70 miles of us have already seen episodes of “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy.” Ralph Cramden and Lucy Arnaz. They probably have low regard for our IQs, but are impressed with our abilities to stomp grapes and drive buses.
Here is a recent, very interesting statement from Lou Elizondo–
In the background to all of the items in the foreground—the Chinese Coronavirus and all of its variations, the snowstorm and day-long backup on I-95, the James W ebb telescope unfolding, Schumer threatening to destroy the filibuster, etc.– we have very interesting things happening in terms of UFOs, which make me think that we are inching closer and closer to some sort of breakthrough announcement.
There is the passage and signing into law of the Defense Authorization Act for 2022, which sets up a permanent UFO investigatory agency in the Pentagon with a responsibility to periodically deliver unclassified reports to the public.
The announcement that NASA has hired 24 theologians to get their ideas about what the impact might be of a revelation that aliens exist. *
Moreover, recently Lou Elizondo has been edging much closer to a flat out stating that UFOs are alien craft.
See for instance this Elizondo quote from a recent 12/23 interview:
“What if it turns out that there is another species that is even higher on this ladder than we are? Do we need the social institutions that we have today, do we need the state and religious organizations that we have today, if it turns out that there is something else, or someone else, technologically more advanced and possibly more advanced from an evolutionary point of view? Are we wasting all this time? Or are we doing exactly what we should be doing?”
“What if it turns out that humanity is actually just another animal in the zoo? If we saw ourselves in the role of the zoo keeper before, then maybe we are just another exhibit inside the zoo? What would this mean to us?”
“There will come a time when we have to come to terms with ourselves, whatever that means, whatever philosophical point of view you take. This will affect all of us. And I think this is important. Are we in a situation where history may need to be rewritten? That’s what I meant”. **
Then there is the announcement by a prominent physicist that he had been contacted by someone from the government, and asked to come up with ideas for how to break the news of aliens to the public.
It all seems very suggestive to me. Does it to you?
CapnRusty:
I’m not really “blaming” anyone: more powerful groups have pretty regularly treated less powerful peoples badly.
OTOH, maybe that’s what Darwin was saying. . .
So there was some messing around?
Snow on Pine,
Way back in the 60s to 70s I believe there was a government/international plan developed for introducing the world to the existence of ETI. I can’t remember the details but I do think it involved quite a long timeline to “adjust” cultural attitudes towards acceptance. I also believe there was a very large concern about such an announcement on people’s psyche, and also general disruption of institutions.
Huxley @ 1:31: “Well, I definitely support erring on the side of caution when it comes to sending signals into space advertising the Earth as home to an intelligent species.
A sufficiently advanced alien civilization using mechanical probes could map the galaxy for all its planets, but we don’t have to speed things up.”
Yeah. But it’s a little late to worry about the EM radiation we’ve been blasting in all directions for decades. Here is my speculation (based on a visit to the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico):
Arecibo Message
It was in the time of punch cards
When memory was scarce
Twenty-three rows
By seventy-three columns
A binary array uniquely
Impregnated with every idea
We could cram in code
Invented for one hearing
By hypothetical beings
Adrift amidst the light-years
Far in our future
Where the outbound beam
Might just interrupt
Their instruments
But even then we knew
Our single burst
Of hope defiance
Invitation
Warning
Must go unheard
Because by then the stars
We aimed for
Will have moved
Only we imagining
Ourselves as listeners
Will catch and unravel
The ingenious cross-stitch
Of value and non-value
That stands for numbers
Which point in turn to elements
Primordial hydrogen
Oxygen carbon nitrogen and yes
Phosphorus all of them
In turn defining DNA
Our ultimate inheritance
Revealing how to read us
How we are made
Our shape and height
And where we can be found
Having seen that dish
In a hinterland of sinkholes
Loud with birds and
Overrun with vines
Having imagined how
Its aluminum surface
Rang once with the pulse
Of human information
Sent into eternity
I can see what a stunt it was
Just a way to shout
Into the void
And please the patrons
But also I see how it was
Real and irrevocable
And nightly now I study it
Worried at the azimuth
Smeared across the sky
Hoping that its elegant
One-time grammar
Will let it be understood
Hoping also it won’t be
Rufus T. Firefly:
I know that “miles” in your post is actually “light-years”, but I live about 70 miles from San Francisco which really does seem to be in a different star system and populated by an alien species.
Snow on Pine (quoting Lou Elizondo):
“…more advanced from an evolutionary point of view?”
I was never the best student, but one concept that stuck with me (I don’t actually know if it’s true or not) is that evolution should not be viewed as a ladder with some species “lower” and some “higher” (with humans being on the highest rung), but more in terms of it leading to species that are simply better adapted to their environment (which, of course, changes over time). I would personally be thrilled to meet an alien single-celled organism.
All four of them are great but the ‘Good kids are compliant kids’ is great.
Need these in every blue city. They are all grafitti strewn wastelands anyway.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, Scott Adams, all the folks at the Monroe Institute, and an exploding population of interested observers are seeing this experience as a virtual reality game.
The players are endlessly reincarnating back into what they call the Earth Life System, but it appears that it is a creation of another virtual reality game occupied by players which created this one.
According to Tom Campbell, a student of Robert Monroe and a PhD physicist, there is free will in this game, with the objective of seeing what will happen.
Introducing the truth into the Earth Life System is an attempt to try to move it toward some sort of advancement.
There are Billions of galaxies, each containing Billions of stars (recall, our Sun is a medium sized star) .
Why anybody could believe that in all the galaxies out there , the only intelligent life (minus democrats) is here on earth, and nowhere else, is beyond comprehension.
The usual excuse is that, well, if these other worldly beings existed they would have contacted us.
To which I say, “why would they bother; why should they; what’s in it for them?” If they know of earthlings and they have seen/visited/know of humans, they are a few thousand years more advanced then humans. For them, it would be similar to communicating with ants.
They would not benefit from chatting it up with humans.
Some years back the Hubble telescope was aimed at a spot in space that was empty; black. Nothing there. It was aimed at that spot for extended period.
After developing the image from Hubble of the empty space, they found thousands upon thousands of stars.
As for humans, hominids, etc., just wait till some Cro-Magnon bones are found, say, in Latin or North America or in the “Stans,” of south central Asia, that are way older than any previous hominid findings, and the entire edifice of human evolution will be turned on it’s head.
Frankly, how a bone fragment about 5 mm ( about 0.2 inches) long and few hundred thousand years old, can be identified as belonging to a pinky bone of a human ancestor defies logic.
After all, humans and chimps share over 90% of DNA; if the pinky bone fragment came from a long ago extinct chimp, how would researchers know it was from a chimp ancestor or from a very early human?
The video shows the pinky bone fragment next to one penny; the fragment is the size of the engraved lettering on the penny,
@ F @ 11:55 AM
Australian aborigine clans would often raid – and kill – other Aborigine clans. White folks need not apply.
Some Native American tribes had been exterminated by other native american tribes, well before whites stepped foot in N. America.
Black African tribes would wage war on other black African tribes, well before whites stepped foot in Africa. And it was black African tribes that “delivered” to white slave traders, black slaves.
The politically correct notion that only whites engaged in deadly policies against anybody that opposed them, is total BS.
People – hominids, if you will – have been killing each other for tens of thousands of years.
Yeah. But it’s a little late to worry about the EM radiation we’ve been blasting in all directions for decades
Owen:
“Blasting out” only applies to human distances. By the Inverse-Square Law the intensity of a signal drops off by the square of the distance. Moving to interstellar distances reduce the blast to a whisper.
My back of the envelope calculation for a radio signal intense enough to be received within 1000 miles on Earth would be reduced by a factor of 6.2×10^20 for Alpha Centauri, our nearest star system at ~4.3 light years away.
That’s a huge amount of attenuation. I have my doubts such a reduced signal could be successfully received even on Alpha Centauri. Farther out it gets worse by the square of the distance.
Regarding aliens and UFOs:
How many can dance on the head of a pin?
deckhand,
Yikes! I just noticed my mistake. You are correct. Should have been light years. Thanks for not piling on!
@deckhand_dreams :
“I would personally be thrilled to meet an alien single-celled organism.”
The feeling could be mutual. In which case you might not be thrilled for very long.
Great work, Owen!
Griffin @ 5:10pm,
Even though Sabo is on the left coast, he would be my first guess as the creator. My second guess would be the guy who does The People’s Cube: https://thepeoplescube.com/
deckhand_dreams,
Yup, evolution is just a contest to see who is good at surviving to the point of successfully reproducing. Everything else is just window dressing.
If Neanderthals lived today, would we not most likely consider them just another race, not another species? This whole idea that two groups, who share common lineage, and can breed and produce fertile offspring , are different “ species” is somewhat arbitrary. We consider dogs and wolves separate species, apparently, not because of any truly great DNA difference, but because of their differing cultural history. You could breed dogs and wolves of similar size and their offspring would be fertile. A Siberian husky is in many ways more like a wolf than the husky is like a Chihuahua, yet we consider the Husky and the Chihuahua to be the same species, but the husky and the wolf a different species, because of cultural history. Horses and donkeys on the other hand, are more legitimately considered different species, because their offspring is usually infertile.
@Rufus:
“Yup, evolution is just a contest to see who is good at surviving to the point of successfully reproducing.”
Yuppety yup.
“Everything else is just window dressing.”
We could even call it ‘Constructed’ 😀
Oops… Where did I put my Browning?
Feeling uncharacteristically mellow this Sunday a.m. I think I’m going to let this Phylogenetic Tree fall in the forest and give it the Nelson Ear.
Of course, if by popular request…
huxley @6:56pm,
Either I misunderstand you or you misunderstand radiation (or there is something completely off in the most basic, fundamental ways I understand radiation).
If we have 2, identical 1 foot diameter spherical balloons covered in identical amounts of wet paint and place both of them inside clear spheres with all the air sucked out (a vacuum) with one clear sphere being 3 feet in diameter and the other being 6 feet in diameter and we pop both balloons the same amount of paint hits the inside of each clear sphere. Even though the paint in the 6 foot diameter sphere travels twice the distance each drop keeps going until it hits something. There is no difference in the amount of paint that gets radiated in either clear sphere.
What is different is the density of the drops splattered. The 6 foot diameter sphere will have more gaps between paint drops than the 3 foot sphere.
In the vacuum of space radio waves (and, I believe, all radiation) travels on forever, or until absorbed by something (which, I think, would always result in heat?).
This is why the part of Mercury’s surface (a rocky planet with no atmosphere) facing the Sun is much hotter than the surface of Mars (another rocky planet with no atmosphere). At a distance of about 4 1/2 times further a lot less solar radiation is “painted” on Mars’ surface than Mercury’s. A solar photon hitting Mercury is identical in force and radiative quality to one hitting Mars, it’s just that a lot fewer hit Mars.
Rufus,
Imagine you are on a mountain top on a clear night, looking down into the farthest reaches of a valley. Imagine a powerful spotlight in the valley shining upward. You would likely be able to see that. Now imagine a double D cell flashlight with old style incandescent bulbs. Maybe you would still be able to see that. Keep getting smaller and smaller with your light sources, and eventually, your eyes , or your mind, will not be able to detect it. Even if some photons are striking your eyes, there are too few for your mind to acknowledge them, or the photons density is so low, there are literally gaps where your eyes are receiving no photons at all, as they pass around your eyes, but not into your eyes.
The Inverse square law is something I brought up on this site several weeks ago on the discussion of aliens, but at the time it seemed to pass right over most people’s head. When I looked up some information on SETI, there was information out there that the standard TV signal is likely the wrong type of signal to travel in detectable amounts to the stars.
And the other thing about EM signals, is that the wave aspects is more important to transmit information than the particulate aspect of mere photonic light detection. The EM wave must arrive at the source as a stream, ie , a wave, in order to transmit information whether it be amplitude modulation or frequency modulation. In other words, a segment, not a mere disjointed photon, must arrive at the receiver, in order to transmit information with TV and radio signals. Light on the other hand, needs mere disjointed photons to transmit its source presence.
From what I have read, that stream runs into other sources of EM along the way, and gets broken up. Think of trying to watch TV with rabbit ears during a strong thunderstorm.
jon baker,
I understand your first comment (the valley and flashlight), but I don’t think it’s relevant to our discussion. Yes, fewer of my retinal cones are struck by light particles or waves (depends on what day of the week it is 😉 ) but the intensity is the same if the valley is on the surface of a planet with no atmosphere.
Your second comment is relevant, regarding interference. Even in the relative vacuum of space the further something travels the more likely it is to run into something. But I still don’t see what any of this has to do with the inverse square law or distance. The inverse square law matters regarding sensitivity. A 10 foot diameter disc antenna is going to pick up more radiation than a 1 foot diameter disc, just as a 10 foot diameter disc 100 miles from the source will pick up more radiation than one 1,000 miles away, but each, individual unit of radiation is the same. Distance matters regarding the odds of encountering interference, but I don’t think that’s an inverse square law thing, that’s just increased odds because space is not a perfect vacuum.
We still communicate with Voyager 1, right? As long as it has power we can communicate with it.
I think?
Rufus: perhaps you meant to say “the energy is the same … with no atmosphere”? But that is not quite correct, either.
But if the energy source is less (flashlight vs. search light), the intensity is also less. So of course the intensity declines if the source is weaker, or the area is greater [over a constant time interval], as it would be at a greater spherical distance. Your “paint-particle-intensity [aka density] is lower on the bigger sphere with the same number of “droplets” covering a larger area.
Rufus,
Voyager 1 is only 21.5 Light HOURS from Earth. If it was 24 Light Hours from Earth, it would still be only 1/365th of one light year from Earth. Which means it has covered a distance less than 0.00064 % of the distance to the next star system, at 4.3 light years.
@ Owen “Arecibo Message”
Very nice poem, and provocative message.
Thanks.
Sunday morning and just catching up with the Neophiles. During your discussion last night I was delighting in watching the Bills destroy the New England Criminals, while also switching over to the Sony Open in Honolulu.
Anyway… The 1/r^2 law applies to radiation that radiates equally in all directions… ie rufus has the right of it. The total integrated energy will be the same, but the energy density decreases with distance. With light, it’s sometimes more convenient to use power as it relates directly to the net flux of the photons, so the 1/r^2 law decreases the watts/m^2. And in terms of energy/photon, E=h(frequency), so a UV photon has more energy than a radio photon.
The Arecibo message was a focused signal much like the cited example of looking at a flashlight from afar as opposed to a bare light bulb radiating in all directions from the same distance. Eventually, the photon density does decrease with the focused light, but not at the 1/r^2 rate as for the bare light bulb. One can also provide even more “resistance” to distance degradation by using a focused laser source as the photons are now initially all in phase.
As far as detecting weak signals, again as Rufus stated collecting area is important. Exploiting computer processing we can now “make” very large dishes. The obvious example is the VLA in New Mexico where the effective size of the dish is the radius of the array. Now the VLA is somewhat obsolete in that we now routinely use what is called VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) in which dishes across the globe are linked. Effectively we now have a receiver that is the diameter of the earth itself. There are dreams of putting receivers in space at L2 points to increase the effective diameter even further. The photon density may be low but gather enough photons and you get a measureable signal.
A main sequence star like the Sun peaks its radiation in the visible and follows the standard blackbody curve. It does radiate in the radio, but at much lower value. I’m not sure of the calculation (never done it myself), but I think I read in some SETI material that when the Earth began radiating in the radio some 100 years ago that would have changed the net output spectrum of the Sun as observed from afar in the radio region. ie the Sun would no longer have the standard radio spectrum of a main sequence yellow star. There would be a small peak in the kHz to MHz frequencies totally uncharacteristic of such a star. If one could detect such a peak, it would indicate an unnatural radio source associated with such a star.
Hello, Owen. That was an interesting poem. It’s interesting to speculate about whether the message would really be understandable by aliens on its own without additional enlightening material or footnotes or something. I tried to interpret it once from the point of view of approaching it without preconceptions, although of course with a chemistry background and having seen Sagan’s series, I still had an unfair advantage. You’re right that there’s a certain elegance to it, but at the same time enough crypticity (neologism?) that we might hope that “they” out there won’t get it. I think that the attempt to render DNA in 2-D was too crude to get the point across, for example, absent some structural depiction of nucleotides.
A very good start. Kirn and Taibbi certainly understand the total corruption and bankruptcy of journalism and liberals. And the hatred of much of America that animates them.
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The last of the alternate hominids walked the earth some 40,000 years ago? Imagine if a band of them had survived until today, how modern humans would have interacted with them. Given the way we treat each other with little differentiation among groups, it is scary to contemplate how we would have treated a group of hominids that were significantly different from us physically, but with whom we could have interbred. Look at how modern Australians treated the indigenous population, for example, or how early Americans treated Native Americans. Not a promising situation for long-term survival of the “different” hominids.
Tucker on fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lF5Bb3Mt0rg
If you think The Left isn’t a totalitarian threat to us all, you ain’t paying attention.
Well, I definitely support erring on the side of caution when it comes to sending signals into space advertising the Earth as home to an intelligent species.
A sufficiently advanced alien civilization using mechanical probes could map the galaxy for all its planets, but we don’t have to speed things up.
F: You’re criticizing Australians and Americans. Perhaps you should lay the blame on “Darwin,” i.e., natural selection (formerly known as “survival of the fittest”)?
huxley,
Well, any life forms in a star system within about 70 miles of us have already seen episodes of “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy.” Ralph Cramden and Lucy Arnaz. They probably have low regard for our IQs, but are impressed with our abilities to stomp grapes and drive buses.
Here is a recent, very interesting statement from Lou Elizondo–
In the background to all of the items in the foreground—the Chinese Coronavirus and all of its variations, the snowstorm and day-long backup on I-95, the James W ebb telescope unfolding, Schumer threatening to destroy the filibuster, etc.– we have very interesting things happening in terms of UFOs, which make me think that we are inching closer and closer to some sort of breakthrough announcement.
There is the passage and signing into law of the Defense Authorization Act for 2022, which sets up a permanent UFO investigatory agency in the Pentagon with a responsibility to periodically deliver unclassified reports to the public.
The announcement that NASA has hired 24 theologians to get their ideas about what the impact might be of a revelation that aliens exist. *
* See https://nypost.com/2021/12/27/nasa-hired-24-theologians-to-study-reaction-to-aliens-book/
Moreover, recently Lou Elizondo has been edging much closer to a flat out stating that UFOs are alien craft.
See for instance this Elizondo quote from a recent 12/23 interview:
“What if it turns out that there is another species that is even higher on this ladder than we are? Do we need the social institutions that we have today, do we need the state and religious organizations that we have today, if it turns out that there is something else, or someone else, technologically more advanced and possibly more advanced from an evolutionary point of view? Are we wasting all this time? Or are we doing exactly what we should be doing?”
“What if it turns out that humanity is actually just another animal in the zoo? If we saw ourselves in the role of the zoo keeper before, then maybe we are just another exhibit inside the zoo? What would this mean to us?”
“There will come a time when we have to come to terms with ourselves, whatever that means, whatever philosophical point of view you take. This will affect all of us. And I think this is important. Are we in a situation where history may need to be rewritten? That’s what I meant”. **
** See https://www.planet-today.com/2021/12/luis-elizondo-earth-is-zoo-ruled-by.html
Then there is the announcement by a prominent physicist that he had been contacted by someone from the government, and asked to come up with ideas for how to break the news of aliens to the public.
It all seems very suggestive to me. Does it to you?
CapnRusty:
I’m not really “blaming” anyone: more powerful groups have pretty regularly treated less powerful peoples badly.
OTOH, maybe that’s what Darwin was saying. . .
So there was some messing around?
Snow on Pine,
Way back in the 60s to 70s I believe there was a government/international plan developed for introducing the world to the existence of ETI. I can’t remember the details but I do think it involved quite a long timeline to “adjust” cultural attitudes towards acceptance. I also believe there was a very large concern about such an announcement on people’s psyche, and also general disruption of institutions.
Huxley @ 1:31: “Well, I definitely support erring on the side of caution when it comes to sending signals into space advertising the Earth as home to an intelligent species.
A sufficiently advanced alien civilization using mechanical probes could map the galaxy for all its planets, but we don’t have to speed things up.”
Yeah. But it’s a little late to worry about the EM radiation we’ve been blasting in all directions for decades. Here is my speculation (based on a visit to the radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico):
Arecibo Message
It was in the time of punch cards
When memory was scarce
Twenty-three rows
By seventy-three columns
A binary array uniquely
Impregnated with every idea
We could cram in code
Invented for one hearing
By hypothetical beings
Adrift amidst the light-years
Far in our future
Where the outbound beam
Might just interrupt
Their instruments
But even then we knew
Our single burst
Of hope defiance
Invitation
Warning
Must go unheard
Because by then the stars
We aimed for
Will have moved
Only we imagining
Ourselves as listeners
Will catch and unravel
The ingenious cross-stitch
Of value and non-value
That stands for numbers
Which point in turn to elements
Primordial hydrogen
Oxygen carbon nitrogen and yes
Phosphorus all of them
In turn defining DNA
Our ultimate inheritance
Revealing how to read us
How we are made
Our shape and height
And where we can be found
Having seen that dish
In a hinterland of sinkholes
Loud with birds and
Overrun with vines
Having imagined how
Its aluminum surface
Rang once with the pulse
Of human information
Sent into eternity
I can see what a stunt it was
Just a way to shout
Into the void
And please the patrons
But also I see how it was
Real and irrevocable
And nightly now I study it
Worried at the azimuth
Smeared across the sky
Hoping that its elegant
One-time grammar
Will let it be understood
Hoping also it won’t be
Rufus T. Firefly:
I know that “miles” in your post is actually “light-years”, but I live about 70 miles from San Francisco which really does seem to be in a different star system and populated by an alien species.
Snow on Pine (quoting Lou Elizondo):
“…more advanced from an evolutionary point of view?”
I was never the best student, but one concept that stuck with me (I don’t actually know if it’s true or not) is that evolution should not be viewed as a ladder with some species “lower” and some “higher” (with humans being on the highest rung), but more in terms of it leading to species that are simply better adapted to their environment (which, of course, changes over time). I would personally be thrilled to meet an alien single-celled organism.
More of this please. Everywhere.
https://twitter.com/LeighWolf/status/1482408194957889537
All four of them are great but the ‘Good kids are compliant kids’ is great.
Need these in every blue city. They are all grafitti strewn wastelands anyway.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, Scott Adams, all the folks at the Monroe Institute, and an exploding population of interested observers are seeing this experience as a virtual reality game.
The players are endlessly reincarnating back into what they call the Earth Life System, but it appears that it is a creation of another virtual reality game occupied by players which created this one.
According to Tom Campbell, a student of Robert Monroe and a PhD physicist, there is free will in this game, with the objective of seeing what will happen.
Introducing the truth into the Earth Life System is an attempt to try to move it toward some sort of advancement.
There are Billions of galaxies, each containing Billions of stars (recall, our Sun is a medium sized star) .
Why anybody could believe that in all the galaxies out there , the only intelligent life (minus democrats) is here on earth, and nowhere else, is beyond comprehension.
The usual excuse is that, well, if these other worldly beings existed they would have contacted us.
To which I say, “why would they bother; why should they; what’s in it for them?” If they know of earthlings and they have seen/visited/know of humans, they are a few thousand years more advanced then humans. For them, it would be similar to communicating with ants.
They would not benefit from chatting it up with humans.
Some years back the Hubble telescope was aimed at a spot in space that was empty; black. Nothing there. It was aimed at that spot for extended period.
After developing the image from Hubble of the empty space, they found thousands upon thousands of stars.
As for humans, hominids, etc., just wait till some Cro-Magnon bones are found, say, in Latin or North America or in the “Stans,” of south central Asia, that are way older than any previous hominid findings, and the entire edifice of human evolution will be turned on it’s head.
Frankly, how a bone fragment about 5 mm ( about 0.2 inches) long and few hundred thousand years old, can be identified as belonging to a pinky bone of a human ancestor defies logic.
After all, humans and chimps share over 90% of DNA; if the pinky bone fragment came from a long ago extinct chimp, how would researchers know it was from a chimp ancestor or from a very early human?
The video shows the pinky bone fragment next to one penny; the fragment is the size of the engraved lettering on the penny,
@ F @ 11:55 AM
Australian aborigine clans would often raid – and kill – other Aborigine clans. White folks need not apply.
Some Native American tribes had been exterminated by other native american tribes, well before whites stepped foot in N. America.
Black African tribes would wage war on other black African tribes, well before whites stepped foot in Africa. And it was black African tribes that “delivered” to white slave traders, black slaves.
The politically correct notion that only whites engaged in deadly policies against anybody that opposed them, is total BS.
People – hominids, if you will – have been killing each other for tens of thousands of years.
Yeah. But it’s a little late to worry about the EM radiation we’ve been blasting in all directions for decades
Owen:
“Blasting out” only applies to human distances. By the Inverse-Square Law the intensity of a signal drops off by the square of the distance. Moving to interstellar distances reduce the blast to a whisper.
My back of the envelope calculation for a radio signal intense enough to be received within 1000 miles on Earth would be reduced by a factor of 6.2×10^20 for Alpha Centauri, our nearest star system at ~4.3 light years away.
That’s a huge amount of attenuation. I have my doubts such a reduced signal could be successfully received even on Alpha Centauri. Farther out it gets worse by the square of the distance.
Regarding aliens and UFOs:
How many can dance on the head of a pin?
deckhand,
Yikes! I just noticed my mistake. You are correct. Should have been light years. Thanks for not piling on!
@deckhand_dreams :
“I would personally be thrilled to meet an alien single-celled organism.”
The feeling could be mutual. In which case you might not be thrilled for very long.
Great work, Owen!
Griffin @ 5:10pm,
Even though Sabo is on the left coast, he would be my first guess as the creator. My second guess would be the guy who does The People’s Cube: https://thepeoplescube.com/
deckhand_dreams,
Yup, evolution is just a contest to see who is good at surviving to the point of successfully reproducing. Everything else is just window dressing.
If Neanderthals lived today, would we not most likely consider them just another race, not another species? This whole idea that two groups, who share common lineage, and can breed and produce fertile offspring , are different “ species” is somewhat arbitrary. We consider dogs and wolves separate species, apparently, not because of any truly great DNA difference, but because of their differing cultural history. You could breed dogs and wolves of similar size and their offspring would be fertile. A Siberian husky is in many ways more like a wolf than the husky is like a Chihuahua, yet we consider the Husky and the Chihuahua to be the same species, but the husky and the wolf a different species, because of cultural history. Horses and donkeys on the other hand, are more legitimately considered different species, because their offspring is usually infertile.
@Rufus:
“Yup, evolution is just a contest to see who is good at surviving to the point of successfully reproducing.”
Yuppety yup.
“Everything else is just window dressing.”
We could even call it ‘Constructed’ 😀
Oops… Where did I put my Browning?
Feeling uncharacteristically mellow this Sunday a.m. I think I’m going to let this Phylogenetic Tree fall in the forest and give it the Nelson Ear.
Of course, if by popular request…
huxley @6:56pm,
Either I misunderstand you or you misunderstand radiation (or there is something completely off in the most basic, fundamental ways I understand radiation).
If we have 2, identical 1 foot diameter spherical balloons covered in identical amounts of wet paint and place both of them inside clear spheres with all the air sucked out (a vacuum) with one clear sphere being 3 feet in diameter and the other being 6 feet in diameter and we pop both balloons the same amount of paint hits the inside of each clear sphere. Even though the paint in the 6 foot diameter sphere travels twice the distance each drop keeps going until it hits something. There is no difference in the amount of paint that gets radiated in either clear sphere.
What is different is the density of the drops splattered. The 6 foot diameter sphere will have more gaps between paint drops than the 3 foot sphere.
In the vacuum of space radio waves (and, I believe, all radiation) travels on forever, or until absorbed by something (which, I think, would always result in heat?).
This is why the part of Mercury’s surface (a rocky planet with no atmosphere) facing the Sun is much hotter than the surface of Mars (another rocky planet with no atmosphere). At a distance of about 4 1/2 times further a lot less solar radiation is “painted” on Mars’ surface than Mercury’s. A solar photon hitting Mercury is identical in force and radiative quality to one hitting Mars, it’s just that a lot fewer hit Mars.
Rufus,
Imagine you are on a mountain top on a clear night, looking down into the farthest reaches of a valley. Imagine a powerful spotlight in the valley shining upward. You would likely be able to see that. Now imagine a double D cell flashlight with old style incandescent bulbs. Maybe you would still be able to see that. Keep getting smaller and smaller with your light sources, and eventually, your eyes , or your mind, will not be able to detect it. Even if some photons are striking your eyes, there are too few for your mind to acknowledge them, or the photons density is so low, there are literally gaps where your eyes are receiving no photons at all, as they pass around your eyes, but not into your eyes.
The Inverse square law is something I brought up on this site several weeks ago on the discussion of aliens, but at the time it seemed to pass right over most people’s head. When I looked up some information on SETI, there was information out there that the standard TV signal is likely the wrong type of signal to travel in detectable amounts to the stars.
And the other thing about EM signals, is that the wave aspects is more important to transmit information than the particulate aspect of mere photonic light detection. The EM wave must arrive at the source as a stream, ie , a wave, in order to transmit information whether it be amplitude modulation or frequency modulation. In other words, a segment, not a mere disjointed photon, must arrive at the receiver, in order to transmit information with TV and radio signals. Light on the other hand, needs mere disjointed photons to transmit its source presence.
From what I have read, that stream runs into other sources of EM along the way, and gets broken up. Think of trying to watch TV with rabbit ears during a strong thunderstorm.
jon baker,
I understand your first comment (the valley and flashlight), but I don’t think it’s relevant to our discussion. Yes, fewer of my retinal cones are struck by light particles or waves (depends on what day of the week it is 😉 ) but the intensity is the same if the valley is on the surface of a planet with no atmosphere.
Your second comment is relevant, regarding interference. Even in the relative vacuum of space the further something travels the more likely it is to run into something. But I still don’t see what any of this has to do with the inverse square law or distance. The inverse square law matters regarding sensitivity. A 10 foot diameter disc antenna is going to pick up more radiation than a 1 foot diameter disc, just as a 10 foot diameter disc 100 miles from the source will pick up more radiation than one 1,000 miles away, but each, individual unit of radiation is the same. Distance matters regarding the odds of encountering interference, but I don’t think that’s an inverse square law thing, that’s just increased odds because space is not a perfect vacuum.
We still communicate with Voyager 1, right? As long as it has power we can communicate with it.
I think?
Rufus: perhaps you meant to say “the energy is the same … with no atmosphere”? But that is not quite correct, either.
From: https://www.restaurantnorman.com/does-light-intensity-depend-on-wavelength/ comes this definition: intensity is the amount of energy [received or detected] per unit time per unit area.
But if the energy source is less (flashlight vs. search light), the intensity is also less. So of course the intensity declines if the source is weaker, or the area is greater [over a constant time interval], as it would be at a greater spherical distance. Your “paint-particle-intensity [aka density] is lower on the bigger sphere with the same number of “droplets” covering a larger area.
Rufus,
Voyager 1 is only 21.5 Light HOURS from Earth. If it was 24 Light Hours from Earth, it would still be only 1/365th of one light year from Earth. Which means it has covered a distance less than 0.00064 % of the distance to the next star system, at 4.3 light years.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
@ Owen “Arecibo Message”
Very nice poem, and provocative message.
Thanks.
Sunday morning and just catching up with the Neophiles. During your discussion last night I was delighting in watching the Bills destroy the New England Criminals, while also switching over to the Sony Open in Honolulu.
Anyway… The 1/r^2 law applies to radiation that radiates equally in all directions… ie rufus has the right of it. The total integrated energy will be the same, but the energy density decreases with distance. With light, it’s sometimes more convenient to use power as it relates directly to the net flux of the photons, so the 1/r^2 law decreases the watts/m^2. And in terms of energy/photon, E=h(frequency), so a UV photon has more energy than a radio photon.
The Arecibo message was a focused signal much like the cited example of looking at a flashlight from afar as opposed to a bare light bulb radiating in all directions from the same distance. Eventually, the photon density does decrease with the focused light, but not at the 1/r^2 rate as for the bare light bulb. One can also provide even more “resistance” to distance degradation by using a focused laser source as the photons are now initially all in phase.
As far as detecting weak signals, again as Rufus stated collecting area is important. Exploiting computer processing we can now “make” very large dishes. The obvious example is the VLA in New Mexico where the effective size of the dish is the radius of the array. Now the VLA is somewhat obsolete in that we now routinely use what is called VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) in which dishes across the globe are linked. Effectively we now have a receiver that is the diameter of the earth itself. There are dreams of putting receivers in space at L2 points to increase the effective diameter even further. The photon density may be low but gather enough photons and you get a measureable signal.
A main sequence star like the Sun peaks its radiation in the visible and follows the standard blackbody curve. It does radiate in the radio, but at much lower value. I’m not sure of the calculation (never done it myself), but I think I read in some SETI material that when the Earth began radiating in the radio some 100 years ago that would have changed the net output spectrum of the Sun as observed from afar in the radio region. ie the Sun would no longer have the standard radio spectrum of a main sequence yellow star. There would be a small peak in the kHz to MHz frequencies totally uncharacteristic of such a star. If one could detect such a peak, it would indicate an unnatural radio source associated with such a star.
Hello, Owen. That was an interesting poem. It’s interesting to speculate about whether the message would really be understandable by aliens on its own without additional enlightening material or footnotes or something. I tried to interpret it once from the point of view of approaching it without preconceptions, although of course with a chemistry background and having seen Sagan’s series, I still had an unfair advantage. You’re right that there’s a certain elegance to it, but at the same time enough crypticity (neologism?) that we might hope that “they” out there won’t get it. I think that the attempt to render DNA in 2-D was too crude to get the point across, for example, absent some structural depiction of nucleotides.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/look-behind-the-curtain-discussion
A very good start. Kirn and Taibbi certainly understand the total corruption and bankruptcy of journalism and liberals. And the hatred of much of America that animates them.