The closest approximation I can find is pp. 292--293. (I don't have a copy and haven't read it in about twenty years, so there may be a better approximation available.) Hadden and Ellie have a brief discussion about the potential to market dying in space as a "really nifty last indulgence", whereupon Hadden segues to the topic of immortality and says the following: "Now, I'm not bringing this up so I can boast. I'm bringing it up for a practical reason. If we're figuring out ways to extend our lifespans, think of what those creatures on Vega must have done. They probably are immortal,…
One serious danger I haven't heard anyone mention mention in regards to the Mars colonization project (though it was considered to some extent in Carl Sagan's "Contact" and probably some other science fiction) is the possibility of terrorism against either the fragile spacecraft or colony. Musk has said there will be no screening of the Mars colonists, and that anyone could go. That means someone who's mentally unstable and/or wants to make a name for himself (ala Herostratus[1] or any number of modern publicity-seeking terrorists and murderers) could go and attempt to harm the spacecraft or…
> In all this excitement hopefully we don’t forget the horde of luddites that’s the modern physics community that couldn’t imagine the possibility of faster than light travel There's a kind of funny example of that involving Kip Thorne, or rather Kip Thorne's students. He ran into his friend Carl Sagan at some event--I think it was something like they arrived at the airport at the same time for some conference they were both attending and ended up sharing a cab [1]. At the time Sagan was writing his novel "Contact", needed FTL travel in it, and was hand waving away how that would be done.…
I share your optimism and I'm a big believer that it will not be long before Carl Sagan's "Contact" event will happen, not from the stars but here on earth - my inclination is to suspect Grey Whales, but there are a good few candidates for the position of first contact as we begin to unpack the semantics of other species communication protocols. I'm interested in your opinions from another perspective however, as I believe it's /possible/ that /intelligence/ has emerged elsewhere in the universe (and as you say the more we learn about and redefine our notions of "intelligence" the more…
Not consecutively repeating patterns. But if you take any length pattern of digits, it would repeat an infinite number of times. Let's take a one digit pattern, say '5'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '5's. Now consider a longer pattern '53'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '53's. In fact, each 53 will be from one of the infinite number of '5's in the previous pattern '5'. Now consider a longer pattern '537' . . . . . . to continue . . . It was long ago when I read Contact (the book), so I…
Because “not prime” isn’t the same as “composite” (1 is neither prime nor composite in the modern view) it isn’t that simple. Some ancient mathematicians such as Aristotle and Plato solved that problem by saying 2 is the first number. Others stated 3 to be the first prime That isn’t holdable once you accept 0 and negative integers to be numbers. https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/journals/JIS/VOL15/Caldwell2/cald6.h... states that, for example, Goldbach thought 1 to be prime at some time (in a letter to Euler), as did Legendre, Lebesgue (sometimes), Cayley, Kronecker, Hardy, Lehmer (as the article…
I think some commenters are forgetting how science is done. Just because you are researching X does not mean your only output is X. An investment into SETI is an investment in science and technology. All the arguments on this forum about why we should not allocate funds to SETI can be used in the same manner for why we should not investment in pure mathematics or any other potentially "useless" human endeavor. SETI researchers will come up with novel ways to solve their problems and invent new technologies along the way, the same as every other branch of science and engineering. It's how…
Well, I was exposed to a new idea today. It looks like the concept here is similar to me observing that the average number of hairs on a human head is about 1e5. Also, the average number of meals a human consumes in their lifetime is about 1e5. Conclusion: we can fix hair loss if we have people eat more meals on average. In seriousness though, the idea of "physical constants" not being actually constant is fascinating. I think the only sci fi book that I've read that explored this much was Carl Sagan's Contact, but it's an idea that must have been used in other sci fi. The implications of…
Kinda thin article. My answer: I would assume that any message we receive from aliens comes with a primer. If it doesn't how then could we read it an know it's a message? The next obvious step is reading, understanding, then extrapolating from the message. Where they're from, who they are, how their message came to us. Like in Carl Sagan's "Contact" the message might come to us from a way station and not the actual source of the aliens themselves. The message might me an invitation, a warning, a plea, or simple salutation. Or it might be something in the middle. They are alien. And we do…
There's a passage of Carl Sagan's "Contact" that's on point and interesting to read 34 years later. The billionaire who helps to decode the Message (from outer space) and ends up building the working copy of the Machine made his fortune by selling tools to detect and block ads from television. There is some discussion of the technical cat-and-mouse game he has to play as advertisers try to make their content avoid detection and blend in with the regular programming. In this version of the future, the ad blockers eventually win and network television is destroyed. (The book also features…