In June 2013, A Group Of Friends Encased A GoPro In A 3D-printed Body, Attached It To A Weather Balloon,

There’s been a rather startling decision today amongst the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) researchers.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, announced to his peers at a conference today that it’s time to begin what’s known as ‘active SETI’.

This is when we actively broadcast and effectively ‘alert’ potential neighbors to our presence.

Needless to say, this was a very polarizing conference.

People from Stephen Hawking all the way to science fiction writer David Brin have spoken out against broadcasting our presence into interstellar space.

They both have made comparisons to what happened when industrial civilizations first encountered indigenous peoples. Things never went well for the locals.

David Brin spoke at the conference and said, “The arrogance of shouting into the cosmos without any proper risk assessment defies belief.  It is a course that would put our grandchildren at risk.”

I was initially sidelined by the idea. SETI Institute has never broadcasted into space in an attempt to make humanity’s presence obvious to alien observers. I hadn’t therefore really considered the topic much and shared the same worries as David Brin initially.

In my opinion though Dr. Shostak put an end to that worry:

“I don’t see why the aliens would have any incentive to do that.

Beyond that, we have been telling them willy-nilly that we are here for 70 years now. They are not very interesting messages but the early TV broadcasts, the early radio, the radar from the Second World War - all that has leaked off the Earth.

Any society that could come here and ruin our whole day by incinerating the planet already knows we are here.”

The point is if there’s a hostile and capable alien presence nearby, they would already know about us. The technology required to get to Earth even from the nearest star system is far more advanced than anything we can even dream up at the moment. Detecting our presence at that point is a cake walk.

Active SETI, would be a redundant risk as we’re clearly visible to those significantly advanced civilizations already (if there are any). That we’re here at all still suggests there are none.

To any nearby neighbors stuck on their home planets or solar systems, we are now going to be actively broadcasting messages.

The search is on.

Read more about today’s meeting at BBC World News.

(Image credit: ESO)

Funky Light Signal From Colliding Black Holes Explained

Entangled by gravity and destined to merge, two candidate black holes in a distant galaxy appear to be locked in an intricate dance. Researchers using data from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have come up with the most compelling confirmation yet for the existence of these merging black holes and have found new details about their odd, cyclical light signal.

The candidate black hole duo, called PG 1302-102, was first identified earlier this year using ground-based telescopes. The black holes are the tightest orbiting pair detected so far, with a separation not much bigger than the diameter of our solar system. They are expected to collide and merge in less than a million years, triggering a titanic blast with the power of 100 million supernovae.

Researchers are studying this pair to better understand how galaxies and the monstrous black holes at their cores merge – a common occurrence in the early universe. But as common as these events were, they are hard to spot and confirm.

PG 1302-102 is one of only a handful of good binary black hole candidates. It was discovered and reported earlier this year by researchers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, after they scrutinized an unusual light signal coming from the center of a galaxy. The researchers, who used telescopes in the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey, demonstrated that the varying signal is likely generated by the motion of two black holes, which swing around each other every five years. While the black holes themselves don’t give off light, the material surrounding them does.

In the new study, published in the Sept. 17 issue of Nature, researchers found more evidence to support and confirm the close-knit dance of these black holes. Using ultraviolet data from GALEX and Hubble, they were able to track the system’s changing light patterns over the past 20 years.

What’s causing the changes in light? One set of changes has to do with the “blue shifting” effect, in which light is squeezed to shorter wavelengths as it travels toward us in the same way that a police car’s siren squeals at higher frequencies as it heads toward you. Another reason has to do with the enormous speed of the black hole.

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This is how fast the space probe is.

More about New Horizons >>

You're walking in the woods. No one is around and your phone is dead. Out of the corner of your eye you spot her.

Poot Lovato

What is this? http://space-pics.tumblr.com/ source:http://imgur.com/r/Astronomy/WhU2y3g

The giant pink lady is going to beat the boy on the floor with the fat puffy thing while the clear pointy-nosed thing guards him with an umbrella.

Someone who hasn’t seen Steven universe yet try to explain this scenario

Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge

Welcome to the Pirate Bay of science.

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,”Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”

If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that’s because it kinda is. But in this story, it’s not just the poor who don’t have access to scientific papers - journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand - with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.

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mark your calendars!!!

In a real vector space, such as R, corresponding concept in an caffeine space. [2880x1800] http://space-pics.tumblr.com/