Fermi Paradox Where Are They?

Fermi's paradox as you know, ask the question, given that there are millions if not billions of Earth class planets, that even if a fraction of these planets support life and only a fraction of them intelligent beings, where are they?

Some of the most interesting ideas are based around the colonization wave front.
From the Technology Review article:

• Various analysis suggest that using spacecraft that travel at a tenth of the speed of light, a colonization wave could take some 50 million years to sweep the galaxy. Others have calculated that it may be closer to 13 billion years, which may explain why we have yet to spot extraterrestrials.

Speculation aside, Carlos Cotta and Álvaro Morales from the University of Malaga in Spain, take a slightly different path to explain the curious absence. Cotta and Morales' suggest that the automated probe idea may be closer to the truth.
Again from the article:

• The scenario involves a civilization sending out eight probes, each equipped with smaller subprobes for studying the regions that the host probe visits.....this could advance much faster than the colonization wave front.

This still has a time scope of about 300 million years before there is any indication of life elsewhere in the universe. Taking into account that this is likely to be the time it would take to explore 4% of the galaxy.

Cotta and Morales ask, why do we assume that only one intelligent race exist at any one time in the galaxy. Why not several and each sending out probes. Ahh but now it gets interesting.

Say each major probe had a lifespan of 50 million years and any evidence of their visit to a solar system lasted 1 million years, the figure that comes up is no more than 1000 intelligent races in the galaxy. The bad news is, that if each sub-probe left evidence in each visited solar system that lasted for 100 million years there would be no more than 10 civilizations out there.

Not good news at all huh? Read complete article in Technology Review

Scientists create transparent aluminum?!

You remember that scene in the Star Trek movie where Scotty needs to retrofit the Klingon Bird of Prey to be able to carry whales? He teaches 20th century people on how to make transparent aluminum to build the cage with. Well that was the first thing I thought of when I first saw this article sent in by Shaun Saunders from Physorg.com.

Its pretty amazing science. Oxford scientists bombarded a sample of aluminum with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. This knocked out sub-atomic particles from each atom, effectively making it transparent.

Now to be fair I have got to make a couple of points.

1. the sample was diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair.
2. the sample was only invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.
3. the effect lasted for only an extremely brief period - an estimated 40 femto-seconds (A femtosecond is one quadrillionth, or one billionth of one millionth of a second.)
4. a FLASH laser was used in this experiment. It produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

Close but no cigar.

Eureka gets a fourth from SyFy

Good news fans of SyFy's Eureka, SyFy has renews the quirky series and ordered 22 new episodes.

It looks like season four will play much like 3 / 3.5 did, breaking the episodes in two sections for airing next summer...though that hasn't been confirmed by the Science fiction Fantasy blog on About.

What is very interesting though is that some of the episodes will be set aside for special projects and there is some very interesting news items.

From the article:

• One or two episodes of the new season have been set aside for a musical episode. We know Colin Ferguson is a comic and improv performer, but can he sing? Ferguson hinted to the panel that he might not feature heavily in that episode. Erica Cerra (Jo Lupo) can, but she seems likewise wary of a musical episode.
• Matt Frewer will return as the (mysteriously absent) animal expert Taggart.
• Show runner Jaime Paglia confirmed that Allison's pregnancy wasn't planned – they decided to incorporate Salli Richardson-Whitfield's real-life pregnancy.

Cool, well I am a fan, and I am glad to hear positive things going on.

Here is the complete article

G.I. Joes suits good for...Skateboarding?!

The A suits from G.I. Joe are probablly the best part of the movie...but still, they look cool. Well here is a viral video that does not seem to be part of the movie's release, but still it's pretty amazing CG

Jupiter just took a pounding, Is Earth next?

Since the huge impact on Jupiter is still fresh in our memories, I think it's fair to ask - what are the chances that the same could befall Earth any time in the near future?

Tim Sayell send in a good article from Yahoo News that deals with just such a question.

As the article points out: So far 784 near-Earth objects (NEOs) more than a half-mile wide (1 km) have been found. NASA has ruled out any of these as an impactor.

It's a safe bet that if 'an object of about the same size that just hit Jupiter also hit Earth — it was probably a typical cometary object of a kilometer or so in size (0.6 miles) — it would have been fairly catastrophic,'

Currently just one NEO poses any significant chance of hitting the Earth — 2007 VK184. This object is 425-foot-wide and should it hit Earth, it would strike with an energy of more than 10,000 times that of Hiroshima. 2007 VK184 has a 1-in-2,940 chance of hitting Earth 40 to 50 years from now.

Like the mosquito that you don't hear, it's the NEOs that we don't know about that are most worrying. NASA estimates that there are about 156 large NEOs 1 kilometer in diameter or larger that remain to be found. But the truly disturbing statistic is that objects of about 500 feet are extremely dangerous and only about 15% of these object have been discovered and only 5% of objects 150 feet in size.

Now the nitty gritty:
The dinosaur killers happen about once every 100 million years
Impacts of 1500 foot size hits about once every 500,000 years...so nothing is expected soon...
150 feet, about 700 years, 98 feet about 140 years or so.

So, nothing really worrisome with what we know so far....but a lot more has to be put into discovery and tracking before I feel safe.

Read the complete article here