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"Consequently, recent conferences on the merits of active SETI have sought the advice of social scientists. Among their worries is whether to be up front about humanity’s seamy side: Should we tell the extraterrestrials about war and injustice?
Personally, I think this concern is overwrought. Any society that can pick up our radio messages will be at a level of development at least centuries beyond our own. They would be no more incensed by our bad behavior than historians who learned that Babylonians attacked one another with spears. It seems naïve to imagine that, by shielding aliens from the less flattering aspects of humanity, we would somehow lessen any incentive to do us harm. If there’s a danger, mincing words is unlikely to eliminate it. A better approach is to note that the nearest intelligent extraterrestrials are likely to be at least dozens of light-years away. Even assuming that active SETI provokes a reply, it won’t be breezy conversation. Simple back-and-forth exchanges would take decades. This suggests that we should abandon the “greeting card” format of previous signaling schemes, and offer the aliens Big Data. For example, we could transmit the contents of the Internet. Such a large corpus — with its text, pictures, videos and sounds — would allow clever extraterrestrials to decipher much about our society, and even formulate questions that could be answered with the material in hand. Sending the web on its way would take months if a radio transmitter were used. A powerful laser, conveying bits much like an optical fiber, could launch these data in a few days...."
What will become of Jupiter's Great Red Spot? Gas giant Jupiter is the solar system's largest world with about 320 times the mass of planet Earth. Jupiter is home to one of the largest and longest lasting storm systems known, the Great Red Spot (GRS), visible to the left. The GRS is so large it could swallow Earth, although it has been shrinking. Comparison with historical notes indicate that the storm spans only about one third of the surface area it had 150 years ago. NASA's Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program has been monitoring the storm more recently using the Hubble Space Telescope. The featured Hubble OPAL image shows Jupiter as it appeared in 2016, processed in a way that makes red hues appear quite vibrant. Modern GRS data indicate that the storm continues to constrict its surface area, but is also becoming slightly taller, vertically. No one knows the future of the GRS, including the possibility that if the shrinking trend continues, the GRS might one day even do what smaller spots on Jupiter have done -- disappear completely.
The mysteries of the sizzling Venus might include active volcanoes. David Grinspoon @Funkyspoon @Planetarysci David Livingston, SpaceShow.com
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jul/21/likely-active-volcanoes-found-on-venus-defying-theory-of-dormant-planet
Proxima Centauri has been in the news frequently since 2016, when scientists including McDonald Observatory’s Michael Endl found its first planet, Proxima Centauri b. The discovery incited speculation on the types of in-depth studies that could done on an extrasolar planet so close to our own solar system.
Adding to the excitement, earlier this year a group led by Mario Damasso of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) announced they might have found another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri farther out. This group used radial velocity observations, that is, measurements of the star’s motion on the sky toward and away from Earth, to deduce the possible planet (dubbed Proxima Centauri c) orbits the star every 1,907 days at distance of 1.5 AU (that is, 1.5 times the distance at which Earth orbits the Sun).
Image: The Orion Nebula is an archetypical example of star formation, from the massive, young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars. NASA
Ken Croswell, astronomer & Science News, in re: They’re making new stars. The intergalactic medium was pervaded by ionizing radiation; anciently, ultraviolet light zapped gasses, which is needed to make new stars, so how can this still be occurring? New gas comes in from intergalactic space. Cosmic web, which pervades all of space.
(Photo: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory (or simply IceCube) is a neutrino telescope constructed at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
Its thousands of sensors are distributed over a cubic kilometre of volume under the Antarctic ice. Similar to its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), IceCube consists of spherical optical sensors called Digital Optical Modules (DOMs), each with a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and a single board data acquisition computer which sends digital data to the counting house on the surface above the array. IceCube was completed on 18 December 2010. DOMs are deployed on "strings" of sixty modules each at depths ranging from 1,450 to 2,450 meters, into holes melted in the ice using a hot water drill. IceCube is designed to look for point sources of neutrinos in the TeV range to explore the highest-energy astrophysical processes. In November 2013 it was announced that IceCube had detected 28 neutrinos that likely originated outside of the Solar System. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory) |
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