I have no idea whether there’s intelligent life out there in the universe. But we can at least confirm that there’s a little intelligent life on Facebook, seeing that Stephen Hawking, the world’s best known theoretical physicist, began posting there yesterday. His first status update reads:
I have always wondered what makes the universe exist. Time and space may forever be a mystery, but that has not stopped my pursuit. Our connections to one another have grown infinitely and now that I have the chance, I’m eager to share this journey with you. Be curious, I know I will forever be.
Welcome, and thank you for visiting my Facebook Page. ‑SH
During the past few years, NASA has released a series of free ebooks, including NASA Earth As Art and various interactive texts focusing on the Webb and Hubble space telescopes. Last week, they added a new, curious book to the collection, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication. Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch (the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute), the text contemplates how we’ll go about “establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence.” The scholars contributing to the volume “grappl[e] with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity if an information-rich signal emanating from another world is detected.” And to make sure that we’re “prepared for contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, should that day ever come,” they draw on “issues at the core of contemporary archaeology and anthropology.” Why archaeology and anthropology? Because, says Vackoch, communication with intelligent life probably won’t be through sound, but through images. We will need to read/understand the civilization we encounter based on what we observe. Vakoch says:
[D]on’t think of “sound worlds” or music or speech as the domains, vehicles, or contents of ETI [extra terrestrial intelligence] messages. Regardless of semiotic concerns, the accessibility of acoustic messaging must remain doubtful. Furthermore, there will be intended and unintended aspects of performance, which elaborate the difficulties of using sound. In my view avoidance of the sound world need not be controversial.
On the other hand, vision and the use of images would appear to be at least plausible. Although spectral details cannot be considered universal, the physical arrangement of objects on a habitable planet’s surface will be shaped in part by gravity (the notion of a horizon might well be universal) and thus multispectral images might plausibly be considered worthwhile for messages. More generally, the implications for considering SETI/CETI as some sort of anthropological challenge need teasing out.
Episode 5 of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos series aired last night on Fox. Thanks to Hulu, US viewers can now watch it online. The episode, called “Hiding the Light,” explores the wave theory of light. It moves across 2000+ years of history and eventually gets into the scientific work of Isaac Newton, William Herschel and Joseph von Fraunhofer, before winding up in modern times and touching on big questions contemplated by astronomers. (For a deeper dive into this material, see our collection of Free Astronomy Courses.) If you need to catch up on earlier episodes, you can find them below.
Workers, hell. It’s not hard to imagine Andrei Sokolov, whose paintings were exhibited aboard the Mir station, producing high quality renderings for Mad Men’s Don Draper to show high-rolling Martian clients.
And pop science mag Tekhnika Molodezhi (“Technology for the Youth”) promoted the space race with pages of intriguing four-color images. The dollhouse-like cross section (above) of a communal residence below the moon’s crust is practically screaming Wes Anderson’s name.
On Monday, the science world joyously celebrated a seminal astrophysics discovery. Using a telescope in the South Pole, researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time, called gravitational waves. These waves confirmed the inflation theory, which stated that for a brief moment — one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang — the universe was violently expanding faster than the speed of light. Stanford’s Andrei Linde (along with MIT’s Alan Guth) was one of the thinkers responsible for working out this theory in the 1980s. In the video above, another Stanford professor, Chao-Lin Kuo, visits Linde to break the news of the discovery to him on his front porch. Finding out that much of his career had been vindicated in such spectacular fashion, Linde was appropriately moved and stunned. You can learn more about Linde’s work in The Stanford Report.
After a long wait, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reboot of Cosmos began airing on Fox this past Sunday night, some 34 years after Carl Sagan launched his epic series on the more heady airwaves of PBS. Fox execs predicted big numbers for the first show — 40 million viewers. But only 5.8 million showed up. But, as we know, quantity has nothing to do with quality. Critics have called Tyson’s show a “striking and worthy update” of the original. If you live in the US, you can see for yourself. Episode 1 appears above, and it looks like the remaining 12 episodes will appear on Hulu. For those outside the US, our apologies that you can’t see this one. But we do have some great related material below, including one of our favorite posts: Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read.
Historians, biographers, and die-hard Sagan devotees will inevitably want to visit the Library of Congress in person to view the full archive, which contains over 1700 boxes of material. The lay reader curious about Sagan’s life, however, won’t need to make the trek to the U.S. capital to sample the archive’s contents. That’s because the Library of Congress has uploaded a portion of the collection online, including sundry fascinating biographical pieces. Above, you can view a digitized set of the Sagan family’s silent home movies, where young Carl shows off his boyhood boxing prowess, rides horseback, and plays piano (preciously, we presume).
It was during high school that Sagan began to fill out intellectually. His senior yearbook is testimony to both his interest in science and the humanities: not only was Sagan president of both the science and chemistry clubs, he also led the French club, served as an editor on his school’s newspaper, debated, took part in theatre productions, and was a member of the photography club.
Indeed, Sagan displayed his uncanny ability to merge science with the humanities in Wawawhack, his high school newspaper, writing a piece entitled “Space, Time, and The Poet.” He begins by saying, “it is an exhilarating experience to read poetry and observe its correlation with modern science. Profound scientific thought is hardly a rarity among the poets.” Throughout the piece, Sagan goes on to draw from verses by Alfred Lord Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, John Milton, and Robert Frost.
Carl Sagan had his first religious experience at the age of five. Unsurprisingly, it was rooted in science. Sagan, then living in Brooklyn, had started pestering everyone around him about what stars were, and had grown frustrated by his inability to get a straight answer. Like the resourceful five-year-old that he was, the young Sagan took matters into his own hands and proceeded to the library:
“I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars … And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light … The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.”
This sense of universal wonder would eventually lead Sagan to become a well-known astronomer and cosmologist, as well as one of the 20th century’s most beloved science educators. Although he passed away in 1996, aged 62, Sagan’s legacy remains alive and well. This March, a reboot of his famed 1980 PBS show, Comos: A Personal Voyage, will appear on Fox, with the equally great science popularizer Neil DeGrasse Tyson taking Sagan’s role as host. Meanwhile, last November saw the opening of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive at the Library of Congress.
Among the papers in the archive was this sketch, titled “The Evolution of Interstellar Flight,” which Sagan drew between the ages of 10 and 13. In the center of the drawing Sagan pencilled the logo of Interstellar Spacelines, which, Sagan imagined, was “Established [in] 1967 for the advancement of transpacial and intrauniversal science.” Its motto? “Discovery –Exploration – Colonization.” Surrounding the logo, Sagan drew assorted newspaper clippings that he imagined could herald the key technological advancements in the space race. Impressively drawn astronauts in the corner aside, I most enjoyed the faux-clipping that read “LIFE FOUND ON VENUS: Prehistoric-like reptiles are…” Good luck containing your sense of wonder on seeing that.
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