The book "Paradox. Nine great mysteries of physics "
Hi, Habrozhiteli! We began to publish a new series of books "Pop Science", a review of which we did at Geektimes .
Here we present an excerpt from the book:
Fermi paradox can be formulated as follows.
Since the Universe is so large, its dimensions are so immense and hundreds of billions of stars shine in the Milky Way alone, many of which have planetary systems around them, if the Earth is not a highly atypical place in terms of conditions for the development of life, the universe must be teeming with such planets, including those inhabited by intelligent civilizations. Many of them should have technologies that allow them to travel in space, and by now they should have visited us.
Where are they all in this case?
For Fermi, it was obvious that if our Solar System is not unique in that it contains (at least) one habitable planet, then alien civilizations with minimal ambitions for expansion and sufficiently developed space technologies had enough time to colonize by now the whole galaxy. Together with other scientists, they calculated that 10 million years would be enough for any species to do this. Although this may seem like a rather long period of time and a somewhat arbitrary value, it is important to note that this is just a tiny part (in this case, one thousandth) of the age of our Galaxy, and do not forget that the Homo sapiens species appeared only about 200,000 years ago.
')
Thus, this paradox can be reduced to the following two questions.
1. If life is not something special, then where is the rest?
——2. If it is, then how is it that the Universe is configured so subtly that life could only arise on Earth?
If you think about the ability of life to arise and flourish on our planet even in the most severe conditions, then why cannot life originate on other planets like Earth? Perhaps the problem is not in the spread of the life that was born, but primarily in its original appearance. Before we find out if scientists were able to resolve this paradox and a lot of related questions, we’ll briefly look at a few of the solutions offered most often.
1. Aliens exist and in fact have already visited us . I will reject this first option on the legal basis that we do not have any credible facts supporting the fantastic illusions of UFO lovers and conspiratorologists. Despite this, many people continue to rest assured that the aliens flew to us on their plates: either a few thousand years ago they jumped in for a short time to build pyramids, or are still among us, kidnapping innocent victims, to spend on them fancy experiments.
2. Aliens exist, but do not come into contact with us . There are many reasons why a successful and developed extraterrestrial civilization may prefer not to tell us about its existence. For example, it is possible (unlike us) that they do not want to further spread over the Galaxy or would prefer to leave us alone until we develop enough to earn membership in the galactic club. Undoubtedly, this version assumes that all alien civilizations think in a way similar to us.
3. We are just looking for the wrong place . We have been listening to signals from space for 50 years now and should have heard something now. But perhaps we should look in a particular area of ​​the sky or adjust our receivers to the desired frequency, or these signals and messages have already reached us, but we could not decipher them.
4. Life in other places is regularly destroyed . Perhaps we do not appreciate the privileged position of the earth. Maybe in other solar systems there are habitable planets, but they regularly experience planetary, star or galactic catastrophes (glacial periods, comets and meteors, large star flares or gamma-ray bursts). In places where such events occur frequently, there is not enough time for life to develop a sensible species capable of space travel. Or the opposite is true: conditions on other planets are so comfortable that life does not undergo periods of mass extinctions, which are believed to be necessary in order to ensure biodiversity and thereby lead to the emergence of reasonable species.
5. Self-destruction . Some assume that all intelligent life in the Universe inevitably destroys itself, either by war or epidemic, or by destroying its habitat around the time when it becomes technologically sufficiently developed to travel in space (if this is true, we do not foretell anything good).
6. The aliens are just too ... strangers . We tend to think that aliens should be like us, have technologies similar to those that we are planning to develop in the future. Although we have reason to think so, since all life must follow the same laws of physics and be limited by them, it may turn out that we simply lack the imagination to understand intelligent life, which is essentially different from us. Of course, I don’t mean that we think they should look like newcomers from the cinema, but we tend to assume that it will be a carbon life form, having eyes and limbs and communicating through the exchange of sound waves.
7. We are truly alone in the universe . Perhaps the conditions necessary for the emergence of a life are so rare that it happened only in a very small number of places, and the Earth is the only planet on which intelligent life has developed that can curb nature in such a way as to be able to send signals about our existence in the depths of the universe. Or our planet really became the only place where life originated.
The above options are just assumptions and, for the most part, are not very reasonable. Fermi himself believed that intelligent life could exist somewhere in the Galaxy, but the distances between the stars are too huge and, given the speed barrier of light, the road would take too much time, therefore, no civilization would consider visiting us worthy of such efforts.
What Fermi did not take into account was the fact that we could learn about the existence of technically advanced aliens, even if they had never left their home planet. In the end, we declare our presence to the Galaxy for almost a century. Since we started using radio and television to transmit information around the world, some of our signals have leaked into space. Alien civilization, living a few dozen light years from us, which comes to mind to send its radio telescopes to our Sun, will notice an extraordinary amount of weak, but rather complex radio signals, indicating that there is life on one of the planets in this system.
Considering that we consider the laws of physics to be the same throughout the Universe, and also that electromagnetic waves are one of the simplest and most universal means of transmitting information, we should expect that any technically developed civilization will use this means of communication at some stage in its life. In this case, some of its signals must leak into the surrounding space, spreading through the galaxy at the speed of light.
Very little time passed, and astronomers of the 20th century began to consider the possibility of listening to signals from space using newly invented radio telescopes. The serious search for extraterrestrial life began with one person.
Drake and his equation
The first real hunter for extraterrestrial civilizations was the astronomer Frank Drake, who worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In 1960, he set up an experiment to search for signs of life in remote star systems by listening to electromagnetic signals in the radio wave range. The project was named Ozma - in honor of Princess Ozma, the ruler of the Emerald City of Oz, from the book by Frank Baum.
Drake directed his radio telescope to two nearby sun-like stars - Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, located respectively 12 and 10 light-years from Earth. Both stars seemed to be suitable candidates for the inhabited planets to rotate around them. He tuned the antenna to receive signals of a certain frequency corresponding to a rather specific electromagnetic radiation emitted by hydrogen, the lightest, simplest and most common element in the Universe, which made it the most likely choice for an alien civilization wanting to make itself known. Drake recorded the data and carefully checked them for the presence of any signal over the background noise. After several months of studying records made over many hours, the only interesting signal was the signal of a very high-flying aircraft. But Drake was not disappointed. He never forgot that the search process is like buying a lottery ticket: if something were found, he would have considered himself lucky.
Failure did not stop Drake, and the following year he organized the first SETI conference (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - an extraterrestrial intelligence search program), inviting all the scientists he knew interested in the subject at that time (there were only 12).
Drake has developed a mathematical formula for calculating in our Galaxy the number of civilizations (N), whose radio signals can be caught from Earth. He derived this value by multiplying seven numbers. The resulting equation, named after him, looks like this:
N = R * Ă— fp Ă— ne Ă— fl Ă— fi Ă— fc Ă— L.
In fact, the equation is fairly easy to explain. I will go through the values ​​of all the characters and indicate in brackets the value that Drake substituted into his first calculations, so you will see how he got the final result. The symbol R * indicates the number of new stars forming in the galaxy each year (Drake suggested that this value is 10 stars per year). The symbol fp denotes the proportion of stars with planetary systems (0.5); ne is the number of planets in each star system whose conditions are suitable for life; fl, fi and fc denote, respectively, the proportion of livable planets on which life actually develops (1); the proportion of habitable planets on which intelligent life develops (0.5); the proportion of civilizations that have developed to the technical level, allowing them to send into space perceptible signals indicating their presence (1). Finally, L corresponds to the time period during which this civilization continues to send perceptible signals into space (10,000 years). Multiplying these seven numbers, Drake got the answer N = 50,000.
This impressive number underlines the Fermi paradox problem. However, how much can you trust this value? Of course, he absolutely can not be trusted. Even if these seven numbers were sufficient, the values ​​assigned to a number of them were taken from the ceiling. The first three symbols (R *, fp and ne) depend on quantities that were not known half a century ago, but now, thanks to the progress in the construction of telescopes, we are beginning to approach their exact values. In particular, this was facilitated by the recent discovery of many planets outside our solar system, called extrasolar planets.
However, the following three factors are probabilities that are related to the emergence of intelligent and contact-capable life. Each of them can take almost any value from 0 (impossible) to 1 (for sure). Drake chose extremely optimistic numbers. He believed that if there were suitable conditions on some earth-like planet, then the appearance of life is inevitable (fl = 1). And if life began, the probability of occurrence of a reasonable species is 50% (fi = 0.5). If such a view has appeared, it will definitely reach in its development the development of a technology that includes sending electromagnetic waves into space (whether it is consciously sending messages or not) (fc = 1).
But numeric values ​​mean little. The Drake equation was far more important than just estimating the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. It opened a worldwide hunt for signals from space, which does not end to this day.
SETI Project
The abbreviation SETI denotes a number of projects implemented throughout the world for many years and aimed at actively seeking out-of-earth signals. We have been listening to potential signals from space, transmitted by electromagnetic waves, ever since scientists knew how to send and receive signals. One of the first such cases dates back to the end of the XIX century.
In 1899, studying atmospheric electricity during a thunderstorm in her laboratory in Colorado Springs and using her newly assembled highly sensitive receiver, electrical engineer and inventor of Serbian origin, Nikola Tesla discovered weak signals coming in groups that make up a numeric code of one, two, three and four "beeps", which, as he was sure, originated on Mars. Tesla described his emotional state caused by this discovery in an interview with the magazine in 1901:
“I will never forget that first feeling when I realized that I was observing a phenomenon that might have enormous consequences for all of humanity ... What I saw, of course, scared me, as if there was something mysterious before me, not to say supernatural ... [Electrical signals ] were periodic and were so explicitly ordered sequence of numbers that they could not be caused by any reason known to me at that time ... Some time later, I realized that the disturbances observed by me could be a message p Azuma beings. "
Although Tesla was criticized for such statements, the mystery of the signals found by him remained unanswered.
The first serious search for possible radio signals from intelligent aliens was a short-term project implemented in America in 1924. At that time it was still believed that our neighbor Mars was the most likely home of an extraterrestrial civilization and that if the Martians are going to make contact with us, they will do this at the moment when the two planets are as close as possible to each other. This happens during the so-called opposition, when the Earth passes between Mars and the Sun. One of these confrontations happened between August 21 and 23, 1924, when Mars approached Earth closer than in the last few thousand years (this record was broken in August 2003, and the next time it will happen in 2287). Scientists have decided that if the Martians exist, they use this opposition to transmit signals to Earth. The US Navy took this idea seriously enough to announce the “national radio day”, asking citizens across the country to turn off the radio for five minutes at the beginning of each hour during the 36-hour period of Mars passing around Earth. At the US Naval Observatory located in Washington, the radio was raised to a height of 3 km on the dirigible, and all the country's naval bases received a command to track radio waves in search of something unusual. But they did not hear anything except atmospheric noise and signals from private radio stations that did not observe the radio silence mode.
It was after the original Frank Drake project that the SETI movement really began to unfold, spreading its search far beyond the solar system. So that you understand how radio telescopes have already expanded the range available to us, the two stars that Drake focused on studying in 1960 are about 10 light-years away — two million times farther than Mars. It’s as if you put a glass on the wall to listen to what your neighbor is talking about, and, not hearing anything, you decided instead to try to overhear the conversation in New York while being in London. Obviously, the crucial point was to determine where exactly to direct the antenna of the radio telescope.
The SETI Institute in California was founded in 1984, and a few years later, the Phoenix project was launched under the direction of astronomer Jill Tarter, who became the prototype for the main character of the novel Karl Sagan “Contact”. Between 1995 and 2004, radio telescopes located in Australia, the United States and Puerto Rico monitored 800 sun-like stars located within 200 light years from Earth using the Phoenix project. But nothing was found. True, the project has become a reliable source of information necessary to study the possibility of the existence of alien life. Together with fellow astronomer Margaret Turnbull, Jill Tarter compiled a catalog of nearby stars that could potentially have planetary systems where life could be found (so-called potentially habitable stars). , HabCat, 17 000 , , .
2001 «» SETI. (Allen Telescope Array, ATA); - -. 350 ( 6 ), . 2007 , 43 , 2011 - . , . , , «» . .
, . . 1 1000 . . , , 1,42 . — , , , , , — . , , 1 10 ( , ).
, , , . .
, ( ) . - — , . — . , , , . . ( , ). , , . , , ( ), .
, , , , , ( ).
700 . . 2009 «» ( , , ). 2011 «» 1235 , 54 , ( , ).
, 50 1 % (500 ) . , , , 2 . 30 000 1000 .
, . , - , , (, : , ). 581 d 581 ( 20 ). , d , , (, , b; ). 581 d , , . , .
HD 85512 b HD 85512, , , 36 . , ; . , 1,5 , — 25 °C. , , , . (, ) 54 .
2011 «» Kepler-22 b. , 581 HD 85512 ( 600 ), ( G). Kepler-22 b , , , . , , , , . , , , , , «» , .
, . , .
?
, , , — -, - : - ? , , .
— . , , , ( ), . , , , , , , - . ? , , , , (, , ), , . ?
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. , , , , , , , , , , ( ).
, , , , , , - ( ).
, , . , ? , . . , ( , ), 3,5 . , , , : .
, , ( ) ( ), -. , , . . ( , ) (, , , ). , , .
, , , «-747», , , . ?
1953 . , . : , , , , . , , . , , — , , , , . , — ( ).
, , , . , ? , , — . , , , , , , , .
, , , . GFAJ-1 ( , , , ). , , . 2–3 , , , (- (pH) 10). , , , . , .
- GFAJ-1, , , : — , .
, , : , , , . , . - , , . , GFAJ-1 , . « », , — , . , . ?
2010 . , GFAJ-1 - . , : , ? , , , , , .
, . , , . , , , .
, , , , . , , , . , , , , , ( ) - .
, , , . , . , , , , . 1973 , - 500- . : «, , . , ». , , , - . , , , , , .
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More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
Table of contents
Excerpt
25% — Pop Science
Here we present an excerpt from the book:
Fermi paradox can be formulated as follows.Since the Universe is so large, its dimensions are so immense and hundreds of billions of stars shine in the Milky Way alone, many of which have planetary systems around them, if the Earth is not a highly atypical place in terms of conditions for the development of life, the universe must be teeming with such planets, including those inhabited by intelligent civilizations. Many of them should have technologies that allow them to travel in space, and by now they should have visited us.
Where are they all in this case?
For Fermi, it was obvious that if our Solar System is not unique in that it contains (at least) one habitable planet, then alien civilizations with minimal ambitions for expansion and sufficiently developed space technologies had enough time to colonize by now the whole galaxy. Together with other scientists, they calculated that 10 million years would be enough for any species to do this. Although this may seem like a rather long period of time and a somewhat arbitrary value, it is important to note that this is just a tiny part (in this case, one thousandth) of the age of our Galaxy, and do not forget that the Homo sapiens species appeared only about 200,000 years ago.
')
Thus, this paradox can be reduced to the following two questions.
1. If life is not something special, then where is the rest?
——2. If it is, then how is it that the Universe is configured so subtly that life could only arise on Earth?
If you think about the ability of life to arise and flourish on our planet even in the most severe conditions, then why cannot life originate on other planets like Earth? Perhaps the problem is not in the spread of the life that was born, but primarily in its original appearance. Before we find out if scientists were able to resolve this paradox and a lot of related questions, we’ll briefly look at a few of the solutions offered most often.
1. Aliens exist and in fact have already visited us . I will reject this first option on the legal basis that we do not have any credible facts supporting the fantastic illusions of UFO lovers and conspiratorologists. Despite this, many people continue to rest assured that the aliens flew to us on their plates: either a few thousand years ago they jumped in for a short time to build pyramids, or are still among us, kidnapping innocent victims, to spend on them fancy experiments.
2. Aliens exist, but do not come into contact with us . There are many reasons why a successful and developed extraterrestrial civilization may prefer not to tell us about its existence. For example, it is possible (unlike us) that they do not want to further spread over the Galaxy or would prefer to leave us alone until we develop enough to earn membership in the galactic club. Undoubtedly, this version assumes that all alien civilizations think in a way similar to us.
3. We are just looking for the wrong place . We have been listening to signals from space for 50 years now and should have heard something now. But perhaps we should look in a particular area of ​​the sky or adjust our receivers to the desired frequency, or these signals and messages have already reached us, but we could not decipher them.
4. Life in other places is regularly destroyed . Perhaps we do not appreciate the privileged position of the earth. Maybe in other solar systems there are habitable planets, but they regularly experience planetary, star or galactic catastrophes (glacial periods, comets and meteors, large star flares or gamma-ray bursts). In places where such events occur frequently, there is not enough time for life to develop a sensible species capable of space travel. Or the opposite is true: conditions on other planets are so comfortable that life does not undergo periods of mass extinctions, which are believed to be necessary in order to ensure biodiversity and thereby lead to the emergence of reasonable species.
5. Self-destruction . Some assume that all intelligent life in the Universe inevitably destroys itself, either by war or epidemic, or by destroying its habitat around the time when it becomes technologically sufficiently developed to travel in space (if this is true, we do not foretell anything good).
6. The aliens are just too ... strangers . We tend to think that aliens should be like us, have technologies similar to those that we are planning to develop in the future. Although we have reason to think so, since all life must follow the same laws of physics and be limited by them, it may turn out that we simply lack the imagination to understand intelligent life, which is essentially different from us. Of course, I don’t mean that we think they should look like newcomers from the cinema, but we tend to assume that it will be a carbon life form, having eyes and limbs and communicating through the exchange of sound waves.
7. We are truly alone in the universe . Perhaps the conditions necessary for the emergence of a life are so rare that it happened only in a very small number of places, and the Earth is the only planet on which intelligent life has developed that can curb nature in such a way as to be able to send signals about our existence in the depths of the universe. Or our planet really became the only place where life originated.
The above options are just assumptions and, for the most part, are not very reasonable. Fermi himself believed that intelligent life could exist somewhere in the Galaxy, but the distances between the stars are too huge and, given the speed barrier of light, the road would take too much time, therefore, no civilization would consider visiting us worthy of such efforts.
What Fermi did not take into account was the fact that we could learn about the existence of technically advanced aliens, even if they had never left their home planet. In the end, we declare our presence to the Galaxy for almost a century. Since we started using radio and television to transmit information around the world, some of our signals have leaked into space. Alien civilization, living a few dozen light years from us, which comes to mind to send its radio telescopes to our Sun, will notice an extraordinary amount of weak, but rather complex radio signals, indicating that there is life on one of the planets in this system.
Considering that we consider the laws of physics to be the same throughout the Universe, and also that electromagnetic waves are one of the simplest and most universal means of transmitting information, we should expect that any technically developed civilization will use this means of communication at some stage in its life. In this case, some of its signals must leak into the surrounding space, spreading through the galaxy at the speed of light.
Very little time passed, and astronomers of the 20th century began to consider the possibility of listening to signals from space using newly invented radio telescopes. The serious search for extraterrestrial life began with one person.
Drake and his equation
The first real hunter for extraterrestrial civilizations was the astronomer Frank Drake, who worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In 1960, he set up an experiment to search for signs of life in remote star systems by listening to electromagnetic signals in the radio wave range. The project was named Ozma - in honor of Princess Ozma, the ruler of the Emerald City of Oz, from the book by Frank Baum.
Drake directed his radio telescope to two nearby sun-like stars - Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, located respectively 12 and 10 light-years from Earth. Both stars seemed to be suitable candidates for the inhabited planets to rotate around them. He tuned the antenna to receive signals of a certain frequency corresponding to a rather specific electromagnetic radiation emitted by hydrogen, the lightest, simplest and most common element in the Universe, which made it the most likely choice for an alien civilization wanting to make itself known. Drake recorded the data and carefully checked them for the presence of any signal over the background noise. After several months of studying records made over many hours, the only interesting signal was the signal of a very high-flying aircraft. But Drake was not disappointed. He never forgot that the search process is like buying a lottery ticket: if something were found, he would have considered himself lucky.
Failure did not stop Drake, and the following year he organized the first SETI conference (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - an extraterrestrial intelligence search program), inviting all the scientists he knew interested in the subject at that time (there were only 12).
Drake has developed a mathematical formula for calculating in our Galaxy the number of civilizations (N), whose radio signals can be caught from Earth. He derived this value by multiplying seven numbers. The resulting equation, named after him, looks like this:
N = R * Ă— fp Ă— ne Ă— fl Ă— fi Ă— fc Ă— L.
In fact, the equation is fairly easy to explain. I will go through the values ​​of all the characters and indicate in brackets the value that Drake substituted into his first calculations, so you will see how he got the final result. The symbol R * indicates the number of new stars forming in the galaxy each year (Drake suggested that this value is 10 stars per year). The symbol fp denotes the proportion of stars with planetary systems (0.5); ne is the number of planets in each star system whose conditions are suitable for life; fl, fi and fc denote, respectively, the proportion of livable planets on which life actually develops (1); the proportion of habitable planets on which intelligent life develops (0.5); the proportion of civilizations that have developed to the technical level, allowing them to send into space perceptible signals indicating their presence (1). Finally, L corresponds to the time period during which this civilization continues to send perceptible signals into space (10,000 years). Multiplying these seven numbers, Drake got the answer N = 50,000.
This impressive number underlines the Fermi paradox problem. However, how much can you trust this value? Of course, he absolutely can not be trusted. Even if these seven numbers were sufficient, the values ​​assigned to a number of them were taken from the ceiling. The first three symbols (R *, fp and ne) depend on quantities that were not known half a century ago, but now, thanks to the progress in the construction of telescopes, we are beginning to approach their exact values. In particular, this was facilitated by the recent discovery of many planets outside our solar system, called extrasolar planets.
However, the following three factors are probabilities that are related to the emergence of intelligent and contact-capable life. Each of them can take almost any value from 0 (impossible) to 1 (for sure). Drake chose extremely optimistic numbers. He believed that if there were suitable conditions on some earth-like planet, then the appearance of life is inevitable (fl = 1). And if life began, the probability of occurrence of a reasonable species is 50% (fi = 0.5). If such a view has appeared, it will definitely reach in its development the development of a technology that includes sending electromagnetic waves into space (whether it is consciously sending messages or not) (fc = 1).
But numeric values ​​mean little. The Drake equation was far more important than just estimating the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. It opened a worldwide hunt for signals from space, which does not end to this day.
SETI Project
The abbreviation SETI denotes a number of projects implemented throughout the world for many years and aimed at actively seeking out-of-earth signals. We have been listening to potential signals from space, transmitted by electromagnetic waves, ever since scientists knew how to send and receive signals. One of the first such cases dates back to the end of the XIX century.
In 1899, studying atmospheric electricity during a thunderstorm in her laboratory in Colorado Springs and using her newly assembled highly sensitive receiver, electrical engineer and inventor of Serbian origin, Nikola Tesla discovered weak signals coming in groups that make up a numeric code of one, two, three and four "beeps", which, as he was sure, originated on Mars. Tesla described his emotional state caused by this discovery in an interview with the magazine in 1901:
“I will never forget that first feeling when I realized that I was observing a phenomenon that might have enormous consequences for all of humanity ... What I saw, of course, scared me, as if there was something mysterious before me, not to say supernatural ... [Electrical signals ] were periodic and were so explicitly ordered sequence of numbers that they could not be caused by any reason known to me at that time ... Some time later, I realized that the disturbances observed by me could be a message p Azuma beings. "
Although Tesla was criticized for such statements, the mystery of the signals found by him remained unanswered.
The first serious search for possible radio signals from intelligent aliens was a short-term project implemented in America in 1924. At that time it was still believed that our neighbor Mars was the most likely home of an extraterrestrial civilization and that if the Martians are going to make contact with us, they will do this at the moment when the two planets are as close as possible to each other. This happens during the so-called opposition, when the Earth passes between Mars and the Sun. One of these confrontations happened between August 21 and 23, 1924, when Mars approached Earth closer than in the last few thousand years (this record was broken in August 2003, and the next time it will happen in 2287). Scientists have decided that if the Martians exist, they use this opposition to transmit signals to Earth. The US Navy took this idea seriously enough to announce the “national radio day”, asking citizens across the country to turn off the radio for five minutes at the beginning of each hour during the 36-hour period of Mars passing around Earth. At the US Naval Observatory located in Washington, the radio was raised to a height of 3 km on the dirigible, and all the country's naval bases received a command to track radio waves in search of something unusual. But they did not hear anything except atmospheric noise and signals from private radio stations that did not observe the radio silence mode.
It was after the original Frank Drake project that the SETI movement really began to unfold, spreading its search far beyond the solar system. So that you understand how radio telescopes have already expanded the range available to us, the two stars that Drake focused on studying in 1960 are about 10 light-years away — two million times farther than Mars. It’s as if you put a glass on the wall to listen to what your neighbor is talking about, and, not hearing anything, you decided instead to try to overhear the conversation in New York while being in London. Obviously, the crucial point was to determine where exactly to direct the antenna of the radio telescope.
The SETI Institute in California was founded in 1984, and a few years later, the Phoenix project was launched under the direction of astronomer Jill Tarter, who became the prototype for the main character of the novel Karl Sagan “Contact”. Between 1995 and 2004, radio telescopes located in Australia, the United States and Puerto Rico monitored 800 sun-like stars located within 200 light years from Earth using the Phoenix project. But nothing was found. True, the project has become a reliable source of information necessary to study the possibility of the existence of alien life. Together with fellow astronomer Margaret Turnbull, Jill Tarter compiled a catalog of nearby stars that could potentially have planetary systems where life could be found (so-called potentially habitable stars). , HabCat, 17 000 , , .
2001 «» SETI. (Allen Telescope Array, ATA); - -. 350 ( 6 ), . 2007 , 43 , 2011 - . , . , , «» . .
, . . 1 1000 . . , , 1,42 . — , , , , , — . , , 1 10 ( , ).
, , , . .
, ( ) . - — , . — . , , , . . ( , ). , , . , , ( ), .
, , , , , ( ).
700 . . 2009 «» ( , , ). 2011 «» 1235 , 54 , ( , ).
, 50 1 % (500 ) . , , , 2 . 30 000 1000 .
, . , - , , (, : , ). 581 d 581 ( 20 ). , d , , (, , b; ). 581 d , , . , .
HD 85512 b HD 85512, , , 36 . , ; . , 1,5 , — 25 °C. , , , . (, ) 54 .
2011 «» Kepler-22 b. , 581 HD 85512 ( 600 ), ( G). Kepler-22 b , , , . , , , , . , , , , , «» , .
, . , .
?
, , , — -, - : - ? , , .
— . , , , ( ), . , , , , , , - . ? , , , , (, , ), , . ?
— . . -, .
( , , ), - , . , () , ( ). , , , .
. , , , , , , , , , , ( ).
, , , , , , - ( ).
, , . , ? , . . , ( , ), 3,5 . , , , : .
, , ( ) ( ), -. , , . . ( , ) (, , , ). , , .
, , , «-747», , , . ?
1953 . , . : , , , , . , , . , , — , , , , . , — ( ).
, , , . , ? , , — . , , , , , , , .
, , , . GFAJ-1 ( , , , ). , , . 2–3 , , , (- (pH) 10). , , , . , .
- GFAJ-1, , , : — , .
, , : , , , . , . - , , . , GFAJ-1 , . « », , — , . , . ?
2010 . , GFAJ-1 - . , : , ? , , , , , .
, . , , . , , , .
, , , , . , , , . , , , , , ( ) - .
, , , . , . , , , , . 1973 , - 500- . : «, , . , ». , , , - . , , , , , .
— . — — . ( ) , . , , ( ), , . , . , ? , ( ). . , , , ( ).
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More information about the book can be found on the publisher's website.
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Excerpt
25% — Pop Science
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/278217/
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