Comments for Space Archaeology

Comment on Review: Prometheus by FlatusMcToot

FlatusMcToot — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 05:51:59 +0000

Hey, DORKS, did you forget it’s a movie and not a Discovery doco?

Suspend your disbelief for a minute.

I watched the original Alien movie the night after seeing Prometheus and I thought it was SHITHOUSE. Plot holes and revealing mistakes galore not to mention the lousy mechanical puppets and props.

Comment on Genomic SETI by kapak

kapak — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 08:52:42 +0000

why do people assume that 80 or so % of the Gene is junk code?? actually it might be something that in programming we call error handling, which means under various circumstances a part of that DNA code would start reacting and that is what i think gives living creatures their Adaptability. just like what we have when 2 people with the same hidden genetic disease(like near family members) marry, in their child that genetic disease would be amplified. perhaps that code is there for a reason and just because we don’t know what a computer code does, doesn’t mean its meaningless. on the contrary nature proves to be very efficient and normally unnecessary material are automatically erased.

Comment on Review: ‘Searching for interstellar communications’, by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison by roger

roger — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 01:39:11 +0000

What kind of passive SETI indication could be built? something that just uses sunlight to refocus the power into a beacon. No moving parts. If light could be captured into the right shaped spaces what kind of output could it create? Then place multiple items in a large orbit so the signals appear around the system. Done properly they could broadcast for a long long time without any intervention. Each one radiating a slightly different frequency perhaps that would attract extra-solar attention.
A flight of fancy with no real source on how to do it…

Comment on Review: ‘Footprints of alien technology’, by Paul Davies by Paul Davies: The (New) Search for Alien Life - Guerrilla Explorer

Paul Davies: The (New) Search for Alien Life - Guerrilla Explorer — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:05:47 +0000

[...] people of a similar mindset suggest searching the solar system for large scale evidence such as “orbiting probes, artificial structures on planetary surfaces, and astroengineering projects s… Davies proposes an all-out search for more subtle traces…right here on earth. In other words, [...]

Comment on 10 Space Archaeology Stories You Must Read by Romana S

Romana S — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 08:37:36 +0000

Thank you heaps Gerard!

Comment on Review: Prometheus by Anne

Anne — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:26:41 +0000

Plus, the best parts were incredibly similar to the Mass Effect games…

Comment on Review: Prometheus by Anne

Anne — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:05:21 +0000

As an archaeologists and a science fiction fan, I have to say this is the best review of the movie so far. I just have to add, Archaeologists looking for Upper Palaeolithic rock art in Scotland!!!! 35.000 years old paintings in the Isle of Skye? Humans were not living there during the upper Palaeolithic, it was all cover with permanent ice! Moreover, there are only such kind of wall paintings in Southern France and Northern Spain, and the few anthropomorphic depictions are quite different from the ones shown! A little research would have made the movie so much better!

Comment on 10 Space Archaeology Stories You Must Read by Gerard Sp

Gerard Sp — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 19:28:21 +0000

The story is “Protected Species” by H B Fyfe.
You probably read it in “Galactic Empires 1″, ed. Brian Aldiss, first published 1976

Comment on Genomic SETI by mick

mick — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 01:24:59 +0000

There is as it turns out a rather simple way of solving this problem in an hour or so. Now before I let the cat out of the bag let me state here categorically that there is no way to find out what the message says… but it will tell us conclusively if there is a hidden message of any type in our DNA or any genome you care to mention, and as I said (since we have a good few genomes sequinned these days and available publicly) any programmer could indeed try it out.

So here’s the gist of it…

If I take a sheet of paper which has radom letters printed on it (including the space character etc) and I read them into a database and then do a search for the most frequently repeated phrases well I’ll get most likely none. This is because the initial letters were all random, so although there is a chance some might appear more than once essentailly the entire thing will be gibberish and any attempt to try plott a frequency of sequences would be total gibberish…the probability of each phrase would flat line.

Now language is a different kettle of fish… if I take any book, in any language, or any math, or any computer script and I carry out the same task some ‘words’ or letter sequences will appear more often than others… in fact as it turns out all mathematical formulas, all written language and all computer scripts have at least one thing in common… a plot distribution of the frequency of sequences will produce a graph, starting with the most common all the way down to the least common.

In english this might be the word ‘the’ or ‘a’ followed perhaps by ‘of’ etc. In Math the most likely character is most likely ‘=’ or ‘divided by’

In programming is almost always ‘=’ followed by quotation marks and so on…

SO all we need to do is search the entire genome of every sequence organism so far for sections with the ‘most’ repeated sequences…and if this section resolves to a decreasing appearance of sequences then there is a bone-fide language in there…but we won’t of course know what it says.

This is because this system would only give you the frequency of ‘words’ or ‘sequence snippets’ it will not tell you what they mean, what order they go in, or if they are mathematical or language or any other form of communication.

Personally I doubt it, the universe is a very big place and I have better things to do…john hawks on the other hand is a bright guy (regardless of his ideas) I’m sure John can take this up if he likes. It’ll answer his basic question.

I’d say each billion base pairs would take no longer than an hour or so to read and run through such an algorithm… that’s three hours or the human genome….a lot less than the time it would take to write and test a script to accomplish it.

Comment on 10 Space Archaeology Stories You Must Read by Romana S

Romana S — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 09:44:35 +0000

I’m trying to find a short story I read in the late 80s about an expedition that is exploring ruins on an alien planet. There is an obvious sentient local life form which the humans are having problems with. The new military commander issues rules that humans stop harming the locals. He is later kidnapped by them and taken to a room where the local leader thanks him for protecting them. He realises they can intercept his radio messages. He asks them about the ruins to which they reply “These aren’t our ruins, they’re yours” or similar. Anyone know this story’s title?