Ā Wow!
Dammit. Beat me to it by three minutes.
This is spectacular news if true.
Couldnāt agree more, one puzzle solved. Go science!
But Iām curious: If comets typically emit large clouds of hydrogen - why donāt we have more false positives? The HI line is one (if not the most) used frequency in astronomy (and SETI).
eta: from TFA
James Bauer of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, agrees that the hydrogen from comets can extend quite far, but still thinks the signal wonāt be strong enough. āIf comets were radio-bright at 21 centimetres, I would be puzzled as to why they arenāt observed more often at those wavelengths,ā he says.
Butā¦ I was hoping it was aliens D-;
Iām not sure. Iād guess that the ratio of Deuterium to Hydrogen would produce subtly different wavelengths.
Deuterium is basically Hydrogen, only heavier.
This ratio is how we know that Earth was not seeded with water by the likes of comet CG. So Iād say that the general fingerprint of comets is known, and is taken into account.
Iām not a physicist, but Iād guess If two crossing comets had different wavelengths merging together, I suppose itās possible that it may have produced an harmonic frequency, making a signal of interest.
If it were aliens, that message would have already been 1500 to 25000 years old.
Um, yeah, but are you saying it still wouldnāt mean anything to know we arenāt alone in the universe? Or uh, werenātā¦
Oh no, not at all. That would be absolutely mind-blowingly brilliant. OTOH it would be finding a fossil, rather than an organism. Not something we could have a back-and-forth with. Any intelligent life is too marooned for that.
And although I believe life is plentiful in the cosmos, I think intelligent life is extremely rare, not inevitable at all.
Intelligence only arrived on Earth seconds ago in the big scheme of things. Life plodded along for millennia before us. I think it takes a perfect storm of factors, environmental, biological and cosmological to allow creatures such as us to evolve.
If the dinosaurs hadnāt been so rudely interrupted, itās likely weād never have happened.
I was thinking about this the other day and, srsly, if your civilization has mastered what it would need to in order to āpop by for a visitā - would they actually want to come here? I sure wouldnāt. It wouldnāt surprise me in the least to one day find that this blue marble has been blacklisted.
Not if they were Martians, mister smarty pants!
Thereās no arguing with that.
Probably true.
Thanks, Obama!
To be exact, it has roughly twice the mass (1N + 1P + 1e). Deuterium and tritium are the only isotopes whose masses are actually multiples of the principal isotope, which is why they are identified by special names. For such a common element, hydrogen has some of the weirdest properties.
Quite a small sample for such a categorical claim.
Also, do we count that bacterium that survived in a camera on the Moon as a life form on another planet?
Only one. And as @shaddack inferred, sample size is everything.
Here on Earth we have a sample size of millions of different organisms, over millions of years, and only one of them developed intelligence(1), and that seems to have only happened because small, shrew-like mammals got a lucky break. If the dinosaurs (amongst others) werenāt wiped out, Iād wager my birth that Earth would still be a wild and overgrown place.
I think that itās wrong to compare it to exceptionalism. Thatās a strawman. Or possibly a red herring.
(1) As intelligence is a little slippery to define, Iāve used āthe ability to actually work out what those lights in the sky areā as my yardstick.
In an infinite universe you can have an infinite number of intelligent-lifeform inhabited planetsā¦ infinitely far part.
