Well, there's the other view . . . perhaps they already know about us and want nothing to do with us, were too primitive or warlike. Kinda of like that one neighbor in the neighborhood everyone scorns. Another thought I had today was about a galaxy, NGC 3621 found here: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1104/ where it discusses that this galaxy has no central bulge but is a pure disk galaxy. What is interesting about this galaxy (and these pure disk galaxies are now thought to be common) is that it has an active super massive black hole at its core. This has occurred because astronomers feels that NGC 3621 is out there by itself and hasn't had any collisions to cause gravitational instabilities that build up stars in the central region, forming the bulge. Anyway, what is interesting to me is that it is 22 million ly away. So lets say there is a highly technological society on a planet in NGC 3621 IF there who has built a telescope capable of seeing planets in another galaxy (yes, highly unlikely) and they were looking at us, or the light that came from us say today, they would be looking back 22 million years to the early Miocene epoch on earth. The apes that we are descendant from didn't even come around until around 15 my years ago and there would be no evidence by studying the spectrograph of the light coming from earth that there is any type of technological civilization here. So would they just skip us and move on looking for advance life that was around 22 my? Or would they be patient or get to the point that they perhaps don't care about finding life and have moved off their planet and colonized space around them by this time? Perhaps they have built the first and second Foundation by now? Bottom line Joe, a fine entry that day. BTW, for fun, we are getting a close shave today by an asteroid that is about 2-3 m in size. 2011 CQ1 will pass us by just under 12,000 KM or 7500 miles. It was discovered yesterday by R. A. Kowalski few hours ago in the course of the "Catalina Sky Survey" <http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/> with a 0.68-m Schmidt + CCD. The object was moving at roughly 6 "/min and it was of magnitude ~19. According to its absolute magnitude H=32 this is a very small object, in the order of 2-3 meters. Here's the info on it at this blog site: http://remanzacco.blogspot.com/2011/02/2011-cq1-very-close-approach.html On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Patrick Wiggins <paw@wirelessbeehive.com>wrote:
On 04 Feb 2011, at 11:51, Don J. Colton wrote:
Your blog readership is much larger than we may have thought. Get a controversial subject and you find out...
You got that right Don. Maybe next Joe should blog about NASA's policy on guns in space. :)
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