five billion years of solitude the search for life among the stars lee billings

5 tỷ năm trước, thời gian rất dài để bây giờ con người chúng ta bắt đầu tìm tòi 1 cuộc sống mới trên hành tinh khác, có thật sự có sự sống trên hành tinh khác, hãy cùng khám phá cuốn sách này của LEE.

[...]... water will rapidly cook off into space The loss of oceans a billion years from now marks the most likely expiration date for all life on Earth’s surface, though the omnipresent microbial biosphere might endure for billions of years further, shielded deep within the planet’s parched crust Somewhere in the neighborhood of five billion years from now, the Sun will exhaust its supply of hydrogen and begin... chronicle of an unfolding scientific revolution, zooming in on the ardent search for other Earths around other stars Most of all, however, it is a meditation on humanity’s uncertain legacy This book’s title, Five Billion Years of Solitude , refers to the longevity of life on Earth Life on this planet has an expiration date, if for no other reason than that someday the Sun will cease to shine Life emerged... other stars Over the years, astronomers used radio telescopes around the world to conduct hundreds of searches, looking at thousands of stars on millions of narrowband radio frequencies But not one delivered unassailable evidence of life, intelligence, or technology beyond our planet The silence of the universe was unbroken And so for more than fifty years Drake and his disciples played the roles of. .. children to the task of counting them as an informal science project They counted more than 2,000, one for each year of the tree’s life, which apparently began around the time of the birth of Jesus Christ “This tree saw the first light from the supernova that made the Crab Nebula, right about here,” Drake said, touching a point midway between the stump’s center and perimeter Light from the supernova... stars in the Kepler field of view Most of the Kepler field stars are several hundreds of light -years distant; the ATA would be extremely unlikely to detect a radio signal from any of them unless the transmitting dish at the other end was at least as large as the one at Arecibo Much like the SETI Institute and the ATA itself, Arecibo had seen better days Around the turn of the millennium, its funding... planet was actually either of those things They would be stuck where Drake had been fifty years before, hoping against all odds for a message from the stars to come streaming from the sky, filled with information on the flora, fauna, and environment of a place far, far away During the nineteenth century, a series of incremental discoveries led to the breakthrough that enabled the bulk of modern astronomy:... atmospheric chemistry They could search for indicators of habitability, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, as well as signs of life, like the free oxygen that filled and tinted our own planet’s skies They could look for the glint of a parent star’s light shining off the smooth, flat surface of a planet’s oceans or seas, or even subtle changes in the color of land that would hint at photosynthetic plants... Observatory was something of a linchpin for his dreams of messages from faraway lands and strange peoples Over the years, as the lingering cosmic silence led some SETI practitioners to lower their estimates of L and of the likelihood of civilizations around nearby stars, the giant Arecibo dish became a central justification for continued SETI efforts Thanks to its existence, the possibility of contact could... the fallen fortunes of his chosen scientific field: SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence “Things have slowed down, and we’re in bad shape in several ways,” Drake rumbled The money simply isn’t there these days And we’re all getting old A lot of young people come up and say they want to be a part of this, but then they discover there are no jobs No company is hiring anyone to search for. .. ones,” he said On Earth, the high technology developed during the first half of the twentieth century had in the second half spread from developed countries to colonize the entire globe After harnessing the power of the atomic nucleus, science had turned to the machinery within the nuclei of living cells, bringing forth what promised to be a transformative era of synthetic biology The world’s human population . publish books for every reader. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Billings, Lee, author. Five billion years of solitude : the search for life among the stars / Lee Billings. pages. title, Five Billion Years of Solitude, refers to the longevity of life on Earth. Life on this planet has an expiration date, if for no other reason than that someday the Sun will cease to shine. Life. back -of- the- envelope calculations based on the dish’s sensitivity and transmitting power, then probably double-checked them with a growing sense of glee. Drake’s figuring showed that if a twin of