voices wrote:

Isn't there talk of building a radio telescope of the dark side of the moon?

It would be handy to eliminate noise pollution but I'm not sure that payoff would justify the cost.

Far side, not dark side - the moon is tidally locked to the earth not the sun.

Well relative to me its the dark side. ;p And I'm the centre of the universe.

Lovely starry night sky tonight.

Also, moon will be nice sight on 14th or so if we can see it.

https://www.firstlightoptics.com/heritage/skywatcher-heritage-76-mini-dobsonian.html

I have one of these.  I don't use it very often but I've seen Jupiter's moons and it does a good job with our own moon.  I'm sure if I bought a couple of good lenses for it, it would make a big difference, too.

superflyninja wrote:

This is what I have. I bought it for a song(40euro) in Lidl last year. I've seen the moons of (and) Jupiter in it. So awesome. And the moon looks amazing. I need to take it out more this winter.

That's fantastic value, especially if you got a good sample.

superflyninja wrote:

The difficultly Im having though is lining up the finder scope with the scope itself.

I think laser finders are much easier to use.

Calculations already factor for that, they also factor for other civs being at or beyond our stage of communication tech.

Fermi intelligent life doe, not space plankton with methane for blood

Well there's been quite a lot of time for alien cavemen to eventually build transmitters. The problem might be that they don't have opposable thumbs. The Universe could be teeming with animals who aren't likely to build a radio telescope ever. Despite the sheer weight of numbers, it might be a very, very unique set of dinosaur meteor type circumstances that get a life to tech abilities, although the size of Universe suggests this argument is irrelevant. 

Could be that the advanced don't bother with us dafties and communicate among their peers using gravitational waves or something, could be there's only one telescope planet per galaxy, could be anything.

https://youtu.be/59zLZ6PpeSA

cockbeard wrote:

Ah sorry, I've not been clear: The Fermi paradox or Fermi's paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates <- from wiki What I meant was we have a very narrow search, we are trying to find Earth twins,we are probably missing stuff left right and centre! Yesterday's announcement is cool though that there could be alien planets we could possibly survive on, but it doesnt excite me greatly about finding ETI there

I claim no knowledge, but the fact that all the life we know of on this planet is ridiculously similar to ourselves, number of limbs, hemispheric brains as well as redundancy across the same plane, kind of mnakes you think that perhaps we are designed (sorry, poor choice of word) pretty bloody well, so why not look for planets with similar characteristics, we'd have the best chance at communication, although we'd likely find creatures similar to what we know

Oh totally, it makes sense to look planets that would support life similar to us(our planet's biology), since we are the only known case of life.In my roundabout way Im wondering what we are missing though, like silicon based life or space whales or something!

Something I read/heard recently is that silicon isn't great for life because some of the important chemical bonds it forms are super difficult to break (i.e. glass - which is very inert). I don't want to say it's impossible, but carbon seems much better suited to complex life because it can be broken down and reformed easily, but still be relatively stable.

I got one of these for £20 from a charity shop, but the focus doesn't work. Nothing that a few hours of DYI wouldn't fix, but I haven't been bothered yet. I can't set up a proper telescope in my current living arrangements so it seems perfect.

cockbeard wrote:

Ah sorry, I've not been clear: The Fermi paradox or Fermi's paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between the lack of evidence and high probability estimates <- from wiki What I meant was we have a very narrow search, we are trying to find Earth twins,we are probably missing stuff left right and centre! Yesterday's announcement is cool though that there could be alien planets we could possibly survive on, but it doesnt excite me greatly about finding ETI there

I claim no knowledge, but the fact that all the life we know of on this planet is ridiculously similar to ourselves, number of limbs, hemispheric brains as well as redundancy across the same plane, kind of mnakes you think that perhaps we are designed (sorry, poor choice of word) pretty bloody well, so why not look for planets with similar characteristics, we'd have the best chance at communication, although we'd likely find creatures similar to what we know

A peculiar prehistoric discovery has left scientists scratching their heads for more than five decades.
Known as the Tully Monster after collector Francis Tully who originally discovered its remains back in 1958, this peculiar prehistoric denizen, which lived 307 million years ago in a coastal estuary in what is now northeastern Illinois, has remained notoriously difficult to classify for more than 50 years.

With a long torpedo-shaped body and two eyes set at either end of a horizontal bar attached to its face, the creature's bizarre appearance was unlike anything else known to science. It even had a long trunk-like snout protruding from its head with a teeth-filled claw attached to the end of it.

Back in March 2016, researchers thought that they had finally solved the mystery by categorising the creature as a type of lamprey, but now a group of paleobiologists led by Lauren Sallan of the University of Pennsylvania have come forward to claim that the previous study got it wrong.

"This animal doesn't fit easy classification because it's so weird," said Sallan. "It has these eyes that are on stalks and it has this pincer at the end of a long proboscis and there's even disagreement about which way is up. But the last thing that the Tully monster could be is a fish."

According to a new report, the original team's conclusions were wrong because they did not fully understand the way in which the fossil specimen had been preserved.

The creature also did not resemble the fossils of actual lampreys discovered in the same area.

"It's important to incorporate all lines of evidence when considering enigmatic fossils: anatomical, preservational and comparative," said study co-author Sam Giles.

"Applying that standard to the Tully monster argues strongly against a vertebrate identity."

We've had a number of mass extinctions (5) in the past wiping out 90% of all the creatures alive at the time. If it wasn't for those extinctions who knows what life would look like now.

superflyninja wrote:

SpaceGazelle wrote:

Could be that the advanced don't bother with us dafties and communicate among their peers using gravitational waves or something, could be there's only one telescope planet per galaxy, could be anything.

I really need to work on posting clearly and having my posts make sense. I meant that we are the cavemen and the aliens are communicating in some far out way amongst themselves we have not even dreamt of yet and we are oblivious. We are searching the universe in a very limited(but improving) manner!

But we have to search for what we know might exist. It's not that scientists are dismissing non goldilocks planets as having life, but they have no frame of reference so have no idea what to look for.

Earth is the only planet in the universe that has life on it, as far as we know, so it makes sense that in order to find extraterrestrial life we should concentrate on planets like ours. Otherwise what are we looking for? You can't search for something if you have no idea what it is, what it looks like, what requirements it has for survival etc.

Yes.