Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kinkblot who wrote (465)	3/23/2005 5:49:51 PM
From: Volsi Mimir	Respond to of 480

List in Space: Calling the Cosmos Gets Commercial [we have to start asking for those GREEN cards, folks] By Ker Than Special to SPACE.com posted: 23 March 2005 06:46 am ET Aliens will be glad to know that if ever they need to find an apartment here on Earth, someone has got them covered. On March 11th at 6:30pm, a company called Deep Space Communications Network beamed the first commercial transmission of a website into space. The message? Over one hundred thousand separate postings from craigslist.com, the popular community website that includes classified listings for jobs, housing and other goods. The transmission included a date and time stamp, as well as an audio track identifying the message as originating from Earth. “It's very fitting that the first [commercial] transmission into space is by a community website like craiglist because it represents a wide cross section of society,” said Jim Lewis, vice president of Deep Space Communications Network. The company is an offshoot of Communications Concepts, Inc., a company based in Cape Canaveral, Florida, that produces live television coverage of shuttle launches. That same equipment is now being used to give the public a chance to send messages out to any intergalactic neighbors that might be listening in a service slated to become widely available within the next month. Lewis told SPACE.com that the company is currently in talks with craigslist to broadcast another transmission on to coincide with the planned Discovery launch, NASA’s first post-Columbia shuttle mission. Commercial messages have long been transmitted into space, inadvertantly since the first radio and television signals were generated, but the Deep Space Communications Network joins a short list of intentional transmissions aimed at contacting someone—anyone—out in the Universe. Another company, talktoaliens.com, offers a similar service but with an added twist: users can send a text message or they can dial a phone number and have their voices beamed live into space via a custom designed parabolic dish antenna dubbed the "Intergalactic Transmitter". The service has been available since March 7th, and the antenna is operational 24-hours a day. Talktoaliens.com is operated by a small group of radio and broadcasts engineers who were part of the Civilian Space eXploration Team, or CSXT, a group that made news in May of last year when they successfully launched the first amateur rocket into space. The company is headed by Eric Knight, CSXT’s former avionics manager. Neither of the companies target specific stars or particular points in space for their transmissions. Deep Space Communications Network aims their antenna at coordinates where there are no known satellites, and they estimate that their transmissions will travel approximately 1-3 light years. Talktoaliens.com states that their antenna is designed to sweep through as much of the Milky Way Galaxy as possible. The two services are the latest in a long tradition of radio CETI—or Communications with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence—attempts. The first, known as the Arecibo Message, occurred in 1974 when two Cornell University scientists beamed an encoded radio message that included an image of a human figure and the structure of DNA toward the great globular cluster M13, 25,000 light years away. In 1999 and 2003, a more elaborate set of messages known collectively as the Cosmic Call was sent out from a radio telescope in the Ukraine to nearby star systems deemed likely to harbor life. In 2001, another message, composed by Russian teens and called the Teenage Message to the Stars, was also transmitted from the Ukraine radio telescope. Knight describes his company as a public service. “The goal is to give every citizen on planet earth who has access to phone or computer an equal opportunity to use this service,” he said. "If you leave it to only a select few, it will end up being some sort of elite processed message.” Knight admits that the chances of an alien response are slim but said that it would be the ultimate reward. "It's the reason so many people are listening or talking into space and trying to establish dialogue with alien races."

To: kinkblot who wrote (465)	4/20/2005 12:33:27 AM
From: Volsi Mimir	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 480

Early universe may have flowed, not exploded By Matt Crenson The Associated Press Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider New results from a particle collider suggest that the universe behaved like a liquid in its earliest moments, not the fiery gas that was thought to have pervaded the first microseconds of existence. By revising physicists' concept of the early universe, the new discovery offers opportunities to better learn how subatomic particles interact at the most fundamental level. It may also reveal parallels between gravity and the force that holds atomic nuclei together, physicists said yesterday at a Tampa, Fla., meeting of the American Physical Society. "There are a lot of exciting questions," said Sam Aronson, associate director for high energy and nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Between 2000 and 2003, the lab's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), repeatedly smashed the nuclei of gold atoms together with such force that their energy briefly generated trillion-degree temperatures. Physicists think of the collider as a time machine, because those extreme temperatures last prevailed in the universe less than 100 millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Everything was so hot then that quarks and gluons, which are now almost inextricably bound into the protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei, were thought to have flown around like BBs in a blender. But by reproducing the conditions of the early universe, the RHIC has shown that unconstrained quarks and gluons don't fly away in all directions so much as squirt out in streams. "The matter that we've formed behaves like a very nearly perfect liquid," Aronson said. When physicists talk about a perfect liquid, they don't mean the best glass of champagne they ever tasted. The word "perfect" refers to the liquid's viscosity, a frictionlike property that affects a fluid's ability to flow and the resistance to objects trying to swim through it. Honey has a high viscosity; water's viscosity is low. A perfect liquid has no viscosity at all, which is impossible in reality but useful for theoretical discussions. "The excitement is that we might be achieving the lowest viscosity that's possible," said Brookhaven physicist Peter Steinberg. Theoretical physicists have recently proposed that material swallowed by black holes might also have extremely low viscosity. That notion, based on a branch of mathematical physics known as string theory, has led some physicists to hypothesize that there might be a deeper connection between what happens in a black hole and what goes on when two gold nuclei collide at the RHIC. For physicists, any chance to draw parallels between two vastly different phenomena is an opportunity to advance toward the field's holy grail, the unification of nature's forces. "It's just a very fascinating problem for a physicist to work on," said Dmitri Kharzeev, a theoretical physicist at Brookhaven. But it is far from being a breakthrough, cautions Dam Thanh Son, one of the string theorists who is working on the problem. "There may be a deep connection between string theory and the real world," said Son, a physics professor at the University of Washington. "The RHIC results will provide a lot of encouragement for people to try to find such a connection."