TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
November 3, 2024
Jupiter Abyss
What's that black spot on Jupiter? No one is sure. During one pass of NASA's Juno over Jupiter, the robotic spacecraft imaged an usually dark cloud feature informally dubbed the Abyss. Surrounding cloud patterns show the Abyss to be at the center of a vortex. Since dark features on Jupiter's atmosphere tend to run deeper than light features, the Abyss may really be the deep hole that it appears – but without more evidence that remains conjecture. The Abyss is surrounded by a complex of meandering clouds and other swirling storm systems, some of which are topped by light colored, high-altitude clouds. The featured image was captured in 2019 while Juno passed only about 15,000 kilometers above Jupiter's cloud tops. The next close pass of Juno near Jupiter will be in about three weeks.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/oct/03/instagram-posts/old-claim-that-diddy-wrote-a-purported-book-traffi/
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'Alien signal' sent from Mars decoded by father-daughter team
Nov 1, 2024
In 2023, a coded message was beamed at Earth from Mars. After over a year, this simulated extraterrestrial signal was finally decoded.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter Mars probe beamed the signal at us in May 2023 as part of "A Sign in Space," a multi-week art project led by Daniela de Paulis, the current Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
The project was intended as an experiment to test what types of techniques might be useful for decoding signals that might be detected as part of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) efforts.
After over a year, a father-daughter team has decoded that signal. Ken and Keli Chaffin were able to decipher the message after "following their intuition and running simulations for hours and days on end," according to an ESA statement.
Before the simulated alien signal could be decoded, it first had to be extracted from the raw radio signal data. That took just 10 days, thanks to a group of some 5,000 citizen scientists. But that was the easy part.
It took the Chaffins over a year to decode the signal. They finally found that it "contained movement," ESA wrote in the statement, which suggested to them that it might harbor information about cellular formation or life.
But decoding a signal doesn't necessarily mean that it can be understood. Now that the cryptic message has been decoded, citizen scientists like the Chaffins will have to begin attempting to interpret its contents and find possible meaning in it.
And that's the overall goal of the A Sign in Space Project. "Receiving a message from an extraterrestrial civilization would be a profoundly transformational experience for all humankind," de Paulis said in a 2023 statement describing the project.
"A Sign in Space offers the unprecedented opportunity to tangibly rehearse and prepare for this scenario through global collaboration, fostering an open-ended search for meaning across all cultures and disciplines."
But interpreting a message of true alien provenance could prove much, much harder, if it ever happens.
Any simulated messages like the one beamed to Earth from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter were created by humans and thus will embody how we view the universe and communicate our experience of it.
All our ideas about language, data, information and communication are rooted in how physics work on Earth, how human sensory organs perceive the world around us, how human languages have evolved, etc.
It's hard for us to imagine how these same processes might work on an exoplanet harboring life, simply because we've never found or experienced one yet.
For all we know, alien communication might more resemble a collection of odors or the movements of a pile of leaves in the wind than anything we recognize as language.
Still, the search has to begin somewhere.
Projects like A Sign in Space offer useful thought experiments for planning how we might respond to the detection of a true alien radio signal.
And the fact that this signal was decoded by citizen scientists shows exactly the type of out-of-the-box thinking that will likely be required when and if we ever receive that signal.
"More than astronomy, communicating with E.T. will require a breadth of knowledge," said Wael Farah, project scientist with the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array in northern California.
"With A Sign in Space, we hope to make the initial steps towards bringing a community together to meet this challenge."
https://www.space.com/alien-signal-mars-decoded-esa-exomars
https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/10/Alien_signal_decoded
Where Americans are safest during an alien invasion revealed in new poll
Updated: 16:06 EST, 1 November 2024
The analysis couldn't come at a better time as public concern over the threat of an alien invasion has skyrocketed.
'Gone are the days when it was regarded as part fringe, part-science fiction, and part conspiracy theory,' said former UK Ministry of Defense UFO investigator Nick Pope.
'UFOs are now being treated as a defense and national security issue, discussed in the United States Congress, and attracting attention from the Head of NASA.'
Nearly two thirds of Americans now believe that aliens exist, and roughly one third consider UFO sightings to be proof - a significant increase from 20 percent in 1996.
And internet searches for 'what would happen if aliens came to Earth' have increased a 2,850 percent in recent months.
Safety officials are prepping for an extra-terrestrial emergency too. In June, the first ever police handbook on UFOs was released, offering guidance to law enforcement on how to respond to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena.
If you're wondering where you should flee in the event that aliens attack, this survey should point you in the right direction.
Rant Casino pulled data on the number of UFO sightings and the average duration of 'UFO visits' from the National UFO Reporting Centre Database and aggregated it per US state.
The number of sightings could suggest that aliens have been circling and planning the invasion, and thus the number and duration of sightings in each state may be linked to the odds of an invasion starting there.
Therefore, states with the lowest number of UFO sightings were ranked safest.
Additionally, one of the first things people should due to survive an alien attack is to hide.
Because of this, Rant Casino decided that states with lower population densities may be safer during an invasion, as they would provide more space for people to take cover, evacuate or organize a counter attack.
This means that rural states or those with large uninhabited regions were given an edge over more densely populated states.
Each state received a score on the zero to 10 alien survival index scale.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14030619/Where-Americans-safest-alien-invasion-poll.html