ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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Loeb plumbs new depths.
Albert Einstein famously argued in a letter to the physicist Max Born in December 1926 that God does not play dice. The letter referred to the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics but it can also be interpreted more broadly as if nature does not make random choices.
In fact, it is the duty of a scientist to make sense of nature’s choices. Otherwise, reality looks random to those who do not understand it. Weather was perceived this way before satellite and ground-based data allowed modern science to make weather forecasts a week in advance. As an advanced scientific civilization, the fundamental insight we learned is that we should be guided by evidence rather than prejudice. As often imagined in mathematics or science fiction stories, the range of possibilities is far greater and sometimes has no overlap with what is actually realized in nature.
On April 6, 2022, the United States Space Command tweeted a formal letter confirming that a meteor identified in the CNEOS catalog by my student Amir Siraj and me in 2019 as originating from outside the solar system based on its high speed, is indeed interstellar. The meteor detection on January 8, 2014, predated the first reported interstellar object, `Oumuamua, by almost four years and should be recognized as the first interstellar object ever discovered. The meteor paper was initially doubted because the uncertainties in the velocity measurements were classified. The release of the confirmation letter is a watershed moment in which the government assists scientific progress by confirming the interstellar origin of this so-called CNEOS-2014-01-08 meteor at the 99.999% confidence. ...
The debris from CNEOS-2014-01-08 landed on the ocean floor near Papua New Guinea and it is possible to scoop them with a magnet. Once collected, we could place our hands around sizeable chunks of interstellar matter and examine its composition and nature. The ocean on site is a couple of kilometers deep, and the impact region is uncertain to within ten kilometers. But an expedition to explore this region for meteor fragments is feasible, and we are currently engaged in designing it.
The fundamental question is whether any interstellar meteor might indicate a composition that is unambiguously artificial in origin? Better still, perhaps some technological components would survive the impact. My dream is to press some buttons on a functional piece of equipment that was manufactured outside of Earth. ...
https://thedebrief.org/scooping-interstellar-fragments-from-the-ocean-floor/
SCOOPING INTERSTELLAR FRAGMENTS FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR
by AVI LOEBAlbert Einstein famously argued in a letter to the physicist Max Born in December 1926 that God does not play dice. The letter referred to the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics but it can also be interpreted more broadly as if nature does not make random choices.
In fact, it is the duty of a scientist to make sense of nature’s choices. Otherwise, reality looks random to those who do not understand it. Weather was perceived this way before satellite and ground-based data allowed modern science to make weather forecasts a week in advance. As an advanced scientific civilization, the fundamental insight we learned is that we should be guided by evidence rather than prejudice. As often imagined in mathematics or science fiction stories, the range of possibilities is far greater and sometimes has no overlap with what is actually realized in nature.
On April 6, 2022, the United States Space Command tweeted a formal letter confirming that a meteor identified in the CNEOS catalog by my student Amir Siraj and me in 2019 as originating from outside the solar system based on its high speed, is indeed interstellar. The meteor detection on January 8, 2014, predated the first reported interstellar object, `Oumuamua, by almost four years and should be recognized as the first interstellar object ever discovered. The meteor paper was initially doubted because the uncertainties in the velocity measurements were classified. The release of the confirmation letter is a watershed moment in which the government assists scientific progress by confirming the interstellar origin of this so-called CNEOS-2014-01-08 meteor at the 99.999% confidence. ...
The debris from CNEOS-2014-01-08 landed on the ocean floor near Papua New Guinea and it is possible to scoop them with a magnet. Once collected, we could place our hands around sizeable chunks of interstellar matter and examine its composition and nature. The ocean on site is a couple of kilometers deep, and the impact region is uncertain to within ten kilometers. But an expedition to explore this region for meteor fragments is feasible, and we are currently engaged in designing it.
The fundamental question is whether any interstellar meteor might indicate a composition that is unambiguously artificial in origin? Better still, perhaps some technological components would survive the impact. My dream is to press some buttons on a functional piece of equipment that was manufactured outside of Earth. ...
https://thedebrief.org/scooping-interstellar-fragments-from-the-ocean-floor/
