Australia Joins High-Budget Alien Hunt!

The Parkes Radio Telescope in New South Wales, Australia joins the Breakthrough Listen to search for alien civilizations. Although the chances of finding aliens are slim, joining the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Automated Planet Finder at Lick Observatory in California could yield promising results.

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Good. Parkes has been too busy to do much of this in the past but it is aging now, and this is the best use for a good aging radio telescope.

What happens if we do detect alien life? I suppose the wankers will want to convert them to Christianity.

bob(from black rock) said:

What happens if we do detect alien life? I suppose the wankers will want to convert them to Christianity.

Yes indeed.

I went to a christian school in my primary years, with some hard-core fundies running the show. I once asked my teacher if he thought there were intelligent aliens living on another planet somewhere. His response surprised me, he was non-committal on whether they existed or not, but he was adamant that of they did exist that Jesus died for their sins too.

party_pants said:

bob(from black rock) said:

What happens if we do detect alien life? I suppose the wankers will want to convert them to Christianity.

Yes indeed.

No indeed.

Any detection will be “we’ve found a result consistent with alien life”.
We won’t be able to read any signal, so won’t have a clue as to what they are saying.

So the first and only thing we can do is to send a signal in the correct direction in the hope that whatever is there may be is sufficiently primitive that it can read our signal. And then wait for a reply. And wait.

When we don’t get a reply, 100 or so years down the track, send a fast automated spacecraft in that direction and hope it survives for the 20,000 years or so to get there and send back some results.

Only then do we have any difficult choices to make. Religious or otherwise. Civilization will have completely collapsed a couple of times between now and then, so the hope is that we haven’t totally wiped ourselves off the planet before the space probe signal comes back.

In the meantime, we should try to create alien life on Earth.

mollwollfumble said:

party_pants said:

bob(from black rock) said:

What happens if we do detect alien life? I suppose the wankers will want to convert them to Christianity.

Yes indeed.

No indeed.

Any detection will be “we’ve found a result consistent with alien life”.
We won’t be able to read any signal, so won’t have a clue as to what they are saying.

So the first and only thing we can do is to send a signal in the correct direction in the hope that whatever is there may be is sufficiently primitive that it can read our signal. And then wait for a reply. And wait.

When we don’t get a reply, 100 or so years down the track, send a fast automated spacecraft in that direction and hope it survives for the 20,000 years or so to get there and send back some results.

Only then do we have any difficult choices to make. Religious or otherwise. Civilization will have completely collapsed a couple of times between now and then, so the hope is that we haven’t totally wiped ourselves off the planet before the space probe signal comes back.

In the meantime, we should try to create alien life on Earth.

It’s alive and well and living in the US of A(liens).