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February 3, 2021 Archives
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
CONTEXT: “A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens” Now on arXiv
Robin Hanson, Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter, and Jonathan Paulson present a novel solution to the Fermi paradox in “A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens”, now posted on arXiv. Spacefaring civilisations which become “grabby”—suppressing the emergence of other spacefaring civilisations in the volume they control—might occupy around a third of the universe today while undetected so far by humans. If humans are on the threshold of becoming such a grabby civilisation, today is a typical origin date for a grabby civilisation. This explains why, despite the “hard steps” model, an advanced human technological civilisation emerged so early in the history of the universe: later-emerging civilisations are precluded by the expansion of grabby alien competitors into the volume where they might develop.
The model has only three parameters, each of which can be estimated with around a factor of four. Here is a visualisation of a simulation of the growth of grabby alien civilisations.
Source code for this simulation is available on GitHub.
Posted at
16:14
TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Scott Manley's Analysis of the SpaceX Starship SN9 Test
Posted at
15:22
THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX Plans to Launch Two Starlink Missions in One Day
Now targeting two Falcon 9 launches of Starlink satellites on Thursday, February 4, pending range acceptance and recovery weather conditions. First Falcon 9 launch at 1:19 a.m. EST from SLC-40, followed by another Falcon 9 launch ~4 hours later at 5:36 a.m. EST from LC-39A
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 3, 2021
Update: (2020-03-03 20:03 UTC)
This is the first time since 11 November 1966 that two launches will lift off from the Eastern Range on the same day. Those previous missions were Gemini 12 and Atlas Agena which lifted off 99 minutes apart from each other. The two Falcons will lift off less than 5 hours apart.
— 45th Space Wing (@45thSpaceWing) February 3, 2021
Posted at
14:54
CONTEXT: Forgotten Number Systems
The Cistercian monks invented a numbering system in the 13th century which meant that any number from 1 to 9999 could be written using a single symbol pic.twitter.com/VRuEx4dkPF
— UCL Department of Mathematics (@MathematicsUCL) February 2, 2021
Posted at
14:23