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Cosmic greetings – Santa-in-Space – in the bubble

John Healy

My holiday card this year in the cosmic greetings, Santa-in-Space series. In the bubble … at various scales …

Santa-in-Space montage 2020
So many habitable bubbles … then bubbles within those …
Notes

• Space.com > “NORAD tracks Santa Claus in cosmic trip to the International Space Station” by Tariq Malik (December 24, 2020)

• YouTube > NORAD > Analytical Graphics > “NTS 2020 ISS” (Dec 21, 2020) – The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI) have unveiled a new video of Santa’s flyby of the International Space Station, which comes just in time for Christmas during the station’s 20th anniversary year of crewed missions.

• Space.com > “Santa Claus snags FAA license for commercial mission to space station” by Mike Wall (December 23, 2020)

Other midstream bubbles … a vision of galactic ambassadors …

• Phys.org > “An updated way to calculate the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations” by Bob Yirka, Phys.org (December 22, 2020) – A small team of researchers from California Institute of Technology, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Santiago High School has developed an updated version of an old equation to calculate the likely existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. The team has uploaded their paper to the arXiv preprint server.

• Space.com > “Alien hunters detect mystery signal coming from the closest star system” by Rafi Letzter (December 21, 2020) – Astronomers hunting for radio signals from alien civilizations have detected an “intriguing signal” from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun, …

• National Geographic > “How many alien civilizations are out there? A new galactic survey holds a clue” by Nadia Drake (November 2, 2020)

One thought on “Cosmic greetings – Santa-in-Space – in the bubble”

  1. So, wondering how many alien civilizations are out there? Say, just in the Milky Way? Here’s an article (below) with a somber estimation.

    • Space.com > “The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations” by Rafi Letzter (Jan 2, 2021) – An astrobiological statistical estimation using an empirical galactic simulation model.

    Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably killed themselves off already.

    That’s the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv database [1], which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map the emergence and death of intelligent life in time and space across the Milky Way. Their results amount to a more precise 2020 update of a famous equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake wrote in 1961.

    … we’re likely a frontier civilization in terms of galactic geography and relative latecomers to the self-aware Milky Way inhabitant scene. But, assuming life does arise reasonably often and eventually becomes intelligent, there are probably other civilizations out there — mostly clustered around that 13,000-light-year band, mostly due to the prevalence of sunlike stars there.

    Notes

    [1] From arxiv.org paper:

    [Funding] This research was supported by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under the contract with NASA. We acknowledge the partial funding support from the NASA Exoplanet Research Program NNH18ZDA001N.

    [See] Appendix Figure 1: An illustrated diagram of approach of key components for ETI investigation as well as our research highlights and potential future works.

    • arxiv.org > “A Statistical Estimation of the Occurrence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy” (v2 17 Dec 2020)

    Authors:

    • Xiang Cai1, Santiago High School, Corona, CA

    • Jonathan H. Jiang (astrophysicist) & Kristen A. Fahy, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

    • Yuk L. Yung, Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

    … typically overlooked factors such as the process of abiogenesis, different evolutionary timescales and potential self-annihilation are incorporated to explore the growth propensity of ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence].

    … Our model simulation also identified a peak location for ETI at an annular region approximately 4 kpc from the Galactic center around 8 billion years (Gyrs), …

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