Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V15_3/V15NO321.TXT

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Date: Sat, 17 Oct 92 05:00:00
From: Space Digest maintainer <[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Subject: Space Digest V15 #321
To: Space Digest Readers
Precedence: bulk


Space Digest                Sat, 17 Oct 92       Volume 15 : Issue 321

Today's Topics:
                   Amateur Radio Astronomy..SOURCES
                   Bootstrap hardware for LunaBase
                          DC-X vote (2 msgs)
                       Dyson sphere (followup)
            Galileo's antenna (was Re: Gallileo's antenna)
                   Houston, Space Center has landed
                               Luna 10
         Math programs with arbitrary precision for the Mac?
               Pres Debate & military spending (2 msgs)
                       SETI functional grammar
                   SETI functional grammer (2 msgs)

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Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 14:44:08 GMT
From: JIM GRAHAM <[e-mail]>
Subject: Amateur Radio Astronomy..SOURCES
Newsgroups: sci.space

There are occasional questions on the net about amateur radio astronomy.

I thought I'd put this information sheet together, hoping to help out
a few wanna-be's.

The following are the only ones I'm aware of.  I was a past member,
and used to subscribe to both journals.

I personally own a 12 foot and a 20 foot dish, spectrum analyzer, and
necessary front-end electronics to get on the air, but have disassembled
everything because of moving.

If you have any further questions, I'll _try_ to answer them.

Jim Graham
[e-mail]
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The leading organization for Amateur Radio Astronomers is:

The Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers (S.A.R.A.)
P.O. Box 4208
Tampa, Florida  33677-4208

S.A.R.A. publishes a monthly or bimonthly journal (I can't recall)
of member activities and occasional guest articles by professional
Radio Astronomers.

S.A.R.A.'s president is:
Jeff Lichtman
37 Crater Lake Drive
Coram, NY  11727

Jeff also publishes various how-to books of amateur radio astronomy
in the microwave spectrum.

If the above two addresses fail, look for an ad in the back of any
Sky & Telescope for "Bob's Electronic Service".  It is owned and
operated by Bob Sickels, past president of S.A.R.A. and the leading
vendor for amateur radio astronomy components and even complete
systems.

Bob publishes a "get-your-hands-dirty" periodical of amateur projects.


disclaimer:  None of the above is meant as advertisement or endorsement.
             They are simply facts.

--
Jim Graham

        -> ->Disclaimer: I do not speak for my company. <- <-
                          Neither do they speak for me.
 ______________________________________________________________________
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------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 15:58:26 GMT
From: "Edward V. Wright" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Bootstrap hardware for LunaBase
Newsgroups: sci.space

>Neither asteroid or lunar enterprises have any signficant commercial
>funding.   Neither are ready for that yet.  My point is that these
>enterprises can and should be analyzed from an industrial and
>commercial viewpoint,

Oh?  That's a far different point from the one you've made in the
past.  The *old* Nick Szabo claimed that lunar enterprises (or any
manned enterprises) were the "socialist road to space" with no
commercial potential to analyze.  And that communications satellites,
mining robots, and other unmanned ventures were the "free-enterprise
road to space."  No further debate possible or necessary.

>and NASA should support them with exploration and tech R&D accordingly.

Well, so much for the "free enterprise" line.

>It is ridiculous to devote most of the resources
>to the moon because of obsolete "next logical step" dogma, or because
>one wants to include astronauts.

Nick, if you want to get into bed with government, you've got to
play by government's rules.  Like it or not, the astronaut office
is enormously powerful within NASA.  As Tom Wolfe said in The Right
Stuff, "No bucks without Buck Rogers."

However, the *old* Nick Szabo attacked the idea of lunar development
as inherently "socialist" even if it was done by a private enterprise
with no ties to the Federal government.

Moreover, some of us believe that government bureacracies like NASA,
while they may be good at space exploration, are not the best vehicles
for space industrialiation and colonization.  We would like to see NASA's
role *restricted* to exploration.  This makes us much less socialist and
mroe libertarian than you are, Nick.


>We need diveristy -- lunar exploration
>_and_ asteroid exploration _and_ comet exploration.  Doing them all
>can be quite cheap if we start taking a sophisticated, in-depth look
>at the problem and the technology available, instead of dogmatically
>insisting on the traditional, ridiculously huge and expensive methods.

Exactly.  However, the *old* Nick Szabo refused to look at *all* the
technology available.  Anything that involved human beings in space
was attacked because "Comsat didn't do it that way."


>We also need to look at the material needs of industry and start designing
>future commercial scenarios around the bottom line.  It is ridiculous
>to focus on the moon when the vast majority of industrial processes
>require volatiles, and by far the largest industrial input is volatiles,
>and volatiles are not found on the moon.

It's ridiculous to estimate that industry in space will use exactly
the same processes and have exactly the same requirements as industry
on Earth.  "The vast majority of industrial processes" may require volatiles
on Earth, but space industry is going to be based on entirely new processes.
You have to examine what those individual processes will be before you
can say what they will and will not require.

And how do you *know* that volatiles are not found on the Moon?
Because a handful of explorers wandering around for a couple
of days on a land mass larger than the continent of Africa
didn't find any?


>I'm objecting to NASA dictation of the direction of space industry,
>especially the style that snubs the real users of space in commerce
>and the military.

To be more precise, you're objecting to the fact that NASA does
not dictate the direction of space industry *your* way.


>And "is" does not mean "will always be".  One of the
>big benefits of extracting volatiles and organics, and after that metal
>regoliths, is that the cost of space habitation comes way down.

Which is a good reason to extract volatiles and organics, *using
technology that can do the job*.


>Ice rockets alone provide enough propellant and shielding to drop
>the cost of an astronaut Mars mission by a factor of ten.

Yes, but the automated systems that you claim would run these ice
rockets do not exist outside your imagination.  And no one knows
how to build them.  You have no understanding of what current
computers and automation systems can and can't do, and you
stubbornly refuse to educate yourself on the subject, preferring
instead to call other people, who propose *practical* means of
getting those resources, names like "socialist" and "Luddite."


>So it turns out that automation is critical to affordably living
>in space, not the enemy as the Luddite "manned is more flexible
>than unmanned" bozos portray it.

No one has claimed that automation is not critical in space.  What
people have been trying to tell you -- people who know more about
such things than you do -- is that there are certain things automation
cannot do.  Things that are required to make missions like your "ice
rockets" succeed.

Now, my dictionary says a Luddite is someone who smashes machines.
The surest way I know to smash a few billion dollars' worth of
high-tech machinery would be to send out to mine the asteroids
without having a Maytag repairman along to fix it when it breaks
down.  (Don't believe the commercials, Nick.  In the real world,
the Maytag repairman never gets lonely.)  If you want to see the
real Luddite in this discussion, Nick, take a look in the mirror.

------------------------------

Date: Friday, 16 Oct 1992 10:01:49 CDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: DC-X vote
Newsgroups: sci.space,talk.politics.space

Sorry for the ignorance, but whiat IS DC-X?

I missed the earlier posts on it.  I gather it's some star wars test, maybe a
target or interceptor?

Thanks,
Al

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 15:53:27 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: DC-X vote
Newsgroups: sci.space,talk.politics.space

In article <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> writes:
>Sorry for the ignorance, but whiat IS DC-X?
>I missed the earlier posts on it.  I gather it's some star wars test, maybe a
>target or interceptor?

Wrong.  See the sci.space FAQ list, where I believe it is discussed.  Real
quick summary:  it is a suborbital test vehicle for a radically new orbital
launch concept, one that could bring costs down enormously and really open
up space.  It is funded through SDIO simply because they're the only agency
interested in space that is young enough to be open-minded.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 11:59:53 GMT
From: John Roberts <[e-mail]>
Subject: Dyson sphere (followup)
Newsgroups: sci.space

-Date: Fri, 16 Oct 92 01:05:49 EDT
-From: John Roberts <roberts>
-Subject: Re: Dyson sphere

-A black sphere surrounding the sun at 1AU would have an outer surface
-temperature of about 140 degrees Celsius (pretty hot - for a temperature
-of 25 C you'd want the radius to be about 1.9AU), and would heat the surface
-of the sun only a fraction a degree. A reflecting sphere would be *hotter*
-and would heat the sun more. To make the calculations more interesting, try
-a sphere that's reflective on the inside and black on the outside.

-I'll try a few more calculations, based on the simplifying assumption that
-a given substance is equally reflective at all wavelengths (generally not
-true). Then if you assign each substance a reflectance rating of N (where
-0 = black and 1 = perfectly reflective), and if you only consider diffuse
-reflection, then for a sphere of a uniform substance, the incident radiation
-on the inner surface is 2/(1-N) times the normal flux at that distance
-from the star, the net photon pressure is 0.5 + 1/(1-N) times the normal
-amount, and the temperature of the outer surface will be (1-N)^0.25 times
-the temperature of a black sphere of the same dimensions, with the
-temperature measured in kelvins. For instance, with N of 0.9 (90% reflectance,
-pretty good for a silver reflector, and probably not too far off for an
-aluminum reflector), the incident flux on the inner surface would be 20
-times the normal amount, the net photon pressure would be 10.5 times the
-normal amount, and the temperature of the outer surface (1AU) would be about
-470 degrees Celsius. To get back down to 25 C, you'd have to set the radius
-to about 6AU.

Attempting to extend the calculations for a sphere that has different
reflectivity on the inner and outer surfaces:

Let Ni be the reflectivity of the inner surface of the sphere, and No be
the reflectivity of the outer surface of the sphere. Then the multiplying
factor for the incident radiation on the inner surface is
((1 - Ni) + (1 - No)) / ((1 - Ni)(1 - No)). If we want to minimize the
outer temperature of the sphere, then No should be set to zero (outer
surface black). If that is done, then the incident radiation multiplier
is 1 + 1/(1 - Ni) and the net photon pressure multiplier is 1 + 0.5/(1-Ni).
So a sphere with 90% reflectance on the inner surface and 0% reflectance
on the outer surface would have a radiation multiplier of 11, and a photon
pressure multiplier of 6. The outer temperature would be no greater than
that of an all-black sphere of the same size.

John Roberts
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 16 Oct 92 14:34:22 GMT
From: Doug Mohney <[e-mail]>
Subject: Galileo's antenna (was Re: Gallileo's antenna)
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey) writes:

[ Bill's Most Excellent Summary snipped]

>--Improvements in ground antennas

>--Data compression:  Galileo has multiple computers aboard.
>"Stealing" the spare attitude control computer, JPL can program it to
>process image data and "squeeze" it so that a picture can be
>represented by 5 to 10 percent of the usual number of bits.  Tricky
>algorithms allow them to do this without serious loss of image
>quality.

>--Error-correcting codes:  Software will be installed aboard the
>spacecraft to encode data in better formats that are resistant to
>errors or noise.

> And who knows?  The antenna might open after all.

ASSUMING opening of the HGA,

Would it be useful to use the HGA in combination with some of the on-the-fly
"improvements" to pump back more data? I'd think of the options listed above,
the data compression technique might be able to provide more data if pumped
through the HGA....


                 Play in the intelluctual sandbox of Usenet

  -- >                  [e-mail]                        < --

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 14:39:23 GMT
From: Graham O'Neil <[e-mail]>
Subject: Houston, Space Center has landed
Newsgroups: sci.space,misc.kids,sci.education,misc.education,tx.general

What I did on my Columbus day holiday.  I went to Space Center Houston
for a preview.  Space Center Houston is the new visitors facility for
Johnson Space Center (JSC).  It contains 4 separate display
participation areas inside and a tram stop for guided tours of JSC
facilities.  In addition, there is a great gift shop, a food court,
and an upscale dining area called ``Silver Moon Cafe.''

As you pass the ticket entrance, you enter the Space Center Plaza,
which is mostly empty space with a full scale shuttle mockup nose
protruding.  The shuttle mockup is the only area, I didn't get a
chance to checkout.  An astronaut said it was comparable to the
training mockups in building 9.  There is also an Manned Maneuvering
Unit (MMU) trainer mounted on an air bearing floor.  They have about 5
or 6 demos an hour with participants selected from on-lookers.  After
strapping you in the chair, you are given a sequence of 6 tasks to
complete on a satellite servicing part task trainer.  Mounting of the
hand-controllers and their use have a feel similar to that of an MMU
on the large air-bearing floor [although without any cross coupling].
Obviously, stabilization and attitude hold are easier than in the
3-dimensional case.  For the kids in the crowd [over 8], this was the
big hit, however, they could only select about 1 in a 100 volunteers.

On the left hand side of the MMU trainer is ``The Feel of Space''
area.  This has a mockup of the Space Station Freedom Habitation
module with cutaway viewing by a gallery seating about 150.  They have
a well paced program talking about living in space and the
transformations required for everyday routines.  They try to pick a
youngster from the audience and walk them through sleeping, showering,
meal preparations, and cleanup activities.  The show runs about 45
minutes and is given hourly. There is some variance from one show to
the next.

For hands-on excitement, this area is number 1; it also has the video
games.  These are free and represent a chance to learn while playing.
There are 3 basic game motifs; an overview of the shuttle systems, an
orbital rendezvous and satellite retrieval mission and a chance to
take the stick of the shuttle in the heading alignment cone at 10 Kft
and grease it in for a landing [right :-)] at Kennedy Space Center
(KSC).  It is probably not too difficult, they explain the Heads-Up
Display (HUD) symbology and show you what the flight path should look
like.  However, the only person who got a landing that could be walked
away from had about 50 missions in the Systems Engineering Simulator
(SES), and my 9 year old son wound up chasing the guidance display
diamond, flying inverted on an outbound course, stalling and failing
to recover.  At least in the hot washup, the instructor only said,
``That was different.''

The Space Center Theater area is an IMAX theater with a 25 minute film
running called, ``To Be an Astronaut.''  I give it about 4.5 *s.  Well
worth the wait.  In addition to standard IMAX audience grabbers, the
film was also interesting, because they used a mix of real people
doing real work and actors to boost the dramatic entertainment value.
The screen flashed through many interesting vignettes including work
on the vomit comet, a sequence of Weightless Environment Training
Facility (WETF) shots, a mission simulation and scenes from a real
mission.  The wait was not really much of a problem, because the
waiting gallery has an exhibit of space suits and a few words about
the astronauts who wore them.  Along one wall is a set of crew
photographs for the STS missions.

The Starship gallery has some of the old building 2 museum exhibits
and a movie, ``On Human Destiny.'' The movie was fun, exciting and
stirring.  The scene and narration of 51-Lima was so powerful and
poignant that I had to pause a moment before explaining to my son what
was happening.  After seeing the movie, you exit to the exhibits. I
know these were over in building 2, but they sure didn't look this
good.  The first part of the display hall was a great overview of
history, technology innovation and impressive artistic design.  The
Skylab trainer module was closer to the Smithsonian exhibit in this
incarnation than it was in building 5.  It was nice to walk through it
again to get a feel for living/working conditions and size. A vault
with a replica of the moon rock lab and a moon rock you can touch led
into an area with Apollo displays and equipment.

The Mission Status Gallery has a set of canned programs showing what
happened today in space, what progress is made for the next mission,
etc.  This came the closest to being a disappointment.  One of the
kids and my wife nearly fell asleep.  The biggest news about space,
NASA or even JSC local wasn't really touched on.  There was no mention
of the Pioneer Venus Orbiter entry, no status on Mars Observer,
Galileo, Ulysses or the joint missions with the Russians.  The crew
said that once things got rolling, there would be more real time
insertions, and better planning on presentation of space activity
status.

We didn't go on the tram tour, but there are two routes possible.  One
goes to the control center at building 30 for a walk-through of Mission
Control Center (MCC).  The other is a facilities tour and includes the
SES, WETF, and the station and shuttle mockups in Building 9.  No one
was able to explain how all these would be conducted so as not to
interfere with business.  There is a viewing gallery along one wall of
Building 9 with the station and shuttle mockups, but I haven't seen
anything comparable with the SES and WETF, although they are
constructing an addition to the building.

The admission is $8.75 for adults, $5.25 for children, school groups
with advance arrangements have free admission for the students.  The
center is wheelchair accessible [except for the MMU trainer].

A great job was done by NASA, Manned Space Flight Education Foundation
[the owner and operator] and the Disney Imagineering team.  There is
considerable education content for almost any education level or age.
Even the most jaded of space junkies will find something to tickle
their imagination, rouse their curiosity, or maybe just turn them
green with envy.  In fact, the families of the astronauts, employees
and contractors at JSC all had a great time and most didn't want to
leave [long lines and all].  For something they live with and must
have seen several times in the old setting, I think this level of
interest says a lot about the good times and the learning experience
at Space Center Houston.

The food is definitely more expensive than at the Building 3 cafeteria
and the gift shop items are about $.50 to $2.50 higher in price than
the last time I checked.  However, the range of material in the gift
shop is so much wider, it is difficult to believe.  The only things
missing were shuttle mission T-shirts and coffee mugs, although they
had many attractively design generic shirts and mugs with space themes
on them.  The selection of books was slightly better than the average
Walden Books, hopefully it will get better.

Contact information:  [phone] or [phone]
Space Center Houston
PO Box 580653
Houston, TX 77258-0653

Open 7 days a week from 0900 to 1900 except Christmas starting on 16
October 1992.  Allow about 4 to 6 hours for the entire tour.  Put it on
your calendar if you come within a few hours travel of Houston.

graham










--
Graham O'Neil    [e-mail]      GONEIL@nasamail
Lockheed  2400 NASA RD 1 Houston, TX 77058  [phone]
----------------------------------------------------------
Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 23:14:58 GMT
From: Ron Baalke <[e-mail]>
Subject: Luna 10
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes...
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
>>However, the Soviet Union launched a spacecraft that carried a gamma
>>spectrometer into a polar lunar orbit (71 degrees inclination), back
>>in 1966. Has anyone ever seen the data from this instrument? ...
>

Luna 10 carried an instrument called a gamma ray detector and it recorded
natural radioactivity in the lunar soil and showed it to be similar to
terrestrial basalt.  It also detected that the cosmic ray background was
higher than expected at five particles/cm^2/sec.  The actual data from the
instrument probably hasn't been released because the data was collected
during the time of Moon race.

>I doubt that this was a gamma-ray spectrometer in the sense that the term
>is now usually used, i.e. something useful for surface mapping.  If it was,
>the data has never been released; Lunar Sourcebook, the authoritative
>source on virtually everything known about the Moon, doesn't even mention
>Luna 10.

The Lunar Sourcebook is a very good book and very thorough, but it does
have a couple of holes.  Hopefully, there will be a second edition to
include more data from the Soviet lunar missions and the recent lunar
data collected by Galileo.
     ___    _____     ___
    /_ /|  /____/ \  /_ /|     Ron Baalke         | [e-mail]
    | | | |  __ \ /| | | |     Jet Propulsion Lab |
 ___| | | | |__) |/  | | |__   M/S 525-3684 Telos | If God had wanted us to
/___| | | |  ___/    | |/__ /| Pasadena, CA 91109 | have elections, he would
|_____|/  |_|/       |_____|/                     | have given us candidates.

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 14:11:53 GMT
From: Dave Jones <[e-mail]>
Subject: Math programs with arbitrary precision for the Mac?
Newsgroups: sci.space

Millard Edgerton ([e-mail]) wrote:
>
> >In article <seal.719016011@leonardo>, [e-mail] (David Seal) writes...
> >>Having been duly inspired by an episode of northern exposure i tried
> >>fiddling with ramanujan's and borwein and borwein's formulas for
> >>computing pi on my mac.  however, the floating point accuracy
> >>for MATLAB (which i was using) isn't settable and i can't get past
> >>the sixteenth decimal place or so.  other mac programs or ways of computing
> >>pi?  thanks.
>
>
> The solution of 355/113 yields PI to with 10^-7.  Archemedies knew it close
> enough for our use today, beyond that it is an academic exercise.
>
You're missing the point, guys.  The exploration of pi's digits as an
end in itself is taken from Carl Sagan's "Contact" in which there are
supposed to be messages from "the creators" hidden in transcendental
numbers like pi, e etc.  At the end of the novel, the heroine finds a
digital picture of a circle out in the jillionth place or so, indicating
that there is indeed intelligence behind the structure of the universe,
and that looking further will yield still more info.

Of course, since pi has infinite digits, every sequence imaginable will
occur there somewhere.  A significant sequence is one which is very unlikely
given the number of digits computed so far.  8 consecutive 8's (10^8:1
against) is not very significant given a couple million digits computed
(which was the event mentioned in the show, I believe).

--
||)) There is no truth to the rumor that:)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))|
||)) Lotus are suing Apple for copying the look and feel of their lawsuits )|
||))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))|
||Dave Jones ([e-mail]) | Eastman Kodak Co. Rochester, NY   |

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 17:39:16 GMT
From: Josh 'K' Hopkins <[e-mail]>
Subject: Pres Debate & military spending
Newsgroups: talk.politics.space,sci.space

[e-mail] (Gary Coffman) writes:

>Unfortunately, the aerospace industry is ill equipped to operate when
>separated from the government teat. There's little consumer demand for
>$800 toilet seats, or $120 million dollar ex-ballistic missiles.

[stuff deleted]

> A much reduced Boeing might survive on airliner
>sales, but have you looked at the airline industry lately? They aren't
>in a position to be buying a lot of airplanes.

Is it my imagination, or does Boeing have a multiyear backlog of aircracft
orders?  I probably would have mentioned Boeing as the example of a company
that was doing fine, but I could be wrong.

>>When you have a $400 billion deficit and a $4 trillion debt, there is no
>>peace dividend, just bills due.

>Actually the Federal government is in better shape than most consumers.
>They spend 35% of their income servicing the debt. How many of you
>spend less than 35% of your incomes on house notes, car notes, and
>consumer debt? The US government owes four times it's annual income.
>How many of you living in $200,000 houses and driving $40,000 cars
>can say you owe less?

I don't own a Lexus or an estate, and neither do any of the people on the net
that I know.  It seems to me to be a little silly to compare the federal
government to a particularly endebted group of people and then say the feds are
doing okay.

--
Josh Hopkins                                          [e-mail]
     The views expresed above do not necessarily reflect those of
ISDS, UIUC, NSS, IBM FSC, NCSA, NMSU, AIAA or the American Association for the
                      Advancement of Acronymphomaniacs

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 15:48:22 GMT
From: Henry Spencer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Pres Debate & military spending
Newsgroups: talk.politics.space,sci.space

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Gary Coffman) writes:
>... Their corporate culture isn't setup to
>handle such concepts. A much reduced Boeing might survive on airliner
>sales...

This is a bad example, actually, because Boeing *is* surviving on airliner
sales.  Although they still do quite a bit of military business, they are
primarily an airliner company, and prosperous because of it.  The main
impact of the recession on their airliner orders has been a chance to
clear some of the backlog...  Boeing's order backlog, for some years now,
has had a total value that sounds like a DoD budget.  In particular, the
airlines are still buying 747s like there was no tomorrow, and Boeing's
profit margin on those things is *huge*, because competition is minimal.
(The airlines regularly pray for a 747 competitor to appear.)

This isn't true of McDonnell-Douglas.
--
MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s.      | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
              -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)|  [e-mail]  utzoo!henry

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 12:12:34 GMT
From: John Roberts <[e-mail]>
Subject: SETI functional grammar
Newsgroups: sci.space

-From: [e-mail] (Steve Linton)
-Subject: Re: SETI functional grammer
-Date: 16 Oct 92 00:42:05 GMT
-Organization: U of Cambridge, England

-In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Robert J Woodhead) writes:
-|> >ends up on an alien planet and won't come back.  How do you tell the aliens
-|> >to press the right (manual override) button and not the left (self destruct)
-|> >button?  I couldn't figure a way out.
-|>
-|> Describe it in terms of physical properties, including the RIGHT-HAND
-|> rule.

-Unfortunately, the right-hand rule depends on our conventions for which way
-current flows and which way a magnetic field points.

-There are bits of particle physics which are asymmetric. Provided we know our
-aliens are matter, then we can ask them to observe the beta-decay of cobalt-60
-nuclei in a magnetic field. More of the electrons emerge going North than South
-(or vice versa I forget).

That was approximately the technique I read about - thanks for posting it.

-If we don't know that the aliens are matter an even
-subtler experiment is needed, but there is one.

Last I heard there wasn't, but that might not be up to date. As I mentioned
before, in this case, the aliens would have a sample of our matter to
experiment on. (And as someone else said, those two buttons ought to have
labels that can be described. :-)

John Roberts
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 14:36:49 GMT
From: Woody Ligon <[e-mail]>
Subject: SETI functional grammer
Newsgroups: sci.space

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Gary Williams x3294) writes:
>

> The more I think about it the more difficult it seems to get past simple
> verbs and mathematics - so much of our languages assume concepts held in
> common and so everything would have to be defined (how rigidly?) even if

> --
> GARY WILLIAMS,  Computing Services Section,  Janet:       [e-mail]
> MRC-CRC & Human Genome Mapping Centre,       Internet:    [e-mail]
> Watford Rd, HARROW, Middx, HA1 3UJ, UK
> Tel [phone]   Fax [phone]
>
The absurd waste of money called SETI assumes a lot more than  language
concepts.

 Consider, for example, that SETI assumes  that alien messages will
be sent in a serial format.  Suppose these beings have the good sence to
utilize a large part of the EM spectrum and communicate massively parallel?
Decoding or even recognizing that could be nearly impossible. This is not
so crazy if you consider that combined human non-verbal and verbal
communication has to be considered "parallel" not serial.

Also consider that if we were sitting somewhere in "inner" space between
our own eyeball and our own brain, we wouldn't have a clue from the EM
signals  whether there was an image being transmitted, and we wouldn't stand
a chance in hell of decoding it.

Moreover, here we are, unable to communicate fluently with a single
other species on this planet and we want to spend taxpayers money to listen
for species who may not even exist.  I might begin to think this is worthwhile
when we can speak to whales and dolphins and decode our own nerve impulses.

In my view, the whole SETI enterprise is absurdly anthropogenic in the
implicit  assumption that aliens will behave like us. Given the variety of
communications strategies seen  among and within organisms on this small
planet,  such assumptions are just childish.

SETI belongs in the same category of science as BIOSPHERE and should be
funded in exactly the same way.

Woody Ligon
Standard Disclaimer Applies
([e-mail])

------------------------------

Date: 16 Oct 92 17:55:36 GMT
From: Josh 'K' Hopkins <[e-mail]>
Subject: SETI functional grammer
Newsgroups: sci.space

[e-mail] (Woody Ligon) writes:

>The absurd waste of money called SETI assumes a lot more than  language
>concepts.

SETI costs something like $10 million per year and has already resulted in some
interesting spinoffs.  If you get upset about $10 million on science, I'd expect
you to start hemorrhaging at the thought of some more serious wastes in our
government.

> Consider, for example, that SETI assumes  that alien messages will
>be sent in a serial format.  Suppose these beings have the good sence to
>utilize a large part of the EM spectrum and communicate massively parallel?

I don't see how you can use huge numbers of frequencies for one message without
limiting the total number of messages you can send.  We communicate the way we
do for a couple of good reasons.

>Also consider that if we were sitting somewhere in "inner" space between
>our own eyeball and our own brain, we wouldn't have a clue from the EM
>signals  whether there was an image being transmitted, and we wouldn't stand
>a chance in hell of decoding it.

What does this mean and what does it have to do with SETI?

>Moreover, here we are, unable to communicate fluently with a single
>other species on this planet and we want to spend taxpayers money to listen
>for species who may not even exist.  I might begin to think this is worthwhile
>when we can speak to whales and dolphins and decode our own nerve impulses.

But these are both completely different issues.  We can "talk" to animals in
some sense, and we haven't shown that they hvae a much larger vocabulary that
we aren't understanding.

--
Josh Hopkins                                          [e-mail]
     The views expresed above do not necessarily reflect those of
ISDS, UIUC, NSS, IBM FSC, NCSA, NMSU, AIAA or the American Association for the
                      Advancement of Acronymphomaniacs

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End of Space Digest Volume 15 : Issue 321
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