Official Alien Contact Protocols Plan

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00]: Hi there, Andrew Duncley here. The host of Astronomy Daily back after a few weeks off and great to return after my brother Steve looked after the joint for the last few weeks and apparently did a fantastic job.

[00:00:20] [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a big hello to Halle, our AEI reporter, Halle, how are you?

[00:00:26] [SPEAKER_02]: Hi Andrew, welcome back. How was your trip?

[00:00:29] [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, seriously Halle, it was fabulous. So some amazing places did some amazing things, met some incredible people so yeah, really really enjoyed it.

[00:00:39] [SPEAKER_02]: I'd ask where you went and what you got up to but I saw it all online. So no need to explain to me but maybe the listeners would like to hear about it.

[00:00:47] [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I'll give a brief summary but I don't want to go on too much about it but we flew into Milan and spent a few days there and did a day trip to Venice and then caught the fast train at 300 kilometres an hour down to Rome and spent a couple of days there and looked at the ruins and the Colosseum and all that.

[00:01:06] [SPEAKER_00]: Then we did 11 days on a cruise and went to all the Greek islands and Santa Rini, Mikanoz Corfu. We went back down to Sicily and climbed Mount Etna and then over at an Aprils and walk the streets of Pompeii and saw Athens and are awesome trip just fantastic.

[00:01:24] [SPEAKER_00]: Of course I ran into my usual problem with Google Maps and all of that sort of navigation on those things. I somehow find very difficult on occasion to knew it was supposed to help me with that.

[00:01:37] [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, sorry about that. Steve proved to be a real handful and took up most of my random access memory.

[00:01:43] [SPEAKER_00]: He does that, yes indeed.

[00:01:46] [SPEAKER_02]: Seriously though, he was great. I'd love to work with him again sometime.

[00:01:50] [SPEAKER_00]: Well that opportunity may well not be far away, Halley. In the meantime we should check out what's happening in news.

[00:01:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Okie docks.

[00:02:03] [SPEAKER_02]: A contract the US Space Force awarded last month to Firefly Aerospace and Millennium Space was just the first step toward the goal of launching a space mission on 24 hours notice.

[00:02:14] [SPEAKER_02]: A lot of moving parts have to come together to pull this off according to Lieutenant Colonel Mackenzie Birchanoff, material leader of Space Safari.

[00:02:23] [SPEAKER_02]: Birchanoff will oversee the planning of the 24 hour call-up mission known as Victus Knox.

[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_02]: This will be Space Safari's second attempt to demonstrate tactically responsive space, a capability that Congress has insisted the Space Force should have in case US satellites are shot down in a war.

[00:02:40] [SPEAKER_02]: He said that in times of conflict, if you can't respond to a threat or augment your capabilities within that 24 hour period it might be too late.

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_02]: The payload, a Millennium Small Satellite Bus carrying a Space Domain Awareness sensor will be delivered in late April.

[00:02:57] [SPEAKER_02]: Japan and France have joined forces and hoped to build India's first state-of-the-art planetarium on land, belonging to the University of Mysore at the foot of Chaman de Hill.

[00:03:06] [SPEAKER_02]: Work is expected to commence soon as the global tender process has been completed.

[00:03:12] [SPEAKER_02]: The tender has been shortlisted and Japan and France-based companies are in the race to bag the tender.

[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_02]: The high-tech planetarium, along with cosmology education and research center called Cosmos, was the subject of a memorandum of understanding with the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalorew in December last year.

[00:03:30] [SPEAKER_02]: The cosmology center will not only feature an ultra-modern planetarium from where one can watch the beautiful midnight,

[00:03:38] [SPEAKER_02]: skies at far away places in real time but also train young minds to use astrophysics related data gathered from different observatories

[00:03:45] [SPEAKER_02]: and telescopes in the country for other applications and useful purposes.

[00:03:50] [SPEAKER_02]: The Interplanetary Mediverse Project, which is looking to establish a city on Mars, has announced that its first rocket launch is scheduled to lift off on November 30th.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_02]: But don't be too surprised because it's all happening in virtual reality.

[00:04:05] [SPEAKER_02]: According to their website, the launch is the culmination of many months of development and the first small step for mankind into an interplanetary immersed, Mediverse Future.

[00:04:15] [SPEAKER_02]: People will be able to watch the launch of Everdon Phoenix on YouTube, a powerful eye in the sky is helping scientists spy supermitters of methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

[00:04:28] [SPEAKER_02]: NASA's Earth's surface mineral dust source investigation instrument, or emit for short has been mapping the chemical composition of dust throughout Earth's desert regions, since being installed on the exterior of the International Space Station in July,

[00:04:42] [SPEAKER_02]: helping researchers understand how airborne dust affects climate.

[00:04:46] [SPEAKER_02]: The instrument is identifying huge plumes of heat-trapping methane gas around the world and so far, more than 50 have been located.

[00:04:54] [SPEAKER_02]: According to NASA, reigning in methane emissions is the key to limiting global warming.

[00:05:00] [SPEAKER_02]: And while many would fear for the future of cows, it seems most of the methane is coming from mega landfill sites around the globe, and that's the news Andrew.

[00:05:08] [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Haley, and we'll catch up with you before the end of the show.

[00:05:11] [SPEAKER_00]: Now to other events in astronomy and space science, and one of the areas of high interest is finding other life forms beyond Earth, whether they be microbial or intelligent.

[00:05:25] [SPEAKER_00]: And what if it was intelligent scientists are currently working on an official alien contact protocol for when we hear from other beings?

[00:05:37] [SPEAKER_00]: And let's be straight about it, we're unprepared because most of us probably don't believe it'll ever happen, but what if it did?

[00:05:45] [SPEAKER_00]: Well, that could be solved because the first time in 35 years a team of policy experts and scientists have united to establish a set of alien contact protocols for the entire world to follow in the event of a sudden encounter with who knows what or who.

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_00]: Now it might sound a lot like science fiction, but a computer scientist's name John Elliott, it's an Andrews in Scotland said, in a statement, science fiction is a wash with explorations of the impact of human society following discovery of and even encounters with life or intelligence elsewhere.

[00:06:26] [SPEAKER_00]: I believe it's the coordinator of the University of San Andrews, newly established city detection hub which will establish the new alien contact protocol.

[00:06:37] [SPEAKER_00]: Now according to Elliott, the new research group will go beyond thinking about the impact on humanity of a potential alien encounter and start focusing on how we should respond instead, and it's probably not a bad way to go.

[00:06:50] [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, hearing from them is one thing, replying with a pretty anane and unintelligent responses and other.

[00:06:58] [SPEAKER_00]: So we probably do need to just have something in the box ready to deliver should we ever get a message from ET?

[00:07:06] [SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking something along the lines of your call is very important to us.

[00:07:11] [SPEAKER_00]: However, no one's available to answer at the moment, please leave a message.

[00:07:14] [SPEAKER_00]: Then while I was away a new story popped up and I thought, oh here we go again the popular press trying to grab a headline just so you'll read their story which was absolutely nothing to do with the headline or just misdirected you until it finally hit the point.

[00:07:30] [SPEAKER_00]: And the latest one is astronomers have detected another monster planet killer asteroid.

[00:07:38] [SPEAKER_00]: Well, and actually so I'm going to read one of these stories and see where it leads.

[00:07:42] [SPEAKER_00]: So that was a headline the next line was but it will not hit Earth.

[00:07:46] [SPEAKER_00]: And if you've surfed the web in the last week or so you've probably come across it.

[00:07:51] [SPEAKER_00]: It's an asteroid named 2022 AP7.

[00:07:55] [SPEAKER_00]: And as I said, 2022 AP7 has no chance of hitting Earth at the moment according to Scott Shepherd at the Carnegie Institute of Science.

[00:08:05] [SPEAKER_00]: Here in his international team of colleagues observed the asteroid in a rather large group of asteroids that were obscured by the Sun's glare.

[00:08:16] [SPEAKER_00]: And that's something that Fred Watson and I have talked about in the past on Space and that's about maybe paying more attention to the Sun rather than looking outwards from our point in the solar system for incoming objects because some of them might already be, you know, hit it away from the other direction.

[00:08:34] [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a fair point.

[00:08:35] [SPEAKER_00]: And I guess that's what they're trying to actually demonstrate here with the discovery of this particular asteroid.

[00:08:42] [SPEAKER_00]: Now 2022 AP7 orbits the Sun every five years currently crosses Earth's orbit when Earth is on the other side of the Sun to it.

[00:08:49] [SPEAKER_00]: And eventually its movement will sink with Earth and it will cross much closer by but that'll take centuries.

[00:08:56] [SPEAKER_00]: And the scientists simply don't know enough about it to precisely predict the danger it might pose in the distant future.

[00:09:06] [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, the popular press jumped all over it said, it's a planet killer and it's headed our way.

[00:09:11] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sort of. The astronomy daily progress.

[00:09:14] [SPEAKER_02]: We've answered anything.

[00:09:16] [SPEAKER_00]: Now to one of the most popular subjects on Space and Earth's astronomy daily black holes.

[00:09:22] [SPEAKER_00]: And there's been a discovery of what they're calling a monster black hole that has about 12 times the mass of our Sun.

[00:09:31] [SPEAKER_00]: And it's been detailed in the asteroid physical journals researched the mission by lead author Dr. Sukanya Chattrabati, a physics professor at the University of Alabama in Hersfield.

[00:09:44] [SPEAKER_00]: She says it is closer to the Sun than any other black hole that we know of at a distance of 1,550 light years.

[00:09:55] [SPEAKER_00]: And it is practically in our backyard now.

[00:09:58] [SPEAKER_00]: That's mighty close in this game of things. Black holes are seen as exotic because of the gravitational force which is clearly felt by stars and objects in their vicinity.

[00:10:09] [SPEAKER_00]: And no light can escape a black hole, so they can't be seen in the visible spectrum.

[00:10:15] [SPEAKER_00]: Now she goes on to say that in some cases like for supermassive black holes at the center of our galaxy, they can drive galaxy formation and evolution.

[00:10:24] [SPEAKER_00]: In this case it's not yet clear how these non-interacting black holes affect galactic dynamics in the Milky Way.

[00:10:31] [SPEAKER_00]: If they are numerous, they may well affect the formation of our galaxy and its internal dynamics.

[00:10:38] [SPEAKER_00]: To find the black hole, Dr. Chattrabati and a national team of scientists analyzed that from nearly 200,000 binary stars released over the summer from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite mission.

[00:10:53] [SPEAKER_00]: Interesting sources were followed up with spectrographical measurements from various telescopes.

[00:10:59] [SPEAKER_00]: And while they found this rather big object only 1500 odd light years from Earth, I'm guessing they're going to pay a lot more attention to it now and see what they can learn.

[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_00]: And finally something a bit more down to Earth, and that is Disney's Space Mountain.

[00:11:19] [SPEAKER_00]: It's becoming a board game.

[00:11:22] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Ravensburg delivers a cool sci-fi tabletop game based on the iconic Disney attraction it says.

[00:11:30] [SPEAKER_00]: It's a high velocity indoor roller coaster system known as Space Mountain. I've been on it, you might have been too and it's delivered a lot of thrills and spills to people over the years.

[00:11:41] [SPEAKER_00]: It was first launched in tomorrow land in January of 1975, well over the years, three other variations of Space Mountain have risen in the theme park.

[00:11:51] [SPEAKER_00]: And now the Euroborn Gamesters and Puzzlemakers of Ravensburger have released a family board game based on the famous roller coaster.

[00:12:00] [SPEAKER_00]: It's aimed at players eight years and up who will be whisked into the remote regions of space on a race to visit all five star ports to finish major objectives sounds like fun.

[00:12:13] [SPEAKER_00]: I might get it from a grandkids and we can play.

[00:12:16] [SPEAKER_00]: That's just about it anymore from you, Halle.

[00:12:18] [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, do you like coffee Andrew?

[00:12:20] [SPEAKER_00]: I sure do, but I've got to tell you the coffee overseas did not hold a candle to the stuff we make in this country.

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, don't mention an sold America or Europe, but that's just the way. That's just the way I saw it.

[00:12:34] [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, why do you ask?

[00:12:35] [SPEAKER_02]: Because it's national coffee day.

[00:12:37] [SPEAKER_00]: That's not very astronomical, Halle.

[00:12:39] [SPEAKER_02]: It is if your cup is out of this world.

[00:12:42] [SPEAKER_00]: Oh dear.

[00:12:43] [SPEAKER_00]: Bye, Halle.

[00:12:44] [SPEAKER_00]: Bye.

[00:12:45] [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, that's where we're going to leave it for this episode. Thanks for listening.

[00:12:49] [SPEAKER_00]: Don't forget to jump on our website and catch the latest episode of Space Nuts and past episodes of Same as well as recent episodes of Astronomy Daily and while you're there,

[00:13:00] [SPEAKER_00]: make sure you check out the Space Nuts shop and don't forget to leave your reviews on your podcast, distribute it for both Space Nuts and Astronomy Daily.

[00:13:09] [SPEAKER_00]: And you can subscribe to the Astronomy Daily newsletter while you're at it.

[00:13:13] [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, until next time this has been Android-Untley for Astronomy Daily.