I had a memorable dream on 08-28-2013. It was short and focused. One man, dark hair, white coat- a scientist. He stood and pondered how to find other planets with life in the universe. A simple solution. Station a small reflective satellite near a far flung sun. Once the reflective satellite was in place, shine a narrow, blue laser beam from far away to bounce off of the reflective surface. That was it!
My logical, conscious brain started racing on how that would really work. Would the blue beam be broken by revolving planets and you could measure the length of disturbance in the blue beam of light and predict the size of the planets and how far they were from the reflective satellite? Wouldn't the blue laser be detectable by intelligent life on foreign planets?
I don't know.
Cool dream though.
Reminds me of the fact my wife and I were driving on the freeway to go shopping just down the hill from where we live and we saw what appeared to be a small, metal object spinning out of control and falling from the sky at about the speed you would expect an object to be falling from the sky at. We thought for sure it was going to crash. Instead we may have looked away for a short second and looked back. It was gone! We both said. That was weird!
Somehow my brain is relating that experience to this dream. I am thinking maybe aliens have already applied some sort of planet scouting technique and they found our planets already. Now they are sending intelligent, scouting satellites to take pictures of the planet surface.
You never know!
Maybe we should be searching for weird reflective satellites near our sun reflecting back blue laser beams to someone.
All we would have to do is follow the beam of light back to its source and catch the culprit in the act!
01/23/2014 I read recently next year they will launch a SETI satellite to monitor for lasers coming from other planets. Tried searching the internet for info on that effort. Couldn't find it.
Update: 4-12-2016
My logical, conscious brain started racing on how that would really work. Would the blue beam be broken by revolving planets and you could measure the length of disturbance in the blue beam of light and predict the size of the planets and how far they were from the reflective satellite? Wouldn't the blue laser be detectable by intelligent life on foreign planets?
I don't know.
Cool dream though.
Reminds me of the fact my wife and I were driving on the freeway to go shopping just down the hill from where we live and we saw what appeared to be a small, metal object spinning out of control and falling from the sky at about the speed you would expect an object to be falling from the sky at. We thought for sure it was going to crash. Instead we may have looked away for a short second and looked back. It was gone! We both said. That was weird!
Somehow my brain is relating that experience to this dream. I am thinking maybe aliens have already applied some sort of planet scouting technique and they found our planets already. Now they are sending intelligent, scouting satellites to take pictures of the planet surface.
You never know!
Maybe we should be searching for weird reflective satellites near our sun reflecting back blue laser beams to someone.
All we would have to do is follow the beam of light back to its source and catch the culprit in the act!
01/23/2014 I read recently next year they will launch a SETI satellite to monitor for lasers coming from other planets. Tried searching the internet for info on that effort. Couldn't find it.
Update: 4-12-2016
I'm proud to join Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking for a new space initiative to go beyond our nearby planets to explore other stars for the first time in human history.
Our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years or about 25 trillion miles away. Even with today's fastest spacecraft, it would take 30,000 years to get there. That's too long.
The new idea here is that instead of using large spacecraft burning fuel like people have in all traditional space travel, we're going to create a fleet of tiny spacecraft -- or nanocraft -- that we can accelerate to 20% of the speed of light using an array of laser beams from our planet's surface. At that speed of 100 million miles per hour, it will only take 20 years to reach Alpha Centauri. This is a completely new way to think about space travel and exploration.
The reason this project is important is recent research has found many stars have planets within a distance where they could have water to sustain life. That is, they're close enough to their star that any water isn't frozen but not so close that it has all evaporated. But just because a planet is in this habitable zone doesn't mean it has water and is a place we can actually live. For example, Mars has no water, so it would be difficult to ever live there. It's quite possible the closest planet that humans could actually live on is orbiting Alpha Centauri, and the only way to know that for sure is to visit close enough to photograph the planet, which is what this project will do.
Over the years, Yuri and I have worked on a number of science initiatives together, including creating the Breakthrough Prize. I'm excited to support this latest initiative with Stephen Hawking, and to help bring human space exploration to the stars.
