Mailund on the Internet

Apropos Hubble Space Telescope’s birthday, here’s a great video from Google:

I hate to disagree with someone as smarter than me as Stephen Hawking, but I just cannot share his fear of alien visitors:

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

If the aliens have the technology for interstellar travel, I doubt there is much point for them in raiding our resources. The resources you can find on Earth you can find in by mining asteroids as well, which is probably easier than dealing with the gravity well of Earth. Plus, if they have the resources to travel between stars, how much need will they have for the resources of Earth anyway?

They might decide to exterminate us just for the heck of it, but raiding our resources I’m just not buying.

As for communicating with aliens in the first place, I am not too optimistic.  I’m sure they are out there, mainly as simple life, probably, but also as highly technically evolved civilizations. I just find it highly unlikely that, in the vastness of the Universe, life only evolved on Earth.  But what’s the chance of finding someone on roughly our level of intelligence?  If they are much dumber, we won’t be able to communicate with them in the first place, and if they are much smarter than us, why would they want to communicate with us?

I hope they will.  There’s a lot we can learn from aliens much smarter than we are, but I’m not too optimistic…

Update 27/4: See also Gene Expression: The aliens are out to get us! and Starts with a Bang: If Aliens Exist, should we be eager to meet them?

Remember SpaceShipOne that won the X-prize in 2004?  Well, Virgin Galactic reviled SpaceShipTwo yesterday.

With SpaceShipTwo, 6 passengers can get a short trip into space, and the plan is to sell such trips.  I don’t know what the prize will be, but I guess it is safe to say that I won’t be able to get a trip any time soon.

Still, it is pretty cool, and if they get to go higher than sub-orbital flight with SpaceShipThree, we might be looking at the beginning of affordable space flight pretty soon.

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342-338=+4

Today Denmark got its first astronaut.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen Andreas Mogensen as the first Danish astronaut to join the European space programme.

ESA launched its search for a new corps of astronauts in May last year and received 8413 applicants, including 35 from Denmark. Of the thousands of eager applicants, six were chosen, including 32-year-old Mogensen.

Congratulations to him!

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139-150=-11

1 Oct 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began operation.

This is shortly after Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2 (carrying the dog Laika) in 1957. It is in the middle of the cold war.  Still, the US makes a civilian agency for space exploration.

Now, 50 years later, we can look back on a truly exciting history of exploration. The first man on the Moon,the Pioneer mission to the outer planets, the Hubble telescope, the Mars rovers…

Of course, NASA didn’t do all the exciting stuff.  USSR put the first satelite in space, the first man in space, were the first to land (an unmanned craft) on the Moon, first space station…  Still, an impressive list of achivements goes to NASA.

Go visit their anniversary web page and read more about it! Or watch the video here (appropriately the video starts by playing Stairway to Heaven…).

If you are a space buff, it has been an exciting week, even ignoring the anniversary.

• Snowfall on Mars
• China puts its first man in space
• ESAs ATV had its first mission