This beautifying, stupifying and climactic video goes a long way to demonstrate Man’s understanding of the Universe, and our place in it. Utterly incredible work from the American Museum of Natural History, who had this to say:
The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.
Get ready to have your mind blown:
Apologies for the brevity of this post, but this is my last working day of 2009 and there’s a lot to get out of the door. I have plenty of more in-depth coolness planned for the Xmas period, so stay tuned!
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Digital Switchover Leaving Earth Invisible To Aliens
If you’ve seen this video of Earth’s place in the Universe, you’ll have already seen the distance our first radio broadcasts have travelled. You’ll also have seen the huge amount of satellites buzzing around the planet, surrounding us with digital noise.
The founder of the Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), Dr Frank Drake, says that the chances of alien life discovering our planet are diminishing, in the wake of the digital revolution. Apparently, phasing out analogue transmissions from television, radio and radar is making our planet electronically invisible from outer space.
While old style signals used to spread out millions of miles into outer space, even reaching some distant stars, digital transmissions are much weaker and therefore are less easy to detect by extra-terrestrial life forms.
The earth used to be surrounded by a 50 light year wide shell of radiation, with old-style television transmissions generating around one million watts, but with satellites aiming much of their transmissions towards Earth now virtually no radiation is escaping into outer space.
Drake explained:
Dr Drake said he remained convinced that intelligent life does exist somewhere in the universe but suggested it was likely to be much more advanced than here on earth. What an irony it is, that in our efforts to improve our own communication networks we may already have cut ourselves off from the rest of the Universe.