A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
A system of UK analysts has chosen to form a message to outsiders - yet they are partitioned about whether such a message ought to be sent into space. The gathering will enter the Breakthrough Message challenge, which offers a $1m prize for making a computerized note that speaks to human civilisation. That prize goes with another push to quicken the quest for additional physical insight (Seti). Specialists have contended for quite a long time about the astuteness of television into space. Listening out for outsiders is one thing, however attempting to get in touch with them raises horde worries about what happens when civilisations impact. The assorted qualities of perspectives was evident at a meeting of the UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) in Leeds, where the bunch's 20 individuals were divided into equal parts in a casual vote."We did a show of hands and we were impeccably equitably part," said Dr Anders Sandberg, addressing writers at the British Science Festival in Bradford.
Dr Sandberg, a rationalist from the Future of Humanity Institute at
the University of Oxford, discovered himself voting twice. "I'm a regular reasoning division gentleman. I brought my hand up in both cases and they were all giggling at me." Yet, the gathering settled solidly for making a message, regardless of the possibility that it may never leave the planet. "What we could concur on was that it was advantageous and vital to attempt to devise that message, so we can achieve the best conceivable adaptation," Dr Sandberg said. He and three other UKSRN individuals have framed a working gathering to "explode the nuts and bolts" of how their message may be formed and what it may contain. For instance, they may draft two recommendations: one utilizing pictures, and one utilizing more unique substance, for example, dialect or arithmetic. Other than its $1m (£0.65m) ruins, the points of interest of the Breakthrough Message prize, financed by tech extremely rich person Yuri Milner, are yet to be declared. Be that as it may, the opposition is interested in anybody.
There's a reasonable chance that we'll get beaten by a schoolgirl some place, and all things considered more influence to her!" Dr Sandberg said.If the British group's offered is effective, Dr Sandberg said they would furrow the prize cash once again into Seti research, which has generally battled for subsidizing and validity in the UK. We would utilize it to develop a somewhat greater Seti research group in the UK, in light of the fact that this has never truly been supported. The snicker component is really high.
Whoever wins the prize, Breakthrough Initiatives have pledged not to transmit the message until a "wide-ranging debate" about the risks and rewards has taken place. "It seems a bit silly in a sense, this prize for a message that they promise not to send," Dr Sandberg said. "But on the other hand, from a scientific perspective, it's a really interesting question: how do you construct a message that an alien intelligence could receive?" Dr Jill Stuart, who studies space law and policy at the London School of Economics, is not a member of the UKSRN but welcomed the group's decision to draft an interstellar introduction. She strongly supports the notion of announcing humanity's presence in the cosmos.
"I'm very explicitly in favour," Dr Stuart said, "not only because I think it's worth trying to contact them, but because of what I think it makes us do - reflecting back on ourselves, building a potential regime for how we could communicate, and so on." But many researchers are much more wary about hitting "send", for various reasons - and these are arguments Dr Sandberg has heard many times.
"The most naive one would be that aliens will come and eat us or invade us," he said. "That is probably not very likely. But a more sophisticated version is that we have seen what happens when more advanced civilisations encounter less advanced ones." On the other hand, we might learn something important. "We have a lot of these uncertainties, but we also know that our own civilisation is in a fair bit of trouble. We face some pretty big threats.
"That means it might be a good idea to gamble, and hope there is someone slightly older and wiser out there. If aliens told us something about how to handle our climate, or artificial intelligence, we might want to listen."
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