This Discovery Really Tickles Me. It's Cool For A Lot Of Reasons, But I Also Find Something Deeply, Tragically

This discovery really tickles me. It's cool for a lot of reasons, but I also find something deeply, tragically funny about it. Lemme try to explain.

Our top astrobiologists are going to spend the next decade testing increasingly weird possible abiotic chemical reactions and arguing furiously about the origins of this dimethyl sulfide. If/when they eventually come to the conclusion that the most logical source is in fact alien microorganisms, that will answer one of the most fundamental questions of humankind: is there life elsewhere in the universe? And that would be great!

But then what?

Well friends, I'm sorry to say the answer is fuck-all. This planet, K2-18 b, orbits a star 120 lightyears away from us. For those of you keeping score, that's a little over a quadrillion kilometers. If it is determined there are alien microbes on that planet, then our entire civilization is going to spend the next several hundred years STARING at it through increasingly large telescopes, getting absolutely zero more actionable information because, let's be honest, this information was never actionable to begin with.

It's a quadrillion kilometers away, and the fastest we could possibly send anything in that direction is about one fifth the speed of light, maybe. It would take the proposed Project Starshot fleet about 480 years to reach K2-18 b, and another 120 for the data to reach home. And that would be a flyby mission! 600 years absolute minimum for very little information that we couldn't get from telescopes. Sending a full-on autonomous landing probe? One or two millennia, probably. Forget it.

What we should really be doing is looking very closely at the worlds around our closest stellar neighbors for spectral signatures like this one. If alien life does exist 120 ly away, there's a pretty damn good chance it also exists much closer to home.

BBC News

Tantalising sign of possible life on faraway world

Nasa's James Webb Telescope may have discovered a molecule thought only to be produced by life.

I actually saw the Offspring live a couple weeks back and naturally did the Jon Arbuckle Disco moves during this song. I got some looks. Worth it.

[AMV] Jon Arbuckle - You’re Gonna Go Far Kid

this is one of my favorite videos on the internet, and it kills me that the source has been silenced by youtube’s copyright system, so I’m putting it here!

I have seen a version of this on tumblr before, but the audio in that one is just a little bit off because that person edited it back in themselves

but today, I am proud to present the original video, sent to me by Crispy Crungy, who gave me permission to upload it here and share it with you all!

enjoy!

hey, big news!! the worldbuilding project formerly called the Diaspora [DSP] is now officially being renamed to Astra Planeta [ASP]!! The tags and world overview post have been changed to reflect this already, but it would be too much of a pain to go back and edit every instance of the old name so here's the explanation. :3

The Αστρα Πλανητα were what the ancient Greeks called the five "wandering stars" in the night sky; the English word "planet" arises from the ancient Greek word for "wandering". The name in context of the setting recalls our status as interstellar explorers, restlessly pursuing the edges of the universe, and also connects to our long history of stargazing.

other pros to this new name:

unique as a setting title, as far as at least three search engines have shown! the only references I could find to this specific term are academic, talking about the actual astra planeta

coincidentally references one of the very first subprojects I worked on after the setting's metamorphosis from Ra'na into Diaspora: a fictional history book called "Wandering the Sky"

inch by inch we're getting closer to a working theory of qualia

phys.org

AI 'nose' predicts smells from molecular structures

In a major breakthrough, scientists have built a tool to predict the odor profile of a molecule, just based on its structure. It can identif

Okay, I have my own opinions about AI, especially AI art, but this is actually a very cool application!

So when you think about it, we can quantify vision/sight using the actual wavelengths of light, and we can quantify hearing using frequency, but there really isn't a way to quantify smell. So scientists at the University of Reading set out to create an AI to do just that.

The AI was trained on a dataset of 5000 known odor-causing molecules. It was given their structures, and a list of various scent descriptors (such as "floral sweet" or "musty" or "buttery") and how well those descriptors fit on a scale of 1-5. After being trained on this data, the AI was able to be shown a new molecule and predict what its scent would be, using the various descriptors.

The AI's prediction abilities were compared against a panel of humans, who would smell the compound of interest and assign the descriptors. The AI's predictions were actually just as good as the human descriptions. Professor Jane Parker, who worked on the project, explained the following.

"We don't currently have a way to measure or accurately predict the odor of a molecule, based on its molecular structure. You can get so far with current knowledge of the molecular structure, but eventually you are faced with numerous exceptions where the odor and structure don't match. This is what has stumped previous models of olfaction. The fantastic thing about this new ML generated model is that it correctly predicts the odor of those exceptions"

Now what can we do with this "AI Nose", you might ask? Well, it may have benefits in the food and fragrance industries, for one. A machine that is able to quickly filter through compounds to find one with specific odor qualities could be a good way to find new, sustainable sources of fragrance in foods or perfumes. The team also believes that this "scent map" that the AI model builds could be linked to metabolism. In other words, odors that are close to each other on the map, or smell similar, are also more likely to be metabolically related

In regards to the Voyager post:

https://ison444.bandcamp.com/track/lost-satellites

On the verge of tears every time tbh

oho, very cool!! it's a bit to the left of my personal taste so I can't say it made me all that emotional, but I do enjoy the lyrics and I appreciate the recommendation regardless!