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| "The Most Exclusive Address in the Local Group", right hand edge of M31 core |
At the date of posting, 1st December 2022, the Northern Sky is a fine sight (no
street-lights in our village). The waxing Moon has proceeded along the ecliptic
from Saturn, is now passing Jupiter and, via the two bright stars of Aries, is on
its way to join Mars for Opposition on 7th December (‘Opposition’,
for planets further away from the Sun than us is, just like the full of the Moon,
getting in line with us and the Sun). When the Moon’s light is out of the way,
then it’s a good time to look up and locate the point in space with the highest
likelihood, selon-moi, of the presence of Alien civilisations in the
known universe.
This blog,
with its starry header, indulges my twin fascinations for the origin of life, human‘n’all (via the celebration of music related to Charles Darwin and DNA including my
own composition, performed at both Oxford/Cambridge Universities), with a possible far future for humans, which is at least an entertaining one.
On ‘8-Billion
Day’ (15th November 2022), I posted an article suggesting a very unorthodox
view of future population first published in my ‘AMiTe Paper') – or see the
separate page in this blog. This came out of my lockdown musing of ‘how to meet
the Aliens’ and neatly gets the humans out of the picture for a few million
years. (Don’t worry: “We Shall Return!”)
The AMiTe paper
is all about how, practically, with currently envisaged technology, an engineer
from any technical (sorry! no super-dolphins!) civilisation, with our level of
vanity - might try to crack the problem. A difficulty, of course, is for everyone
in the galaxy to agree to meet at the same place when you can’t talk to
them first (the ‘Schelling Point’ problem). The answer, funnily enough, and ‘proving
Brian Cox wrong’ (in a way), is almost certainly for robotic ships to meet outside the
galaxy (Martin Rees should approve, leaving it to the robots).
Just above
Aries (see map) is the long line of bright stars connecting the Square of Pegasus
with Perseus and his bright ‘Sword Handle’ double-cluster, the three middle
stars being ‘Andromeda’. You may well have observed the farthest-you-can-see-with-the-naked-eye
Andromeda galaxy, at 2.54 Million light years distance and 2.54 Million years
ago. You go up from the central star Mirach (‘Girdle’), do a little shimmy to
the right and the cloudy smudge is it. Or rather, it’s the bright central part
of a monster galaxy of a trillion stars. The lovely spiral stuff covers a much
bigger extent – about 6 full-moons in breadth – but is just beyond the grasp of
eyes which also have to cope with the daylight Sun. It's our Milky Way’s
biggg sister (we’re the middle-weight of three). Just in line with the right
hand edge of the smudge (to our line of sight) is the most exclusive address in
the Local Group – the mid-point of the two galaxies, the AMiTe point, Andromeda/Milky-Way
Treffpunkt (‘meeting point’, see the paper for why). The
beautiful thing is that every intelligent race in the trillion stars of
Andromeda and the four hundred billion of our own spiral knows where it is…
I will write
again on 16th December, Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday, (which I hope
he’d have appreciated) of a grand but tenuous ‘intergalactic bridge’…
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