Warning, Warning, Warning - the world will end in about
60 minutes; The only thing that will survive as a record of humanity will be
your Facebook page. Furthermore, in the interest of brevity, only the top 1/2 of
your facebook page will be archived in order to avoid the impression that humanity
is incredibly redundant.
Message signed:
The Vogon Construction Fleet (Google them to make sure the
message is authentic).
Well, just in the oft chance that the Vogon Construction Fleet is real, you need to make your contribution.
So, the question is, what set of words or images or music would you choose to represent humanity and our collective presence on planet Earth. Note: if you already have a Facebook page, it would be acceptable to simply modify the top 1/2 screen of your page and take a screen shot and submit that in answer to this question. If you don't have a facebook page, just write down a description of what it would contain or if you want to make a picture, that is fine. Be Creative. This question is designed to get you to think about the collective behavior of humanity on this planet and how you would represent that.
2. In the class notes we make use of the Drake equation as providing a statistical estimate of the number of civilizations that might exist in our Galaxy and are capable of communication. Recently, however, some scientists have argued that the Drake equation is an inaccurate description. This new theory is known as the "Rare Earth Theory" (by Ward and Brownless). Do some reserach on this new theory and identify what the key components of this theory are that suggests planets like the Earth are much rarer than we think they are.
3. As many of you heard, or saw the movie, the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was thought to be the result of an asteroid impact. Since so many people are saying this it must be true. So, a) find out and report on how secure you think the evidence is that indeed an asteroid did strike the Earth and b) if this impact occurred how, in fact, did it cause a mass-extinction. In other words, what was the mechanism that extincted both ends of the food chain (e.g. the dinosaurs became extinct but so did most forms of ocean plankton). Something more than just blocking out the sun with some dust in the atmosphere must have occurred.
4. Consider our galaxy to be a very thin circular disk of stars of radius approximately 50,000 light years. If there are currently 2500 civilizations in our galaxy capable of communication, what is the approximate separation of these civilizations (in units of light years) if they are uniformly (e.g. equally spaced) distributed within this circular disk of stars? (it helps to visualize this problem but drawing a circle and putting some uniformly space dots in that circle and then thinking about the problem that is being asked).