“A positive result in a search for the pattern would be one of the great experiments in the history of science.” Unidentified point-like very high energy gamma ray sources in the Milky Way may actually be starships of hyper-advanced alien civilizations who are actively exploring interstellar space, proposes Louis Crane in Searching for Extraterrestrial Civilizations Using Gamma Ray Telescopes.
“If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we hypothesize the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be the size of the galaxy itself. But there’s more,” explained Paolo Salucci, astrophysicist with SISSA and a dark matter expert. “We could even travel through this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Salucci is among the authors of the paper published in Annals of Physics.
“I knew, of course, that, at least in our corner of the universe, there are lots more electrons than positrons, but I still found it an exciting idea to think of trajectories in spacetime that could go unrestricted in any direction — forward in time, backward in time, up, down, left, or right.”
Space vacuum that appears to be stable due to the complete absence of substance in it, is likely to be fraught with great danger. This idea about the destruction of the universe is based on the hypothesis of vacuum instability. Any system in our world has a certain amount of potential energy.
Imagine a 2001-like scenario on the Red Planet, suggests astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz, the current chair of astrobiology at the U.S. Library of Congress, where, instead of HAL gone rogue, a camera-operated airlock or some other system—perhaps vital oxygen-supply gear that relies on facial-recognition algorithms—never turns on for a non-white settler. A person could be left, trapped outside her own home, unable to trigger the airlock or to obtain more oxygen, literally asphyxiating in the biases of someone else’s shoddy computer program. The effects would be both fatal and enraging.
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
