2019 - 10/2019 Meeting
age Created: 08/15/19. Last Updated: 11/21/19.
CALEB SCHARF
Books
..........Extrasolar Planets & Astrobiology (Textbook)
..........Gravity's Engines: The Other Side of Black Holes
..........The Copernicus Complex: Our Cosmic Significance in a Universe of Planets & Probablities
..........The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour Through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Nearly Nothing
Links
..........Columbia University: http://www.astro.columbia.edu/profile?uid=caleb
..........Scientific American Page: https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/caleb-a-scharf/
..........Speaker Website: http://www.calebscharf.com/
..........Wikipedia Entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caleb_Scharf
MEETING DETAIL
Meeting Date: October 12, 2019.
Meeting Site: Bergen Highlands United Methodist Church. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Attendance: 32.
Meeting Program: Talk / Q & A by Astrophysicist / Science Writer
Newsletter Account
The following account is reprinted from THE STARSHIP EXPRESS Copyright 2019 Philip J De Parto:
The Saturday, October 12, 2019 meeting of the Science Fiction Association of Bergen County was held at the Bergen Highlands United Methodist Church in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Astrophyscist Caleb Scharf was our speaker. Professor Scharf s the Director of Columbia University's AstroBiology Department and is the author of three books of popular science: THE COPERNICUS COMPLEX, GRAVITY'S ENGINES, and THE ZOOMABLE UNIVERSE (with Ron Miller), as well as the science textbook EXTRASOLAR PLANETS AND ASTROBIOLOGY.
The focus of Professor Scharf's presentation was the Fermi Paradox and the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. He was not the first speaker at the Association to discuss this topic, but he offered a number of new insights into these issues.
One of the observations he put forth was the Silurian Hypothesis, If aliens had visited our planet before the evolution of mankind, the dynamics of time, weather, and plate tectonics make it extremely unlikely that there would be any record of their visitation.
A second theme our guest discussed was the Cosmic Haystack Equation. The SETI projects have focused on a very small portion of the electro-magnetic spectrum because we assumed that those areas were the most likely to be used by intelligent life. Changes in technology have called those assumptions into question. For example, signals degrade much sooner and dramatically than was originally believed. Aliens in other solar systems are not watching episode of I LOVE LUCY broadcast in the 1950s. The signals would break down into noise before going very far. Another factor is that a broadcast transmission like analog television is a far less efficient pathway than (for example) a tightly focused signal through lasers. Because of these and other factors, there is a growing consensus in the scientific community that we have examined the equivalent of a bathtub of water in an area the size of the Pacific Ocean.
The Archipelago Model presents another framework to examine the Fermi Paradox. The galaxy is not a static landscape, but one of dynamic movement. Modeling of these movements suggest that an interstellar community would be likely to confine themselves to a particular area within the galaxy. To use a Pacific Ocean analogy, a large island chain may be repeatedly visited or colonized, but there is far less incentive to maintain a presence on the equivalent of Easter Island.
Caleb Scharf was an enthusiastic and fascinating speaker and we are very grateful that he was able to take some time from his busy schedule and spend an evening with our group.
Our thanks to everyone who assisted with the set up, clean up, and operation of this meeting.