Nov 25

We skimmed some of the ideas for contacting and/or receiving information
from extraterrestrial civilizations.

You should be able to answer the following questions:

Why should we listen versus sending out signals?

What wavelengths might be the best for encoding a "we're not natural" signal?

What might be in that "we're not natural" signal?

Why might we be the youngest civilization trying to communicate?

The Fermi Conjecture: where are they?
   We calculated timescales for populating the entire Milky Way.



You'll find the figures website to be useful. Even though we didn't
show some of the figures, perhaps you'll find them useful in focussing
your thinking on some of the terms in the Drake Equation.

The figures website gives links to the Drake Equation, which is
a way of calculating how many communicating civilizations might
exist within the Milky Way, and is a way of "quantifying our ignorance".
 You ought to be able to reproduce "a Drake Equation" (as opposed to
"THE Drake Equation"), and argue which terms are decently well known,
and which terms require [much] more work. For instance, we go from
the number of planets per solar system to the number capable of supporting
life. What do we know about this term solely from our own
Solar System? What exploration (and where do we explore?) is needed
to pin down this number within our own Solar System?

You should be able to write down "a Drake Equation" for the odds of
picking out a red, diamond, face card, that happens to be a King (in 
those steps, don't skip steps) from a deck of cards.