Update from Vulcan
Humans have come a long way...
April was a huge month! The First Contact Day - Planning Committee thanks everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter! That is over 240,000+ people! First Contact Day could not happen without the support from our paid subscribers!
Moving forward, the First Contact Day Newsletter plans to provide subscribers updates on three fronts:
Star Trek News & Updates
Science & Technology Achievements
Science & Technology News Roundup
Paid Subscribers will be provided with updates from the Planning Committee on progress and be given a chance to tell us what you would like to see from the Planning Committee in discussion threads! We want your input on how we can make this Newsletter better and tailored to you.
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Star Trek News & Updates
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds debuted on May 5, 2022.
Star Trek: Picard’s Season 2 ended last week and it was confirmed the original cast from The Next Generation will be joining Picard for Season 3.
Fun Fact
Q has appeared in only 21 episodes over 35 years.
Science & Technology Achievements
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Arrives at Delta for New Science Campaign
After collecting eight rock-core samples from its first science campaign and completing a record-breaking, 31-Martian-day (or sol) dash across about 3 miles (5 kilometers) of Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover arrived at the doorstep of Jezero Crater’s ancient river delta April 13. Dubbed “Three Forks” by the Perseverance team (a reference to the spot where three route options to the delta merge), the location serves as the staging area for the rover’s second science expedition, the “Delta Front Campaign.” [...]
Mars rover Perseverance sets distance record on the Red Planet
The Perseverance rover's self-driving function is working just great on Mars, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The mission, not quite at one Earth year on Mars, has topped a new distance record for Red Planet rovers. On Friday (Feb. 4) Perseverance made the longest drive completed in a single Martian day, or sol, traveling 806.3 feet (245.76 meters), the rover's Twitter feed reported. [...]
Scientists Blast Out Earth's Location With Hope of Reaching Aliens
If a person is lost in the wilderness, they have two options. They can search for civilization, or they could make themselves easy to spot by building a fire or writing HELP in big letters. For scientists interested in the question of whether intelligent aliens exist, the options are much the same.
For over 70 years, astronomers have been scanning for radio or optical signals from other civilizations in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, called SETI. Most scientists are confident that life exists on many of the 300 million potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way galaxy. […]
Science & Technology News Roundup
Time Travel Could Be Possible, But Only With Parallel Timelines
Have you ever made a mistake that you wish you could undo? Correcting past mistakes is one of the reasons we find the concept of time travel so fascinating. As often portrayed in science fiction, with a time machine, nothing is permanent anymore — you can always go back and change it. But is time travel really possible in our universe, or is it just science fiction?
Our modern understanding of time and causality comes from general relativity.[…]
'Star Wars'-style hyperdrive might produce a quantum glow, not star streaks
The view from the iconic Millennium Falcon of "Star Wars" during hyperdrive maneuvers would be far different than what science fiction portrays, scientists say.
Rather than the iconic star streaks, we'd see a glow, either due to quantum (subatomic) fluctuations, as a new study proposes, or in previous work, perhaps due to the Doppler effect shifting the visible wavelengths of stars into the X-ray range. Of course, absent a hyperdrive-equipped ship, it's been difficult to prove the 'glow' theory despite the fact that the quantum fluctuation idea dates to the 1970s. […]
‘Beyond quantum’ connection hints at more secure encryption and future universal theory
Danish physicist and pioneer of modern quantum mechanics Niels Bohr is famously quoted as saying: “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” Well, Niels, you were right. But things might be getting even more complicated.
First came the news about the W boson measurement, in which the actual measurement of the particle appears to deviate from the predictions of the Standard Model. Now, new research has found a way to connect two complex phenomena – without having to resort to quantum theory.[…]
Why Believing in the Multiverse Isn’t Madness
What is the multiverse? The idea that the universe we inhabit is just one of many parallel universes gets a superhero shout-out in “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” the latest movie based on Marvel comic-book characters.
And in the opinion of Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, giving some screen time to the multiverse isn’t such a bad thing — even if the plot has some horror-movie twists.
“I think it’s really good if some of these ideas are brought out in a variety of different ways,” Greene says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, which focuses on the realm where science and technology intersect with fiction and popular culture. […]