Integrated Coordinated Science for the 21st Century
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Answers
Physics To Go
- a) It takes 200 m / 340 m/s = 0.59 s for the sound to travel from one gong to another. It would take 1.08 s, plus the reaction time of the other student, about 0.5 s, for the sound to return to you.
b) We will have to wait until our message reaches other terrestrial life and continue waiting until their reply reaches us.
- a) Yes.
b) No. At that distance, it could be in the Andromeda galaxy.
- a) 1.3 s
b) 8.3 minutes
c) 5.5 hours
d) 4.3 years
e) 100,000 years
f) More than a million years
g) 15 billion years
- a) The speed of light is a serious limitation on space travel to the site of another civilization. Even traveling at the speed of light, the nearest star would require 4.3 years just to get there.
b) According to the Theory of Special Relativity, it is not possible.
- It would be necessary to plan to sustain life for almost 4.4 million years (assuming the voyagers wanted their descendants to return).
- a) Base it on something we and they have in common, like an understanding of the periodic table or the spectral lines of hydrogen.
b) Yes. An advanced civilization would have to understand the periodic table to have the technology to communicate with us.
c) Yes. We see the spectral lines of many elements in the light of distant stars and galaxies.
d) See answer to Part (b).
e) Begin describing the elements of the periodic table.
f) Send a binary message with radio waves.
- a) Because we are curious.
b) Not afraid, but perhaps careful.
c) The distances are so large that they might not feel threatened.
- a) We know that civilizations had already existed for thousands of years, but we consider their technology to be primitive compared to ours.
b) It would not be up-to-date, because much will have happened in the 2000 years since the travelers left Earth.
c) Even more change would have occurred. It might be worthwhile to those who were alive at the time of the contact with the extraterrestrials.
- a-c) Answers will vary.
d) Ideally, yes.
- a-b) Answers will vary.
c) Star Trek presents scientific investigation accurately. However, relativity prohibits travel faster than the speed of light. Also, “beaming” persons or objects from one place to another violates the conservation of matter (during the beaming process).
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