As I’m sure you’ll want to know who is watching Tiswas!

However, a planet far enough away to be in the comfort zone of the pair taken collectively COULD be in a stable orbit. The B1 III is awfully luminous, after all.

One is a real star, an orange giant in front of the hyades open star cluster.

The other is a fictional planet looking very similar to Earth that was home to Princess Leia and destroyed by Darth Vader’s Death Star in the original ‘Star Wars’ movie.

There is a difference!

BTW. Aldebarran (or its system) is probably not inhabited because :

a) having probably formed before the sun it may well be relatively metal poor & thus unlikely to host exoplanets.

b) If OTOH Aldebaran formed after the Sun then to have already evolved to orange gianthood it would have to have been much a more massive – and thus shorter lived star. Very likely too short-lived to have allowed enough time for intelligent life to evolve.

&

b) having swollen to become an orange giant, it will have rendered any hypothetical planet in its old main-sequence stage “habitable zone” way too hot and uninhabitable many millions of years ago. Indeed, this would have happened during Aldebaran’s sub-giant stellar phase when it first left the Hydrogen burning “dwarf star” main-sequence.

Yes I know you were joking – just thought I’d point that out…

Incidentally, the same logic applies to almost all the other giant stars out there – Arcturus, we know, is a very ancient star thus probably metal-poor & planetless, Capella started life as a binary of A or B-type stars each being twice as massive as the Sun or more. Betelegeuse and Antares at 15-20 solar masses are wa-ay too massive to be considered and so forth. Pollux, OTOH, at 1 and a half or so solar masses and with a known exoplanet in a circular Jupiter-like (590-day) orbit might be an exception to this rule …

@41. Surely the aliens would have their own far-fetched science fiction too.

Then there’s the matter of what they’d think of our ‘adult films’.

Are you saying the cable companies don’t transmit their signals via satellites?

wiki.answers.com/Q/How_does_cable_television_work
electronics.howstuffworks.com/cable-tv.htm

Or were you just joking?

“Lrrr: This is ancient Earth’s most foolish program. Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?
Nd-Nd: Perhaps they are saving that for sweeps. “

Coincidence?

I think not . . .

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/02/ending_up_in_a_kind_of_soundle.html

Which leads us to the question, where will all this be twenty, fifty years from now? Who will be reading these (digitally-compiled) entries of ours many, many years from now? The august critic Roger Ebert reflected on a similar question in his blog Ending up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must, causing him to write,

”The day will come when the words of Shakespeare are no longer known. The day will come, perhaps sooner, when all the words on the internet, in every language, have disappeared. These very words, and all the words we have read and written, will no longer exist. Oh, for a long time they may be on a hard drive somewhere, one able to store the entirety of the web. But not forever. Not even close. A word not read is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. The word existed, the tree fell, but without witness, what does it mean?”

Personally, I think this is another example of the seemingly dual state of things. In a way, man’s work seems important; but then at the same time, it isn’t. We can only cherish the present; and therefore, thanks, BA and bloggers, for sharing knowledge.

@Naked Bunny – You got room for a passenger? I loved “Night Court” too.

I wonder if the Grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli have planned their first Star Trek convention yet?

It is unfortunate that life on Earth was exposed to those signals. My analog TV has never made more sense than it does now; finally: reality TV.

@BA
But isn’t the reason we can detect GRBs is because the energy is all concentrated into two bursts instead of spreading out all around? Anyways, how big must the dishes be to detect the signal from the nearest star?

They’re still on dial-up. Give it a few years.

[rolleyes]

In fact, the radio waves do travel forever, and the Earth’s radio does make it to other stars. It can be detectable, but you’d need a big dish. Power has nothing to do with how far the radio travels, just how weak the signal is. That’s why we can detect radi waves from gamma-ray bursts billions of light years away.

But I guess that’s just me being uninformed.

Earth’s signals barely make it out of the solar system and go to no other stars.

The Skeptologists so far are fairly non-scientific and uninformed.

Phil, could you shed some light on that for us ?