Author: Vishwaa Patel

The biggest fear Earthlings face about sending messages and signals to exoplanets is to attract a more advanced civilizations who has evil intentions to destroy us.

Eamonn Kerins at University of Manchester talked about how we can use game theory to determine a way to detect and communicate with alien civilizations. The idea in Kerins approach is to detect mutual detectability. This means we want to search for alien like where the aliens would have a similar chance of seeing us. According to Kerins, mutual detectability is a game theory approach to increase the chance of communication between two alien civilizations. It might be possible that both the parties might not exchange the same kind of information, and also that the exoplanets might not be looking for the information that we exhibit. Therefore the best way to search is to let the exoplanets search for the information that we are looking for as well. Kerins calls this “common denominator information.”

Now that we and exoplanet have found each other, the game theory suggests that the party with the most common denominator information should make the first move in communicating with the other. For ex. we have detected that star K2-155 has a planet in its habitable zone. However, K2-155 is more luminous than Earth, so we can see them but they might not be able to see us very clearly. Therefore, we should make the first move in communicating with them since our CDI is bigger.

In the lecture, we have learned game theory which helps to make a smart decision about the most beneficial move that a player should make. Here, in this case, we are also using the same strategy to make a decision about how to find an exoplanet and which party making the first contact would be beneficial.

Link: https://astronomy.com/news/2020/10/game-theory-helps-focus-the-hunt-for-alien-civilizations

There has been a lot of talk and work done on the data set of COVID-19 infections which shows that the growth of infection is exponential since the growth does not seem to be linear. However, that does not seem to be the case here. There was an exponential growth pattern in the early stages of the virus, however it was followed by the power law distribution. 

The possibility of exponential growth exist in random network since there is an equal probability of two people coming together. However, the real world network of this infectious disease is not like random network where people come across each other randomly. The structure of this network shows that majority of the population have scattered connections with their neighbours and that the connectedness of people is less than exponential, which is similar to a small world network.This can help to show that the spread of COVID-19 happens in small world interaction network such as neighbours or people travelling together with the infected ones. A small world network is a distribution which comes between a random network and a well connected network.

This analysis can also be seen practically as the disease is talking longer to double the deaths as shown in the image below. This is because the susceptible individuals around the infected are decreasing because of they might have higher immunity or mild symptoms which are not be worth getting tested.

This topic is very essential to be talked about because this performs a more detailed analysis on the data of COVID-19 infections and predicts a more accurate infections rate which is necessary to correctly educate the government and general public to make help them make the right decisions for themselves and the community.

Link: https://www.zdnet.com/article/graph-theory-suggests-covid-19-might-be-a-small-world-after-all/