Tag Archives | SETI

Is SETI Science?

By on April 29, 2013 in News 0
Picture: SETI (C)

Picture: SETI (C)

Steven Novella of the Neurologica blog tackles an interesting question: Is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) scientific?

Via Neurologica:

With regard to SETI the hypothesis is this – life arose spontaneously on Earth, there is nothing special about the Earth and therefore it is possible for life to arise elsewhere in the universe. It is possible that some of that life evolved intelligence, and some of that intelligence developed technology. One method for a technological civilization to communicate across stellar distances is through radio signals. Therefore, perhaps the Earth is being bathed at this moment with intelligent radio signals from other worlds.

Every link in that logical change is perfectly reasonable. The best way to test that hypothesis is to simply look. Looking is part of science. It is a valid way to test many hypotheses. It is not necessary to be able to prove that there are no intelligent radio sources anywhere in the universe in order for this endeavor to be properly scientific.

… Read the rest

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Could An Extraterrestrial Message Be Encoded In Our DNA?

By on April 8, 2013 in News 0

Could a message have been inserted into our genetics billions of years ago, as the most durable method of communicating with intelligent life eons later? Discovery News ponders:

Could our genes have an intelligently designed “manufacturer’s stamp” inside them, written eons ago elsewhere in our galaxy?

Vladimir I. shCherbak of al-Farabi Kazakh National University of Kazakhstan, and Maxim A. Makukov of the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, hypothesize that an intelligent signal embedded in our genetic code would what they call “biological SETI.”

In the journal Icarus, they assert: “Once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature.” To pass the designer label test, any patterns in the genetic code must be highly statistically significant and possess intelligent-like features that are inconsistent with any natural know process.

They go on to argue that their detailed analysis of the human genome displays a thorough precision-type orderliness in the mapping between DNA’s nucleotides and amino acids.

… Read the rest

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Sirius: It Is Time For You To Know

By on January 24, 2013 in News 34

Dr. Steven Greer, founder of the worldwide Disclosure Movement and the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence is working with Emmy award winning filmmaker Amardeep Kaleka to expose what they call “the greatest story never told”:

  • The Earth has been visited by people from other worlds who are not malicious, but in fact concerned for the future of humanity.
  • A cabal of military, industrial and financial interests have kept this contact and what we have learned from it secret for over 60 years.
  • Their secrecy is meant to suppress the knowledge that can liberate the world from the yoke of oil, gas, coal and nuclear power and replace the current world order with one of New Energy and true Freedom.

Here’s a teaser for the film. If you’re interested, they are still raising finishing funds.

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Are Aliens Communicating With Us Via The Stars?

By on December 4, 2012 in News 8

TIME on the possibility that we are oblivious to extraterrestrial messages shining right down onto us:

Lucianne Walkowicz wants to conduct a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), not by doing anything so conventional as listening for radio transmissions or watching for flashes of laser light. Instead, she wants to see if ET’s are somehow manipulating the light coming from their stars so that they wink at us.

“Our premise,” she says, “is that up until now, we’ve had a preconceived idea of what a SETI signal would look like.” It would basically be the sort of signal we know how to create, since searching for a signal from some entirely unknown technology would be difficult.

If aliens were so advanced that they could cause their star to appear to flicker, however, it wouldn’t matter how they did it, and it would be easy enough to see with existing technology. In fact, says Walkowicz, “our premise was, ‘what if we’ve already detected a signal but missed it because of our preconceptions.’”

So she and her co-investigators proposed to look through a potential trove of signals: the archives from the Kepler mission, which has been scanning space since 2009 for stars that are winking because of orbiting planets passing in front of them.

… Read the rest

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No Intelligent Aliens Detected on the SETI-Targeted “Earth Condition” Gliese 581 System

By on June 4, 2012 in News 13

Yet that is. As Ian O’Neill desribes on Discovery News:

SETI astronomers have eavesdropped on an alien star system thought to contain two “habitable” worlds in the hope of hearing a radio transmission from an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Sadly, there appears to be no chatty aliens living around the red dwarf star Gliese 581.

In results announced last week by Australian SETI astronomers, of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Perth, Gliese 581 was precisely targeted by Australian Long Baseline Array using three radio telescope facilities across Australia. This is the first time the technique of very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) has been used to target a specific star in the hunt for extraterrestrials, so although it didn’t turn up any aliens, it is a proof of concept that may prove invaluable for future SETI projects…

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The Wow! Signal: SETI’s Most Tantalizing Recording

By on February 18, 2012 in News 7

Wow! SignalGood article about the mysterious Wow! signal from Ross Andersen in the Atlantic:

Late one night in the summer of 1977, a large radio telescope outside Delaware, Ohio intercepted a radio signal that seemed for a brief time like it might change the course of human history. The telescope was searching the sky on behalf of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the signal, though it lasted only seventy-two seconds, fit the profile of a message beamed from another world. Despite its potential import, several days went by before Jerry Ehman, a project scientist for SETI, noticed the data.

He was flipping through the computer printouts generated by the telescope when he noticed a string of letters within a long sequence of low numbers — ones, twos, threes and fours. The low numbers represent background noise, the low hum of an ordinary signal. As the telescope swept across the sky, it momentarily landed on something quite extraordinary, causing the signal to surge and the computer to shift from numbers to letters and then keep climbing all the way up to “U,” which represented a signal thirty times higher than the background noise level.

… Read the rest

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SETI Is Back!

By on August 10, 2011 in News 1

300px-SETI@home_Multi-Beam_screensaverGood news for those hoping to find aliens, reported by Deborah Netburn for the LA Times:

Citizens of the world: You are awesome. This week the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute announced that it had raised more than $200,000 from a crowd-sourced fundraising effort that launched this spring. The money, which came from just over 2,000 people who want to keep the search for alien life alive, will help the institute put its Allen Telescope Array back online.

“We are so grateful to our donors,” said Tom Pierson, who co-founded the SETI Institute with Jill Tarter (the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in “Contact”). “We believe we will be back on the air in September.”

On the Setistars website, where the call for donations was originally placed, large red type proclaims: “Thank You for Your Support to Resume the Search!”

The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, is a series of 42 linked radio-telescope dishes funded by a $30-million gift from Microsoft Corp.

… Read the rest

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This is Planet Earth’s Impact So Far in the Universe

By on July 23, 2011 in News 38

Radio BroadcastsLook for the tiny blue dot for our impact. Adam Grossman writes about “The Tiny Humanity Bubble” on jackadamblog:

Mankind has been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now — since the days of Marconi.

That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity’s presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years across.

But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)?

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Saving SETI

By on June 23, 2011 in News 2

Seti StarsFormer disinfonaut Nick Hodulik’s company General Things has recently helped the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) launch SETIstars, a new initiative meant to get the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) back into action.

The ATA is SETI’s primary tool for scanning the skies for potential intelligent life, and recent federal and state budget deficits have cut its funding so severely as to force it to shut down. It takes $200,000 per month to pay the staff and operating expenses of the ATA, and SETIstars hopes to help bridge the gap between the community and SETI in order to get the ATA up and running again. Please donate today!… Read the rest

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The Cost of Keeping the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Going vs. Other ‘Human’ Affairs

By on May 7, 2011 in News 2

Very interesting post from the MicroCosmologist blog:

So it looks like the Allen Telescope Array is falling onto the chopping block in this era of fiscal “emergency.” To me, this sounds a lot like the recent battle to defund NPR or PBS, in that the money they need to continue is just … chump change in the grand scheme of finances. They’re $2.5 million short, and for that, they’ll need to stop taking data and shut down the telescope array. It deeply bums me out to think that such a low value is placed on the quest to find other intelligence in our universe. When compared with so many other things that gladly get millions or billions of dollars, it’s maddening to see SETI so marginalized …

And to put things into perspective, I’ve whipped up this handy infographic, comparing how $2.5 million compares to so many other things that we absolutely must have, and will not hesitate to pay for:

SET Infographic

Background info on the shutdown here.

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