Free Republic

For several decades scientists have been using telescopes to scan the heavens for unnatural-looking radio or optical transmissions coming from intelligent alien life. With this search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) having so far failed to pick up a single signal, however, researchers in the US now believe it is worth extending the search beyond electromagnetic waves and start paying attention to neutrinos. John Learned of the University of Hawaii and colleagues have worked out that advanced alien civilizations could send messages within the Milky Way using neutrinos, and that these messages could be picked up using neutrino detectors currently under...

A widespread and popular impression of SETI is that it's a worldwide enterprise. Well, it's not, and there's something modestly puzzling in that. The idea of communicating between worlds is at least 150 years old. Victorian scientists Karl Friedrich Gauss and Joseph von Littrow are both reputed to have concocted schemes to establish rapport with Moon-men or Martians by signaling them with light. Gauss was a German, and von Littrow was Austrian. But within a century, the important ideas about getting in touch with aliens were coming from the western side of the Atlantic. The fundamental concepts for radio SETI...

BERKELEY, Calif. -- On Monday, KTVU reported scientists have received an odd signal from space and some readers may have interpreted this as a confirmed extra-terrestrial contact. Scientists did confirm there was an anomalous radio signal and reported it late last year. However, as SETI@home lead scientist Dan Werthimer now clarifies, "although this pulse is not well understood..." it may have a natural origin. SETI Institute Chief Scientist Seth Shostak says the highly energetic and brief signal at first excited some researchers, who at the time thought it may be a candidate ET signal. It was received not at Arecibo,...

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is receiving 500 times more data from an upgraded telescope and better frequency coverage than project planners anticipated, meaning the SETI@home project is in dire need of more desktop computers to help crunch the data. New, more sensitive receivers on the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before, project leaders said in a release. SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new...

ET too bored by Earth transmissions to respond 16:35 18 December 2007 NewScientist.com news service Tom Simonite Messages sent into space directed at extraterrestrials may have been too boring to earn a reply, say two astrophysicists trying to improve on their previous alien chat lines. Humans have so far sent four messages into space intended for alien listeners. But they have largely been made up of mathematically coded descriptions of some physics and chemistry, with some basic biology and descriptions of humans thrown in. Those topics will not prove gripping reading to other civilisations, says Canadian astrophysicist Yvan Dutil. If...

When Alexander Zaitsev presented his recent paper at the International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad (India) recently, he spoke from the center of a widening controversy. The question is straightforward: Should we broadcast messages intentionally designed to be received by extraterrestrial civilizations, thereby notifying them of our existence? Zaitzev, chief scientist at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, addressed the question by seeing a necessary relationship between SETI (the search for ETI) and METI (messaging to other civilizations). Indeed, the Russian scientist, working at the Evpatoria Deep Space Center in the Ukraine, has the experience to...

Today, in the remote northeast corner of California, technology innovator and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will hit the big red button. No, he won't be throwing heavy-duty machinery into an emergency shutdown, nor will he be sending ICBMs screaming from their silos (traditional functions for ruddy buttons). Instead, he'll be christening a new telescope that, in its significance, could eventually outpace the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. The famous technologist will be inaugurating the initial 42 antennas of his namesake, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) – the first major radio telescope designed from the pedestal up to efficiently (which is...

Nasa this week unveils a new emissary in the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which launches next month, marks just the latest instalment in a quest that has exercised the imaginations of writers and scientists since long before the adventures of Jules Verne. In the 17th century Johannes Kepler, the architect of our modern understanding of the solar system, imagined a journey to a moon inhabited by serpent-like creatures called Prevlovans who endured the lunar night "bristling with ice and snow under the raging, icy winds". Regrettably, however, here is no reliable account of a...

NEW YORK: A panel of scientists convened by America's leading scientific advisory group says the hunt for extraterrestrial life should be greatly expanded to include what they call "weird life": organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life as we know it. "The committee's investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth," the scientists conclude in their report. Starfish, sequoias, salamanders and the rest of Earth's residents may seem very diverse, but they are surprisingly similar on the molecular scale. All species that scientists have studied need liquid water to survive, for...

PALMDALE - The world's newest flying telescope will be in focus on Saturday, June 30, at NASA's Aerospace Exploration Gallery in the Palmdale Civic Center. Dr. Dana Backman will give presentations regarding NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronom beginning at 9 a.m., then repeating at 10:30, noon and 1:30 p.m. Dr. Backman is with the SETI Institute and the Universities Space Research Association and manages SOFIA's education and public outreach program. An infrared astronomer, Backman received his doctoral degree in astrophysics from the University of Hawaii. While Backman was a post-doctoral student at NASA's Ames Research Center, he flew on...

OK, don't make a mistake: this isn't really a movie about space. The Astronaut Farmer is the quintessential American Story. That's right; it's the classic, archetypical, consummate, perfected American myth, served up in packaging so homespun, you'll wonder that the actors aren't dressed in quilts. When it comes to this movie's theme, you already know the drill, because during your childhood, Hollywood saut?ed your tender brain with the potboiler genre known as the Western. And what was the icon of the Western? A rugged individual, hard as tool steel on the outside, and soft as warm Jell-O within; a slouch-hatted...

Is there anybody out there? Give the question some thought before you answer, because it’s more perilous than it seems. Deny the possibility of a universe populated with intelligent extraterrestrials that can speak and mate and battle with humanity, and the science-fiction canon collapses; more than a century’s worth of novels, from “The War of the Worlds” to “Old Man’s War,” would find their speculative foundations swept out from underneath them. But admit to a sincere belief in the remotest potential for alien life, and prepare to be fitted for a straitjacket; a recent survey conducted by Baylor University found...

People interested in Mars exploration, like many of the scientists at the Carl Sagan Center (CSC) in Mountain View California, often start by exploring cold, dry, thin aired Mars-like “analogue” sites on earth. Most of these places are isolated and hard to reach. Antarctica, the Arctic, the Peruvian Andes, Kamchatka and other exotic locales offer scientists glimpses into the kinds of environments that may hold clues to understanding Mars and the processes that have shaped it. Of key interest is the extreme or unusual conditions under which life persists. We know that everywhere on earth where we find liquid water,...

Presently, 200-plus known extrasolar planets have been found -- mostly huge gas giants like Jupiter within our own solar system of Sun-orbiting planets. Given these discoveries -- just within the last 10 years or so -- under what conditions can we expect terrestrial planets to crop up? Moreover, just how common are habitable planets in the universe? Planet scouting scientists met here January 26-28 at a media workshop sponsored by the University of Colorado's Center for Astrobiology to share theories as well as new observational information... What's now taking place is that extrasolar planet researchers are shifting into high gear...

“At what point would you abandon the search?” That’s a question I get relatively frequently from folks who think that SETI may be a quixotic quest, as futile as searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. After all, modern efforts to find signals from extraterrestrial transmitters are now in their fifth decade. Could it be that those of us who still hope to tune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with a simple, if disappointing message: “There are no aliens”? The question seems fair, since SETI’s obvious analogs–the historical voyages of...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Remember studying the (heavy chords) Scientific Method in middle school? According to your dour-faced science teacher, this was the secret formula by which legions of clipboard-carrying, lab coat-attired researchers pushed back the frontiers of knowledge. The scheme was simple: Scientists sat around dreaming up hypotheses—possible new truths—which they torture-tested in the lab or in the field. Experiment would arbitrate, either by validating the truth of a hypothesis, or by sending the scientist back to the blackboard to think again. Indeed, some research is done like that; investigations that proceed by testing a falsifiable premise. But there’s another way to learn...

An official announcement is expected tommorow. http://www.spaceref.com/calendar/calendar.html?pid=4200 http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=178899

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message. Those contributions -- part of media company Yahoo's "Time Capsule" project -- will be digitalized and beamed with a laser into space on October 25 from the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, now an archeological site near Mexico City. Archeologists say...

----cut---- The notion that Intelligent Design theory is fundamentally "unscientific" is based on the philosophy originated by Karl Popper (1902-1994), who postulated a set of rules for science known as "Falsificationism." The main idea is that a hypothesis or theory does not qualify as "scientific" unless it is "falsifiable" (which is independent of whether it is actually "true" or "false"). Popper is revered by evolutionists, but certainly even they would agree that we should not blindly accept his word as revealed truth. So let us consider some of the implications of his "falsifiability" criterion. ----cut---- The ultimate irony here is...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1,020 active CPUs - 70,500 completed Work Units and 12.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

A comprehensive review by leading scientists about our Solar System which speculates on the possibility of life on other planets has been published.Solar System Update brings together the work of 19 physicists, astronomers, and climatologists from Europe and the USA in 12 chapters on the sun, the main planets and comets.The book, co-edited by Dr Philippe Blondel, of the University of Bath, highlights the many recent discoveries and in particular the amount of water, one of the essentials for life, found in the Solar System.Recent studies have revealed ice in craters on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, and...

Astronomers are working to choose a site for a giant telescope that could read TV or radio signals from alien civilizations. Artist's concept of collecting dishes for the Square Kilometer Array. The instrument (see www.skatelescope.org)  is so named because it would have radiation-collecting surfaces totalling a square kilometer (about 1/3 square mile.) (Image © Xilostudios) The instrument, called the Square Kilometer Array or SKA, would be the world’s most powerful radio telescope and would begin operation by 2020, if all goes according to plan. Radio telescopes are devices that pick up radio waves, a type of light radiation that has...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1009 active CPUs - 55,700 completed Work Units and 9.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

On now....550 stations in the US, and XM165

It’s been 46 years since Frank Drake aimed an antenna at the stars in the first modern SETI experiment. His hope was to hear a deliberate signal – guided into space by intelligent beings – rather than the natural, noisy dance of hot electrons. Since then, SETI has expanded its search space, bettered its equipment, and refined its strategies. But the bottom line hasn’t budged: still no confirmed chitter from the cosmos. Some people mistakenly confuse a long search with a thorough one, and figure that the lack of a SETI detection indicates that we’re alone in the Galaxy. This,...

It's been 46 years since Frank Drake aimed an antenna at the stars in the first modern SETI experiment. His hope was to hear a deliberate signal - guided into space by intelligent beings - rather than the natural, noisy dance of hot electrons. Since then, SETI has expanded its search space, bettered its equipment, and refined its strategies. But the bottom line hasn't budged: still no confirmed chitter from the cosmos. Some people mistakenly confuse a long search with a thorough one, and figure that the lack of a SETI detection indicates that we're alone in the Galaxy. This,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 351 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 85th place (with 908 active CPUs - 47,400 completed Work Units and nearly 8.5 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 342 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 99th place (with 985 active CPUs - 39,500 completed Work Units and nearly 7 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Speculating about what an alien race might believe, think, or do has a definite fascination. Of course, it is nearly pure speculation; we simply don’t know enough about intelligence in the universe yet to reach even any tentative conclusions. It’s also important to remember that speculation is human speculation, and may not, therefore, have anything at all to do with the thought patterns of an intelligent species that evolved along its own path. With that disclaimer firmly in mind, let’s look at the “Park Hypothesis” as put forth by Michael Huang in a recent TSR article. (See “The Park hypothesis”,...

Is SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a religion? This is one of the topics that Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, and I discussed on "Are We Alone?", the SETI Institute's weekly radio program on Wednesday May 17. The discussion by Jill and I was in response to a claim made by George Basalla (professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware) in his book Civilized Life in the Universe (Oxford University Press: 2006) that SETI is more of a faith-based enterprise than a genuine science. He points to SETI's failure to make...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 337 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 103th place (with 988 active CPUs - 36,400 completed Work Units and more than 6,4 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 325+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 108th place (with 991 active CPUs - 34,150 completed Work Units and more than 6,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 117th place (with 1,038 active CPUs - 29,000 completed Work Units and more than 5,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

BOSTON --A new telescope at an observatory outside Boston will become a key tool in the search for extraterrestrials as scientists try to detect light signals from distant civilizations. An optical telescope dedicated Tuesday at the Oak Ridge Observatory, about 35 miles west of Boston, is the first to be used exclusively for a project called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 144th place (with 1,045 CPUs - 24,200 completed Work Units and nearly 4,000,000 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see...

Washington, D.C., is full of conspiracy theories and political intrigue at the best of times. When it comes to talk about aliens in the U.S. capital, it's often about calls for the CIA to reveal what it did with a UFO that allegedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1950s, or buzz about frozen alien bodies in the basement of the Pentagon. But next week in Washington, talk about aliens will be taken with furrowed-brow seriousness. It's not speculation about pregnant women and Martian abductions, but the painstaking search for possible Martian microbes. Not alien invaders, but talk about...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 164th place (with 992 CPUs - nearly 19,000 completed Work Units and 2,982,241 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 188th place (with 940 CPUs - 15,725 completed Work Units and 2,330,000 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see the...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 204th place, having reached more than 2,000,000 points! This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Sharing, it’s a lesson we learned as children. If you grew up with siblings, your mother probably encouraged you to let them play with your toys. While initially reluctant, you soon realized that if they got to play with your toys, you could then play with theirs. The lesson, sharing could be mutually beneficial, applies to many situations, even when we grow up. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is the first of a new generation of radio telescopes. It is a radical departure from traditional radio telescope design and construction. The completed ATA, with 350 six-meter dishes, will be among...

Welcome to the new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's 250+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 241st place, having moved up from 1200th...

G. Scott Hubbard, director of NASA Ames Research Center, located in California’s Silicon Valley, today announced his personal plans for the future. He has accepted a new assignment as holder of the Carl Sagan Chair for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., effective Feb. 15, 2006. As holder of the Carl Sagan Chair, Hubbard will work to strengthen the SETI Institute’s visibility and support for its research into the origin of life, and how it might be found on other worlds, particularly the planets and moons of our solar system. “The...

For all you science and space buffs, engineers are making a whole new generation of gizmos designed to find extraterrestrial life. I look forward to success in my lifetime.

Hardly a week goes by without some keyboard correspondent reluctantly telling me that SETI has a honking big problem. "Even if the Galaxy is brimming with intelligent life," they’ll gravely intone, "SETI has virtually no chance of success." Their reasoning is this: the probability that SETI’s receiving antennas are pointed at the aliens’ world just when their transmitting antennas are aimed at ours is vanishingly small. Since we lack a TV Guide for extraterrestrial broadcasts, we’ll never twist our telescopes to the right direction, at the right time, to pick up a signal. Note that this is not the well-known...

Welcome to the folding at home thread. The previous thread has gotten too large, so we move on to yet another. While this folding@home team is not officially sanctioned by Free Republic, it's members, or it's founders, it is comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing, who have banded together, to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via Distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimers, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 777th place,...

New thread for this week. Congrats to all new members who joined this week! We've made excellent progress so far and have smoked the DUmmies and Kossacks. Let's keep folding!

A continuation of the Freeper Folder Thread

OK, new thread to celebrate reaching a major milestone! Within a few hours Team FreeRepublic will be in the Top1000!!!! We should pass Dean for America, around noon tommorrow. Other liberal teams want to challenge us (DUmmies and Kos) but we're humiliating them beyond description.