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Paul Allen gives $13.5 million to search for space aliens SEATTLE - Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is giving $13.5 million to research that includes looking for intelligent life in outer space. The contribution announced yesterday brings his total donations to the project to $25 million. It is going for construction of the Allen Telescope Array at a lava bed about 25 miles north of Lassen Peak in northern California. Besides the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the radio astronomy project is directed at examining quasars, cosmic explosions and the birth of stars for clues to the origin of the universe....

Breaking: Discovery of ‘Habitable’ Earth-Like Planet Announced The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute and planet hunters from The National Aeronautics and Space Administration have made a startling discovery while exploring the Milky Way Galaxy By Robin Seemangal | 07/23/15 12:20pm  Comment Artist’s concept depicts the earth-like planet Kepler-452b (NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle) The SETI Institute and NASA have confirmed the discovery of Kepler 452b, the most Earth-like planet ever encountered. Located in the Goldilocks zone of its host star, this planet would have “just the right” conditions to support liquid water and possibly even life. This extraordinary world was spotted by...

Professor Matthew Bailes said 'the history of weak civilisations contacting more advanced civilisations is not a happy one' "... he warned that making contact with aliens capable of transmitting powerful signals to Earth over tens of thousands of light years could lead humanity into disaster, because they're likely to be so much more advanced."

UFOs may be fodder for comedians and science fiction but there was no joking Monday when a group of pilots and officials demanded the US government reopen an investigation into unidentified flying objects. The 19 former pilots and government officials, who say they have seen UFOs themselves or been involved in probes of strange flying objects, told reporters their questions can no longer be dismissed more than 30 years after the US case was closed."We want the US government to stop perpetuating the myth that all UFOs can be explained away in down-to-earth, conventional terms," said Fife Symington, former governor...

The Starship Builders by Kim Burrafato In UFOs and the New Physics, we discussed some of the daunting problems in applying terrestrial rocket propulsion principles to any hypothetical models of UFO propulsion. A lot has happened since that article?s publication over two years ago. It seems we?re getting almost weekly reports of newly discovered extrasolar planetary systems. What was once highly speculative, is now commonplace. Obviously, our previous estimates of the number of stars with possible planetary systems will be revised dramatically upwards. Then there is the recent announcement from a distinguished British research team, that they also had...

On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce their new project: injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor they're calling Breakthrough Listen. "We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," Hawking said at Monday's news conference, "So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life." Geoffrey Marcy, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer who found most of our first exoplanets, also spoke at the event as part of the group's brain trust....

Is there anyone else out there in the universe? The endeavor to answer that eternal question got a serious shot in the arm this week thanks to Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner. At the Royal Society in London, the billionaire announced the launch of Breakthrough Listen, a 10-year, $100 million initiative to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Related: The Power of Planning: NASA's Pluto Flyby Was Epic and Amazing Aided by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in W. Va., the CSIRO Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia and the Lick Telescope in at the Lick Observatory in...

A $100 Million Infusion for SETI Researchby Paul Gilster on July 20, 2015 SETI received a much needed boost this morning as Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, along with physicist Stephen Hawking and a panel including Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Martin Rees and Geoff Marcy announced a $100 million pair of initiatives to reinvigorate the search. The first of these, Breakthrough Listen, dramatically upgrades existing search methods, while Breakthrough Message will fund an international competition to create the kind of messages we might one day send to other stars, although the intention is also to provoke the necessary discussion and debate...

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces most comprehensive hunt for alien life.You could say that the silence has been deafening. Since its beginnings more than half a century ago, the dedicated search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has failed to detect the presence of alien civilizations. But at London’s Royal Society today (20 July), Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a shot in the arm for SETI: a US$100-million decadal project to provide the most comprehensive hunt for alien communications so far. The initiative, called Breakthrough Listen, will see radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and...

Explanation: Galactic or open star clusters are young. These swarms of stars are born together near the plane of the Milky Way, but their numbers steadily dwindle as cluster members are ejected by galactic tides and gravitational interactions. In fact, this bright open cluster, known as M46, is around 300 million years young. It still contains a few hundred stars within a span of 30 light-years or so. Located about 5,000 light-years away toward the constellation Puppis, M46 also seems to contain contradictions to its youthful status. In this pretty starscape, the colorful, circular patch above and right of the...

Explanation: While most spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have two or more spiral arms, NGC 4725 has only one. In this sharp color composite image, the solo spira mirabilis seems to wind from a prominent ring of bluish, newborn star clusters and red tinted star forming regions. The odd galaxy also sports obscuring dust lanes a yellowish central bar structure composed of an older population of stars. NGC 4725 is over 100 thousand light-years across and lies 41 million light-years away in the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. Computer simulations of the formation of single spiral arms suggest that...

Not only does NASA's chief scientist believe alien life forms likely exist, but she said the space agency knows where to look and could discover signs of extraterrestrial life within the next decade. Speaking on a panel discussion on Tuesday about water in the universe, NASA's chief scientist Ellen Stofan said she believes the first indications of alien life could come by 2025 -- with more concrete evidence of extraterrestrial life coming in 20 to 30 years.

During the walk to the Fuller Lodge, the physicists discussed a recent spate of UFO sightings, and a cartoon in the New Yorker Magazine depicting aliens and a flying saucer. Although the topic of conversation moved on as the group sat down for lunch, Edward Teller recalls “in the middle of the conversation, Fermi came out with the quite unexpected question ‘Where is everybody?’…The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that in spite of Fermi’s question coming out of the clear blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was...

Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message? BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology. Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have...

...So began SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a form of astronomical inquiry that has captured the imaginations of people around the planet but has so far failed to detect a single “hello.” Pick your explanation: They’re not there; they’re too far away; they’re insular and aloof; they’re zoned out on computer games; they’re watching us in mild bemusement and wondering when we’ll grow up. Now some SETI researchers are pushing a more aggressive agenda: Instead of just listening, we would transmit messages, targeting newly discovered planets orbiting distant stars. Through “active SETI,” we’d boldly announce our presence and try...

E.T. does not need to phone home anymore, someone, or something is on it’s way to earth. SETI Astrophysicist Craig Kasnov has announced the approach to the Earth of 3 very large, very fast moving objects. The length of the "flying saucers" is in the range of tens of kilometers. Landing, according to calculations of scientists, should be in mid-December 2012. Date coincides with the end of the Mayan calendar. A few very large objects rapidly approaching the Earth - says SETI astrophysicist Craig Kasnov. Don’t take his word for it you can check it out for yourself. He recommends...

The first detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life will likely come within the next quarter-century, a prominent alien hunter predicts. By 2040 or so, astronomers will have scanned enough star systems give themselves a great shot of discovering alien-produced electromagnetic signals, said Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said here Thursday (Feb. 6) during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium here at Stanford University "Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems,...

Earth may be a nice and cozy place for life as we know it to evolve, but is it really the best place for life to thrive? Probably not, say two researchers. In fact, Earth may be one of the more extreme examples of a “habitable” world where life was lucky to survive. The search for extraterrestrial life is fraught with uncertainly. Faced with a seemingly infinite Universe and an assumption that life beyond our planet is an inevitability, we focus on nooks and crannies that have similar habitable environments to Earth and exoplanets that resemble our world orbiting stars...

ID theorists say that information is the foundation of the universe. Others say matter is. Our choice of who to believe will shape our future. First, suppose the materialists are right. If materialism (naturalism) is simply true, because everything comes down to matter in the end, what future might we expect? Stephen Hawking insists in a recent interview that "Science will win." If we take his current non-realist views seriously, science as we have known it is finished and there is nothing to win. That doesn't mean, of course, that everything shuts down. Some projects will continue as if immortal...

(Phys.org) —Scientists as eminent as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have long believed that humans will one day colonise the universe. But how easy would it be, why would we want to, and why haven't we seen any evidence of other life forms making their own bids for universal domination? A new paper by Dr Stuart Armstrong and Dr Anders Sandberg from Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) attempts to answer these questions. To be published in the August/September edition of the journal Acta Astronautica, the paper takes as its starting point the Fermi paradox – the discrepancy between...