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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Even if humanity could reach out to an intelligent alien civilization, scientists are polarized over whether we should. Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has argued that the extraterrestrials we contacted would be likely to harm us, a view that divided the experts here at the SETIcon convention. *SNIP* However, Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the SETI Institute, said of aliens: "Even if they tend to be hateful, awful folks, can they do us any harm at interstellar distances?"

Astronomers, actors and a host of other science-minded professionals will descend on California this weekend to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the SETI Institute and its mission to scan the universe for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Called SETICon, the public gathering includes a veritable feast of research presentations and discussions. Here, SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak offers a taste of what to expect and the big SETI shindig: What would happen if an Earthling astronaut encountered a Vulcan? Would they chat about the rigors of spaceflight, or merely chuckle about one another's misshapen ears?

Astrophysicist Gregory Benford — standing before the UCI Observatory — believes an alien civilization would transmit “cost-optimized” signals rather than the kind sought for decades by the SETI Institute. Courtesy of Steve Zylius For 50 years, humans have scanned the skies with radio telescopes for distant electronic signals indicating the existence of intelligent alien life. The search — centered at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA — has tapped into our collective fascination with the concept that we may not be alone in the universe. But the effort has so far proved fruitless, and the scientific community driving...

HAT CREEK, CALIF. -- The wide dishes, 20 feet across and raised high on their pedestals, creaked and groaned as the winds from an approaching snowstorm pushed into this highland valley. Forty-two in all, the radio telescopes laid out in view of some of California's tallest mountains look otherworldly, and now their sounds conjured up visions of deep-space denizens as well.

A computer administrator with the Higley Unified School District in Gilbert, Arizona, has resigned during an investigation into suspicious activity. He's accused of wasting district resources, totaling more than a million dollars to search for UFOs. The IT administrator is accused of installing a program on every one of the district's 5,000 computers. The school district was unknowingly the largest contributor to the "SETI" program, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. Authorities say 38 year old Brad Nezloochowski rigged up Higley School District computers to help look for intelligent life in outer space. Superintendent Denise Birdwell says the district recently...

Many people make a distinction between the origin of life and the evolution of life. In this view, biological evolution refers to the gradual development of the diversity of living things from a common ancestor, while the ultimate origin of life is a separate question. This is a legitimate point, but evolution is about much more than just biology. The evolutionary worldview is that all of physical existence, both living and non-living, arose through purely natural processes. With this broad definition of evolution, abiogenesis--the spontaneous appearance of life from non-living matter--is a necessity. If life did arise on earth by...

A flash. Then complete darkness. I swerve wildly on my rickety bike, skidding on a soaked, winding path, squeezing my eyes shut and opening them in an attempt to get my eyesight back. Just when I regain my bearings (but not quite my eyesight), a sharp crack! throws me off my seat. I land awkwardly and stumble as the two dogs (Peach and Jasmine) scurry away to avoid me. Another flash sends them back up against my pant legs. They're shivering – fear? Cold? Probably both; thunderstorms aren't exactly great experiences for most non-humans, or most humans for that matter....

Aliens Lose in Switch to Digital TV By Seth ShostakSenior Astronomer, SETI Instituteposted: 18 June 200905:07 pm ET The United States is finally ditching analog television broadcasting, and the rest of the world is doing the same. Unless you've got a converter, the government has just morphed your trusty analog boob tube into an inert piece of furniture. Mind you, this is a good thing. Digital TV (DTV) offers better picture quality. For example, the ghost images caused by signal reflections off that high-rise office building down the block will be a thing of the past. In addition, you...

SETI Invites Alien Talk May 24, 2009 — They may not be saying much to us, but we can think about what to say to them – aliens, that is.  Space.com reported on the latest project from the SETI Institute: invite people all over the world to ponder, “What would you say to an extraterrestrial civilization?”     The SETI Institute is launching a new website, Earth Speaks, to gather people’s ideas about what we should say to an alien civilization should contact be made.  “By submitting text messages, pictures, and sounds from across the globe,” CEO Thomas Pierson explained,...

If you'd asked 20 years ago the question he's heard over and over -- whether humanity will discover extraterrestrial intelligence in his lifetime -- Frank Drake would have shrugged and said, "sure." Today, the renowned astronomer, who turns 79 next month, admits the chances are slimming. "It's going to be a close call," he said. But even if Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, doesn't see the day we learn we're not alone, he knows it's coming. To him, it's a mathematical inevitability. He should know. He wrote the formula. And...

« A symposium called Crossroads: The Future of Human Life in the Universe seems timely about now (the site has been down all morning but should be up soon). With the Kepler mission undergoing calibration and CoRoT actively searching for small extrasolar worlds, we’re probably within a few dozen months of the detection of an Earth-like world around another star (and maybe, by other methods, much closer). This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Holy Grail’ of planetary sciences, but as soon as we accomplish it, a new ‘Grail’ emerges: The discovery of life on these worlds. And then...

IT’S a birthright proffered by science and prophesied by “Star Trek,” “Battlestar Galactica” and a thousand other space operas: We’re destined to go to the stars. Our descendants will spread beyond this nondescript solar system and seek adventure and bumpy-headed pals in the stellar realms. Well, cool your warp jets, Mr. Scott, because we’re not about to breach the final frontier. Piling into a starship and barreling into deep space may long remain —like perfect children or effort-free bathroom cleaners —a pipe dream. . . . [A] trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million...

The real geeks among us long for synthohol. Only Class A nerds know, or admit to knowing, what it is, too. But I have to tell you, your potential partner’s drinking it won’t make you any better looking. Better to stick with the real thing. I’d surely like to see cheap, readily available fusion power. With unlimited energy comes unlimited possibility. Medical advances never really grabbed my interest. Probably—and luckily—because I don’t have any sicknesses. Would be good to see genetics progress to the point where we can reliably clone humans so that we don’t deprive the world of another...

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiment ended up being far more successful as a marketing gimmick than as a science project. The intrepid researchers never found the little green men. Perhaps that's because they never aimed their high-dollar radio telescopes at The Church of England. The Right Rev Richard Chartres made the following comments that suggest his familiarity with how affairs are conducted on the third planet out from Sol is nodding at best. He addressed reporters covering the Church of England's General Synod on the financial crisis."Sometimes, people seem to be relieved to get off the treadmill and...

Frank Drake is being honored on Space.com by the SETI Institute as the “Father of SETI,” His reputation is providing an opportunity for a fund raiser. For a lot of money, you can spend time with a celebrity whose accomplishments are questionable...

'Aliens Cause Global Warming' From a lecture delivered by the late Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology on Jan. 17, 2003: Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the...

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...