Free Republic

I’m optimistic by nature—as a scientist, you have to be. But my hopeful feeling is not wishful thinking; it is firmly grounded in the logic of SETI. Half a century sounds like a long time, but the search is truly in its early days. Given the current state of SETI efforts and abilities, I feel that we’re on the cusp of learning something truly revolutionary.

If extraterrestrials are out there, odds are they're too clever to have been blindsided by global warming run amok. Could it be that climate change is a universal menace? A recent article in Forbes addresses the idea that the galaxy might be strewn with extinct alien civilizations, burned to a crisp by ferocious planetary warming. The idea is certainly intriguing, and has obvious relevance as a cautionary tale for us. But could it be true? The article doesn’t say these hypothetical societies died out thanks to an alien fondness for SUVs. Instead, the aliens are hypothesized to be the victims...

Seth Shostak from SETI.org joined the Chris Pryor Show. Seth discussed current scientific attempts to discover intelligent life and the mechanisms involved in this search. Seth has a fantastic radio show of his own, Big Picture Science and it can be found here https://seti.org/education-outreach/big-picture-science-overview

t’s something people tell me all the time, and usually in hushed tones: “With a trillion planets out there, we really can’t be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy.” In other words, given the enormous amount of real estate in space, aliens are sure to exist. So why haven’t we found any? I don’t dispute this straightforward idea because, after all, it underpins the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). But not everyone agrees. A recent paper by three researchers at the University of Oxford is throwing shade on those who feel confident that the cosmos is thick with extraterrestrials....

If E.T. phones earth, he'll get a "disconnect" signal. Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes — popularized in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" — that scans the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson explained that last week the array was put into "hibernation," safe but non-functioning, due to inadequate government support. The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced...

The good news is that polls continue to show that between one and two-thirds of the public thinks that extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction thinks that some of it is visiting Earth. Several recent television shows have soberly addressed the possibility that alien craft are violating our air space, occasionally touching down long enough to allow their crews to conduct bizarre (and, in most states, illegal) experiments on hapless citizens. While these shows tantalize viewers by suggesting that they are finally going to get to the bottom of the so-called "UFO debate", they never...

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Scientists searching the stars for aliens are convinced an E.T. is out there -- it's just that they haven't had the know-how to detect such a being. But now technological advances have opened the way for scientists to check millions of previously unknown star systems, dramatically increasing the chances of finding intelligent life in outer space in the next 25 years, the world's largest private extraterrestrial agency believes. "We're looking for needles in the haystack that is our galaxy, but there could be thousands of needles out there," Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at California's non-profit Search...