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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...

Aliens may be trying to communicate with Earth by flashing blinking lasers towards our planet like a cosmic lighthouse, astronomers believe.Laser scientists at the Vienna University of Technology are searching for faint but repetitive light signals from the distant reaches of space, in the hope of identifying signals sent out by extraterrestrials, according to Astrobiology Magazine. Because of their ability to transmit signals over vast distances, lasers have long been considered a possible means of contact by alien species. But while astronomers have searched tens of thousands of stars for laser signals in the past – without identifying any...

Yes, the most transparently opportunistic administration is becoming more transparent every day. In the midst of negotiations for a free-trade agreement between Europe and the U.S., the NSA Papers, made transparent by Edward Snowden, reveal that America has been spying on allies as well as enemies. Yeah I know. Obama has a hard time telling the difference between U.S. allies and U.S. enemies. Hence he’s arming our allies, er, enemies, Al Qaida, in Syria; he’s being flexible for Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator, er, president; helping the Venezuelan government wing disguised as an oil company, our ally, er, enemy; and...

Academics from 11 institutions have set up a network to co-ordinate their Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti). The English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, will act as patron. The group is asking funding agencies for a small - about £1m a year - sum of money to support listening time on radio telescopes and for data analysis. It would also help pay for research that considered new ways to try to find aliens. Currently, most Seti work is done in the US and is funded largely through private donation.

As far as we know, Earth is the only place in the Universe where life has arisen, let alone developed an intelligent civilization. This baffling contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox, first described in 1950 by the physicist Enrico Fermi. Scientists have been trying to resolve this mystery for decades, listening for radio signals from other worlds. We’ve only sampled a fraction of the radio spectrum, and so far, we haven’t detected anything that could be a signal from an intelligent species. How can we explain this?

SETIÂ’s Colossus by Paul Gilster on May 31, 2013 For the most part, the focus of SETI since Project Ozma has been directed at intercepting signals deliberately sent our way. It doesnÂ’t have to be so, of course, because extraneous signals from a civilization going about its business would also be profoundly interesting, and even a civilization not much more advanced than ours might be throwing off powerful evidence of its existence through the planetary radars it uses to detect potential impactors in its own system. Whether or not the Ohio State WOW! signal was a SETI detection remains unresolved,...

A team of astronomers is now looking for Dyson Spheres, massive star-scale solar power plants that extraterrestrial hunters hope alien civilizations employIn 1960, mathematician, physicist, and all-around genius Freeman Dyson predicted that every civilization in the Universe eventually runs out of energy on its home planet, provided it survives long enough to do so. Dyson argued that this event constitutes a major hurdle in a civilization's evolution, and that all those who leap over it do so in precisely the same way: they build a massive collector of starlight, a shell of solar panels to surround their home star. Astronomers...

We take it for granted that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a safe endeavor. Seriously, what could possibly go wrong with passively searching for interstellar radio signals? Unfortunately, the answer is quite a lot –- especially if the incoming signal contains something malicious, like a computer virus or Trojan horse. And according to the experts, this isn't just idle speculation – the threat is very real. So, just how concerned do we need to be? To get a better sense of this possibility, we spoke to two experts on the matter: Andrew Siemion, a PhD candidate in astronomy...

If there's something you'd like to say to aliens, now's your chance. The Wow! signal, a mysterious radio transmission detected in 1977 that may or may not have come from extraterrestrials, is finally getting a response from humanity. Anyone can contribute his or her two cents — or 140 characters, to be exact — to the cosmic reply via Twitter. All tweets composed between 8 p.m. EDT Friday (June 29) and 3 a.m. EDT Saturday (June 30) tagged with the hashtag #ChasingUFOs will be rolled into a single message, according to the National Geographic Channel, which is timing the Twitter...

Astronomer Jill Tarter, the inspiration for heroine Ellie Arroway in the novel and movie "Contact," is retiring after spending 35 years scanning the heavens for signals from intelligent aliens. Tarter is stepping down as the director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., the organization's officials announced today (May 22). But rather than go lie on a beach somewhere,Tarter will continue to devote herself to the search for E.T. She's shifting into a full-time fundraising role for the SETI Institute, which had to shut down a set of alien-hunting...

Got some spare time today? How about putting aside that game of Bejeweled Blitz and instead lend a hand in what could be the most important discovery of all time? It’s no joke — the people behind the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project have partnered with TED (Technology Entertainment Design) to create a website where anyone can log on and start searching for aliens. Called SETI Live, the new project reduces the hunt for intelligent life on other planets to a kind of game — sort of a mix between Foursquare and Where’s Waldo. Once you log on and...

We've started searching our Kepler SETI observations and our analyses have generated some of our first candidate signals. Each of the signals below is shown in a pair of plots, one from an observation of Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) 817 and one from an observation of KOI-812. During an observation, we alternated between targets to enable us to rule out signals seen coming from two different places in the sky. If we see a signal coming from multiple positions on the sky, it is very likely to be interference.What do these plots represent? These are plots of electromagnetic...

A week doesn't go by without the announcement of new planets. "Week Brings Hail of Planets" was just the most recent report. It capped a week of "new findings about worlds beyond our own solar system," according to the Wall Street Journal. The latest marvel, 200 light years distant from Earth, has two suns. The reporter quoted John Knoll of Industrial Light & Magic as saying that this shows "science is stranger than fiction." Actually, science fiction started this whole ball rolling, but that's another story. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has gone on for more than 50 years....

The White House has said there is no sign of aliens – but it is still looking. Staff were responding to a petition that accused the government of covering up contact with life beyond Earth. Phil Larson, from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, officially denied knowledge of alien life and denied they had withheld information from the public. He promised scientists are still on the search for extraterrestrial life. 'The U.S. government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human...

Back in April we told you about the shuttering of the Allen Array and the difficulties that E.T. would have phoning home. Well, if you happen to be in touch with the lovable alien, let him know to load up a few more minutes on his long distance card because SETI is back, on the strength of private donations. Forty-two radio telescope dishes near Mount Shasta will again start listening for sounds of intelligent life in the universe this fall after donors — including actress Jodie Foster — came up with more than $200,000 to save the Mountain View-based SETI...

‘Blue Stragglers’ in the Galactic Bulge by Paul Gilster on May 30, 2011 I’m fascinated by how much the exoplanet hunt is telling us about celestial objects other than planets. The other day we looked at some of the stellar spinoffs from the Kepler mission, including the unusual pulsations of the star HD 187091, now known to be not one star but two. But the examples run well beyond Kepler. Back in 2006, a survey called the Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search (SWEEPS) used Hubble data to study 180,000 stars in the galaxy’s central bulge, the object being...

A massive radio telescope in rural West Virginia has begun listening for signs of alien life on 86 possible Earth-like planets, US astronomers said Friday.The giant dish began this week pointing toward each of the 86 planets -- culled from a list of 1,235 possible planets identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope -- and will gather 24 hours of data on each one. "It's not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they're very good places to look for ET," said University of California at Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion. The mission is part of...

A monitoring system for potential extra-terrestrial communication has been shelved due to budget cuts. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in California has been mothballed, according to the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Institute. Funding for the observatory, which hosts the ATA, has been cut to one-tenth its former level. The Seti Institute was established in 1984 to look for life beyond Earth. The telescopes, at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory north of San Francisco, California, have a number of science goals, including searching for radio signals from intelligent life in the Universe. "Effective this week, the ATA has been placed...