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Is there some evidence suggesting that humans are the Galaxy’s only intelligent species? Enrico Fermi thought so – and he was a pretty smart guy. Could he be right? In 1950, the famous physicist made a seemingly innocuous lunchtime remark that has caught and held the attention of every SETI researcher since. The utterance came while Fermi was discussing with his mealtime mates the reasonable possibility that many sophisticated societies populate the Galaxy. But somewhere between one sentence and the next, Fermi’s supple brain realized that if this was true, it implied something profound. If there are really a lot...

The story of how Richard and Karen covered Klaatu, the group rumored to the secret reunion of the Fab Four. Have you heard the one about the futuristic track by a group that were rumored to be The Beatles in disguise, and which was turned into a hit by America’s favorite musical brother and sister? This is the story of how the Carpenters get involved with an organization called the International Flying Saucer Bureau, and turned the affair into a hit record. Devotees of quality pop of the 1970s will, by now, know that we’re talking about “Calling Occupants Of...

In the same way that scientists have studied Antarctica for what insights could prove valuable for a Mars mission, the Whale-SETI group said its studies with humpback whales can help them develop “intelligence filters” used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A team that includes a UC Davis professor and a scientist with SETI, the organization that searches the cosmos for signs of alien intelligence, has cited a breakthrough here on Earth – a 20-minute “conversation” with a humpback whale in the wild. The Templeton Whale-SETI group said its findings on what it calls “non-human intelligence communication” could help in...

It might sound like a scene out of Avatar 2. But scientists claim it's now possible to have a conversation with a whale, following a 20-minute chat with a humpback whale in Southeast Alaska. A 38-year-old whale named Twain 'spoke' with the researchers from the SETI Institute and UC Davis by responding to a pre-recorded 'contact call'. This marks the first communication between humans and whales in their own language, according to the team. Looking ahead, the researchers say the conversation could pave the way for interactions with aliens in the future. In the study, researchers from SETI studied how...

A team of astronomers says they have detected a never-before-heard radio signal that offers insights into the mystery of uncharted deep space. This signal is known as a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), a bright flash of radio light lasting for a few milliseconds and originating from beyond the Milky Way. Some FRBs repeat themselves, and a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has shed new light. The study has detected a highly active repeating FRB signal behaving differently than anything previously detected. "This work is exciting because it provides both confirmation of known FRB...

UCLA’s SETI group will launch a new project on Tuesday that allows the public to assist scientists in classifying radio signals that could be signs of extraterrestrial life, a news release said. Participants will then be asked to select an image, provided by researchers, that closely resembles the radio signal they previously saw. The goal is to match the signals to the “common classes of radio frequency interference,” a news release said. Scientists with the group have observed about 42,000 stars and over 64 million radio signals and have technology that discards about 99.5% of the signals that are either...

A surprise meteor shower spotted in February was likely caused by cosmic "bread crumbs" dropped by an undiscovered comet that could potentially pose a threat to Earth, astronomers announced today (July 27). The tiny meteoroids that streaked through Earth's atmosphere for a few hours on Feb. 4 represent a previously unknown meteor shower, researchers said. The "shooting stars" arrived from the direction of the star Eta Draconis, so the shower is called the February Eta Draconids, or FEDs for short. The bits of debris appear to have been shed by a long-period comet. Long-period comets whiz by the sun very...

The truth is out there — or at least that’s what researchers at NASA and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute are hoping. While much of the SETI Institute’s research involves scanning space for light and radio signals as indicators of extraterrestrial life, it’s also looking for bigger objects — and specifically alien megastructures. “[It’s] essentially any artificial structure built by an intelligent civilization perhaps for energy harvesting purposes,” Ann Marie Cody, a researcher scientist at NASA Ames and the SETI Institute, told Vice in a fascinating new interview. The method that Cody and her colleagues employ to try...

Last December news leaked that the Breakthrough Listen project, part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), had picked up an unexplained signal from the direction of Proxima Centauri. Although everyone involved stressed how unlikely it was that our first evidence for alien intelligence would come from the nearest star to our Sun, some dared to hope. Further research, however, has made Earth-based interference a near-certain explanation. There are many reasons to study Proxima Centauri besides the possibility of technological radio emissions. Australia’s giant Murriyang radio telescope was pointed towards the star primarily to study stellar flares, but in the...

Seventy years ago, Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues a question during a lunchtime conversation. If life is common in our Universe, why can’t we see any evidence of its activity out there (aka. “where is everybody?”) Seventy years later, this question has launched just as many proposed resolutions as to how extraterrestrial intelligence (ETIs) could be common, yet go unnoticed by our instruments. Some possibilities that have been considered are that humanity might be alone in the Universe, early to the party, or is not in a position to notice any yet. But in a recent study,...

‘Hycean’ Worlds: A New Candidate for Biosignatures?by Paul Gilsteron August 27, 2021We’ve just seen the coinage of a new word that denotes an entirely novel category of planets. Out of research at the University of Cambridge comes a paper on a subset of habitable worlds the scientists have dubbed ‘Hycean’ planets. These are hot, ocean-covered planets with habitable surface conditions under atmospheres rich in hydrogen. The authors believe they are more common than Earth-class worlds (although much depends upon their composition), and should offer considerable advantages when it comes to the detection of biosignatures.Hycean worlds give us another habitable zone,...

The principle underlying dynamical ptychography One of the topics investigated in recent physics studies is strong-field quantum electrodynamics (SF-QED). So far, this area has rarely been explored before, mainly because the experimental observation of SF-QED processes would require extremely high light intensities (>1025W/cm2), over three orders of magnitude higher than those attained using the most intense PetaWatt (PW)-class lasers available today.A SF-QED process that has proved to be particularly difficult to observe is the Schwinger process. This is a process that occurs close to the so-called Schwinger limit (1029/cm2), which is associated with the optical breakdown of the quantum...

In 1960, the first survey dedicated to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) was mounted at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. This was Project Ozma, which was the brainchild of famed astronomer and SETI pioneer Frank Drake (for whom the Drake Equation is named). Since then, the collective efforts to find evidence of life beyond Earth have coalesced to create a new field of study known as astrobiology. The search for extraterrestrial life has been the subject of renewed interest thanks to the thousands of exoplanets that have been discovered in recent years. Unfortunately, our efforts are still...

Aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow made a cryptic announcement in September 2008 in a radio interview with George Knapp. Bigelow revealed that he had just created BAASS, a subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace, and that BAASS had entered into a partnership with an unnamed entity to study the UFO mystery and related phenomena. The public didn’t know it at the time, but one week earlier, Bigelow had signed a contract with the Defense Intelligence Agency to carry out an investigation under the umbrella of AAWSAP, the Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program. The impetus for the program had occurred a year earlier...

This aerial view shows the damage to the Arecibo Observatory after its 900-ton equipment platform broke loose, swung into a nearby rock face, and smashed onto the radio dish below. ==================================================================== The Arecibo Observatory’s suspended equipment platform fell hundreds of feet and crashed through the giant radio dish. The Arecibo Observatory’s suspended equipment platform collapsed just before 8 a.m. local time on December 1, falling more than 450 feet and crashing through the telescope’s massive radio dish—a catastrophic ending that scientists and engineers feared was imminent after multiple cables supporting the platform unexpectedly broke in recent months. No one was...

The Arecibo Observatory's platform collapsed this morning due to structural failure. In mid-November, the National Science Foundation had announced that the Observatory would be dismantled because of the danger it posed.

The world-famous Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, known for helping scientists peer into deep space and listen for distant radio waves, is set to be decommissioned and demolished after engineers concluded that the facility’s structure is at risk of a collapse. While teams will try to salvage some parts of the observatory, the decommission will bring an end to the popular 57-year-old telescope, which has been featured in numerous films and television shows. The decision comes after two major cables failed at the facility within the last few months, causing significant damage to the observatory. The National Science Foundation (NSF),...

The study, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia on Monday, details a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a collection of 4096 antennas planted in the red soil of Western Australia that detects radio signals from space. "They are little spider-like antennas that sit on the ground," explains Chenoa Tremblay, co-author on the study and astrophysicist with CSIRO, an Australian government scientific research organization. Tremblay and co-author Stephen Tingay, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, used the MWA to listen out for "technosignatures," or evidence of alien technology, in a...

On Monday (Aug. 10), an auxiliary cable supporting a platform that is suspended above the 1,000-foot-wide (300 meters) radio dish broke and crashed into the telescope's reflector panels, creating a gash in the dish measuring about 100 feet (30 m) long. In a news conference with reporters Friday (Aug. 14), Arecibo director Francisco Cordova said that 250 of the observatory's primary reflector dish panels were damaged, along with several support cables underneath the dish. But observatory officials have not yet fully assessed the extent of the damage or determined the cost of the repairs needed to get the 56-year-old radio...

At Arecibo, scientists conduct all sorts of work, from atmospheric and planetary science through to radio and radar astronomy and even searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, also known as SETI. The purpose of these observations are to determine the ways in which red dwarf stars, like Barnard’s Star, affect the habitability of their planets. Méndez was also planning to embark on a SETI project to detect extraterrestrial technosignatures (i.e. evidence of alien technology), which would have leveraged both past and future observations at Arecibo. All this now appears to be on hold. Méndez’s observations aren’t time critical, but others might be,...