From “The MIT Technology Review” : “The Biggest Questions – Are we alone in the universe?”

From The MIT Technology Review
Credit: Ariel Davis

November 13, 2023
Adam Mann

The Biggest Questions is a mini-series that explores how technology is helping probe some of the deepest, most mind-bending questions of our existence.

In 1977, The New York Times published an article titled “Seeking an End to Cosmic Loneliness,” describing physicists’ attempts to pick up radio messages from aliens. The endeavor, known as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), was still in its early stages, and its proponents were struggling to persuade their peers and Congress that the idea was worth funding.

The quest to determine if anyone or anything is out there has gained greater scientific footing in the nearly half-century since that article’s publication. Back then, astronomers had yet to spot a single planet outside our solar system. Now we know the galaxy is teeming with a diversity of worlds. Our planet’s oceans were once considered exceptional, whereas evidence today suggests that numerous moons in the outer solar system host subsurface waters.

Our notion of the range of environments where life could exist has also expanded thanks to the discovery on Earth of extremophile organisms that can thrive in places far hotter, saltier, acidic, and more radioactive than previously thought possible, including creatures living around undersea hydrothermal vents.

We’re now getting closer than ever before to learning how common living worlds like ours actually are. New tools, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, could help scientists look past their preconceived notions of what constitutes life. Future instruments will sniff the atmospheres of distant planets and scan samples from our local solar system to see if they contain telltale chemicals in the right proportions for organisms to prosper.

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Breakthrough Listen Project

UC Observatories Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at The University of California-Santa Cruz Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California.

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory being cut loose by the National Science Foundation, supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (AU) Parkes 64 metre Observatory [Murriyang, the traditional Indigenous name], located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, 414.80m above sea level.

SKA SARAO Meerkat [SKA-Mid] Telescope (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

Newly added

The University of Arizona Veritas – Four Čerenkov telescopes – A novel gamma-ray telescope at The Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory-Center for Astrophysics , Mount Hopkins, Arizona, altitude 2,606 m 8,550 ft.

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“I think within our lifetime we will be able to do it,” says Ravi Kopparapu, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “We will be able to know if there is life on other planets.”

While humans have a long history of speculating about distant worlds, for much of that time actual evidence was in short supply. The first planets around other stars—known as exoplanets—were discovered in the early 1990s, but it took until the launch of NASA’s Kepler space telescope in 2009 for astronomers to understand how common they were.

NASA Kepler X-ray Space Telescope launched in 2009 and retired on October 30 2018.

Kepler carefully monitored hundreds of thousands of stars, looking for tiny dips in their brightness that could indicate planets passing in front of them. The mission helped the number of known exoplanets rise from a mere handful to over 5,500.

Kepler was built to help determine the prevalence of Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars at the right distance to have liquid water on their surface (a region often nicknamed the Goldilocks zone). While not a single extraterrestrial world has been a perfect twin of our own so far, researchers can use the sheer quantity of discoveries to make educated guesses as to how many might be out there. The current best estimates suggest that anywhere between 10% and 50% of sun-like stars have planets like ours, leading to numbers that make astronomers’ heads swim.

“If it’s 50%, that’s bonkers, right?” says Jessie Christiansen, an astrophysicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “There are billions of sun-like stars in the galaxy, and if half of them have Earth-like planets, there could be billions of habitable rocky planets.”

Is there anybody home?

Determining whether these planets actually contain organisms is no easy task. Researchers must capture the faint light from an exoplanet and spread it into its constituent wavelengths, scanning for signatures that indicate the presence and amount of different types of chemicals. While astronomers would like to focus on sun-like stars, doing so is technically challenging. The mighty new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is currently training its 6.5-meter mirror and unparalleled infrared instruments on worlds around stars smaller, cooler, and redder than our sun, known as M dwarfs.

National Aeronautics Space Agency/European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU)/ Canadian Space Agency [Agence Spatiale Canadienne](CA) James Webb Infrared Space Telescope annotated, finally launched December 25, 2021, ten years late.

Such places might be habitable, but at the moment, nobody is really sure.

For liquid water to be present on their surfaces, planets around M dwarfs would need to orbit close to their stars—which tend to be more active than the sun, sending out violent flares that could strip away atmospheric gases and likely leave the ground a dry husk. JWST has been investigating Trappist-1, an M dwarf 40 light-years away with seven small rocky worlds, four of which are at the right distance to potentially have liquid water.

A size comparison of the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, lined up in order of increasing distance from their host star. The planetary surfaces are portrayed with an artist’s impression of their potential surface features, including water, ice, and atmospheres. Credit: NASA.

The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL) Belgian robotic Trappist National Telescope-South at Cerro La Silla, Chile interior, altitude 2400 meters.

The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europäische Südsternwarte](EU)(CL) Belgian robotic Trappist-South National Telescope at Cerro La Silla, Chile, altitude 2400 meters.

The two closest exoplanets have already been shown to be devoid of atmospheres, but scientists are eagerly awaiting the results of Webb observations from the next three. They want to know if even those outside the habitable zone can have atmospheres.

There’s special interest in looking for other planets around M dwarf stars, because they are far more prevalent than sun-size stars. “If they find them to hold atmospheres, that increases the habitable real estate of the galaxy a hundredfold,” says Christiansen.

Once we’ve found a planet that looks a lot like Earth, then we’ll want to start hunting for chemical clues of life on its surface. Webb isn’t sensitive enough to do that, but future ground-based instruments like the Extremely Large Telescope, Giant Magellan Telescope, and Thirty Meter Telescope—which are expected to begin taking data in the 2030s—could tease out the chemical components of nearby Earth-like worlds.

The European Southern Observatory [La Observatorio Europeo Austral] [Observatoire européen austral][Europaiche Sûdsternwarte] (EU)(CL) ELT 39 meter telescope for visible/infrared light to be on top of Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile at an altitude of 3,060 metres (10,040 ft).

Giant Magellan Telescope(CL) 21 meters, to be at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory(CL) some 115 km (71 mi) north-northeast of La Serena, Chile, over 2,500 m (8,200 ft) high.

TMT-Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory, proposed and approved for location at Manua Kea, Hawai’i, Altitude 4,050 m [13290 ft], the only giant 30 meter class telescope for the Northern hemisphere.

Information from more distant targets will have to wait for NASA’s next planned flagship mission, the space-based Habitable Worlds Observatory, expected to launch sometime in the late 2030s or early 2040s.

NASA HABEX with starshade

The telescope will use either an external star shade or an instrument called a coronagraph to block the glaring light of a star and home in on dimmer planetary light and its potential molecular fingerprints.

Which chemicals in particular astronomers should be looking for remains a matter of debate. Ideally, they want to find what are known as biosignatures—molecules like water, methane, and carbon dioxide present in amounts similar to what we find on Earth. What that means in practice isn’t always clear, since our planet has gone through many periods when it contained life yet the quantities of different chemicals varied wildly.

“Do you want it to detect an Archaean Earth, like 2 or 3 billion years ago?” asks Kopparapu. “Or from the Neoproterozoic, where there was a snowball Earth? Or do you want to detect the current Earth, where there is a lot of free oxygen, ozone, water, and CO2?”

There was much excitement recently when Webb spotted dimethyl sulfide-a molecule that on our world is made only by living things-on an exoplanet nearly nine times Earth’s size located 120 light-years away. The results which have yet to be confirmed, highlight the trickiness of such methods. If dimethyl sulfide is truly present in the planet’s atmosphere, then starlight should also break it down to form ethane, a molecule that has yet to be seen. “No single gas is a biosignature,” says Kopparapu. “You need to see a combination of them.” Last year, he and others in the community published a report emphasizing that any particular finding must be placed in the context of its stellar and planetary environment, since there could be many results that seemingly point to life yet have alternative explanations.

What counts as life?

This problem—how to definitively differentiate between life and non-life—is a perennial one, whether you’re looking at distant planets or even phenomena here on Earth. Researchers may soon receive help from algorithmic techniques that can tease out associations too complex for the human brain to fathom. In recent experiments, Robert Hazen and his colleagues took 134 living and non-living samples (including petroleum, carbon-rich meteorites, ancient fossils, and a wasp that flew into their lab), vaporized them, and spread out their chemical constituents. Roughly 500,000 different attributes were identified within each sample’s molecular makeup and run through a machine-learning program.

“When we look at those 500,000 attributes, there are patterns that are unique to living things and patterns unique to non-living things,” says Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

After the software was trained on 70% of the specimens, the technique was able to recognize with 90% accuracy which of the remaining samples had a biological origin. The device that is used to spread out the chemical components of the samples is around seven inches long, small enough to be sent on missions to nearby ocean worlds like Jupiter’s Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus. NASA’s Perseverance rover carried a similar instrument to Mars, so Hazen thinks his team’s machine-learning algorithm could be adapted to sift through its data and hunt for organisms past or present there. And because it relies on molecular relationships rather than detecting specific organic chemicals like DNA or amino acids, which may not be used in other biospheres, the method could allow scientists to look for life entirely unlike what we have on Earth.

Such machine-learning applications are also starting to find use in SETI, which has in recent years pivoted toward looking for a broader array of visible evidence for tool-using extraterrestrial species than before. Most in the field are on the lookout for such technosignatures, defined as “some remotely detectable signature of technology that we can characterize with astronomical instrumentation,” says Sofia Sheikh of the SETI Institute. This could be a radio signal, but other evidence could include things like optical laser pulses, giant space-based engineering projects, atmospheric pollution, or even artificial probes that make their way to our solar system.

At the Zwicky Transient Facility near San Diego, California, which continuously searches the entire night sky for brief flashes of light coming from unknown sources, engineers are teaching artificial intelligence how to identify features that would not be expected from natural phenomena.

Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) instrument installed on the 1.2m diameter Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory in California. Credit: Caltech Optical Observatories.

Caltech Palomar Samuel Oschin 48 inch Telescope, located in San Diego County, California, altitude 1712 m (5617 ft). Credit: Caltech.

“It’s at that point that we can start asking questions,” says Ashish Mahabal, an astronomer and data scientist at Caltech. The answers to such questions could help reveal novel astronomical events or, just maybe, a star surrounded by enormous solar panels that feed an energy-intensive alien society.

SETI researchers hope that by using such tools, they can help overcome some of their anthropocentric biases. Most recognize that our expectations of otherworldly beings are constrained by our own experience. For example, the search for signs of massive alien solar panels is often “based on this assumption that there’s always going to be an exponential need for energy,” says Sheikh.

Because of all the avenues currently being explored, many scientists believe that answers to our questions about extraterrestrial life are not far off. Yet ultimately, the question of our cosmic loneliness is a philosophical one.

For most of humanity’s history, we didn’t believe ourselves to be alone. We filled the heavens with gods, monsters, and mythic creatures. It is only in the modern age that our species has started to worry about its place in the universe. But whether or not any other part of it harbors life, the cosmos is our home. We can choose to be lonely or to embrace the beauty and wonder all around us.
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Conspicuously missing from this article:

SETI Institute

About The SETI Institute

What is life? How does it begin? Are we alone? These are some of the questions we ask in our quest to learn about and share the wonders of the universe. At the SETI Institute we have a passion for discovery and for passing knowledge along as scientific ambassadors.

The SETI Institute is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Mountain View, California. We are a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science Foundation, and we collaborate with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute employs more than 130 scientists, educators, and administrative staff. Work at the SETI Institute is anchored by three centers: the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe (research), the Center for Education and the Center for Outreach.

The SETI Institute welcomes philanthropic support from individuals, private foundations, corporations and other groups to support our education and outreach initiatives, as well as unfunded scientific research and fieldwork.

A Special Thank You to SETI Institute Partners and Collaborators
• Campoalto, Chile, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Headquarters, National Science Foundation, Aerojet Rocketdyne,SRI International

Frontier Development Lab Partners
• Breakthrough Prize Foundation, The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU), Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, KBRwyle. Kx Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames Research Center, Nvidia, SpaceResources Luxembourg, XPrize
In-kind Service Providers
• Gunderson Dettmer – General legal services, Hello Pilgrim – Website Design and Development Steptoe & Johnson – IP legal services, Danielle Futselaar

SETI Institute Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

The Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory which includes the NIROSETI instrument which saw first light on March 15, 2015. © Laurie Hatch.

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope. (Photo by Laurie Hatch)

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz.

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Laser SETI

LaserSETI observatory installation at Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawai’I, aimed East.

There is also an installation at Robert Ferguson Observatory, Sonoma, CA aimed West for full coverage [no image available].

SETI Institute – 189 Bernardo Ave., Suite 100
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone 650.961.6633 – Fax 650-961-7099
Privacy Policy – Questions and Comments

Also previously in the hunt, but not a part of the SETI Institute
SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply” at the bottom of the post.

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The mission of “The MIT Technology Review” is to equip its audiences with the intelligence to understand a world shaped by technology.

From “BBC (UK)” : “Alien life in Universe – Scientists say finding it is ‘only a matter of time'” And More Advanced Research

From “BBC (UK)”

9.30.23
Pallab Ghosh

Europa, one of Jupiter’s icy moons is the most likely place in our solar system to be home to alien life. ESA.

Many astronomers are no longer asking whether there is life elsewhere in the Universe.

The question on their minds is instead: when will we find it?

Many are optimistic of detecting life signs on a faraway world within our lifetimes – possibly in the next few years.

And one scientist, leading a mission to Jupiter, goes as far as saying it would be “surprising” if there was no life on one of the planet’s icy moons.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) recently detected tantalizing hints at life on a planet outside our Solar System – and it has many more worlds in its sights. Webb may have detected a molecule called dimethyl sulphide (DMS). On Earth, at least, this is only produced by life.

Numerous missions that are either under way or about to begin mark a new space race for the biggest scientific discovery of all time.

SETI Institute

SETI Institute Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

LaserSETI observatory installation at Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawai’i, aimed East.

SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

________________________________
Breakthrough Listen Project

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory at University of California-Santa Cruz, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California.

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory, being cut loose by the National Science Foundation, supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (AU) Parkes Observatory [ Murriyang, the traditional Indigenous name] , located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, 414.80m above sea level.

SKA SARAO Meerkat [SKA-Mid] Telescope (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

Newly added

University of Arizona Veritas Four Čerenkov telescopes A novel gamma ray telescope under construction at the CfA Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Mount Hopkins, Arizona, altitude 2,606 m 8,550 ft. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array, composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory [Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias ](ES) in the Canary Islands and Chile at European Southern Observatory Cerro Paranal(EU) site. The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev.
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“We live in an infinite Universe, with infinite stars and planets. And it’s been obvious to many of us that we can’t be the only intelligent life out there,” says Prof Catherine Heymans, Scotland’s Astronomer Royal.

“We now have the technology and the capability to answer the question of whether we are alone in the cosmos.”

The researchers stress that the detection on the planet 120 light years away is “not robust” and more data is needed to confirm its presence.

Researchers have also detected methane and CO2 in the planet’s atmosphere.

Detection of these gases could mean the planet, named K2-18b, has a water ocean.

Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, of the University of Cambridge, who led the research, told BBC News that his entire team were ”shocked” when they saw the results.

“On Earth, DMS is only produced by life. The bulk of it in Earth’s atmosphere is emitted from phytoplankton in marine environments,” he said.

Caution

But Prof Madhusudhan described the detection of DMS as tentative and said that more data would be needed to confirm its presence. Those results are expected in a year.

”If confirmed, it would be a huge deal and I feel a responsibility to get this right if we are making such a big claim.”

It is the first time astronomers have detected the possibility of DMS in a planet orbiting a distant star. But they are treating the results with caution, noting that a claim made in 2020 about the presence of another molecule, called phosphine, that could be produced by living organisms in the clouds of Venus was disputed a year later.

Even so, Dr Robert Massey, who is independent of the research and deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, said he was excited by the results.

”We are slowly moving towards the point where we will be able to answer that big question as to whether we are alone in the Universe or not,” he said.

”I’m optimistic that we will one day find signs of life. Perhaps it will be this, perhaps in 10 or even 50 years we will have evidence that is so compelling that it is the best explanation.”

Webb is able to analyze the light that passes through the faraway planet’s atmosphere. That light contains the chemical signature of molecules in its atmosphere. The details can be deciphered by splitting the light into its constituent frequencies – rather like a prism creating a rainbow spectrum. If parts of the resulting spectrum are missing, it has been absorbed by chemicals in the planet’s atmosphere, enabling researchers to discover its composition.

The feat is all the more remarkable because the planet is more than 1.1 million billion km away, so the amount of light reaching the space telescope is tiny.

As well as DMS, the spectral analysis detected an abundance of the gases methane and carbon dioxide with a good degree of confidence.

The proportions of CO2 and methane are consistent with there being a water ocean underneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. Nasa’s Hubble telescope had detected the presence of water vapour previously, which is why the planet, which has been named K2-18b, was one of the first to be investigated by the vastly more powerful JWST, but the possibility of an ocean is a big step forward.

Recipe for life

The ability of a planet to support life depends on its temperature, the presence of carbon and probably liquid water. Observations from JWST seem to suggest that that K2-18b ticks all those boxes. But just because a planet has the potential to support life it doesn’t mean that it does, which is why the possible presence of DMS is so tantalising.

What makes the planet even more intriguing is that it is not like the Earth-like, so called rocky planets, discovered orbiting distant stars that are candidates for life. K2-18b is nearly nine times the size of Earth.

Exoplanets – which are planets orbiting other stars – which have sizes between those of Earth and Neptune, are unlike anything in our solar system. This means that these ‘sub-Neptunes’ are poorly understood, as is the nature their atmospheres, according to Dr Subhajit Sarkar of Cardiff University, who is another member of the analysis team.

“Although this kind of planet does not exist in our solar system, sub-Neptunes are the most common type of planet known so far in the galaxy,” he said.

“We have obtained the most detailed spectrum of a habitable-zone sub-Neptune to date, and this allowed us to work out the molecules that exist in its atmosphere.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply” at the bottom of the post.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

From The University of Toronto (CA): “University of Toronto undergrad develops AI tool to accelerate the search for alien life” Peter Ma

From The University of Toronto (CA)

1.30.23
Meaghan MacSween

Peter Ma, a member of Victoria College, developed an AI algorithm used by an international group of researchers to help speed up the search for signals generated by extraterrestrial life (photo by Polina Teif)

Are we alone in the universe? With the help of artificial intelligence, scientists may be one step closer to finding the answer.

Led by researchers at the University of Toronto, an international team of scientists has streamlined the search for extraterrestrial life by using a new algorithm to organize the data from their telescopes into categories to distinguish between real signals and interference. Through an AI process known as machine learning, the new approach allows the researchers to quickly sort through the information and find patterns.

Since the 1960s, astronomers working on “SETI” (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have used powerful radio telescopes to search thousands of stars and hundreds of galaxies for so-called “technosignatures,” or technologically-generated signals, on the assumption that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be sophisticated enough to emit such signals.

Originals:

_____________________________________________________
SETI Institute

About The SETI Institute

The SETI Institute is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Mountain View, California. We are a key research contractor to The National Aeronautics and Space Agency and the National Science Foundation, and we collaborate with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.
SETI/Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.

March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at University of California-San Diego,discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the University of Toronto-Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone University of California Observatory Lick Observatory; Dan Werthimer, University of California-Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, University of Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Laser SETI

LaserSETI observatory installation at Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawai’i, aimed East.

There is also an installation at Robert Ferguson Observatory, Sonoma, CA aimed West for full coverage [no image available].

Also in the hunt, but not a part of the SETI Institute
SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience. BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.
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Yet, despite the fact that the telescopes used for these searches are located in areas where there is minimal interference from technology like cell phones and TV stations, human disturbance still poses major challenges.

“In many of our observations, there is a lot of interference,” says Peter Ma, a U of T undergraduate student studying math and physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science who is first author on a new research paper published in Nature Astronomy [below] that explains the technique.

“We need to distinguish the exciting radio signals in space from the uninteresting radio signals from Earth.”

By simulating signals of both types the team has trained their machine-learning tools to differentiate between extraterrestrial-like signals and human-generated interference. They compared a range of different machine-learning algorithms, studied their precision and false-positive rates and then used that information to settle on a powerful algorithm.

This new algorithm, created by Ma, has resulted in the discovery of eight new radio signals that could potentially be transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence. The signals came from five different stars located 30 to 90 light years from Earth. The signals were overlooked in a previous analysis of the same data, which did not use machine learning.

To the SETI team, these signals are considered notable for two reasons. “First, they are present when we look at the star and absent when we look away – as opposed to local interference, which is generally always present,” says Steve Croft, project scientist for Breakthrough Listen on the Green Bank Telescope.

___________________________________________________________________
Breakthrough Listen Project

UC Observatories Lick Automated Planet Finder fully robotic 2.4-meter optical telescope at Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California

Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory, being cut loose by the National Science Foundation, supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc.

CSIRO-Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (AU) Parkes Observatory [ Murriyang, the traditional Indigenous name] , located 20 kilometres north of the town of Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, 414.80m above sea level.

SKA SARAO Meerkat telescope(SA) 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

Newly added

University of Arizona Veritas Four Čerenkov telescopes A novel gamma ray telescope under construction at the CfA Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, Mount Hopkins, Arizona, altitude 2,606 m 8,550 ft. A large project known as the Čerenkov Telescope Array, composed of hundreds of similar telescopes to be situated at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory [Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias ](ES) in the Canary Islands and Chile at European Southern Observatory Cerro Paranal(EU) site. The telescope on Mount Hopkins will be fitted with a prototype high-speed camera, assembled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and capable of taking pictures at a billion frames per second. Credit: Vladimir Vassiliev. ___________________________________________________________________

“Second, the signals change in frequency over time in a way that makes them appear far from the telescope.”
+However, Croft notes that when you have a dataset containing millions of signals, signals can occasionally have the same two characteristics just by sheer chance. “It’s a bit like walking across a gravel path and finding a stone stuck in the tread of your shoe that seems to fit perfectly.”

For this reason, even though the eight signals appear the way the team expects extraterrestrial signals to look, the researchers are not yet convinced that they are from extraterrestrial intelligence – at least until they see the same signal again. When brief follow-up observations were done using the Green Bank Radio Telescope, the patterns that could indicate extraterrestrial signals were not found. More observations and analyses are underway.

A member of Victoria College, Ma refers to the algorithm that he created as a combination of two subtypes of machine learning – supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Called “semi-unsupervised learning,” his approach involves using supervised techniques to guide and train the algorithm in order to help it generalize, along with unsupervised learning techniques, so that new hidden patterns can be more easily discovered in the data.

Ma first came up with the idea to apply this specific algorithm to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in a Grade 12 computer science class. Unfortunately, he says, the project confused his teachers, who weren’t sure how it could be used.

“I only told my team after the paper’s publication that this all started as a high-school project that wasn’t really appreciated by my teachers,” Ma says.

Cherry Ng, a research associate at U of T’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and second author on the paper, says new ideas are very important in a field like SETI.

“By poking the data with every technique, we might be able to discover exciting signals,” she says.

Ng, who has been working on this project with Ma since the summer of 2020, says machine learning is the way to go in an era of big data astronomy. “I am impressed by how well this approach has performed on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” Ng says.

“With the help of artificial intelligence, I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to better quantify the likelihood of the presence of extraterrestrial signals from other civilizations.”

Looking ahead, Ma, Ng, and the rest of the SETI team hope to expand on their new algorithm and apply it to other datasets and observatories.

Using powerful, multi-antenna radio telescopes like MeerKAT, the Square Kilometre Array, and the Next Generation VL, Ma says the team plans to scale their machine learning approach in a major way.

SKA SARAO Meerkat [SKA-Mid] Telescope (SA), 90 km outside the small Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, SA.

SKA-Square Kilometer Array

SKA Murchison Widefield Array (AU), Boolardy station in outback Western Australia, at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA ASKAP Pathfinder Radio Telescope at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

SKA Square Kilometre Array low frequency at the Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO), on the traditional lands of the Wajarri peoples.

ngVLA to be located near the location of the NRAO Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array site on the plains of San Agustin, fifty miles west of Socorro, NM, at an elevation of 6970 ft (2124 m) with additional mid-baseline stations currently spread over greater New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Mexico.

“With our new technique, combined with the next generation of telescopes, we hope that machine learning can take us from searching hundreds of stars to searching millions.”

The data used in this study come from the Green Bank Telescope [above] in West Virginia, which is one of the major facilities involved in the Breakthrough Listen technosignature search project [above]. The initiative, sponsored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, is the most powerful, comprehensive and intensive scientific search ever undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Nature Astronomy

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From “Astronomy Magazine” : “What happens when we detect alien life?”

From “Astronomy Magazine”

1.19.23
FROM THE May 2012 ISSUE

Seth Shostak | SETI Institute

Scientists have been listening for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations for decades but what would they do if they actually heard one?

NASA Voyager Golden Record. The Voyager Golden Records are two phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Voyager 1.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Voyager 2.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration Heliosphere-heliopause showing positions of two Voyager spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The Sun-like star Epsilon (ε) Eridani was one of Frank Drake’s first targets in his search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Astronomers have since learned that the star anchors the closest known planetary system, depicted in this artist’s conception, but no detectable life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

We’ve never heard a peep from aliens. But improved technology is speeding up the search for extra- terrestrial intelligence (SETI), so what happens if today’s silence suddenly gives way to tomorrow’s discovery?

“Wow!” signal from Ohio State Big Ear Radio Telescope Aug. 15, 1977.

Ohio State Big Ear Radio Telescope, Construction of the Big Ear began in 1956 and was completed in 1961, and it was finally turned on for the first time in 1963, disassembled in 1998 having operated for over 30 years.

SETI Institute

LaserSETI observatory installation at Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawai’i, aimed East.

The Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory which includes the NIROSETI instrument which saw first light on March 15, 2015. © Laurie Hatch.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Would the world rejoice in the news that someone’s out there? Would euphoria engulf humanity, as Nobel Prizes are doled out like after-dinner mints?

That’s one view. But many people think the dis- covery would be hushed up as quickly as a Mafia informant, assuming that the public couldn’t handle the news. Or scarier still, kept secret for fear that an unauthorized response would tell a hostile race exactly where to send their interstellar battlewagons.

That’s melodramatic enough. But has any serious consideration gone into what happens when our efforts to detect cosmic intelligence pay off and we find a blip of a signal in the sea of radio noise that pours into the SETI antennas?

Some think that addressing that question — even in a speculative way — is hubristic at best and wildly pre- sumptuous at worst. After all, SETI scientists have been torquing their telescopes toward celestial targets for more than half a century without ever detecting such a signal. If we haven’t won the E.T. lottery in all that time, why worry about what would happen if we got the winning ticket?

Simple: SETI researchers are buying more tickets all the time, and the chances of scoring the big one keep going up. As computer power improves and new detection technology comes out of the labs, the search is accelerating. Unless the aliens are excessively secretive or simply nonexistent, we could find evidence for their presence within decades.

So, again, then what?

SETI Institute Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

The Allen Telescope Array and the Jansky Very Large Array (pictured) are powerful enough to detect and pinpoint a possible extraterrestrial transmission with a high degree of accuracy. The latter hosts 27 antennas, while the former boasts 42 and plans to have 350 upon completion.Credit: Dave Finley/AUI/NRAO/NSF.

Immediate reactions

In the spring of 1960, astronomer Frank Drake performed the first modern SETI experiment, whimsically dubbed Project Ozma after L. Frank Baum’s fictional queen of Oz. What few people realize is that he actually detected something. While pointing his antenna at the nearby Sun-like star Epsilon (ε) Eridani, Drake heard a strong hammering signal. Surprised by how quickly his search succeeded, he wondered, “What do we do now?”

Drake answered his own question by rigging up additional equipment, and he soon proved that the throbbing bleats from his loudspeaker were terrestrial interference, not Eridanians trying to phone our home.

Project Ozma could tune to only one frequency at a time, but today’s SETI receivers simultaneously monitor hundreds of millions of channels. Consequently, picking up a signal is neither remarkable nor rare: A few dozen typically come up with each scan. Naturally, no one gets very excited about this. Instead, researchers rely on sophisticated software to perform the tedious task of deciding whether these signals are likely to be alien intelligence or (as in Drake’s case) just more human-caused radio static.

Only rarely does any signal survive this automatic scrutiny. But if and when that happens, a series of additional tests occurs. Eventually, the astronomers running the experiment ask someone at another observatory to verify the detection — to rule out equipment bugs, coding errors, or pranks.

The scenario for handling a signal is briefly described in a document developed under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics, and referred to as “SETI detection protocols.” These “best practices” boil down to this: (1) carefully verify that the signal is truly extraterrestrial, (2) inform other scientists and the public, and (3) seek international approval before transmitting any reply.
____________________________________________________________________________

Abridged SETI detection protocols

Confirmed detections:

If the verification process confirms that a signal is due to extraterrestrial intelligence, the discoverer shall report this conclusion in a full and complete open manner to the public, the scientific community, and the Secretary General of the United Nations. All data necessary for the confirmation of the detection should be made available to the international scientific community through publications, meetings, conferences, and other appropriate means.

The discovery should be monitored. Any data bear- ing on the evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be recorded and stored permanently to the greatest extent feasible and practicable.

If the evidence of detection is in the form of electromagnetic signals, observers should seek international agreement to protect the appropriate frequencies by exercising the extraordinary procedures established within the World Administrative Radio Council of the International Telecommunication Union.

Post detections:

A Post Detection Task Group under the auspices of the SETI Permanent Committee has been established to assist in matters that may arise in the event of a confirmed signal, and to support the scientific and public analysis by offering guidance, interpretation, and discussion of the wider implications of the detection.

Response to signals:

In the case of the confirmed detection of a signal, signatories to this declaration will not respond without first seeking guidance and consent of a broadly representative international body, such as the United Nations.

(From the International Academy of Astronautics Commission 1 “Space Physical Sciences” Meeting on October 2, 2011)
____________________________________________________________________________

Not so fast

These are all patently good ideas that seem to suggest that everyone would handle a discovery soberly. However, such interesting signals are bound to provoke a response that’s both messy and confused because verification will take many days, at the least.

During all that time, word of the possible detection will surely spread via blogs and tweets from the researchers themselves (there’s no policy of secrecy in SETI). So you can bet that long before any official press conference announcing that we’ve found the aliens, you’ll have heard about it many times over. Indeed, you should brace yourself for plenty of future false alarms caused by signals that — at first blush — look promising. This has occurred in the past and shows the error of those who think that a discovery could be covered up.

Any real detection would be a headliner, everyone agrees. SETI practitioner Paul Horowitz of Harvard University in Cam- bridge, Massachusetts, says it would “easily be the most interesting discovery in human history. Journalists would go wild, at least for a month or two.”

Astronomer Jill Tarter, who heads the SETI Institute’s listening efforts in Mountain View, California, concurs: “The general public will be in an excited state for a while, fueled by the media. But UFO enthusiasts will yawn because they knew it all along.”

A public reaction of initial enthusiasm, and not mayhem, has precedent. Consider the 1996 announcement that NASA scientists had found fossilized martian microbes in a meteorite. That story ran in The New York Times with billboard-sized headlines for three days. The public’s reaction to the possible detection of life beyond Earth? “That’s interesting. Tell us more.”

The meteorite story was a stunted reprisal of astronomer Percival Lowell’s reports of martian canals a century earlier. Again, people were tantalized, but few seemed to panic.

When astronomers announced that a martian rock contained fossilized microbes (the tube-like structures, less than one-hundredth the width of a human hair) in 1996, the public proved itself capable of “handling” an extraterrestrial discovery. Credit: NASA.

Early results

Of course, in 1996 no one felt threatened by dead protozoans, even if they were from Mars. But SETI searches for intelligent life, and given that human beings are still the new kids on the technological block (consider that we’ve only had radio technology for a hundred years), you can be pretty sure that anyone we hear will be more advanced than us — possibly much more advanced.

That might sound unsettling, but most people don’t see it that way. A 2005 survey by the National Geographic Channel, the SETI Institute, and the University of Connecticut found that 72 percent of Americans said they would feel “excited and hopeful” to learn about a signal from E.T. Only 20 percent confessed they would be “anxious and nervous.”

Again, perhaps that’s not too surprising, given that any transmission we discover likely will be from beings many hundreds of light-years distant, a seemingly safe remove. And, at first, we won’t know much more than the signal’s existence.

But you can bet your paycheck that every telescope on Earth will aim straight for the transmission. Is a star waiting there? Does it have planets? In the rush to learn more, even a stalled project like NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder might see new life as scientists shake it out of its comatose state, infuse it with new vigor, and hurl it into orbit.

NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder depiction.

There are some things we could learn quickly about the signal’s source. Within a thousand light-years lie tens of millions of stars. Consequently, a few arcminutes separate them in the sky, on average. A high-resolution radio telescope, such as the Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico [above], has a beam size of about 5 arc seconds at the commonly used SETI frequency of 1420 megahertz. It would have little difficulty pinpointing which star hosts the detected aliens. We’ll know exactly where they live.

And that’s not all. Two decades ago, radio astronomers Jim Cordes and Woodruff Sullivan considered what we might learn by looking at the subtle variations of any alien signal. This includes small frequency shifts due to the Doppler effect (which alters a signal’s frequency according to its motion), as well as intensity changes due to the atmosphere of E.T.’s planet or simply its daily rotation.

Careful measurement could theoretically pin down the length of the aliens’ day and year, the size of their world, the presence of moons, and possibly even information about their atmosphere and magnetic field.

Initial questions

All of that would be tasty fodder for the technically inclined, but everyone else is going to ask an obvious question: What are the aliens saying? That, of course, assumes that they’re saying anything — that they’ve included a message in the signal. After all, the extraterrestrials might withhold commentary if they want us to reply first, perhaps so they can gauge what level of conversation is appropriate.

But let’s suppose that E.T. is trying to tell us something. Just getting the message “bits” could be hard. SETI observations add up incoming static for seconds or minutes to increase the sensitivity to weak signals.

This is completely analogous to astronomical photography — the longer the exposure time, the fainter the stuff you can image. Unfortunately, just as a long exposure would obliterate the rapid flashes of an optical pulsar, so too would these long SETI observations smooth away any message. If, for example, the alien transmission included a television-type signal, researchers would need an antenna roughly 10,000 times larger than most of today’s radio telescopes to see the picture. Building such an enormous antenna would require impressive amounts of money and time. However, after a signal’s detection, it’s reasonable to assume that research money would be practically unlimited, unlike today’s situation.

In the meantime, the public would be confronted with the fact of cosmic company. We wouldn’t know what they’re like, nor what we might learn from them, only that they exist. Anthropologist Ben Finney of the University of Hawaii at Manoa has predicted that an “interpretation industry” would quickly sprout — facile pundits who, out of conviction or merely greed, will explain to the masses what contact means and how we should feel about it.

And in particular, how should religions react? Research in this area is lacking, but most mainstream theologians have expressed the upbeat view that our belief systems could adapt. As Vatican Observatory astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno has said, “If your religion has survived millennia — if it can handle Copernicus, Galileo, and even Darwin — then E.T. should eventually prove palatable.”

Mainstream religion might easily incorporate the discovery, but fundamentalists will have a harder time. They are less willing to accept a cosmic circumstance that’s not found in scripture. And unless you’re inclined to consider seraphim, nephilim, or angels as alien beings, most religions don’t anticipate the presence of intelligent life on other worlds (an exception is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints).

The fundamentalists would likely rail against the discovery, claiming it’s “just Satan, tempting you,” according to sociologist Bill Bainbridge of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Significance sets in

Without doubt, learning of other beings among the star fields of the Milky Way would be discomfiting to some. But the most profound consequences of a SETI detection would surely be the long-term impacts. And these would affect everyone.

The degree to which a signal would alter the lives of our descendants depends on whether we could decode any attached message. This might sound like a tractable problem — merely a matter of time and effort. After all, humans eventually deciphered hieroglyphics, Linear B, and other “messages” that once seemed as inscrutable as teenage behavior. But the universe is old, and consequently the content of any message might simply be incomprehensible to our 3-pound hominid brains.

Still, let’s take the sunny view and assume that we eventually learn what the aliens are saying. Because, as noted, they’re likely to be well in advance of us, the information might include such practical topics as all of Physics and Astronomy, the extent and nature of Cosmic Biology and intelligence, the whether and how of faster-than- light travel, and many other things that are the provenance of science fiction today. To suddenly learn such matters would trigger a sharp discontinuity in our species’ history — a kind of “wormhole” to a future that we might otherwise reach only after thousands or millions of years.

Aside from such a torrent of knowledge, we would confront the fact that the differences among humans are of trivial import compared to the gulf between extra-terrestrials and ourselves. Some people, such as SETI’s Tarter, suggest that this would lead to more human harmony and less worry that we’re on the road to destruction. After all, if they’ve survived their technical adolescence, then we could, too.

Sociologist Don Tarter of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, is less sanguine. He notes that the idea of the world’s peoples coming together in sweetness and light — popular in the early days of space exploration with the first pictures of Earth as a small blue orb against a vast, dark sky — was shattered by subsequent wars and terrorist attacks. We’re back to the usual conflict and competition.

And what about a response? If we know where the aliens live, do we dare reply with our own shout out? Or would that, as some aver [Stephan Hawking, among others], merely expose our planet to possible future destruction because we’ve given away our existence and position?

In fact, while no one can say whether aliens would be peaceable or pugnacious, we’ve been sending radio, television, and (most visibly) radar signals into space inadvertently for more than 90 years. Any society that has the capability to travel interstellar distances and threaten our world could easily pick up these “leaked” signals. Indeed, by using their own sun as gravitational lens, the nearest could theoretically see the lights from our cities. Any deliberate reply from us would simply add to information they already have.

The great unknown

Frankly, predicting the truly durable consequences of a SETI success is a fool’s errand. Consider if members of the Spanish court in 1492 had written a treatise on what the discovery of a new continent might eventually mean. An interesting exercise, but not one likely to have much currency a few hundred years down the road.

But this much we can say: If SETI succeeds, we’ll have proof that biology is as much a part of the cosmos as pulsars and pockmarked planets. And, while instant brotherhood is unlikely to erupt suddenly on Earth, we’ll at least know we’re neither the crown of creation nor even particularly exceptional. For as long as our species exists, we’ll be aware that we’re just one more duck in a row.

And you can be sure that news will ruffle a few feathers.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Astronomy is a magazine about the science and hobby of Astronomy. Based near Milwaukee in Waukesha, Wisconsin, it is produced by Kalmbach Publishing. Astronomy’s readers include those interested in astronomy and those who want to know about sky events, observing techniques, astrophotography, and amateur astronomy in general.

Astronomy was founded in 1973 by Stephen A. Walther, a graduate of The University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point and amateur astronomer. The first issue, August 1973, consisted of 48 pages with five feature articles and information about what to see in the sky that month. Issues contained astrophotos and illustrations created by astronomical artists. Walther had worked part time as a planetarium lecturer at The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and developed an interest in photographing constellations at an early age. Although even in childhood he was interested to obsession in Astronomy, he did so poorly in mathematics that his mother despaired that he would ever be able to earn a living. However, he graduated in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, and as a senior class project he created a business plan for a magazine for amateur astronomers. With the help of his brother David, he was able to bring the magazine to fruition. He died in 1977.

From SETI Institute: “Research group to construct outrigger telescope to search for FRBs at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory”

From SETI Institute

March 30, 2022

CHIME Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment-A partnership between The University of British Columbia (CA), The University of Toronto (CA), McGill University [Université McGill](CA), Yale University, and The National Research Council Canada [Conseil national de recherches Canada](CA) at The Canada NRCC Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia(CA) Altitude 545 m (1,788 ft).

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is expanding its ability to more accurately identify where fast radio bursts (FRBs) are coming from. The organization is constructing a new radio telescope outrigger at the SETI Institute’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) [below], site of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). The outrigger will work with the main CHIME instrument in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley and enable CHIME-detected FRBs to be precisely localized on the sky. In addition to the new radio telescope at HCRO, CHIME is constructing outriggers near Princeton, British Columbia on land kindly leased to CHIME by HML Mining Ltd., and at the Green Bank Observatory.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SETI Institute
About the SETI Institute
What is life? How does it begin? Are we alone? These are some of the questions we ask in our quest to learn about and share the wonders of the universe. At the SETI Institute we have a passion for discovery and for passing knowledge along as scientific ambassadors.

The SETI Institute is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Mountain View, California. We are a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and we collaborate with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute employs more than 130 scientists, educators, and administrative staff. Work at the SETI Institute is anchored by three centers: the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe (research), the Center for Education and the Center for Outreach.

The SETI Institute welcomes philanthropic support from individuals, private foundations, corporations and other groups to support our education and outreach initiatives, as well as unfunded scientific research and fieldwork.

A Special Thank You to SETI Institute Partners and Collaborators
• Campoalto, Chile, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Headquarters, National Science Foundation, Aerojet Rocketdyne,SRI International

Frontier Development Lab Partners
• Breakthrough Prize Foundation, European Space Agency, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, KBRwyle. Kx Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames Research Center, Nvidia, SpaceResources Luxembourg, XPrize

In-kind Service Providers
• Gunderson Dettmer – General legal services, Hello Pilgrim – Website Design and Development Steptoe & Johnson – IP legal services, Danielle Futselaar

SETI/Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, USA, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego (US), discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to UCSD and installed at the UC Santa Cruz (US) Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch).

Shelley Wright of UC San Diego with (US) NIROSETI, developed at U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) at the 1-meter Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz

NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, UCSD; Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).

Laser SETI

LaserSETI observatory installation at Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawai’i aimed East. There is also an installation at Robert Ferguson Observatory, Sonoma, CA aimed West for full coverage [no image available].

SETI Institute – 189 Bernardo Ave., Suite 100
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone 650.961.6633 – Fax 650-961-7099
Privacy Policy – Questions and Comments

Also in the hunt, but not a part of the SETI Institute
SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience. BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

From SETI Institute via phys.org : “LaserSETI installs 2nd observatory at Haleakala Observatory”

From SETI Institute

via

phys.org

December 21, 2021

LaserSETI Installation at Haleakala. The instruments here look at the same point as the ones at Ferguson (RFO) in Sonoma, CA. Image Credit: Eliot Gillum.

Last summer the SETI Institute began installing a second LaserSETI Observatory, this time 10,000 feet above sea level at The Haleakala Observatory -University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy Facilities (US), thanks to the University of Hawai’i’s Institute of Astronomy (IfA).

Haleakalā Observatory located on the island of Maui owned by the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawai’i (US)

As a result of challenges involving equipment damaged during shipping, supply chain delays for replacement parts, equipment malfunctions and even a blizzard in Hawai’i, the installation was delayed but is now complete. While two of the four cameras are not fully functional and will be replaced, observations are now possible and data collection is underway. The staff at the IfA has provided invaluable assistance throughout the setup process especially during times when it was not possible for LaserSETI staff to be onsite due to COVID restrictions and other logistical challenges.

LaserSETI is a unique astronomy program designed to detect potential laser pulses originating from outside the solar system. It is building a global network of instruments to monitor the entire night sky. Each LaserSETI device consists of two identical cameras rotated 90 degrees to one another along the viewing axis. They work by using a transmission grating to split light sources up into spectra, then read the camera out more than a thousand times per second. The first LaserSETI observatory is at the Robert Ferguson Observatory in Sonoma, CA.

Robert Ferguson Observatory, Sonoma, CA (US)

Cameras at the new site in Hawai’i will be aimed east, and the California devices are be aimed west. The two observatories will provide redundant coverage of the sky over the Pacific because, as Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“LaserSETI is attempting a big step forward in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It’s the first project in either optical or radio astronomy designed to cover the entire sky. When you don’t know where to look, an instrument with an enormous field-of-view and time range allows us to cover a lot more ground than ever before.” said Eliot Gillum, principal investigator for LaserSETI. “There are so many people who’ve helped make LaserSETI possible that I’d like to thank. From the project team to other scientists at the SETI Institute, to our Indiegogo backers and private donors, to our outstanding observatory partners at Institute for Astronomy and Ferguson Observatory, it takes a village to tackle a project this audacious.”

“The possibility that life exists elsewhere is exciting for the public, especially with the reports of biologically interesting molecules in the atmosphere of Venus, the selection of two Venus missions by NASA, the Mars Perseverance rover mission, and the upcoming Europa Clipper mission to explore Jupiter’s moon,” said Karen Meech, IfA interim director. “UH has had a long involvement in Astrobiology to explore the possibility of life elsewhere—both through research related to formation of habitable worlds, discovery of exoplanets, and the development of new innovative mirror and telescope technology to detect planets. It is exciting to add a new direction to this investigation by searching for technological signatures.”

Traditionally optical SETI projects have relied on photomultiplier tubes to detect laser flashes, essentially making them one-pixel cameral and enabling only a small part of the sky to be observed. LaserSETI uses two cameras with a commercial lenses that images approximately 75 degrees of the sky onto off-the-shelf solid-state detectors. In front of the lens is a grating that transforms any light source in the camera’s field-of-view into a double rainbow-like spectrum. While stars will produce a complete spectrum from blue to red, a laser will only show up at its characteristic wavelength (think of your red laser pointer). Able to distinguish different colors of light, LaserSETI instrumentation is not limited to extremely short flashes as conventional SETI searches have been. And because the devices are wide-angle, it’s possible to cover the entire night sky with a relatively small number of them, thereby keeping costs down.

Initial funding for LaserSETI was raised through a crowdfunding campaign in 2017, with additional financing provided through private donations. The plan calls for ten more instruments deployed in Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and Chile. When this phase is complete, the system will be able to monitor the nighttime sky in roughly half of the western hemisphere.

Next steps for LaserSETI at Haleakala will include replacing two of the cameras to bring the system to full functionality. This is expected to take place by January of 2022.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SETI Institute
About the SETI Institute
What is life? How does it begin? Are we alone? These are some of the questions we ask in our quest to learn about and share the wonders of the universe. At the SETI Institute we have a passion for discovery and for passing knowledge along as scientific ambassadors.

The SETI Institute is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Mountain View, California. We are a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and we collaborate with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute employs more than 130 scientists, educators, and administrative staff. Work at the SETI Institute is anchored by three centers: the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe (research), the Center for Education and the Center for Outreach.

The SETI Institute welcomes philanthropic support from individuals, private foundations, corporations and other groups to support our education and outreach initiatives, as well as unfunded scientific research and fieldwork.

A Special Thank You to SETI Institute Partners and Collaborators
• Campoalto, Chile, NASA Ames Research Center, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (US) , The National Science Foundation (US), Aerojet Rocketdyne,SRI International

Frontier Development Lab Partners
• Breakthrough Prize Foundation, The European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU), Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, KBRwyle. Kx Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames Research Center, Nvidia, SpaceResources Luxembourg, XPrize

In-kind Service Providers
• Gunderson Dettmer – General legal services, Hello Pilgrim – Website Design and Development Steptoe & Johnson – IP legal services, Danielle Futselaar

SETI/Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, USA, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

SETI Institute – 189 Bernardo Ave., Suite 100
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone 650.961.6633 – Fax 650-961-7099
Privacy Policy – Questions and Comments

Also in the hunt, but not a part of the SETI Institute
SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience. BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

From SETI Institute : “What we learned about life beyond Earth in 2021”

From SETI Institute

Dec 8, 2021

Alien hunters recap the most exciting developments of the year.

When news broke that scientists had detected a signal when their antennas were aimed at Proxima Centauri, many thought we had finally found evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth.

Centauris Alpha Beta Proxima, 27 February 2012. Skatebiker.

Turns out, the signal is easily explainable as terrestrial interference and didn’t come from E.T. Still, 2021 has been full of exciting developments in the search for life beyond Earth. From better understanding the origin of life to exploring potentially habitable worlds of our solar system, here are the SETI highlights of the year.

Complex molecules associated with life spotted in space.

For the first time, scientists found complex carbon-bearing molecules critical to the development of life in space. Scientists have long believed that these molecules are abundant in the universe, and in March, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia detected the first definitive radio signatures from them.
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Green Bank Radio Telescope, West Virginia, USA, now the center piece of the Green Bank Observatory(US), being cut loose by the National Science Foundation(US), supported by Breakthrough Listen Project, West Virginia University, and operated by the nonprofit The Associated Universities, Inc.(US)
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Alessandra Ricca, SETI Institute researcher, is working on a database of infrared signals from these complex molecules for future observations using the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in December.

National Aeronautics Space Agency(USA)/European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)/ Canadian Space Agency [Agence Spatiale Canadienne](CA) Webb Infrared Space Telescope(US) James Webb Space Telescope annotated. Scheduled for launch in October 2021 delayed to December 2021.

Further research will help humans understand how life originates and the conditions it needs to thrive throughout the universe.

Perseverance Rover gets to work – what clues about life do its samples hold?

Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover – NASA Mars annotated.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover, Percy to friends, made a nail-biting landing in Mars’ Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The Red Planet is of enormous interest to astrobiologists and to SETI because the planet may have once been warmer and wetter and thus habitable. Understanding whether life ever existed on Mars will help humans understand more about how life originated on Earth and, possibly, on other planets.

Percy successfully cached its first sample of Martian rock, which will be returned to Earth in an upcoming mission. It also made images suggesting Jezero Crater had experienced past flooding, further advancing the idea that it was once a lake.

And, of course, we can’t forget the little helicopter that could, Ingenuity, which hitched a ride to Mars with Percy.

NASA Mars Ingenuity helicopter traveling with Perseverance rover.

Ingenuity became the first aircraft to complete a controlled flight on a planet beyond Earth. The helicopter’s success will help future missions understand how best to use an aircraft as a scout for interesting exploration sites.

Allen Telescope Array detects FRB.

In June, the team at the Allen Telescope array announced an observation of a bright double-peaked Fast Radio Burst (FRB) from the repeating source known as FRB20201124A. This observation was the first FRB detected with the ATA, which has been undergoing extensive upgrades for both its receivers and digital signal processing hardware.

This detection demonstrates the sensitivity of the ATA’s instrumentation and its abilities to detect a radio signal of interest in the search for advanced societies beyond Earth.

Additionally, Dr. Sofia Sheikh, an astronomer and physicist, has been awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the ATA to focus on FRBs and develop improved SETI detection methods. She will also mentor underrepresented students in physics and astronomy. Read more about these exciting updates here and here.

U.S. Government issues inconclusive report on UAPs.

In June, the U.S. government issued its highly anticipated preliminary report on Unidentified Ariel Phenomenon (UAPs). The report concluded that most UAPs can’t be understood fully due to limited data but says nothing about a possible extraterrestrial source for these incidents.

This report, and the buzz surrounding it, raise important questions for the SETI community, primarily are UAPs worthy of deeper scientific study and if so, how do we do it? Researchers at Harvard University (US), the SETI Institute, and the broader community are working on answers to these questions.

Dual Missions to Venus will shine a light on Earth’s twin- DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.

In June, NASA announced two missions to Venus: DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) and VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy).

DAVINCI+ Artist’s concept of descent stages-Credit Goddard Space Flight Center.

VERITAS-Exploring the Deep Truths of Venus. Credit NASA JPL.

These will be the first NASA missions to Venus, often referred to as Earth’s twin, since 1990, and will increase our understanding of the planet and its evolution. This information will help SETI scientists better characterize habitable zones around stars and climate change on planets.

DAVINCI+ will send a probe into Venus’ atmosphere to better determine its composition at various altitudes and take images of Venus’ “tesserae,” land masses akin to Earth’s continents. David Grinspoon, a member of the SETI Institute’s Science Advisory Board, is a key investigator on this mission.

VERITAS is an orbiter that will better map the planet’s surface, identify rock types on the surface, and determine if active volcanoes are releasing water vapor or phosphine into the atmosphere.

Ganymede has water vapor-could it have life?

Planets aren’t the only type of world that could sustain life; Several of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have been particularly interesting to astrobiologists. And scientists studying Hubble images have found evidence that water vapor exists in the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. Since water is essential to life on Earth, this discovery will prompt further study of this moon.

A new class of exoplanets to study

A group of scientists identified a new class of exoplanets, Hycean (hydrogen-ocean) worlds, which are covered with oceans and boast hydrogen-rich atmospheres. These planets are numerous and, thanks to their size, easier to find than small, rocky, Earth-like planets. They are also thought to be quite warm, making it possible for microbial life to thrive beneath their surface.

With the launch of the James Webb Telescope, researchers are hoping to learn more about these interesting candidates for life beyond Earth.

Laser SETI begins installation in Hawaii

While the ATA searches the skies for radio signals, LaserSETI will examine star systems for laser flashes that could indicate the presence of an advanced civilization.

In late September, the SETI Institute’s Eliot Guillum began setting up the latest LaserSETI hardware in Haleakala, Hawaii.

LaserSETI observatory installation at Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawai’i (US)

Signals for Proxima Centauri aren’t from aliens

Shortly before Halloween, researchers published two papers analyzing the signal detected in 2019 by Breakthrough Listen. The signal appeared to originate near Proxima Centauri and generated significant buzz when it was first announced.

After additional research, SETI scientists concluded the signal most likely didn’t come from aliens but rather malfunctioning equipment on Earth. Dr. Andrew Siemion contributed to both papers and Dr. Sofia Sheikh, who will join the team at the Allen Telescope Array team in January, was the lead author on one.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition
SETI Institute

About the SETI Institute

What is life? How does it begin? Are we alone? These are some of the questions we ask in our quest to learn about and share the wonders of the universe. At the SETI Institute we have a passion for discovery and for passing knowledge along as scientific ambassadors.

The SETI Institute is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Mountain View, California. We are a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and we collaborate with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute employs more than 130 scientists, educators, and administrative staff. Work at the SETI Institute is anchored by three centers: the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe (research), the Center for Education and the Center for Outreach.

The SETI Institute welcomes philanthropic support from individuals, private foundations, corporations and other groups to support our education and outreach initiatives, as well as unfunded scientific research and fieldwork.

A Special Thank You to SETI Institute Partners and Collaborators
• Campoalto, Chile, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Headquarters, National Science Foundation, Aerojet Rocketdyne,SRI International

Frontier Development Lab Partners
• Breakthrough Prize Foundation, European Space Agency, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, KBRwyle. Kx Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames Research Center, Nvidia, SpaceResources Luxembourg, XPrize

In-kind Service Providers
• Gunderson Dettmer – General legal services, Hello Pilgrim – Website Design and Development Steptoe & Johnson – IP legal services, Danielle Futselaar

SETI/Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, USA, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

SETI Institute – 189 Bernardo Ave., Suite 100
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone 650.961.6633 – Fax 650-961-7099
Privacy Policy – Questions and Comments

Also in the hunt, but not a part of the SETI Institute

SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

From SETI Institute via EarthSky : “Meteors from rare long-period comets”

From SETI Institute

via

EarthSky

May 27, 2021
Kelly Kizer Whitt

Long-period comets may take thousands of years to orbit our sun once. This artist’s concept shows the meteoroid stream from long-period Comet Thatcher entering the solar system and looping around the sun. The outer blue ellipse is the orbit of Neptune. Comet Thatcher is responsible for April’s Lyrid meteor shower. Image via P. Jenniskens/ SETI Institute.

Around the world, a network of low-light video security cameras are pointed at dark skies, capturing faint meteors and using triangulation to determine their trajectories and orbits. Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute leads this project, which is called CAMS-Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance. He said in May 2021 that he’s using the data to discover that some long-period comets, with orbits up to 4,000 years long, are the sources of some of the meteors captured by CAMS. The passes of these comets might sometimes create a meteor rain, he said, plus the potential for an impact by a comet. He said:

“Until recently, we only knew five long-period comets to be parent bodies to one of our meteor showers, but now we identified nine more, and perhaps as many as 15”.

The results of this new meteor shower survey were published this month in the peer-reviewed journal Icarus.

CAMS stands for Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance. The project now has networks of cameras in nine countries, including Australia, Chile and Namibia. The thin trail of debris left behind by long-period comets can be hard to detect, but the CAMS network has approximately doubled the number of meteor showers known to come from this type of comet.

Interactive map of CAMS data

The worldwide cameras have pinpointed the locations that meteors appear to come from – known as the radiant – and enabled scientists to create an interactive map of the data. The meteors appear as colored dots on the map. Red denotes the fastest meteors and blue the slowest. White dots represent sporadic meteors that do not come from any specific shower. The black dots on the map are stars. You can change the date on the map to find what meteors were detected on a certain date. Jenniskens described the interactive map:

“These are the shooting stars you see with the unaided eye. By tracing their approach direction, these maps show the sky and the universe around us in a very different light.”

Taken from the interactive map, the cluster of yellow dots in this diagram are meteors from the Lyrid radiant picked up by CAMS data. These meteors came from the long-period Comet Thatcher. Image via P. Jenniskens/ SETI Institute.

Comets are not the main source of debris that impacts with Earth. However, historically they have caused some of the biggest impact events due to their large size and fast speed. The new survey results allow these faint, long-distant comets from as far back as 4,000 years to be spotted via the meteors left behind. Jenniskens said:

“This creates a situational awareness for potentially hazardous comets that were last in near-Earth orbit as far back as 2,000 BC.”

CAMS data reveal long-period comets

The team of scientists analyzed their data to find something unexpected: Long-period comet meteor showers can last for many days. Jenniskens said:

“This was a surprise to me. It probably means that these comets returned to the solar system many times in the past, while their orbits gradually changed over time.”

The team also discovered that the most dispersed meteor showers show the highest fraction of small meteoroids. Jenniskens explained why this might be:

“The most dispersed showers are probably the oldest ones. So, this could mean that the larger meteoroids fall apart into smaller meteoroids over time.”

The team hopes to go even farther into the past with help from CAMS. Jenniskens explained:

“In the future, with more observations, we may be able to detect fainter showers and trace the orbit of parent comets on even longer orbits.”

Long-period Comet Thatcher and the Lyrids

Comet Thatcher, shown in the above mapping examples, is a previously known long-period comet that’s responsible for the Lyrid meteor shower. Thatcher returns to the sun every 415 years, with its next arrival in our vicinity scheduled for approximately 2283 A.D. When not in the inner solar system, Comet Thatcher journeys as far out as 110 astronomical units (AU) from the sun.

In contrast, Pluto is about 40 AU from the sun.

View at EarthSky Community Photos. | You don’t have to be an astronomer to capture meteors. This image is from Cecilia Ray in Sedona, Arizona: the Milky Way and a meteor on April 14, 2021. She wrote: “I was running a time lapse of the Milky Way rising. As I went through about 600 images, this meteor appeared only in this photo. Unbelievable. This was my first Milky Way.” Thank you, Cecilia!

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

SETI Institute

About the SETI Institute
What is life? How does it begin? Are we alone? These are some of the questions we ask in our quest to learn about and share the wonders of the universe. At the SETI Institute we have a passion for discovery and for passing knowledge along as scientific ambassadors.

The SETI Institute is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit scientific research institute headquartered in Mountain View, California. We are a key research contractor to NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and we collaborate with industry partners throughout Silicon Valley and beyond.

Founded in 1984, the SETI Institute employs more than 130 scientists, educators, and administrative staff. Work at the SETI Institute is anchored by three centers: the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe (research), the Center for Education and the Center for Outreach.

The SETI Institute welcomes philanthropic support from individuals, private foundations, corporations and other groups to support our education and outreach initiatives, as well as unfunded scientific research and fieldwork.

A Special Thank You to SETI Institute Partners and Collaborators
• Campoalto, Chile, NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Headquarters, National Science Foundation, Aerojet Rocketdyne,SRI International

Frontier Development Lab Partners
• Breakthrough Prize Foundation, European Space Agency, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, KBRwyle. Kx Lockheed Martin, NASA Ames Research Center, Nvidia, SpaceResources Luxembourg, XPrize

In-kind Service Providers
• Gunderson Dettmer – General legal services, Hello Pilgrim – Website Design and Development Steptoe & Johnson – IP legal services, Danielle Futselaar

SETI/Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, USA, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft)

SETI Institute – 189 Bernardo Ave., Suite 100
Mountain View, CA 94043
Phone 650.961.6633 – Fax 650-961-7099
Privacy Policy – Questions and Comments

Also in the hunt, but not a part of the SETI Institute

SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

BOINC is a leader in the field(s) of Distributed Computing, Grid Computing and Citizen Cyberscience.BOINC is more properly the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at UC Berkeley.

From Nautilus: “If Aliens Exist Here’s How We’ll Find Them”

From Nautilus

February 24, 2021
Martin Rees & Mario Livio

Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would they have seen? Over most of that vast timespan, Earth’s appearance altered slowly and gradually. Continents drifted; ice cover waxed and waned; successive species emerged, evolved, with many of them becoming extinct.

But in just a tiny sliver of Earth’s history—the last hundred centuries—the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture—and later urbanization. The changes accelerated as the human population increased.

Then came even faster changes. Within just a century, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere began to rise dangerously fast. Radio emissions that couldn’t be explained by natural processes appeared and something else unprecedented happened: Rockets launched from the planet’s surface escaped the biosphere completely. Some spacecraft were propelled into orbits around the Earth; others journeyed to the moon, Mars, Jupiter, and even Pluto.

If those hypothetical aliens continued to keep watch, what would they witness in the next century? Will a final spasm of activity be followed by silence due to climate change? Or will the planet’s ecology stabilize? Will there be massive terraforming? Will an armada of spacecraft launched from Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere?

LASER POWER: A crucial impediment to space flight is the inefficiency of chemical fuel. One day a laser power station, located on Earth, might generate a beam to “push” a craft through space. Credit: NASA / Pat Rawlings (SAIC).

Let’s think specifically about the future of space exploration. Successful missions such as Viking, Cassini, New Horizons, Juno, and Rosetta were all done with last-century technology.

NASA/Viking 1 Lander

NASA Viking 2 Lander

NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft.

NASA/New Horizons spacecraft.

NASA/Juno at Jupiter.

ESA/Rosetta spacecraft, European Space Agency’s legendary comet explorer Rosetta annotated.

We can realistically expect that during this century, the entire solar system—planets, moons, and asteroids—will be explored by flotillas of robotic craft.

Will there still be a role for humans in crewed spacecraft?

There’s no denying that NASA’s new Perseverance rover speeding across the Jezero crater on Mars may miss some startling discoveries that no human geologist could reasonably overlook.

NASA Perseverance Mars Rover annotated.

But machine learning is advancing fast, as is sensor technology. In contrast, the cost gap between crewed and autonomous missions remains huge.

We believe the future of crewed spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers like SpaceX and Blue Origin, prepared to participate in a cut-price program far riskier than western nations could impose on publicly supported projects. These ventures—bringing a Silicon-Valley-type culture into a domain long-dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—have innovated and improved rocketry far faster than NASA or the European Space Agency have done. The future role of the national agencies will be attenuated—becoming more akin to an airport rather than to an airline.

We would argue that inspirationally led private companies should front all missions involving humans as cut-price high-risk ventures. There would still be many volunteers—a few perhaps even accepting one-way tickets—driven by the same motives as early explorers and mountaineers. The phrase “space tourism” should be avoided. It lulls people into believing such ventures are routine and low-risk. If that’s the perception, the inevitable accidents will be as traumatic as those of the space shuttle were. These exploits must be sold as dangerous, extreme sports, or intrepid exploration.

The most crucial impediment to space flight stems from the intrinsic inefficiency of chemical fuel and the requirement to carry a weight of fuel far exceeding that of the payload. So long as we are dependent on chemical fuels, interplanetary travel will remain a challenge. Nuclear power could be transformative. Allowing much higher in-course speeds would drastically cut the transit times in the solar system, reducing not only astronauts’ boredom, but their exposure to damaging radiation. It’s more efficient if the fuel supply can be on the ground; for instance, propelling spacecraft into orbit via a “space elevator”—and then using a “star-shot”-type laser beam generated on Earth to push on a “sail” attached to the spacecraft.

By 2100, thrill seekers in the mold of Felix Baumgartner (the Austrian skydiver who in 2012 broke the sound barrier in free fall from a high-altitude balloon) may have established bases on Mars, or maybe even on asteroids. Elon Musk has said he wants to die on Mars—“but not on impact.” It’s a realistic goal, and an alluring one to some.

But don’t expect mass emigration from Earth. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve those here. Coping with climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic may seem daunting, but it’s a piece of cake compared to terraforming Mars. There’s no place in our solar system that offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Mount Everest. Simply put, there’s no Planet B for ordinary risk-averse people.

Still, we (and our progeny here on Earth) should cheer on the brave space adventurers. They have a pivotal role to play in spearheading the post-human future and determining what happens in the 22nd century and beyond.

Pioneer explorers will be ill-adapted to their new habitat, so they will have a compelling incentive to re-design themselves. They’ll harness the super-powerful genetic and cyborg technologies that will be developed in coming decades. This might be the first step toward divergence into a new species.

Organic creatures need a planetary surface environment on which life could emerge and evolve. But if post-humans make the transition to fully inorganic intelligence, they won’t need an atmosphere. They may even prefer zero-gravity, especially for constructing massive artifacts. It’s in deep space that non-biological brains may develop powers that humans can’t even imagine.

There are chemical and metabolic limits to the size and processing power of organic brains. Maybe we are close to these limits already. But no such limits apply to or constrain electronic computers (still less, perhaps, quantum computers). So, by any definition of “thinking,” the amount and intensity that can be achieved by organic human-type brains will be swamped by the cerebrations of AI.

We are perhaps near the end of Darwinian evolution, but technological evolution of intelligent beings is only just beginning. It may happen fastest away from Earth—we wouldn’t expect (and certainly wouldn’t wish for) such rapid changes in humanity here on the Earth, though our survival may depend on ensuring the AI on Earth remains “benevolent.”

Few doubt machines will gradually surpass or enhance more and more of our distinctively human capabilities. Disagreements are only about the timescale on which this will happen. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil says it will be just a matter of a few decades. More cautious scientists envisage centuries. Either way, the timescales for technological advances are an instant compared to the timescales of the Darwinian evolution that led to humanity’s emergence—and more relevantly, less than a millionth of the vast expanses of cosmic time ahead. The products of future technological evolution could surpass humans by as much as we have surpassed slime mold.

But, you may wonder, what about consciousness?

Philosophers and computer scientists debate whether consciousness is something that characterizes only the type of wet, organic brains possessed by humans, apes, and dogs. Would electronic intelligences, even if their intellects would seem superhuman, lack self-awareness? The ability to imagine things that do not exist? An inner life? Or is consciousness an emergent property that any sufficiently complex network will eventually possess? Some say it’s irrelevant and semantic, like asking whether submarines can swim.

We don’t think it is. If the machines are what computer scientists refer to as “zombies,” we would not accord their experiences the same value as ours, and the post-human future would seem rather bleak. On the other hand, if they are conscious, we should welcome the prospect of their future hegemony.

What will their guiding motivation be if they become fully autonomous entities? We have to admit we have absolutely no idea. Think of the variety of bizarre motives (ideological, financial, political, egotistical, and religious) that have driven human endeavors in the past. Here’s one simple example of how different they could be from our naive expectations: They could be contemplative. Even less obtrusively, they may realize it’s easier to think at low temperatures, therefore getting far away from any star, or even hibernating for billions of years until the cosmic microwave background cooled down far below its current 3 degrees Kelvin. At the other edge of the spectrum, they could be expansionist, which seems to be the expectation of most who’ve thought about the future trajectory of civilizations.

Even if life had originated only on Earth, it need not remain a marginal, trivial feature of the cosmos. Humans could jump-start a diaspora whereby ever-more complex intelligence spreads through the galaxy, transcending our limitations. The “sphere of influence” (or some would envisage a “frontier of conquest”) could encompass the entire galaxy, spreading via self-reproducing machines, transmitting DNA or instructions for 3-D printers. The leap to neighboring stars is just an early step in this process. Interstellar voyages—or even intergalactic voyages—would hold no terrors for near-immortals.

Moreover, even if the only propellants used were the currently known ones, this galactic colonization would take less time, measured from today, than the more than 500 million years elapsed since the Cambrian explosion. And even less than the 55 million years since the advent of primates, if it proceeds relativistically.

The expansionist scenarios would have the consequence that our descendants would become so conspicuous that any alien civilization would become aware of them.

The crucial question remains: Are there other expansionists whose domain may impinge on ours?

We don’t know. The emergence of intelligence may require such a rare chain of events and happenstance contingencies—like winning a lottery—that it has not occurred anywhere else. That will disappoint SETI searchers and explain the so-called Fermi Paradox—the surprise expressed by physicist Enrico Fermi over the absence of any signs for the existence of other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way. But suppose we are not alone. What evidence would we expect to find?

The Allen Telescope Array, located at the Hat Creek Observatory in the Cascade Mountains, about 300 miles north of San Francisco, makes astronomical observations and stays attuned to signs of extraterrestrial life. Credit: Seth Shostak / SETI Institute.

SETI@home, a BOINC [Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing] project originated in the Space Science Lab at UC Berkeley.

Suppose that there are indeed many other planets where life emerged, and that on some of them Darwinian evolution followed a similar track to the one on Earth. Even then, it’s highly unlikely that the key stages would be synchronized. If the emergence of intelligence and technology on a planet lags significantly behind what has happened on Earth (because, for example, the planet is younger, or because some bottlenecks in evolution have taken longer to negotiate) then that planet would reveal no evidence of ET. Earth itself would probably not have been detected as a life-bearing planet during the first 2 billion years of its existence.

But around a star older than the sun, life could have had a head start of a billion years or more. Note that the current age of the solar system is about half the age of our galaxy and also half of the sun’s predicted total lifetime. We expect that a significant fraction of the stars in our galaxy are older than the sun.

The history of human technological civilization is measured in mere millennia. It may be only a few more centuries before humans are overtaken or transcended by inorganic intelligence, which will then persist, continuing to evolve on a faster-than-Darwinian timescale for billions of years. Organic human-level intelligence may be, generically, just a brief interlude before the machines take over, so if alien intelligence had evolved similarly, we’d be most unlikely to catch it in the brief sliver of time when it was still embodied in that form. Were we to detect ET, it would be far more likely to be electronic where the dominant creatures aren’t flesh and blood—and perhaps aren’t even tied to a planetary surface.

Astronomical observations have now demystified many of the probability factors in the so-called Drake Equation—the probabilistic attempt traditionally used to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the Milky Way.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

The number of potentially habitable planets has changed from being completely unknown only a couple of decades ago to being directly determined from the observations. At the same time, we must reinterpret one of the key factors in the Drake equation. The lifetime of an organic civilization may be millennia at most. But its electronic diaspora could continue for billions of years.

If SETI succeeded, it would then be unlikely that the signal would be a decodable message. It would more likely reveal a byproduct (or maybe even a malfunction) of some super-complex machine beyond our comprehension.

The habit of referring to “alien civilizations” may in itself be too restrictive. A civilization connotes a society of individuals. In contrast, ET might be a single integrated intelligence. Even if messages were being transmitted, we may not recognize them as artificial because we may not know how to decode them, in the same way that a veteran radio engineer familiar only with amplitude-modulation (AM) transmission might have a hard time decoding modern wireless communications. Indeed, compression techniques aim to make the signal as close to noise as possible; insofar as a signal is predictable, there’s scope for more compression.

SETI so far has focused on the radio part of the spectrum. But we should explore all wavebands, including the optical and X-ray band. We should also be alert for other evidence of non-natural phenomena or activity. What might then be a relatively generic signature? Energy consumption, one of the potential hallmarks of an advanced civilization, appears to be hard to conceal.

One of the most plausible long-term energy sources available to an advanced technology is starlight. Powerful alien civilizations might build a mega-structure known as a “Dyson Sphere” to harvest stellar energy from one star or many stars or even from an entire galaxy.

The other potential long-term energy source is controlled fusion of hydrogen into heavier nuclei. In both cases, waste heat and a detectable mid-infrared signature would be an inevitable outcome. Or, one might seek evidence for massive artifacts such as the Dyson Sphere itself. Intriguingly, it’s worth looking for artifacts within our own solar system: Maybe we can rule out visits by human-scale aliens, but if an extraterrestrial civilization had mastered nanotechnology and transferred its intelligence to machines, the “invasion” might consist of a swarm of microscopic probes that could have evaded notice. Still, it would be easier to send a radio or laser signal than to traverse the mind-boggling distances of interstellar space.

Finally, let’s fast forward not for just a few millennia, but for an astronomical timescale, millions of times longer. As interstellar gas will be consumed, the ecology of stellar births and deaths in our galaxy will proceed more gradually, until jolted by the environmental shock of a collision with the Andromeda galaxy, about 4.5 billion years hence. The debris of our galaxy, Andromeda, and their smaller companions (known as the Local Group) will aggregate into one amorphous (or perhaps elliptical) galaxy. Due to the accelerating cosmic expansion, distant galaxies will move farther away, receding faster and faster until they disappear—rather like objects falling into a black hole—encountering a horizon beyond which they are lost from view and causal contact. But the remnants of our Local Group could continue for a far longer time. Long enough perhaps for what has been dubbed a “Kardashev Type III” phenomenon, in which a civilization is using the energy from one or more galaxies, and perhaps even that released from supermassive black holes, to emerge as the culmination of the long-term trend for living systems to gain complexity and negative entropy (a higher degree of order).

The only limitations set by fundamental physics would be the number of accessible protons (since those can in principle be transmuted into any elements), and the total amount of accessible energy (E=mc2, where m is mass and c is the speed of light) again transformable from one form to another.

Essentially all the atoms that were once in stars and gas could be transformed into structures as intricate as a living organism or silicon chips but on a cosmic scale. A few science-fiction authors envisage stellar-scale engineering to create black holes and wormholes—concepts far beyond any technological capability that we can imagine, but not in violation of basic physical laws.

If we want to go to further extremes, the total mass-energy content in the Local Group isn’t the limit of the available resources. It would still be consistent with physical laws for an incredibly advanced civilization to lasso the galaxies that are receding because of the cosmic expansion of space before they accelerate and disappear over the horizon. Such a hyper-intelligent species could pull them in to construct a segment resembling Einstein’s original idea of a static universe in equilibrium, with a mean density such that the cosmic repulsion caused by dark energy is precisely balanced by gravity.

Everything we’ve said is consistent with the laws of physics and the cosmological model as we understand them. Our speculations assume that the repulsive force causing cosmic acceleration persists (and is described by dark energy or Einstein’s cosmological constant). But we should be open-minded about the possibility that there is much we don’t understand.

Human brains have changed relatively little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah and coped with the challenges that life then presented. It is surely remarkable that these brains have allowed us to make sense of the quantum subatomic world and the cosmos at large—far removed from the common sense, everyday world in which we have evolved.

Scientific frontiers are now advancing fast. But we may at some point hit the buffers. There may be phenomena, some of which may be crucial to our long-term destiny, that we are not aware of any more than a gorilla comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies. Physical reality could encompass complexities that neither our intellect nor our senses can grasp. Electronic brains may have a rather different perception of reality. Consequently, we cannot predict or perhaps even understand the motives of such brains. We cannot assess whether the Fermi paradox signifies their absence or simply their preference.

Conjectures about advanced or intelligent life are shakier than those about simple life. Yet there are three features that may characterize the entities that SETI searches could reveal.

• Intelligent life is likely not to be organic or biological

• It will not remain on the surface of the planet where its biological precursor emerged and evolved.

• We will not be able to fathom the intentions of such life forms.

Two familiar maxims should pertain to all SETI searches. On one hand, “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” but on the other, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

See the full article here .

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From NASA JPL Caltech and From Caltech via phys.org: “An updated way to calculate the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations”

From NASA JPL-Caltech

and

From Caltech

via

phys.org

December 22, 2020
Bob Yirka , Phys.org

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

A small team of researchers from California Institute of Technology, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Santiago High School has developed an updated version of an old equation to calculate the likely existence of extraterrestrial civilizations. The team has uploaded their paper to the arXiv preprint server [A Statistical Estimation of the Occurrence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Milky Way Galaxy].

Over the span of human history, many have wondered if life exists on other planets—intelligent or otherwise. As new tools have been applied to the question, many space scientists have become convinced that the likelihood of extraterrestrial civilizations developing seems more probable than not given all that has been learned. As other exoplanet systems have been found, many circling stars very similar to our sun, it has become difficult to find anything unique about our own planet to justify a belief that Earth alone ever produced life. In this new effort, the researchers have expanded on research done by Frank Drake back in 1961.

Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.

Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.

SETI Institute

SETI/Allen Telescope Array situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California, USA, Altitude 986 m (3,235 ft), the origins of the Institute’s search.

He and his colleagues developed an equation (now known as the Drake equation) to calculate the odds of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations—given all that was known about space and astronomical objects back then. The researchers factored in such variables as the number of believed exoplanets and star systems and how many of them were likely to be capable of supporting life.

Space scientists have learned a lot more about space and celestial objects since Drake’s time—exoplanets have been observed, for example, some in their own Goldilocks zones, and scientists have learned more about the age of the universe and circumstances after the Big Bang. The researchers with this new effort took all the new factors into account and added something else not considered in 1961—the likelihood of other extraterrestrial civilizations arising and then unintentionally killing themselves off. Humans and other animals have a way of destroying their environment. Rats introduced to an island will eat every last scrap of food, for example, and then all of them will starve to death. Humans pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and confront a future in which the planet can no longer support life. The researchers suggest such evidence likely means that if extraterrestrial civilizations have arisen, most of them are probably gone by now due to their inability to prevent their own demise.

The result of the team’s work is not an estimate of the likelihood of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, but a new formula that others can use to make their own calculations based on what they believe to be true.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The California Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Caltech) is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering. Its 124-acre (50 ha) primary campus is located approximately 11 mi (18 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles. “The mission of the California Institute of Technology is to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education. We investigate the most challenging, fundamental problems in science and technology in a singularly collegial, interdisciplinary atmosphere, while educating outstanding students to become creative members of society.”

Caltech campus

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although the facility has a Pasadena postal address, it is actually headquartered in the city of La Cañada Flintridge, on the northwest border of Pasadena. JPL is managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Laboratory’s primary function is the construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. It is also responsible for operating NASA’s Deep Space Network.