S.E.T.I.Scenarios, conspiracies
and detection
S.E.T.I.
ESA simulation of humankind's expansion across the stars
Gravitational radiation requires a changing mass quadrupole moment, whereas electromagnetic radiation such as a broadcast antenna, only requires a changing charge dipole moment (electromagnetism is a spin-1 field, a vector field, but gravitation is a spin-2 field, a tensor field).What else should we be looking for? There seem to be two approaches to using UAP sightings to work out their operation.
Lieutenant Accoin said he interacted twice with the objects. The first time, after picking up the object on his radar, he set his plane to merge with it, flying 1,000 feet below it. He said he should have been able to see it with his helmet camera, but could not, even though his radar told him it was there.
A few days later, Lieutenant Accoin said a training missile on his jet locked on the object and his infrared camera picked it up as well. “I knew I had it, I knew it was not a false hit,” he said. But still, “I could not pick it up visually.”
In late 2014, Lieutenant Graves said he was back at base in Virginia Beach when he encountered a squadron mate just back from a mission “with a look of shock on his face.”
He said he was stunned to hear the pilot’s words. “I almost hit one of those things,” the pilot told Lieutenant Graves.
The pilot and his wing-man were flying in tandem about 100 feet apart over the Atlantic east of Virginia Beach when something flew between them, right past the cockpit. It looked to the pilot, Lieutenant Graves said, like a sphere encasing a cube.
From my point of view, there is no SETI race, official or unofficial, just two nations trying to answer one of the greatest scientific questions of all time," said Steven Dick, author of "Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Having said that, the consequences of a first discovery could be quite profound," Dick added. "Even if a signal were detected in the United States, it is likely to be ambiguous and an extended affair as astronomers try to figure out whether or not it is a real ET signal." Dick said that any discovery in China is bound to be complicated by geopolitical considerations and communication problems. "Although international SETI protocols basically call for confirming the signal and then telling everyone," he said, "those protocols are unlikely to be followed in the heat of the moment. Consequences of discovery In the unlikely case that there is an unambiguous ET signal, with an encoded message, and if the message can be deciphered, Dick said, all bets are off, depending on what the message says! That will be an endeavour that involves not only astronomers, but communications experts and a wide array of scholars in the social sciences and humanities," Dick said. "In the broadest sense, in the long term, contact with ET is likely to change our religious, philosophical and scientific worldviews in ways we cannot yet predict. In short, the consequences of the discovery of an ET signal very much depend on the discovery scenario, Dick concluded.Announcements
It will be revolutionary. It’s like when Copernicus stated ‘no we go around the Sun.' Completely revolutionary. It will start a whole new line of thinking. I don’t think we’re prepared for the results.https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-chief-scientist-announcements-life-on-mars October 2nd 2019
And yet the size argument really has little relevance because it turns out that most of our universe is empty. Well, that’s not quite right. The universe appears to be full of “stuff ”, but it’s “stuff ”—dark energy and dark matter—of which we have almost zero knowl- edge except for the fact that it isn’t suitable for constructing life. Even the 5% of the mass–energy content of the universe that we understand—atoms and neutrinos and radiation—is spread thinly, and most of it isn’t in a form that would permit the existence of life. The universe might be big, but size alone tells us little about whether there are homes for beings such as us.Perhaps we are at the bottom of the galactic food chain and our level of development precludes interest except from ethologists (and a few TV channels, world wars are probably good for ratings).
When people find out you’re an astronomer, they want to ask you about aliens—specifically, whether intelligent life forms similar to humans exist elsewhere in the vastness of the universe.
About one in a trillion stars are the right size to burn for a long enough time and host a planet in precisely the right location. However, we also have to take into account the Sun’s place in the Milky Way galaxy. We’re out on the edge, on a spiral arm of the Milky Way. Not too close to the edge and intergalactic space, not too close to the dense center where our supermassive black hole resides, generating lots of high-energy radiation. Either way, radiation would kill off any life on planets around stars not in this galactic “Goldilocks zone.”
Once a star has formed, and a planet has formed from those life-giving elements, it then needs to orbit in the zone around the star where it’s not too hot and not too cold. Not only that, the planet needs to stay there. That might sound obvious, but when we simulate planets forming from the mess around stars, they tend to like to move around and migrate inward toward their stars. This nicely explains how all those hot Jupiter-like exoplanets we’ve been detecting have formed around their stars. In fact, considering that these hot Jupiters seem to be quite prolific throughout the rest of the Milky Way, it’s quite odd that Jupiter is where it is in our own solar system, and not closer to the Sun than Earth. It is only through its interaction with Saturn that it’s been stopped from migrating inward toward the Sun and disrupting all the other planets as it goes. If that had happened, Earth’s orbit could have been disrupted, either moving us out of the precious habitable zone around the Sun, or even slingshotting us entirely out of the solar system. So, if we’re conservative with our odds of that not happening, does that bring us to one in a Quintilian? ...
Perhaps, we can estimate that there are at least 100 sextillion stars. That’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. So, if one in a Quintilian stars might develop life, and there are at least a hundred sextillion stars in the universe, then perhaps there are a hundred thousand planets out there in the vastness of space that might have the right conditions to develop intelligent life!
Perhaps unsurprisingly with regards to such a secretive topic, NASA was mum on the details of what aspects of JWST planning require top secret clearance. “It is important to ensure that the JWST program director is exposed to and benefits from common practices, standards and manufacturing techniques that are used in both classified and unclassified programs,” Chou says. “This leads to a better understanding of the work involved and better mission outcomes.” Aftergood speculated that the requirement likely had to do with the interface between Webb’s technology and that used in intelligence and military Earth-observing satellites. “I think it probably reflects the role of surveillance technology and the need for coordination with U.S. intelligence agencies,” he says.
In recent years, however, physicists have discovered two loopholes to Einstein's ultimate speed limit: the Einstein-Rosen bridge (commonly referred to as а "wormhole") and the warp drive. Fundamentally, both ideas involve manipulation of spacetime itself in some exotic way that allows for faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Essentially, the wormhole involves connecting two potentially distant regions of space bу а topological shortcut. Theoretically, one would enter the wormhole and instantaneously Ье transported to the exit located in а distant region of space. Although no observational evidence of wormholes exists: theoretically they сап exist as а valid solution to general relativity. The warp drive-the main focus this paper-involves local manipulation of the fabric of space in the immediate vicinity of а spacecraft. The basic idea is to create an asymmetric bubblе of space that is contracting in front of the spacecraft while expanding behind it. Using this form of locomotion, the spacecraft remains stationary inside this "warp bubble," and the movement of space itself facilitates the relative motion of the spacecraft. The most attractive feature of the Warp drive is that the theory of relativity places no known restrictions оп the motion of space itself, thus allowing for а convenient circumvention of the speed of light barrier.The discussion examines ways that the specific Lorentzian manifold that exhibited bubble-like characteristics that Miguel Alcubierre proposed in his 1994 paper, could bе achieved by an understanding of dark energy to harness it's effects on the fabric of space.
One believes that an energy field called the Higgs boson permeates spacetime and that the interaction of matter with this field is what is responsible for particles acquiring mass. One believes that an exotic ubiquitous energy source, unimaginatively named dark energy, is responsible for the current accelerated expansion of the universe based оп observation of supernova iп galaxies billions bf light years from Earth. One also believes that the universe may not consist of the three spatial dimension of length, height, width, and one of time, but that, in fact, there mау bе as many as seven additional compactified dimensions assuming the topology of а Calabi-Yau manifold, апd that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are, in fact, extended string-like entities.October 2020
Rothschild thinks the universal rules of chemistry narrow some of the options. “I have difficulty imagining another life form that is not based on carbon,” she says. So it makes sense to design life-seeking planetary missions with that in mind. Water too “has a ton of advantages” as life’s solvent. Even if there were interesting chemical reactions happening in the methane lakes of Titan, they would be slowed down greatly by the frigid temperatures. Could life proceed at such a glacial pace? Planetary scientist Stuart Bartlett of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena is keeping an open mind. “There could be organisms floating in Titan’s atmosphere that essentially drink petrol to sustain themselves,” he says.It later suggests that we may soon be able to examine the atmospheric makeup of the 4000 identified exoplanets to indicate commonalities and that some living organisms might use energy sources untapped here on Earth, such as magnetic fields or kinetic energy.
This is the first time that all of the pieces have been put together to provide a reliable measurement of the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy," said co-author Jeff Coughlin, an exoplanet researcher at the SETI Institute and Director of Kepler's Science Office. "This is a key term of the Drake Equation, used to estimate the number of communicable civilizations—we're one step closer on the long road to finding out if we're alone in the cosmos.Previous research primarily utilized a planet's distance from it's star, this takes data from both Kepler and Gaia and considers not only the distance but also how much light hit's the planet which impacts the likelihood that it could support liquid water.
What they found is that if the radiogenic heating is more than the Earth's, the planet can't permanently sustain a dynamo, as Earth has done. That happens because most of the thorium and uranium end up in the mantle, and too much heat in the mantle acts as an insulator, preventing the molten core from losing heat fast enough to generate the convective motions that produce the magnetic field. With more radiogenic internal heating, the planet also has much more volcanic activity, which could produce frequent mass extinction events. On the other hand, too little radioactive heat results in no volcanism and a geologically "dead" planet. "Just by changing this one variable, you sweep through these different scenarios, from geologically dead to Earth-like to extremely volcanic without a dynamo," Nimmo said, adding that these findings warrant more detailed studies. "Now that we see the important implications of varying the amount of radiogenic heating, the simplified model that we used should be checked by more detailed calculations," he said.
Astronomers can use spectroscopy to measure the abundance of different elements in stars, and the compositions of planets are expected to be similar to those of the stars they orbit. The rare earth element europium, which is readily observed in stellar spectra, is created by the same process that makes the two longest-lived radioactive elements, thorium and uranium, so europium can be used as a tracer to study the variability of those elements in our galaxy's stars and planets.December 2020
The A$188 million ($138 million) radio telescope was able to map about three million galaxies in just 300 hours. Comparable surveys of the sky have taken as long as 10 years.Oxford researchers say the evolution of intelligent life is 'exceptionally rare'.
“It’s really a game changer,” said astronomer David McConnell, who led the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) study of the southern sky at the Murchison Radioastronomy Observatory in Western Australia.
The telescope only needed to combine 903 images to map the sky, compared with other all-sky radio surveys that require tens of thousands of images.
“Even with this first pass we’ve got right now, compared with previous images, we’ve already found some unusual objects,” McConnell said, including some unusual stars that undergo violent outbursts.
It took approximately 4.5 billion years for a series of evolutionary transitions resulting in intelligent life to unfold on Earth. In another billion years, the increasing luminosity of the Sun will make Earth uninhabitable for complex life. Intelligence therefore emerged late in Earth's lifetime. Together with the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, one can conclude that the expected transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude. In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare. Arriving at an alternative conclusion would require either exceptionally conservative priors, finding additional instances of evolutionary transitions, or adopting an alternative model that can explain why evolutionary transitions took so long on Earth without appealing to rare stochastic occurrences. The model provides a number of other testable predictions, including that M dwarf stars are uninhabitable, that many biological paradoxes will remain unsolved without allowing for extremely unlikely events, and that, counter intuitively, we might be slightly more likely to find simple life on Mars.January 2021
The point is that, going from inventing radios to inventing thinking machines is very short - a few centuries at most.Recently, Harvard professor, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy, in his upcoming book, “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” suggested the first sign of intelligent life that visits us from space will most likely be an alien civilization’s trash.
The dominant intelligence in the cosmos may well be non-biological.
Until recently, our instruments have not been sensitive enough to pick up these kinds of visitors. But Loeb said technology will soon make it possible to locate more space travellers, and the only way the mystery of ‘Oumuamua will be settled is if a similar object is spotted and more thoroughly investigated with a probe.February 2021
According to Newton's second and third laws of motion, the conservation of momentum would mean the rocket was propelled forwards - and at speeds 10 times faster than comparable devices.Aliens could be extracting energy from black holes
The co-author of the study, astrophysicist Luca Comisso of Columbia University in New York, said the next step will be to figure out what deliberate extraction energy from a black hole might look like to distant observers.March 2021
Doing so would allow Earthlings to potentially detect distant alien civilizations, Comisso told Live Science.
"We have only done the physics in this paper," he said. "But I am now working with a colleague of mine to apply this to reality, to look for civilizations, to try to see what kind of signal you would need to look for."
All planets in the Milky Way may be formed by the same building blocks, meaning that planets with the same amount of water and carbon as Earth – and thus potential places where life may be present – occur frequently around other stars in our galaxy, provided the temperature is right.Potential model for a real physical warp drive
The new telescopes are powerful. They use spectroscopy, which means that by observing which type of light is being blocked from the planets’ orbit around their star, you can see how much water vapour there is. It can tell us something about the number of oceans on that planet.
The Alcubierre warp drive is an exotic solution in general relativity.It allows for superluminal travel at the cost of enormous amounts of matter with negative mass density. For this reason, the Alcubierre warp drive has been widely considered unphysical. In this study, we develop a model of a general warp drive spacetime in classical relativity that encloses all existing warp drive definitions and allows for new metrics without the most serious issues present in the Alcubierre solution. We present the first general model for subluminalpositive-energy, spherically symmetric warp drives; construct superluminal warp-drive solutions which satisfy quantum inequalities; provide optimizations for theAlcubierre metric that decrease the negative energy requirements by two orders of magnitude; and introduce a warp drive spacetime in which space capacity and the rate of time can be chosen in a controlled manner.April 2021
The idea is to send a small satellite past a dynamically stable point about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometres) beyond Earth called Lagrange Point 2, roughly where the James Webb Space Telescope will eventually reside. There, the spacecraft can pass across the Earth-Sun line and watch as Earth transits the Sun, collecting data as if Earth were a potentially habitable exoplanet.May 2021
Because it’s our own planet-star system, scientists can account for variations happening on Earth and at the Sun. “Here, we know exactly what Earth, its clouds and the Sun are doing,” Mayorga said. “Can we then connect that with the unresolved observations we normally make of exoplanets and test the method of stacking up low-signal observations? That’s really where we want to go.
For example, in 2004, researchers suggested that broadcasting a signal across the cosmos is expensive and inefficient. Instead, the scientists calculated that inscribing messages onto a hunk of matter and launching it at potential extraterrestrial pen pals would require about a trillionth as much energy.June 2021
Another concern with conventional SETI is that extraterrestrial civilizations may be long dead by the time astronomers do actually detect signals from them. In contrast, extraterrestrial artifacts could provide a way for us to directly learn about alien civilizations, especially if these artifacts are equipped with artificial intelligence, said study author James Benford, a physicist at Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, California.
In the new study, Benford developed a version of the Drake equation for artifacts. The new formula specifically focused on what he calls "lurkers" — hidden and likely robotic extraterrestrial probes. Although the civilizations that deployed these lurkers may well be dead, the lurkers themselves could still be active enough to communicate with us.
In contrast to approaches that use the accuracy of MS measurements to uniquely identify each peak with a particular molecule in a complex organic mixture, the researchers instead aggregated their data and looked at the broad statistics and distribution of signals. Complex organic mixtures, such as those derived from living things, petroleum, and abiological samples present very different "fingerprints" when viewed in this way. Such patterns are much more difficult for a human to detect than the presence or absence of individual molecule types.Signatures of life
The researchers fed their raw data into a computer machine learning algorithm and surprisingly found that the algorithms were able to accurately classify the samples as living or non-living with ~95% accuracy. Importantly, they did so after simplifying the raw data considerably, making it plausible that lower-precision instruments, spacecraft-based instruments are often low power, could obtain data of sufficient resolution to enable the biological classification accuracy the team obtained.
It could be a milestone on the path to detecting life on other planets: Scientists under the leadership of the University of Bern and of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Planets detect a key molecular property of all living organisms from a helicopter flying several kilometers above ground. The measurement technology could also open up opportunities for remote sensing of the Earth.July 2021
The next step we hope to take, is to perform similar detections from the International Space Station (ISS), looking down at the Earth. That will allow us to assess the detectability of planetary-scale biosignatures. This step will be decisive to enable the search for life in and beyond our Solar System using polarization
After examining these binary stars, the team has concluded that Earth-sized planets in many two-star systems might be going unnoticed by transit searches like TESS's, which look for changes in the light from a star when a planet passes in front of it. The light from the second star makes it more difficult to detect the changes in the host star's light when the planet transits.August 2021
"This is a major finding in exoplanet work," Howell commented. "The results will help theorists create their models for how planets form and evolve in double-star systems".
The discovery of a potential biosignature in [a planet’s] atmosphere is important, but it’s just the start,” said Green in an interview. “You have to examine potential false positives, whether there are [non-biological] ways to form the chemical, whether the measurement is an artifact of your instrument, whether the environment on the planet is conducive or hostile to life, whether water is present.September 2021
Other countries have reached out to us since the June UAP report was released. China has established its own UAP task force. South America is active in investigating UAP. International cooperation among government officials and among scientists is crucial in moving forwardOctober 2021
The Galileo Project follows three major avenues of research. The first involves obtaining high-resolution images of UAP using an array of dedicated small-aperture telescope at various geographical locations. Extensive artificial intelligence/deep learning (AI/DL) and algorithmic approaches are needed to differentiate atmospheric phenomena from birds, balloons, commercial aircraft or drones, and from potential technological objects of terrestrial or other origin surveying our planet, such as satellites.November 2021
I think if general-purpose AI is created in the current context of superpower rivalry - you know, whoever rules AI rules the world, that kind of mentality - then I think the outcomes could be the worst possible.Most other technological civilisations, after obtaining nuclear capability, would cease such spending and devote massive resources to FTL, why not us?
NASA generates enormous amounts of data, and we use machine learning to try to extract subtle signatures and look for unusual events in these massive datasets, says Dr. Chien. AI can sift through satellite imagery and extract the most interesting aspects of cosmic events, which could range from supernovas to deadly meteorites.MIT Electromagnetic UAV for the Moon
It sends these to humans for further examination, but the AI is often the first to notice anomalies.
In a process called “intelligence amplification", if an AI discovers signs of extraterrestrial life first, human analysis is required to confirm its existence.
Would it go to [AI] before humans? Almost certainly yes, he says, but he considers it a joint discovery.
Artificial intelligence is used for pre-screening.
There’s no way humans could look at all of the images if we’re putting down 500,000 per night.
However, artificial intelligence reduces it to fifty per night.
MIT scientists are now proposing utilizing one of their own design to explore the Moon. The vehicle would hover above the lunar surface via the force of electrostatic repulsion.Interestingly, many UFO sightings involve electromagnetic effects. If a gravitational drive was used to hover, perhaps something similar to the above might then be used to maneuver. Indeed, it may be a standard facilty for navigation near smaller celestial objects like moons and asteroids.
The un-crewed craft would boost the force of electrostatic repulsion by emitting beams of negatively charged ions outward – giving the rover itself a positive charge – and by emitting positively charged ions down onto the lunar surface, increasing its existing positive charge. Those ions would be dispensed by nozzles on upward- and downward-facing miniature ion thrusters, which would apply voltage to an ionic liquid (molten salt) drawn from a connected onboard reservoir.
The researchers explored how primitive life may have originated on our planet from simple, non-living materials. They asked what properties define life as we know it and concluded that anything alive would have needed to collect and use energy, from sources such as the Sun or hydrothermal vents.February 2022
In molecular terms, this would mean that the ability to shuffle electrons was paramount to life. Since the best elements for electron transfer are metals (think standard electrical wires) and most biological activities are carried out by proteins, the researchers decided to explore the combination of the two—that is, proteins that bind metals.
We have very little information about how life arose on this planet, and our work contributes a previously unavailable explanation," said Bromberg, whose research focuses on deciphering the DNA blueprints of life's molecular machinery. "This explanation could also potentially contribute to our search for life on other planets and planetary bodies. Our finding of the specific structural building blocks is also possibly relevant for synthetic biology efforts, where scientists aim to construct specifically active proteins anew.
When heavy stars explode, they produce cosmic rays made of elementary particles with enormous energies. Cosmic rays travel to our solar system, and some end their journey by colliding with Earth’s atmosphere. Here, they are responsible for ionizing the atmosphere
Previous studies by Svensmark and colleagues have demonstrated that ions help the formation and growth of aerosols, thereby influencing cloud fraction. Since clouds can regulate the solar energy that can reach Earth’s surface, the cosmic-ray-cloud link is important for climate. Empirical evidence shows that Earth’s climate changes when the intensity of cosmic rays changes. Supernovae frequency can vary by several hundred per cent on geological time scales, and the resulting climate changes are considerable.
Thus, the researchers contend, it seems that instead of looking for oxygen signatures on other planets, or the presence of carbon, space scientists might want to look at the complexity of a given planet—and one way to do that is by using epsilon machines. To that end, they trained an epsilon machine on images of Earth taken from a distance. They then did the same for several of the other planets in the solar system to show the machine what lifeless planets look like. They also used other data meant to depict Earth as if there were no life on the planet.April 2022
If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won’t be that different at all; they’ll even drink and play music at the same cafes that humans frequent. A bit of imagination, however, makes us wonder whether they won’t be completely alien — we have zero data about what extraterrestrial biology could be like, so it makes sense to keep an open mind. Arik Kershenbaum argues for a judicious middle ground. He points to constraints from physics and chemistry, as well as the tendency of evolution to converge toward successful designs, as reasons to think that biologically complex aliens won’t be utterly different from us after all.Near light drive proposed
Woodward realized that if Einstein was right and inertia really is gravity in disguise, it should be possible to detect these brief changes in an object’s mass as its energy fluctuates. If part of an object accelerated at the exact moment when it became a little heavier, it would pull the rest of the object along with it. In other words, it would create thrust without propellant. Woodward called these temporary changes in mass “Mach effects,” and the engine that could use them a Mach-effect thruster.James Webb targets secret
In a paper published on May 2 in The Astrophysical Journal, the researchers describe a way to manipulate solar gravitational lensing to view planets outside our solar system. By positioning a telescope, the sun, and exoplanet in a line with the sun in the middle, scientists could use the gravitational field of the sun to magnify light from the exoplanet as it passes by. As opposed to a magnifying glass which has a curved surface that bends light, a gravitational lens has a curved space-time that enables imaging far away objects.Martian meteorites may hold evidence of life
Sara Motaghian at Imperial College London, however, is developing analytical tools for ExoMars’s cameras to quickly identify meteorites on Mars. She says the same tools could be used by Perseverance. “We can study them with the drill or by crushing them with the wheels,” she says, noting that the interiors of some meteorites on Mars could even provide shielding from radiation and be “tiny habitats” for life that may be there now. Even if the rovers don’t directly sample meteorites, Tait says that some samples returned by Perseverance could contain meteoritic material mixed into the Martian soil.June 2022
The discovery shows that microorganisms can remain well preserved in halite over hundreds of millions of years.Breakthrough in determining life's origin on Earth
This has implications for the search for alien life, according to the researchers.
It is possible that similar biosignatures could be detected in chemical sediments from Mars, where large salt deposits have been identified as evidence of ancient liquid-water reservoirs.
Led by Elisa Biondi, the study shows that long RNA molecules, 100-200 nucleotides in length, form when nucleoside triphosphates do nothing more than percolate through basaltic glass.July 2022
The beauty of this model is its simplicity. It can be tested by highschoolers in chemistry class," said Jan Špaček, who was not involved in this study but who develops instrument to detect alien genetic polymers on Mars. "Mix the ingredients, wait for a few days and detect the RNA.
Most biological materials, for example, amino acids, fossils, sedimentary rocks, plants, microbes, proteins and lipids, have strong organic fluorescence signals that can be detected by specialized scanning cameras. In a study published in Nature Scientific Reports recently, the research team reported that the Biofinder is so sensitive that it can accurately detect the bio-residue in fish fossils from the 34-56 million year-old Green River formation.Quantum communication across interstellar space possible
With quantum communications, engineers are faced with quantum particles that lose some or all of their unique characteristics as they interact with obstructions in their path—they have been found to be quite delicate, in fact. Such events are known as decoherence, and engineers working to build quantum networks have been devising ways to overcome the problem. Prior research has shown that the space between the stars is pretty clean. But is it clean enough for quantum communications? The math shows that it is. Space is so clean, in fact, that X-ray photons could travel hundreds of thousands of light years without becoming subject to decoherence—and that includes gravitational interference from astrophysical bodies. They noted in their work that optical and microwave bands would work equally well.August 2022
The researchers noted that because quantum communication is possible across the galaxy, if other intelligent beings exist in the Milky Way, they could already be trying to communicate with us using such technology and we could begin looking for them. They also suggest that quantum teleportation across interstellar space should be possible.
The production of NO2 on Earth today includes biogenic and anthropogenic sources, in addition to lightning," the paper notes. "However, human-generated NO2 dominates by three times the amount from non-human sources. Detecting high levels of NO2 at levels above that of non-technological emissions found on Earth could be a sign that the planet may host active industrial processes.September 2022
These more urbanized planets would have a higher nightside brightness from city lights, and be correspondingly easier to detect. Other specific focuses are the detectability of atmospheric technosignatures, artificial surface modifications, optical beacons, space engineering and megastructures, and interstellar flight.
TOI-1452b is one of the best candidates for an ocean planet that we have found to date," Cadieux said in a statement (opens in new tab). "Its radius and mass suggest a much lower density than what one would expect for a planet that is basically made up of metal and rock, like Earth."The James Webb Telescope
Its relative proximity to the solar system means that TOI-1452b has now joined a select group of temperate exoplanets that are close enough for JWST to study their atmosphere and to search for potential signs of life, called biosignatures.
If a cryobot is designed to carry three or four science experiments, 48 microswimmers would take up only one experiment’s worth of space. Each craft would have a lifetime of roughly 1.5 to 3 hours, enough time to chart physical or chemical gradients in the water column, as well as measure the region’s salinity, temperature, and even search for signs of active life. The small subs would be deployed a few at a time to investigate ocean dynamics at different times of day and night. In the search for life, variations that follow the day/night cycle can serve as strong biomarkers, or clues to the presence of life.November 2022
Perhaps its biggest advantage, though, is that it works across the infrared spectrum. That is a boon because molecules love to interact with light at these wavelengths. “The infrared is the richest spectral region if you want to see absorption by molecules,” says Drake Deming at the University of Maryland. And JWST’s mirror is more than 7.5 times larger in diameter than previous infrared telescopes, like Spitzer. What all of this means is that, for the first time, astronomers have a real shot at seeing the details of the atmosphere of a rocky exoplanet, which is generally considered the best bet for finding potential signs of life. What we are looking for are smaller rocky planets with atmospheres, like Earth, that happen to orbit within the habitable zone around a star, where temperatures would allow liquid water to exist at the planet’s surface. The trouble is that smaller worlds, with less gravitational heft, can only retain relatively tenuous atmospheres. (For example, Earth’s atmosphere contributes less than 1 per cent to its radius.) So if we want to detect their atmospheres with JWST, these rocky worlds also have to be relatively near. Those criteria alone hugely narrow the number of viable targets. “For rocky planets that are in the habitable zone and accessible to JWST, we’re talking definitely less than 10, With all that in mind, Kreidberg will use JWST to observe the TRAPPIST-1 planets as they move in front of and behind their star. The idea is to determine the difference between their day and night temperatures, which will in turn tell her whether each has an atmosphere or not. Atmospheres tend to efficiently distribute heat around a planet, so the day and night temperatures tend to be similar. A bare rock with no atmosphere will heat up on the dayside and then radiate that energy directly into space on the nightside, giving a different temperature profile. Once we know there is an atmosphere, it will be time to try to get a spectrum and look for the signatures of life. Based on what we know on Earth, the best things to look for are the spectral fingerprints of oxygen and methane.NASA The Great Filter theory
The not-yet-peer-reviewed report - authored by Jonathan Jiang, Philip Rosen, Kelly Lu, Kristen Fahy, and Piotr Obacz - cited dangers including asteroid strikes, nuclear war, pandemics, climate change and artificial intelligence.It seems to me that the study misses the point. If the Great Filter theory is the explanation for the lack of intelligent life, then the only thing that you can say about the event is it cannot be forseen (unlike the cited dangers above). That suggests a physical event, say a planet splitting explosion caused by research into FTL travel.
The Great Filter theory was first proposed in the late 1990s by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.
Last week, the University of St. Andrews in the UK announced a new research hub that will bring together an international team of experts to help prepare humanity for alien contact. The SETI Post-Detection Hub will develop a framework for "impact assessments, protocols, procedures and treaties designed to allow humanity to respond responsibly" should we detect intelligent life from beyond our planet.Gravitational wave detectors could spot alien warp drives
Our results allow existing GW observatories like LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA to search for evidence of RAMAcraft right away, turning these observatories into the first-ever RAMAcraft Detection And Ranging (RAMADAR) devices. Future observatories like DECIGO and the Big Bang Observer (BBO) will be 100 times more sensitive than LIGO in detecting RAMAcraft, expanding the search volume of a RAMADAR by a million-fold. This new frontier will allow us to probe thousands of galaxies for advanced technology.
By estimating cell densities, the team found that the moon's life-supporting region or biosphere around hydrothermal vents could be very small — less than 10 tons of carbon, which is smaller than the biosphere around Earth's hydrothermal vents.February 2024
Nevertheless, according to this new research, an adequate amount of cells and organic material from methanogens would enter the plume, increasing the chances that at least some of them would be captured by a visiting spacecraft.
In many of our observations, there is a lot of interference," Ma said. "We need to distinguish the exciting radio signals in space from the uninteresting radio signals from Earth."March 2024
To make sure the new algorithm wasn't confused by signals originating from Earth, Ma and the team trained their machine-learning tools to tell the difference between human-generated interference and potential extraterrestrial signals.
The findings add more credibility to the theory that the basic ingredients needed to kickstart the development of life on Earth could have been delivered to the planet in its infancy from space.April 2024
The presence of prebiotic molecules on the asteroid surface despite its harsh environment caused by solar heating and ultraviolet irradiation, as well as cosmic-ray irradiation under high-vacuum conditions, suggests that the uppermost surface grains of Ryugu have the potential to protect organic molecules.
If – and this is a pretty big if – we could find a way to sort the interstellar dust from the stellar, or if we could build a dust catcher with an effective area Totani described as "hopefully comparable to Earth … to expect one particle detection per year," then we might be able to find a dust particle that might contain traces of alien life.August 2024
Totani said: "If there are signs of life in dust grains, not only could we be certain, but we could also find out soon.
We're the first data and community platform dedicated to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) sightings, formerly known as UFOs. We remain neutral on the explanation for UAP. We are open-minded and will follow the science wherever it leads. Enigma is the frictionless way to share your story, discover similar sightings, and get real-time alerts.October 2024
Our model layers historical and new user-generated UAP sightings with confounding variables - including planes, satellites, stars, planets, drones, lightning, solar fields, solar flares, weather, and ionosphere phenomena. Many of these sources are satellite-derived and only recently became commercially available.
Due to the Doppler effect, a radio signal sent from a distant exoplanet to Earth may appear at a higher or lower frequency when seen by an observer on Earth. That frequency shift will also change over time due to relative motion between the exoplanet and Earth. This effect of shifting frequency is called a "drift rate."November 2024
Searching twice as many drift rates—for example, up to 2 nHz instead of 1 nHz—takes twice as many computations for low drift rates. This new research, which drops the recommended limits by a factor of 4 (for stars with known planets) or over 400 (for stars without known planets), will significantly reduce unnecessary calculations and allow future SETI scientists to fine-tune the drift rate parameters in their searches to better match the particular systems they're observing.
Not only was Franklin the primary benefactor of SETI research at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA), but he was an integral part of the technical team. His extraordinary knowledge of communications technology was invaluable in upgrading the ATA to the world-class radio telescope instrument it is today,” said Dr. Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair of SETI Research at the SETI Institute and Director of SETI Research at the University of Oxford.December 2024
Life on Earth requires six critical elements: nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur (NCHOPS). Most of those are relatively easy to come by, as they’re blown into space as common low-mass stars reach the end of their lives. Phosphorus, meanwhile, is much rarer, and as such is generally considered the limiting factor for life in the universe. In the new study, astronomers have detected phosphorus where there “shouldn’t” be any, suggesting unknown mechanisms for making phosphorus, which may turn out to be more abundant than we gave it credit for. The team used the radio telescopes at the Arizona Radio Observatory and IRAM in Spain to observe a molecular cloud named WB89-621. And sure enough, they detected the telltale signs of phosphorus monoxide and phosphorus nitride.January 2024
Up until now, there has been no practical method for detecting the presence of liquid water, the research suggests.
Amaury Triaud, professor of exoplanetology at the University of Birmingham, said: "It is fairly easy to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in a planet's atmosphere. This is because CO2 is a strong absorber in the infrared. By comparing the amount of CO2 in different planets' atmospheres, we can use this new habitability signature to identify those planets with oceans, which make them more likely to be able to support life.
Amedeo Balbi, who is an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of Roma Tor Vergata in Italy, and Adam Frank, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester in the U.S., argue that a planet's atmosphere needs to contain at least 18% oxygen to facilitate a technological civilization. The reason for this, they say, is a simple one: oxygen is needed for fire.February 2024
Caleb Harada at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have analysed 164 candidate stars to gauge what we know of them. “We’re trying to get the ball rolling so we can fill in our knowledge gaps,” says Harada. These may become some of the most studied stars in history. The list of candidates includes Tau Ceti, a sun-like star 12 light years away that is believed to host multiple planets, and 82 G. Eridani, 20 light years away, which is known to have at least three super-Earths, with masses bigger than Earth’s but smaller than Neptune’s. So far about 47 of the stars have been ranked as “Tier A”, the most promising targets for HWO.March 2024
Warp drives are exotic solutions of general relativity that offer novel means of transportation. In this study, we present a solution for a constant-velocity subluminal warp drive that satisfies all of the energy conditions. The solution involves combining a stable matter shell with a shift vector distribution that closely matches well-known warp drive solutions such as the Alcubierre metric. We generate the spacetime metric numerically, evaluate the energy conditions, and confirm that the shift vector distribution cannot be reduced to a coordinate transformation. This study demonstrates that classic warp drive spacetimes can be made to satisfy the energy conditions by adding a regular matter shell with a positive ADM mass.April 2024
We develop a pipeline that employs multiple filters to identify potential candidates and reject interlopers in a sample of five million objects, which incorporates a convolutional neural network to help identify confusion in WISE data. Finally, the pipeline identifies seven candidates deserving of further analysis. All of these objects are M-dwarfs, for which astrophysical phenomena cannot easily account for the observed infrared excess emission.May 2024
The law in question would create an ‘‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Records Collection” that would ostensibly include any and all historical records that exist about the UFO subject.June 2024
Formation of interstellar complex organic molecules on water-rich ices triggered by atomic carbon freezing.July 2024
The reactivity of interstellar carbon atoms (C) on the water-dominated ices is one of the possible ways to form interstellar complex organic molecules (iCOMs).
The gases, which include fluorinated versions of methane, ethane, propane, on Earth are known to be some of the most potent and persistent heat-trapping gases emitted by humans during various industrial manufacturing processes, like those used to produce semiconductors, for instance. Because these substances don't naturally form in large quantities — if we're going by Earth chemistry, at least — spotting them in an exoplanet's air would signal the presence of technologically-advanced species, scientists say.August 2024
Analysis by instruments aboard the rover indicates the rock possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life. The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water.September 2024
On board are nine science instruments to gather detailed measurements while Europa Clipper performs approximately 50 close flybys of the Jovian moon. Research suggests an ocean twice the volume of all the Earth’s oceans exists under Europa’s icy crust.October 2024
November 2024
A next-generation space observatory that will launch around May 2027. With a field of view at least 100 times larger than that of the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will be used to investigate exoplanets and infrared astrophysics.Improved Alcubierre Warp Drive
The mass of an object moving faster and faster would increase infinitely, eventually requiring a similarly infinite amount of energy to maintain its speed.December 2024
“That’s the chief limitation and key challenge we have to overcome—how can we have all this matter in our [bubble], but not at such a scale that we can never even put it together?” Martire said. The Applied Physics team believes future innovations in warp travel are inevitable. “Humanity,” Martire said, “is officially, mathematically, on aninterstellar track.
But that would also leave us in a barren, almost lifeless universe. This is a real possibility, but personally I don’t think it’s likely. My preferred scenario is that we are indeed a truly exceptional species. Or that technologically advanced aliens are in fact all around us, and for some reason we haven’t seen them. In the end, though, the universe is as it is, and not as we wish it to be.
