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21 June 2010
Maybe ET's Calling, But We Have the Wrong Phone
To date, SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) has focused on ETs who 'phone home' using the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and even a very small region within that. But what if ET's phone doesn't use radio waves? Sure the xkcd comic, is funny, but maybe it points to a deep flaw in our [...]
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19 June 2010
Astronomy Without A Telescope – SETI 2.0
Fifty years of eerie silence in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence has prompted some rethinking about what we should be looking for. After all, it’s unlikely that many civilizations would invest a lot of time and resources into broadcasting a Yoo-hoo, over here signal, so maybe we have to look for incidental signs of alien [...]
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04 May 2010
Will Aliens Be Hostile?
Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking caused a bit a of buzz last week when he warned that we shouldn't attempt to contact aliens because the outcome probably wouldn't be good (for us, anyway). But once again, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a voice of reason about the whole thing. Watch a clip from the Discovery Channel's "Stephen Hawking's [...]
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20 March 2010
Astronomy Without A Telescope – How To Impress An Alien (Or Not)
It's about fifty years since Frank Drake sent out our first chat request to the wider universe. I say about as I think the official date is 11 April 1960 – but I notice a lot of fifty year anniversary blogs and interviews are already being published, so what the heck, I'm not waiting either.(...)Read [...]
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08 February 2010
If the Earth is Rare, We May Not Hear from ET
If civilization-forming intelligent life is rare in our Milky Way galaxy, chances are we won't hear from ET before the Sun goes red giant, in about five billion years' time; however, if we do hear from ET before then, we'll have lots of nice chats before the Earth is sterilized. That's the conclusion from a recent [...]
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05 June 2009
So Where Is ET, Anyway?
While having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos National Labs in 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi mused about the likelihood of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the Universe.  Fermi, one of the most astute scientists of his day, thought the size and age of the Universe means many advanced civilizations should have already colonized the galaxy, [...]
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13 May 2009
A New Drake Equation? Other Life Not Likely to be Intelligent
Looking for signals from distant civilizations might be an effort in futility, according to scientists who met at Harvard University recently. The dominant view of astronomers at a symposium on the future of human life in the Universe seems to be that if other life is out there in the Universe, it likely is dominated [...]
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21 April 2009
Should We Really Tell ET Our Problems?
So, you have a radio transmitter and you’ve been tasked to send a message into space to try to communicate with a hypothetical alien civilization. Where do you begin? Probably high on your list is to seek out the best candidate stars to send a signal to. As we only have experience of life on [...]
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13 March 2009
Looking For Extraterrestrials Looking At Us
The cosmos is a very big place, how do you begin the search for exoplanets orbiting other stars? Astronomers have a few tricks up their sleeves to work out how to spot these tiny specks of distant alien worlds. Astronomers can look for the gravitational "wobble" of a star as a massive exoplanet tugs on [...]
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16 February 2009
The Milky Way Could have Billions of Earths
With the upcoming launch in March of the Kepler mission to find extrasolar planets, there is quite a lot of buzz about the possibility of finding habitable planets outside of our Solar System. Kepler will be the first satellite telescope with the capability to find Earth-size and smaller planets. At the most recent meeting of [...]
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20 October 2008
Podcast: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
You know what this show needs? More aliens. Since we don't seem to have any visiting right now, we're going to have to find some. SETI is an acronym. It stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But there's more to SETI than just putting up a radio telescope and hoping to catch a glimpse [...]
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09 October 2008
Messages From Earth Beamed to Alien World
The powerful opening scene of the movie "Contact" portrays radio and television signals from Earth heading out into space. Then later in the film, shockingly, one of those signals — a televised speech by Adolf Hitler — is beamed back as a reply. Could that really happen? Could an alien civilization "find" us [...]
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25 September 2008
New Search for Extraterrestrials Waits for No One, Er…, Everyone
In a bold move, astronomers have begun a new search to understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of intelligent life in the universe. Called WETI, which stands for Wait for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, the institute employs an entirely novel approach to achieve its goals. Instead of actively searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the [...]
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03 September 2008
Communicating Via the Cepheid Galactic Internet
If an alien species wanted to communicate with Earthlings, or any other civilization that might be out there, how might they do it? Some have proposed microwaves, neutrinos or lasers, or even moving stars around into patterns. But why wouldn't aliens just use the internet? The Cepheid Galactic Internet, that is. [...]
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16 June 2008
New Radio Telescope to Help SETI Scan Unexplored Frequencies for Extraterrestrials
Since the 1960's astronomers have been scanning the heavens, searching for radio signals beamed towards the vicinity of Earth by other intelligent beings. But so far, no ET signals have been found. However, no radio telescope has been able to search the very low frequency radio spectrum, which could possibly include "leakage" of [...]
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