What’s happening right now due to the global outbreak of COVID-19 should make us rethink our desire to meet alien lifeforms.
Category: alien life – Page 89
Take a look at space image processing, and try it yourself. Plus, catch up on the week’s space news.
Explore space art created by members of The Planetary Society’s community, and learn about a possible alien signal.
Needle, Haystack
The scientists even pointed to specific stars, like the erratic EPIC 249706694, that might be harboring such life, though once again they say they’re totally speculating. These theoretical organisms would survive by absorbing some of their star’s energy, so any star that dims faster than models predict could, theoretically, be serving as host.
“It is a fascinating thought that the universe may be packed with intelligent life that is so different from ours that we failed to recognize its existence,” study coauthor Eugene Chudnovsky told ScienceAlert.
The race to the ‘Red Planet’
Posted in alien life
# Gravitas | Three spacecraft are on their way to find life on Mars. UAE’s ‘Hope Orbiter’, NASA’s ‘Perseverance’ rover & China’s ‘Tianwen-1’ mission. Which one will be the first to arrive? Palki S Upadhyay gets you a report.
COSPAR’s Planetary Protection Policy ensures scientific investigations related to the origin and distribution of life are not compromised.
Protecting the Earth from alien life sounds like the latest plot for a blockbuster thriller set in outer space. Whether it’s an invasion or a mysterious alien illness, the extraterrestrial threat to our planet has been well-explored in science fiction. But protecting the Earth from extraterrestrial contamination is not just a concept for our entertainment; as we explore further across our solar system and begin to land on our neighbouring planetary bodies, ensuring that we don’t bring potentially dangerous material home to Earth or indeed carry anything from Earth that may contaminate another planet is a responsibility we must take seriously.
So, who is responsible for ensuring that our space exploration is completed safely? Many nations around the world have their own space agencies, such as NASA and the European Space Agency, who run many different types of missions to explore space. States are responsible for their space activities under the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, including governmental and non-governmental actors. The Outer Space Treaty, among several provisions, regulates in its Article IX against harmful contamination. One of the core activities of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) is to develop, maintain, and promote a Policy on Planetary Protection, as the only international reference standard for spacefaring nations and in guiding compliance with Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty.
As we explore further across our solar system, ensuring we don’t bring potentially dangerous material home or indeed carry anything from Earth that may contaminate another planet and compromise scientific investigations is a responsibility we must take seriously.
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Is there a slight possibility that advanced alien civilizations may have already found us without us even noticing?
According to experts, intelligent alien beings may be quietly watching over humankind in a kind of ‘galactic Zoo.’
Scientists say that despite us still not finding evidence that aliens exist, it doesn’t mean that aliens haven’t found us.
Interesting…
A 982 megahertz signal dubbed BLC1 (Breakthrough Listen 1) came from the star, as spotted by the Parkes telescope in Australia in April and May 2019. Most tantalizingly, the relatively nearby star system contains a planet dubbed Proxima b, which is about 20 percent larger than Earth and located in the system’s habitable zone, the area where it’s theoretically possible for life to sustain itself.
The news also met with a healthy dose of skepticism. In a statement released today, the SETI Institute commented on the controversial report. The main takeaway: Breakthrough Listen’s discovery is a candidate, not a confirmed signal.
“Because of its profile, it’s very unlikely that the signal was produced by a natural but unknown cosmic source, but who knows… Nature often surprises us,” reads the statement, penned by SETI Institute senior planetary astronomer Franck Marchis.
How to detect life on Mars
Posted in alien life
“If there’s life on Mars, there’s a good chance it’s related to us.”
Scientists from SETG have developed a method to detect the tiniest traces of life on other planetary bodies.
Astronomers behind the most extensive search yet for alien life are investigating an intriguing radio wave emission that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun.
The narrow beam of radio waves was picked up during 30 hours of observations by the Parkes telescope in Australia in April and May last year, the Guardian understands. Analysis of the beam has been under way for some time and scientists have yet to identify a terrestrial culprit such as ground-based equipment or a passing satellite.
Extraterrestrial Languages
Posted in alien life, robotics/AI
If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand?
The endlessly fascinating question of whether we are alone in the universe has always been accompanied by another, more complicated one: if there is extraterrestrial life, how would we communicate with it? In this book, Daniel Oberhaus leads readers on a quest for extraterrestrial communication. Exploring Earthlings’ various attempts to reach out to non-Earthlings over the centuries, he poses some not entirely answerable questions: If we send a message into space, will extraterrestrial beings receive it? Will they understand? What languages will they (and we) speak? Is there not only a universal grammar (as Noam Chomsky has posited), but also a grammar of the universe?
Oberhaus describes, among other things, a late-nineteenth-century idea to communicate with Martians via Morse code and mirrors; the emergence in the twentieth century of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), CETI (communication with extraterrestrial intelligence), and finally METI (messaging extraterrestrial intelligence); the one-way space voyage of Ella, an artificial intelligence agent that can play cards, tell fortunes, and recite poetry; and the launching of a theremin concert for aliens. He considers media used in attempts at extraterrestrial communication, from microwave systems to plaques on spacecrafts to formal logic, and discusses attempts to formulate a language for our message, including the Astraglossa and two generations of Lincos (lingua cosmica).