Tag: the Drake equation

The Order of the Dolphin: SETI’s Secret Origin Story

by John Wenz                October 10, 2018                     (discovermagazine.com)

• In 1960, Harvard PhD Frank Drake and his colleagues decided that rather than using the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to determine the surface temperature of Venus or the radiation belts of Jupiter, they’d train it on two nearby stars to listen for signs of life from intelligent extraterrestrials. This was the beginning of the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

• In the meantime, physician/philosopher John Lilly was trying to communicate with earth-bound intelligences. From apes to elephants to pig to octopus, these creatures seem to possess intelligent self-awareness. He found that the most intelligent were the dolphins and whales. Lilly also saw the experiments as a way to help efforts to contact extraterrestrial aliens. If we can crack the code of dolphin language, we might have a shot at decoding other alien communication.

• In 1961, a group of scientists met at green Bank to discuss the search for alien intelligence. They included Drake and Lilly, radio expert Dana Atchley, biochemist Melvin Calvin, optical astronomer Su-Shu Huang, computing pioneer Barney Oliver, Russian radio astronomer Otto Struve, and a young Carl Sagan. To begin with they wanted to get an idea of how many ET’s were possibly out there. They came up with what is no referred to as ‘The Drake Equation’.

• Lilly used this meeting to tell his colleagues about his dolphin research, pointing out that the dolphin’s brain was actually larger and more complex than the human brain. The dolphin was clearly an intelligent being. Lilly even heard signs of language and empathy in recordings of the dolphins.

• But after this 1961 meeting, Lilly began introducing substances such as ketamine and LSD in his research to assist in communicating with dolphins. Drake and some other scientists began to distance themselves from Lilly’s dolphin research, calling it “poor science” and “unreliable”. As a result, Lilly’s work has tainted subsequent attempts to understand the intelligence of dolphins.

• Still, this episode in the history scientific research spawned the SETI research of today. More resources than ever are pouring into SETI efforts, thanks in part to a $100 million project from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner called Breakthrough Listen. As we search for intelligent aliens in ‘habitable zones’, we also may discover life that existed in Mars’s past, or currently on the moons Enceladus, Europa, Titan or Triton.

[Editor’s Note]   The advances in our knowledge of intelligent extraterrestrial life that we will see in the near future, and indeed, the existence of extraterrestrials on and around our own planet, will make these initial scientific explorations trivial, if not irrelevant. We are on the brink of an entirely new and exciting exo-scientific age.

 

In 1961, when UFOs were all the rage, a group of top scientific minds met in secret at a rural observatory in West Virginia. At the time, the Green Bank Observatory was the biggest, baddest telescope in the burgeoning practice of radio astronomy. While the list of meeting attendees now reads like a who’s who of the era’s luminaries, the reason they gathered covertly was because of the taboo nature of their topic of discussion. These scientists wanted to find, and talk to, aliens. They didn’t know it, but they were about to launch the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

SETI First Steps

Let’s back up a moment. In 1958, a newly minted Harvard PhD named Frank Drake came to Green Bank. Usually he sought out typical radio astronomy targets — the Van Allen Belts around Earth, say, or the surface temperature of Venus, or the radiation belts of Jupiter.

But one day in 1960, Drake and his colleagues instead tuned into two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Their goal was simple: they were alien hunting, hoping to hear radio communications originating from intelligent extraterrestrials.

UFOs were popular then, but Drake’s research was legitimate, one of the first dedicated scientific searches for aliens. Drake had been spurred on by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, who the previous year had co-authored a Nature paper with the provocative title “Searching for Interstellar Communications.” It remains a foundational SETI text.

Much to Drake’s surprise, his team actually heard something in those first few experiments. Unfortunately, it ended up being just a high altitude plane. Project Ozma, as the research was called (after L Frank Baum’s fictional monarch of Oz), was both the first SETI experiment and the first SETI false alarm.

“We had failed to detect a genuine alien signal, it was true, but we had succeeded in demonstrating that searching was a feasible, and even reasonable, thing to do,” Drake wrote in his book Is Anyone Out There?, co-written with science writer Dava Sobel.

Talking to Dolphins

While Drake was launching some of the first SETI programs, John Lilly — a physician, philosopher, writer and inventor — was attempting to communicate with his own alien intelligence. He just wasn’t looking quite as far.

Humans are, in fact, surrounded by intelligence. Our fellow great apes understand the rudiments of language, and seem to possess highly organized social structures, tool-making skills and self-awareness. Creatures literally great and small — elephants and crows — have many of these qualities as well. (Alas, the pig is also remarkably intelligent; your bacon was likely self aware.)

Intelligent life isn’t isolated to land, either. The octopus brain is one of the most remarkable on Earth, and its close cousin, the cuttlefish, is no slouch either. But the superstars of the sea, to most humans, are marine mammals, especially dolphins and whales.

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Humanity Is Likely The Only Intelligent Civilization

by Lorenzo Tanos            June 22, 2018            (inquisitr.com)

• Oxford University senior fellow Anders Sanberg, Oxford moral philosopher Tod Ord, and nanotechnology “founding father” Eric Drexler have combined to release a study entitled “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” that was published on June 8th. It seems that humanity on this Earth is the only intelligent civilization in the galaxy, nay, the entire universe.

• The esteemed researchers also revisited the Drake equation, which was proposed in the 1960’s by astronomer Frank Drake, factoring in a number of variables to show how there are various places in our galaxy  where one can find intelligent extraterrestrial life (approximately 10 places actually according to Drake).

• These deep thinking Brits have erased the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life in the galaxy to fewer than even Drake would have conceded. Zero. They arrived at their conclusion using ‘new chemical and genetic transition models’, coupled with the time-tested theorem that it would be just too unlikely that another advanced humanoid civilization comparable to our own could have pulled themselves out of the primordial ooze like we did.

• These academic giants do acknowledge, however, that there is a “considerable amount of scientific uncertainties” in the equation, and that this approach is “purely based on guesswork” and “what we already know”, and that “we shouldn’t be too surprised if we find (extraterrestrial) intelligence”.

[Editor’s Rant] This article and its’ companion article “Nazi UFO Toy Pulled for Historical Inaccuracy”, in which a German historian instigated the removal of a model of a Nazi Haunebu spacecraft from the toy company’s product line because “it never existed”, are glaring examples of how desperate the governmental Deep State and the global elite cabal is to suppress the public’s knowledge.

From removing a model of the Nazi Haunebu to Amazon’s decision not to offer Dr Michael Salla’s new book, Antarctica’s Hidden History for sale in all of Europe because a Nazi flag is shown in small part on the book’s cover (even though Dr Salla found many other books sold in Europe with prominent Nazi swastikas on their cover (see ExoNews article here), to insisting here that there is no such thing as extraterrestrial beings, the cabal is going the extra distance to whitewash the true history of the past century.

The giant multi-national banks and corporations hold sway over smaller companies to do their bidding, while both academia and the media are compelled to propagate the cabal’s decreed historical narrative.

On this July 4th Independence Day let us begin to free ourselves from the cabal’s programming, start thinking for ourselves, and outwardly respect and support those who dare to present an ‘alternative viewpoint’ that just happens to be the truth.

 

Are there other intelligent civilizations out there? Although there has yet to be solid, tangible proof of advanced alien life beyond our planet, many scientists and organizations continue searching for these extraterrestrial civilizations. However, there is a theory — physicist Enrico Fermi’s eponymous paradox — that illustrates the contradiction between the good chance that alien life exists and the aforementioned lack of evidence to back that up. A recent study has offered a new take on that classic paradox, and as it seems, the new interpretation suggests that humanity is the universe’s, or at least the Milky Way’s, only intelligent civilization.

Originally published on June 8 and recently posted on Arxiv, the study entitled “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox” was authored by Oxford University senior fellow Anders Sanberg, Oxford moral philosopher Tod Ord, and nanotechnology “founding father” Eric Drexler. As summarized by Universe Today, the researchers also revisited the Drake equation, which was proposed in the 1960s by astronomer Frank Drake, factoring in a number of variables to show how there are various places in our galaxy where one can find intelligent extraterrestrial life.

New variables, namely chemical and genetic transition models, were taken into account by the researchers, who then concluded that there is a “considerable amount of scientific uncertainties” in the equation. That’s on top of the uncertainties already present in the equation’s existing variables — the average rate of star formation in the Milky Way, the percentage of stars with planets, the number of planets that could support life, the number of plants that could facilitate life, the number of planets capable of developing intelligent life, the number of civilizations that could invent transmission technologies, and the length of time it might take to transmit those signals into space. All of these figures are multiplied by each other to come up with the likely number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way.

In an email sent to Universe Today, Sanberg explained the aforementioned uncertainties, which remain in place decades after the Drake equation was formulated. He said that it’s common for people to guess the values corresponding to each of the variables, which creates results that are likewise purely based on guesswork .

When trying to reinterpret the Fermi paradox, the researchers considered each of the parameters in the Drake equation as “uncertainty ranges,” with a smallest and largest possible value based on what we know today about each variable. Universe Today noted that there are some values that are more certain than others, such as the number of planets in the Milky Way, based on recent studies on exoplanets, and the number of planets within a star’s habitable zone.

After combining all the ranges, the researchers got a “broad spread” because there were so many parameters with uncertain values. But Sanberg told Universe Today that this spread helped him and his fellow researchers come up with a figure determining the likelihood that we are our galaxy’s sole intelligent civilization, at least based on what we already know.

Sanberg added that further review of scientific literature could result in more “extreme” results, where there is a “stronger uncertainty” about our galaxy’s number of civilizations, which suggests that there’s a very good chance humanity is “alone” as an intelligent civilization.

“However, we *also* conclude that we shouldn’t be too surprised if we find intelligence!” Sanberg hinted.

As stressed by Universe Today, the new study on the Fermi paradox does not absolutely say that humanity is “alone” and that it’s impossible to find proof of extraterrestrial life, but merely says that it’s likelier than ever that we might be the only advanced species in the Milky Way. As such, Sanberg stated that the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI) is definitely not pointless, though, at this point, there is so much uncertainty that needs to be reduced, largely through the many SETI initiatives being carried out at the present

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