Tag: Adam Frank

NASA to Fund Search for Signs of Alien ‘Technosignatures’ and Air Pollution

Article by Jamie Carter                           June 19, 2020                             (forbes.com)

• In the first NASA non-radio technosignatures grant ever awarded, and the first NASA grant in over three decades connected with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), NASA has awarded the University of Rochester (NY), Harvard University and the Smithsonian funding for a study entitled: Characterizing Atmospheric Technosignatures, to find ‘technosignatures’ that would indicate the presence of life on exoplanets within another star system.

• Technosignatures are scientific evidence of past or present technology similar to the type that we produce here on Earth. “Such signatures might include industrial pollution of atmospheres, city lights, photovoltaic cells (solar panels), megastructures, or swarms of satellites,” said Harvard’s Avi Loeb. The study will focus first on finding evidence of solar panels and chemical pollution. The presence of chlorofluorocarbons in exoplanetary atmospheres could indicate the presence of industrial activity.

• “There are only so many forms of energy in the Universe,” said Adam Frank at the University of Rochester. Any alien civilization is bound to have thought of solar power generation. “The nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, hosts a habitable planet, Proxima b. The planet is thought to be tidally locked with permanent day and night sides,” said Loeb. “If a civilization wants to illuminate or warm up the night side, they would place photovoltaic cells on the day-side and transfer the electric power gained to the night side.”

• Some astronomers believe that technosignatures may be simpler to find than evidence of microbial life—known as ‘biosignatures’ – which detect chemicals such as oxygen and methane. Says Loeb, “If another civilization had been doing it for much longer than we have, then their planet’s atmosphere might show detectable signs of artificially produced molecules that nature is very unlikely to produce spontaneously.”

• In the past five years, many thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, some of which are in their star systems’ habitable zones and could have water vapor in their atmospheres. “Now we know where to look. We have thousands of exoplanets including planets in the habitable zone where life can form,” says Frank. “The game has changed.” Loeb’s hope is that “[by] using this grant, we will quantify new ways to probe signs of alien technological civilizations that are similar to or much more advanced than our own.” The scientists eventually want to begin an online library of technosignatures that astrophysicists can use when gathering data.

• [Editor’s Note]   This is just more time and money wasted by deep state-controlled institutions such as Harvard and the Smithsonian (and now add the University of Rochester to the list) who only want to hide the fact that since at least WWII, the US government and the cabal elite have known of the presence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings and civilizations permeating our galaxy and universe, and have been secretly studying and working with these beings to their own ends, which has nothing to do with elevating human development here on Earth. They have no intention of “discovering” and revealing to the public any extraterrestrial civilizations.

 

Space agency NASA has awarded a grant to a group of astronomers to search the Universe for signs of alien civilizations via “technosignatures”—and it will focus first on finding evidence of solar panels and chemical pollution.

                 Adam Frank

Technosignatures are scientific evidence of past or present technology, which of course would indicate the presence of life in another star system. Some think that these technosignatures may be simpler to find than direct evidence of microbial life—known as biosignatures.

                    Avi Loeb

“Technosignatures relate to signatures of advanced alien technologies similar to, or perhaps more sophisticated than, what we possess,” said Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard. “Such signatures might include industrial pollution of atmospheres, city lights, photovoltaic cells (solar panels), megastructures, or swarms of satellites.”

Put simply, the scientists at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian, and the University of Rochester, will look for exactly the same technosignatures that we produce.

It’s believed that other civilizations would probably use solar panels to produce energy, and also probably pollute their planet’s atmosphere with artificial chemicals and gases.

How and why to find solar panels around distant planets

How does an astronomer look for sunlight reflected off solar panels around a distant exoplanet? As long as they know the wavelength band to search in—which is what this study will try to establish—astronomers training their telescopes on exoplanets may be able to spot these technosignatures.
Any alien civilisation is bound to have thought of solar power generation, think the scientists. “There are only so many forms of energy in the Universe,” said Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and the primary recipient of the grant. “Aliens are not magic.”

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Are Humans a Genetic Accident?

Listen to “E81 8-30-19 Are-Humans-a-Genetic-Accident?” on Spreaker.
August 22, 2019                       (dailygalaxy.com)

• Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist in what they call the Abiogenesis Zone. Would it contain life? Intelligent life? Human-like intelligent life?

• At some point the cosmos must have harbored extraterrestrial life, argues astrophysicist Adam Frank in a New York Times article “Yes, There Have Been Aliens”, Frank reasons that with an estimated 10 billion trillion habitable planets residing in boundless star system’s Goldilocks Zones, and considering that there are two planets in our own solar system – Earth and Mars – that we know have contained water and vegetation in its history, the degree of pessimism required to doubt the existence of another advanced extraterrestrial civilization existing at some point in time, borders on the irrational.

• On the other hand, there may have been only a handful of civilizations that have come and gone throughout a timeline of billions of years, decreasing the odds of two of them running into one another. How long does a civilization typically exist? It took the human race 7 million years to get far enough just to build a radio. Adam Frank points out that we haven’t the slightest clue how life arose on this planet, and what series of happenstance allowed primordial ooze to evolve into an intelligent being. Who knows what sort of life might be spawned on a different planet under different circumstances? The development of life is quite an unreliable process which further decreases the odds of our finding another civilization.

• Colin Blakemore, a neurobiologist at Oxford University, estimates that 200,000 years ago the brains of some, but not all, of an ancient primate species mutated into an intelligent human species. As it is unknown how this could have happened, it appears that humanity is a genetic accident. Then suddenly, over mere hundreds of years, we’ve recently develop the technological means to destroy ourselves. Perhaps, as Harvard’s Avi Loeb hypothesized in his book: How to Search for Dead Cosmic Civilizations, the explanation to Fermi’s paradox as to ‘where are all of the aliens?’ , is – from a cosmic perspective of billions of years – that they have all run the course of their brief existences.

• Paul Rimmer, an astrophysicist at Cambridge University, is pessimistic that life might exist outside of our own world. “You want to at least look at the places where the (building blocks of life) exist,” says Rimmer. “But they may not be sufficient. It’s possible you could mix them for billions of years and nothing happens.” Rimmer speculates that life itself may have come as one big accident. If so, then we are probably the only intelligent life in the universe, and maybe the only life at all. But this seems highly unlikely.

• [Editor’s Note]   Oh how the world yearns for the truth about how we humans came to this point. These academics and scientists, coming from Deep State institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, must adhere to the Rockefeller Deep State presumption that as hard as we’ve tried, we have yet to find any evidence of extraterrestrial life. This is to ignore and obfuscate the multitude of evidence all around us – from ancient rock and renaissance paintings of ETs and UFOs, to modern testimony of ET and UFO sightings and personal experiences, to leaks of classified government documents, to consistent reports by credible insiders that various extraterrestrial species have been working behind the scenes with the Deep State government and the covert development of various secret space programs over the past eighty years. When these mainstream “experts” are finally unshackled from the Deep State-controlled narrative, they will relearn a history that answers all of their questions.

The universe, our galaxy, and our local star cluster of 52 stars is teeming with intelligent and highly advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, we Earth humans here in third density consciousness are at the bottom of the developmental totem pole. The fossil records suggest that we suddenly appeared here on Earth because, well, we suddenly appeared here on Earth. Human-like species of a wide variety of races happen to dominate this region of our galaxy. For millions of years, Earth was used as a haven for some of these third density races to escape catastrophes or wars on their home planets. For hundreds of thousands of years, technologically advanced extraterrestrials conducted genetic experiments on these different human-like species to create a congruent human species made up of various races, genetically and physiologically adapted to this particular planet. Higher density beings sat back to allow the Earth humans to develop uninhibited, while technologically advanced negative beings did their best to infiltrate and control the planet.

Some of these refugees came here upon the destruction of their Super Earth home which blew up and became the asteroid belt about a half million years ago. It left nearby Mars a barren husk of what it once was. About 55,000 year ago they resettled on Atlantis, an island that was and is part of the Antarctica continent. Then they set out to conquer the planet, evolving from the Pharaoh priest class into the “church and crown” medieval rulers, and then into the modern Illuminati cabal. This bloodline of the “Sons of Belial” worked with the advanced negative extraterrestrials over millennia to fully control the planet. But we now happen to be at the precise point in our species’ history when a solar energy event will cause the planet, and those humans on the planet who are prepared, to ascend to a fourth density of consciousness, and take our place among our human star cousins. This will extract us from the control of the dark ET/cabal alliance. The dark forces want to maintain the status quo and prevent this shift in consciousness by keeping the human population ignorant of the truth. They do this through their official control over the mainstream narrative which denies that extraterrestrial life exists beyond this small planet, and propagating articles such as this one.

 

Insights from the world’s leading scientists on evolution, climate change, technology and extraterrestrial life. We are the only species of the billions of species that have existed on Earth that has shown an aptitude for radios and even we failed to build one during the first 99% of our 7 million year history, says Australia National University’s Charley Lineweaver.

Are Homo sapiens a one-off, genetic accident?

             Adam Frank

Scientists have identified a group of planets outside our solar system where the same

Paul Rimmer

chemical conditions that may have led to life on Earth exist in what they call the Abiogenesis Zone. It’s also possible that if there is extraterrestrial life, that it has, or will, develop in a totally different way than it did on Earth.

“I’m not sure how contingent life is, but given that we only have one example so far, it makes sense to look for places that are most like us,” said Cambridge University astrochemist, Paul Rimmer. “There’s an important distinction between what is necessary and what is sufficient. The building blocks are necessary, but they may not be sufficient, it’s possible you could mix them for billions of years and nothing happens. But you want to at least look at the places where the necessary things exist.

Rimmer speculates that life may have come from non-life as one big accident. This seems highly unlikely, at least given the way our universe is set up, so if it’s that way, then we are probably the only intelligent life in the universe, maybe the only life at all.

For what purpose did the human brain evolve?

“For what purpose did the human brain evolve?” It is a question that has puzzled scientists for decades, and was answered in 2010 by Colin Blakemore, an Oxford University neurobiologist who argued that a mutation in the brain of a single human being 200,000 years ago turned intellectually able primates into a super-intelligent species that would conquer the world. Homo sapiens appears to be genetic accident. Or are we?

 

1 hour video of Adam Frank “Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds
and the Fate of the Earth” (Talks at Google YouTube)

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Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox

by Rebecca Boyle                March 7, 2019                   (quantamagazine.org)

• The universe is filled with stars, nearly all those stars have planets, and some of those planets are surely livable. So where is everybody? This is the ongoing conundrum that is the Fermi Paradox, first presented by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950.

• In 1981, Carl Sagan and William Newman speculated that the answer to the paradox was that intelligent people were simply too far away from us to come here. But they may do so in time. Others reason that tech-savvy civilizations are rare and prone to self-destruction, or are avoiding the Earth on purpose. In 1975, the astrophysicist Michael Hart declared there simply are no other intelligence civilizations in the universe (a hypothesis recently revived by Oxford researcher, Anders Samberg).

• Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester, has led another study, now under review by The Astrophysical Journal. Carroll-Nellenback says that it wouldn’t take very long for a space-faring civilization to spread across the galaxy because the movement of stars throughout the galaxy would “… spread life on time scales much shorter than the age of the galaxy” and help distribute life. “The sun has been around the center of the Milky Way 50 times.” According to simulations by Carroll-Nellenback and his colleagues Jason Wright, Adam Frank, and Caleb Scharf, natural variability will mean that sometimes galaxies will be settled, but often not — solving Fermi’s quandary.

• But the fact that no interstellar visitors are here now does not mean they do not exist, the study’s authors say. Civilizations do not last forever. Not every star is a destination, and not every planet is habitable. There’s also what Frank calls “the Aurora effect,” in which settlers arrive at a habitable planet on which they nonetheless cannot survive. When Carroll-Nellenback and his coauthors included these impediments in their model and ran simulations with different star densities, seed civilizations, spacecraft velocities and other variations, they found a vast middle ground between a silent, empty galaxy and one teeming with life. It’s possible that the Milky Way is partially settled, or intermittently so.

• Frank and Wright say that now we need to look for alien signals, which will be possible as more sophisticated telescopes open their eyes to the panoply of exoplanets and begin glimpsing their atmospheres. “We are entering an era when we are going to have actual data relevant to life on other planets,” Frank said. “This couldn’t be more relevant than in the moment we live.”

• [Editor’s Note]   The wrangling over Fermi’s Paradox continues among mainstream scientists who are groping for an answer to a flawed premise. When you take the premise that no interstellar beings have ever visited the Earth as “Fact A”, there’s nowhere to go. It becomes a perpetual debate on why there are no beings here besides us. But this is a falsehood from the start. Of course there are extraterrestrial beings all around us. We have real evidence that they have been here for thousands of years, and anecdotal evidence that they have been here for hundreds of millions or even a couple of billion years. This galaxy and the universe are teeming with intelligent life. All of the 52 star systems in our local star cluster have human-like civilizations very similar to our own. We are apparently the last to join this community. It is our time. The problem is that the powers that be, which control the Deep State government and the mainstream science community, have made it a priority to keep Earth humans completely ignorant and unaware of our true reality, often through silly “scientific studies” such as this one.

 

As far as anyone knows, we have always been alone. It’s just us on this pale blue dot, “home to everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of,” as Carl Sagan so memorably put it. No one has called or dropped by. And yet the universe is filled with stars, nearly all those stars have planets, and some of those planets are surely livable. So where is everybody?

The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was purportedly the first to pose this question, in 1950, and scientists have offered a bounty of solutions for his eponymous paradox since. One of the most famous came from Sagan himself, with William Newman, who postulated in a 1981 paperthat we just need patience. Nobody has visited because they’re all too far away; it takes time to evolve a species intelligent enough to invent interstellar travel, and time for that species to spread across so many worlds. Nobody is here yet.

Other researchers have argued that extraterrestrial life might rarely become space-faring (just as only one species on Earth ever has). Some argue that tech-savvy species, when they arise, quickly self-destruct. Still others suggest aliens may have visited in the past, or that they’re avoiding us on purpose, having grown intelligent enough to be suspicious of everyone else. Perhaps the most pessimistic answer is a foundational paper from 1975, in which the astrophysicist Michael Hart declared that the only plausible reason nobody has visited is that there really is nobody out there.

Now comes a paper that rebuts Sagan and Newman, as well as Hart, and offers a new solution to the Fermi paradox that avoids speculation about alien psychology or anthropology.

The research, which is under review by The Astrophysical Journal, suggests it wouldn’t take as long as Sagan and Newman thought for a space-faring civilization to planet-hop across the galaxy, because the movements of stars can help distribute life. “The sun has been around the center of the Milky Way 50 times,” said Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, an astronomer at the University of Rochester, who led the study. “Stellar motions alone would get you the spread of life on time scales much shorter than the age of the galaxy.” Still, although galaxies can become fully settled fairly quickly, the fact of our loneliness is not necessarily paradoxical: According to simulations by Carroll-Nellenback and his colleagues, natural variability will mean that sometimes galaxies will be settled, but often not — solving Fermi’s quandary.

The question of how easy it would be to settle the galaxy has played a central role in attempts to resolve the Fermi paradox. Hart and others calculated that a single space-faring species could populate the galaxy within a few million years, and maybe even as quickly as 650,000 years. Their absence, given the relative ease with which they should spread, means they must not exist, according to Hart.

Sagan and Newman argued it would take longer, in part because long-lived civilizations are likelier to grow more slowly. Faster-growing, rapacious societies might peter out before they could touch all the stars. So maybe there have been a lot of short-lived, fast-growing societies that wink out, or a few long-lived, slowly expanding societies that just haven’t arrived yet, as Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, a coauthor of the new study, summarized Sagan and Newman’s argument. But Wright doesn’t agree with either solution.

“That conflates the expansion of the species as a whole with the sustainability of individual settlements,” he said. “Even if it is true for one species, it is not going to be this iron-clad law of xenosociology where if they are expanding, they are necessarily short-lived.” After all, he noted, life on Earth is robust, “and it expands really fast.”

In their new paper, Carroll-Nellenback, Wright and their collaborators Adam Frank of Rochester and Caleb Scharf of Columbia University sought to examine the paradox without making untestable assumptions. They modeled the spread of a “settlement front” across the galaxy, and found that its speed would be strongly affected by the motions of stars, which previous work — including Sagan and Newman’s — treated as static objects. The settlement front could cross the entire galaxy based just on the motions of stars, regardless of the power of propulsion systems. “There is lots of time for exponential growth basically leading to every system being settled,” Carroll-Nellenback said.

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