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Aliens On Earth? Elon Musk Has His Doubts

March 8, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Christine Andas February 22, 2021 (ph.asiatatler.com)

• As the CEO and founder of SpaceX, the first private company to launch a spacecraft to reach the International Space Station and to send humans to space, Elon Musk (pictured above) would most probably know if aliens do exist. In a recent interview on the Joe Rogan podcast, Rogan asked him whether extraterrestrial beings exist and are visiting the Earth. Shaking his head, Musk responded by saying, “No… To the best of my knowledge… there is no direct evidence [of] alien life [on Earth].”

• Musk then insinuated that if extraterrestrial beings were here on Earth, with so many people possessing iPhones why aren’t there any good photos of them, noting that the pictures and video released by the Pentagon and the CIA of hovering UFOs have been grainy black and white footage. The use this to claim that it is still unclear whether UFOs are indeed of extraterrestrial origin.

• In addition to being the CEO of SpaceX rocket manufacturing and Tesla Motors electric car manufacturing, Musk is the co-founder of Neuralink which develops brain-machine interfaces, and OpenAI which is developing next generation Artificial Intelligence. Musk is also the CEO of The Boring Company, which bores underground transportation tunnels. All of this has made Musk the “Richest Man in the World”.

• One need not go too far to find others who harbor doubts about the existence of extraterrestrial life – visiting the Earth or not. Most mainstream scientists and astronomers would agree. In 1979, American mathematical physicist Frank J. Tipler strongly insisted that aliens do not exist and that humans are the only intelligent species in the galaxy. In 1961, the mathematician Frank Drake developed the ‘Drake Equation’ wherein he estimated that there are likely only ten other planets in the Milky Way galaxy that might harbor extraterrestrial civilizations. Recently, Tom Westby and Christopher J. Conselice used the Drake Equation to arrive at their own estimate that no more than 36 alien civilizations exist in the galaxy. And of course, none of them have reached Earth.

• [Editor’s Note] Let’s see. A high-profile space transportation company clinging to outdated rocket propulsion technology. An electric car manufacturing company. A company developing Artificial Intelligence and a sister company integrating that technology into the human brain. And a deep underground tunnel boring company. Elon Musk’s vast fortune depends entirely on the Deep State and the cabal’s nefarious plans for the future. So of course Musk is going to go along with the Deep State’s cover-up of the existence of the numerous extraterrestrial races with whom cabal operatives here on Earth continually interact. The Deep State has been keeping the existence of extraterrestrials and their advanced technology from the people of Earth since the inception of the CIA and Majestic 12 in 1947. They simply want this highly advanced alien technology all to themselves, so that they can dominate the Earth and our solar system. Since Musk is so closely tied to this elite cabal of government, bankers and industrialists, he must know the truth about the extraterrestrial presence. This makes Elon Musk a liar and a Deep State stooge, as I have been saying for years.

“To the best of my knowledge… there is no direct evidence [of] alien life [on earth],” Elon Musk recently said in a new interview

with Joe Rogan. Rogan was hoping Musk would know (or at least hint at) the existence of these cosmo beings but Elon only responded by shaking his head, saying “no”.

“Somebody’s gotta at least have an iPhone 1 level camera,” he added. This rings true considering all the UFO footage that the Pentagon released last year and CIA’s UFO files which were released recently. The Pentagon’s grainy black and white footage revealed a hovering figure. Although the unidentified flying object was evident in the footage, it’s still unclear if it was the work of an extraterrestrial being.

As the CEO and founder of SpaceX, the first private company to launch a spacecraft to reach the space station and send humans to space, Musk would most probably know if aliens do exist. He has mastered multiple fields namely rocket science, engineering,

transportation and aerospace. Apart from SpaceX, Elon is also the CEO of Tesla Motors and The Boring Company. He is also the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. Currently, Elon’s prowess and success have earned him the title “Richest Man in the World”.

CONTRASTING INTELLIGENT LIFE STUDIES

One would think that the copious amount of alien studies, footage, and documents that we have would finally answer the questions we have been asking for years. But these discoveries are only revealing contrasting finds made by scientists and astronomers alike.

In 1979, American mathematical physicist Frank J. Tipler strongly insists that aliens do not exist and that humans are the only intelligent species to exist in the galaxy.

The Drake Equation which Frank Drake started in 1961 is an argument used to estimate the number of alien civilisations in the milky way galaxy. It helped Drake estimate 10 planets in the milky way. Since then, various scientists have used the Drake Equation in an attempt to make the best guesses. It helped Tom Westby and Christopher J. Conselice in their new study. They claim that alien life is existent but rare—only 36 alien societies reside within the milky way.

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Milky Way is Littered with Dead Alien Civilizations

January 3, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Charlotte Edwards December 21, 2020 (thesun.ie)

• A study has been published to the arXiv database that models the evolution of the Milky Way since its estimated beginning, around 13 billion years ago. Authored by three Caltech physicists and a high school student, the new model builds on the famous equation developed by SETI founder Frank Drake in the 1960s. Using astronomy and statistical modeling, the researchers estimated how much intelligent life could have lived – and died – within our Milky Way galaxy.

• The researchers looked at rocky earth-like planets outside our solar system that are near Sun-like stars, and considered whether there would have been a time period when life could have formed there – taking into account that intelligent beings typically end up destroying themselves. According to their model, intelligent life could have emerged 8 billion years after the Milky Way formed, in a region 13,000 light-years from the galactic center – which is half as far from the galactic center as Earth.

• The study suggests that early galactic civilizations reached their peak 5 billion years ago, but it is most likely they annihilated themselves due to something like nuclear war or climate change.

• The researchers are now waiting for their work to be peer reviewed.

• [Editor’s Note] Okay. How is this disinformation? Let me count the ways. First, it is a study conducted by physicists at CalState in Pasadena, a town which is practically owned by the CIA. Their model was based on the highly conjectural ‘Drake Equation’ in which the number of possible intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, besides the Earth, ranges from millions to zero. This equation was arrived at by Frank Drake, who founded deep state-riddled SETI. Their new “study” promotes the theory that all other civilizations have died off from ‘nuclear war or climate change’, to bolster the public’s fear of climate change (as an excuse for many parts of the deep state’s agenda of fear and helplessness), and to promote the idea that we are most likely all alone in this galaxy. This study is only meant to propagate the deep state’s long-standing policy of preventing the public from knowing the truth – that our Milky Way galaxy is positively teeming with civilizations and a wide variety of species of intelligent beings, and our solar system is no exception.

Researchers used astronomy and statistical modelling to estimate how much intelligent life could have

lived and died out in the Milky Way.

The study has been published to the arXiv database.

It builds on a famous 1960s equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake created.

The new model was written by three Caltech physicists and a high school student.

It looks at when and where life is most likely to live in the universe and also takes into account the idea that intelligent beings seem to end up destroying themselves.

The researchers looked at rocky earth-like planets outside our Solar System that are near Sun-like stars.

Even if these planets are now un-habitable due to radiation or other factors, the scientists considered whether there would have been a time period when life could have formed there.

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My Dad Launched the Quest to Find Alien Intelligence

July 2, 2020
ExoNews Editor

Article by Nadia Drake June 22, 2020 (nationalgeographic.co.uk)

• In the spring of 1960, with a budget of less then $2,000 and access to an 85-foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, a 29-year-old astronomer named Frank Drake set out to look for signs of intelligent alien life beyond Earth. For three months, the telescope scanned its targets and found nothing more than cosmic static.

• Back in the 1960s, astronomers knew of no worlds beyond our solar system. But Drake reasoned that other worlds might be populated by civilizations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos, as we on Earth had been doing for decades. “Searching for intelligent life was considered bad science in those days,” says Drake, who just turned 90 years old.

• So Drake designed an experiment called Project Ozma, after the princess in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series. Even though Ozma failed to find evidence of extraterrestrial technologies, the project was the first step toward solving a monumental mystery. In 1961, the National Academy of Sciences asked Drake to convene a meeting at Green Bank to further discuss the search for intelligent life. While organizing that meeting, he casually came up with the now-famous ‘Drake Equation’, a framework for estimating how many civilizations might be detectable in the Milky Way galaxy.

• Project Ozma was transformed into the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or ‘SETI’. “There were radio astronomers all over the place who wanted to do SETI searches,” says Drake. But SETI projects in the US, Australia and Europe failed to gain ground. “It still had this problem of being considered flaky stuff.”

• In the Soviet Union, however, astronomers learned of Ozma and eagerly started scanning stars for signs of life. “There were far fewer restrictions on what Soviet scientists could do. They had kind of steady budgets because of the way the centralized communist government worked. They could kind of do whatever they wanted,” said science historian Rebecca Charbonneau of the University of Cambridge.

• The Soviets and Americans would meet to exchange ideas about searching for intelligent life. While the Cold War raged, U.S. and Soviet astronomers worked congenially in competition to first detect extraterrestrial life. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the relationship morphed into friendship within a global community.

• SETI had been funded by NASA. But by the 1990s, Congress began to cut federal funding for SETI projects, calling it “Martian hunting” and a waste of taxpayer dollars. The nonprofit SETI Institute, founded in 1984 at the University of California, Berkeley, was on its own.

• But in 1995, astronomers discovered the first ‘exoplanet’ outside of our own solar system. It was a Jupiter-like world, called 51 Pegasi b, orbiting a sun-like star. But it was considered inhospitable for life as we know it. Since then, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets with many having conditions favorable to life. We’ve learned that planets vastly outnumber stars in the Milky Way, providing billions of places for intelligent alien civilizations to exist.

• In 2015, a 10-year, $86 million project called Breakthrough Listen was funded by Silicon Valley tech investor Yuri Milner to harnesses the world’s sharpest radio telescopes, such as the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Parkes Observatory in Australia, to search the nearest million stars for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Now, halfway through its tenure, it has yet to find any. It will soon add to its search the MeerKAT array of radio dishes in South Africa.

• Astronomers have expanded their search parameters beyond interstellar radio signals. They now also look for optical pulses, waste heat generated by powerful civilizations, and any other signs known as ‘technosignatures’. One of these projects is called PANOSETI, designed to scan the entire sky for fleeting but intense flashes of optical and infrared light. Led by Shelley Wright, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, the project will capture information about transient astronomical phenomena such as supernovae —and, just maybe, artificial transmissions.

• Today, some say that SETI is in the midst of a renaissance. Large projects are kicking off, funds are materializing, and astronomy courses now include a broader perspective on humanity’s place in the universe. If SETI can maintain its current momentum, astronomers are optimistic that future projects could be even more ambitious – maybe even installing a radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, the only place in the solar system where Earth’s constant transmissions don’t overwhelm radio signals from the cosmos.

• SETI astronomers believe that they may soon discover another extraterrestrial civilization. Or we may be the only active civilization at this moment in time. Other civilizations may have risen and fallen during the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe. It make take a few million more years for nascent lifeforms on exoplanets to evolve complex metabolisms and technological intelligence.

• In any case, the answer to Frank Drake’s question of “where are the extraterrestrials” has the potential to change the course of humanity’s future. Drake says that he didn’t anticipate how captivating the search would be, or how SETI would grow into the enterprise it is today, although it still hasn’t completely shed the “giggle factor”. Public funding is difficult. The field has relatively few dedicated practitioners, and it has yet to fully infiltrate the halls of academia. But momentum is gathering.

• [Editor’s Note] I have no doubt that Frank Drake was sincere in his initial Ozma quest to detect errant radio signals from space to try to discover other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Likewise, Frank’s daughter Nadia has every reason to be proud of her father. But just like the rest of us, the Drakes and other honest astronomers have been obstructed by the deep state. While from the 60s to the 80s, the deep state allowed NASA funding of SETI efforts, they knew that technology embargo and the ‘giggle factor’ which the deep state had imposed on the scientific community would prevent SETI from finding anything or being taken seriously. By the 1990s, conventional technology was rapidly developing, so the deep state government cut off funding and infiltrated these programs with counter-productive deep state operatives. Those who now run SETI are only interested in using the project for disinformation purposes – to satisfy the public that smart people are working diligently but fruitlessly to discover evidence of another intelligent civilization in our galaxy, because these extraterrestrial beings simply don’t exist. In reality, intelligent extraterrestrial worlds permeate this galaxy and the entire universe. The elite deep state hierarchy has secretly been working with these extraterrestrials since World War II. During the past seventy years, they have developed a handful of secret space programs, including bases and colonies on the Moon, on Mars, and on celestial bodies throughout the solar system and beyond. As Richard Dolan famously put it, our shadow government has created a ‘breakaway civilization’, concealed from the people on Earth who serve as unwitting slaves to generate an industrial economy for these elite ‘puppet masters’ to utilize for their own purposes, which excludes the rest of us.

In the spring of 1960, a 29-year-old astronomer with streaks of preternaturally white hair and a devil-may-care attitude set out to tackle one of humanity’s most existential questions: Are we alone in the universe?

Frank Drake, then an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, was gearing up to search for radio whispers from faraway civilizations that might be sailing the cosmic sea. For such a grand quest, he had a budget of £1,600 and access to a radio telescope thought to be sensitive enough to detect transmissions from any potentially broadcasting extraterrestrials.

“Searching for intelligent life was considered bad science in those days,” says Drake, who just turned 90 years old—and is better known to me as Dad.
At the time, looking for evidence of alien technologies was still squarely in the camp of schlocky science fiction. But for my dad, it was worth taking a risk to find out if the cosmos is as richly populated as Earth’s teeming oceans—or if humanity is adrift in a profoundly quiet interstellar expanse.

Humble and curious, with a knack for quiet mischief, Dad is committed to his science, still writing research papers and serving on committees. My early memories are full of trips to observatories and conferences, and the singular pleasure of staring through telescopes at the twinkling sky. I was never bitten by the academic astronomy bug, though.

It wasn’t until I began working as a science journalist that I realised just how risky and revolutionary Dad’s early work really was.

First light

Astronomers knew of no worlds beyond our solar system back in the 1960s, but Drake reasoned that if planets like Earth orbited stars like the sun, then those worlds might be populated by civilisations advanced enough to broadcast their presence to the cosmos. His logic made sense: For the last century, Earthlings have been making these sorts of announcements all the time in the form of TV and radio broadcasts, military radar, and other communications that leak into space.

So he designed an experiment to search for signals coming from worlds that could be orbiting the nearby stars Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti. He named the experiment Project Ozma, after the princess in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series—an homage to an adventure tale populated by exotic and unearthly beings.

Before sunrise on April 8, 1960, Drake climbed an 85-foot radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, jammed himself inside a trash-can-size piece of equipment, and launched humanity’s first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence—now known as SETI. For three months the telescope scanned its targets and found nothing more than cosmic static. The stars were stubbornly quiet.

“That was a disappointment,” Dad told me a few years ago. “We’d hoped that, in fact, there were radio-transmitting civilisations around almost every star.”

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W.Va. Ground-Zero For UFO Research, Encounters

November 19, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “e170 W.Va. Ground-Zero For UFO Research, Encounters” on Spreaker.

Article by David Sibray November 13, 2019 (wvexplorer.com)

• Dave Spinks, a top paranormal and UFO investigator and author who has appeared on the Travel Channel, the History Channel, and Destination America, says you can’t beat West Virginia when it comes to UFO lore. Spinks will speak on these matters at the Flatwoods Monster Museum in Sutton, WV on Saturday, November 23rd, and will sign copies of his new book, “Real West Virginia UFOs”.

• Spinks says West Virginia has a long association with UFO activity because of its role in the search for extraterrestrial life and because it is the location of many early UFO encounters. “Two of the earliest and most famous encounters in the U.S. were reported here,” Spinks says, referring to legendary encounters involving Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster.

• A former federal law-enforcement officer, Spinks began to collect notes about encounters with UFOs and the paranormal in the 1990s. He left law enforcement in 2011 and became a full-time paranormal investigator, appearing in nationally televised shows and in thousands of news articles and podcasts. Spinks grew up nearby near Birch River and some of the members of his family had attended school with some of the witnesses from Flatwoods. “That’s what started me thinking.”

• In 1952, people reported seeing a spacecraft crashing in the hills south of the town of Flatwoods, WV. On investigation, they encountered its apparent occupant, a super-human being called the Flatwoods Monster, which chased them from the crash site. Spinks also heard tales of Mothman, a winged creature said to haunt the Ohio Valley in the 1960s.

• West Virginia is also the home to the Green Bank Observatory where Frank Drake established the first telescopes used in the SETI program—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” Says Spinks, “Here he met with Carl Sagan” to speculate about the possibilities of intelligent (extraterrestrial) life.

A top paranormal investigator says West Virginia has a long association with UFO activity, because of its role in the search for extraterrestrial life and because it is the location of many early alleged UFO encounters.

Dave Spinks, perhaps best known for his appearances on the Travel Channel, the History

Channel, and Destination America, says you can’t beat the Mountain State when it comes to UFO lore.

“Two of the earliest and most famous encounters in the U.S. were reported here,” Spinks says, referring to legendary encounters involving Mothman and the Flatwoods Monster.

“But it was here, too, at Green Bank Observatory that Frank Drake established the first telescopes used in the SETI program—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”

“Here he met with Carl Sagan,” Spinks said, referring to the collaboration with scientists who met with the proponent of the Drake Equation, an argument used to speculate about the possibilities of intelligent life off the planet.

A former federal law-enforcement officer, Spinks began to collect notes about encounters with UFOs and the paranormal in the 1990s. However, his inspiration came from his youth spent in the hills near Flatwoods, the site of one of the state’s first encounters.

In 1952, a group of Flatwoods residents reported seeing what they believed was a spacecraft crashing in the hills south of the town. On investigation, they encountered its apparent occupant, a super-human, the Flatwoods Monster, a being that chased them from the alleged crash site.

Spinks grew up nearby near Birch River and some of the members of his family had attended school with some of the witnesses from Flatwoods. “That’s what started me thinking.”

Spinks also heard tales of Mothman, a winged creature said to haunt the Ohio Valley near Point Pleasant in the 1960s, during which West Virginians frequently watched the sky, hoping to catch a glimpse, which some claim to have done.

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Aliens ‘May Be On Their Way to Earth’ to ‘Eat, Enslave or Destroy’ Humanity, Scientist Warns

August 12, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E64 8-12-19 Aliens ‘May Be On Their Way to Earth’ to ‘Eat, Enslave or Destroy’ Humanity” on Spreaker.

Article by Jasper Hamill July 31, 2019 (metro.co.uk)

• Jacco van Loon, an astrophysicist at the University of Keele in Staffordshire, England, has issued a warning about the potentially disastrous effects of the light pollution and radio transmissions that we send into space. In an article for The Conversation, van Loon writes, ‘Images of the Earth at night reveal our presence in spectacular fashion. Cities and roads outline the contours of continents… This type of light, which has replaced older, incandescent sources, is unnatural. From the orange sodium or bluish mercury lamps to white-light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the artificial origin of this “spectrum” should be easy for technologically advanced aliens to spot.”

• Van Loon worries that technologically advanced and hostile extraterrestrials may have already detected these lights and transmissions, and may already be on their way here to invade the Earth. Professor Stephen Hawking feared that an encounter between humanity and an alien species would be disastrous. Hawking mused that extraterrestrials could be ‘rapacious marauders roaming the cosmos in search of resources to plunder, and planets to conquer and colonize’. Van Loon notes that when Columbus encountered the New World, that didn’t turn out so good for the Native Americans.

• Much effort has gone into searching space for signals transmitted by extraterrestrial civilizations. In 1974, radio astronomer Frank Drake used the then most powerful radio transmitter, at Arecibo in Puerto Rico, to broadcast a message into space announcing our presence. The message will now be 45 light years away from us. Today, SETI is better informed and better resourced. Russian billionaires Yuri and Julia Milner allocated US$100M to SETI’s ‘Breakthrough Listen’ project, which buys time on powerful telescopes to detect artificial signals from space.

• Says van Loon, “[M]any scientists now agree that sending messages into space without knowing who might be intercepting them might not be such a good idea. Once sent, it cannot be undone… Listening is much safer. But radio communication among ourselves – which includes navigation, television broadcasts and the internet – might also be detected from space.

• Scientists have started to wonder why we haven’t heard from aliens yet. This puzzle is known as the Fermi Paradox. Among the many proposed answers, one is that aliens might be afraid of other aliens. Van Loon suggests that, “Unintentionally, we may already have been observed by an amused, terrified or “interested” species, who may decide to meet us to “shake hands”, or come to enslave us, eat us, or destroy us as a precaution. We are, after all, an aggressive species ourselves.”

• [Editor’s Note] Here, professor van Loon is broadcasting more Deep State disinformation, falsely claiming that in spite of all of our efforts, no extraterrestrial beings have ever been detected. Extraterrestrial beings are all around us, and exist throughout the galaxy. While it is true that we are already enslaved by negative ETs that have long controlled our planet and our society for their own spiritual and natural resource-consuming agenda, if they were planning to invade and eat all of us they would have done so by now. But the Deep State wants people to fear all extraterrestrials, so that when positive ET beings come to expose the negative ET beings and their Earthly counterparts, we will cling to the Deep State government to protect us. This is simply part of the negative ET agenda, as they directly control the Deep State government. We need to understand the Deep State agenda and discern for ourselves who the enemy truly is.

Professor Stephen Hawking famously feared that an encounter between humanity and an alien species would be disastrous.

So you may be slightly alarmed to hear that one scientist has suggested that extraterrestrial invaders ‘may already be on their way’.

Jacco van Loon, an astrophysicist at Keele University, has issued a rather scary warning about light pollution here on Earth.

He said that we may have already given away our location to a non-human civilisation because we light up the planet every single night with electric illuminations.

For a sense of what our first encounter with aliens might be like, we’d urge you to remember that Hawking also said extraterrestrials could be ‘rapacious marauders roaming the cosmos in search of resources to plunder, and planets to conquer and colonize’. ‘

Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus,’ he continued. ‘That didn’t turn out so well.’

In an article for The Conversation, Mr van Loon, astrophysicist and director of Keele Observatory at Keele University, wrote: ‘Images of the Earth at night reveal our presence in spectacular fashion. Cities and roads outline the contours of continents, while oil platforms dot the seas and ships draw lines across the ocean. This type of light, which has replaced older, incandescent sources, is unnatural. From the orange sodium or bluish mercury lamps to white-light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the artificial origin of this “spectrum” should be easy for technologically advanced aliens to spot.

‘In the coming decades, Earth’s space agencies may be developing the means to detect such artificial light from planets around other stars. But we may fail, if aliens believe the smartest thing to do is to keep quiet and remain in the dark. We, on the other hand, may already have been seen, and they may already be on their way. This begs the question – should we dim our lights, before it’s too late?’

He went on to warn about the potentially disastrous effects of light pollution and the well-meaning, but potentially ruinous, decision to send radio transmissions out into space in the hope aliens will pick them up.

‘Since the first use of electric lamps in the 19th century, society hasn’t looked back,’ he continued.

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Yes, I’m Searching for Aliens – And No, I Won’t Be Going to Area 51 to Look For Them

July 31, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E47 7-31-19 Yes, I’m Searching for Aliens – And No, I Won’t Be Going to Area 51 to Look For Them” on Spreaker.

Article by Bryan Keogh July 19, 2019 (theconversation.com)

Astronomy professor Jason Wright is a participating scientist with SETI, the ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’, and the 2018 winner of the Frank Drake Award that SETI bestows on its researchers who are “dedicated to understanding humanity’s place in the universe”. “Believe me, no one wants to find evidence of extraterrestrial life more than those of us in this field,” says Professor Wright. “We scour the skies for evidence of such extraterrestrial technologies with some of the most advanced equipment in the world for understanding what’s going on in the sky, and we haven’t found anything compelling yet.”
With regard to the recent interest in “Storming Area 51” to emancipate aliens, Wright says, “I don’t know very much about Area 51, but I can say that the intense interest in the goings on there related to aliens reveals a deep public interest in what kinds of life might exist elsewhere in the universe.” Wright finds the most fascinating thing about Area 51 is Project Mogul, where the government floated balloons to detect Soviet nuclear testing in the 1940’s. Says Wright, “When one of those balloons… landed in a farm in Roswell, New Mexico it helped fuel the whole alien craze we’re still living with today.”
SETI’s space telescopes are designed to detect “biosignatures” with signs of microfossils or metabolism in the atmospheres of distant planets. But SETI is a privately funded operation. NASA and the National Science Foundation spend next to nothing looking for intelligent life in the universe, including technological life.
Says Professor Wright, “I see this (Frank Drake) award as validation of my work to help elevate the field of SETI as an academic discipline, and to persuade Congress, NASA and the public that it is worthy of public investment. It is, after all, the scientific approach to answering one of the most profound questions ever asked: Is Earth life unique? Or are there other beings like us out there in the universe?”
[Editor’s Note] Frank Drake was a founding member of SETI and developer of the “Drake Equation” in 1961, which uses a list of subjective variables to determine that the number of planets similar to the Earth that could possibly host an extraterrestrial civilization advanced enough to use radio-wave communication is astonishingly small. This is the basis for SETI’s nearly 60-years of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

As the most recent recipient of the Drake Award, Professor Wright is shilling for the re-establishment of SETI funding from the government which ended in 1993, even though SETI’s research has existed since the early 1960’s and they have found exactly nothing through this process. It seems that the purpose of SETI is to appear to the public to be scientifically searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, while actually finding nothing that might upset the Deep State’s cover-up of a long-standing extraterrestrial presence in our solar system. Wright pretends to know nothing about Area 51 or the Roswell crash, recognizing only Project Mogul which the Deep State used to cover-up the Roswell crash. This, apparently, is the primary criteria for being awarded the Frank Drake Award.

This is further evidence that SETI is nothing more than a Deep State disinformation program to give the public the impression that serious scientists are doing serious work to locate extraterrestrial life, but there simply isn’t any in this universe to find besides humans on planet Earth. The “scientists” at SETI believe that they should be paid handsomely by the US government for doing the Deep State’s bidding.

What started as an internet joke has generated a stern military warning after more than a million people “signed up” to “raid” Area 51 – a secretive military installation in Southern Nevada long fancied by conspiracy theorists to be hiding evidence of a crashed UFO with aliens. The purpose of the planned raid is in order to “see them aliens.” In the following Q&A, astronomy professor Jason Wright discusses the public’s interest in answering the age-old question: Are we alone?

Since you have a longstanding scholarly interest in extraterrestrial life – and even wrote about the possibility of advanced civilizations in the distant past on Mars or Venus – I presume you’ve canceled your classes for Sept. 20 and signed up to go to the “raid” on Area 51?

To be honest, I was completely unaware of this “raid” until you brought it to my attention! I work in SETI, the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and believe me, no one wants to find evidence of extraterrestrial life more than those of us in this field. We scour the skies for evidence of such extraterrestrial technologies with some of the most advanced equipment in the world for understanding what’s going on in the sky, and we haven’t found anything compelling yet. But we’re not paying much attention to what happens in Area 51.

Do you think the public knows enough about Area 51? Or is the widespread interest in this raid a good barometric read on how frustrated people are that the government appears to be hiding something there?

I don’t know very much about Area 51, but I can say that the intense interest in the goings on there related to aliens reveals a deep public interest in what kinds of life might exist elsewhere in the universe.

Have you yourself ever tried to do any real research into the happenings in Area 51?

Not Area 51, exactly. The closest I’ve come was a talk I heard by a physicist describing the fascinating science carried out by the military back in the late 1940s, especially Project Mogul, which launched microphones on balloons to see if they could detect nuclear testing going on in the Soviet Union. It’s an amazing story of physics and engineering ingenuity. When one of those balloons with its disc microphones and radar reflectors landed in a farm in Roswell, New Mexico it helped fuel the whole alien craze we’re still living with today. It’s a shame, because the science-fiction-inspired “aliens” conspiracy theory is – from my standpoint – so much less fascinating than the story of the research that was going on then.

There was a time when the federal government provided researchers with money to search for – and teach about the search for – extraterrestrial life. And you’ve lamented that that is no longer the case. If you had your way, how much money do you think the federal government should give America’s researchers to search for aliens or evidence of aliens?

The search for life in the universe is a major priority for NASA and American science. Many of our missions to Mars and our space telescopes are designed with the detection of biosignatures in mind – “biosignatures” being signs of life like microfossils or evidence of metabolism in the atmospheres of distant planets. But despite the billions of dollars spent on these missions, I think many members of the public would be surprised to learn that NASA and the National Science Foundation spend next to nothing looking for intelligent life in the universe, including technological life that might, after all, be easier to find. I think the level of funding for the field should be determined the way the rest of science is, by competitive peer review of proposals for research. So, I don’t know what the “right” level is, but I know it’s not zero.

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Apollo 11 Moon Landing Showed That Aliens Might Be More Than Science Fiction

July 31, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E51 8-03-19 A Private Tour of Roswell with a UFO Expert Looking for the Truth” on Spreaker.

Article by Brandon Specktor July 20, 2019 (livescience.com)

• On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Four days later, the astronauts were quarantined aboard the USS Hornet for a 21-day isolation period. This was to ensure that no potentially hazardous lunar microbes had hitchhiked back to Earth with them. The NASA scientists found no microbial aliens on the astronauts themselves or in the 50 pounds of lunar rocks they brought back.

• Senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak (pictured above), thinks that the Apollo 11 Moon mission did bring back aliens, in a sense. “Today, about 30 percent of the public thinks the Earth is being visited by aliens in saucers, despite the evidence of that being very poor,” says Shostak. “I think the Moon landing had something to do with that.” Live Science.com recently spoke with Shostak to find out more about how the Moon landing changed the scientific community’s pursuit of aliens and the world’s perception of them.

• LS: What did the Moon landing teach humans about extraterrestrial life? Shostak: Not too much. By 1969, most scientists expected the Moon would be dead. The Moon has no atmosphere, no liquid, and temperatures that range from hundreds of degrees to minus hundreds of degrees. “It’s awful!” But the Apollo missions showed that you could travel from one world to another on a rocket – and maybe aliens could, too. Suddenly, the universe was a little more open.

• LS: In 1969, did scientists think there might be aliens somewhere else in the solar system? Shostak: Mars was the ‘Great Red Hope’ of extraterrestrial life in the solar system. People were very optimistic in 1976 when the Viking landers plopped down onto Mars that there would be life. There wasn’t. These days, scientists will suggest looking at the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, such as Enceladus, where geysers shoot possible microbial material right into space, so you don’t have to land a spacecraft on the surface to find it.

• LS: What did the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) look like around 1969? Shostak: Modern SETI experiments began in 1960 with astronomer Frank Drake and his Project Ozma, where he searched for inhabited planets around two stars using a radio telescope. (After four years of searching, no recognizable signals were detected.) By 1969, SETI research was being conducted informally by people who were working with telescopes in their spare time, looking up the coordinates of nearby stars and hoping to pick up radio waves. It wasn’t really organized until the NASA SETI program began in the 1970’s with a budget of $10 million a year. In 1993, a democratic congressman from Nevada killed the SETI funding, in spite of the fact that the NASA program profited from the public’s fascination with aliens more than from anywhere else.

• [Editor’s Note] Previous articles have established that Seth Shostak and SETI are Deep State assets whose objective is to lull the public into complacency by reassuring them that every planet and heavenly body, besides the Earth, is ‘dead’ and unable to support life beyond possible microbial life. Lately, SETI and Shostak have been shilling for the restoration of Deep State government funding, so they can line their pockets while maintaining the ongoing Deep State cover-up of a teeming extraterrestrial presence on, within, and orbiting our planet.

On July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on Earth’s moon for the first time in human history. Four days later, they — along with Apollo 11 command module pilot Michael Collins — were locked up on an American battleship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

The triumphant astronauts were in quarantine. Per a NASA safety protocol written half a decade earlier, the three lunar visitors were escorted directly from their splashdown site in the central Pacific to a modified trailer aboard the USS Hornet, where a 21-day isolation period began. The objective? To ensure that no potentially hazardous lunar microbes hitchhiked back to Earth with them.

Of course, as NASA quickly confirmed, there were no tiny aliens lurking in the astronauts’ armpits or in the 50 pounds (22 kilograms) of lunar rocks and soil they had collected. But despite this absence of literal extraterrestrial life, the Apollo 11 astronauts still may have succeeded in bringing aliens back to Earth in another way that can still be felt 50 years later.

“Today, about 30 percent of the public thinks the Earth is being visited by aliens in saucers, despite the evidence of that being very poor,” Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute — a nonprofit research center focused on the search for alien life in the universe — told Live Science. “I think the moon landing had something to do with that.”

Shostak has been searching for signs of intelligent life in the universe for most of his life (and, fittingly, shares a birthday with the Apollo 11 landing). Live Science recently spoke with him to find out more about how the moon landing changed the scientific community’s pursuit of aliens and the world’s perception of them. Highlights of our conversation (lightly edited for clarity) appear below.

LS: What did the moon landing teach humans about extraterrestrial life?

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Efforts To Search For, Send Messages To Extraterrestrial Life Advance In Digital Age

May 8, 2019
ExoNews Editor

by Molly McCrea and Juliette Goodrich April 25, 2019 (sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com)

• In 1977, NASA scientists installed a golden record on two space probes that were part of the Voyager Mission. On each copy were dozens of images, sounds from nature, and multiple greetings in 55 different languages. The record also contained music from around the world, and included classical as well as a recording of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode.” “This was a way of telling another civilization about us,” explained the legendary astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake.

• Drake and fellow astrophysicist, the late Carl Sagan, also wrote what’s known as the Arecibo Message in 1974, the first interstellar radio message sent from earth to a globular star cluster known as M13 in hopes that extraterrestrial intelligence could receive and decipher it.

• Drake and Sagan also designed what is known as the Pioneer plaques. These plaques were another kind of message from earth that scientists hoped would be intercepted by extraterrestrial beings from the 1972 Pioneer 10 and the 1973 Pioneer 11 spacecraft missions.

• In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner unveiled a project called the “Breakthrough Initiatives” to search for extraterrestrial intelligence over the span of at least 10 years. Part of the Initiatives program includes a $1M Breakthrough Message competition, where the task is to design a digital message to send to advanced civilizations. But no message has yet been sent. And some, such as Doug Vakoch who heads up: Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), want to send the messages now and hear back from other civilizations. He explained that the messages would be sent by radio or in the near future, by lasers using very brief laser pulses.

• Not everyone agrees we should be rapidly concocting and sending messages. Stargazer Alicia Adams says, “I’ve seen Mars Attacks and that ended horribly!” Retired Professor of Astronomy Andrew Fraknoi says it’s a question over which space scientists are now grappling. “If we’re going to be deciding to advertise our presence to the universe, we should have a discussion with the rest of the world,” said Fraknoi. “Are we ready to signal out there that we on earth exist? We are barely getting along with each other. Are we ready to get along with aliens?”

• Drake thinks intelligent beings already know we’re here due to television and radio signals traveling in space. “It’s too late, folks. We’ve made our presence known big-time,” said Drake.

• A recent survey by Glocalities involving 24 countries found nearly half of all humans believe in extraterrestrials.

An ambitious new effort is underway to make direct contact with intelligent life beyond earth, improving upon 70s-era space missions which included attempts to bring messages from Earth to extraterrestrials.

For centuries, we’ve gazed up at the stars, and wondered are we alone? Some say it is time to move more aggressively and find out.

In early April, NASA’s newest planet hunter called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovered its first Earth-sized alien planet. A recent survey by Glocalities involving 24 countries found nearly half of all humans believe in extraterrestrials.

ETs are on our mind. At the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, an entire evening’s event was all about extraterrestrials. A special dance troupe performed to an eclectic mix of sounds. The sounds were excerpts taken from a famous golden record, intended for intelligent life in the universe. The 12-inch copper gold plated disk is known as the Pioneer Golden Record.

Artist Katerina Wong choreographed the performance and was thrilled to know its history.

“They were hoping if there was an opportunity to meet an ET, that they would get a little bit of understanding about what life on earth was like.” remarked Wong.

In 1977, NASA scientists installed a golden record on two space probes that were part of the Voyager Mission.

On each copy were dozens of images, sounds from nature, and multiple greetings in 55 different languages. The record also contained music from around the world, and included classical as well as a recording of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode.”

According to NASA, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Their primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn in our own solar system but now, both probes are billions of miles away from earth – carrying a message from earth on these golden records. The hope was that somewhere beyond our solar system, intelligent life or advanced civilizations will find them and be able to decipher their contents.
“This was a way of telling another civilization about us,” explained the legendary astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake.

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Astronomers Are Asking Kids to Help Them Contact Aliens

March 3, 2019
ExoNews Editor

by Sigal Samuel February 21, 2019 (vox.com)

• In 1974, scientists at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico used the 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope to send a carefully crafted radio broadcast into outer space – a message of zeros and ones meant to alert aliens to our existence for the first time. In honor of the 45th anniversary of that transmission, researchers at the observatory are pondering how to design a follow-up dispatch. Rather than asking their fellow experts, they’ve launched a global contest inviting youth, from kindergarteners to 16-year-olds, to create the New Arecibo Message.

• Says Abe Pacini, a researcher at Arecibo, “Sometimes the scientists are so focused on their topics and they can see stuff very deep but they cannot see very broad… Students know a little bit about everything, so they can see the big picture better. For sure they can design a message that is actually much more important.” Teams composed of up to ten students plus one mentor must register by March 20th. The more diverse the team is, the more points it gets. The contest guidelines recommend using social media to find possible teammates in other countries or regions. The Arecibo scientists will determine which, if any, message will be selected to represent Earth.

• The 1974 Arecibo message was authored by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and provided basic information about us, like the position of Earth in our solar system, the size of the human population, the shape of the human body, and the double helix structure of DNA. (The information about the nucleotides in DNA has since been shown to be false.) The message was beamed at M13, a globular star cluster 25,000 light years away. (But these primitive radio waves would take 25,000 years for the message to get there.)

• Another determination that the scientists will make is the “risks of exposure” inherent in messaging alien civilizations. Scientists like the late Stephen Hawking and technologists like Elon Musk have warned that communicating with extraterrestrials could pose an existential threat to the Earth if the message is received by hostile aliens. In 2015, SETI researchers, Elon Musk, and others released a statement saying, “We strongly encourage vigorous international debate by a broadly representative body prior to engaging further in this activity.”

• Astronomer and science fiction author David Brin, one of the most vocal critics of an Arecibo Message, says that, “[M]ost of us are much more concerned about the arrogance these zealots are displaying by presuming to speak for a civilization of 8 billion people without ever exposing their assumptions to normal debate and risk assessment.” Brin also noted, “Their instrument (the Arecibo Telescope) is funded by the taxpayers.”

• Douglas Vakoch, an astrobiologist who worked at SETI before splitting off to found his own international organization, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), points out that “[A]ny civilization that could do us harm would already know we’re here from our accidental TV and radio leakage.” Vakoch says that the most important aspect of this communication may be our announcing to the galaxy that we are ready to make contact. Known as the ‘Zoo Hypothesis’, this is the idea that extraterrestrials may be keeping an eye on our planet but are waiting for us to indicate that we want to be in contact and that we’re sophisticated enough to merit attention.

• Neither a 1967 Outer Space Treaty ratified by dozens of countries and adopted by the United Nations which laid out an anti-weaponization framework for space, nor a SETI post-ET-detection protocol drafted in the 1980’s, addresses any protocol for actively sending out messages to other civilizations.

• For Brin, all this anxiety over interstellar communication seems like a reflection of our anxieties about communicating with one another. Underneath the question of how to talk to alien minds is a question that’s much closer to home: how to make ourselves understood to other minds right here on Earth.

• On a bulletin board at the Arecibo visitor center where kids were invited to post messages, one child’s misspelled missive was especially poignant: “Earth is destroying it self. Help us! Please help! Send better knowledg.”

• [Editor’s Note] Sending radio waves into space is like traveling across the American continent in horse-drawn covered wagons. This is just another example of mainstream scientists pretending to be on the cutting edge of space exploration when, in fact, our secret space programs are hundreds of years more advanced in space technology. Also, this speculation as to what kinds of extraterrestrials are out there, and the hand-wringing at what hostile ETs might do to our planet if we are “found”, is just more disinformation. We already know that many, many types of ET beings have already been here throughout our human development on Earth, and have been actively interacting with Earth humans since WWII. All of this drama about searching for intelligent life in the cosmos is simply theater to placate a mind-controlled Earth populace.

The scientists at Arecibo Observatory, a gigantic radio telescope in Puerto Rico, are some of the smartest astronomers and physicists in the world. But they need help with their next big project — and for that, they’re turning to kids.
In 1974, scientists used the 1,000-foot-wide telescope to send a carefully crafted radio broadcast into outer space, a message of zeros and ones meant to alert aliens to our existence.

It was humanity’s first interstellar message intended to be picked up by aliens. We haven’t heard back from E.T. yet. But in honor of the 45th anniversary of that transmission, the researchers at the observatory are pondering how to design a follow-up dispatch. Rather than asking their fellow experts, they’ve launched a global contest inviting youth — from kindergarteners to 16-year-olds — to create the New Arecibo Message.

**The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico**

The grand prize? A chance to have your message broadcast into the stars, and to potentially become the first human being ever to communicate with aliens.

I asked Alessandra Abe Pacini, a researcher at Arecibo who helped generate the idea for the contest, why kids are the best people for the job. “Sometimes the scientists are so focused on their topics and they can see stuff very deep but they cannot see very broad,” she said. “Students know a little bit about everything, so they can see the big picture better. For sure they can design a message that is actually much more important.”

But designing messages to aliens is a tricky business, on multiple levels. How do you write a missive that an alien intelligence will be able to understand? Should you avoid including sensitive information about humanity, in case that emboldens aliens to come to our planet and annihilate our species? Should you avoid transmitting messages into outer space altogether, because even just alerting aliens to our existence is too risky?

These questions are at the heart of a long-running, and sometimes very heated, debate among scientists. There’s no consensus about any of them, or even about the meta-question of who gets to decide on the answers.

One thing is clear, though: The stakes are extremely high. As scientists like the late Stephen Hawking and technologists like Elon Musk have warned, communicating with extraterrestrials could pose a catastrophic risk to humanity. In fact, if we send out a message and it’s received by less-than-friendly aliens, that could pose an existential threat not only to the human species but to every species on Earth.

The Original Arecibo Message

When space scientists wanted to celebrate a huge upgrade that had been made to the Arecibo Observatory in 1974, two of their greatest minds stepped up to draft a memo to aliens. It would be broadcast from the telescope during a public ceremony. Frank Drake, who came up with the famous “Drake Equation” for estimating the odds that intelligent life exists in our galaxy, crafted the message with help from Carl Sagan, the astronomer and popular science writer who penned Contact and popularized the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization.

Written in binary code — a series of ones and zeros — the message was designed with the hope of being intelligible to any aliens who might be listening. It sought to give them some basic information about us, like the position of Earth in our solar system, the size of the human population, the shape of the human body, and the double helix structure of DNA. When you look at the message in pictogram form, you can see all these components and more.

But this interstellar postcard was directed at M13, a globular star cluster 25,000 light years away, which may help explain why we haven’t heard back yet — it’ll take 25,000 years for the message to get there and the same amount of time for any reply to get back to us. The scientists chose that destination partly because the star cluster was big and relatively close, and partly just because it was within the telescope’s declination range (the part of the sky it can target) at the time of the ceremony.

In other words, the scientists weren’t really aiming to communicate with an alien civilization in their lifetimes so much as they were trying to publicly showcase the fact that their telescope could now do something incredible: For nearly three minutes, it sent a cosmic hello from humanity into the sky, as the audience assembled on site was moved to tears.

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44 Years After Its First Message to Aliens, Arecibo Observatory Calls For Follow-Up

November 26, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Alan Boyle November 16, 2018 (geekwire.com)

• In 1974, the first Arecibo Message transmitted from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was designed by SETI astronomers including Frank Drake and Carl Sagen and was beamed by radio transmission from the Arecibo telescope in the direction of the M13 star cluster in the constellation Hercules. It was meant as an intergalactic greeting from planet Earth. (see image of message below)

• The shapes shown on the Arecibo Message grid represent a variety of concepts ranging from the numbers 1 through 10 to the chemical constituents of DNA, our solar system’s planets and the telescope itself, plus a stick figure that stands for humanity. Other types of messages have been sent out periodically since then as well.

• Since the first transmission was sent in 1974, the three minutes’ worth of radio waves have rippled out to a distance of 44 light-years, or less than 0.2 percent of the way to M13 star cluster. Experts acknowledge that it’s extremely unlikely the message will ever be detected and decoded by an alien civilization.

• Now the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo Observatory wants to transmit a second Arecibo Message from Arecibo’s 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope. They’ve announced a student-focused competition to design a new message to beam to extraterrestrials. In order to qualify and ultimately register, student competitors will first need to solve a series of brain-teasing puzzles posted on Arecibo’s website. The contest is open to teams from around the world, in classes ranging from kindergarten to college. Each team should consist of five students plus an adult mentor – for example, a teacher, professor or professional scientist. The first challenge will be posted on December 16th. Clues and follow-up activities will be rolled out periodically over the next year, and the winning team is due to be revealed next fall during a celebration of the Arecibo Message’s 45th anniversary. (see 1:08 minute video below)

• Experts continue to debate the wisdom of broadcasting our existence to the rest of the universe. Most famously, the late physicist Stephen Hawking said letting extraterrestrials know where we are could turn out as badly for us as Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the New World turned out for Native Americans.

The Arecibo Observatory today kicked off a student-focused competition to design a new message to beam to extraterrestrials, 44 years to the day since the first deliberate message was sent out from Arecibo’s 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope.

“Our society and our technology have changed a lot since 1974,” Francisco Cordova, the observatory’s director, said in a news release. “So if we were assembling our message today, what would it say? What would it look like? What one would need to learn to be able to design the right updated message from the earthlings? Those are the questions we are posing to young people around the world through the New Arecibo Message – the global challenge.”

It’s not just about the message, however: Competitors will have to solve brain-teasing puzzles posted on Arecibo’s website in order to qualify, get instructions, register and submit their designs. Along the way, they’ll learn about space science, the scientific method and Arecibo’s story.

“We have quite a few surprises in store for participants, and we will be sharing more details as the competition progresses,” Cordova said.

The contest is open to teams from around the world, in classes ranging from kindergarten to college. Each team should consist of five students plus an adult mentor – for example, a teacher, professor or professional scientist. The first challenge will be posted on Dec. 16.

“Teams should wait until the release of the first challenge on December 16, since they will need to solve that challenge to be able to register,” Abel Méndez, director of the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, told me in an email. “Meanwhile, team leaders should subscribe to the Arecibo newsletter for updates and start forming their own teams.”

Clues and follow-up activities will be rolled out periodically over the next year, and the winning team is due to be revealed next fall during a celebration of the Arecibo Message’s 45th anniversary.

1:08 minute video on the 1974 Arecibo Message

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

October 23, 2018
ExoNews Editor

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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Interstellar Travel and Biosphere Reboots Means There Are a Lot of Aliens in the Galaxy

March 2, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Brian Wang February 22, 2018 (nextbigfuture.com)

• Based upon the average lifespan of a typical galactic civilization, and the notion that civilizations come, go, and reappear within the same star systems, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin (pictured above) calculates that the number of technologically advanced civilizations in our galaxy (ie: at least as advanced as we are) greatly exceeds the 3,500 calculated by Frank Drake in 1961 known as “Drake’s Equation”.

• Among the 400 billion stars comprising the Milky Way galaxy, Zubrin estimates the number of technological civilizations to be 5 million. Also, the nearest civilization is probably about 185 light years away.

In 1961, radio astronomer Frank Drake developed a pedagogy for analyzing the question of the frequency of extraterrestrial civilizations. Robert Zubrin shows a couple of significant mistaken assumptions by Drake. Robert Zubrin wrote this for Centauri Dreams.

Drake equation defines a “civilization” as a species possessing interstellar communication capability. This means radiotelescopes. By this definition, civilization did not appear on Earth until the 1930s. Although, Earth does not really have the means to usefully broadcast and had limited means to interpret interstellar radio communications. Also, we may need to look at laser or other forms of interstellar communication.

L is the average lifetime of a technological civilization.
N/L, is the rate at which such civilizations are disappearing from the galaxy.
R∗, the rate of star formation in our galaxy;
fp, the fraction of these stars that have planetary systems;
ne, is the mean number of planets in each system that have environments favorable to life;
fl the fraction of these that actually developed life;
fi the fraction of these that evolved intelligent species; and
fc the fraction of intelligent species that developed sufficient technology for interstellar communication

If we estimate L=50,000 years (ten times recorded history), R∗ = 10 stars per year, fp = 0.5, and each of the other four factors ne, fl, fi, and fc equal to 0.2, we calculate the total number of technological civilizations in our galaxy, N, equals 400.

Four-hundred civilizations in our galaxy may seem like a lot, but scattered among the Milky Way’s 400 billion stars, they would represent a very tiny fraction: just one in a billion to be precise. In our own region of the galaxy, (known) stars occur with a density of about one in every 320 cubic light years. If the calculation in the previous paragraph were correct, it would therefore indicate that the nearest extraterrestrial civilization is likely to be about 4,300 light years away.

The Drake equation is wrong. The equation assumes that life, intelligence, and civilization can only evolve in a given solar system once. This is manifestly untrue. Stars evolve on time scales of billions of years, species over millions of years, and civilizations take mere thousands of years.

Current human civilization could knock itself out with a thermonuclear war, but unless humanity drove itself into complete extinction, there is little doubt that 1,000 years later global civilization would be fully reestablished. An asteroidal impact on the scale of the K-T event that eliminated the dinosaurs might well wipe out humanity completely. But 5 million years after the K-T impact the biosphere had fully recovered and was sporting the early Cenozoic’s promising array of novel mammals, birds, and reptiles.

Similarly, 5 million years after a K-T class event drove humanity and most of the other land species to extinction, the world would be repopulated with new species, including probably many types of advanced mammals descended from current nocturnal or aquatic varieties.
Estimating the Galactic Population

There are 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and about 10 percent of them are good G and K type stars which are not part of multiple stellar systems. Almost all of these probably have planets, and it’s a fair guess that 10 percent of these planetary systems feature a world with an active biosphere, probably half of which have been living and evolving for as long as the Earth. That leaves us with two billion active, well-developed biospheres filled with complex plants and animals, capable of generating technological species on time scales of somewhere between 10 and 40 million years. As a middle value, let’s choose 20 million years as the “regeneration time” tr.

Using average lifespan technological civilization at 50,000 years then there are probably 5 million technological civilizations active in the galaxy right now and the nearest civilization is probably about 185 light years away.

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Tag: Frank Drake