Tag: Jason Wright

A New Frontier in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Article by Adam Frank                                       December 31, 2020                                        (washingtonpost.com)

• On December 18th, ‘Breakthrough Listen’ – a privately funded offshoot of SETI, the ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence’ – detected a distant “candidate signal” labeled BLC-1, which SETI astronomers would like to think is coming from another intelligent civilization in the galaxy. Of course, these scientists are quick to point out that it is probably not coming from another civilization, but just radio interference from our own planet.

• The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence began more than 60 years ago. Proponents of SETI have long complained that there has never been sufficient funding or telescope time available to make a dent in the effort. In the 1980s and 1990s, Congressional legislators withheld “wasteful” SETI funding, and it has survived since on private funding from millionaires like Yuri Milner who in 2015 pledged $100 million to create Breakthrough Listen.

• Jason Wright and his astronomy colleagues at Penn State have argued that the reason we have not found life elsewhere in the universe is simple: We haven’t really looked. If the galaxy were an ocean, so far astronomers have splashed around in just one hot-tub’s worth of water.

• With Milner’s funding, the Breakthrough Listen project was provided access to telescopes from the Parkes radio dish in Australia and the Green Bank instrument in West Virginia, and resources to explore new search methods and technologies. These include machine-learning initiatives designed to accelerate “classic” SETI research. Artificial intelligence can enable computers to identify those all-important ‘weirdness needles’ in the cosmic signal haystack of data. The next generation of instruments, including the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, should enable SETI astronomers to explore the atmospheres of smaller, Earthlike planets and search for the chemical imprint of an exo-biosphere.

• Meanwhile, the ‘exoplanet revolution’ opened a second frontier in the search for ET. In the mid-1990s, astronomers found the first exoplanet, a Jupiter-size world on a four-day orbit around the star 51 Pegasi. Today, we know that almost every star in the sky hosts a family of worlds. Scientists worldwide are building a census of alien planets, showing which stars have planets and which planets are in the star’s “Goldilocks zone,” where surface temperatures are just right (that is, anywhere between freezing and boiling) for life to form. As a result, astronomers can find out exactly where they should be looking for life and intelligence.

• Astronomers are also gaining the capacity to probe the atmospheres of distant planets for ‘biosignatures’. By interrogating light passing through a far-flung world’s gaseous veil, astronomers can compile its chemical inventory and see what’s in the planet’s atmosphere. Alien astronomers looking at Earth, for example, would see oxygen and methane in our atmosphere — a signature of life’s presence on our planet. Scientists have already explored the atmospheres of a few Jupiter-size exoplanets.

• But why stop at biosignatures? The presence of technology on a planet might be far more detectable than biology. Telescopes on the drawing boards right now might have the capacity to see city lights on distant worlds. In 2019, NASA awarded the first-ever research grant to study atmospheric technosignatures, with two more funded in 2020. All this means that the search for technosignatures is becoming just as plausible and just as important as the search for biosignatures, representing a thrilling new face of SETI, embracing both anomaly-based searches and targeted explorations of exoplanets and their environments.

• The truth about the search for intelligent exo-civilizations is that it’s probably going to take a lot of time and effort. That’s the price you pay for great science. This extraordinary journey — taking us to the shores of alien worlds — is really only just getting started. Something remarkable is happening in the science of life and intelligence beyond Earth. The age of “technosignatures” is dawning.

• [Editor’s Note]  The boys at SETI are dedicated… dedicated, that is, to making sure that the average person remains woefully ignorant of the multitude of intelligent beings and civilizations that permeate our galaxy and universe. Seth Shostak and his accomplices at SETI are simply shills for the deep state. The deep state controls several secret space programs that interact constantly with mostly negative extraterrestrial beings, and have access to their advanced technologies which the deep state wants to maintain for themselves only, in order to preserve their advantage.

But it appears that 2021 will usher in a new level of disclosure of this underlying deep state cabal that has repressed the natural technological and spiritual development of the human species on this Earth since World War II, when the presence of extraterrestrial beings, both benevolent and malevolent, greatly increased in response to our species’ own technological achievements. Suddenly, Earth humans were a more interesting species to scrutinize, and more valuable to exploit. By using human (?) deep state operatives to infiltrate all aspects of government and society, these negative beings orchestrated a false reality which has supported their control agenda for the past seventy years.

We have a unique opportunity now to expose this deep state cabal and the negative extraterrestrial entities that have given this cabal its capacity to control the planet. The time has come to reclaim the planet for our own species, as the benevolent beings and our human cousins of the Galactic Federation have urged us to do. They won’t step in and do it for us. We must save ourselves. It appears that President Trump has declared war on the deep state, and this much anticipated transition has begun.

We are living in the most fantastic period in human history. It is just a shame that more people have not yet awakened to recognize the battle between good and evil that is now unfolding. Once we have overcome our deep state oppressors, the human species will enter a golden age of higher spiritual consciousness and advanced technologies (available to everyone) that will transform our planet as we assume our rightful place among the multitude of space-faring civilizations which deep state operatives, such as SETI and the Washington Post, are desperately trying to prevent.

 

On Dec. 18, the world learned that Breakthrough Listen, a privately funded search for extraterrestrial

                        Jason Wright

intelligence, had found its first official candidate signal. The signal’s existence lit up the Internet. Was BLC-1, as it’s called, finally our moment of contact? Breakthrough Listen scientists, now hard at work on a paper about their findings, were quick to explain that the answer was probably “no”: Given the wealth of human-made radio signal interference out there, BLC-1 will probably turn out to be of human origin.

Their preliminary conclusion, however, does not defuse the excitement of BLC-1. The fact that there’s a candidate at all is cause for celebration. That’s because something remarkable is happening in the science of life and intelligence beyond Earth. The age of “technosignatures” is dawning.

                             Yuri Milner

Many people have the romantic notion that astronomers huddle over their telescopes every night and scan the skies looking for signals from distant, alien civilizations. That, unfortunately, just ain’t happening. Though the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began more than 60 years ago, there was never sufficient funding or telescope time available to make a dent in the effort. In the 1980s and 1990s, some in Congress cited public SETI funding (as little as it was) as a press-worthy example of wasteful spending. Government support mostly dried up, leaving the field running on fumes. As Jason Wright and colleagues at Penn State have demonstrated, if the sky is an ocean that needs to be searched for life, so far astronomers have splashed around in just one hot-tub’s worth of water. The reason we have not found life elsewhere in the universe is simple: We haven’t really looked.

Now, however, the long desert of opportunity may finally be giving way to a new era of growth. In 2015, Internet billionaire Yuri Milner pledged $100 million to create Breakthrough Listen, a next-generation radio-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence. With a single stroke, Milner helped rejuvenate the field: The project provided access to telescopes from the Parkes radio dish in Australia and the Green Bank instrument in West Virginia, and provided resources to explore new search methods and technologies. These include machine-learning initiatives designed to accelerate “classic” SETI research of the kind epitomized by BLC-1. As pioneered by Frank Drake and others (and popularized by the 1997 movie “Contact”), classic SETI searches for signals that are anomalous, as opposed to those originating from natural or human causes. Historically, the challenge has been that SETI observations produce tidal waves of data. But artificial intelligence can enable computers to identify those all-important weirdness needles in the cosmic signal haystack of all that data.

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“The Search for Techno-Artifacts” From an Earlier Civilization in the Solar System

May 2, 2020                             (dailygalaxy.com)

• In his 2016 study, ‘Prior Indigenous Technological Species’, Penn State’s Jason Wright discussed possible origins and locations for “technosignatures” of a technological species’ civilization that could have existed in the solar system prior to humanity’s rise on Earth, or on nearby planets Venus and Mars. “From a purely scientific standpoint, it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask whether life may have existed elsewhere in the Solar System, or does today,” said Wright, who is also a member of the ‘Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds’ at Penn State.

• What could have ended a prior technologically advanced civilization within our solar system? “The most obvious answer is a cataclysm, whether a natural event, such as an extinction-level asteroid impact or self-inflicted, such as a global climate catastrophe,” says Wright. “[S]uch an event would only permanently extinguish the species if there were many cataclysms across the solar system closely spaced in time, (such as) a swarm of comets or interplanetary warfare, …an unexpected nearby gamma ray burst or supernova…”

• In the case of Venus, its global greenhouse and resurfacing might have erased all evidence of a prior civilization’s existence on the Venusian surface. In the case of Earth, erosion and plate tectonics may have erased most of such evidence if the species lived a billion years ago. Remaining indigenous technosignatures would be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer solar system.

• In a 2019 study co-written by Manasvi Lingam (at Florida Tech) and Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb entitled, “The Moon as a Fishing Net for Extraterrestrial Life”, Loeb suggested that Earth’s Moon might yield traces of technological equipment that crashed on the lunar surface a billion years ago. “The absence of a lunar atmosphere,” wrote Loeb, “guarantees that these messengers would reach the lunar surface without burning up. In addition, the geological inactivity of the Moon implies that the record deposited on its surface will be preserved and not mixed with the deep lunar interior. Serving as a natural mailbox, the lunar surface collected all impacting objects during the past few billions of years. Most of this “mail” comes from within the solar system.”

 

         Jason Wright

One of the primary open questions of astrobiology is whether there is extant or extinct life elsewhere the Solar System. Astrophysicists Avi Loeb at Harvard and Penn State’s Jason Wright have both explored the question, with Loeb suggesting that ancient technological artifacts from beyond the Solar System may exist on Earth’s Moon amounting to a letter from an alien civilization saying, “We exist.”

Wright, a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, has considered the possibility that a technological

             Avi Loeb

species could have existed in the Solar System prior to humanity’s rise on Earth in his study, Prior Indigenous Technological Species.

In 2016, Wright authored a paper that discussed possible origins and locations for “technosignatures” of such a civilization while other astronomers have suggested looking for lights on Kuiper Belt Objects that “may serve as a lamppost which signals the existence of extraterrestrial technologies and thus civilizations.”

The origins and possible locations for technosignatures of such a prior indigenous technological species might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars. In the case of Venus, the arrival of its global greenhouse and potential resurfacing might have erased all evidence of its existence on the Venusian surface. In the case of Earth, erosion and, ultimately, plate tectonics may have erased most such evidence if the species lived a billion years ago. Remaining indigenous technosignatures, observes Wright, might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer Solar System.

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NASA’s Kepler Telescope Discovers a Colossal Artificial Structure Orbiting a Star in Our Vicinity

Listen to “E146 NASA's Kepler Telescope Discovers a Colossal Artificial Structure Orbiting a Star in Our Vicinity” on Spreaker.

Article by Steve                      October 15, 2015                      (ufoholic.com)

•  A paper submitted by Tabitha Boyajian, an astronomer at Yale, to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (in 2015) described a particular star named KIC 8462852 orbiting only 1,500 light years from Earth. “… KIC 8462852 (aka “Tabby’s Star”), was observed by the Kepler Space Telescope (image above) to undergo irregularly shaped, aperatic dips in flux down to below the twenty percent level.” “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. (But the data) checked out.”

• The study mostly focused on two interesting anomalies of the star. The first event was recorded between days 788 and 795 of the Kepler mission and showed a single transit causing a star brightness drop-off of 15 percent. The second event was recorded between days 1510 to 1570 and showed a burst of several transits with a brightness dip of up to 22 percent. The transiting objects have to be extremely big.

• Scientists are now trying to point a radio antenna at KIC 8462852 in order to pick up their television shows to solve the riddle. Meanwhile, a second paper is being drafted around the possibility of the light obstruction being caused a colossal artificial device engineered by advanced aliens.

• Considering that our galaxy has existed for more than 13 billion years, it’s not hard to imagine that an alien civilization may be out there, possessing technology that allows them to build megastructures around stars. Jason Wright, a fellow astronomer at Penn State said, “This looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” Researchers are hypothesizing the possibility of a mega-engineered project created by a Type 2 alien civilization on the Kardashev scale. With a vast shell or series of rings surrounding a star, a Dyson sphere-like structure could use all the available energy radiating from a star.

 

Besides Kepler’s ability of finding small, rocky worlds orbiting distant stars, it can also detect different space phenomenon like stellar flares, star spots and dusty planetary rings.

This time however, Kepler detected the signal of a supposed vast artificial structure orbiting a star only 1,500 light years away from Earth.

After finishing all plausible explanations, scientists now believe that this complex structure might be an artificial construction made by an advanced alien civilization way up on the Kardashev scale of comparison.

This megastructure works like a supersized solar array orbiting around its host star, stocking the energy and sending it back to the source. The size of the structure is so grand that it’s blocking a considerable fraction of starlight as it spins around its host.

Normally all the exoplanets discovered by Kepler have a typical planet-shape, meaning they are round. This time however, the telescope detected something that isn’t round and behaves unnatural.

A paper has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in which a particular star named KIC 8462852 is described.

OVER THE DURATION OF THE KEPLER MISSION, KIC 8462852 WAS OBSERVED TO UNDERGO IRREGULARY SHAPED, APERIODIC DIPS IN FLUX DOWN TO BELOW THE TWENTY PERCENT LEVEL.

WE’D NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS STAR, IT WAS REALLY WEIRD. WE THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE BAD DATA OR MOVEMENT ON THE SPACECRAFT, BUT EVERYTHING CHECKED OUT. – TABETHA BOYAJIAN, RESEARCHER AT YALE UNIVERSITY

Studies mostly focused on two interesting anomalies at KIC 8462852, one that was recorded between days 788 and 795 of the Kepler mission and between days 1510 to 1570.

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

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?

Professor Jason Wright

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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Scientific Community Making Search For UFOs Mainstream

May 17, 2019            (newyork.cbslocal.com)

• Christopher Deperno and Sam Falvo investigate unidentified flying objects for the New York chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, a global organization established in 1969. Author and researcher Linda Zimmermann has investigated some 500 eyewitness accounts of UFO’s in the Hudson Valley NY area. Zimmermann and Falvo’s organizations have now formed a joint venture called Project Aries – with the goal of collecting as much data as possible on Hudson Valley UFO sightings.

• “We do know that the phenomenon is real,” said Falvo. “Military pilots, army personnel… the U.S. Navy now… all of them have reported different types of sightings,” added Deperno. Even NASA is conceding it’s possible the universe contains different life forms. Experts say the race is heating up to find answers as to who they are, where they’re from, and what they may want from us.

• What has long been considered a fringe field of science, the search for answers about extraterrestrials and UFOs has gone mainstream. Prestigious universities including Harvard and Penn State are dedicating some of their brightest minds to this as a new field of study. “We believe the search for extraterrestrial intelligence needs a permanent academic home,” said Penn State’s Jason Wright. In the private sector, there is funding everything from digital, interstellar communication, to a dish that emits radio waves.

• Why has the Hudson Valley of New York state become such a UFO hot spot? “There is the possibility that they are drawn to the water here… the rivers, the lakes, and reservoirs, but also this area has a very unique magnetic field and gravitational field,” Zimmermann said.  (see 2:20 minute video from CBS New York on the UFOs in the Hudson Valley)

 

NEW YORK (CBS NewYork) – The search for extraterrestrial activity is getting some credibility.

Notable scientists are getting behind a push to make contact with whatever might be out there.

“It was between a half mile and a mile away… it was big and quiet… moving very slowly,” UFO witness Robert Strong said.

Did the Hudson Valley resident really see a UFO?

“Military pilots, army personnel… the U.S. Navy now… all of them have reported different types of sightings,” Christopher Deperno of MUFON said.

Even NASA is conceding it’s possible the universe contains different life forms.

        Linda Zimmerman

“We do know that the phenomenon is real,” Sam Falvo of MUFON added.

Experts say the race is heating up to find answers as to who they are, where they’re from, and what they may want from us.

Deperno and Falvo investigate unidentified flying objects for the New York chapter of the Mutual UFO Network, a global organization established in 1969.

“Most of them… 95 percent or so can be identified… it’s those five or six percent that really stir your interest,” Falvo said.

What they do has long been considered a fringe field of science, but today, this search for answers has gone mainstream. Prestigious universities including Harvard and Penn State are dedicating some of their brightest minds to this as a new field of study.

2:20 minute video from CBS New York on the UFOs in the Hudson Valley

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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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Penn State Center to Focus on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

by Geoff Rushton                   March 4, 2019                     (statecollege.com)

• The Pennsylvania State University, or “Penn State”, has received a $2.5 million endowment from alumnus John and Natalie Patton, plus another $1 million anonymous pledge, to create “PSETI” – Penn State’s SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). It will be called the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center.

• PSETI will create a “world-class SETI research program,” establish graduate curriculum to train the next generation of researchers, initiate a competitive research grants program, coordinate conferences and symposia and establish a permanent, worldwide SETI community.

• SETI is an international scientific effort that seeks to answer whether ours is the only technologically-capable species in the Milky Way galaxy. Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics who will lead the center, told Science Magazine the field has been lacking in academic training.

• SETI also has been lacking in financial support since 1993, when Congress prohibited NASA from funding it. Wright told Science that the prospect of no funding and few jobs has discouraged researchers from pursuing the field, and that he had identified only five people with doctoral degrees in SETI-related research.

 

Penn State is planning to establish an international research center dedicated to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), an initiative that would be one of only a few academic SETI research centers and would offer a graduate program training the next generation of researchers.

The university announced last week the first two donations, totaling $3.5 million, toward creating the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center.

SETI is an international scientific effort that seeks to answer whether ours is the only technologically-capable species in the Milky Way galaxy. Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics who will lead the center, told Science Magazine the field has been lacking in academic training.

“There really isn’t an academic ecosystem for the field as a whole,” Jason Wright, associate professor of astronomy PSETI Center head. “You can’t work on it if you can’t hire students and postdocs.”

SETI also has been lacking in financial support since 1993, when Congress prohibited NASA from funding it. Wright told Science that the prospect of no funding and few jobs has discouraged researchers from pursuing the field, and that he had identified only five people with doctoral degrees in SETI-related research.

Penn State will draw on its infrastructure and expertise to provide PSETI with endowment funding and administrative framework. The university’s existing astronomy and astrophysics departments and centers make it a “natural home” for a new center.

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Why Astronomers Don’t See UFO’s

January 19, 2019                   (dailygalaxy.com)

• There are innumerable astronomers who gaze into telescopes all night to look at the sky. Why aren’t they picking up the UFO’s that others report seeing?

• Astrophysicists such as Great Britain’s Martin Rees and Paul Davies at Arizona State University suggest that it is because these advanced beings who traverse our skies are so highly evolved that they aren’t subject to our laws of physics and we simply cannot recognize them. Davies believes that advanced alien technology may exist that is “beyond matter” with no fixed size or shape.

• Astrophysicist Jason Wright at Penn State University thinks it is a simpler explanation. He believes that there are no UFOs out there to observe. Says Wright, “[A]stronomers study big swaths of the sky all the time, and with much more sophisticated equipment than the cameras that have captured those iconic images of extraterrestrial UFOs. I tell them we don’t see any UFOs.”

• Wright says that when astronomers do find an anomaly, it is quickly identified. NASA doesn’t send its “goons” to quiet the astronomers, or photoshop the UFO anomaly to destroy evidence. Wright is certain that UFOs simply do not exist.

• [Editor’s Note]   This is classic obfuscation by the mainstream science community in its ongoing effort to debunk UFOs and the alien presence. Professor Wright claims NASA hasn’t photo-shopped anomalies? We know from Donna Hare, Karl Wolfe and others that, oh yes, NASA does. He ridicules ufologists who are closer to the truth than he will ever be by joking about government “goons” who enforce the Deep State moratorium on the truth. Yes, Professor Wright, the government does ridicule and suppress the truth. And on the other end of this debunking apparatus are so-called “astrophysicists” such as Martin Rees and Paul Davies who come up with theories that are so fantastically outlandish that it puts the argument back in the realm of the ridiculous. This is just another way to ridicule people honestly seeking the disclosure of the truth. If they didn’t duly debunk aliens and UFOs, they would lose their jobs at these Deep State controlled institutions. So they lie. The evidence of UFOs and the alien presence is too overwhelming to believe that, somehow, they are not aware of UFOs. They lie. And one day, when we all learn the truth, they will be exposed for the liars and Deep State stooges that they are, and how they conspired to keep humanity in the dark for so many decades.

 

Why is that of the tens of thousands of reports of UFO’s since the iconic radio broadcast of Orson Welle’s “War of the World’s” terrified the nation in 1938, have none been reported by astronomers manning the observatories across our pale blue dot?

                Jason Wright

Is it because some leading astrophysicists such as Great Britain’s Martin Rees and Paul Davies at Arizona State University, who believe that advanced alien civilizations may be a billion or more years older than the human species have technology that would be unrecognizable by our primitive means?

Davies believes that advanced alien technology may exist that is “beyond matter.” That might have no fixed size or shape; have no well-defined boundaries. Is dynamical on all scales of space and time. Or, conversely, does not appear to do anything at all that we can discern. Does not consist of discrete, separate things; but rather it is a system, or a subtle higher-level correlation of things. Are matter and information, Davies asks, all there is? Five hundred years ago, Davies observes, “the very concept of a device manipulating information, or software, would have been incomprehensible. Might there be a still higher level, as yet outside all human experience, that organizes electrons?

                             Martin Rees

If so, this “third level” would never be manifest through observations made at the informational level, still less at the matter level.

Closer to the reality of 2019, astrophysicist Jason Wright at Penn State University has an solid, verifiable answer: astronomers haven’t observed any unidentified objects. It’s that simple he says. In a 2013 post, Astronomers and UFOs in his AstroWright blog, he wrote that “astronomers study big swaths of the sky all the time, and with much more sophisticated

equipment than the cameras that have captured those iconic images of extraterrestrial UFOs. I tell them we don’t see any UFOs.”


             Paul Davies

 

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