Article by Morgan McFall-Johnsen January 13, 2021 (businessinsider.com)
• On January 11th, astronomers at the University of Hawaii informed fellow scientist at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society that they have found a ‘rocky’ planet 280 light-years away, orbiting a star located within the Milky Way galaxy’s ‘thick disk’ that holds most of the Milky Way’s material. Stars in this thick disk region are about 10 billion years old, and researchers think that this planet is just as ancient.
• The planet, called TOI-561 b, is a “super-Earth” – about 50% larger than Earth and three times its mass. But it orbits so close to its star that has a surface temperature over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This would turn the top layer of rock into molten magma, drastically reducing the chance that it could host life forms.
• “TOI-561 b is the first planet with a confirmed rocky composition around such an old star, demonstrating that rocky planets have been forming for most of the history of the universe,” said Lauren Weiss, lead researcher in the discovery.
• While this super-Earth is far older than expected for a rocky planet, its existence suggests that other stars could have ancient Earth-like worlds with temperatures more suitable for life. Having existed for twice as long as Earth, such planets would have had plenty of time to support complex life and even intelligent civilizations.
• The finding was published in The Astronomical Journal.
A rocky, molten planet orbiting one of the galaxy’s oldest stars could be scientists’ best evidence yet that alien life may have
Lauren Weiss
arisen in the distant past.
The planet, called TOI-561 b, is a “super-Earth” 280 light-years away. It’s about 50% larger than our planet and three times its mass, but it’s unlikely to host life. It orbits so close to its star that the researchers who discovered it calculated that its surface temperature is more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, turning the top layer of rock into molten magma.
But this super-Earth is far older than scientists previously expected for rocky planets, suggesting that other stars could have ancient Earth-like worlds with temperatures more suitable for life. Such planets may have existed for twice as long as Earth, giving them plenty of time to support complex life and even intelligent civilizations.
The star that TOI-561 b orbits lies in the galaxy’s “thick disk,” the outer region above and below the flat plane that holds most of the Milky Way’s material. Stars in the thick disk are about 10 billion years old, and researchers think that this planet is just as ancient.
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Article by Charles Mudede November 19, 2020 (thestranger.com)
• As a boy, British physicist Stephen Webb was certain that solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy were teeming will all kinds of intelligent life forms. Then in the 1980s, Webb discovered “The Fermi Paradox” based on the Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where is everybody?” In a galaxy with billions of stars that are similar to our star, there must be many planets in the ‘habitable zone’. So where are the aliens? Why haven’t we meet them yet?
• Webb decided to collect solutions to the Fermi paradox: Aliens live where we’re not looking; talk how we’re not listening; resemble something we don’t recognize. Perhaps aliens use radio or optical transmissions at a different frequency or form. Maybe a signal is sitting on data server right now and we haven’t noticed. Maybe the extraterrestrials alter the emissions of their stars to hide themselves from us. Maybe they don’t care about astronomy or space exploration. Or maybe they are here already and we just don’t take them seriously.
• It is almost certain that there is other life in the universe. Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve called it a ‘cosmic imperative’ that – with the right chemical and energetic conditions – life will emerge. And since the first exoplanet was discovered nearly 30 years ago, many others have been found virtually everywhere. Soon we’ll spot a planet with a biosphere. Will there be technologically advanced life forms there?
• An examination of Earth’s history provides the answer to Fermi’s paradox. Capitalism holds the key to the universe’s apparent dearth of intelligent life. A civilization on a distant exoplanet may be locked in a class struggle that has stalled the progress of their means of production. The same happened here on Earth. Our early history shows that human progress often stalled as socially complex societies would arise and collapse. Good ideas would come and go. Technologies would emerge and vanish. This was the state of things until only 300 years ago.
• Since the 17th century, the Dutch brought a ‘progressive’ pattern of development to Western society. Its motive was not technology itself, however, but market-share competition between capitalists and the wage-profit struggle with their employees. Improvements in machine technology in the 19th century were only due to increased political power of the worker. Today, robots are tasked with exploring planets and moons, building cars or monitoring stores.
• An alien in a spaceship will most likely not be operated by enlightened beings, but rather capitalists scouring the galaxy for cheap labor.
• [Editor’s Note] This article is right on the money. We are told that we have not made ET contact, and mainstream scientists and academics cling to that belief. The rest of the population seems too self-absorbed (or mind controlled) to even contemplate interaction with extraterrestrials. But in reality, a capitalist elite and the military industrial complex have participated in the development of a handful of secret space programs operating within and beyond our solar system since the 1950s.
These space programs were not created for the advancement of mankind. They were created to give the capitalist elite access to extraterrestrial technology that is denied to the rest of us, thereby giving them a commercial advantage. This elite class who own and operate vast space programs are determined to keep us from knowing anything about these programs or the multitude of extraterrestrial beings with whom they regularly interact.
By all accounts, these secret space programs are driven purely by capitalism in a barter and trade economy with other extraterrestrial civilizations. Corey Goode estimates that the deep state-controlled Interplanetary Corporate Conglomerate SSP trades with at least 900 extraterrestrial species. Humans themselves are being bred and traded as a space commodity for cheap (free) labor, household slaves, sex slaves, and even for food.
It is apparent that the arc of Earth-human expansion into space so far has been based on intergalactic commerce, just as commerce played a central role in the expansion of humankind around our planet over the past few millennia. But in a capitalist mercantile system, the rich are only interested in getting richer. Ultimately, these selfish motives have greatly hindered our overall progress as space-faring civilization. It has rendered those of us here on the ground economic slaves to the elite. And it has actively kept us from knowing that the galaxy is indeed teeming with intelligent life waiting for our scheduled collective leap in consciousness so we can deal with the dark forces that have controlled us and allow this planet to become part of a galactic community.
Christian de Duve
“Is life on Earth just a lucky fluke?” According to the website Astronomy, this question has preoccupied the mind and work of a British physicist named Stephen Webb since his childhood, which was shaped by the Space Age of the 1960s. As a boy, he was certain that by the time he became a man humans would live in a universe that looked much like the one in the popular Disney TV show, The Mandalorian—solar systems teeming will all kinds of intelligent life forms, from froggish women to gambling ants to what have you.
Stephen Webb
Webb, however, was brought straight back down to earth in the final decade of the Cold War, the 1980s, by an article that appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine titled, “The Fermi Paradox.” The author of the article, the geologist Stephen L. Gillett, returned to a basic question that the Italian American physicist Enrico Fermi made famous in the middle of the 20th century: “Where is everybody?” Meaning, where are the aliens? Why haven’t we meet them yet? Our galaxy has billions of stars that are similar to our star, the sun. Many of these stars have planets. Many of these planets must be in a habitable zone. And yet, we have heard nothing from the galaxy or from universe that sounds intelligent. Why are we so alone?
Sixty-five million years ago, a comet hit planet Earth and killed all of the large and loud animals of that time. Gillett’s Fermi Paradox article did something similar to the large population of aliens in Webb’s imagination. They all vanished in an instant, and he began to wonder about the awesome silence of the universe. Are we really alone? Is the extremely thin layer of life, our biosphere, all there is? Webb decided “to collect solutions to the so-called Fermi paradox.”
Here are some of the solutions that Webb gathered and presented in a 2002 book If the Universe Is Teeming With Aliens … Where Is Everybody? 75 Solutions to the Fermi Paradox:
Aliens live where we’re not looking, talk how we’re not listening or resemble something we haven’t sought out. Maybe the aliens like to send messages or signals using neutrinos, nearly massless and barely-there particles that don’t interact with normal matter much, or tachyons, hypothetical particles that fly faster than light. Maybe they use the more-conventional radio or optical transmissions but at frequencies, or in a form, astronomers haven’t sought out. Maybe a signal is sitting on data servers already, escaping notice. Maybe the extraterrestrials subtly alter the emissions of their stable stars, or the blip-blip-blip pulsations of variable stars. Maybe they put something big — a megamall, a disk of dust — in front of their sun to block some of its light, in a kind of anti-beacon. Maybe their skies are cloudy, and they consequently don’t care about astronomy or space exploration. Or — hear Webb out — perhaps they drive UFOs, meaning they are here but not in a form that scientists typically recognize, investigate, and take seriously.
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Article by Chris Ciaccia August 10, 2020 (msn.com)
• In 2014, astronomers discovered a dormant neutron star in the Vulpecula constellation, 30,000 light-years (or 6 trillion miles) from Earth, but still within the Milky Way galaxy. On April 28, 2020, scientists trained the European Space Agency’s Integral satellite on this powerful neutron star, also called ‘a magnetar’, and found that it had become active again, shooting out radio waves and X-rays at random intervals. These are known as ‘Fast Radio Bursts’.
• The research study’s lead author, Sandro Mereghetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, said, “We’ve never seen a burst of radio waves, resembling a Fast Radio Burst (FRB), from a magnetar before.” “It truly is a major discovery, and helps to bring the origin of these mysterious phenomena into focus.” The study has been published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
• Within seconds of his discovery, Merghetti enacted the “Burst Alert System”, sending out a global FRB alert to “the scientific community to act fast and explore this source in more detail.” Astronomers monitoring the CHIME radio telescope in Canada worldwide also spotted the “short and extremely bright burst of radio waves” on April 28th. Subsequent confirmation came from California and Utah the following day.
• Fast Radio Bursts are a mysterious but not an uncommon observation in deep space. First discovered in 2007, FRBs are relatively new to astronomers. Some of them can generate as much energy as 500 million suns in just a few milliseconds. It’s unknown why some FRBs repeat while others do not. Some researchers speculate that they originate from an extraterrestrial civilization.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are often mysterious in nature, but not an uncommon observation in deep space. However, researchers have discovered the first FRB to emanate from the Milky Way galaxy, according to a newly published study.
Sandro Mereghetti
The research details magnetar SGR 1935+2154, which was discovered in 2014, but it wasn’t until April 2020 when scientists saw it become active again, shooting out radio waves and X-rays at random intervals.
“We’ve never seen a burst of radio waves, resembling a Fast Radio Burst, from a magnetar before,” the study’s lead author, Sandro Mereghetti of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF–IASF), said in a statement.
This FRB likely comes from a neutron star, approximately 30,000 light-years from Earth in the Vulpecula constellation, LiveScience reports. A light-year, which measures distance in space, is approximately 6 trillion miles.
Mereghetti and the other researchers detected the FRB using the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Integral satellite on April 28.
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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.
Frank and Nadia Drake
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.
Nadia Drake
“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.
Rebecca Charbonneau
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.
Shelley Wright
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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Article by Natasha Kumar June 16, 2020 (thetimeshub.in)
• Despite the fact that we persistently listen to heaven through sensitive antennas, we still have not received any signal from an extraterrestrial civilization and none of them have responded to our messages. Adam Grossman from The Dark Sky Company has created a map of our Milky Way galaxy, illustrating the full extent of its huge size. A radio signal issued on one side of the galaxy would take 100 thousand light-years to reach the other side.
• On Grossman’s map (above), the little blue circle with a diameter of 200 light years around the Earth represents the maximum distance that the first radio signals have traveled from Earth over the past 100 years, since the radio was invented. In this radius of 200 light years around the Earth, there are no known habitable exoplanets, with liquid water and oxygen in the atmosphere.
• SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is constantly listening to radio signals from space. But considering the size of our galaxy, we’d have to listen for signals for tens of thousands of years before humanity had a chance to establish contact with another civilization. Then double this time to receive a reply.
Are we alone in the Universe or at least in our galaxy? Despite the fact that we persistently listen to heaven your most sensitive antennas, we still have not received any signal from an extraterrestrial civilization and none of them respond to our messages. The Fermi paradox has tried to answer this question, but the answer can be simple, if you look at our milky Way galaxy to scale to rate how vast distances in space and realize that we simply do not hear.
Adam Grossman from The Dark Sky Company has created a map of our galaxy, so you can see the full extent of its huge size. And the milky Way is not the biggest galaxy in the Universe. The diameter of the milky Way is about 100-180 thousand light-years, depending on how you measure. That is, the radio signal issued in one side of the galaxy, you will need at least 100 thousand light-years to reach the other side.
Now, it is worth remembering that our civilization is familiar with the radio only about a century. And the little blue circle with a diameter of 200 light years around the Earth, represents the maximum distance that at the moment overcame the first radio signals from Earth. Below us to hear the alien civilization must be in a tiny radius. It should be noted that in the nearest 200 light years not found any habitable exoplanets, or at least with liquid water and oxygen in the atmosphere.
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Article by Voctor Tangermann May 1, 2020 (futurism.com)
• On April 28th, astronomers have detected ‘fast radio burst’ (FRB) originating in our own galaxy for the first time. “Something like this has never been seen before,” Caltech astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni told ScienceAlert.
• The signal, a millisecond- long burst of bright radio waves, was traced back to a neutron star within our Milky Way galaxy with an extremely strong magnetic field. The signal was so intense that it could have been detectable from another galaxy. The massive outburst of radio waves could also be an indication that there are plenty of other FRBs that we are currently unable to detect.
• Despite some releasing more energy than 500 million suns, fast radio bursts are extremely unpredictable. They don’t seem to have a pattern and last for only a tiny fraction of a second. Astronomers have suggested the FRB signal might originate from a star’s massive, shifting gravitational forces causing a starquake or magnetar flare, a disturbance in the magnetic field surrounding it.
Shrinivas Kulkarni
Astronomers have detected the first-ever fast radio burst (FRB) originating in our own galaxy, ScienceAlert reports.
“Something like this has never been seen before,” Caltech astronomer Shrinivas Kulkarni told ScienceAlert.
The signal, a millisecond-wave bursts of radio waves, was traced back to a Milky Way magnetar, a type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field. The magnetar suddenly lit up, sending out a gargantuan millisecond-long burst of bright radio waves, picked up by astronomers on April 28.
According to ScienceAlert, the blip was so intense that it could’ve been detectable from another galaxy.
“If the same signal came from a nearby galaxy, like one of the nearby typical FRB galaxies, it would look like an FRB to us,” Kulkarni told ScienceAlert.
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• Fast Radio Bursts (FRB’s) are very brief and “mysterious space signals” that originate from galaxies throughout our universe, though not from our own Milky Way galaxy. FRBs are composed of compact, complex radio waves, and are difficult to track and pin down. Many of the intense flashes have traveled billions of light-years across space.
• Now, according to the New York Post, a doctoral student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia named Wael Farah has matched the Molonglo telescope in Canberra with an artificially intelligent machine-learning system that recognizes FRB signatures as they arrive to produce the finest records of FRBs yet. Farah’s research was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
• FRBs have “mysterious structures, patterns of peaks and valleys in radio waves that play out in just milliseconds”, quite unlike what you’d expect to see from a massive collision or explosion that randomly happen throughout the universe. So what are they? Are they signs of intelligent alien civilizations? If so, they must be up to something pretty spectacular to produce enough energy to reach us with that much power from far off galaxies.
• Then the question is, is detecting aliens a good enough excuse to unleash even more Artificial Intelligence into the global web? Carl Sagan warned us long ago that alerting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations to our presence was probably a bad idea. Steven Hawking once warned that while AI doesn’t hold actual malice against humans, if the AI’s goals aren’t aligned with our own, we’re in trouble.
• So now we’re mixing the search for possible extraterrestrials with Artificial Intelligence. What could possibly go wrong?
While still being a bit on the frightening side, the science behind this story is still kind of cool and worth a look. The “mysterious space signals” referenced in the title are probably more familiar to those of you who follow such topics as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). They originate all over the universe, though not from our own Milky Way Galaxy (yet, thankfully), and are composed of compact, complex radio waves that don’t seem like the sort of thing you’d get from a normal spacial event like a supernova or the creation of a black hole.
Wael Farah
The problem is, they are rare and very brief, so we’ve had trouble trying to track them and pin them down. Now a laboratory in Australia has worked out a way to use Artificial Intelligence to do just that.
(NY Post quote) Wael Farah, a doctoral student at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, developed a machine-learning system that recognized the signatures of FRBs as they arrive.
Farah’s system trained the Molonglo telescope in Canberra to spot FRBs and switch over to its most detailed recording mode, producing the finest records of FRBs yet.
“It is fascinating to discover that a signal that traveled halfway through the universe,” he said. The research was recently published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Many of the intense flashes have traveled billions of light-years across space.
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by Sebastian Kettely March 19, 2019 (express.co.uk)
• With the rocket-based space travel, it is estimated that it would take between 5 and 50 million years for a civilization like ours to colonize our Milky Way galaxy. This should have happened several times already with previous civilizations in the history of our galaxy. But there is still no hard evidence of space faring civilizations. This discrepancy has been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.
• While a growing community of UFO researchers are certain that aliens visit Earth on a regular basis, such claims are immediately dismissed by the scientific community. Scientists demand solid proof – “smoking gun” evidence – which could once and for all prove the existence of UFOs.
• A former NASA researcher and physicist at the University of Albany, Kevin Knuth, argues that such immediate skepticism to all UFO-related theories is counterproductive. “I think UFO skepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy,” says Knuth. “In the end, the skeptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted.”
• Knuth does not rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial UFOs visiting the Earth. “[S]ince little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out. “The fact is that many of these encounters… defy conventional explanation.”
• Knuth said it would greatly benefit the scientific community to try and better understand alien visitors should they ever arrive. “[T]his would present a great opportunity for mankind, promising to expand and advance our knowledge and technology, as well as reshaping our understanding of our place in the universe.”
• William Borucki, the principal investigator for NASA’s Kepler mission, said, “If we find lots of planets like ours we’ll know it’s likely that we aren’t alone, and that someday we might be able to join other intelligent life in the universe.” The biggest problem faced by human explorers today is the lack of speedy and efficient interstellar travel technology. “Unless we get lucky, the search for signs of life could take decades.”
NASA’s hunt for proof of alien life is at the forefront of the space agency’s deep space exploration. But here on Earth, many conspiracy theorists and self-appointed UFO-hunters are already certain aliens visit Earth on a regular basis. Most of these alien claims, supposed UFO sightings and stories of mysterious crop circles appearing overnight are immediately dismissed by the scientific community. A former NASA researcher and physicist at the University of Albany, however, has argued immediate scepticism to all UFO-related theories is counterproductive.
Dr. Kevin Knuth
Kevin Knuth, an associate professor at Albany, argued in an opinion piece for Cosmos Magazine, the odds of life existing outside of Earth are pretty high.
The “unsettling and refreshing” possibility is exactly why, he argued, more attention needs to be paid to what is happening in the skies.
Dr Knuth said: “I think UFO scepticism has become something of a religion with an agenda, discounting the possibility of extraterrestrials without scientific evidence, while often providing silly hypotheses describing only one or two aspects of a UFO encounter reinforcing the popular belief that there is a conspiracy.
“A scientist must consider all of the possible hypotheses that explain all of the data, and since little is known, the extraterrestrial hypothesis cannot yet be ruled out.
“In the end, the sceptics often do science a disservice by providing a poor example of how science is to be conducted.
“The fact is that many of these encounters – still a very small percentage of the total – defy conventional explanation.”
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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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A rocky, molten planet orbiting one of the galaxy’s oldest stars could be scientists’ best evidence yet that alien life may have
Are we alone in the Universe or at least in our galaxy? Despite the fact that we persistently listen to heaven your most sensitive antennas, we still have not received any signal from an extraterrestrial civilization and none of them respond to our messages. The Fermi paradox has tried to answer this question, but the answer can be simple, if you look at our milky Way galaxy to scale to rate how vast distances in space and realize that we simply do not hear.
