Article by Jamie Carter March 22, 2021 (forbes.com)
• In 1993, pressure by budget-conscious politicians stopped NASA funding of programs searching for extraterrestrial life in the solar system. But in recent decades, NASA has been working more and more with organizations such as SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But a recent NASA-funded study paper published in the journal Acta Astronautica suggests that as NASA goes about its business in space, perhaps it should also keep an eye out for ‘technosignatures’ – or evidence of technology or industrial activity – without much additional spending.
• The study paper suggests that a permanent radio telescope could be set up on the far side of the Moon to search for alien signals. Interstellar probes from extraterrestrial civilizations might have been sent into our solar system long ago, and there may be artifacts or aliens “lurking” on asteroids or UFO crash sites on other planets giving off a laser or radio signal. “Such artifacts might have been captured by solar system bodies into stable orbits or they might even have crashed on planets, asteroids or moons,” reads the paper. “Bodies with old surfaces such as those of the Moon or Mars might still exhibit evidence for such collisions.”
• About every 100,000 years, the closest star ‘Proxima Centauri’ comes within nearly a light-year from the Sun – one quarter its usual distance. So there have been literally “tens of thousands” of opportunities for a technologically advanced civilization from that system to launch probes into our solar system, according to the paper.
• The study includes a list of nine ways that NASA missions could detect observational “proof of extraterrestrial life” beyond Earth in our solar system and beyond:
1. Conduct ultra-high resolution scans of the surfaces of the Moon, Mars, Mercury and Ceres for signs of impact or artifacts in crash sites that could be millions and billions of years old.
2. Look for CFC gases or nitrogen dioxide – pollutions typically associated with industrial activity or a byproduct of combustion or nuclear technology around distant exoplanets.
3. Conduct an all-sky survey using an infrared space telescope to search for “waste heat emission” from technological waste or Dyson spheres.
4. Put a permanent radio telescope dish on the “radio-quiet” far side of the Moon to conduct super-sensitive searches for distant technosignatures, free of human radio contamination.
5. Look for aliens and alien artifacts lurking on resources-rich asteroids orbiting the Sun with Earth.
6. Have an intercept mission ready to launch when a target like ‘Oumuamua’ next presents itself, tumbling through our solar system. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s all-sky surveys that is scheduled to begin later this year may very well find such a rogue object heading towards our star system.
7. Search existing NASA and academic data for objects in orbit around known exoplanets, atmospheric pollution and night-time illumination on exoplanets.
8. Conduct all-sky infrared laser pulse searches for in visible light and in wide regions.
9. Identify small asteroids under 10m in diameter that we may have previously overlooked, that may be artificial.
• [Editor’s Note] If deep state fronts such as NASA and SETI truly did any of these obvious things that their study paper suggests, they would find that we inhabit a solar system and star sector of this galaxy that is absolutely teaming with technologically advanced extraterrestrial activity. Of course, the deep state knows this. This is why they make a big deal out of publishing their “latest efforts” in their never-ending search for signs of extraterrestrial life. It is all for show.
From UFO crash sites on other planets and aliens “lurking” on asteroids to a permanent radio telescope on the far side of the Moon, a new NASA-funded study into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life (SETI) details how future NASA missions could purposefully look for the “technosignatures” of advanced alien civilizations.
Described as evidence for the use of technology or industrial activity in other parts of the Universe, the search for technosignatures has barely begun, but could unearth something surprising without much additional spend, says the study.
After more or less ceasing its search for technosignatures in 1993 after pressure by politicians, NASA has become increasingly involved in SETI.
Published in the specialized journal Acta Astronautica, the study includes a list of what’s NASA missions could detect as observational “proof of extraterrestrial life” beyond Earth.
Perhaps most intriguingly, the paper suggests that interstellar probes might have been sent into the Solar System a long time ago, perhaps during the last close encounter of our Sun with other stars.
The closest star to the Sun right now, Proxima Centauri, is over 4.2 light-years distant, but roughly every 100,000 years a star comes within nearly a light-year from the Sun. There have therefore been “tens of thousands” of opportunities for technologies similar to ours to have launched probes into our Solar System, according to the paper.
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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
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.
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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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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Article by Chelsea Gohd December 18, 2020 (space.com)
• Following the collapse of the historic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, China has opened the biggest radio telescope in the world up to international scientists. “Our scientific committee aims to make ‘FAST’ increasingly open to the international community,” Wang Qiming, the chief inspector of the telescope’s operations and development center. China will accept requests in 2021 from foreign scientists looking to use the instrument for their research.
• In Pingtang, Guizhou province of China stands the massive 1,600-foot dish of the Aperture Spherical Telescope (“FAST”) (pictured above). The largest radio telescope in the world, FAST began full operations in January of 2020. “We drew a lot of inspiration from its [Arecibo’s] structure, which we gradually improved to build our telescope,” Wang said. The Arecibo Observatory had been the largest radio telescope for decades, although the FAST is three times more sensitive than Arecibo. FAST is also surrounded by a 3-mile (5 kilometers) “radio silence” zone in which cellphones and computers are not allowed.
• Researchers may use FAST to not just explore the universe but also to study alien worlds. Radio telescopes like FAST use antennas and radio receivers to detect radio waves from radio sources in the cosmos, like stars, galaxies and black holes. These instruments can also be used to send out radio signals and even reflect radio light from objects in the solar system (like planets) to see what information might bounce back, as SETI did in 1974 at Arecibo. An interstellar radio message was sent to the globular cluster M13 in hopes of reaching an extraterrestrial civilization there. The message was co-authored by Carl Sagan and helped to popularize Arecibo and radio astronomy in general.
Following the collapse of the historic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, China has opened the biggest radio telescope in the world up to international scientists.
In Pingtang, Guizhou province stands the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), the
largest radio telescope in the world, surpassing the Arecibo Observatory, which stood as the largest in the world for 53 years before the construction of FAST was completed in 2016. Following two cable failures earlier this year, Arecibo’s radio telescope collapsed in November, shutting down the observatory for good. Now, FAST is opening its doors to astronomers from around the world.
“Our scientific committee aims to make FAST increasingly open to the international community,” Wang Qiming, the chief inspector of FAST’s operations and development center told the news agency AFP during a visit to the telescope, according to the French news site AFP.
China will accept requests this upcoming year (2021) from foreign scientists looking to use the instrument for their research, according to the report.
With its massive 1,600-foot (500 meters) diameter dish, FAST is not only larger than the now-destroyed Arecibo telescope, but it’s also three times more sensitive. FAST, which began full operations in January of this year, is also surrounded by a 3-mile (5 kilometers) “radio silence” zone in which cellphones and computers are not allowed.
“We drew a lot of inspiration from its [Arecibo’s] structure, which we gradually improved to build our telescope,” Qiming said.
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Article by Vistor Tangermann November 9, 2020 (futurism.com)
• A second cable has fallen, crushing the intricate reflector dish at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. A first auxiliary cable failed on August 10th, crushing a portion of the dish and resulting in a significant setback for the observatory. The massive dish was mainly used by SETI to hunt for extraterrestrial life. But research had to be put on pause for several months following the August event.
• Now, a main cable connected to the same support tower as the auxiliary cable failed this week, causing additional damage to both the dish and other nearby cables, according to a statement by the University of Central Florida, which co-manages the facility.
• Officials suspect the break may have been caused by the extra load the cables had to carry since the first cable failure. “This is certainly not what we wanted to see, but the important thing is that no one got hurt,” said observatory director Francisco Cordova. “We have been thoughtful in our evaluation and prioritized safety in planning for repairs that were supposed to begin Tuesday. Now this.”
• Engineers are hoping to support the structure with steel reinforcements to alleviate some of the additional load. Two replacement cables are already on their way to the observatory. The aging Arecibo radio telescope dates back to the early 1960s and has been in operation for over half a century. The reflector dish alone is 1,000 feet in diameter and is composed of 38,778 perforated aluminum panels.
More bad news for the alien-hunting Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. A second cable has fallen, crushing the intricate reflector dish below.
A first auxiliary cable failed over the massive dish on August 10, crushing a portion of the dish and representing a significant setback for the observatory.
The dish was mainly used to hunt for extraterrestrial life — but research had to be put on pause for several months following the event.
Compounding the problem, a main cable — which was connected to the same support tower as the auxiliary cable — failed this week, causing additional damage to both the dish and other nearby cables, according to a statement by the University of Central Florida, which co-manages the facility.
Luckily, nobody was hurt.
Extra Load
The cause of the break has yet to be identified. Officials suspect it may have been caused by the extra load the cables had to carry since the first cable failure.
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Article by Mike Williams November 3, 2020 (unilad.co.uk)
• A new study claims that the Milky Way galaxy could in fact be home to many other inhabitable planets just like ours, within the ‘habitable zone’ of its star – just the right orbital distance where water has the potential to be stable on a planet’s surface. There are around 200 billion G dwarf stars just like our sun, so the chances of some of these solar systems having a planet like Earth is conceivable.
• To illustrate how vast space is, 200 billion stars is only 7% of the Milky Way. Says the study’s co-author, Jeff Coughlin, “This is the first time that all of the pieces have been put together to provide a reliable measurement of the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy.” Coughlin is an exoplanet researcher at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California. “We’re one step closer on the long road to finding out if we’re alone in the cosmos.”
• Building upon NASA’s Kelper’s science studies conducted between 2009 and 2018, a 2020 team, led by Steve Bryson of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, has worked hard to discover more than 2,800 exoplanets to date. Bryson and his crew have also examined the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft’s stellar properties which maps out billions of Milky Way stars.
• With all that data, the researchers have been able to predict the occurrence rates of potentially habitable Earth-sized rocky planets along with a sun-like star of similar temperatures. And the chance of there being other life forms on planets like ours is becoming more and more likely.
• [Editor’s Note] What a waste to have these scientists spend their sad careers focused on deep state red herrings, just to give the public the impression that they are diligently looking for intelligent extraterrestrial life but cannot find any, when ETs currently reside throughout our solar system and extraterrestrial civilizations permeate the galaxy and the universe. They just don’t want us to know about it.
A new study suggests there are plenty more planets just like ours out there, suggesting we aren’t alone after all.
Having barely touched the tip of space exploration, we are still largely unaware of what is out there – let alone what’s beyond the power of any NASA probe, satellite, or telescope at our disposal.
However, recent research claims the Milky Way could in fact be home to many other inhabitable planets
just like ours, when it comes to exploring the sun-like stars that could have small planets within each’s so-called ‘habitable zone’. The breakthrough claims these zones are just the right orbital distance where water has the potential to be stable on a planet’s surface.
The findings give a glimmer of hope to that age old question of whether it’s just us in the universe; reminding us that there are around 200 billion G dwarfs, aka balls of burning gas just like our sun, so the chances of some of them lighting up planets just like Earth is conceivable, Space.com reports.
But, just to illustrate how vast space is, the figure of 200 billion is only 7% of the Milky Way, as co-author of the study, Jeff Coughlin, shared the significant news, saying, ‘This is the first time that all of the pieces have been put together to provide a reliable measurement of the number of potentially habitable planets in the galaxy.’
Coughlin, an exoplanet researcher at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, also said, ‘This is a key term of the Drake Equation, used to estimate the number of communicable civilizations.’
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Article by News Staff September 8, 2020 (sci-news.com)
• Astronomers searching for technosignatures of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope (in Western Australia) published their findings in a paper that appears in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. “The MWA is a unique telescope, with an extraordinarily wide field-of-view that allows us to observe millions of stars simultaneously,” said Dr. Chenoa Tremblay, an astronomer at the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.
• Dr. Tremblay and her colleague, Professor Steven Tingay from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (in Perth), searched for narrow-band radio signals consistent with radio transmissions from six known exoplanets and 10,355,066 stellar systems in the Vela region of our Milky Way Galaxy.
• “The telescope was searching for powerful radio emissions at frequencies similar to FM radio frequencies, that could indicate the presence of an intelligent source,” said Dr. Tremblay. “We observed the sky around the constellation of Vela for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before.”
• “Even though this was the broadest search yet,” said Professor Tingay, “… we found no technosignatures – no sign of intelligent life.” “[E]ven though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool.”
• “Since we can’t really assume how possible alien civilizations might utilize technology, we need to search in many different ways,” said Professor Tingay. “Although there is a long way to go in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, telescopes such as the MWA will continue to push the limits – we have to keep looking.”
• [Editor’s Note] I’m certain that many of these astronomers working with SETI are unaware that SETI is a Deep State front whose purpose is to make sure that scientists and astronomers do not find any intelligent extraterrestrials. The game is rigged to maintain the Deep State’s seventy-five year psyop, convincing the public that there is no such thing as UFOs and there are no extraterrestrial beings anywhere near here, when the exact opposite is the truth. I wonder how these unwitting scientists and astronomers are going to react to the imminent disclosure of the ubiquitous presence of advanced extraterrestrial beings and civilizations everywhere; that they have been lied to by their superiors; and that they themselves have been promoting Deep State disinformation all of this time.
Astronomers using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope have searched for technosignatures —
indicators of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — in six known exoplanets and over 10 million stellar systems in the Vela region of our Milky Way Galaxy. But in this part of the Milky Way at least, it appears alien civilizations are elusive, if they exist.
“The MWA is a unique telescope, with an extraordinarily wide field-of-view that allows us to observe millions of stars simultaneously,” said Dr. Chenoa Tremblay, an astronomer at the CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.
Dr. Tremblay and her colleague, Professor Steven Tingay from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, searched for narrow-band signals consistent with radio transmissions from six known exoplanets (HD 75289b, HD 73526b, HD 73526c, HD 70642b, DE0823-49b and KELT-15b) and 10,355,066 stellar systems in the Vela region.
“The telescope was searching for powerful radio emissions at frequencies similar to FM radio frequencies, that could indicate the presence of an intelligent source,” she explained.
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Article by Deborah Byrd September 2, 2020 (earthsky.org)
• Researchers at University of Manchester in the UK have developed a new analytical technique that they say represents “a milestone in SETI”, the ‘search for extraterrestrial intelligence’. Making use of new data being gathered by European Space Agency’s ‘Gaia’ satellite, this “analytical technique” will “place limits” on the probability of other extraterrestrial intelligence in the Milky Way.
• In a new research paper published on September 2nd in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, University of Manchester astronomers Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka and Michael Garrett, in collaboration with Andrew Siemion, the director of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative (at SETI), have increased the number of stars available for applying SETI search criteria by more than 200 times – from 1,327 to 288,315 stars.
• The Gaia spacecraft satellite and observational platform is currently gathering a vast quantity of data to create the first-ever three-dimensional map of our Milky Way galaxy. SETI estimates that fewer than 0.04% of stellar systems have the potential of hosting an advanced civilization with at least 21st century radio technology. “Combing through the catalogue produced by the ESA’s Gaia spacecraft, which measured the distances to over a billion stars,” reads the report, “[we] recalculated limits on the prevalence of transmitters around additional stars within the radio telescope’s fields of view. By selecting stars out to much larger distances (up to about 33,000 light years) than the original sample of nearby stars, [we] were able to expand the number of stars studied from 1,327 to 288,315.”
• In other words, Wlodarczyk-Sroka and Garrett have extrapolated this 0.04% standard to a much larger field of data – representing 200 times the number of stars that it was once applied to – to ‘place some of the most stringent limits to date on the prevalence of powerful radio transmitters in this region of our Milky Way galaxy’. This SETI-approved 0.04% probability of other advanced civilizations out there doesn’t include non-technical ‘simple life’ civilizations.
• Team leader Mike Garrett is glad that SETI searches can now take into account the many other ‘cosmic objects’ (ie: exoplanets) that fall within the range of the ESA telescope, and apply the same SETI limits to 287,000 more star systems. “Knowing the locations and distances to these additional sources greatly improves our ability to constrain the prevalence of extra-terrestrial intelligence in our own galaxy and beyond,” said Garrett. “We expect future SETI surveys to also make good use of this approach.
• According to the report’s conclusion, “fewer than 0.04% of stellar systems have the potential of hosting advanced civilizations with the equivalent or slightly more advanced radio technology than 21st century humans. As well as improving the limits for nearby stars, the team for the first time have actually placed limits on more distant stars with the caveat that any potential lifeforms inhabiting the outer limits of the galaxy would need even more powerful transmitters in order to be detectable.”
• “Our results help to put meaningful limits on the prevalence of transmitters comparable to what we ourselves can build using 21st century technology,” said Wlodarczyk-Sroka. “We now know that fewer than one in 1,600 stars closer than about 330 light years host transmitters just a few times more powerful than the strongest radar we have here on Earth.”
• [Editor’s Note] Is this what they call hiding the deceit in plain sight? Is the deep state’s SETI admitting that they are simply extrapolating its 0.04% probability estimate of advanced ET beings in the galaxy to more and more stars as they are discovered? And how do they arrive at this ‘1 in 1,600 stars’ probability in the first place? Their false narrative is that there must be some other intelligent civilization out there in this vast galaxy, but we have a pathetically small chance of ever detecting them, much less meeting them. Now, if this was a true analytical probability, it would presume that they actually discovered some of these civilizations through returned radio transmissions to compute a ratio. This hasn’t happened, not according to SETI. But SETI isn’t so much in the business of actually finding evidence of intelligent extraterrestrials as they are in looking for them. So all that this prestigious university report does is to arbitrarily “place” SETI’s pseudo-scientific “limits” on any new stars that the highly advanced ESA space observatory finds. Yay.
The researchers called their new analytical technique “a milestone in SETI.” One researcher commented: “We now know that fewer than one in 1,600 stars closer than about 330 light years host transmitters just a few times more powerful than the strongest radar we have here on Earth.”
Astronomers at the University of Manchester in the UK said today (September 2, 2020) that they’ve made an
analytical breakthrough in the ability to seek and perhaps someday find intelligent extraterrestrial life in our Milky Way galaxy. They said this breakthrough is a “milestone” that could “significantly improve” our chances of finding extraterrestrial intelligence by dramatically expanding the number of stars available for searching. They said their new analytical technique has increased the number of stars that can be analyzed by more than 200 times. And they said they’ve now placed the best limits yet on the prevalence of artificial radio transmitters, dubbed techno-signatures, in the Milky Way.
In new research published on September 2 in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In a statement the researchers said: “The collaborative research team have been able to dramatically expand the search for extra-terrestrial life from approximately 1,400 stars to 280,000 – increasing the number of stars analyzed by a factor of more than 200 …”
“The result suggests that fewer than 0.04% of stellar systems have the potential of hosting advanced civilizations with the equivalent or slightly more advanced radio technology than 21st century humans. As well as improving the limits for nearby stars, the team for the first time have actually placed limits own more distant stars with the caveat that any potential lifeforms inhabiting the outer limits of the galaxy would need even more powerful transmitters in order to be detectable.”
The research team consists of University of Manchester Masters student Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka and his advisor Michael Garrett, collaborating with Andrew Siemion, director of the Breakthrough Listen Initiative.
The analysis, say researchers, can only locate intelligent and technically advanced civilisations that use radio waves as a form of communication. They could not, for example, detect ‘simple’ life or non-technical civilizations. They said: “Combing through the catalogue produced by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft, which measured the distances to over a billion stars, [we] recalculated limits on the prevalence of transmitters around additional stars within the radio telescope’s fields of view. By selecting stars out to much larger distances (up to about 33,000 light years) than the original sample of nearby stars, [we] were able to expand the number of stars studied from 1,327 to 288,315.”
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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.
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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Article by Jamie Carter June 19, 2020 (forbes.com)
• In the first NASA non-radio technosignatures grant ever awarded, and the first NASA grant in over three decades connected with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), NASA has awarded the University of Rochester (NY), Harvard University and the Smithsonian funding for a study entitled: Characterizing Atmospheric Technosignatures, to find ‘technosignatures’ that would indicate the presence of life on exoplanets within another star system.
• Technosignatures are scientific evidence of past or present technology similar to the type that we produce here on Earth. “Such signatures might include industrial pollution of atmospheres, city lights, photovoltaic cells (solar panels), megastructures, or swarms of satellites,” said Harvard’s Avi Loeb. The study will focus first on finding evidence of solar panels and chemical pollution. The presence of chlorofluorocarbons in exoplanetary atmospheres could indicate the presence of industrial activity.
• “There are only so many forms of energy in the Universe,” said Adam Frank at the University of Rochester. Any alien civilization is bound to have thought of solar power generation. “The nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, hosts a habitable planet, Proxima b. The planet is thought to be tidally locked with permanent day and night sides,” said Loeb. “If a civilization wants to illuminate or warm up the night side, they would place photovoltaic cells on the day-side and transfer the electric power gained to the night side.”
• Some astronomers believe that technosignatures may be simpler to find than evidence of microbial life—known as ‘biosignatures’ – which detect chemicals such as oxygen and methane. Says Loeb, “If another civilization had been doing it for much longer than we have, then their planet’s atmosphere might show detectable signs of artificially produced molecules that nature is very unlikely to produce spontaneously.”
• In the past five years, many thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, some of which are in their star systems’ habitable zones and could have water vapor in their atmospheres. “Now we know where to look. We have thousands of exoplanets including planets in the habitable zone where life can form,” says Frank. “The game has changed.” Loeb’s hope is that “[by] using this grant, we will quantify new ways to probe signs of alien technological civilizations that are similar to or much more advanced than our own.” The scientists eventually want to begin an online library of technosignatures that astrophysicists can use when gathering data.
• [Editor’s Note] This is just more time and money wasted by deep state-controlled institutions such as Harvard and the Smithsonian (and now add the University of Rochester to the list) who only want to hide the fact that since at least WWII, the US government and the cabal elite have known of the presence of intelligent extraterrestrial beings and civilizations permeating our galaxy and universe, and have been secretly studying and working with these beings to their own ends, which has nothing to do with elevating human development here on Earth. They have no intention of “discovering” and revealing to the public any extraterrestrial civilizations.
Space agency NASA has awarded a grant to a group of astronomers to search the Universe for signs of alien civilizations via “technosignatures”—and it will focus first on finding evidence of solar panels and chemical pollution.
Technosignatures are scientific evidence of past or present technology, which of course would indicate the presence of life in another star system. Some think that these technosignatures may be simpler to find than direct evidence of microbial life—known as biosignatures.
“Technosignatures relate to signatures of advanced alien technologies similar to, or perhaps more sophisticated than, what we possess,” said Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard. “Such signatures might include industrial pollution of atmospheres, city lights, photovoltaic cells (solar panels), megastructures, or swarms of satellites.”
Put simply, the scientists at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian, and the University of Rochester, will look for exactly the same technosignatures that we produce.
It’s believed that other civilizations would probably use solar panels to produce energy, and also probably pollute their planet’s atmosphere with artificial chemicals and gases.
How and why to find solar panels around distant planets
How does an astronomer look for sunlight reflected off solar panels around a distant exoplanet? As long as they know the wavelength band to search in—which is what this study will try to establish—astronomers training their telescopes on exoplanets may be able to spot these technosignatures.
Any alien civilisation is bound to have thought of solar power generation, think the scientists. “There are only so many forms of energy in the Universe,” said Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, and the primary recipient of the grant. “Aliens are not magic.”
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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 Jerome H. Barkow March 29, 2020 (scientificamerican.com)
• The collaboration between SETI’s Breakthrough Listen project and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite provides thousands and thousands of ‘Goldilocks Zone’ targets for the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Yet so far, neither SETI nor NASA have announced contact with far off extraterrestrial civilizations or aliens visiting our planet. Ask Fermi would ask, ‘if they exist, where are they?’
• Perhaps these ET civilizations have not reached a technological level of development. Perhaps the chances of two technologically advanced civilizations are too great. Perhaps advanced civilizations have a habit of self-destructing. Perhaps they simply do not find Earth interesting.
• Is the human species on a trajectory of “species maturity”? Or is our development random? Will we as a species ever see the wisdom in less murder and self-destruction? … in increased kindness and compassion? A necessary step to our species’ maturing is to recognize the right of other animal species on Earth to exist in their own way, and to extend this to the recognition of other sovereign extraterrestrial species in the universe.
• We are rapidly becoming a spacefaring species. In the future, we will mine asteroids and create manufacturing bases on the moon. Even today, we are looking for life – albeit microscopic life – in our own solar system. Seeking life on other planets and moons is characteristic of a maturing species, understanding that our community doesn’t end at the outskirts of our solar system.
• We humans possess a natural desire to expand and meet new people outside of our world. Awareness that we are not alone could make us a morally better species. This is why SETI’s cousin METI – messaging extraterrestrial intelligence – ought to go ahead and actively call out to the galaxy. Some fear that we will expose our planet to hostile aliens. But we’ve been sending tell-tale radio waves into space for decades. Should we live in fear? In hiding? The greater likelihood is that contact with other species will help us to mature and lessen our own internecine conflict.
• Imagining galactic neighbors and what we would want to say to them is in itself a step towards species maturity. In ancient times, we looked to the stars for guidance. Today we look to them for neighbors and witnesses to our species’ trajectory.
• [Editor’s Note] I hope that people like this writer remember their casual ‘hypothetical’ position on meeting intelligent extraterrestrials. Because the thoughtful, educated people who have clung relentlessly to the deep state propaganda from places like SETI – that extraterrestrials can’t be found and probably don’t exist – are in for a rude awakening. We are witnessing the first dominoes to fall that will ultimately expose the existence of numerous intelligent ET species that have been here a long time, and have been working directly with our deep state government since World War II. The pandemic/ economic collapse/ global financial reset will begin a series of amazing public revelations, thereby revealing the deep state that has kept it all secret. We as a planet will learn about existing technologies that have been hidden from us, including: medical scans that will not only detect but cure disease; free energy devices, 3-D printers and replicators that can print anything from clothing and tools to food; warp drive propulsion and portal travel. We will learn about the evil agenda of the deep state and the depravity of its leaders and members. We will discover how these wealthy elite and a military industrial complex have actually achieved far-reaching secret space programs and breakaway civilizations. We’ll find that there already exist numerous human and extraterrestrial bases and colonies all across our solar system. We will realize that all of our history as a species has been heavily corrupted, and we will re-learn our true history, and our true reality. We are at the beginning of a new era of Earth humanity’s development.
In a press release dated Wednesday, October 23, 2019, Breakthrough Listen announced its collaboration with NASA and the space agency’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS is expected to add thousands more to the thousands of exoplanets already discovered. The collaboration means that Breakthrough Listen will now have specific directions in which to listen and look both for extraterrestrial signals, signs of intelligent life and technosignatures—signs of advanced technology.
Some exoplanets are in the “Goldilocks zone,” meaning that their distance from their sun likely permits the existence of liquid water, essential for life as we know it. Listening for the radio sounds of extraterrestrial life and for other technosignatures, SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has become an industry. True, so far we have found no extraterrestrials and no one (as far as we can ascertain) has visited us; this is Fermi’s Paradox, the “if they exist where are they?” issue—but there could be many reasons why we have yet to detect other intelligent species.
For one thing, most of them, like most intelligent species on our own planet, are probably not technological. Then, too, the span during which a high technology species both can and might wish to make contact with a relatively low-technology species such as our own may be limited. Technological species may even regularly destroy their capacity for interstellar contact, something that not inconceivably could be our own fate. Perhaps other intelligent species are simply not interested in us, their evolved curiosity driving them in other directions. Most likely (in my opinion), we aren’t very interesting to them, at least not yet.
How relatively easy it is to study child development, with billions of children growing up all the time, each with a brief and comparable trajectory. How hard it is to study the development of a high-technology species, with an n of 1 so far and a developmental trajectory of tens of thousands of years.
Worse, that one intelligent species we do know about has not (I hope) finished growing up. Worse still, perhaps the very idea of “species maturity” is a misguided analogy, and all we will ever have is history’s rather random walk.
If we are to mature it will require us to become less self-destructive; we must increase kindness and compassion and decrease murder and mutilation. It must include an end to environmental destruction. In practical terms, our growing up is likely to be associated with continuing technological development and change, making greater achievements possible while creating dangerous challenges. In a sense, we must move to a new neighborhood.
One aspect of the U-Haul rental that could take us there is our increasing recognition of other species as having their own kinds of intelligence and their own rights. Even as biodiversity shrinks and extinction rates soar, many of us are learning to think of the entire planet as our community.
Species maturity also means that we are learning that “home” is broader than our planet. We are rapidly becoming a spacefaring species with the necessary technology and investment being generated by competition among nations, billionaires and immense corporations. In the future, we will mine asteroids and create manufacturing bases on the moon. Even more exciting, today’s space exploration emphasizes the search for microbial life elsewhere in our solar system, or at least for the possible building blocks of life.
No one today anticipates finding intelligent, high-technology organisms anywhere in our own planetary system, but seeking life on other planets and their moons makes it easier to accept that the community in which we live does not end at the outskirts of the solar system. If it did, what a pity, as a mature species may need neighbors.
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• Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists use telescopes to look for intelligent beings’ technological signatures. Then there are those who believe that intelligent extraterrestrials are here, now, buzzing the skies of planet Earth. The respective members of these three groups of ‘alien hunters’ do not necessarily get along with one another. Their interactions demonstrate a concept that sociologists call “boundary-work”, e.g.: building fences and enforcing ideas about who counts as a scientist, and who doesn’t. This ‘boundary’, however, is subjectively based on social mores, social fears, and politics.
• People who find themselves on the outside of mainstream science often foster a sense of antagonism. But the line of demarcation as to what is ‘outside’ of mainstream science shifts with time. Science’s ideas about which ET-seeking methods are valid and which are ‘fringey’ have changed over the past few decades.
• In the early years, astrobiologists and SETI – the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, worked together. ‘Perhaps those microbes on a far-off planet evolved and built radio transmitters.’ But then their respective disciplines parted ways. In order to study the conditions of life on other planets, astrobiologists tend to study conditions on this planet – drilling into frozen lakes, doing lab experiments, studying geological evolution, researching our genetics. They use this data to determine which exoplanets have the best chance for evolving life forms. SETI, on the other hand, search for electromagnetic transmissions and signatures of technologies that are not yet understood.
• In the early 1970s, NASA and the National Academy of Sciences considered SETI an important component of the search for extraterrestrial lifeforms. Then politicians such as Senator Richard Proxmire denounced SETI as a wasteful, useless, and futile endeavor. Congressional funding of SETI’s ‘High-Resolution Microwave Survey’ in the early 1990s was cut-off in 1993. The National Science Foundation banned SETI projects from its funding portfolio. Grant opportunities dried up. NASA and mainstream astrobiologists began to distance themselves from SETI.
• In the 2000s, SETI turned to private investors like Paul Allen and Yuri Milner and became associated with searching for ‘little green men’ and UFOs. The mainstream considered SETI ‘laughable pseudo-research’ outside the bounds of proper science. At the same time, astrobiology became a “legitimate” science. Astrobiologist Sara Seager told Congress in 2013, “We’re not looking for aliens or searching for UFOs. We’re using standard astronomy.”
• But SETI scientists have been clawing their way back to legitimacy. In April 2018, Congress directed NASA to start including searches for “technosignatures” in its broader search for life beyond Earth. The House Appropriations Committee is deciding whether SETI’s work will be sanctioned in the 2020s.
• One thing that both “legitimate” astrobiologists and SETI have in common is that they both consider ufology silly. They keep their distance from anyone who believes in UFOs or an extraterrestrial presence. But for someone at SETI who imagines light-years-away microbes growing into sentient beings that broadcast radio waves and beam lasers, is it that much harder to imagine these beings traveling here to Earth?
• Mainstream academic researchers claim that virtually no hard UFO data exists beyond personal accounts. Ufology doesn’t explain how or why alien spaceships could or would come all the way here. Then there are the standard variety of banal explanations for bogus UFO sightings. Ufology is not science in the way SETI researchers do science.
• Greg Eghigian, a Penn State researcher, points out that “From the early-1950s through the 1970s, a number of academics took the study of UFOs seriously and regularly engaged with ufologists.” Back then the military had official UFO research programs, even though their conclusions usually amounted to “nothing to see here.” Those programs ended. The Air Force-sponsored 1968 ‘Condon Report’ concluded that studying UFOs was a waste of time, and UFO research was consigned to the fringes.
• In 1983, Thomas F. Gieryn published his paper: “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science.” When researchers do ‘boundary-work’, they create and maintain lines around who qualifies as a scientist and who doesn’t, and what is and what is not science. In so doing, they bestow legitimacy onto themselves and deny it to others. But this can backfire on them. When the public perceives scientists arbitrarily establishing exclusive scientific authority, people themselves feel alienated, fostering conspiracy theories about the mainstream scientists’ true motives.
• Similar to anti-vaccination activists, GMO no-goers, and people who say climate change has nothing to do with people, many ufologists have decided that scholars and politicians are at best, narrow-minded or, at worst, engaged in a deliberate attempt to hide information.
• Psychologist Stuart Appelle wrote that ufology “is not simply rejected as a legitimate discipline, it is categorically dismissed.” Rejection suggests a conclusion based on close examination and careful reflection. But dismissal is a judgment that close examination is not warranted at all, which is not very scientific. This silencing is a form of ‘social stigmatization’.
• Adam Dodd, a communications instructor at the University of Queensland (in Australia) sees mainstream scientists’ dismissal of the UFO phenomenon as ‘saving face’ in order to maintain their reputation among their own peers. An example of this is when Stephen Hawking concluded that the absence of any evidence of aliens essentially equates with evidence of the absence of aliens. And therefore, for a ‘true scientist’, UFOs and aliens are not worthy of consideration.
• This ‘boundary-work’ by mainstream scientists is both frustrating and patronizing to UFO researchers who find themselves outside of the mainstream fence. They suspect a mainstream agenda is being formed against them. Ufologists become mistrustful of so-called ‘experts’, while the mainstream regards UFO followers as ‘cranks’. So they each band together to create an ‘us versus them’ scenario, and keep their distance from each other. Scientists cannot afford the professional consequences of being associated with fringe ufologists. As a consequence, science probably loses out on the ‘kernels of truth’ in the nut bin.
• The thing that both sides generally have in common is the desire to get to the truth. But with the elitist scientists’ blanket denial of all that is lumped together as ‘fringe conspiracy theories’, these ‘hard science’ practitioners also tend to ignore cultural knowledge, emotional knowledge, spiritual knowledge, and personal knowledge. Their plodding and myopic focus on hard science may slow the rate of scientific achievement.
• Today, mainstream science seems to be more willing to embrace SETI. In 2014, SETI astronomer Jill Tarter received radio astronomy’s highest honor, the Janksy Lectureship award. And this is slowly expanding into the field of ufology. The chair of the Harvard astronomy department has publically suggested that the ‘asteroid’ Oumuamua could be a visiting spaceship.
• A NASA scientist notes that both SETI and ufology are about ‘finding the signal in the noise’. There may be ‘signals’, however small, that indicate a phenomena associated with UFOs that cannot be explained or denied that should be taken into consideration. Rather than dismissing the research of a particular ‘fringe’ group outright, scientists might listen. If so, the reaction by the fringe might be to consider mainstream ‘expert’ analysis more. There can be important truths revealed from both sides of the spectrum.
Aliens—hypothetical beings from outer space—fall into roughly three categories. They could be far-away microbes or other creatures that don’t use technology humans can detect; they could be far-away creatures that use technology earthlings can identify; or they could be creatures that have used technology to come to Earth.
Each of these categories has a different branch of research dedicated to it, and each one is probably less likely than the last to actually find something: Astrobiologists use telescopes to seek biochemical evidence of microbes on other planets. SETI scientists, on the other hand, use telescopes to look for hints of intelligent beings’ technological signatures as they beam through the cosmos. Investigating the idea that aliens have traveled here and have skimmed the air with spaceships, meanwhile, is the province of pseudoscientists. Or so the narrative goes.
Although these three groups have a common goal—answering the question “Are we alone?”—they don’t always get along. Their interactions demonstrate a concept that sociologists call “boundary-work”: designing and building fences around Legitimate Science, and enforcing ideas about who counts as a scientist, who doesn’t, and why. Those fences are supposed to defend science’s honor, demonstrate scientists’ objectivity, and uphold the profession’s standards. That’s good! We want that! But the fence posts also demarcate a boundary that isn’t objective but is, in fact, a function of time, location, culture, social mores, social fears, and politics. The enforcement of this sometimes-shifting boundary can send people who find
themselves on the outside further away from mainstream science, fostering a sense of antagonism and slighted outsiderism. The history of hunting aliens is a good way to understand those unintended consequences of boundary-work in other disciplines. Because even though none of the groups actually knows, or has gained access to, whatever ET truth is out there, science’s ideas about which ET-seeking methods are valid and which are fringey have changed over the past few decades.
Astrobiology v. SETI
In the early years of astrobiology and SETI, the two groups worked more side by side than they later would. After all, they just existed at different locations on a spectrum: Maybe microbes arose on a far-off planet, and maybe those microbes evolved and built radio transmitters. Astrobiology technically just means the study of life in the universe. But that encompasses a lot: Astrobiologists look into questions like how life started, how it evolved, and what environments can support it. To study these questions, scientists can gather data on this planet, drilling into frozen lakes, doing lab experiments involving the chemistry of early Earth, studying geological evolution on Mars, or gaining a better understanding of genetics to get a better sense of what alternatives might exist to our own DNA. They also investigate what life might look like on another world, whether it has existed on other solar-system planets, and how to pick out a habitable or perhaps inhabited exoplanet from astronomical data.
SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, falls logically within the scope of astrobiology. But this search, usually for electromagnetic transmissions, is more speculative, since it deals less explicitly with the kinds of chemistry, geology, physics, and biology we can observe in the solar system—and so perhaps beyond—and instead seeks signatures of technology whose nature we don’t yet, and may never, know.
Still, NASA initially supported both sorts of searches (although it called astrobiology “exobiology”). The venerable National Academy of Sciences, in its 1972 recommendations for the search for life beyond the solar system, listed SETI as an important component of exobiology, stating that “SETI investigations are among the most far-reaching efforts underway in exobiology today.” Trouble bubbled up between the groups, though, after SETI became the object of political ire. The search for smart aliens had already proven to be a favorite football for politicians, a frequent contender for cancelation—because of the low probability of success, the speculation required, and the money that they said could be better spent on Earth. For instance, in 1978, Senator Richard Proxmire awarded the nascent project his infamous Golden Fleece Award, for wasting government funds on what he considered a useless, futile endeavor. In the early 1990s, NASA finally began its first SETI observations, part of the project that had been on the drawing board when Proxmire mocked it: then called the High-Resolution Microwave Survey. But the year after the survey began, in 1993, Congress shut down the program.
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Article by Adam Mann January 22, 2020 (livescience.com)
• Claire Webb is an anthropology student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 2017, Webb has worked with Breakthrough Listen to examine how SETI researchers think about aliens and place anthropocentric assumptions into their work. On January 8th at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu, Webb pointed out the potential flaw in SETI’s $100 million Breakthrough Listen Project, which scours the cosmos for intelligent alien signals, being that scientists tend to bring with them their human biases. Webb’s job is to get SETI researchers to be mindful of their human behavior in order imagine new ways to perform scientific studies.
• At the conference, Webb pointed out how Breakthrough Listen scientists use artificial intelligence (or ‘AI’) to sift through large data sets to uncover potential ‘technosignatures’ to indicate technology or tools use by alien beings. Researchers that employ AI “tend to disavow human handicraft in the machines they build,” said Webb. “I find that somewhat problematic.” AI is trained by human beings. In doing so, they predispose their algorithms to certain biases.”
• Most SETI research assumes that beings on different worlds will be able to communicate in the same way that we do, says Webb. It presumes a technological compatibility in using radio telescopes and understanding the universal language of science and math. “(But) if E.T. was looking at us, what would they see?” Webb asks.
• Biases also come from assuming that other species’ technological development would mirror our own, such as dealing with nuclear weapon proliferation and climate change. We can’t automatically assume that the history of another species will unfold in the same way, says Webb.
• Veteran SETI scientist Jill Tarter suggested that we may be looking for a better version of ourselves, hoping that a message from advanced beings will include blueprints for a free energy device that can alleviate poverty. This assumes that an advanced species will have an equal moral advancement. Says Tarter, “I think that’s something that can be contested.”
• “One thing Jill [Tarter] has said many times is, ‘We are doing what we think makes sense now, but we might one day be doing something totally different… We reserve the right to get smarter.'”
HONOLULU — Our hunt for aliens has a potentially fatal flaw — we’re the ones searching for them.
That’s a problem because we’re a unique species, and alien-seeking scientists are an even stranger and more specialized bunch. As a result, their all-too human assumptions may get in the way of their alien-listening endeavors. To get around this, the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100-million initiative scouring the cosmos for signals of otherworldly beings as part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is asking anthropologists to help unmask some of these biases.
“It’s kind of a joke at Breakthrough Listen,” Claire Webb, an anthropology and history of science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said here on Jan. 8 at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Honolulu. “They tell me: ‘We’re studying aliens, and you’re studying us.'”
Since 2017, Webb has worked with Breakthrough Listen to examine how SETI researchers think about aliens, produce knowledge, and perhaps inadvertently place anthropocentric assumptions into their work.
She sometimes describes her efforts as “making the familiar strange.”
For instance, your life might seem perfectly ordinary — maybe involving being hunched over at a desk and shuttling electrons around between computers — until examined through an anthropological lens, which points out that this is not exactly a universal state of affairs. At the conference, Webb presented a poster looking at how Breakthrough Listen scientists use artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through large data sets and try to uncover potential technosignatures, or indicators of technology or tool use by alien organisms.
“Researchers who use AI tend to disavow human handicraft in the machines they build,” Webb told Live Science. “They attribute a lot of agency to those machines. I find that somewhat problematic and at the worst untrue.”
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• Beginning January 21, 2020, distributor TriCoast Entertainment will release the feature length documentary “WOW SIGNAL” on streaming platforms Amazon, iTunes, FlixFling, Vimeo on Demand, and Google Play. Produced by Bob Dawson and Michael Shaw, the film documents a night in 1977 when Ohio radio telescope operators discovered a strong, interstellar signal that is said to be the world’s best evidence of communication from an extraterrestrial civilization. The resulting code of printed letters and numbers was so astounding, one of the astronomers wrote the word: ‘Wow!’ next to it, and it became the “Wow Signal”.
• While the origins of the signal remain a mystery, the documentary takes the opportunity of the Wow Signal event to explore the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence by Seth Shostak at SETI, Jerry Ehman of the University of Michigan, Karen O’Neil and Michael Holstine of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and radio astronomer John D. Krause who designed the “Big Ear” radio telescope at Ohio State University which picked up the signal. These are folks who believe that intelligent life beyond our own exists just ‘outside our grasp’. The ramifications of proving that “we are not alone” is a strong motivation for continued research.
• Produced by ‘Next Feature Filmstory’, WOW SIGNAL comes off of a successful run through the festival circuit, winning Best U.S. Documentary Feature at the Los Angeles Theatrical Release Competition & Awards in 2018, and being recognized at the Roswell Film Festival, the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, and the Raw Science Film Festival.
• Says the film’s director Bob Dawson, “The job of a documentary filmmaker is never to come to a conclusion. It’s always to present the evidence and let your audience decide.”
• [Editor’s Note] It is interesting that the film’s director would say that “the job of a documentary filmmaker is never to come to a conclusion” but let your audience decide. This happens to be the very same view as mainstream astronomers such as Seth Shostak of SETI have in their ‘ongoing search’ for extraterrestrial life. The ‘Wow Signal’ is ideal for the mainstream because it offers a small bit of proof of another alien civilization out there somewhere, but no concrete evidence. This way, SETI astronomers and mainstream documentary filmmakers can keep doing what they do for a living, forever. It all remains a never-ending search, a big mystery, and a steady paycheck.
The ‘conclusion’ that they want people will take away is that our top ‘scientists’ are working diligently to find other intelligent extraterrestrial beings and civilizations. But in fact, they are doing the exact opposite. They are actively hiding the truth.
The truth is that the US shadow government has been working with extraterrestrial beings, developing highly advanced technologies, and building a secret space program ever since the Roswell crash of 1947. All of this searching by SETI through radio telescope arrays is mere misdirection to maintain this seventy-year cover-up of the true extraterrestrial presence. The real purpose of mainstream scientists and the controlled media is to reinforce the institutionalized lie that everything can be explained as weather balloons, atmospheric phenomenon, or top secret military technology, and that there is no such thing as extraterrestrials or alien UFOs.
1977, another civilization may have been calling… and we were listening.
Los Angeles, CA – Jan 6, 2020 – In a dark, wooded clearing in Ohio, a large radio telescope received a mysterious communication from deep space. Discovered days later as a code of printed letters and numbers, it became regarded as the strongest potential alien communication, branded by a single word: ‘Wow!’
WOW SIGNAL is a fascinating and thought-provoking documentary that follows the development, search, discovery and acceptance of the Wow Signal’s place in history, and its influence on future SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) projects and uncovers the passion of scientists who do the work through interviews of radio astronomers like John D. Krause, who built homemade radio telescopes and designed the building “Big Ear”.
Receiving various official selections and finalist accolades, WOW SIGNAL was awarded Best U.S. Documentary Feature at LATCA 2018. The science documentary stars Jerry Ehman (Astronomer at the University of Michigan), Karen O’Neil (Site Director National Radio Astronomy Observatory), Seth Shostak (Former director of SETI) and Michael Holstine (Former Director National Radio Astronomy Observatory; Child of God, Angel’s Perch).
“WOW SIGNAL makes a strong case for radio astronomy and the continued search for extraterrestrial life in the universe. The notion that “we are not alone,” and its ramifications are a strong motivation for continued research. The film is educational and highly recommended for anyone interested in Astronomy and/or the universe around us here on earth,” wrote JR Martin Media.
2:47 minute trailer for ‘WOW SIGNAL’ movie (‘TRIADincVideos’ YouTube)
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Article by Leonard David November 26, 2019 (space.com)
• So far, astronomers have found more than 4,000 exoplanets and more are being discovered, suggesting that every star in the Milky Way galaxy hosts more than one planet. Space.com asked top SETI experts whether they will detect life elsewhere in the galaxy or even intelligent extraterrestrials?
• In searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, senior SETI astronomer Seth Shostak relies on detecting narrow-band radio signals or brief flashes of laser light from nearby star systems. If there are 10,000 extraterrestrial societies broadcasting radio signals in the galaxy, then he estimates that SETI will need to examine 10 million star systems to find one. That will take at least two more decades.
• But with the new receivers for the Allen Telescope Array in northern California that is scheduled for 2020, SETI will be able to search for laser technosignatures, which may improve their chances. Says Shostak, “[O]ne can always hope to be taken by surprise.”
• Michael Michaud, author of the book: Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials, says that improvements to search technologies could boost the odds of success. But there are still vast areas of the galaxy that we are not looking at. In searching for chemical technosignatures, we’ll most likely find simple life forms before finding a technological civilization.
• If SETI did find evidence of life in the galaxy, Michaud thinks the news will leak quickly. How should they announce the discovery? “[G]overnmental authorities won’t have much time for developing a public-affairs strategy,” says Michaud. Premade plans for such an announcement are unlikely because agency personnel won’t be able to get past the “giggle factor”, thinking that it is all just too absurd.
• Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, which is affiliated with SETI, said, “I think this is going to be a long-term project. I estimate a very small probability of success (of finding extraterrestrial life) in any given year.” Nevertheless, “The Breakthrough Initiatives is committed to full and immediate disclosure of any and all results,” said Worden.
• Steven Dick, an astrobiology scholar and author of the book: Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact, says despite the work by Breakthrough Listen and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), there’s no reason to think 2020 would be the year for discovery. “[A]ll these things combine to increase the chances over the next decade of finding extraterrestrial intelligence. I would caution, though, that any discovery will be an extended process, consisting of detection and interpretation before any understanding is achieved,” said Dick. “I see the search advancing incrementally next year, but with an accelerating possibility that life will be discovered in the near future.” “One thing that is certain is that we are getting a better handle on the issues of societal impact, should such a discovery be made.”
• Douglas Vakoch, president of the SETI-affiliated nonprofit Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI), notes that “We are right now on the verge of finding out whether there is life elsewhere in the universe.” We scan with available technologies: Earth-based observatories, space-based telescopes, and even craft that travel to other planets and moons in our solar system. “It all depends on how plentiful intelligent extraterrestrials are. If one in 10,000 star systems is home to an advanced civilization trying to make contact, then …the news we’re not alone in the universe could well come in 2020,” Vakoch says.
• “As the next generation of space telescopes is launched, we will increase our chances of detecting signs of life through changes to the atmospheres of planets that orbit other stars, giving us millions of targets in our search for even simple life in the cosmos,” says Vakoch. But we probably won’t have “definitive proof” until after 2020 when NASA launches the James Webb Space Telescope, or 2028 when the European Space Agency starts its Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey, or ARIEL, to study the atmospheres of exoplanets for potential signs of life.
• “[D]on’t hold your breath for discovery by 2020,” says Vakoch. Humans cannot control whether or not there is life elsewhere in the universe. “Either it’s there or it’s not.” “To be human is to live with uncertainty.” “If we demand guarantees before we begin searching, then we are guaranteed to find nothing. But if we are willing to commit to the search in the coming year and long afterwards, even without knowing we will succeed, then we are sure to discover that there is at least one civilization in the universe that has the passion and the determination to understand its place in the cosmos — and that civilization is us.”
• [Editor’s Note] Seth Shostak and his band of idiots at SETI make their living by covering up the widespread existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life all around us, on behalf of their puppet masters, the Deep State elite. Are they liars or are they being fooled themselves? If they are half the scientists they claim to be, they must know the truth. Therefore, they are the very face of the Deep State lying to the public. They are reprehensible. They talk in scientific terms about the new technologies that they employ in their phony search to find a needle in a haystack. But they insist that it will take years, and probably lifetimes before they find a microbe on a distant exoplanet. Then they add platitudes of what a grand discovery it will be if they ever find life in the universe besides humanity. But make no mistake. Their job is to never find life beyond the Earth, and they have gotten very good at it.
In the past three decades, scientists have found more than 4,000 exoplanets. And the discoveries will keep rolling in; observations suggest that every star in the Milky Way galaxy hosts more than one planet on average.
Given a convergence of ground- and space-based capability, artificial intelligence/machine learning research and other tools, are we on the verge of identifying what is universally possible for life — or perhaps even confirming the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence?
Is 2020 the celestial payoff year, in which objects of interest are found to offer “technosignatures,” indicators of technology developed by advanced civilizations?
Space.com asked top SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experts about what next year may signal regarding detecting other starfolk.
Gaining speed
“Well, despite being the widely celebrated 100-year anniversary of the election of Warren G. Harding, 2020 will not likely gain fame as the year we first discover extraterrestrial life,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.
The search for intelligent beings elsewhere, Shostak said, is largely conducted by checking out nearby star systems for either narrow-band radio signals or brief flashes of laser light. And those might succeed at any time, he told Space.com.
“But one should remember that this type of search is gaining speed in an exponential fashion, and that particular technical fact allows a crude estimate of when SETI might pay off. If we take — for lack of a better estimate — Frank Drake’s opinion that there might be 10,000 broadcasting societies in the Milky Way, then we clearly have to examine at least one [million] – 10 million stellar systems to have a reasonable chance of tripping across one. That goal will be reached in the next two decades, but certainly not in 2020,” Shostak said.
Improved searches
But there are still reasons for intelligent-alien hunters to be excited and optimistic about the coming year. Multiple existing projects will either be expanded or improved in 2020, Shostak said. For example, the SETI Institute will get new receivers for the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, and both the SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, will conduct new searches for possible laser technosignatures.
“And, of course, there’s always the unexpected,” Shostak said. “In 1996, the biggest science story of the year was the claim that fossilized Martian microbes had been found in a meteorite. No one really saw that coming. So one can always hope to be taken by surprise.”
Previous predictions
“I am skeptical about picking a specific year for the first discovery. Previous predictions of success have been wrong,” said Michael Michaud, author of the thought-provoking book “Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials” (Copernicus, 2007).
“I and others have observed that the continued improvement of our search technologies and strategies could boost the odds for success,” Michaud said, noting that the primary focus of SETI remains on radio signals. “However, we still don’t cover all frequencies, all skies, all of the time. Other types of searches have failed, too, such as looking for laser signals or Dyson spheres [ET mega-engineering projects]. Those campaigns usually have limited funding and often don’t last long.”
A new possibility has arisen because of exoplanet discoveries, Michaud said: “In some cases, astronomers now can look for chemical evidence of life in planetary atmospheres. It is conceivable that we will find simple forms of life before we find signals from a technological civilization.”
Prevailing opinion
If astronomers do someday confirm a SETI detection, how should they announce the discovery? It is an old question that has been answered in several ways.
“The prevailing opinion among radio astronomers has been that the news will leak quickly. If that is correct, scientific and governmental authorities won’t have much time for developing a public-affairs strategy,” Michaud said.
“It remains possible that the sophisticated monitoring capabilities of intelligence agencies might be the first to detect hard evidence,” Michaud said. “One might think that the government would have a plan to deal with such an event.”
But, Michaud said that his own experience suggests that such plans are unlikely to be drawn up due to a “giggle factor” and would be forgotten as officials rotated out of their positions. He previously represented the U.S. Department of State in interagency discussions of national space policy.
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Article by Sean Martin November 8, 2019 (express.co.uk)
• Sara Seager is an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the deputy science director of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The TESS space telescope uses an array of wide-field cameras to survey 85 percent of the sky to study the mass, size, density, and orbit of exoplanets, and telltale brightness dips potentially indicating planetary “transits” across its star. By analyzing data from TESS, scientists will determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
• Breakthrough Listen and the Berkeley SETI Research Center recently announced they are partnering with NASA to use its TESS space telescope to assist SETI in its search for exoplanets that may harbor extraterrestrial intelligence (see previous ExoArticle). Said Ms Seager, “We are very enthusiastic about joining the Breakthrough Listen SETI search.”
• Findings such as other earth-like exoplanets, evidence of the past existence of water on Mars, and habitable moons in our solar system suggest conditions for life are not unique to our planet. However, there is yet to be any concrete evidence of the existence of aliens. But scientists believe it will come. But when the discovery of other life in the galaxy does come, it is likely to be a gradual process. Speaking on a panel at the (70th annual) International Astronautical Congress in Washington DC (October 21-25, 2019), Ms Seager stated, “[W]hen alien life is found, it will …[be] a painstaking process where study after study will have to confirm alien existence.” “[N]ot like the little green humanoids arriving here on earth scaring everybody.” “It’s probably going to take a long time,” which will help humanity process the concept of extraterrestrial life. Ms Seager concluded: “Out of all the exoplanet endeavors (in the world) only SETI holds the promise for identifying signs of intelligent life.”
• [Editor’s Note] Let’s see. An astronomer at MIT with the most advanced technology in the world at her disposal, is saying that there is no evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial life beyond this planet. But when it happens, it will be a long and painstaking process of discovery. Sounds suspicious. Ah! Of course. They are being assisted by the Deep State puppet show known as SETI. Now it makes sense. Just more disinformation intended to assure the public that there is no such thing as UFOs and extraterrestrial beings visiting the planet, all evidence to the contrary.
Ms Seager says that the process of discovering extraterrestrial life will be very long. What exactly does she mean? Her line of thought probably goes something like this: First, SETI will one day announce the great discovery of an exoplanet with unmistakable signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Then we’ll spend fifty years sending signals back and forth. Language “experts” will spend another fifty years formulating some sort of communication with them. Then we’ll decide on a mid-point between our planets where our representatives can meet, and set out for a hundred year journey to that rendezvous. Under this presumption, it would take a thousand years or so before we would be technologically able to visit each other’s planet. Yes, given Newtonian physics and this myopic perspective, it certainly would take a looooong time.
But this planet has been visited by various extraterrestrial groups for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, influencing each stage of life and civilization. A hundred years ago we reached a level of technology that caught the attention of the various ET groups that operate in the background today. With the detonation of the first atomic bomb, both benevolent and negative ET groups began working with world military leaders and governments, and several of them met with President Eisenhower during the 1950’s. The new shadow government killed JFK to prevent him from disclosing all of this to the public, and then set up a secret cultural exchange program between Eben beings from the planet Serpo and American astronauts who went to Serpo in the early 1960’s and returned in the mid-1970’s. The world’s wealthy elite allied themselves with a group of negative ET beings in return for advanced technology that would allow them to create several secret space programs. Mind-controlled Deep State operatives were charged with maintaining this secrecy by any means. Mass mind control is the most common method.
People believe what has been drilled into them since birth. Their cognitive dissonance won’t allow them to contemplate anything except the agreed upon “scientific” narrative, as promulgated by the Deep State education system. Since humans “evolved” unassisted from a primordial soup under unique circumstances, these brain-washed scientists and academics like to point out the tremendously long odds of there being any other intelligent life in the universe. Surely there can only be a minimum of other intelligent beings that also developed by accident and happen to be at our level of technological skill at this same moment in time – if any. And as this universe is so vast, it would be a miracle that the two or three intelligent civilizations in the universe happened to find one another. And if we ever did meet an alien being, it would be so different from humans that we might not be able to effectively communicate with it, or even recognize it. The message from our most educated scientists is that the odds of humans ever finding another extraterrestrial civilization is so impossible, that for the average person its not worth even thinking about. … ‘Move along. There’s nothing to see here. Move along.’
The reality is that our universe is teeming with life. Virtually every star system in the galaxy is home to an extraterrestrial civilization. Here in our particular cluster of 52 stars, most of these civilizations are human-like, according to Corey Goode, and they are all watching and waiting to see if our time has finally come. Will we wake up to this deception that has stolen our reality, and join with our human cousins in the Galactic Federation? Will we overthrow the elite cabal and embark upon a new era of humanity on earth, with instant access to the advanced technologies that can solve our existing societal and environmental problems, and make it possible for us to expand our presence into the galaxy as we are meant to do?
The possibility of extraterrestrial life has intrigued humanity for centuries, but recent discoveries seem to prove that we are edging closer to the discovery. Findings such as Earth-like exoplanets, the past existence of water on Mars and habitable moons in our solar system suggest conditions for life are not unique to our planet. However, there is yet to be any concrete evidence of the existence of aliens, but scientists believe it will come.
But when that discovery does come, it is unlikely to be instantaneous, but rather a gradual process.
Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who focuses on detecting exoplanets, said when alien life is found, it will not be how the movies depict it where extraterrestrials invade Earth, but a painstaking process where study after study will have to confirm alien existence.
Speaking on a panel at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, Ms Seager said: “It’s probably something that’s going to be a slow discovery, not like the little green humanoids arriving here on Earth scaring everybody.
“It’s probably going to take a long time.”
Ms Seager said the slow discovery will help humanity process the concept of extraterrestrial life.
Ms Seager is also NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) deputy science director.
Just a few weeks ago, Breakthrough Listen, an organisation which scans the stars in the hope of finding alien signals, bosses said they will collaborate with scientists on TESS – which looks for planets outside the solar system.
By analysing data from TESS scientists will be able to determine which distant planets they should focus on in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
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• Since 1958, Green Bank, West Virginia has been home to the United States’ first national astronomy hub, the Green Bank Observatory. The world’s largest steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, has located black holes, gravitational waves, and pulsars to name a few cosmic anomalies. In September, GBT researchers detected the most massive neutron star ever captured by telescopic lenses.
• Green Bank is also where the ‘Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (or “SETI”) began in 1960 with Project Ozma, a state-funded effort to listen for signals from potential extraterrestrial intelligences. SETI’s work is still ongoing at Green Bank.
• The 8,500 residents living in surrounding Pocahontas County are prevented by law from emitting any radio frequency interference (or RFIs) by their home electronic devices and appliances, to avoid data interference with Green Bank’s astronomical studies. Anti-RFI legislation dates back to a 1956 Act that says it’s “illegal to operate or cause to be operated any electrical equipment within a two-mile radius of… any radio astronomy facility”.
• Frequencies emitted by astronomical phenomena are similar to ordinary WiFi connections at 2.4 GHz. Staff at the observatory are charged with pinpointing local RFI hotspots that could potentially harm its research. RFI technician Chuck Niday drives around the county looking for unauthorized radio waves. In today’s era of high-tech gadgets and smart homes, unauthorized RFIs are becoming ubiquitous. Popular Mechanics quoted Niday as saying “We got tons of WiFi around here. It’s kind of don’t ask, don’t tell”. Niday notes that there is little that could be done about it – apart from the locations being properly mapped for further study, as observatory staffers don’t have the power to strip residents of their WiFi spots.
• Green Bank’s site director Dr Karen O’Neil says, “The GBT is the most sensitive telescope in the world”. O’Neil admits that it is challenging to keep track of new RFI-causing WiFi connections. But being such a rural area, RFI interference is not nearly as ubiquitous as in other more densely populated areas. Says O’Neil, “If we ever lose the GBT, we will lose ability to dig deep into the universe.”
Green Bank, West Virginia is a key location for past and present-day cosmic research, as it’s been home to the iconic Green Bank Observatory ever since it first
opened in 1958 as the United States’ first national astronomy hub.
Here, operational telescopes, including the world’s largest steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope, or GBT, have found black holes, gravitational waves, pulsars, and whatnot. Also, it is where just last month, local researchers detected the most massive neutron star ever captured by telescopic lenses.
And it doesn’t stop here: Green Bank is also where the comprehensive study and search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) kicked off. In 1960, Frank Drake started Project Ozma here, the first US state-funded effort to listen for extraterrestrial intelligence and intercept signals, if there are any. Besides, the town is the place where he wrote his famed equation about the possibility of worlds other than ours.
SETI work is still ongoing at Green Bank, with a gigantic trove of one million gigabytes of related data filed over the last three years having been released to the public.
However, there is a nuance, if not a setback that comes with the continuous scientific progress in the area.
This part of the larger Pocahontas County, with a population of only 8,500 people, has long lived under binding anti-radio frequency interference (RFI) legislation, which forbids any devices or appliances at home or beyond that would emit RFIs – as these may ruin research, experts claim.
One of the past legislative acts that still applies there is the Virginia’s Radio Astronomy Zoning Act of 1956 that says it’s “illegal to operate or cause to be operated any electrical equipment within a two-mile radius of… any radio astronomy facility”.
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Article by Albert McKeon October 15, 2019 (northropgrumman.com)
• When people think of UFOs, they typically think of craft flying over their heads. No one talks much about the possibility that intelligent extraterrestrials may already be here among us on Earth. Last year, after writing a paper on theoretical ways for SETI to detect an alien presence, NASA physicist Silvano Colombano was accused by Fox News of claiming that aliens have indeed come to Earth. Colombano was quick to correct the Fox News story, saying that he believes an alien visit is only theoretically possible. However, Colombano also stated that “reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study.” But mainstream scientists are loath to even discuss an extraterrestrial presence, much less study it.
• So the discussion about UFOs and extraterrestrials has been relegated to ‘claims’ and ‘theories’. Claims such as a New Hampshire couple being abducted by aliens one summer evening in 1961; or theories such as Harvard Professor Avi Loeb assertion that the rogue “asteroid” Omuhamuha may have been an alien probe, which “elicited some derision from scientists.”
• The vast majority of our efforts to discover intelligent extraterrestrials has been by looking out beyond our planet. The ‘Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence’ or ‘SETI’ employs more than 130 scientists, educators and administrative staff in a quest to “explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and the evolution of intelligence.” They do this by monitoring telescope arrays that study the characteristics of red dwarf stars and newly-discovered exoplanets. Unfortunately, SETI has recently had to cross a large number of potential exoplanets off of their list for having “unsuitable environments”.
• [Editor’s Note] So this is where the line is currently drawn. The compromised media welcomes any news on a ‘scientific research group’ like SETI (also compromised) searching for life on other planets, but they will attack you as soon as you suggest that the aliens are already here. Organizations such as Fox News and SETI only exist to do the Deep State’s bidding, which in this case is to make it sound like smart people are doing everything possible to find other extraterrestrial life or even a viable explanation for UFOs, but alien civilizations beyond the Earth simply do not exist. They have most of the world believing this. The Deep State and the elite they protect does not want people to know that they have been fleecing the natural and economic resources of the Earth and its inhabitants for the past seventy years in order to develop advanced technologies and create a secret space program to rival the other space programs, both human and extraterrestrial, that exist all around us and throughout the galaxy. And they will stop at nothing to prevent the population from “waking up” to this reality.
Of course, whether extraterrestrial life has actually touched the soil of Earth — or floated above it, observing us all — has been a burning question for almost as long as humankind could look at the stars. The many claims of alien sightings, often buttressed by grainy photos of UFOs, and the many theories about outer space creatures already living among us could fill enough books to weigh down a spacecraft that’s collecting samples of our planet.
One thing is for certain: The public and private agencies that deal with all things space focus on finding life away from Earth. They are not researching, at least publicly, the scientific possibility of whether aliens have already been on our planet. For that matter, governments answer stories of UFO sightings on Earth by pointing to the weather or by saying the claim couldn’t be corroborated. There are no official records of aliens visiting Earth.
Claims and Theories of Aliens Visiting Earth
Discussion about aliens on Earth can be, for the sake of argument, placed into two camps: claims and theories. Claims are those that appear on the covers of supermarket tabloids or occasionally make for a fun feature in a mainstream news publication. For instance, a New Hampshire couple that spoke of being captured by aliens on a late-summer evening in 1961 as they drove through the White Mountains is the first widely-publicized alien abduction claim, a tale that started a legion of others.
Theories of alien visits can also spread like wildfire in the mainstream news if they are made by someone with authority. It happened only recently. Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard University’s astronomy department, didn’t propose that aliens were even close to Earth. Rather, he and a colleague posited that Oumuamua, a cigar-shaped comet or object that whizzed by the sun in 2017, might have been a probe sent to the vicinity of Earth by an alien civilization. The theory, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, elicited some derision from scientists.
The minor controversy led NASA physicist Silvano Colombano to say that scientists essentially rock the establishment when they theorize about extraterrestrial life. “General avoidance of the subject by the scientific community” creates a catch-22, Colombano told Quartz. He means that scientists might appear crazy for posing questions about aliens, but society will never know about alien life or any possible alien missions to Earth if no one in the scientific community examines the concept.
Colombano himself got caught up in the debate last year, when Fox News reported he claimed aliens have indeed come to Earth, pointing to a document of his on the space agency’s website. But Colombano was quick to correct the Fox News story, saying it was taken out of context and that he believes an alien visit is only theoretically possible. “My perspective was simply that reports of unidentified aerial phenomena should be the object of serious study, even if the chance of identification of some alien technology is very small,” he told Live Science.
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• “It seems a safe bet that if advanced aliens do exist in our galaxy, they would at least know our planet is here,” says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The real challenge for these inquisitive ET species isn’t finding habitable planets such as Earth, it is discovering details that will narrow their search – mass, size, approximate temperature. The aliens will have really big telescopes trained on us. Being aware of our world and its properties, would they be spurred to transmit signals in our direction? Extraterrestrials could have learned enough about us by now to even pay us a visit.
• An enormous alien telescope would see the Earth as a dot of light. Directed through a prism, they could analyze its spectral fingerprint and detail the Earth’s atmosphere. Researchers here on Earth recently used spectroscopy to detect water vapor in the atmosphere of planet K2-18b, 110 light-years from Earth. An alien telescope could surely detect oxygen on our planet. Oxygen betrays photosynthesis, a sure tip-off that this is a living planet. Light patterns would tell the alien astronomer that the Earth rotates, perhaps even revealing oceans and continents in low-res images.
• Shostak continues to ruminate: “If we can imagine it, some of (the aliens out there) have probably done it. Of course, the most interesting thing these hypothesized neighbors might find is not the outlines of the Americas or even the oxygen in our atmosphere. They might find us.” If they’re within 70 light-years of us, they could pick up the radar or television signals that we’ve been sending into space since during World War II. Roughly 15,000 star systems lie within 70 light-years.
• Researchers using data from NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory recently simulated how an extraterrestrial astronomer might gather information on the Earth, resulting in a world map more accurate than the Greeks had. It’s hardly inconceivable that alien astronomers have not only found Earth but learned that we humans inhabit it.
• [Editor’s Note] The assumption that Shostak is making here, is that intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations are as technologically deficient as we are here on earth – taking spectrometer readings from telescopes to search the galaxy for the elusive intelligent civilization. In reality, the plethora of extraterrestrials with advanced technologies have far more effective ways of watching us than telescopes, and they are literally here already. But Shostak goes through this meaningless drill of speculating what non-terrestrial aliens would do if there were any alien civilizations out there whose technology had “equaled” our own. Not that we don’t possess advanced technologies ourselves. But the elite power brokers on the planet have prevented the general populace from having knowledge of or access to these technologies. Instead, they limit the use of these technologies to their super-secret space programs and black projects, which Shostak’s disinformation is intended to hide.
The truth is that the extraterrestrial beings that are visiting our solar system and interacting with certain elite factions of our human species are far more advanced in their technological development than we. They know everything about us. But Shostak and his Deep State handlers want people to think they are continuing the hard work of searching for extraterrestrial worlds and beings. And since they haven’t found any (on purpose), there must not be any extraterrestrials out there who can reach our star system. It is all a carefully controlled psy-op that SETI has helped to perpetrate since 1960. But when it is finally revealed that advanced extraterrestrial beings not only exist but have been here throughout the history of this planet, Seth Shostak will be out of a job.
Scientists have been trying to discover planets around other stars for generations. They finally succeeded in the 1990s, and more than 4,000 have been catalogued since then.
But could aliens have found our planet? Is Earth cataloged by even a single population of extraterrestrials? If so, what do they really know about terra firma?
You may consider this an idle question, of no greater importance than asking if gerbils enjoy oboe concertos. But the answer is of real consequence for those who scan the skies for signals from intelligent aliens. After all, if extraterrestrials are unaware of our world and its properties, what would spur them to transmit signals in our direction?
Additionally, if you’re among the many folks who are convinced that aliens are sailing through the troposphere, it might help your self-esteem to know that extraterrestrials could have learned enough about us to pay a visit.
It seems a safe bet that if advanced aliens do exist in our galaxy, they would at least know our planet is here. If human astronomers can find thousands of worlds in two dozen years, how many exoplanets —planets around other stars — will the denizens of other solar systems find in, say, a millennium of slogging away?
The real challenge for these exo-catalogers isn’t finding the planets, but discovering details beyond the gross characteristics — mass, size and approximate temperature. To learn more, the aliens will need really big telescopes.
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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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Article by Colleen Killingsworth July 16, 2019 (my9nj.com)
• In a report published in the journal Acta Astronautica, researchers from the University of Cadiz in Spain say that aliens could be all around us, but may exist in ways we cannot even fathom. We simply don’t know how to detect them. One of the report’s co-authors, Gabriel G. De la Torre, says, “Our traditional conception of space is limited by our brain, and we may… be unable to see them.”
• The Spanish research team used a classic psychological experiment that demonstrates “inattention blindness” as a possible explanation for our inability to see what we aren’t looking for. They point to a video of a social experiment by Daniel J. Simons and Christopher Chabris in 1999 where they asked participants to watch the video and keep a silent count of the number of passes of a basketball made by the people in white shirts. A person in a gorilla suit walks through the video frame for nine seconds, faces the camera, thumps his chest, then leaves. Only half of the people who watched the video in the original experiment saw the gorilla. (see 1:21 minute video below)
• The “Invisible Gorilla” experiment revealed that human perception isn’t foolproof. Most people miss a lot of what’s going on around them as they try to filter and process the incredible amounts of perceptual information being fed to their brains. Said De la Torre, “It is very striking, but very significant and representative of how our brain works.”
• De la Torre and co-author Manuel A. Garcia conducted a similar experiment. They asked 137 adults to look at aerial photographs and determine whether they featured artificial structures, like roads and buildings, or natural elements, like mountains and rivers. In one photo, De la Torre and Garcia inserted an image of a person in a gorilla suit. Only 45 out of the 137 participants noticed the gorilla in the aerial photograph. De la Torre says that the more “intuitive individuals identified the gorilla in our photo more often than those (who are) more rational and methodical.”
• According to De la Torre and Garcia, the result of the experiments show that just as people may not see the gorilla in the image, aliens could very well exist in a way that humans are not oriented to perceive or understand. “[W]e tend to see them from our perceptive.” Says De la Torre, “What we are trying to do with this differentiation is to contemplate other possibilities – for example, beings of dimensions that our minds cannot grasp; or intelligences based on dark matter or energy, which make up almost 95 percent of the universe and which we are only beginning to glimpse. There is even the possibility that other universes exist, as the texts of Stephen Hawking and other scientists indicate.”
• De la Torre and Garcia suggest that focusing too much on certain methods, like SETI‘s search for radio signals, is limiting our ability to discover the “cosmic gorilla” that is non terrestrial life. Solely searching for civilizations populating other planets or solar systems may limit our ability to conceive of and potentially locate inter-dimensional capable civilizations, the research team suggests. Expanding our search methods may bring us closer to the truth.
• In other words, De la Torre and Garcia think we need to first check our egos and account for the limitations of human biology and psychology before we can expect to comprehend advanced extraterrestrial or non-terrestrial life.
CADIZ, Spain – Aliens may exist in ways we cannot even fathom and they could be all around us, but because we don’t know how to detect them, we can’t see what’s right in front of our faces. At least that’s what a group of researchers from the University of Cadiz in Spain suggested in a report published in the journal Acta Astronautica.
“Our traditional conception of space is limited by our brain, and we may have the signs above and be unable to see them,” Gabriel G. De la Torre, one of the co-authors of the study, told the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT). “Maybe we’re not looking in the right direction.”
The research team used a classic psychological experiment to provide a possible explanation as to why we humans have not found any indication of extraterrestrial life. The theory hinges on the idea of inattention blindness, which suggests that we don’t see what we aren’t looking for.
Countless teachers and professors have used a video to illustrate exactly how this phenomenon works. The experiment was originally conceived and carried out by Daniel J. Simons and Christopher Chabris in 1999. They asked participants to watch the video and keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts.
Chabris and Simons showed the video to a group of participants at Harvard University, and the experiment went on to become one of the best-known in psychology because of its surprising outcome.
The experiment is called “The Invisible Gorilla” because a person in a gorilla suit spends nine seconds on screen — they stroll through the video frame at one point, face the camera and thump their chest, then leave — but half of the people who watched the video in the original experiment didn’t see the gorilla at all. It was like the gorilla was invisible.
The experiment revealed that human psychology and perception aren’t as foolproof as many of us would like to believe. Most people miss a lot of what’s going on around them as they try to filter and process the incredible amounts of perceptual information being fed to their brains through the senses and nervous system every nanosecond of every day.
“It is very striking, but very significant and representative of how our brain works,” De la Torre told FECYT.
De la Torre and co-author Manuel A. Garcia used a similar approach in their research. They asked 137 adults to take the cognitive reflection test, fill out a perception and attention questionnaire and look at aerial photographs and determine whether they featured artificial structures, like roads and buildings, or natural elements, like mountains and rivers. In one photo, De la Torre and Garcia inserted an image of a person in a gorilla suit to see if participants noticed.
Only 45 out of the total 137 participants noticed the gorilla in the aerial photograph.
1:21 minute “Invisible Gorilla” selective attention test (Simons and Chabris 1999)
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• Seth Shostak (pictured above) is the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in Mountain View, California. His job is to listen for signals from intelligent extraterrestrial sources in space.
• Shostak contends that, even though US Navy pilots have come forward to describe witnessing UFOs reaching hypersonic speeds without any detectable exhaust plumes, suggesting super-advanced propulsion technology, Defense Department officials aren’t invoking intelligent aliens as an explanation, and neither is Shostak. ‘UFOs are very real, as we have recently seen – but that doesn’t mean ET has been violating our airspace,” said Shostak.
• US Navy pilots and the DoD have provided video evidence of fast moving UFOs off of the coast of San Diego in 2004 (i.e.: the “Tic Tac UFO”) and more recently off of the Virginia and Florida coasts. In one case, a UFO nearly collided with a Navy jet off the Virginia coast. The Pentagon’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’ (AATIP) has studied these incidents, and others (including UFO propulsion technology) since at least 2007. Such incidents have become so common that the Navy has enacted a new policy for reporting UFOs.
• Shostak argues against jumping to the ET conclusion, however. And he offers several “common sense” reasons why: First, these Navy sightings are all off of the coast of the continental US. Isn’t this exactly where you might expect to find advanced Russian reconnaissance craft?
• Second, the Navy pilots’ radar equipment had been upgraded. “[W]henever you upgrade any technical product, there are always problems,” says Shostak. Therefore, the sightings might stem from some sort of software bug or instrument issue.
• Third, it is ridiculous to imagine that alien spacecraft would cross vast gulfs of space and time to come here, and then to not offer their assistance, or pilfer our natural resources, or even show themselves. “[T]hey never do anything,” Shostak said. | • But Shostak is quick not to dismiss the existence of extraterrestrials altogether. He points out that at least 20% percent of the galaxy’s 200 billion stars could harbor habitable worlds. So intelligent aliens could be out there somewhere, or were out there sometime during the Milky Way’s 13-billion-year history. But the odds are long that any UFO witnessed to date was an extraterrestrial craft.
• [Editor’s Note] Seth Shostak’s livelihood is searching for ET intelligence among the 200 billion stars in the galaxy. As the Senior Astronomer and former Director for the SETI Institute, he has become something of a celebrity. The last thing he wants is to discover that ET beings already pervade our reality: around and within this planet, on/within our Moon, on/within Mars, and throughout the solar system. Has Shostak and SETI been duped just like the rest of us? Have SETI’s efforts been futile for decades, and now rendered obsolete? Or was SETI just another Deep State psyop that existed to appease and assure the public that so-called “experts” were on the look out for aliens, while their puppet masters continued to hide the true extraterrestrial presence? If so, that would explain why Shostak insists that there are perfectly logical non-alien explanations for Navy pilot’s reports of UFOs possessing technology that defies known physics. (And why Fox News published this article.) Apparently, Shostak knows more about UFO technology than experienced Navy fighter pilots who roam the skies on a daily basis. Nevertheless, while emphatically denying that ET is already here, Shostak advocates continuing the abstract “search” for extraterrestrial life, light years from Earth. After all, it’s a living.
UFOs are very real, as we have recently seen — but that doesn’t mean E.T. has been violating our airspace.
“UFO” refers to any flying object an observer cannot readily identify. And pilots with the U.S. Navy saw fast-moving UFOs repeatedly off the East Coast throughout 2014 and 2015, in one case apparently nearly colliding with one of the mysterious objects, The New York Times reported earlier this week.
Those incidents were reported to the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), whose existence the Times and Politico revealed in December 2017. (Interestingly, those 2017 stories cited Pentagon officials as saying that AATIP had been shut down in 2012.)
Former AATIP head Luis Elizondo, by the way, is involved with a new six-part series called ” Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation,” which premieres tonight (May 31) on The History Channel.
The Navy pilots said some UFOs reached hypersonic speeds without any detectable exhaust plumes, suggesting the possible involvement of super-advanced propulsion technology. Still, Defense Department officials aren’t invoking intelligent aliens as an explanation, according to this week’s Times story — and they’re right to be measured in this respect, scientists say.
There are multiple possible prosaic explanations for the Navy pilots’ observations, said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI ( Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ) Institute in Mountain View, California.
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• For nearly 70 years the scheme favored by most scientists in looking for extraterrestrial life on other planets, and that employed by SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), has been to beam radio transmissions toward celestial objects in space. Radio waves can easily traverse light-years. (The article’s writer is a former director and senior astronomer at SETI.)
• Successful results from our beaming a radio transmission into space is dependent upon the ET society beaming back a response, should they happen to receive it at all. They may not want to reveal themselves. Similarly, we may not want to reveal ourselves to an evil race of ETs.
• An attractive alternative might be in searching for alien structures and large artifacts in the form of massive engineering works constructed by an advanced extraterrestrial society.
• University of Chicago physicist Daniel Hooper recently suggested looking for clusters of stars where an advanced civilization may have moved distant stars into their own orbit as back-up suns. Corralled stars would be easy to spot, reasons Hooper.
• In 2015, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian and her colleagues thought that they’d found a star around which a Dyson sphere had been constructed by an extraterrestrial civilization. It was noted that ‘Tabby’s Star’, 1400 light years away, would dim as the star rotated. Today, scientists believe that the dimming comes not from a mega-structure, but heavy dust surrounding the star.
If you’re trying to come up with the best game plan for proving the existence of extraterrestrials, you’ve got plenty of options. Naturally, you want a strategy with a high chance of success, simply in the interests of time, money and a shot at the Nobel Prize.
For nearly 70 years the scheme favored by most scientists has been to look for signals — radio transmissions. That’s the classic approach of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), and frankly, it makes sense. Radio can easily traverse light-years, and the technology for detecting it is well known and highly sensitive.
But is looking for signals really the best plan? Is it possible that we’re making the wrong bet?
There’s an attractive alternative: searching for physical artifacts — alien structures. We’re not talking about crop circles or other odd phenomena here on Earth. We’re talking about massive engineering works that an advanced society has constructed somewhere in space.
Why search for artifacts? Because it eliminates the requirement that the aliens have chosen to get in touch — to transmit radio signals our way. Sure, maybe they’d want to do that, but then again maybe they’d rather lay low. If you’re not sure you’re the Milky Way’s top-dog society, you don’t want to bet the farm by assuming that the alpha aliens, wherever they might be, have good intentions. Silence could have survival value.
There’s another point: Picking up an alien civilization’s transmissions requires that the signal reach your telescope at the very moment that you’re pointing it in their direction. This is SETI’s well-known “synchronicity” problem, and it’s been likened to firing a bullet and expecting that it will intercept, head-on, another bullet shot by someone else. Improbable.
In nearly every radio SETI experiment, the amount of time spent listening at any given frequency is but a few minutes. The universe has been around for nearly ten thousand trillion minutes, so SETI efforts are a bit like stepping into the backyard hoping you’re just in time to catch a raccoon stealing the cat food.
Of course, you can believe the aliens have some good reason to spend lots of time transmitting to Earth, but if they’re even a short distance away (astronomically speaking), they won’t know we’re here — there hasn’t been enough time for our radar and television signals to reach them yet, even at the speed of light.
In contrast, artifacts may be lurking in space just waiting our discovery, all night, every night. China’s Great Wall and the Egyptian pyramids are earthly constructions that have existed for centuries. Finding them doesn’t demand much synchronicity.
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