Yuri Milner | Exo News

Chinese Telescope Now Open to Foreign Scientists

April 15, 2021
ExoNews Editor

Article by Abhijnan Rej April 3, 2021 (thediplomat.com)

• China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (or ‘FAST’, pictured above) will now be available for use by foreign scientists, reported Chinese state media. “All foreign applications will be evaluated, and the results will be announced on July 20. Observations by international users will begin in August.”

• China’s Xinhua news agency quoted the telescope’s chief engineer as saying that 10 percent of observation time would be allocated to foreign scientists in the instrument’s first year of operations. “The project will contribute Chinese wisdom to the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity, and strive to promote international sci-tech development and the progress of human civilization.”

• FAST, located in China’s Guizhou province, is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope and became fully operational January last year. While the telescope’s scientific uses are vast, its potential use to discover extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) that has attracted considerable attention.

• In October 2016, the privately-funded Breakthrough Listen initiative announced that researchers using FAST will collaborate with those using the Green Bank Telescope in (West Virginia) USA and the Parkes Observatory in NSW Australia to “exchange observing plans, search methods and data” in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

• “Are we alone?’ is a question that unites us as a planet,” said Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire financing the Breakthrough Initiatives. “And the quest to answer it should take place at a planetary level too. With this agreement, we are now searching for cosmic companions with three of the world’s biggest telescopes across three continents.”

• Milner drew considerable political attention amid allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election when Milner made substantial investments in Facebook and Twitter on behalf of two Russian state entities. Milner also held stakes in a company co-owned with Jared Kushner, former White House advisor and son-in-law of Donald Trump.

• In September 2019, Maura McLaughlin, a radio astronomer at West Virginia University who studies extra-galactic pulsars, said she was “super excited to be able to use the (FAST) telescope.” However, with the deterioration of China-U.S. relations, American scientists have come under considerable scrutiny amid allegations that they are – wittingly or not – being used by the Chinese Communist Party for technical and scientific espionage and intellectual property theft. The arrest of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineering professor in January on charges that he failed to adequately disclose his professional and financial ties with China added to an increasingly long list of experienced scientists who have been pursued by the US Department of Justice for their China links.

Chinese state media reported earlier this week that China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) will now be available for use by foreign scientists. According to Xinhua, based on a statement by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), “All foreign applications will be evaluated, and the results will be announced on July 20. Observations by international users will begin in August.” This announcement confirms a January NAOC announcement that FAST would be open to astronomers around the world from April 1.

“The project will contribute Chinese wisdom to the construction of a community with a shared future for humanity, and strive to promote international sci-tech development and the progress of human civilization,” Xinhua quoted the statement as saying.

A separate January Xinhua story on FAST had quoted the telescope’s chief engineer as saying that 10 percent of observation time would be allocated to foreign scientists in the instrument’s first year of operations.

FAST, located in China’s Guizhou province, is the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope and became fully operational January last year. While the telescope’s scientific uses are vast – and the instrument had already been used to discover 100 new pulsars (fast-spinning dead stars that emit radio waves) in its test phase — it is its potential use to discover extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) that has attracted considerable attention, including from geopolitical analysts given to (farfetched) scenario planning.

In October 2016, NAOC and the privately-funded Breakthrough Listen initiative – which funds projects for astronomers to use radio telescopes around the world to search for ETI – announced their collaboration at a ceremony in Beijing. According to a Breakthrough Initiatives statement on the occasion, researchers using FAST will collaborate with those using the Green Bank Telescope in the U.S. and the Parkes Observatory in Australia to “exchange observing plans, search methods and data.”

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A New Frontier in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life

January 15, 2021
ExoNews Editor

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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My Dad Launched the Quest to Find Alien Intelligence

July 2, 2020
ExoNews Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First light

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

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

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

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

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What Would We Say to Extraterrestrials?

August 19, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E70 8-19-19 What Would We Say to Extraterrestrials?” on Spreaker.

Article by Gwynne Dyer August 6, 2019 (winnipegfreepress.com)

• In July, London’s Royal Society and the U.K. SETI Research Network launched a survey on the subject of public attitudes toward alien contact. Martin Dominik, an astronomer at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland joined the discussion by advocating a legally binding framework in international law for responding to a signal received from an alien civilization. It would be prudent to make these policy determinations now, rather than sometime in the future in the midst of the inevitable media circus that would erupt with proof of other intelligent life in the universe.

• In 2015, SETI launched its ‘Breakthrough Listen’ project, funded by Russian-Israeli tech billionaire Yuri Milner. The project buys thousands of hours of time on the world’s most powerful radio telescopes over a ten year period to search over a million stars for artificial radio or laser signals. Merely listening for alien signals is known as “passive SETI”. The debate arises when SETI officials contemplate replying to an alien signal. So far, SETI has not found any alien signals.

• So why haven’t we found any alien signals coming from extraterrestrial planets? One reason is that SETI’s eavesdropping range can only go so far into the galaxy. Another possible reason is that other civilizations are maintaining radio silence because there is something big and bad and dangerous lurking out there in the dark, and they do not want to attract its attention. This theory is known as the “Dark Forest Problem”.

• Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin is the author of the popular Three-Body Problem trilogy, which traces the calamitous consequences over 400 years of an alien-contact scenario, initiated by well-meaning human beings, that goes desperately wrong. Some astronomers look to this as a cautionary tale.

• In 2015, the American Association for the Advancement of Science debated whether it was wise for SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to actively send out signals to other planets. Should we advertise our existence, or is that just asking for trouble? After all, if 1950’s sci fi movies are any indication, they may be bug-eyed monsters intent on abducting half-naked Earth maidens. The scientists supported a declaration that a “worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent.”

• Should we be worried about marauding aliens coming to Earth? The current mainstream scientific consensus is that interstellar travel is virtually impossible because it would take too long to travel such distances to make it worthwhile. But we still have much to learn. We may be unaware of a type of physics and technology that would overcome the long distance obstacle. Therefore, distance alone might not be enough to protect us from any ill-intentioned bug-eyed monsters with a sufficiently high level of technology.

• Yuri Milner and SETI are working on another program called “Breakthrough Message” to craft a message that we could send in response to an alien signal. The program heads had pledged “not to transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilizations.”

• [Editor’s Note] Once again, the Deep State asset known as SETI is furthering its mission to keep pumping out disinformation. They want the public to think that SETI’s unsuccessful search for alien civilizations means that there are no extraterrestrials in our cosmic vicinity, which is a lie. The universe, our galaxy, and our particular cluster of star systems is teeming with intelligent extraterrestrial life. They are not only in communication with us but actively influencing our global reality, and not in a good way. The Deep State also wants the public to fear these extraterrestrials, so that when the ET presence is revealed, the public will turn to these compromised institutions to save us. But most of all, they want the public to be complacent in believing that the scientific community is on top of this, assuring us that if they do come across an alien signal, we will be the first to know. Don’t count on it.

“There is absolutely no procedure enshrined in international law to respond to a signal from an alien civilization,” said Martin Dominik, an astronomer at the University of St. Andrews. “It makes sense to create a legally binding framework that is properly rooted in international law.”

Well, yes, it would make sense. But if the Bug-Eyed Monsters do send a message, would we really want to reply at all?

Bug-eyed monsters, generally portrayed carrying off half-naked Earth maidens with evil intent, were a standard feature of pulp science fiction in the 1950s. We are all more sophisticated now, of course, but fear of alien contact is not necessarily irrational.

The specific reason for Dominik’s remarks is a survey of public attitudes toward alien contact that was launched last month by London’s Royal Society and the U.K. SETI Research Network, but in broader terms it is a response to two important developments in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) that occurred in 2015.

One was a debate at the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention in 2015 about whether “active SETI” was a good idea. Should we advertise our existence and publish our address to the cosmos, or is that just asking for trouble? Many of the scientists present backed a declaration that a “worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent.”

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If Aliens Are Flashing Laser Beams at Us, We Now Have a Way to Detect Them

August 13, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E66 8-13-19 If Aliens Are Flashing Laser Beams” on Spreaker.

Article by Tim Childers August 2, 2019 (livescience.com)

• The $100 million 10-year project funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, called the “Breakthrough Listen” project, is the most extensive SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program in history. The project, which began in 2015, has surveyed over 1,000 stars within 160 light-years away from Earth for signs of alien radio signals, with no positive results.

• ‘Breakthrough Listen’ announced that its team will begin looking for new signs of alien technology using the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), consisting of four 12-meter optical telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona. Using VERITAS, astronomers will begin scanning the night sky for nanosecond flashes of light, known as “fast optical pulses”, from nearby stars indicating a new class of alien communication. Said Andrew Siemion, director of Berkeley’s SETI Research Center, “Optical communication has already been used by NASA to transmit high-definition images to Earth from the moon, so there’s a reason to believe that an advanced civilization might use a scaled-up version of this technology for interstellar communication.”

• VERITAS searched for such laser pulses from the mysteriously dimming Tabby’s Star after some speculated there could be an alien megastructure surrounding it. If Tabby’s Star pointed powerful lasers at the Earth, VERITAS could detect them. Less powerful lasers could be detected from closer star systems. David Williams, a member of the VERITAS and professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said, “It is impressive how well-suited the VERITAS telescopes are for this project, since they were built only with the purpose of studying very-high-energy gamma rays…”.

• At the VERITAS initiative’s launch, physicist Stephen Hawking said, “[I]n an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life… [P]erhaps intelligent life might be watching these lights of ours… Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos, unseen beacons announcing that, here on one rock, the universe discovered its existence?”

• SETI’s Russian benefactor, Yuri Milner says, “[O]ur philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”

• [Editor’s Note] SETI is now using a $100 million telescope array to search for lights and lasers emanating from extraterrestrial sources in the cosmos. So much money is being wasted on this Deep State disinformation program which is only meant to make the public believe that if there were any extraterrestrial beings and civilizations to be found, such equipment could not miss them, when in reality the extraterrestrial presence is all around us. Of course the Breakthrough Listen project will fail because the Deep State’s true agenda is to deny the existence of extraterrestrials. Or will it be used by the Deep State to claim success and control the narrative through a new disinformation campaign when the exposure of the extraterrestrial presence becomes imminent?

Are aliens using super powerful flashlights to get our attention? Astronomers think there’s a chance they are.
Since the invention of the radio, humans have been silently listening to the stars, wondering if we are alone in the universe. But if intelligent alien life does exist, the extraterrestrials could be using other forms of technology to communicate. Astronomers are beginning to not only listen to the cosmos but also gaze toward it for other signs of alien tech: laser beams.

Breakthrough Listen, the most extensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program in history, announced that its team will begin looking for new signs of alien technology using the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona.

“When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates,” Yuri Milner, billionaire particle physicist and founder of Breakthrough Listen, said in a statement. “So our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”

Using VERITAS, astronomers will begin scanning the night sky for nanosecond flashes of light from nearby stars. Like a lighthouse beacon for the cosmos, these brief pulses of optical light would outshine any nearby stars and could indicate a method of alien communication.

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Powerful New Telescope Joins the Search for Possible Laser Pulses from Aliens

July 30, 2019
ExoNews Editor

Listen to “E46 7-30-19 Powerful New Telescope Joins the Search” on Spreaker.

Article by Michael Irving July 19, 2019 (newatlas.com)

The “Breakthrough Listen” initiative is the largest scientific program designed to survey the million closest stars to Earth for any signs of radio and laser transmissions, which extraterrestrials might use to communicate with one another or the galaxy at large. The project has gained a new tool for its arsenal, the ‘Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System’, or ‘VERITAS’.
VERITAS is made up of four 40-foot telescopes designed to detect gamma rays by the bursts of blue light they create as they hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere. The Breakthrough Listen team claims the tech is so powerful it can detect a laser with the energy of a regular light bulb from 25 trillion miles away. The idea is that if aliens are using lasers to communicate, Earth might just happen to cross the path of a rogue beam for a split second, alerting us to their presence even if that wasn’t their direct intention.
Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, says, “When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates. Our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”
Andrew Siemion, leader of the Listen team, says, “Breakthrough Listen is already the most powerful, comprehensive, and intensive search yet undertaken for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. Now, with the addition of VERITAS, we’re sensitive to an important new class of signals: fast optical pulses. Optical communication has already been used by NASA to transmit high definition images to Earth from the Moon, so there’s reason to believe that an advanced civilization might use a scaled-up version of this technology for interstellar communication.”

Statistically, it’s pretty much a given that alien life is out there somewhere, whether that’s Martian microbes or highly intelligent life beaming comms through the cosmos. While the Curiosity rover is poking around in the dirt for the former, the Breakthrough Listen initiative is searching for the latter. Now, a new telescope array has joined the hunt, scanning the skies for flashes of laser light that alien civilizations might be giving off.

The Breakthrough Listen initiative is the largest scientific program designed specifically to find evidence of extraterrestrials. The aim is to survey the million closest stars to Earth for any signs of radio and laser transmissions, which aliens might be using to communicate with each other or even deliberately broadcasting their existence. The team claims the tech is so powerful it can detect a laser with the energy of a regular light bulb from 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km) away.

And now the project has a new tool in its arsenal. The Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) is made up of four 12-m (40-ft) telescopes, and was designed to detect gamma rays by the bursts of blue light they create as they hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

As part of Breakthrough Listen, VERITAS will search for pulses of laser light that might be as short as a few nanoseconds. The idea is that if aliens are using lasers to communicate, Earth might just happen to cross the path of a rogue beam for a split second, alerting us to their presence even if that wasn’t their direct intention.

“When it comes to intelligent life beyond Earth, we don’t know where it exists or how it communicates,” says Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives. “So our philosophy is to look in as many places, and in as many ways, as we can. VERITAS expands our range of observation even further.”

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

May 8, 2019
ExoNews Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 23, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by John Wenz October 10, 2018 (discovermagazine.com)

• In 1960, Harvard PhD Frank Drake and his colleagues decided that rather than using the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to determine the surface temperature of Venus or the radiation belts of Jupiter, they’d train it on two nearby stars to listen for signs of life from intelligent extraterrestrials. This was the beginning of the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

• In the meantime, physician/philosopher John Lilly was trying to communicate with earth-bound intelligences. From apes to elephants to pig to octopus, these creatures seem to possess intelligent self-awareness. He found that the most intelligent were the dolphins and whales. Lilly also saw the experiments as a way to help efforts to contact extraterrestrial aliens. If we can crack the code of dolphin language, we might have a shot at decoding other alien communication.

• In 1961, a group of scientists met at green Bank to discuss the search for alien intelligence. They included Drake and Lilly, radio expert Dana Atchley, biochemist Melvin Calvin, optical astronomer Su-Shu Huang, computing pioneer Barney Oliver, Russian radio astronomer Otto Struve, and a young Carl Sagan. To begin with they wanted to get an idea of how many ET’s were possibly out there. They came up with what is no referred to as ‘The Drake Equation’.

• Lilly used this meeting to tell his colleagues about his dolphin research, pointing out that the dolphin’s brain was actually larger and more complex than the human brain. The dolphin was clearly an intelligent being. Lilly even heard signs of language and empathy in recordings of the dolphins.

• But after this 1961 meeting, Lilly began introducing substances such as ketamine and LSD in his research to assist in communicating with dolphins. Drake and some other scientists began to distance themselves from Lilly’s dolphin research, calling it “poor science” and “unreliable”. As a result, Lilly’s work has tainted subsequent attempts to understand the intelligence of dolphins.

• Still, this episode in the history scientific research spawned the SETI research of today. More resources than ever are pouring into SETI efforts, thanks in part to a $100 million project from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner called Breakthrough Listen. As we search for intelligent aliens in ‘habitable zones’, we also may discover life that existed in Mars’s past, or currently on the moons Enceladus, Europa, Titan or Triton.

• [Editor’s Note] The advances in our knowledge of intelligent extraterrestrial life that we will see in the near future, and indeed, the existence of extraterrestrials on and around our own planet, will make these initial scientific explorations trivial, if not irrelevant. We are on the brink of an entirely new and exciting exo-scientific age.

In 1961, when UFOs were all the rage, a group of top scientific minds met in secret at a rural observatory in West Virginia. At the time, the Green Bank Observatory was the biggest, baddest telescope in the burgeoning practice of radio astronomy. While the list of meeting attendees now reads like a who’s who of the era’s luminaries, the reason they gathered covertly was because of the taboo nature of their topic of discussion. These scientists wanted to find, and talk to, aliens. They didn’t know it, but they were about to launch the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.

SETI First Steps

Let’s back up a moment. In 1958, a newly minted Harvard PhD named Frank Drake came to Green Bank. Usually he sought out typical radio astronomy targets — the Van Allen Belts around Earth, say, or the surface temperature of Venus, or the radiation belts of Jupiter.

But one day in 1960, Drake and his colleagues instead tuned into two nearby stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Their goal was simple: they were alien hunting, hoping to hear radio communications originating from intelligent extraterrestrials.

UFOs were popular then, but Drake’s research was legitimate, one of the first dedicated scientific searches for aliens. Drake had been spurred on by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, who the previous year had co-authored a Nature paper with the provocative title “Searching for Interstellar Communications.” It remains a foundational SETI text.

Much to Drake’s surprise, his team actually heard something in those first few experiments. Unfortunately, it ended up being just a high altitude plane. Project Ozma, as the research was called (after L Frank Baum’s fictional monarch of Oz), was both the first SETI experiment and the first SETI false alarm.

“We had failed to detect a genuine alien signal, it was true, but we had succeeded in demonstrating that searching was a feasible, and even reasonable, thing to do,” Drake wrote in his book Is Anyone Out There?, co-written with science writer Dava Sobel.

Talking to Dolphins

While Drake was launching some of the first SETI programs, John Lilly — a physician, philosopher, writer and inventor — was attempting to communicate with his own alien intelligence. He just wasn’t looking quite as far.

Humans are, in fact, surrounded by intelligence. Our fellow great apes understand the rudiments of language, and seem to possess highly organized social structures, tool-making skills and self-awareness. Creatures literally great and small — elephants and crows — have many of these qualities as well. (Alas, the pig is also remarkably intelligent; your bacon was likely self aware.)

Intelligent life isn’t isolated to land, either. The octopus brain is one of the most remarkable on Earth, and its close cousin, the cuttlefish, is no slouch either. But the superstars of the sea, to most humans, are marine mammals, especially dolphins and whales.

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Has An Alien Probe Entered Our Solar System?

December 13, 2017
ExoNews Editor

by Harry Pettit December 12, 2017 (dailymail.co.uk)

• Astronomers are set to scan an ‘alien’ comet for signs of extraterrestrial signals.

• The cigar-shaped object, named ‘Oumuamua, sailed past Earth last month.

• The mysterious comet is the first interstellar object seen in the solar system.

• Now a team of alien-hunting scientists led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is scanning the object for radio signals.

Astronomers are set to scan an ‘alien’ comet for signs of extraterrestrial technology.
The cigar-shaped asteroid, named ‘Oumuamua by its discoverers, sailed past Earth last month and is the first interstellar object seen in the solar system.

A team of alien-hunting scientists, led by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, will scan the comet this week before it sails beyond the reach of Earth’s telescopes.

They say they are looking for radio signals, claiming the mysterious visitor could be an alien spaceship.

The alien-hunting project will use the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia for its investigation, with the campaign set to begin at 3:00pm ET (8:00pm GMT) on Wednesday.

The telescopes sensitive equipment would would take less than a minute to pick up something as faint as the radio waves from a smartphone, according to the Atlantic.

Milner, the business mogul behind Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million (£75m) search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, received an email about the object last week from one of his chief scientists.

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Russian Billionaire to Fund Trip to Saturnian Moon Enceladus

November 25, 2017
ExoNews Editor

by Paul Seaburn November 14, 2017 (mysteriousuniverse.org)

Russian billionaire and internet oligarch, Yuri Milner, announced plans to pay for the first privately funded interplanetary space mission to search for life on Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon.
Famous for its columns or ‘plumes’ of water vapor venting from the moon’s southern polar region, Enceladus is considered by mainstream scientists to have the best chance of harboring some form of life in the solar system besides Earth.
Milner wants to beat NASA to Enceladus, which is also planning a billion dollar trip to the distant moon in ten years.
It appears that Milner is more interested in deep space exploration than his contemporaries, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who are looking to create near-space business enterprises.

Look out Elon and Jeff … there’s a new billionaire in space town and he’s planning to boldly go – or at least boldly fund a trip – where no billionaire has gone before. Russian rich man Yuri Milner, one of the biggest players in the Russian part of the Internet, announced plans to pay for the first privately funded interplanetary space mission to search for life on Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth-largest moon and the solar system object considered to have the best chance of harboring some form of life. Is Milner serious or just trying to distract attention from revelations in the “Paradise Papers” about his involvement in helping the Russian government covertly invest in Facebook and Twitter?

“We formed a sort of little workshop around this idea: Can we design a low-cost, privately funded mission to Enceladus which can be launched relatively soon and that can look more thoroughly at those plumes and try to see what’s going there ahead of a more expensive mission that NASA is considering right now, which might take maybe 10 years to launch?”

GeekWire reports that Milner made this statement at The Economist’s New Space Age conference at the Museum of Flight in Seattle last week. The ‘plumes’ are the columns of water vapor and simple hydrocarbons venting from the moon’s south polar region that were first seen and later passed through by the Cassini probe. The “more expensive mission” he’s referring to is NASA’s proposed $1 billion New Frontiers program which would not launch until at least the mid-2020s.

If you’re wondering whether he will accomplish this lofty goal, Milner is a billionaire who has put money into space projectsbefore. He’s invested $100 million in the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Breakthrough Listen), another $100 million to send a fleet of nano-probes to the Alpha Centauri star system (Breakthrough Starshot) and more financial support to enhance the capability of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and to launch – both for improving observations of the Alpha Centauri system.

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UFOs and Smart Phones Come of Age

July 24, 2015
Rebecca Hardcastle

It was 8 years ago, over lunch with computer guru Larry Lowe, Phoenix Lights researcher, Lynne Kitei and peace activist, Terri Mansfield–together, we birthed a vision for mobile phones as a means of tracking UFO’s.

The four of us knew 3 things regarding UFOs, consciousness, and technology:

1. the effectiveness of crowdsourced data gathering, 2. the connection of handheld mobile phones and 3. the power of a community of conscious intention.

Our idea was to create a text-based system to track a UFO sighting whose trajectory would be traced via individual mobile phones with geographical coordinates and images. Then Larry would recreate a geospatial animation of the UFOs journey, eventually creating a map of multiple sightings.

We envisioned the Phoenix Valley as an illuminated map of UFO craft and exoconscious participants.

SETI Breakthrough Listening

That was 8 years ago. Today, SETI announced their $100 million grant from billionaire social media investor, Yuri Milner, that involves smartphone crowdsourcing of the data of universe’s entire electromagnetic spectrum gathered from two telescopes, Green Bank and Parkes.

It’s a funny feeling to see a vision you and your friends held come to life–in a different way. It’s like thinking you know how your newborn will look–only to be delighted by its distinctive appearance at birth. You experience a death of your expectations and a birth of new possibilities. All so TS Eliot.

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?

Connection of Frequencies, Question of ET Contact

SETI wants to explore frequencies across the universe’s electromagnetic spectrum and we wanted to explore UFOs. Different focuses, and yet, we both see consciousness and how humans are connected to the universe.Exoconsciousness.

Today I follow the unfolding of SETI’s venture with enthusiasm. It wasn’t always so.

When SETI first began its work, I questioned why they didn’t ask ET experiencers what we know about the universe and the extraterrestrial presence. It seemed an obvious route to information.

Well, I made peace with those questions that were entangled with feelings. Peace came because I have a deeper understanding of consciousness. Extraterrestrial exploration is like healing our bodies. One consciousness needs drugs and surgery to heal. Another consciousness needs oils and energy medicine to heal.

SETI consciousness needs telescopes and computers to interact with the extraterrestrial presence. Exoconsciousness needs telepathy and psychic-heart connection to interact with the extraterrestrial presence.

Exoconsciousness is about merging consciousness science and extraterrestrial experiencers (including those who witness UFOs). In that respect, SETI’s ability to explore across the universe’s entire electromagnetic spectrum is important.

Extraterrestrial experiencers need science

We ET experiencers are aware of dimensions and frequencies that science is researching via advances in technology. How the exoconscious human experiences the full electromagnetic spectrum is central to energy healing, telepathy, and how we create connection. Technology advances consciousness. And consciousness advances technology. It’s not an either or.

Both SETI and ET Experiencers are about acknowledging, integrating and advancing our connection to our planet Earth, the universe and the extraterrestrial presence. For the Exoconscious the path lies within. We are extraterrestrial and as such our consciousness connects to other extraterrestrials and their field of information.

SETI and ET experiencers have different paths. A different conscious guidance. A different experience of contact. Yet, we live in a home of similar frequencies.

Our paths diverge and then merge in this field of information. It’s what creates a pattern so we all can see.

Tag: Yuri Milner

SETI Breakthrough Listening

Connection of Frequencies, Question of ET Contact

Extraterrestrial experiencers need science