Free Republic

Hold on to your hats, skeptics. The study of alien existence is about to become a real scientific field. Pennsylvania State University is gearing up to make the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) an established field of scientific study. This means that a degree in Alien Research, no matter how outlandish it might sound, is soon going to be a real thing. According to a report, the university is planning on doing this by offering courses on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life in its course catalog. It will also conduct actual research into the subject through it’s newly-established Penn...

“A prior indigenous technological species might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars,” he wrote. ... Earth’s plate tectonics would effectively have “erased” the traces of a civilization that lived billions of years ago. Venus is in the grip of a severe greenhouse effect and also undergoes similar “resurfacing” that would scour it clean of artifacts. This leaves just a handful of places where archaeologists might find traces of a lost extraterrestrial civilization. “Remaining indigenous technosignatures might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be...