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HAT CREEK, CALIF. -- The wide dishes, 20 feet across and raised high on their pedestals, creaked and groaned as the winds from an approaching snowstorm pushed into this highland valley. Forty-two in all, the radio telescopes laid out in view of some of California's tallest mountains look otherworldly, and now their sounds conjured up visions of deep-space denizens as well.

A computer administrator with the Higley Unified School District in Gilbert, Arizona, has resigned during an investigation into suspicious activity. He's accused of wasting district resources, totaling more than a million dollars to search for UFOs. The IT administrator is accused of installing a program on every one of the district's 5,000 computers. The school district was unknowingly the largest contributor to the "SETI" program, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. Authorities say 38 year old Brad Nezloochowski rigged up Higley School District computers to help look for intelligent life in outer space. Superintendent Denise Birdwell says the district recently...

Many people make a distinction between the origin of life and the evolution of life. In this view, biological evolution refers to the gradual development of the diversity of living things from a common ancestor, while the ultimate origin of life is a separate question. This is a legitimate point, but evolution is about much more than just biology. The evolutionary worldview is that all of physical existence, both living and non-living, arose through purely natural processes. With this broad definition of evolution, abiogenesis--the spontaneous appearance of life from non-living matter--is a necessity. If life did arise on earth by...

A flash. Then complete darkness. I swerve wildly on my rickety bike, skidding on a soaked, winding path, squeezing my eyes shut and opening them in an attempt to get my eyesight back. Just when I regain my bearings (but not quite my eyesight), a sharp crack! throws me off my seat. I land awkwardly and stumble as the two dogs (Peach and Jasmine) scurry away to avoid me. Another flash sends them back up against my pant legs. They're shivering – fear? Cold? Probably both; thunderstorms aren't exactly great experiences for most non-humans, or most humans for that matter....

Aliens Lose in Switch to Digital TV By Seth ShostakSenior Astronomer, SETI Instituteposted: 18 June 200905:07 pm ET The United States is finally ditching analog television broadcasting, and the rest of the world is doing the same. Unless you've got a converter, the government has just morphed your trusty analog boob tube into an inert piece of furniture. Mind you, this is a good thing. Digital TV (DTV) offers better picture quality. For example, the ghost images caused by signal reflections off that high-rise office building down the block will be a thing of the past. In addition, you...

SETI Invites Alien Talk May 24, 2009 — They may not be saying much to us, but we can think about what to say to them – aliens, that is.  Space.com reported on the latest project from the SETI Institute: invite people all over the world to ponder, “What would you say to an extraterrestrial civilization?”     The SETI Institute is launching a new website, Earth Speaks, to gather people’s ideas about what we should say to an alien civilization should contact be made.  “By submitting text messages, pictures, and sounds from across the globe,” CEO Thomas Pierson explained,...

If you'd asked 20 years ago the question he's heard over and over -- whether humanity will discover extraterrestrial intelligence in his lifetime -- Frank Drake would have shrugged and said, "sure." Today, the renowned astronomer, who turns 79 next month, admits the chances are slimming. "It's going to be a close call," he said. But even if Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, doesn't see the day we learn we're not alone, he knows it's coming. To him, it's a mathematical inevitability. He should know. He wrote the formula. And...

« A symposium called Crossroads: The Future of Human Life in the Universe seems timely about now (the site has been down all morning but should be up soon). With the Kepler mission undergoing calibration and CoRoT actively searching for small extrasolar worlds, we’re probably within a few dozen months of the detection of an Earth-like world around another star (and maybe, by other methods, much closer). This is sometimes referred to as the ‘Holy Grail’ of planetary sciences, but as soon as we accomplish it, a new ‘Grail’ emerges: The discovery of life on these worlds. And then...

IT’S a birthright proffered by science and prophesied by “Star Trek,” “Battlestar Galactica” and a thousand other space operas: We’re destined to go to the stars. Our descendants will spread beyond this nondescript solar system and seek adventure and bumpy-headed pals in the stellar realms. Well, cool your warp jets, Mr. Scott, because we’re not about to breach the final frontier. Piling into a starship and barreling into deep space may long remain —like perfect children or effort-free bathroom cleaners —a pipe dream. . . . [A] trip to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star beyond the Sun and 100 million...

The real geeks among us long for synthohol. Only Class A nerds know, or admit to knowing, what it is, too. But I have to tell you, your potential partner’s drinking it won’t make you any better looking. Better to stick with the real thing. I’d surely like to see cheap, readily available fusion power. With unlimited energy comes unlimited possibility. Medical advances never really grabbed my interest. Probably—and luckily—because I don’t have any sicknesses. Would be good to see genetics progress to the point where we can reliably clone humans so that we don’t deprive the world of another...

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiment ended up being far more successful as a marketing gimmick than as a science project. The intrepid researchers never found the little green men. Perhaps that's because they never aimed their high-dollar radio telescopes at The Church of England. The Right Rev Richard Chartres made the following comments that suggest his familiarity with how affairs are conducted on the third planet out from Sol is nodding at best. He addressed reporters covering the Church of England's General Synod on the financial crisis."Sometimes, people seem to be relieved to get off the treadmill and...

Frank Drake is being honored on Space.com by the SETI Institute as the “Father of SETI,” His reputation is providing an opportunity for a fund raiser. For a lot of money, you can spend time with a celebrity whose accomplishments are questionable...

'Aliens Cause Global Warming' From a lecture delivered by the late Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology on Jan. 17, 2003: Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the...

For several decades scientists have been using telescopes to scan the heavens for unnatural-looking radio or optical transmissions coming from intelligent alien life. With this search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) having so far failed to pick up a single signal, however, researchers in the US now believe it is worth extending the search beyond electromagnetic waves and start paying attention to neutrinos. John Learned of the University of Hawaii and colleagues have worked out that advanced alien civilizations could send messages within the Milky Way using neutrinos, and that these messages could be picked up using neutrino detectors currently under...

A widespread and popular impression of SETI is that it's a worldwide enterprise. Well, it's not, and there's something modestly puzzling in that. The idea of communicating between worlds is at least 150 years old. Victorian scientists Karl Friedrich Gauss and Joseph von Littrow are both reputed to have concocted schemes to establish rapport with Moon-men or Martians by signaling them with light. Gauss was a German, and von Littrow was Austrian. But within a century, the important ideas about getting in touch with aliens were coming from the western side of the Atlantic. The fundamental concepts for radio SETI...

BERKELEY, Calif. -- On Monday, KTVU reported scientists have received an odd signal from space and some readers may have interpreted this as a confirmed extra-terrestrial contact. Scientists did confirm there was an anomalous radio signal and reported it late last year. However, as SETI@home lead scientist Dan Werthimer now clarifies, "although this pulse is not well understood..." it may have a natural origin. SETI Institute Chief Scientist Seth Shostak says the highly energetic and brief signal at first excited some researchers, who at the time thought it may be a candidate ET signal. It was received not at Arecibo,...

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilizations is receiving 500 times more data from an upgraded telescope and better frequency coverage than project planners anticipated, meaning the SETI@home project is in dire need of more desktop computers to help crunch the data. New, more sensitive receivers on the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before, project leaders said in a release. SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new...

ET too bored by Earth transmissions to respond 16:35 18 December 2007 NewScientist.com news service Tom Simonite Messages sent into space directed at extraterrestrials may have been too boring to earn a reply, say two astrophysicists trying to improve on their previous alien chat lines. Humans have so far sent four messages into space intended for alien listeners. But they have largely been made up of mathematically coded descriptions of some physics and chemistry, with some basic biology and descriptions of humans thrown in. Those topics will not prove gripping reading to other civilisations, says Canadian astrophysicist Yvan Dutil. If...

When Alexander Zaitsev presented his recent paper at the International Astronautical Congress in Hyderabad (India) recently, he spoke from the center of a widening controversy. The question is straightforward: Should we broadcast messages intentionally designed to be received by extraterrestrial civilizations, thereby notifying them of our existence? Zaitzev, chief scientist at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, addressed the question by seeing a necessary relationship between SETI (the search for ETI) and METI (messaging to other civilizations). Indeed, the Russian scientist, working at the Evpatoria Deep Space Center in the Ukraine, has the experience to...

Today, in the remote northeast corner of California, technology innovator and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen will hit the big red button. No, he won't be throwing heavy-duty machinery into an emergency shutdown, nor will he be sending ICBMs screaming from their silos (traditional functions for ruddy buttons). Instead, he'll be christening a new telescope that, in its significance, could eventually outpace the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria. The famous technologist will be inaugurating the initial 42 antennas of his namesake, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) – the first major radio telescope designed from the pedestal up to efficiently (which is...

Nasa this week unveils a new emissary in the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. The Phoenix Mars Lander, which launches next month, marks just the latest instalment in a quest that has exercised the imaginations of writers and scientists since long before the adventures of Jules Verne. In the 17th century Johannes Kepler, the architect of our modern understanding of the solar system, imagined a journey to a moon inhabited by serpent-like creatures called Prevlovans who endured the lunar night "bristling with ice and snow under the raging, icy winds". Regrettably, however, here is no reliable account of a...

NEW YORK: A panel of scientists convened by America's leading scientific advisory group says the hunt for extraterrestrial life should be greatly expanded to include what they call "weird life": organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life as we know it. "The committee's investigation makes clear that life is possible in forms different from those on Earth," the scientists conclude in their report. Starfish, sequoias, salamanders and the rest of Earth's residents may seem very diverse, but they are surprisingly similar on the molecular scale. All species that scientists have studied need liquid water to survive, for...

PALMDALE - The world's newest flying telescope will be in focus on Saturday, June 30, at NASA's Aerospace Exploration Gallery in the Palmdale Civic Center. Dr. Dana Backman will give presentations regarding NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronom beginning at 9 a.m., then repeating at 10:30, noon and 1:30 p.m. Dr. Backman is with the SETI Institute and the Universities Space Research Association and manages SOFIA's education and public outreach program. An infrared astronomer, Backman received his doctoral degree in astrophysics from the University of Hawaii. While Backman was a post-doctoral student at NASA's Ames Research Center, he flew on...

OK, don't make a mistake: this isn't really a movie about space. The Astronaut Farmer is the quintessential American Story. That's right; it's the classic, archetypical, consummate, perfected American myth, served up in packaging so homespun, you'll wonder that the actors aren't dressed in quilts. When it comes to this movie's theme, you already know the drill, because during your childhood, Hollywood saut?ed your tender brain with the potboiler genre known as the Western. And what was the icon of the Western? A rugged individual, hard as tool steel on the outside, and soft as warm Jell-O within; a slouch-hatted...

Is there anybody out there? Give the question some thought before you answer, because it’s more perilous than it seems. Deny the possibility of a universe populated with intelligent extraterrestrials that can speak and mate and battle with humanity, and the science-fiction canon collapses; more than a century’s worth of novels, from “The War of the Worlds” to “Old Man’s War,” would find their speculative foundations swept out from underneath them. But admit to a sincere belief in the remotest potential for alien life, and prepare to be fitted for a straitjacket; a recent survey conducted by Baylor University found...

People interested in Mars exploration, like many of the scientists at the Carl Sagan Center (CSC) in Mountain View California, often start by exploring cold, dry, thin aired Mars-like “analogue” sites on earth. Most of these places are isolated and hard to reach. Antarctica, the Arctic, the Peruvian Andes, Kamchatka and other exotic locales offer scientists glimpses into the kinds of environments that may hold clues to understanding Mars and the processes that have shaped it. Of key interest is the extreme or unusual conditions under which life persists. We know that everywhere on earth where we find liquid water,...

Presently, 200-plus known extrasolar planets have been found -- mostly huge gas giants like Jupiter within our own solar system of Sun-orbiting planets. Given these discoveries -- just within the last 10 years or so -- under what conditions can we expect terrestrial planets to crop up? Moreover, just how common are habitable planets in the universe? Planet scouting scientists met here January 26-28 at a media workshop sponsored by the University of Colorado's Center for Astrobiology to share theories as well as new observational information... What's now taking place is that extrasolar planet researchers are shifting into high gear...

“At what point would you abandon the search?” That’s a question I get relatively frequently from folks who think that SETI may be a quixotic quest, as futile as searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. After all, modern efforts to find signals from extraterrestrial transmitters are now in their fifth decade. Could it be that those of us who still hope to tune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with a simple, if disappointing message: “There are no aliens”? The question seems fair, since SETI’s obvious analogs–the historical voyages of...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Remember studying the (heavy chords) Scientific Method in middle school? According to your dour-faced science teacher, this was the secret formula by which legions of clipboard-carrying, lab coat-attired researchers pushed back the frontiers of knowledge. The scheme was simple: Scientists sat around dreaming up hypotheses—possible new truths—which they torture-tested in the lab or in the field. Experiment would arbitrate, either by validating the truth of a hypothesis, or by sending the scientist back to the blackboard to think again. Indeed, some research is done like that; investigations that proceed by testing a falsifiable premise. But there’s another way to learn...

An official announcement is expected tommorow. http://www.spaceref.com/calendar/calendar.html?pid=4200 http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=178899

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message. Those contributions -- part of media company Yahoo's "Time Capsule" project -- will be digitalized and beamed with a laser into space on October 25 from the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, now an archeological site near Mexico City. Archeologists say...

----cut---- The notion that Intelligent Design theory is fundamentally "unscientific" is based on the philosophy originated by Karl Popper (1902-1994), who postulated a set of rules for science known as "Falsificationism." The main idea is that a hypothesis or theory does not qualify as "scientific" unless it is "falsifiable" (which is independent of whether it is actually "true" or "false"). Popper is revered by evolutionists, but certainly even they would agree that we should not blindly accept his word as revealed truth. So let us consider some of the implications of his "falsifiability" criterion. ----cut---- The ultimate irony here is...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1,020 active CPUs - 70,500 completed Work Units and 12.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

A comprehensive review by leading scientists about our Solar System which speculates on the possibility of life on other planets has been published.Solar System Update brings together the work of 19 physicists, astronomers, and climatologists from Europe and the USA in 12 chapters on the sun, the main planets and comets.The book, co-edited by Dr Philippe Blondel, of the University of Bath, highlights the many recent discoveries and in particular the amount of water, one of the essentials for life, found in the Solar System.Recent studies have revealed ice in craters on Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, and...

Astronomers are working to choose a site for a giant telescope that could read TV or radio signals from alien civilizations. Artist's concept of collecting dishes for the Square Kilometer Array. The instrument (see www.skatelescope.org)  is so named because it would have radiation-collecting surfaces totalling a square kilometer (about 1/3 square mile.) (Image © Xilostudios) The instrument, called the Square Kilometer Array or SKA, would be the world’s most powerful radio telescope and would begin operation by 2020, if all goes according to plan. Radio telescopes are devices that pick up radio waves, a type of light radiation that has...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 358 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 75th place (with 1009 active CPUs - 55,700 completed Work Units and 9.75 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please...

On now....550 stations in the US, and XM165

It’s been 46 years since Frank Drake aimed an antenna at the stars in the first modern SETI experiment. His hope was to hear a deliberate signal – guided into space by intelligent beings – rather than the natural, noisy dance of hot electrons. Since then, SETI has expanded its search space, bettered its equipment, and refined its strategies. But the bottom line hasn’t budged: still no confirmed chitter from the cosmos. Some people mistakenly confuse a long search with a thorough one, and figure that the lack of a SETI detection indicates that we’re alone in the Galaxy. This,...

It's been 46 years since Frank Drake aimed an antenna at the stars in the first modern SETI experiment. His hope was to hear a deliberate signal - guided into space by intelligent beings - rather than the natural, noisy dance of hot electrons. Since then, SETI has expanded its search space, bettered its equipment, and refined its strategies. But the bottom line hasn't budged: still no confirmed chitter from the cosmos. Some people mistakenly confuse a long search with a thorough one, and figure that the lack of a SETI detection indicates that we're alone in the Galaxy. This,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 351 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 85th place (with 908 active CPUs - 47,400 completed Work Units and nearly 8.5 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 342 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 99th place (with 985 active CPUs - 39,500 completed Work Units and nearly 7 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Speculating about what an alien race might believe, think, or do has a definite fascination. Of course, it is nearly pure speculation; we simply don’t know enough about intelligence in the universe yet to reach even any tentative conclusions. It’s also important to remember that speculation is human speculation, and may not, therefore, have anything at all to do with the thought patterns of an intelligent species that evolved along its own path. With that disclaimer firmly in mind, let’s look at the “Park Hypothesis” as put forth by Michael Huang in a recent TSR article. (See “The Park hypothesis”,...

Is SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a religion? This is one of the topics that Jill Tarter, Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, and I discussed on "Are We Alone?", the SETI Institute's weekly radio program on Wednesday May 17. The discussion by Jill and I was in response to a claim made by George Basalla (professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware) in his book Civilized Life in the Universe (Oxford University Press: 2006) that SETI is more of a faith-based enterprise than a genuine science. He points to SETI's failure to make...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 337 members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 103th place (with 988 active CPUs - 36,400 completed Work Units and more than 6,4 million points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 325+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 108th place (with 991 active CPUs - 34,150 completed Work Units and more than 6,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 117th place (with 1,038 active CPUs - 29,000 completed Work Units and more than 5,000,000 points). This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more,...

BOSTON --A new telescope at an observatory outside Boston will become a key tool in the search for extraterrestrials as scientists try to detect light signals from distant civilizations. An optical telescope dedicated Tuesday at the Oak Ridge Observatory, about 35 miles west of Boston, is the first to be used exclusively for a project called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Time for a new FreeRepublic folding@home thread. Our FreeRepublic team of 300+ members comprised primarily of Free Republic members in good standing have banded together to donate their excess CPU cycles to a worthy cause. Via distributed computing, millions of computers around the world, contribute directly to scientific research, in the quest for a greater understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Cancer, and Mad Cow (BSE). Currently, the team is in 144th place (with 1,045 CPUs - 24,200 completed Work Units and nearly 4,000,000 points) This is an entirely voluntary program, and if you want to learn more, please see...