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“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,...