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While Hawking fears that giving aliens our cosmic address could potentially bring death and ruin — much like what happened to many groups of Native Americans when Europeans invaded North America — Tarter thinks that aliens advanced enough to skip across star systems and reach Earth will be friendly, not aggressive.  

American space agency, the NASA had recently observed flares of X-rays from a black hole, which goes against the conventional notion that they are compact particles with such huge gravity that even light can't escape. Last month NASA announced that two of its space telescopes caught a huge burst of X-ray spewing out of a super massive black hole. These flairs appeared to be be triggered by the eruption of a charged particle from the black hole, which according to conventional belief doesn't let anything out. The latest findings are in accordance with the theory of Indian astrophysicist Abhas Mitra...

The Church of England has received unlikely backing from the biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins after the UK’s three leading cinema chains refused to screen its advertisement featuring the Lord’s Prayer. The 60-second advert was due to be shown before Star Wars: the Force Awakens, released on December 18, which would have guaranteed it a huge cinema audience in the run-up to Christmas. But the Odeon Cineworld and Vue chains, which control 80 per cent of screens around the country, have refused to allow it because of a policy not to allow political or religious advertising...The decision prompted an...

The world famous physicist has admitted that if aliens came to visit Earth, the outcome might not be a positive oneStephen Hawking has tackled the mysteries of the universe his entire life. Now the world-renowned scientist has some new things to say about a potential alien invasion . "If aliens visit us, the outcome could be much like when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans," Professor Hawking told El País . "Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach," he said.

22 Articles on Whether Or Not To Search for Extraterrestrial Life. Full Title:Commentaries: Stephen Hawking's Aliens. The Search for Intelligent Extraterrestrial Life. Project Breakthrough Listen Abstract Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner have launched a $100m search for intelligent alien life beyond solar system; a program focused on listening for radio signals coming from advanced civilizations far beyond the solar system, which, presumably, rely on similar technologies as those of the present civilizations of Earth. The search will be 50 times more sensitive, and cover 10 times more sky, than previous hunts for alien life. According to Stephen Hawking the effort...

A global robotic arms race "is virtually inevitable" unless a ban is imposed on autonomous weapons, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and 1,000 academics, researchers and public figures have warned. In an open letter presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aries, the Future of Life Institute signatories caution that "starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control". Although the letter, first reported by the Guardian, notes that "we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many...

A $100 Million Infusion for SETI Researchby Paul Gilster on July 20, 2015 SETI received a much needed boost this morning as Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, along with physicist Stephen Hawking and a panel including Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Martin Rees and Geoff Marcy announced a $100 million pair of initiatives to reinvigorate the search. The first of these, Breakthrough Listen, dramatically upgrades existing search methods, while Breakthrough Message will fund an international competition to create the kind of messages we might one day send to other stars, although the intention is also to provoke the necessary discussion and debate...

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announces most comprehensive hunt for alien life.You could say that the silence has been deafening. Since its beginnings more than half a century ago, the dedicated search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has failed to detect the presence of alien civilizations. But at London’s Royal Society today (20 July), Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced a shot in the arm for SETI: a US$100-million decadal project to provide the most comprehensive hunt for alien communications so far. The initiative, called Breakthrough Listen, will see radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and...

Is there anyone else out there in the universe? The endeavor to answer that eternal question got a serious shot in the arm this week thanks to Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner. At the Royal Society in London, the billionaire announced the launch of Breakthrough Listen, a 10-year, $100 million initiative to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Related: The Power of Planning: NASA's Pluto Flyby Was Epic and Amazing Aided by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in W. Va., the CSIRO Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia and the Lick Telescope in at the Lick Observatory in...

On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce their new project: injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor they're calling Breakthrough Listen. "We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," Hawking said at Monday's news conference, "So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life." Geoffrey Marcy, a University of California, Berkeley, astronomer who found most of our first exoplanets, also spoke at the event as part of the group's brain trust....

When Henri met Albert the stars didn’t quite align; nor did their clocks. Jimena Canales, historian of science, tells Joe Gelonesi about her discovery of an explosive 20th century debate that changed our view of time and destroyed a reputation.Physicists and philosophers have a curious relationship. They both need each other for the cosmic dance, but one partner sometimes refuses to join in. Star physicist Stephen Hawking even declared the end of philosophy in 2011. In some ways the pronouncement was to be expected; physics triumphalism dictates that at some point philosophy will exhaust itself and be unable to solve...

British physicist Stephen Hawking, the brilliant man who wrote "A Brief History of Time," says aliens probably exist and frets that if they discover Earth their intentions might be less like the film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and more like the book, "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." In the book, alien bureaucrats determine the Earth should be demolished to make way for space highway and blow the Earth up. Sorry. Nothing personal. Prepare to die. It's not such a crazy thought, says Hawking, in a Discovery Channel series. "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking...

Stephen Hawking may be getting some Hollywood love for "The Theory of Everything," a biopic about his life that earned actor Eddie Redmayne the best actor Oscar at last night's Academy Awards. But that hasn't stopped the world-famous physicist from issuing yet another warning about humanity's impending doom. Human aggression threatens to destroy us all, Hawking said during a tour of London's Science Museum last week. The remark was in response to a question about what human shortcomings he would most like to alter. Hawking suffers from a neurological disease similar to Lou Gehrig's disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)....

One of these days, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, you do not accept this bet because, as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider. So said Sky Masterson, gambler and philosopher, in Guys and Dolls.  Brother Sky was a skeptic.  He believed...

Her bizarre New Age views on topics such as reincarnation and UFOs have often left the public baffled. Now Shirley MacLaine has provoked widespread fury by claiming the victims of the Holocaust may have brought their fate upon themselves. The veteran Hollywood actress suggests the six million Jews and millions of others systematically murdered in Hitler’s death camps in the 1940s were ‘balancing their karma’ for crimes committed in past lives. She also suggests that cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking may have subconsciously given himself his debilitating motor neurone disease.

Meanwhile, scientists have learned what people would say on making first contact with aliens and it is not “take me to your leader”. Instead, they are much more likely to ask the extraterrestrials for help. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence scientist Doug Vakoch said: “One of the striking commonalities — men and women, young and old — was a message ‘please help’. “A sense that we are in a very precarious time in our development as a civilisation,” said Dr Vakoch. “Our technologies are greater than our social stability. So if we make contact with another civilisation that may be more...

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has raged for decades, and despite numerous attempts to broker peace, an end to the violence does not appear likely anytime soon. Opinions on both sides of the debate are fierce and passionate, and nearly everyone has feelings of some kind regarding the geo-political situation.

This week's reception will give three young entrepreneurs who were finalists in a Pitch@Palace competition the chance to speak to the assembled tycoons. Another of the Prince's pet projects, iDEA, supports 14 to 25-year-olds in developing digital business ventures... Alan Dershowitz, one of Jeffery Epstein's lawyers, has issued writs denying Ms Roberts's claims one by one, saying he has never met her... Writing in The Times, he added: 'She has also claimed that Stephen Hawking and I were on the island together during a sex orgy. I have never met Professor Hawking.' ... A secret cache of videotapes locked in...

Explanation: What's happening at the center of active galaxy 3C 75? The two bright sources at the center of this composite x-ray (blue)/ radio (pink) image are co-orbiting supermassive black holes powering the giant radio source 3C 75. Surrounded by multimillion degree x-ray emitting gas, and blasting out jets of relativistic particles the supermassive black holes are separated by 25,000 light-years. At the cores of two merging galaxies in the Abell 400 galaxy cluster they are some 300 million light-years away. Astronomers conclude that these two supermassive black holes are bound together by gravity in a binary system in part...

... Well, even 90 years isn't enough, it seems, so right now, we are entering new waters – the denial of some basic results of general relativity, our modern theory of gravity that has been around and available to everyone since 1916. So in the last week, hundreds of publications informed their readers that it's been "mathematically proven" that the big bang theory is wrong and the black holes don't exist. These nutty claims boil down to some papers by a crackpot named Ms Laura Mersini-Houghton (no, I really, really won't accept her doctorate) who had previously claimed that she...