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While the truth might be out there, technological aliens don't seem to be — at least not yet. New results from the most comprehensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program ever undertaken — which surveyed 1,327 nearby stars for signals from intelligent beings — have turned up empty. "There's certainly nothing out there glaringly obvious," ... lead author of a paper about the results, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal, told Live Science. "There's no amazingly advanced civilizations trying to contact us with incredibly powerful transmitters." While the team didn't find anything this time around, Price said that there...

“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...

A Fourier transform analysis of 2.5 million spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was carried out to detect periodic spectral modulations. Signals having the same period were found in only 234 stars overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range. The signals cannot be caused by instrumental or data analysis effects because they are present in only a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range and because signal to noise ratio considerations predict that the signal should mostly be detected in the brightest objects, while this is not the case. We consider several possibilities, such as...

Are the Laws of the Universe Fine-Tuned for Life? By Korey Haynes | November 12, 2018 Humans have often looked at the night sky and wondered if there’s anyone else out there. But stare into that darkness long enough, and many wonder instead: how did we get here? What were the odds, in a universe so enormous and chaotic, that humans should have come to exist at all? Is life, let alone intelligent life, such a wildly improbable occurrence that we’re the only ones here? Or are we an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics?Life exists on Earth (assuming...

The German government has “no plans or protocol” should first contact with aliens occur, according to a report by German daily Bild. The government considers such an event “extremely unlikely according to current scientific knowledge,” the Ministry of Economics said when responding to a question from Green MP Dieter Janecek. “Concrete cases that could have been the subject of bilateral or multilateral talks with other states are not known,” the ministry’s statement continued. While Germany might not have a plan for extraterrestrial visitors, the US is more prepared. Even before the establishment of a Space Force that US President Donald...

Ever since the Renaissance, the sciences have dealt human beings a steady stream of humiliations. The Copernican revolution dismantled the idea that humanity stood at the center of the universe. A cascade of discoveries from the late-18th to the early-20th century showed that humanity was a lot less significant than some had imagined. The revelation of the geological timescale stacked millions and billions of years atop our little cultural narratives, crumbling all of human history to dust. The revelation that we enjoy an evolutionary kinship to fish, bugs, and filth eroded the in-God’s-image stuff. The disclosure of the size of...

Seth Shostak from SETI.org joined the Chris Pryor Show. Seth discussed current scientific attempts to discover intelligent life and the mechanisms involved in this search. Seth has a fantastic radio show of his own, Big Picture Science and it can be found here https://seti.org/education-outreach/big-picture-science-overview

A new radio telescope in Canada is doing its job picking up mysterious signals from deep space known as "fast radio bursts" (FRBs). The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in British Columbia detected the first-ever FRB at frequencies below 700 MHz on July 25, a signal named FRB 180725A. As you might guess, FRBs are milliseconds-long bursts of radio emissions that come from some unknown source across the universe. They're one of the newer cosmic mysteries around, having been first detected only about a decade ago. Possible explanations include bursts from magnetars, exploding black holes, and yes, highly advanced...

Installation was completed on the world's largest radio telescope on Sunday morning as the last of 4,450 panels was fitted into the center of the big dish. ... In the first two or three years after its completion, the telescope will undergo further adjustment, and during that period Chinese scientists will use it for early-stage research. After that, it will be open to scientists worldwide, said Peng Bo, director of the NAO Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory. Scientists can also carry out remote control and observation in other cities such as Beijing, more than 2,000 kilometers from the telescope site, said...

When it comes to detecting laser pulses aliens might shoot at Earth to attract our attention, scientists now find they can detect signals as faint as a single photon of light every few tiny fractions of a second. Astronomers have gazed at the skies for decades searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Lasers can in principle help transmit messages over extraordinary distances, but while scientists have monitored a large number of stars looking for alien laser signals — for instance, facilities at Harvard and Princeton scanned more than 10,000 sun-like stars for several years — no evidence for any have...

It was an unusual question, but the candidate answered it. During a campaign stop late last week in New Hampshire, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton was asked her opinion about UFOs and whether the U.S. government would ever acknowledge the existence of such unearthly craft. In a casual conversation with the Conway Daily Sun, a local paper, Mrs. Clinton vowed, "Yes, I'm going to get to the bottom of it." She later added, "I think we may already have been visited. We don't know for sure." Mrs. Clinton also suggested that a future task force could be assembled to investigate Area...

Astronomers at the SETI@Home project have spoken up to dismiss suggestions that the project intercepted signals from an alien civilisation. Reports spread across the net yesterday and today after New Scientist said that an "interesting" signal had been picked up by the huge radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. The magazine quoted Dan Wertheimer, the chief scientist on the SETI@Home project, as saying that the signal was the most interesting yet identified by the project. He remarked: "We're not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it." Despite the otherwise sceptical tone of the article, his comments...