Arecibo observatory: Two New Programs Launching to Listen for Aliens

The 305-meter telescope at Arecibo Observatory is just one of a collection that SETI will use to search nearby stars for electronic signals that could indicate intelligent life. 

If such a civilization was utilizing a similar dish to image exoplanets, SETI's team should be able to detect it.

Credit: Arecibo Observatory

SETI is stepping up its search for alien lifeforms on far off worlds.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program recently announced two new methods to search for signals that could come from life on other planets.

In the Panchromatic SETI project, multiple telescopes will scan a variety of wavelengths from 30 stars near the sun; the project will look for powerful signals beamed into space, potentially by intelligent extraterrestrials.

SETI is also launching an interplanetary eavesdropping program that is expected to search for messages beamed between planets in a single system.

"If we are polluting space, perhaps other extraterrestrials are leaking signals," Dan Werthimer, director of the Berkley SETI Research Center, told an audience during the Smithsonian Magazine's "The Future is Here" Festival in May. "Maybe they're sending something our way."

'Everything we've got'
Since humans made their first FM radio and television transmissions, signals from Earth have been spilling out into space, announcing the presence of intelligent life to any group that might be searching for it.

According to Werthimer, signals from the 1950s television show "I Love Lucy" have reached thousands of stars, while the nearest suns have already enjoyed the "The Simpsons."

If Earth has unintentionally leaked signs of its presence, other alien civilizations may have done the same thing.

SETI's new Panchromatic project will utilize a variety of telescopes covering a range of frequencies to scour the nearest stars.

"We're going to throw everything we've got at it," Werthimer added.

The panchromatic project will examine a sample of the 30 stars that lie within 5 parsecs (16 light-years) from the sun. The list includes 13 single stars, seven binary systems and one triple system.

Most of the stars are smaller than the sun, but the project will also examine two white dwarfs and one moderately evolved F star. No confirmed exoplanets have been found around any of the stars.

By setting distance as the criteria, the SETI team hopes to alleviate any bias that might otherwise result from focusing on systems similar to that of Earth. The team selected stars for study based only on how far they lie from the sun.

According to SETI-Berkeley's Andrew Siemion, chief scientist of the eavesdropping project, the search will also probe a diverse stellar population already well studied at many wavelengths.

"In the event of a non-detection, these attributes of the sample will allow us to place strong and broadly applicable limits on the presence of technology," Siemion told Space.com via email.

Observations from the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope in Europe and the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia will begin over the summer and fall of 2014.

Instrument development and commissioning is still in progress for the Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) at Mount Wilson Observatory and the Nickel Telescope at Lick Observatory, both in California.

But according to Siemion, the pair should be ready at about the same time. The Nickel Telescope will conduct the first-ever SETI observations done in the near-infrared.

SETI and Three Piatcions: As Seen Through a Telescope

This is an interesting music video for Italian shoegaze band “Thee Piatcions“. Their Wall-Of-Sound, psychedelic music (they must be one of the loudest bands touring Europe) inspired us to create this sort of retro sci-fi comedy about searching for life in space and looking for love on Earth.

SETI Live: Online Project Lets ‘Citizen Scientists’ Help Search for Aliens

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, has launched a new website, which invites anyone to log on and help analyze signals from space that could provide evidence of intelligent alien life in the universe.

SETI Live provides data gathered by the Institute's Allen Telescope Array, which scans sections of space for radio frequency signals.



Web users can log on to the site and help analyze the data, sifting through signals for evidence of an extraterrestrial civilization.

"There are parts of the spectrum where our sophisticated signal processing system is overwhelmed because there are so many signals," said astronomer Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research, in an interview. "I'm hoping to put together this army of citizen scientists to help figure out which signals to follow up on."

Essentially, human eyes are needed to pick up on subtle patterns that might be overlooked by SETI computer algorithms.

"The people that will do the best at this are going to be people whose pattern skills are such that they can ignore the bright pattern that's so easy to detect and look to see that there's something else there, something fainter, and see if they can in fact discover this needle that's buried under the hay," Jill Tarter stated.

SETI Live came out of the TED Prize program, which awards $100,000 every year to an "exceptional individual" with "One Wish to Change the World."

Jill Tarter won the prize in 2009, revealing her wish to "to empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company." Her wish developed into SETI Live.

SETI Institute scientists have been searching for signs of intelligent alien life since the 1960s, but have yet to find anything. With the discovery of 700 extra-solar planets, the search for extraterrestrial life has become much more targeted in these regions of space.

UFO Alien Encounters are Only Dreams?

American researchers are claiming that supposed human encounters with aliens and unidentified flying objects (UFO) may just be dreams based on results of a sleep experiment.

The researchers from the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles made the findings after subjecting 20 volunteers to out-of-body experiences when they are half-awake at night and asking them to meet aliens during that dream-like state.

Out of those volunteers, more than half were able to achieve out-of-body experiences with seven or 35 percent dreaming of alien or UFO encounters at their home as instructed, according to lead researcher Michael Raduga.

Raduga has a theory that people claiming to encounter aliens or see UFOs are just dreaming, so he conducted the study to prove it.

"When people experience alien abductions in the night, they usually don't know they are actually in REM sleep and having an out-of-body experience," Raduga told Life's Little Mysteries.

The volunteers had varying response to the instructions. Raduga said there were some who needed more attempts to separate from their sleeping bodies while others failed to do so out of fear.

There were also some who never proceeded to looking for aliens while dreaming also due to fear.

Those who encountered aliens described their dreams to the researchers. One described the aliens as resembling the creatures from the movie "The Thing."

The volunteered told Raduga the three aliens that appeared before him scared him so much that he regained consciousness.

UFO Pod: Theme room

Make your childhood fantasies come true by staying in a UFO for a night. 

The flying-saucer-shaped pod hovers above the ground in a forest at Treehotel near the Lule River in Harads, Sweden. 

The UFO room is one of five free-standing treehouse rooms, which also include the Bird's Nest, Mirrorcube and the Blue Cone.

 
Picture: Peter Lundstrom WDO/www.treehotel.se/Rex Features

SETI: Rethinking the Search for Alien 'Footprints'

Any intelligent extraterrestrial life that exists probably won't announce itself by blowing up the White House, or win over the hearts of children as a lovable alien with a glowing finger.

Many scientists simply hope to find evidence of them by scanning the skies for a radio signal from a distant star's alien civilization but such efforts may also risk overlooking clues of past alien activity right here on Earth.

If aliens did leave their mark on Earth by some wild chance, we could search for the possible "footprints" of alien technology or even analyze the DNA of terrestrial organisms for signs of intelligent messages or tinkering.

Such a CSI-style forensics search could complement, rather than replace, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomers who continue to look skyward, said Paul Davies, a physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.

"My proposals aim to spread the burden from a small band of heroic radio astronomers to the entire scientific community," Davies said. "Projects like genomic SETI are an attempt to complement radio SETI, not undermine it."

Aliens and Interstellar Archaeology on the Kardashev Galactic Scale

Kardashev Type III and Its Traces
What would happen if a true galaxy-spanning civilisation went to work on astro-engineering?

We call this a Kardashev Type III civilisation, one that could exploit the power resources of an entire galaxy, and the assumption made has always been that such a culture would be very high profile, if not, blindingly obvious. It's projects would be so vast that our astronomers would be able to detect them by noting anomalies, outside of natural occurences.

Imagine, for example, a galactic culture that encloses each individual star in a Dyson sphere.

Image: M81, a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. A ‘wavefront’ Dyson sphere culture might spread across such a galaxy, causing stars to drop out of visible light spectrum entirely, and then one by one, to be detected in the infrared. Credit and copyright: Giovanni Benintende.

A Dyson sphere or ‘shell’ would absorb all of the visible light from a star, re-radiating stellar energy at infrared wavelengths. A Dyson ‘ring’ would use planetary materials that would mask only part of the star’s light.

Scientists have used a list of very interesting infrared sources from the Infrared Astronomy Satellite (IRAS) in their searches, but have come up with no strong Dyson sphere candidates. Nonetheless, Dyson spheres remain interesting, if only because they vastly increase the habitable area around a star.

What would a Type III civilisation do with technologies that could create Dyson spheres not only in one place but across the galaxy?

Whatever the answer, you would think it would be clearly noticeable. Freeman Dyson himself has said that “…a type III (Kardashev civilisation) in our own galaxy would change the appearance of the sky so drastically that it could hardly have escaped our attention.”

James Annis, who has studied anomalous galaxies in a quest for signs of a Type III civilisation, reports: “It is quite clear that the Galaxy itself has not transformed into a type III civilisation based on starlight, nor have M31 or M33, our two large neighbours.” Nonetheless, we wonder whether we should take these statements as conclusive or definitive:

…what would happen for a civilisation that was on its way to becoming a type III civilisation, i.e. a type II.5 civilisation that is developing?

If it was busily turning stars into Dyson spheres the civilisation could create a “Fermi bubble” or void in the visible light from a patch of the galaxy with a corresponding upturn in the emission of infrared light.

This bubble would grow following the lines of a suggestion attributed to Fermi… that patient space travellers moving at 1/1000 to 1/100 of the speed of light could span a galaxy in one to ten million years.

To read more on Interstellar Archaeology ......

Meeting and Greeting the Nearest Aliens Will Take Centuries

Although our telescopes will likely become good enough to detect signs of life on exoplanets within the next 100 years, it would probably take many centuries before we could ever get a good look at the aliens.

"Unfortunately, we are perhaps as far away from seeing aliens with our own eyes as Epicurus was from seeing the first other worlds when, 23 centuries ago, he predicted the existence of these planets," said astrobiologist Jean Schneider at the Paris Observatory at Meudon. He and his colleagues discussed the difficulties of studying distant alien life in the journal Astrobiology.

Schneider and his colleagues say that in the next 15 to 25 years, there will likely be two generations of space missions able to analyze exoplanets in greater detail. The first generation will feature 1.5-to-2.5-meter-wide coronagraphs to block out the direct light from a star to help search for giant planets and nearby super-Earths.

The second generation will feature interferometers, coronagraphs and other equipment to better analyze the light reflected off these exoplanets. These missions could reveal what the planets might look like, and what they might have in their atmospheres or on their surfaces. At the same time, there will likely be coronagraphic cameras on extremely large ground-based telescopes.

After these projects, future missions could search for more potentially habitable planets either by peering at more distant stars more than 50 parsecs away or at rocky moons of giant planets seen in the habitable zones of nearby stars. The follow-up missions also could deeply investigate any exoplanets that display potential signs of life.

Such missions will require much larger arrays in space - for instance, taking a 100-pixel image of a planet twice the width of Earth some 16.3 light years away would require the elements making up a space telescope array to be more than 43 miles apart.

Such pictures of exoplanets could make out details such as rings, clouds, oceans, continents, and perhaps even hints of forests or savannahs. Long-term monitoring could reveal seasonal shifts, volcanic events, and changes in cloud cover. One might even detect the presence of moons by shadows they project on the planets.

More sensitive instruments could hunt for the wavelengths of infrared light associated with carbon dioxide, which could tell a lot about the atmosphere.

Beyond conventional signs of life as we know it, such as oxygen in atmospheres, another type of signal could be "technosignatures," features that cannot be explained simply by complex organic chemistry. Technosignatures could include laser light, chlorofluorocarbon gases, or even artificial constructions.

"Looking for aliens is philosophically important - it would tell us what is essential in the human condition," Schneider said.

However, if scientists actually detect signs of life, it will frustratingly take many centuries before humanity can realize the hope of seeing what these aliens might actually look like, Schneider and his colleagues explained.

"It is very disappointing," Schneider said.

NASA: Search for Alien Life Continues - Under the Laser Microscope

MICROSCOPES revolutionised the study of life on Earth. Now a rugged, easy-to-use instrument is aiming to be equally influential in the search for alien life in locations such as the oceans beneath the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa.

The hunt for signs of extraterrestrial life usually focuses on detecting molecules associated with living organisms. Direct observation through optical imaging would be more conclusive, so Hans Kreuzer and Manfred Jericho at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and their colleagues have taken a different approach. They have built a robust microscope that can be dunked into water to detect any microscopic life forms that may be swimming or floating there.

Called the digital inline holographic microscope, it consists of a pair of watertight compartments separated by a chamber into which water can flow. One compartment contains a blue laser that is focused onto a pinhole-sized window facing into the water. Opposite the pinhole, in the second compartment, is a digital camera.

As the laser light hits the pinhole, it generates a spherical light wave that spreads out through the water. If it hits a microscopic object - a bacterium, say - further diffraction occurs. The spherical wave and the diffraction pattern created by the microscopic object interfere to create a pattern that is captured by the camera. This interference pattern is essentially a hologram of whatever is in front of the pinhole.

Kreuzer has patented an algorithm that can reconstruct the objects that created the interference pattern within milliseconds. In this way the camera can produce real-time images of any object in the water if they are larger than about 100 nanometres across.

To test the instrument, the team took it to the extreme environment of Axel Heiberg island in the Arctic, where a robotic vessel immersed it in a lake (Planetary and Space Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.pss.2009.07.012). "We saw all sorts of critters we didn't know were there," says team member Jay Nadeau of McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Nadeau says that the rugged, lightweight device can be easily transported, and does not require constant intervention to obtain clear images. It has a wide angle of view and a large depth of field, which together allow it to follow objects as they float in the 7-cubic-millimetre chamber in front of the pinhole. "You can be absolutely certain if something is alive and swimming," says Nadeau.

Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, who worked on the Phoenix mission to Mars, is intrigued by the work. "While I would not argue that a microscope is the next instrument to send to Mars or Europa, it is clear that eventually we must send microscopes," he says. "The design here is pretty clever and well suited for a flight instrument."

Pioneer & Voyager; are we sending Mixed Messages?

NASA's Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, which launched in 1972 and 1973, carried this design, which was etched on a 15x23-cm gold-anodised aluminium plate. The plaque was intended to inform any extraterrestrials who might come upon it when and where the spacecraft launched (using 14 pulsars as a reference point). "There's also an image of a man and woman - perhaps the most cryptic for an extraterrestrial to understand," says Vakoch. "The response NASA got [to that image] was quite surprising to them. Some were concerned that NASA was sending pornography into space." (Illustration: NASA)

NASA placed a more ambitious message aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which launched in 1977.

Sounds and images intended to portray the diversity of life and cultures on Earth were encoded on a phonograph record made of gold-plated copper. A committee chaired by Carl Sagan assembled its contents: 115 images, a variety of natural sounds, music from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages.

Each record is encased in a protective aluminium jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and how to play the record.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilisations in interstellar space," said Sagan. "But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet." (Image: NASA)

"Like other messages that have been created for extraterrestrial audiences, the starting point of the Voyager recording was something we would expect extraterrestrials to have in common with us - and that's basic math and science," says Vakoch. (Illustration: Frank Drake)

This illustration of DNA (top left) shows how "the chemistry of Earth is tied into our genetic material", says Vakoch.

Human reproduction is also the focus of multiple Voyager images, from the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm to a developing foetus to a silhouette of a man and a pregnant woman. "There's an emphasis on reproduction in the Voyager recording, but also considerable caution in depicting nude human beings," says Vakoch. "The image [of the man and woman] nicely portrays our ambivalence about sexuality." (Illustrations: Jon Lomberg)

This image illustrates "licking, eating and drinking" (Image: National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center)

There are some Voyager images that relate to health and the human body, including this X-ray of a hand, says Vakoch - "but nothing that explicitly says, 'Our bodies are frail.'"

"The Voyager recordings intentionally minimise negative aspects of [human culture]," says Vakoch. "There was an intentional decision not to include a picture of a nuclear mushroom cloud [or] poverty and disease."

But long-lived alien civilisations are the ones most likely to be around to intercept our messages. "If they're older, perhaps they're also much more advanced than we are," says Vakoch. "What would we have to say that would be of interest to them?"

"I think the greatest thing we have to offer is to be honest about our current level of development, to highlight that we're not sure that we're even going to survive the next century . . . but that we have enough faith that we will continue to exist that we are making an effort to reach out to other civilisations." (Image: National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center)

This illustration of vertebrate evolution shows representatives of the major vertebrate groupings, including amphibians, birds and mammals.

The image of the man and woman at top right is quite similar to the drawing that was on the Pioneer plaque, with one difference - in the Pioneer image of the early 1970s, the man is raising a hand in greeting, but in this image from a few years later, the woman is waving hello. "Just in the span of a few short years, we saw a responsiveness in NASA to [include] a more adequate representation of women by showing a woman not as passively standing next to a man but as being a member of a couple that was actively sending greetings to other worlds," says Vakoch. (Illustration: Jon Lomberg)

NASA really made an effort with Voyager to include images and sounds from around the world. "What's unique about the Voyager recording is there's really an emphasis on describing the breadth of human experience," says Vakoch. "Really it's the best portrayal of human diversity of any messages that have been sent out in space."

Still, the diversity it displays is limited – there are no images representing homosexuality, for example. "I think any interstellar message is in part a reflection of its times," he says. "It may well be that if NASA sends out another image in the future, it may include a picture of two men or two women holding hands." (Images: United Nations)