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SETI
Feb 28, 2014 20:53:46 GMT -6
Post by skywalker on Feb 28, 2014 20:53:46 GMT -6
Maybe the poking and prodding is just to test us to find out what our weaknesses are. Then when they know us inside and out...they attack!
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Deleted
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Posts: 0
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SETI
Feb 28, 2014 23:17:14 GMT -6
Post by Deleted on Feb 28, 2014 23:17:14 GMT -6
Way too Independence Day LOL
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SETI
May 23, 2014 12:09:30 GMT -6
Post by auntym on May 23, 2014 12:09:30 GMT -6
www.openminds.tv/extraterrestrials-ufos-discussed-capitol-hill-congress-giggles/27826 Extraterrestrials and UFOs discussed on Capitol Hill: Congress giggles Posted by: Shepherd Johnson May 22, 2014 When Congress discusses the search for intelligent life in the universe and the seemingly related topic of UFOs it usually falls under the purview of the House science committee. Exceptions were when the Pentagon was still examining the phenomena in an attempt to establish if UFOs posed a threat to national security. Then it was the House Armed Services Committee that held a hearing. The last time a hearing was held specifically about the singular topic of UFOs was in 1968, the hearing was called “The Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects” and several prominent scientists were called to give witness testimony. Those scientists included J. Allen Hynek, James McDonald and Dr. Carl Sagan. That symposium was held in the same room in which the current House science committee meets, Room 2318 of the Rayburn House Office Building. One year after a mock congressional hearing was held with former congressional representatives and members of the UFO community at the National Press Club, an actual congressional committee convened on May 21, 2014 and discussed extraterrestrial life on other worlds and in a back door way, UFOs, and such fringe topics as the ancient alien theory. Two key members of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) were on Capitol Hill to discuss the SETI mission and the current state of the scientific search for life elsewhere in the universe before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Senior Astronomer for SETI, Dr. Seth Shostak was joined by Dan Wertimer, the director of SETI Research at the University of California, Berkeley, to discuss technical details on SETI’s research, funding problems, scenarios in which extraterrestrial life might be discovered, and a good dose of flying saucer popular culture which Shostak has come to describe as, “the giggle factor.” CONTINUE TO READ: www.openminds.tv/extraterrestrials-ufos-discussed-capitol-hill-congress-giggles/27826 SETI astronomers tell US Congress 'there's alien life out there' www.independent.co.uk/news/science/seti-astronomers-tell-us-congress-theres-alien-life-out-there-9419702.html
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SETI
Jul 24, 2014 14:26:55 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Jul 24, 2014 14:26:55 GMT -6
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/14686/careful-what-you-ask-for/Careful what you ask forBy Billy Cox, Herald-Tribune / Wednesday, July 23, 2014 Radioastronomer Seth Shostak, last making headlines in May alongside colleague Dan Wertheimer by appearing on Capitol Hill to appeal for congressional SETI funding, is one of the nicest, brightest and most approachable scientists you’ll ever want to meet. Even during disagreements over The Great Taboo, the SETI Institute’s senior astronomer is unfailingly cordial. So when British chemist Erol Faruk tuned into a podcast in which Shostak asked listeners to send him “just one good example” of UFO evidence, Faruk took him at his word. The results of Faruk’s quixotic quest for a fair hearing from Shostak and mainstream science have just been released in his self-published ebook on Amazon. It pretty much strips away the myth that institutional scholars would welcome Great Taboo data if Only They Had Decent Stuff To Study. Its title is a mouthful - The Indisputable Scientific Evidence for a UFO Landing and Deposition (aka The Delphos Case) that was denied Publication by Scientific Journals — but it’s a relatively succinct reiteration of the hallmark timidity that characterizes — or more aptly, impedes — America’s learning curve into terra incognita. First, Erol Faruk has what exclusive groups like to call standing. He has a PhD in chemistry, worked research posts at Oxford and Nottingham universities, and became a development chemist at the corporation that became GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He has published peer-reviewed papers in arcane industry journals such as Helvetica Chimica Act, and The Journal of Antibiotics. He holds several formula patents. He speaks the language. Years ago, Faruk got interested in the 1971 Delphos, Kan., UFO case. No need to rehash the whole thing here, you can read all about it online, but what sucked him in was the ring of glowing soil it left behind. The family took pictures moments after the UFO took off, local media and law enforcement converged on the scene, and the ring scars lingered long afterwards. Fungal growth was the chief suspect at the top of the conventional explanations list, but it couldn’t account for the temporary blindness alleged by one witness, nor the numbing sensation reported by another who touched the glowing earth when it was still fresh. Faruk, years later, subjected several grams of affected soil to chemical analysis and discovered some puzzling behaviors in the sample compounds, including an apparent paradox in water soluble and water repellent properties. Most intriguing to him was how, as he would later write, the UFO “appears to have contained within its periphery an aqueous solution of an unstable compound whose likely sole function would be light emission.” Many UFOs are reported to glow. Maybe these trace effects held implications above and beyond this single event. Faruk’s research was published in the Journal of UFO Studies in 1989. Analytical chemist Phyllis Budinger later weighed in with her own study. Budinger interpreted some of Faruk's findings differently, but she also discovered complexities that he had missed. JUFOS published Budinger's work in 2002. CONTINUE READING: devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/14686/careful-what-you-ask-for/
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SETI
Dec 18, 2014 12:21:58 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Dec 18, 2014 12:21:58 GMT -6
www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/einsteins-thoughts-seti-180953666/?no-istEinstein’s Thoughts on SETI“Why should earth be the only planet supporting human life?” asked the physicist in 1920.By Tony Reichhardt airspacemag.com December 17, 2014 Albert Einstein in 1921, the year he won the Nobel Prize. The release this month of a digital edition of Albert Einstein’s papers had me hunting through the great man’s works for any mention of space travel. True, Einstein died two years before the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, but people had been theorizing about rocket flight for decades by then, including some, like Hermann Oberth, in the physicist’s native Germany. Unfortunately, this first digital release only covers Einstein’s life up until 1923, around the time Oberth started writing about spaceflight. So not a single hit turned up for the search terms “rocket” or “space travel.” Guess we’ll have to wait for the later volumes. There was, however, an intriguing item from January 1920, a reference to an article in the London Daily Mail, whose correspondent had asked the soon-to-be Nobel laureate his opinions about extraterrestrial life. Radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi had recently told the same paper about mysterious signals he speculated may have come from Mars. What did Einstein think? “There is every reason to believe that Mars and other planets are inhabited,” answered the professor. “Why should the earth be the only planet supporting human life? It is not singular in any other respect. But if intelligent creatures do exist, as we may assume they do elsewhere in the universe, I should not expect them to try to communicate with the earth by wireless [radio]. Light rays, the direction of which can be controlled much more easily, would more probably be the first method attempted.”Einstein’s dismissal of what we now know as radio SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) may sound surprising, considering that’s exactly the region of the spectrum where most searches have been conducted to date. But in 1920, Einstein lacked a key bit of information. The reason radio searches are favored for modern SETI is that long radio waves more easily penetrate the pervasive dust in interstellar space that blocks shorter-wavelength light from reaching us. In 1920, astronomers didn’t yet understand the nature of interstellar dust. CONTINUE READING: www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/einsteins-thoughts-seti-180953666/?no-ist
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Post by auntym on Jan 3, 2015 15:42:38 GMT -6
nautil.us/issue/101/in-our-nature/dont-write-off-et-quite-yet Don’t Write Off ET Quite Yet
It’s true that we haven’t seen alien life, but neither have we seen much of the universe.By Caleb Scharf January 1, 2015 Here’s a riddle. We’ve never seen any, and we don’t know if they exist, but we think about them, debate them, and shout at each other about them. What are they? Aliens, of course. A while ago I wrote a piece for Nautilus on what might happen to us after learning about the existence of extraterrestrial life—whether microbes on Mars or technological civilizations around other stars—and asked if there might be inherent, unexpected, dangers in acquiring this information. Could infectious alien memes run riot, disrupting societies? Might intelligent life decide to shield itself from such knowledge? It was a whimsical, quizzical thought experiment, exploring the real science of our hunt for life in the cosmos, and the possibility—even if remote—that there could be unexpected perils for intelligently curious life anywhere. Simple enough. But as comments to the piece began to pile up—many in my inbox—I found myself on the receiving end of a barrage of opinion. There was outrage at the suggestion that there might ever be circumstances to drive us (or any intelligent species) to close our astronomical and scientific eyes to avoid picking up dangerous alien data. At the other extreme, and I do mean extreme, there was outrage that we were already being kept in the dark about aliens by our governments. And across the board was a world-weary sense of our seemingly boundless capacity to screw things up, big universe or not. Phew. The possibility of life somewhere else in the cosmos isn’t just scientifically fascinating, it’s a unique mental playground for our hopes, fears, and fantasies. It can also be, as I’ve learned, an inkblot test; a reflection of our inner thoughts, emotions, and—to be honest—hang-ups. Science is littered with the corpses of phenomena we’d thought we’d observed in their entirety. For some of us, the prospect of joining a universe that we fantasize is populated by intelligent aliens à la Star Wars is irresistible. It’s an escape hatch from the ever-diminishing circles of an Earth with 7 billion hungry, polluting humans. We have to stretch our interstellar wings. For others, a sinister extraterrestrial presence already exists here on Earth, a scapegoat for explaining humanity’s ills—so there’s no point seeking aliens out there when they’re already down here, locked behind a firewall of deceit and cat videos. One can feel a modicum of sympathy for these views. But what bothered me the most were statements of defeat; “There’s no point worrying. We know there’s nothing out there.” These stem from the fact that we currently have no answer to the “Where is everybody?” question, also known as the Fermi Paradox: If life is reasonably likely, and the universe is vast and old, why are extraterrestrials not already on our doorstep? Many people construe this as evidence that intelligent, technological life must be thinly spread through cosmic space and time, out of sight, out of the equation. True? No, not necessarily. CONTINUE READING: nautil.us/issue/101/in-our-nature/dont-write-off-et-quite-yet
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SETI
Jan 3, 2015 15:47:19 GMT -6
Post by paulette on Jan 3, 2015 15:47:19 GMT -6
Good thinking. Nothing has been substancially proved. But nothing has been disproved either.
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SETI
Feb 13, 2015 11:50:15 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 13, 2015 11:50:15 GMT -6
www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31442952 Nick Pope @nickpopemod Should we try to contact aliens? Yes! It would be the greatest scientific discovery of all time: www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31442952*************************************************************************** 12 February 2015 Scientists in US are urged to seek contact with aliensBy Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News, San Jose Scientists at a US conference have said it is time to try actively to contact intelligent life on other worlds. Researchers involved in the search for extra-terrestrial life are considering what the message from Earth should be. The call was made by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence institute at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Jose. But others argued that making our presence known might be dangerous. Researchers at the Seti institute have been listening for signals from outer space for more than 30 years using radio telescope facilities in the US. So far there has been no sign of ET. The organisation's director, Dr Seth Shostak, told attendees to the AAAS meeting that it was now time to step up the search. "Some of us at the institute are interested in 'active Seti', not just listening but broadcasting something to some nearby stars because maybe there is some chance that if you wake somebody up you'll get a response," he told BBC News. The concerns are obvious, but sitting in his office at the institute in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, he expresses them with characteristic, impish glee. WATCH VIDEO & CONTINUE READING: www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31442952
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SETI
Feb 15, 2015 14:10:32 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 15, 2015 14:10:32 GMT -6
www.educatinghumanity.com/2015/02/first-contact-with-et-aliens.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EducatingHumanity+%28Educating+Humanity%29 Sunday, February 15, 2015 When ET Picks Up The Phone, Then What?What Will Happen When ET Acknowledges our Calls? It will be one of the greatest moments in science, and also one of the greatest moments in history. After decades of searching, a signal from extraterrestrials is received by a radio telescope on Earth. SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) analysts quickly check the transmission using other instruments, and prepare to announce the great discovery. The media descends on the story and soon millions of people around the world are reading the news. Then what? Exactly how the world would react to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence has been the subject of much speculation. There could be a mixture of excitement, fascination, fear, confusion, disbelief, indifference and panic. Like emergency planners preparing for a catastrophe, scientists regularly assemble to consider ways that world at large would respond to such an event, and how to plan for the day when a discovery comes. Psychologist and SETI scholar Doug Vakoch has been exploring this question for years, and recently gathered an eclectic team to explore the issue. The result is a large and detailed book, "Astrobiology, History and Society", which was recently released by the academic publisher Springer. A free preview of the book has been released online here. Scientists and journalists have struggled with this problem for a long time. "One of the best ways to prepare for the discovery of life beyond Earth is to understand how we've dealt with false alarms in the past," explains Vakoch. "History is rich with incidents when life beyond Earth was reported and widely believed. In the early nineteenth century, the astronomer John Herschel reportedly discovered intelligent "bat-men" on the Moon. The news spread widely, and the public was energized. There's only one problem: it was a hoax!" "As we move from science fiction to science fact, we learn the same lesson: be cautious! When astronomers first discovered pulsars--super-dense stars that emit regular pulses as they spin rapidly--these scientists wondered whether they may have finally detected signals from extraterrestrials. After all, the signals they detected looked unlike anything they'd ever seen nature make before." It is not entirely clear when the next big alert will come, but Vakoch hopes that we will be a little wiser than before. "If we do detect a signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, we should expect some ambiguity. It probably won't be clear overnight whether or not this really is a signal from an advanced civilization. So our best preparation for the actual discovery of extraterrestrial life--whether intelligent or microbial--is to be patient, as scientists sift through the data to see whether it really points to the existence of life beyond Earth." CONTINUE READING: www.educatinghumanity.com/2015/02/first-contact-with-et-aliens.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EducatingHumanity+%28Educating+Humanity%29
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SETI
Feb 15, 2015 14:20:05 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 15, 2015 14:20:05 GMT -6
www.newscientist.com/article/dn26979-contacting-aliens--war-of-the-worlds-or-war-over-cash.html#.VOD_CSwsrpe Contacting aliens - war of the worlds or war over cash? 15 February 2015 by Rowan Hooper, San Jose, California (Image: NAIC - Arecibo Observatory/Wikimedia Commons) "It's not the Klingons you should be worried about, it's the Borg. We could take the Klingons." In a bar in San Jose, the beer flows and talk turns to the latest controversy from the SETI Institute, based just down the road in Mountain View. On Friday Doug Vakoch of SETI broached the subject at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here. He proposed that instead of merely searching and listening for signals from aliens, we should actively direct signals to promising exoplanet locations where they might live. The project is also known as METI - messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. The idea is to use the world's largest radio telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, to message stars within 82 light-years of Earth. Klingon attack This has caused a bit of a stink. What we might call the "Klingons argument", made against Vakoch's plan, goes that if we alert a super-intelligent race of aliens to our presence they'll come here and harvest us. Stephen Hawking has warned against shouting about our location to aliens, and this week in a statement so did SpaceX founder Elon Musk and several others, including a couple of SETI researchers based at the University of California, Berkeley, Dan Werthimer and Geoff Marcy, and science fiction author and astrophysicist David Brin. Speaking at the meeting, Brin called for a moratorium on METI. There should be public debate about the possible risks before we go ahead, he says. The statement says: "Intentionally signaling other civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy raises concerns from all the people of Earth, about both the message and the consequences of contact. A worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent." Or as Hawking once put it, contact with aliens could do for us what it did to Native Americans when Europeans first came over, "which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans." It's all good fun speculating about aliens, and it has generated much media coverage. But it's not really about the threat of war with aliens. It's about money. In their statement the anti-METI faction raised concerns that the project would cause so much strife amongst scientists and the public alike that it could endanger funding for a broad swathe of similar research projects. CONTINUE READING: www.newscientist.com/article/dn26979-contacting-aliens--war-of-the-worlds-or-war-over-cash.html#.VOD_CSwsrpe
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Deleted
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SETI
Feb 15, 2015 23:09:31 GMT -6
lois likes this
Post by Deleted on Feb 15, 2015 23:09:31 GMT -6
Rather ridiculous for scientists to be worrying about invading aliens when they don't acknowledge their presence in the first place.
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SETI
Feb 20, 2015 14:55:41 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Feb 20, 2015 14:55:41 GMT -6
www.universetoday.com/119055/who-speaks-for-earth-the-controversy-over-interstellar-messaging/ Who Speaks for Earth? The Controversy over Interstellar Messagingby Paul Patton February 19, 2015 The prospect of alien invasion has sent shivers down the spines of science fiction fans ever since H. G. Wells published his classic “The War of the Worlds” in 1897. Drawing on the science of his times, Wells envisioned Mars as an arid dying world, whose inhabitants coveted the lush blue Earth. Although opponents of METI seldom explicitly invoke the spectre of alien invasion, some do believe that we must take into account the possibility that extraterrestrials may mean to harm us. The illustration from Well’s novel shows a Martian fighting machine attacking the British warship HMS Thunderchild. (credit: Henrique Alvim Correa, 1906, for the novel “The War of the Worlds”) Should we beam messages into deep space, announcing our presence to any extraterrestrial civilizations that might be out there? Or, should we just listen? Since the beginnings of the modern Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), radio astronomers have, for the most part, followed the listening strategy. In 1999, that consensus was shattered. Without consulting with other members of the community of scientists involved in SETI, a team of radio astronomers at the Evpatoria Radar Telescope in Crimea, led by Alexander Zaitsev, beamed an interstellar message called ‘Cosmic Call’ to four nearby sun-like stars. The project was funded by an American company called Team Encounter and used proceeds obtained by allowing members of the general public to submit text and images for the message in exchange for a fee. Similar additional transmissions were made from Evpatoria in 2001, 2003, and 2008. In all, transmissions were sent towards twenty stars within less than 100 light years of the sun. The new strategy was called Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). Although Zaitsev was not the first to transmit an interstellar message, he and his associates where the first to systematically broadcast to nearby stars. The 70 meter radar telescope at Evpatoria is the second largest radar telescope in the world. In the wake of the Evpatoria transmissions a number of smaller former NASA tracking and research stations collected revenue by making METI transmissions as commercially funded publicity stunts. These included a transmission in the fictional Klingon language from Star Trek to promote the premier of an opera, a Dorito’s commercial, and the entirety of the 2008 remake of the classic science fiction movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”. The specifications of these commercial signals have not been made public, but they were most likely much too faint to be detectable at interstellar distances with instruments comparable to those possessed by humans. Zaitsev’s actions stirred divisive controversy among the community of scientists and scholars concerned with the field. The two sides of the debate faced off in a recent special issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, resulting from a live debate sponsored in 2010 by the Royal Society at Buckinghamshire, north of London, England. CONTINUE READING: www.universetoday.com/119055/who-speaks-for-earth-the-controversy-over-interstellar-messaging/
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SETI
Nov 21, 2017 0:43:17 GMT -6
Post by auntym on Nov 21, 2017 0:43:17 GMT -6
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SETI
Nov 21, 2017 3:49:39 GMT -6
Post by plutronus on Nov 21, 2017 3:49:39 GMT -6
Hah hah hah ho ho ho...oh that is so perfect. Thanks..
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SETI
Nov 21, 2017 10:32:20 GMT -6
Post by swamprat on Nov 21, 2017 10:32:20 GMT -6
Perfect picture of Seth Showstop Shostok! (Except his leg should be the "target".....)
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