Lifeboat Foundation

Mysterious signals are being sent from deep in space.

For the first time, an international team of researchers has used a quantum computer to create artificial life—a simulation of living organisms that scientists can use to understand life at the level of whole populations all the way down to cellular interactions.

With the quantum computer, individual living organisms represented at a microscopic level with superconducting qubits were made to “mate,” interact with their environment, and “die” to model some of the major factors that influence evolution.

The new research, published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, is a breakthrough that may eventually help answer the question of whether the origin of life can be explained by quantum mechanics, a theory of physics that describes the universe in terms of the interactions between subatomic particles.

Continue reading “Researchers Created ‘Quantum Artificial Life’ For the First Time” »

NASA is ramping up its search for life outside of our solar system.

The space agency is hosting a workshop in Houston this week to assess the state of current efforts to find ‘technosignatures’ coming from deep space and explore new areas.

These signatures are those that could be traced to an advanced civilization, reaching Earth as radio signals or other emissions caused by extraterrestrial activity.

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Despite much speculation and conspiracy theories, the reason for the mysterious closure of New Mexico’s Sunspot Solar Observatory by the FBI earlier this month was an ongoing child pornography investigation, court documents show.

The secret behind the 11-day closure of the facility was finally explained in newly unsealed FBI records and its application for a search warrant. According to the court documents, the federal agents were investigating a janitor suspected of using the observatory’s WiFi network to download child pornography.

Scientists don’t know exactly what fast radio bursts (FRBs) are. What they do know is that they come from a long way away. In fact, one that occurs regularly comes from a galaxy 3 billion light years away. They could form from neutron stars or they could be extraterrestrials phoning home. The other thing is — thanks to machine learning — we now know about a lot more of them. You can see a video from Berkeley, below. and find more technical information, raw data, and [Danielle Futselaar’s] killer project graphic seen above from at their site.

The first FRB came to the attention of [Duncan Lorimer] and [David Narkevic] in 2007 while sifting through data from 2001. These broadband bursts are hard to identify since they last a matter of milliseconds. Researchers at Berkeley trained software using previously known FRBs. They then gave the software 5 hours of recordings of activity from one part of the sky and found 72 previously unknown FRBs.

The undisclosed “security issue” behind all of the activity at the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico remains a mystery to the public.

It has been a week since the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico, was shut down, evacuated, and visited by FBI agents—and the undisclosed “security issue” behind all this activity remains a mystery to the public.

Theories about the true reasoning behind the shutdown range from an accidental interception of military signals to captured proof of alien life.

Continue reading “‘Telescope Did Not See Aliens,’ Director of Mysteriously Shut Down Observatory Claims” »

Speaking at a Q&A session hosted for a Madrid university’s Master’s of Business Administration students, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell talked for nearly an hour about the launch company’s next-generation BFR rocket, the reality of long-term life on Mars, and more, revealing a number of interesting tidbits in the process.

Almost entirely led by questions from the unusually well-informed audience, the graduate students and professors predominately kept the famous SpaceX exec more or less focused on the company’s future, delving into the reasoning behind BFR. Shotwell had only praise for the next-generation launch vehicle, which is targeting initial hop tests in late 2019 and its first full launches as early as 2021, a delay of several months from previous schedule estimates targeting hops in early 2019 and orbit by 2020.

We haven’t seen SpaceX’s BFR — the rocket that it hopes will enable trips around the world, to the Moon, and, eventually, to Mars — actually take flight yet, but the company says it has already booked a private passenger for a trip around the Moon. No one has been there since Apollo missions ended in the 70s, but now, in a “world’s first” SpaceX is apparently taking reservations. Details like who is going and “why” are to be revealed during a livestream on Monday September 17th at 9 PM ET.

In 1960, American physicist Freeman Dyson proposed the idea that an extremely advanced—and power-hungry—alien civilization could, in theory, harness the majority of their host star’s energy by building a vast structure around it to absorb its radiation.

Scientists in the field of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) have carried out a number of searches for such structures, known as Dyson spheres—which could be constructed using material harvested from dismantled planets—without uncovering any compelling evidence for them.

Now, in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers from Uppsala University, Sweden, and Heidelberg University, Germany, have proposed a new way to look for Dyson spheres that may have some advantages over previous attempts.

Continue reading “This is how we could find advanced alien civilizations” »