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Continue reading “Laser SETI: First Ever All-Sky All-the-Time Search” »
The year is 2030. In a high-security containment lab, scientists gathered around a towering machine, eagerly awaiting the first look at a newly discovered bacterium on Mars.
With a series of beeps, the machine—a digital-to-biological converter, or DBC—signaled that it had successfully received the bacterium’s digitized genomic file. Using a chemical cocktail comprised of the building blocks of DNA, it whirled into action, automatically reconstructing the alien organism’s genes letter-by-letter.
Within a day, scientists had an exact replica of the Martian bacterium.
Early space aliens wouldn’t need to have worried about iron-poor blood astrophysicists now report. Apparently, iron was distributed uniformly throughout the cosmos quite quickly.
The implications for #astrobiology are obvious.
Iron — a building block of everything as we know it — was ubiquitous much earlier in the cosmos than anyone could have imagined, astrophysicists now report.
Continue reading “Universe Was Rife With Iron Early On, Say Astrophysicists” »
They say everything’s sweeter the second time around, and that seems to be the case for SpaceX’s plans to colonize Mars. Last year, Musk unveiled his plans to colonize the Red Planet and make it fit for human habitation. Now, that version of the plan has been published and made available for free— with a few notable updates.
In the paper, the focus is on affordability, as that is the primary factor in making life on Mars a reality. As Musk notes, “You cannot create a self-sustaining civilization if the ticket price is $10 billion per person.” In order for it to be viable, Musk asserts that the cost should be about $200,000—equivalent to the median price of a house in the United States. In the paper, Musk outlines the steps he considers essential to ensuring this relative affordability.
But this is just the beginning. Musk posted a tweet today hinting that this version one is already being reviewed…and version 2 is on its way.
Continue reading “Elon Musk Just Published His Plan to Colonize Mars” »
The SETI Institute is hosting a global, public hackathon and code challenge to find a robust signal classification algorithm for use in our mission to find E.T. radio communication.
The Data Set
Each night, the SETI Institute observes signals across the radio frequency spectrum using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). The signal detection system at the ATA searches for narrow-band radio signals coming directly from particular targets in the sky.
UPDATE May 17, 2017: The IBM PowerAI team and Nimbix have recently announced support for the hackathon. Teams at the hackathon will enjoy access to PowerAI systems for the weekend, which will significantly improve deep learning model building for ET signal classification. Thanks, Nimbix and IBM PowerAI.
As the Fermi paradox states, the Universe is a vast, unknowable space, filled with trillions upon trillions of potentially habitable planets, so… where are all the aliens?
In the latest attempt to solve this conundrum, a trio of researchers have suggested that advanced alien civilisations have gone into self-imposed ‘hibernation’ — waiting for a future where the Universe is far colder than it is now, which would facilitate the kind of processing power we could only ever dream about.
A new paper written by Oxford neuroscientist and AI expert, Anders Sandberg and Stuart Armstrong, together with Milan Ćirković from the Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade, Serbia, argues that civilisations far more advanced than us could have conceivably explored a big chunk of the Universe already, and are now waiting for a better time to be alive.
Continue reading “Could Aliens Be Hibernating Through The Worst Time in The Universe?” »
On a geopolitical level, science is also a crucial agent of soft power between nations. Going back decades, scientific collaborations have tempered tensions between Russia and its rival nations, and allowed cooler heads to prevail. In 1975, astronaut Thomas Stafford and cosmonaut Alexey Leonov shook hands in space as part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which reflected the policy of détente, or easing of strained relations, between the US and the USSR. The International Space Station (ISS), the crown jewel of science partnerships, is directly descended from this symbolic gesture.
I took a five-day tour of Russia’s leading scientific research centers. This is what I saw.
They call them the “golden brains.” Perched 22 storeys high, they engulf the top floors of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) headquarters in southwest Moscow. Somehow both geometric and wildly rampageous, the copper and aluminum sculptures look like the kind of long-lost technologies that protagonists stumble across on deserted alien worlds in Mass Effect.
Continue reading “In the Midst of Global Turmoil, Russia’s Science Community Reboots” »
We have reached a turning point in society. According to renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, the next 100 years of science will determine whether we perish or thrive. Will we remain a Type 0 civilization, or will we advance and make our way into the stars?
Experts assert that, as a civilization grows larger and becomes more advanced, its energy demands will increase rapidly due to its population growth and the energy requirements of its various machines. With this in mind, the Kardashev scale was developed as a way of measuring a civilization’s technological advancement based upon how much usable energy it has at its disposal (this was originally just tied to energy available for communications, but has since been expanded).
The scale was originally designed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (who was looking for signs of extraterrestrial life within cosmic signals). It has 3 base classes, each with an energy disposal level: Type I (10¹⁶W), Type II (10²⁶W), and Type III (10³⁶W). Other astronomers have extended the scale to Type IV (10⁴⁶W) and Type V (the energy available to this kind of civilization would equal that of all energy available in not just our universe, but in all universes and in all time-lines). These additions consider both energy access as well as the amount of knowledge the civilizations have access to.
Continue reading “The Kardashev Scale — Type I, II, III, IV & V Civilization” »
