In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could. They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.
But what if the alien civilization was… us? What if we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun? Could we do it? How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back? Before we put too much thought into whether humanity is capable of this amazing feat, even theoretically, we should decide if it’s worth the effort. Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere?
A Harvard physicist has detailed his planned expedition to Papua New Guinea with the ambitious task of gathering remnants of a meteorite that he believes could be an alien probe.
Avi Loeb who is head of the Galileo Project, the “Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts”, hopes to find fragments CNEOS1 2014/01/08 which crashed into Earth back in 2014 during the $1.5 million mission trip he organised to visit the Pacific island nation.
A team of Rutgers University scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism – a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth – has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life.
The research, published on March 10 in the journal Science Advances.
<em>Science Advances</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.
“Modern satellite technology will allow us to explore our celestial backyard.”
The University of Sydney and Bulgarian aerospace manufacturer EnduroSat have teamed up to search for alien life in our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.
The plan for the TOLIMAN mission is to search for planets in the habitable zone around two Sun-like stars in the system, Alpha Centauri A and B, which are located four light-years from Earth.
ESA
The Wow! signal is a radio signal detected by astronomer Jerry R. Ehman on August 15, 1977, while he was analyzing data from Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope.
When the astronomer discovered the signal, he was so impressed with it that he wrote a comment “Wow!.” Thus, the mysterious signal came to be called the Wow! signal.
The signal appeared to come from the Sagittarius constellation, and it lasted for 72 seconds. The signal was unusual because it had a narrow bandwidth, was significantly stronger than background noise, and appeared to come from a fixed point in space.
There’s a theory that’s in vogue in astrochemistry called “Assembly Theory.” It posits that highly complex molecules—many acids, for example—could only come from living beings. The molecules are either part of living beings, or they’re things that intelligent living beings manufacture.
If Assembly Theory holds up, we could use it to search for aliens—by scanning distant planets and moons for complex molecules that should be evidence of living beings. That’s the latest idea from Assembly Theory’s originator, University of Glasgow chemist Leroy Cronin. “This is a radical new approach,” Cronin told The Daily Beast.
But not every expert agrees it would work—at least not anytime soon. To take chemical readings of faraway planets, scientists rely on spectroscopy. This is the process of interpreting a planet’s color palette to assess the possible mix of molecules in its atmosphere, land, and oceans.