Author: Douglas Vakoch
Douglas Vakoch is the President of METI International
Teaser: Rage, father-son conflict, and a distant husband launch Ad Astra, a science fiction action film.
The further we travel into outer space, the more we realize our most important connections are down here on Earth. That’s the message of Ad Astra, a science fiction action movie that doubles as a psychological study of deep space exploration and complex intimate relationships.
SPOILERS FOLLOW.
Carl L. DeVito.
Carl L. DeVito is a member of the Emeritus faculty of the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona. Here he discusses his new book “Space, Life, Science and Stories: Our Recurring Interest in the Possibility of Cosmic Visitors”.
Some time ago an unusual book sold over 70 million copies and was translated to 28 languages. It claimed that aliens had come here and greatly influenced the development of humanity. This was just one of a number of surges of public interest in the possibility of our having cosmic visitors. Unfortunately, the scientific community rarely addresses the stories behind these surges and, when pressed, some among them respond with ridicule.
By Morris Jones
Morris Jones, PhD, is an Australia-based journalist and has acted as an advisor on scientific matters to the media. He can be reached at morrisjones@hotmail.com.
Multi-messenger astronomy is a hot ticket in science right now. Basically, it means observing the same astronomical target (or event) with different types of instruments. Some phenomena can produce flashes of light (visible with optical telescopes), radio bursts (collected by radio telescopes), and particle emissions (which show up in neutrino detectors and other instruments). Combining simultaneous observations from two or more instruments with different capabilities can help to reveal the true nature of strange things in the universe.
By Laura Welcher.
Laura Welcher is the director of Operations and the Long Now Library at the Long Now Foundation. She is also a member of the board of METI International.
Beth Laura O’Leary, New Mexico State University
Beth Laura O’Leary is a retired professor of Anthropology from New Mexico State University
Of all the kinds of unlikely scary stories humans have told each other about what might be 'out there', to me, this is the scariest. Our thanks to Rebecca Orchard for the grim details:
Rebecca Orchard is a fiction writer in the PhD program at Florida State University, and her work about the Voyager Golden Record has been profiled in the Guardian, BBC World Service Newshour, and Atlas Obscura.
This is the second in our Fermi Paradox series. This one brought by us by Kelly Smith, Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Clemson University. Kelly is also the current president of SSOCIA: The Society for Social and Conceptual Implications of Astrobiology - https://ssocia.com/ - and serves on the advisory board of METI International.
On the Meaning of the Fermi Paradox
Carl L. DeVito
The many extra-solar planets the astronomers have found lends greater poignancy to Enrico Fermi’s famous question: “Where is everyone?”
My paper dealing with this question appeared in a special issue of Futures.
The paper begins with a thought experiment. Suppose that the universe had been scanned continuously, and at many frequencies, for intelligent signals. Suppose the scan had been programed to note any signal detected but then to simply continue the search. We would expect the rate at which societies would be found to depend, in some unknown way, on the number of societies and the rate at which such societies arise. Had this scan begun when the first society arose and continued to the present the number of societies detected would be expressible as a definite integral.
Serpil Oppermann
What we currently know about a very elusive phenomenon known as intelligent ETs from other planets and interstellar communication through radio signals, is in the context of our still limited understanding of expressive life forms on Earth. The linguistic ability of an intelligent extraterrestrial being is imagined to be more or less similar to human linguistic systems, or to nonhuman earthly agencies, including plant and animal communications. Biosemiotics has taught us that “human language is the most recent evolutionary part of a vast global web of semiosis encompassing all living things”
Russian astrophysicist and SETI pioneer Nikolai Kardashev passed away on August 3, 2019. Known for the Kardashev scale of extraterrestrial civilizations, in 1963 he conducted the first Soviet search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) by examining the quasar CTA-102 for signs of a technological civilization. In the following year, Kardashev organized the first Soviet conference on communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI) at Byurakan Observatory in Armenia. Also in 1964, Kardashev proposed a scale that now bears his name, which is used for classifying extraterrestrial civilizations in terms of their energy use. Civilizations ranked on the Kardashev Scale range from Type I civilizations capable of using the energy resources of a single planet, to Type II civilizations that use the full energy of a star, to Type III civilizations that have access to the energy of an entire galaxy.