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.
By Morris Jones
2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the mission of Apollo 11, when humans walked on another world for the first time. While the flight was a tremendous achievement for science, technology and exploration, there's one aspect that's rarely discussed. In some ways, Apollo 11 was a proto-project for METI.
By Morris Jones
In these high-tech times, most communications on Earth move very quickly, sometimes at the speed of light. Telecommunications and information technology have made it practical to quickly send messages around the world, and to practically any place in the world. We still have traditional postal systems, but their speed of delivery is modest compared to electronic systems. Thus, physical mail is sometimes dubbed "Snail Mail" for its slow pace.
By Morris Jones
"Warning: The following broadcast contains the voices of deceased persons." That's unlikely to shock most readers of this blog. But for some Indigenous Australians, it's enough to make them switch off.
Messages like this sometimes appear in Australian media broadcasts. They reference cultural taboos amongst some (but not all) Indigenous Australians, but are only included when the voices of deceased people of Indigenous background are used.
Seeing a SpaceX Launch
by James Benford, President of Microwave Sciences
On Sunday night, October 7, SpaceX launched a satellite into a polar orbit for Argentina from the Vandenberg, California launch site. The Falcon rocket flew north along California and came in sight where I was in Lafayette, 375 miles north of Vandenberg. I happened to be looking southward when the rocket came into view and I took the attached photos. The first photo shows the rocket with its exhaust streaming just before the first stage dropped away.
by Derek Malone-France, Trustee, METI International
This Saturday, October 6, the "METI Debates" will be organized by the Universidad de los Andes at the Uniandino Debate Tournament (TDU). METI is a co-sponsor of the event, along with the Center for Citizen Inclusion and Rights (INCIDE), and the Universidad del Rosario.