By Morris Jones, METI International Advisory Council

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence is challenging to the scientific and wider scholarly communities. Much of the difficulties encountered in academic work on SETI stem from the sheer lack of concrete information concerning real extraterrestrial civilizations. A subsector of the SETI community is actually focused on the possibility that extraterrestrial civilizations do not even exist, and the lack of any evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence (so far) is consistent with this theory.

By John W. Traphagan, Trustee, METI International

Although the speculation that the odd star KIC 8462852 might have something very unnatural orbiting it--a Dyson swarm or some other megastructure--seems to have been unfounded, it's worth contemplating what it might mean for humanity should the speculation prove to be accurate.  From the start, SETI scientists assumed the odds were very much against our neighbor 1,400 light years away having anything other than some natural phenomenon that we simply didn't know about before orbiting it.  And observations both by the SETI Institute using the Allen Telescope Array and optical SETI observations in Panama by METI International have shown no evidence of ET.  But even with a lack of empirical data, there is a chance, slight as it may be, that we've finally hit the jackpot and found evidence that humans have or had neighbors in the universe.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO – The anomalous star KIC 8462852 has baffled astronomers with its erratic dimming, causing some to speculate that it’s orbited by a massive structure built by an extraterrestrial civilization. To help evaluate that possibility, scientists searched for brief laser pulses from the distant star, but found none, as reported in a paper submitted to TheAstrophysical Journal Letters, available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02388 .