The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“Disclosure has already occurred. Disclosure is not an event, it’s a process,” said Luis Elizondo, former head of a hitherto unknown government operation called the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP). “My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone.”
“It’s worthwhile to not just do what was done 60 years ago, but also to keep an eye out for very unusual things,” says SETI Institute astronomer Seth Shostak. “The universe has been around for three times as long as the Earth has been around, so there could be aliens out there that are very, very much more advanced than we are—not just 1,000 years, but millions and billions of years ahead.”
We can never prove that we’re alone in the universe. But a remote radio observatory in Australia’s outback with the ability to scan hundreds of times more broadly than any previous search for extraterrestrial life, could prove that we’re not. “The search will continue”, said Edwin Hubble, for whom the iconic space telescope was named, about our quest to unveil the ultimate secret of the cosmos. “The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and will not be suppressed.”
Two of our planet’s leading astrophysicists say it’s time to get serious about aliens: Adam Frank of the University of Rochester and Andrew Siemion, director of the U of California Berkeley SETI Research Center, who wrote in an email that “I suspect there are other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way – we just need to look!” But, asks Frank, will they, or have they, survived their Anthropocene bottleneck?
