Humanity may be as few as 10 years away from discovering evidence of extraterrestrial life. Once we do, it will only deepen the mystery of where alien intelligence might be hiding. In the seventh episode of Crazy/Genius, the new podcast from The Atlantic on tech, science, and culture, puts the question to several experts, including Ellen Stofan, the former chief scientist of NASA and current director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum; Adam Frank, a writer and astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; Anders Sandberg, a scientist and futurist at the University of Oxford; and Tim Urban, the science essayist at Wait But Why.
“Whether or not FRBs themselves eventually turn out to be signatures of extraterrestrial technology, Breakthrough Listen is helping to push the frontiers of a new and rapidly growing area of our understanding of the Universe around us,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen, the initiative to find signs of intelligent life in the universe.
“As we look for life around other stars, we should also expand our search strategies or we might miss something,” says Rice University geophysicist Adrian Lenardic.
The first-ever observations of merging binary stars stunned the world’s astronomy community, but not quite as stunning as the first-ever signal from extraterrestrial life will be. GW170817 is the name given to the gravitational wave signal seen by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on 17 August 2017. Lasting for about 100 seconds, the signal was produced by the merger of the two neutron stars. The observation was then confirmed – the first time this has happened for gravitational waves – by observations with light waves.
This amazing podcast from the Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination explores ideas of alien contact with Jill Tarter (SETI Institute) and Jeff VanderMeer (bestselling author of the Southern Reach trilogy). They discuss the Drake Equation, the faulty math of the film Contact, manifest destiny, whether we’re alone, flawed assumptions about the concept of intelligence, what fiction can do to help us think about the very alien-ness of alien contact, and how it may be happening all around us.
“We’re just starting to learn how to look for, in machine learning, what’s called anomaly detection,” says Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for SETI at the University of California at Berkeley. “In anomaly detection, you classify things — ‘this is a curved signal, this is a sinusoidal signal, this is a pulsed signal’ — and if it’s not one of those things, it’ll say, ‘Hey, I found something that’s not following all these categories, this is an anomaly.’ It will alert you, and you’ll take a look at it and see if it’s interesting. We are not doing that now, we’re learning how to do that.”
