“Perhaps in ten thousand years, the starry sky that humankind gazes upon will remain empty and silent,” writes Liu Cixin, China’s foremost philosopher of first contact and author of the Three Body Problem. “But perhaps tomorrow we’ll wake up and find an alien spaceship the size of the Moon parked in orbit.”
“This data release is a tremendous milestone for the Breakthrough Listen team,” said Dr. Danny Price of the search “pipeline” that scans through billions of radio channels, looking for signals of radio-transmitting extraterrestrial civilizations in our Galactic neighborhood that are too narrow and well-defined to result from natural processes.
A professor of physics, Kevin Knuth, formerly a research scientist who worked for four years at NASA’s Ames Research Center, attended the 2002 NASA Contact Conference, which focused on serious speculation about extraterrestrials. During the meeting a concerned participant said loudly in a sinister tone, “We have absolutely no idea what is out there!” The silence that followed was palpable as the truth of this statement sunk in.
“For nearly 70 years the scheme favored by most scientists has been to look for signals — radio transmissions,” says SETI scientist Seth Shostak. “That’s the classic approach of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence), and frankly, it makes sense. Radio can easily traverse light-years, and the technology for detecting it is well known and highly sensitive. But is looking for signals really the best plan? Is it possible that we’re making the wrong bet?”
Check out today’s eclectic coverage of programs broadcast and streamed on the (occasionally “far side”) state of affairs on our pale blue dot, signaling our existence to possible exo-civilizations.
“FM signals and those of broadcast television travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).” –Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death By Black Hole
We don’t know where they’re coming from or when they’ll occur. All we know is these blazingly bright bursts of low-frequency radiation that emit more energy than the sun does in decades come from “some special place” in the cosmos.
