Why the Government Is Cagey on UFO Matters Three days ago, The New York Times published what appeared to be a bombshell of a story. The report revealed that, from roughly 2007 through 2012, the Department of Defense ran a small program out of the Defense Intelligence Agency known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The mission was, in short, to look into UFO reports and assess if any of them represented a threat to the United States. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below While wearing the uniform, I had the opportunity to participate in several very interesting, highly-classified efforts. The fact is that the Department of Defense looks at a huge number of things, from the future effects of global warming to the games that Chinese strategists play as kids that may affect their modes of thinking. Getty This is not the first time the Department of Defense has looked into the issue of UFOs. Sure would be interesting to see what they found though.
Alien Hunters to Investigate Mysterious Interstellar Asteroid The first-ever detection of an asteroid from beyond the solar system revealed a remarkable object. About 400 meters long and only 40 meters wide, 'Oumuamua's axis ratio of 10:1 makes it the most elongated asteroid ever discovered. The highest axis ratio we see for asteroids in the solar system is only about 3:1. The odd shape is perhaps a clue about when the asteroid was flung from its own star during the formation of that solar system, or perhaps it can tell us something about what happens to space rocks when they fly through interstellar space for millions of years. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below And of course there is another remote possibility. Avi Loeb, a professor of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) who has written multiple papers on the search for extraterrestrial life, first brought the unique properties of the object to Yuri Milner's attention, suggesting the object could be artificial.
Next-gen exoplanet-hunting spectrograph achieves first light The aggravating thing about science is that data gathering is only as precise and accurate as the least accurate part of the whole system. A simple example of this is measuring an object using a super-accurate set of calipers, then recording the result by making a drawing using a blunt pencil. It doesn't matter how good the calipers are. The same is true for even the most sophisticated of instruments. This is particularly important when it comes to hunting for extra-solar planets revolving about distant stars. An alternative technique for finding smaller planets is called the radial velocity method. For a star without planets, this shift is very simple and symmetrical, but if a planet is orbiting it, it will cause the star to wobble and that will show up in the spectrum. According to ESO, the third-generation ESPRESSO is the instrument for the job. The first tests of ESPRESSO were to look at stars and exoplanet systems that have already undergone extensive observation by HARPS.
How the discovery of extraterrestrial life would change morality Suppose we woke up tomorrow to learn that extraterrestrial life had been discovered. What difference would that make? Set aside the extreme scenarios of popular fiction. The truth will probably be more mundane – not massive spaceships suddenly filling the sky but, instead, microorganisms found deep inside an ice-covered Moon, a non-random radio signal from a distant star system, or the ruins of a long-dead alien civilisation. In academic philosophy today, an interest in extraterrestrial life is regarded with some suspicion. My goal here is to explore some unexpected implications of the discovery of extraterrestrial life, and my conclusions are very speculative: extraterrestrial life would lend non-decisive support to several interesting and controversial philosophical positions. We know that life has emerged once. One perennial set of philosophical questions concerns the nature of values, norms and reasons. Normative non-naturalism combines several distinct claims. Syndicate this Essay
Another potential hurdle identified in the search for extraterrestrial life According to a new study, evidence of alien life in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets could be hidden from prying telescopic eyes by unusual air flow patterns. The research could have significant implications regarding how and where astronomers search for extraterrestrial life on nearby worlds. Even taking into account the most ambitious of ideas, humankind is unlikely to make the big leap to a neighboring exoplanet any time soon – let's face it, NASA has its hands full getting to Mars at the moment. So how do astronomers search for life while confined to this Earthly prison? The answer lies in the atmospheres of distant worlds. Scientists know that biological life on Earth has dramatically changed our planet's atmosphere, contributing to the creation of the ozone layer, and adding numerous other biological markers to the protective shell. This atmospheric quirk could also damage an exoplanet's chances of sustaining life.
Is This UFO in NASA Footage Evidence of an Alien Craft? A video of NASA archival footage of a 2011 rocket launch is sparking controversy after the discovery of a mysterious white UFO. While the '90s boom in UFO sightings may have died down in the age of the camera smartphone, there still exists a core group of dedicated truthers that are eager to find proof of the presence of advanced alien life visiting our planet for unknown purposes. A video, uploaded to the YouTube channel UFO Today, argues that this object is possibly a White Knight Satellite, a twist on the existing Black Knight Satellite conspiracy that's already been doing the rounds on the internet for several decades. The UFO appeared part of the way through the launch of the Endeavour space shuttle, at the point where the shuttle lost one of its boosters. The UFO appears for just a few seconds in the footage that NASA has released, which is probably why it's gone unnoticed for this long. The folks at NASA likely ignored this because it's very clearly unimportant.
Why the search for alien technology is about to get much more efficient I’ve bet a cup of coffee to any and all that by 2035 we’ll have evidence of E.T. To many of my colleagues, that sounds like a losing proposition. For more than a half-century, a small coterie of scientists has been pursuing the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. And we haven’t found a thing. I’m optimistic by nature—as a scientist, you have to be. Most of our experiments so far have used large radio antennas in an effort to eavesdrop on radio signals transmitted by other societies, an approach that was dramatized by Jodie Foster in the 1997 movie Contact. A modern SETI receiver simultaneously examines tens or even hundreds of millions of channels, each having a cramped 1-hertz bandwidth. To aim our antennas, SETI has traditionally used two approaches. It’s hard to imagine that aliens would go to the trouble of smashing together two black holes. The SETI Institute is not the only band of alien hunters. Furthermore, scientists have been diversifying.
First contact: what if we find not organic life but ET’s AI? We have a problem. In a 10-billion-year-old galaxy there should have been ample opportunity for at least one species to escape its own mess, and to spread across the stars, filling every niche. That this species doesn’t seem to have come calling leads to Fermi’s Paradox – if life isn’t impossibly rare, then where is everyone? Efforts to scan the skies for signs of intelligent life have come up blank too, adding to the puzzle. Another explanation for the great silence of the galaxy is that any surviving intelligence out there is so different from us, so radically evolved, that we can’t even conceive of its forms or behaviours. But there is also a possibility that lies between such extremes and it might be the most probable of all. The idea is not truly new. It would require a more complex mission still for such devices to have true artificial intelligence (AI). One possibility is that this machine is super-capable, exceeding our human capacity for cognitive or analytical tasks.
Could aliens find Earth the same way we spot exoplanets? You can tell a lot about a star by its twinkle. So far, thousands of exoplanets have been spotted orbiting distant stars, mostly by looking for "transits" as light from the host star dips when a planet passes in front of it. Now, scientists have examined whether Earth could be detected by other civilizations using the same technique, and according to their calculations, 68 known exoplanets are in prime positions to spot Earth and our rocky neighbors. The transit method has uncovered a veritable treasure trove of interstellar discoveries. Scientists from Queen's University Belfast and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research wanted to turn that idea back onto our home planet, and ask "How would an alien observer see the Solar System?" "Larger planets would naturally block out more light as they pass in front of their star," says Robert Wells, lead author of the study. So are aliens looking back at us from these exoplanets? View gallery - 3 images