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Archive for the ‘alien life’ category: Page 132

May 2, 2016

3 Newly Discovered Nearby Planets Are a Game Changer in The Hunt For Alien Life

Posted by in category: alien life

An international team of astronomers has discovered three Earth-sized exoplanets, all orbiting the same star just 40 light-years from us, the 16-nation intergovernmental research organization ESO reported on Monday.

The scientists have deemed all three planets potentially habitable, an exciting turn in the hunt for “exoplanets,” a term for planets that orbit a star other than our sun.

And it could bring us closer to finding extraterrestrial life.

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May 2, 2016

This Tiny Star Is Now the Best Place to Hunt for Alien Life

Posted by in category: alien life

In a few years, powerful new telescopes will usher in a search for habitable worlds outside our solar system. And TRAPPIST-1—a dim, tepid star just a smidge larger than Jupiter—is one of the first places we’ll look. It’s only forty light years away, and it’s home to several promising, Earth-sized exoplanets.

Three siblings, described today in the journal Nature, are the first exoplanets ever discovered around an “ultracool dwarf” star. And they’re a jackpot when it comes to the search for alien life. Each planet is similar in size to Earth or Venus and probably rocky. The planets all skirt the edge of the so-called habitable zone. Finally, these potential Earth twins are so close to us that we can begin studying their atmospheres right now.

“This is basically a paradigm shift,” study co-author Julien de Wit told Gizmodo. “If these planets have atmospheres, they really are the best places to look for life.”

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May 1, 2016

Probability we’re the only intelligent life ever? Really low, say astronomers

Posted by in categories: alien life, information science

A new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets, plus a revised Drake’s equation, produces a new, empirically valid probability of whether any other advanced civilizations have ever existed.

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Apr 23, 2016

WTF Was That Thing Near the International Space Station?

Posted by in categories: alien life, mathematics, media & arts, satellites

“The station regularly passes out of range of the Tracking and Relay Data Satellites (TDRS) used to send and receive video, voice and telemetry from the station,” a spokesperson for NASA told ValueWalk.

The only problem with this explanation, of course, is that it’s so much more boring…”

It is, of course, highly unlikely that this was some alien ship. That said, those tracking and relay stations are fixed and known locations. Also, the range and power of the ISS communication systems are well known, non-classified public domain knowledge. I suck at math, but it should only be a matter of taking the exact time and duration of this outage and comparing it to the tracking and relay station stats.

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Apr 19, 2016

The serious search for aliens has a radical new method to make contact

Posted by in category: alien life

VIDEO: It’s time for something new.

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Apr 18, 2016

Are Aliens Real? If They Are, Science Says They Won’t Look Like What You Expect

Posted by in categories: alien life, science

Little green men seem a little unimaginative.

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Apr 16, 2016

Micro spaceships powered by lasers to search for alien life

Posted by in categories: alien life, computing, internet, mobile phones, robotics/AI, space travel

Microscopic spaceships powered by Earth-based lasers are being developed to hunt for extra-terrestrial life in Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours.

The £70m Breakthrough Starshot concept involves creating a tiny robotic spacecraft, no larger than a mobile phone chip, which would carry cameras, thrusters, a power supply and navigation and communication equipment.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner have all joined the project’s board giving it major backing.

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Apr 13, 2016

Aliens may have already swung by Earth without us even noticing

Posted by in category: alien life

Avi Loeb and Ann Druyan just proposed an unsettling idea as to why we haven’t yet found extraterrestrial life.

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Apr 12, 2016

Breakthrough Initiatives

Posted by in category: alien life

“Where is everybody?” So wondered the great physicist Enrico Fermi. The Universe is vast and ancient. Life, he reasoned, has had plenty of time to get started – and get smart. But we see no evidence of life or intelligence beyond Earth.

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Apr 12, 2016

How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the Galaxy

Posted by in categories: alien life, robotics/AI, space travel

Forget about generation ships, suspended animation, or the sudden appearance of a worm hole. The most likely way for aliens to visit us — whatever their motive — is by sending robotic probes. Here’s how swarms of self-replicating spacecraft could someday rule the galaxy.

Top image by Alejandro Burdisio via Concept Ships.

Back in late 1940’s the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann wondered if it might be possible to design a non-biological system that could replicate itself in a cellular automata environment, what he called a universal constructor. Von Neumann wasn’t thinking about space exploration at the time, but other thinkers like Freeman Dyson, Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas later took his idea and applied it to exactly that.

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