It helps if you know what to look for.
Searching for alien life has never been easier. Scientists are finally getting closer to discovering extraterrestrial life in the universe using a combination of data and tools.
After six decades of examining signals from space, why have we yet to discover evidence of extra-terrestrial life?
Keith’s book “The Contact Paradox: Challenging our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” is available now — https://geni.us/JFpy.
For the past six decades a small cadre of researchers have been on a quest, as part of SETI, to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So far, SETI has found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, but with more than a hundred billion stars in our Galaxy alone to search, the odds of quick success are stacked against us.
Continue reading “Why Have We Not Found Any Aliens? — with Keith Cooper” »
For Lisa Kaltenegger and her generation of exoplanet astronomers, decades of planning have set the stage for an epochal detection.
A recently released set of topography maps provides new evidence for an ancient northern ocean on Mars. The maps offer the strongest case yet that the planet once experienced sea-level rise consistent with an extended warm and wet climate, not the harsh, frozen landscape that exists today.
“What immediately comes to mind as one the most significant points here is that the existence of an ocean of this size means a higher potential for life,” said Benjamin Cardenas, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State and lead author on the study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
Continue reading “Traces of ancient ocean discovered on Mars” »
We continue our look at possible explanations why life may be very rare in the Universe by examining our planet itself, and looking at which of its characteristic might be important to intelligence developing and how improbable those traits are for a given planet in a given solar system.
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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Earth” »
“Machine learning provides a way of providing almost human-like intuition to huge data sets. One valuable application is for tasks where it’s difficult to write a specific algorithm to search for something—human faces, for instance, or perhaps ” something strange,” wrote astrophysicist and Director of the Penn State University Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center, Jason Wright in an email to The Daily Galaxy. ” In this case, you can train a machine-learning algorithm to recognize certain things you expect to see in a data set,” Wright explains, ” and ask it for things that don’t fit those expectations, or perhaps that match your expectations of a technosignature.
Crowdsourcing Alien Structures
We conclude our look at possible explanations why life may be very rare in the Universe by looking at the evolutionary pathway to intelligence and the hurdles between life starting on a planet and migrating off of it.
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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox Great Filters: Rare Intelligence” »
If conditions on a distant planet allowed life to flourish, would it look anything like life here on Earth? It’s a question that’s seen a Darwinian rise of contradictory theories over the years.
Now, in an interview with the BBC’s Science Focus magazine, Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionary palaeobiologist at the University of Cambridge, says “with reasonable confidence” that human-like evolution has occurred in other parts of the universe.
Could we describe and search for proof of technology originating from outside of Earth?
If an alien were to look at Earth, many human technologies — from cell towers to fluorescent light bulbs — could be a beacon signifying the presence of life.
We are two astronomers who work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — or SETI. In our research, we try to characterize and detect signs of technology originating from beyond Earth. These are called technosignatures. While scanning the sky for a TV broadcast of some extraterrestrial Olympics may sound straightforward, searching for signs of distant, advanced civilizations is a much more nuanced and difficult task than it might seem. iStock.
Andrej Karpathy is a legendary AI researcher, engineer, and educator. He’s the former director of AI at Tesla, a founding member of OpenAI, and an educator at Stanford. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Books mentioned:
The Vital Question: https://amzn.to/3q0vN6q.
Life Ascending: https://amzn.to/3wKIsOE
The Selfish Gene: https://amzn.to/3TCo63s.
Contact: https://amzn.to/3W3y5Au.
The Cell: https://amzn.to/3W5f6pa.
