There is a problem with our approach at the moment when looking for alien civilisations. SETI looks for signals that are sent by the electromagnetic spectrum and their are a lot of frequencies to search. If you pair this with the size of the universe you can see how SETI is really looking for a [...]

Lots of signals have gone into space such as TV, radar and radio. The signals have been betraying our presence for 60 years and have passed over about 6000 star systems and are reaching new systems every day. This would seem to be enough, even though we haven’t received anything back yet, but what if [...]

Fifty years ago, a young astronomer named Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope at nearby stars in the hope of picking up a signal from an alien civilization. Thus began one of the boldest scientific projects in history: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). A great lecture with slides from the Royal Society. // Join [...]

ENCORE While the Kepler spacecraft hunts for habitable planets beyond the solar system, we’ve let one of our own planets slip away! Find out why Pluto’s demotion to dwarf status created a public uproar as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson reads us his hate mail. From third-graders! Also, how we might find Earth-like planets… the possibility [...]

The search for astro-engineering by SETI and others. Will these massive engineering projects seen in modern Si-Fi one day become a reality? // Join the forum discussion on this post – (1) Posts

On my voyage across the Internet I bumped into something that I had been thinking about for a long time. Name a star was high up on my list of things that I must do but never got round to because I just really didn’t want to get conned. Well, I took the leap and [...]

Look up and you will see lots of dots of light. No, it’s not a load of cars screaming towards the Earth because they missed the stop sign at Mars.  It’s stars. There are said to be about 140 billion stars that look like the sun in the Milky Way. There are a lot more stars [...]

Light is one of those things that you take for granted just switching on a switch or, if you are a caveman, lighting a fire. It appears almost instantaneously as that switch clicks or fire bursts into life. But, you know what I’m going to say don’t you, it’s not that simple. It takes time [...]

A communication strategy that aliens might use instead of radio signals is to send brief and intense bursts of laser light across the galaxy – sort of like a signal lamp between two ships. Some space telescopes would be ideally suited to pluck out such a signal from the sky background. Why laser beams instead of radio transmitters? [...]

We have been trying to communicate with ET Or other civilisations for a long human time but when you compare that to the universe’s clock it’s not even one millionth of a second. Time is the big problem when looking for other civilisations and being human we really don’t have time on our side at [...]