Tag: Aliens

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GeekWire

How the buzz over an ‘alien’ interstellar comet went viral

Photo of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS
An astrophotograph shows the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. (Copyright Victor Sabet and Julien De Winter, republished with permssion)

Is an interstellar spacecraft zooming through our solar system? That’s the big question for fans of unidentified flying objects — and for a researcher at the University of Washington who analyzed the speculation over the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS.

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public, focused on 3I/ATLAS to track how social-media influencers use over-the-top speculation to fill in information gaps.

“I’ve written previously on how expert opinions can fuel conspiracy theorizing through elite-driven rumoring and amplification,” Bayar explained in an email. “My academic interest in philosophy, epistemology and the politics of conspiracy theories, plus a personal interest in space-related conspiracy theories, led me to look more closely at 3I/ATLAS.”

His analysis, published this week, is titled “Alien of the Gaps: How 3I/ATLAS Was Turned into a Spaceship Online.” The title takes inspiration from a concept known as “God of the Gaps,” which traces how thinkers through the ages explained phenomena they couldn’t fully understand by appealing to the influence of higher powers.

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Fiction Science Club

Native American legends get woven into an alien tale

Petroglyphs showing a spiral and a horned figure carved into sandstone
Pictures carved into Utah sandstone call to mind the "Sky People" of ancient legends. (Courtesy of the Utah Geological Survey / Mark Milligan)

Centuries before the Roswell UFO Incident, Native Americans had their own stories to tell about alien visitations — for example, about the “Sky People” who traveled from the Pleiades star cluster to Earth and have a special bond with the Cherokee Nation.

In a newly published novel titled “Hole in the Sky,” Cherokee science-fiction author Daniel H. Wilson blends those stories with up-to-date speculation about UFOs, now also known as unidentified anomalous phenomena or UAPs, to deliver a fresh take on the classic tale of first contact with an alien civilization.

Wilson says the typical alien-invasion tale tends to parallel the real-life story of European settlement in the Americas.

“I love robot uprisings and alien invasions, and the more I thought about it, you realize that in an alien invasion, the aliens show up, and they usually want to extract our resources, take our land, our water, destroy our culture, enslave us,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “That’s kind of a really thinly veiled fear projection that what colonizers have done to Indigenous people will be done to our society. And so I started from there.”

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GeekWire

Microsoft works with students on Golden Record 2.0

Richard Black holding glass platter
Richard Black, research director for Microsoft’s Project Silica, holds a data storage platter. (Microsoft Photo)

Forty-seven years after NASA sent a “Golden Record” into deep space to document humanity’s view of the world, Microsoft’s Project Silica is teaming up with a citizen-science effort to lay the groundwork — or, more aptly, the glasswork — for doing something similar.

Golden Record 2.0, a project created by students, teachers and researchers affiliated with Avenues: The World School, is also getting an assist from artist Jon Lomberg, who was the design director for Golden Record 1.0.

The original Golden Record project involved preserving imagery and sounds from around the world on gold-plated phonograph records. Copies of the record were placed on NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 probes and launched into space in 1977. The idea was that if space travelers came across the records in the distant future, they could decipher the recorded archive and learn what our world was like in the 20th century.

Golden Record 2.0’s organizers are going after the same idea, even though they’re still looking into how their archive would be packaged and launched.

Project Silica could play a role in the packaging. Richard Black, a manager at Microsoft Research’s Cambridge lab in Britain, has been leading an effort to store data inside thin platters of fused silica glass.

“It does that using ultrashort laser pulses that make a permanent, detectable and yet transparent modification to the glass crystal, so the data ends up as durable as the piece of glass itself,” Black explained in a Microsoft podcast called Collaborators.

Each coaster-sized platter could store several terabytes of data for 10,000 years or more, according to Microsoft. The data can be read out using a microscope, and decoded using machine-learning algorithms.

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Fiction Science Club

‘The Expanse’ team explores what happens if aliens win

Black-and-white portrait of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham
Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham are the authors of "The Expanse" series and "The Mercy of Gods." (Kyle Zimmerman Photo)

In nearly all alien-invasion tales, the puny humans somehow find a way to win — for example, in classic novels like “The War of the Worlds,” or in movies like “Independence Day” and “Battle: Los Angeles.” But in a new novel by the authors of “The Expanse” sci-fi series, the humans lose within the first hundred pages.

“The Mercy of Gods” is the first book in what’s destined to be a trilogy by James S.A. Corey, which is actually a pen name representing a long-running collaboration between science-fiction writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. “The Expanse” is their best-known work — consisting of nine novels that lay out a future history of the solar system and encounters between human settlers and alien outsiders.

Those novels inspired a TV series that ran for three seasons on the Syfy cable network — and was then picked up for three more seasons on Amazon Prime Video. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a memorable splash in 2018 when he announced at a Los Angeles space conference that “‘The Expanse’ is saved” from cancellation.

In this week’s episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Abraham says the idea behind “The Expanse” came from Franck’s imagination. The idea behind “The Mercy of Gods,” which kicks off a trilogy of Captive’s War novels, came from Franck as well.

“When Ty pitched the idea, the thing that I loved about it was this very different kind of not-at-all-triumphalist vision of being a human in a wider galaxy,” Abraham says.

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Fiction Science Club

The search for alien civilizations gets a reality check

Zine Tseng at control console of radio telescope
Zine Tseng plays a Chinese radio astronomer in "3 Body Problem." (Credit: Ed Miller / Netflix © 2024)

Fortunately, the real-world search for signs of extraterrestrial civilizations doesn’t have to deal with an alien armada like the one that’s on its way to Earth in “3 Body Problem,” the Netflix streaming series based on Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s award-winning novels. But the trajectory of the search can have almost as many twists and turns as a curvature-drive trip from the fictional San-Ti star system.

Take the Breakthrough Initiatives, for example: Back in 2016, the effort’s billionaire founder, Yuri Milner, teamed up with physicist Stephen Hawking to announce a $100 million project to send a swarm of nanoprobes through the Alpha Centauri star system, powered by light sails. The concept, dubbed Breakthrough Starshot, was similar to the space-sail swarm envisioned in Liu’s books — but with the propulsion provided by powerful lasers rather than nuclear bombs.

Today, the Breakthrough Initiatives is focusing on projects closer to home. In addition to the millions of dollars it’s spending to support the search for radio or optical signals from distant planetary systems, it’s working with partners on a miniaturized space telescope to identify planets around Alpha Centauri, a radio telescope that could someday be built on the far side of the moon, and a low-cost mission to look for traces of life within the clouds of Venus.

Breakthrough Starshot, however, is on hold. “This looks to be quite feasible. However, it seems to be something that is still pretty, pretty expensive, and probably wouldn’t be feasible until later in the century,” says Pete Worden, executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives. “So, we’ve put that on hold for a period of time to try to look at, are there near-term applications of this technology, which there may be.”

Worden provides a status report on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — and sorts out science fact from science fiction — on the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Cosmic Space

The air of an alien world lifts hopes of detecting life

Blue exoplanet and red parent star in space
An artist's conception shows the exoplanet K2-18 b. (NASA / CSA / ESA / STScI / Cambridge U.)

Readings from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope confirm the presence of carbon-based molecules including methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a distant planet known as K2-18 b — which supports previous suggestions that it might be the kind of ocean-covered world capable of harboring marine life.

K2-18 b, which was first detected in 2015 using data from NASA’s now-retired Kepler space telescope, lies in the habitable zone of a star system that’s about 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo. It’s about 8.6 times as massive as Earth, and astronomers regard it as a sub-Neptune — a type of planet that doesn’t exist in our solar system.

Since its initial detection, astrobiologists have been interested in the world’s potential for habitability. They suspected it might be what’s called a Hycean planet — a type of world that’s massive enough to hold onto a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a globe-spanning sea. The evidence has been piling up: In 2019, researchers reported the chemical signature of water vapor and clouds in K2-18 b’s atmosphere.

The fact that JWST detected an abundance of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), along with a shortage of ammonia (NH3), is consistent with the atmospheric modeling for Hycean planets.

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Fiction Science Club

How we’ll find the first evidence of extraterrestrial life

Illustration: A variety of planets
Astronomers have detected thousands of planets, including dozens that are potentially habitable. (NASA Illustration)

When will we find evidence for life beyond Earth? And where will that evidence be found? University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey, the author of a book called “Worlds Without End,” is betting that the first evidence will come to light within the next decade or so.

But don’t expect to see little green men or pointy-eared Vulcans. And don’t expect to get radio signals from a far-off planetary system, as depicted in the 1992 movie “Contact.”

Instead, Impey expects that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — or one of the giant Earth-based telescopes that’s gearing up for observations — will detect the spectroscopic signature of biological activity in the atmosphere of a planet that’s light-years away from us.

“Spectroscopic data is not as appealing to the general public,” Impey admits in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “People like pictures, and so spectroscopy never gets its fair due in the general talk about astronomy or science, because it’s slightly more esoteric. But it is the tool of choice here.”

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Universe Today

SETI researchers are simulating alien contact

Allen Telescope Array in California.
Radio telescopes monitor the sky at the Allen Telescope Array in California. (SETI Institute Photo)

Is it a multimedia art project? Or a rehearsal for alien contact? Let’s call it both: Researchers specializing in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, are working with a media artist to stage the receipt of an interstellar message — and a global effort to decode the message.

The project, titled “A Sign in Space,” is orchestrated by media artist Daniela de Paulis in collaboration with the SETI Institute, the European Space Agency, the Green Bank Observatory and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (also known as INAF).

The metaphorical curtain rises on May 24, when ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter transmits an encoded radio message from Martian orbit to Earth at 19:00 UTC / noon PDT.

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GeekWire

How ‘Big Data’ can help scientists focus the search for E.T.

Gaia spacecraft
Artwork shows the Gaia spacecraft against the background of the Milky Way. (ESA Illustration / D. Ducros)

Could far-off aliens be sending out signals telling us they exist? If so, how would we know where to look? Researchers focusing on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have laid out a new strategy for focusing their quest.

The strategy applies simple trigonometry to millions of data points, with the aim of seeking out potential interstellar beacons that are synchronized with hard-to-miss astronomical phenomena such as supernovae.

University of Washington astronomer James Davenport and his colleagues lay out the plan in a research paper submitted to the arXiv pre-print server this month. The idea is also the subject of a talk that Davenport’s giving this week at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in California.

“I think the technique is very straightforward. It’s dealing with triangles and ellipses, things that are like high-school geometry, which is sort of my speed,” Davenport told GeekWire half-jokingly. “I like simple shapes and things I can calculate easily.”

The pre-print paper, which hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, draws upon data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia sky-mapping mission. But Davenport said the technique is tailor-made for the terabytes of astronomical data that will be coming from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory nightly when it goes online, a couple of years from now.

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Universe Today

NASA sets up independent study on UFO sightings

Apollo 16 "flying saucer" image
NASA says this "flying saucer" image from Apollo 16 actually shows the spacecraft's EVA boom and floodlight. (NASA Photo)

NASA has dipped into the debate over UFOs for decades, but today the space agency said it’s commissioning an independent study team to survey a wide range of what are now known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.

“The most exciting things in science are things we don’t understand, and my starting point — I think all our starting points for this — is that there are phenomena that we don’t understand,” astrophysicist David Spergel, who’ll lead the study team, told reporters.

“How do we start to make progress?” he said. “We have a very limited set of observations right now with these UAPs. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions. So we start by trying to figure out what data is out there. We’re going to be working with government, nonprofits, companies, civilians, and try to identify what data is already there, then start to think about what data should we collect in the future.”

NASA’s independent study will start early in the fall and run in parallel to the Pentagon-led effort to analyze UAP reports from aviators, which was the focus of a congressional hearing last month.

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