SETI Institute

And so it's highly probable that there are a huge number of other civilizations out there.

This is the way the SETI Institute puts it, who search for extraterrestrial life.

If intelligent alien civilizations are common and could expand across the galaxy within just tens of millions of years, an expanse minuscule compared to the galaxy's age, where is everybody the institute continues even assuming conservative estimates of spacecraft speeds or colonization pacing spreading across the milky way would require dramatically less time than the galaxy's billion-year history yet we observe no signs of such galactic empires end quote there are several possible solutions to this paradox one of them is the zoo hypothesis which we have also featured on this channel we just got such a rich back catalogue for you to dive

into

The time it takes for a space rock, a bolide being its scientific name, to travel through Earth's atmosphere and crash into the ground literally takes only a few seconds.

But what happens to a space rock during this very brief travel time, and how can scientists use this to learn about a specific space rock's origin and the potential damage it could cause if it explodes in midair? Now, a team of researchers from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center might have shed new light on what happens to space rocks as they blaze through the Earth's atmosphere.

In findings recently published in Meteoritics and Planetary Science, the researchers introduced a step-by-step process regarding what happens to space rocks from the moment they enter the Earth's atmosphere and all the way to ground impact.

The primary motivation behind the study was to fill a long-standing knowledge gap regarding how a space rock's composition influences what happens if it explodes in midair, like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013.

Six, back of the rock breaks apart.

Seven, melting and breaking apart continue until glowing stops, followed by a melting ending and wind discards crusted pieces.

We used to think that solid rocks would evaporate from the enormous heat and brilliant light generated in the air collision, said Dr. Peter Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center and lead author of the study.

We found instead that first melting and then fragmentation controls how a rock loses mass.

Hello, everybody.

My name is Seth Shostak, and I work at the SETI Institute.

That's S-E-T-I, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

We're looking for life in space that's cleverer than your next-door neighbor.

it, it, it-

The, the, the ATA, the, uh, s- SETI Institute where I was the chairman, [lips smack] uh, got the bright idea of the, uh, Jill Tarter and, and, uh, Jerry Harp of pointing at the, uh, at the Kepler field at the, at those stars in the Kepler field that were, uh, found to have exoplanets.

Yes.

Completely stupid idea.

That doesn't discourage true believers.

Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute, writes that SETI's failure is tempered by the fact that the number of star systems sampled is still quite small.

In 2010, astronomer Jill Tarter, one of the leading figures in the field for decades, calculated that so little of the universe had been searched that it was like dipping a single glass into the ocean to determine whether it contains fish.

If extraterrestrial signals are out there, and it's just a matter of looking in the right place, it's entirely possible that SETI could find one tomorrow.

Private organizations picked up the torch.

The SETI Institute was founded in 1984.

Various radio telescopes around the world were occasionally pointed at promising star systems, listening for signals at frequencies thought to be natural communication channels, particularly the 1,420 megahertz hydrogen line, a frequency that any civilization with radio astronomy would know about.

The searches grew more sophisticated over the decades.

The Meta Project, funded in part by Steven Spielberg, scanned the sky at high spectral resolution.

The Serendip Project piggybacked on existing radio astronomy observations, sifting through data for anomalous signals while other astronomers conducted their primary research.

The Phoenix Project, run by the SETI Institute, systematically targeted roughly 800 nearby sun-like stars between 1995 and 2004, scanning a wide range of frequencies with the best equipment available.

Every one of these projects reported the same result, no confirmed detections.

The Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope scanned the skies continuously for years.

Private organizations like the SETI Institute, founded in 1984, built world-class research programs around the search.

The Allen Telescope Array, funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was designed specifically to accelerate the hunt for extraterrestrial signals.

And in 2015, Breakthrough Listen launched with $100 million in funding from Russian-Israeli investor Yuri Milner, becoming the most comprehensive SETI initiative ever undertaken.

These warnings have been met with significant pushback from within the scientific community.

Many proponents argue that the potential benefits of contact with an advanced civilization, access to knowledge, technology, and perhaps solutions to existential problems like climate change or asteroid impacts, outweigh the speculative risks.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, has publicly described fears about alien hostility as irrational, arguing that any civilization capable of interstellar action would have no conceivable motivation to harm a species as technologically primitive as humanity.

Douglas Vakoch has argued that passive SETI itself is an implicit endorsement of active messaging.

Seth Shostak is a senior

astronomer at SETI Institute.

Anybody who's been to the Atacama desert of Chile knows that it's pretty unusual.

There's some very old life forms there you don't find so easily in other parts of the world.

I like this one a lot.

A team led by Naman Bajaj out of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory with the SETI Institute published in the Astronomical Journal on the 27th.

They used archival James Webb data, specifically the MII instrument, to study 72 young Sun-like stars.

72 is a decent sample size.