Are Aliens Behind Mysterious Radio Bursts?

What are those things?

For the past eight years, astronomers have been scratching their heads over a series of strange radio signals emanating from somewhere in the cosmos. And now, the mystery has deepened.

A new study shows that the so-called "fast radio bursts" follow a weirdly specific pattern -- a finding that the researchers behind the study say "is very hard to explain."

"There is something really interesting we need to understand," study co-author Michael Hippke, a scientist at the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, told New Scientist. "This will either be new physics, like a new kind of pulsar, or, in the end, if we can exclude everything else, an E.T."

Alien signals, really? That might sound far out, but a leading scientist in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) says we shouldn't rule out that possibility.

"These fast radio bursts could conceivably be 'wake up calls' from other societies, trying to prompt a response from any intelligent life that's outfitted with radio technology," Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the Center for SETI

Read Full Story: Huffington Post

Would Finding Aliens Shatter Religious Beliefs?

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The discovery of life beyond Earth would shake up our view of humanity's place in the universe, but it probably wouldn't seriously threaten organized religion, experts say.

Religious faith remains strong in much of the world despite scientific advances showing that Earth is not the center of the universe, and that our planet's organisms were not created in their present form but rather evolved over billions of years. So it's likely that religion would also weather any storms caused by the detection of E.T., researchers say.

"I think there are reasons that we might initially think there are going to be some problems," said Doug Vakoch, director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. "My own hunch is they're probably not going to be as severe as we might initially think."

Help SETI Find Aliens From Your Home PC

Got some spare time today? How about putting aside that game of Bejeweled Blitz and instead lend a hand in what could be the most important discovery of all time? It’s no joke — the people behind the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project have partnered with TED (Technology Entertainment Design) to create a website where anyone can log on and start searching for aliens.

Called SETI Live, the new project reduces the hunt for intelligent life on other planets to a kind of game — sort of a mix between Foursquare and Where’s Waldo. Once you log on and take a brief tutorial, the site flashes snapshots of radio-signal data. Then it’s your job to identify any suspicious patterns you may spot — a straight line among a sea of random streaks could be ET trying to say hello.

Do it long enough and you’ll earn special badges.

SETI to Scour the Moon for Alien Footprints?

LRO image Apollo 17 landing site. 1972 Astronaut footprints are preserved.

The most profound question asked by mankind is: are we alone? So the second most profound question must be: where should we look for life if we're not alone?

Now, two prominent scientists have published a paper suggesting that although we have an entire universe to seek out the proverbial alien needle in a haystack, perhaps looking in our own backyard would be a good place to start.

Paul Davies and Robert Wagner of Arizona State University have suggested a crowd-sourcing effort to find artificial structures on the moon. After all, lunar missions like NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter are returning some dazzling, high-resolution imagery of the moon's surface. If aliens have been there, perhaps we could spot evidence of their presence.

"Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artifact or surface modification of lunar features, this location has the virtue of being close, and of preserving traces for an immense duration," Davies and Wagner say in their paper published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

WATCH VIDEO: Will the real ET be little green men or little green bacteria?

Indeed, due to the moon's pristine environment, any modification of lunar surface features will remain preserved for eons -- the lack of an atmosphere means features are not eroded away. Unless intelligent aliens came, saw and then covered their tracks, perhaps they left something as basic as a footprint for us to find.


Alien-hunting programs like the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have primarily focused on looking for alien transmissions being beamed around the universe, but the probability of success is extremely low. Other methods of alien hunting are therefore being considered and the moon has just become the logical "intelligent alien hunting ground."

If these hypothetical aliens are advanced enough to traverse the vast distances between the stars, and if they decided to pay the Earth-moon system a visit over the past few million years, they may have used the lunar surface as an ideal observation post. Logical, right?.

The idea that some kind of alien artifact may have been left behind then makes sense. This "artifact" could be a footprint, spacecraft or structure -- the LRO can spot the Apollo landers and astronauts' preserved footprints from orbit (pictured top), so it stands to reason that we have the technology to carry out this proposed lunar hunt.

"Systematic scrutiny of the LRO photographic images is being routinely conducted anyway for planetary science purposes, and this program could readily be expanded and outsourced at little extra cost to accommodate SETI goals, after the fashion of the SETI@home and Galaxy Zoo projects," Davies and Wagner point out.


Although the probability for success is low, building a crowd-sourcing effort like the hugely popular SETI@home and Galaxy Zoo projects could be a very efficient and low-cost means to analyze the lunar surface.

Simply distribute images being beamed back from lunar satellites to participating members of the public -- using PC idle time (like SETI@Home) or asking for voluntary participation (like Galaxy Zoo) -- and see if any strange shapes in the lunar regolith need some follow-up investigation.
With a lot of search time using low cost crowd-sourcing techniques could result in a profound discovery if aliens did decide to camp out on our moon at some point in history. The moon may be keeping a record of their campsite.

Source: Discovery News