Recent content by AboveAndBeyond

The article isn't very good at making a case that "the existence of other technological species is highly likely". Sure, the probablity is not exactly zero, but how much bigger than that is not known.

This article has some observing misinformation. I was able to follow T CrB in the evening twilight sky until the beginning of December (not September) at which time it was already visible in the pre-dawn sky. It's far enough north that with the sun so far south that time of year it's not really...

With 950,000 pointings they obviously couldn't spend much time on each one, so the implied sensitivity isn't great. It would be interesting to also know what frequencies were searched and with what bandwidth resolution.

Anything's better than our current bankster-gangster, fiat counterfeit-money (grown on trees and printed out of thin air), organized crime backed entities. They've bamboozled everyone for about a century and have practically taken over the planet. Maybe the new AI rulers will make some new kind...

Shoudn't he have said "to the stars", not "into the stars"? (Set the controls for the heart of the Sun...) I know he was speaking symbolically, as politicians are apt to do, but it also could have been planets not stars, to be precise. The hitch is that a mission there and back takes about 3...

That's too bad. "Inland Empire" has the best single scene in all of movie-making history, in my opinion. Unfortunately the average movie-goer won't make it a half hour into the film, and the whole thing runs for nearly 3 hours, with the scene in question (involving some Hollywood street people)...

I was going to say... I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Hubble without a pipe in his mouth! It's interesting that Shapley had been at Mount Wilson when he did his work mentioned here (with the 60") but left about the time the 100" went into operation, to take over the directorship at...

Well, you know the joke about Janeway... they hand the keys to the starship to a woman, and the first thing she does is make a wrong turn and gets them lost in the Delta Quadrant. I second the Doctor deserving a mention, along with Kes. I could have done without Neelix, or Paris, really. And I...

I'm sure you probably know the warm little pond (or tidal pool) has fallen out of favor. People now seem to place more stock in undersea hot smokers, or possibly formation on Mars and then transport here via meteorite. Experiments with the equivalent of a warm pond or tidal pool have failed to...

One thing is sure: the discovery of so many exoplanets in the last several decades certainly exacerbates the poignancy of Fermi's Paradox. At the time he blurted it out it was only supposed that solar systems frequently formed along with stars but no one really knew for sure.

I don't understand how you get "close". Either you've got an ironclad SETI detection or you don't.

Uhm, the universe doesn't expand into anything, it just expands.

M dwarfs have been discounted for some time in being able to evolve advanced lifeforms because they are fully convective stars, leading to the sorts of flares and other activity that would/could erode away the entire atmosphere of a planet in a close (enough) orbit on a timescale which is very...

Compared to next-word predictors, I'm not sure how you "train" software on what's basically radio static, noise. IOW, language means there's some information present in just about every word being used to train the software, but what the radio telescopes are going to be picking up ~99+% of the...

Belief is a poor substitute for certain knowledge. - Fred Hoyle From an evolutionary standpoint there's no real survival penalty for false beliefs of the sort being raised by this article, so naturally they proliferate. Gullibility isn't something that's gotten a lot of attention from...