Michael Anissimov looks out at a universe devoid of intelligence other than our own. Here's a clip, referring to Frank Tipler's 1980 paper "Extraterrestrial intelligent beings do not exist": It was quite a few years ago when I looked up to the stars, with Dr. Tipler's book in my hand, that I realized he was right - the stars are empty, ready to be harvested and spun into pure energy with the help of gravitational singularity goodness. No aliens, green bug-eyed ones or otherwise, are waiting there to be inconvenienced. And this: Luckily, hypertelescopes may finally put the nail in the coffin of SETI - perhaps 100 years from now. We will be able to see even the simplest of flora, if they exist in large numbers on exoplanets. (Though what we should really be looking for are Dyson spheres or disappearing stars, and as far as we can tell, there are absolutely none.) After we look at a good thousand earth-sized objects and see nothing there but vast, dead wastes, we'll start getting used...

Some day alien civilizations may pick up television or radio signals from Earth. But does this mean they're likely to visit us? Danish researcher Rasmus Bjørk (Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen) doubts it. "Even then, unless they can develop an exotic form of transport that gets them across the galaxy in two weeks it's still going to take millions of years to find us," says Bjørk in an article in The Guardian. "There are so many stars in the galaxy that probably life could exist elsewhere, but will we ever get in contact with them? Not in our lifetime." Bjørk is in the news because he set up a computer simulation to investigate how long it would take to explore the galaxy. Suppose we build eight probes which, along the way, send out eight more mini-probes, all headed for different stars that are likely to have life. Bjørk's plan is to search only within the galactic habitable zone, to use flyby probes only, and to fan out the spacecraft at one tenth the speed of light. The aim is to...

It's a pleasure to see that Cosmic Search is now accessible on the Internet. Appearing first in 1979, this magazine devoted solely to SETI was well ahead of its time, trying to generate interest in a popular audience that had not yet become familiar with the concepts driving the search for life in the universe. In those days long before SETI@Home, I learned about Cosmic Search through the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, a group I had joined in the mistaken belief that I had could create my own receiving station and do interesting science. That hope was never realized, a victim of my clumsiness with hardware, and I contented myself with reading and learning. Cosmic Search was a true gift, covering the range of SETI investigations and stuffed with reading from the likes of Philip Morrison, Frank Drake, Ronald Bracewell and many other familiar names. Go to the site, where you can scroll through the listings and see for yourself how SETI looked 25 years ago. Cosmic Search will...

The buzz about the Viking landers continues. Yesterday at the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Seattle, two scientists argued that we can reinterpret the data from the Vikings' 30-year old mission in the light of recent findings regarding life in extreme conditions on Earth. Doing so leads to an intriguing possibility: Viking may have found microbes that use water and hydrogen peroxide to survive in the cold, dry Martian climate. The researchers are Dirk Schulze-Makuch (Washington State) and Joop Houtkooper (Justus-Liebig-University, Germany). Here's a link to an early article on this work that explains the beauties of hydrogen peroxide in this scenario. For one thing, its freezing point is low, but even better is the fact that when its temperature drops, it doesn't form the kind of crystals that can destroy cell structures, as water by itself would. But how do you protect a cell from the corrosive effects of hydrogen peroxide? From the article: Schulze-Makuch said that...