I’m only just getting to Steven Desch and Alan Jackson’s two papers on ‘Oumuamua, though in a just world (where I could clone myself and work on multiple stories simultaneously) I would have written them up sooner. Following Avi Loeb’s book on ‘Oumuamua, the interstellar object has been in the news more than ever, and the challenge it throws out by its odd behavior has these two astrophysicists, both at Arizona State, homing in on a possible solution. No extraterrestrial technologies in this view, but rather an unusual object made of nitrogen ice, common in the outer Solar System and likely to be similarly distributed in other systems. Think of it as a shard of a planet like Pluto, where nitrogen ice is ubiquitous. Desch and Jackson calculated the object’s albedo, or reflectivity, with the idea in mind, realizing that the ice would be more reflective than astronomers had assumed ‘Oumuamua was, and thus it could be smaller. As the authors note: “Its brightness would be consistent with...

Given that we are just emerging as a spacefaring species, it seems reasonable to think that any civilizations we are able to detect will be considerably more advanced -- in terms of technology, at least -- than ourselves. But just how advanced can a civilization become before it does irreparable damage to itself and disappears? This question of longevity appears as a factor in the famous Drake Equation and continues to bedevil SETI speculation today. In a paper in process at The Astronomical Journal, Amedeo Balbi (Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”) and Milan ?irkovi? (Astronomical Observatory of Belgrade) explore the longevity question and create a technosignature classification scheme that takes it into account. Here we’re considering the kinds of civilization that might be detected and the most likely strategies for success in the technosignature hunt. The ambiguity in Drake’s factor L is embedded in its definition as the average length of a civilization’s communication...

Héctor Socas-Navarro (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias) is lead author of a paper on technosignatures that commands attention. Drawing on work presented at the TechnoClimes 2020 virtual meeting, under the auspices of NASA at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, the paper pulls together a number of concepts for technosignature detection. Blue Marble’s Jacob Haqq-Misra is a co-author, as is James Benford (Microwave Sciences), Jason Wright (Pennsylvania State) and Ravi Kopparapu (NASA GSFC), all major figures in the field, but the paper also draws on the collected thinking of the TechnoClimes workshop participants. We’ve already looked at a number of technosignature possibilities in these pages, so let me look for commonalities as we begin, beyond simply listing possibilities, to point toward a research agenda, something that NASA clearly had in mind for the TechnoClimes meeting. The first thing to say is that technosignature work is nicely embedded within more...

The reaction to Avi Loeb's new book Extraterrestrial (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021) has been quick in coming and dual in nature. I'm seeing a certain animus being directed at the author in social media venues frequented by scientists, not so much for suggesting the possibility that 'Oumuamua is an extraterrestrial technological artifact, but for triggering a wave of misleading articles in the press. The latter, that second half of the dual reaction, has certainly been widespread and, I have to agree with the critics, often uninformed. Image credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard file photo. But let's try to untangle this. Because my various software Net-sweepers collect most everything that washes up on 'Oumuamua, I'm seeing stark headlines such as "Why Are We So Afraid of Extraterrestrials," or "When Will We Get Serious about ET?" I'm making those particular headlines up, but they catch the gist of many of the stories I've seen. I can see why some of the scientists who spend their working...

While we often think about so-called Dysonian SETI, which looks for signatures of technology in our astronomical data, as a search for Dyson spheres, the parameter space it defines is getting to be quite wide. A technosignature has to be both observable as well as unique, to distinguish it from natural phenomena. Scientists working this aspect of SETI have considered not just waste heat (a number of searches for distinctive infrared signatures of Dyson spheres have been run), but also artificial illumination, technological features on planetary surfaces, artifacts not associated with a planet, stellar pollution and megastructures. Thus the classic Dyson sphere, a star enclosed by a swarm or even shell of technologies to take maximum advantage of its output, is only one option for SETI research. As Ravi Kopparapu (NASA GSFC) and colleagues point out in an upcoming paper, we can also cross interestingly from biosignature searches to technosignatures by looking at planetary atmospheres....

The stars move ever on. What seems like a fixed distance due to the limitations of our own longevity morphs over time into an evolving maze of galactic orbits as stars draw closer to and then farther away from each other. If we were truly long-lived, we might ask why anyone would be in such a hurry to mount an expedition to Alpha Centauri. Right now we’d have to travel 4.2 light years to get to Proxima Centauri and its interesting habitable zone planet. But 28,000 years from now, Alpha Centauri -- all three stars -- will have drawn to within 3.2 light years of us. But we can do a lot better than that. Gliese 710 is an M-dwarf about 64 light years away in the constellation Serpens Cauda. For the patient among us, it will move in about 1.3 million years to within 14,000 AU, placing it well within the Oort Cloud and making it an obvious candidate for worst cometary orbit disruptor of all time. But read on. Stars have come much closer than this. [Addendum: A reader points out that some...

Moore’s Law, first stated all the way back in 1965, came out of Gordon Moore’s observation that the number of transistors per silicon chip was doubling every year (it would later be revised to doubling every 18-24 months). While it’s been cited countless times to explain our exponential growth in computation, Greg Laughlin, Fred Adams and team, whose work we discussed in the last post, focus not on Moore’ Law but a less publicly visible statement known as Landauer’s Principle. Drawing from Rolf Landauer’s work at IBM, the 1961 equation defines the lower limits for energy consumption in computation. You can find the equation here, or in the Laughlin/Adams paper cited below, where the authors note that for an operating temperature of 300 K (a fine summer day on Earth), the maximum efficiency of bit operations per erg is 3.5 x 1013. As we saw in the last post, a computational energy crisis emerges when exponentially increasing power requirements for computing exceed the total power...