Gaining a human foothold on another world -- Mars is the obvious first case, but we can assume there will be others -- will require a search for resources to support the young colony. In today's essay, Ioannis Kokkinidis looks at our needs in terms of agriculture, whether on a planetary surface or a space-borne vessel like an O'Neill colony or a worldship. Happily, his first reference, to Lucian of Samosata, has deep science fiction roots. The author of several Centauri Dreams posts including Agriculture on Other Worlds, Ioannis graduated with a Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering from the Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering of the Agricultural University of Athens. He holds a Mastère Spécialisé Systèmes d'informations localisées pour l'aménagement des territoires (SILAT) from AgroParisTech and AgroMontpellier and a PhD in Geospatial and Environmental Analysis from Virginia Tech. He now lives in Fresno CA and...

Is it possible to use natural phenomena to boost signals to the stars? In the essay below, Bill St. Arnaud takes a look at the possibilities, noting that civilizations that chose to broadcast information might select a method that mimics by electromagnetic means what the classic von Neumann probe would achieve with physical probes. St. Arnaud is an optical communications engineer, a network and green IT consultant who works with clients on a variety of subjects such as next generation research/education and Internet networks. His interest in practical solutions -- free broadband and dynamic charging of electric vehicles -- to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is matched by a fascination with interstellar matters, particularly SETI. By Bill St. Arnaud In their recent post on Centauri Dreams Roger Guay and Scott Guerin (https://centauri-dreams.org/?p=36802) make a compelling argument that fading electromagnetic halos may be all that's left for us to discover of an extraterrestrial...

We normally think of the appearance of oxygen on Earth in terms of a 'great oxygenation event,' sometimes referred to as the 'oxygen catastrophe' or 'great oxidation.' Here oxygen begins to emerge in the atmosphere about 2.3 billion years ago as oceanic cyanobacteria produce oxygen by photosynthesis. The actual oxygenation event would be the point when oxygen is not all chemically captured but becomes free to escape into the atmosphere. It's a straightforward picture -- we move from a lack of oxygen to gradual production through photosynthesis and then a concentration strong enough to destroy many anaerobic organisms, an early and huge extinction event as life on our planet adjusted to the new balance. But a team of researchers led by Michael Kipp (University of Washington) has produced a paper showing a much more complicated emergence of oxygen, one that produced a surge in oxygenation that lasted a quarter of a billion years before easing. Kipp and team studied oxygen in the...

A recent snowfall followed by warming temperatures produced a foggy night recently, one in which I was out for my usual walk and noticed a beautiful Moon trying to break through the fog layers. The scene was silvery, almost surreal, the kind of thing my wife would write a poem about. For my part, I was thinking about the effect of the Moon on life, and the theory that a large single moon might have an effect on our planet’s habitability. Perhaps its presence helps to keep Earth’s obliquity within tolerable grounds, allowing for a more stable climate. But that assumes we’ve had a single moon all along, or at least since the ‘big whack’ the Earth sustained from a Mars-sized protoplanet that may have caused the Moon’s formation. Is it possible the Earth has had more than one moon in its past? It’s an intriguing question, as witness a new paper in Nature Geoscience from researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science. The paper suggests...

I love watching people who have a passion for science constructing projects in ways that benefit the community. I once dabbled in radio astronomy through the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, and I could also point to the SETI League, with 1500 members on all seven continents engaged in one way or another with local SETI projects. And these days most everyone has heard the story of Planet Hunters, the citizen science project that identified the unusual Boyajian's Star (KIC 8462852). When I heard from Roger Guay and Scott Guerin, who have been making their own theoretical contributions to SETI, I knew I wanted to tell their story here. The post that follows lays out an alien civilization detection simulation and a tool for visualizing how technological cultures might interact, with an entertaining coda about an unusual construct called a 'Dyson shutter.' I'm going to let Roger and Scott introduce themselves as they explain how their ideas developed. by Roger Guay and Scott Guerin...

The problem in sending intentional signals to the stars isn't technology. It's our lack of consensus. Having widespread buy-in on whether, why and how to add an 'active' component to SETI is deeply polarizing, at least on the surface. But dig deeper: While there are those who think we should send signals about ourselves to other stars, the opposition doesn't necessarily disagree provided appropriate discussion and consultation be achieved first. I'm with the latter camp and always have been. To me, this is as sensible as coming up with an environmental impact statement and debating it. We need to be thinking about the issues involved here because as technologies get more powerful, individual actors will be able to send messages that would formerly have been in the province of governments. As I mentioned last week, such issues are not new to science, as witness the debate over recombinant DNA research that eventually led to multidisciplinary agreement -- for more on this, see Asilomar...

We speculated yesterday that categorizing civilizations on the basis of their power use may not be a given, though it is the basis of the familiar Kardashev types. It seems natural to a rapidly changing technological society like ours that the trend is always upward, a clear path toward harnessing the energies of the home planet, then the Sun, then the galaxy. That this may not be the case seems to go against the grain of ‘Dysonian SETI,’ which looks for, among other things, artifacts as large as Dyson spheres and other astro-engineering projects on massive scales. Or maybe not, for some engineering involving adjustments to planetary environments may well produce observables. We just have to be aware of the range of possibilities here, and recognize our own limitations in trying to figure them out. For we’ve learned something else from technology, and that is that its components grow ever smaller. Working at nanotech scales to create things from the ground up isn’t beyond the...

Have we, as some have argued, entered a new 'age of humanity,' the so-called Anthropocene? The notion is controversial in many quarters, but it addresses the growing concern about our human influence on the Earth and the nature of planetary change. David Grinspoon's new book Earth in Human Hands (Grand Central Publishing, 2016) has much to say about the Anthropocene, but as anyone who has read the work of this canny scientist knows, he's not one to let facile assumptions get by unquestioned. For if the activity of humans is now emerging as an agent of geological change, then we are discussing our civilization in the same terms we talk about planetary forces like tectonic movement and the carbon cycle. This makes us major players whose effects we can begin to chart in terms of the effects of our technology on Earth's living systems. If the Anthropocene is happening, it presents us not only with danger but the prospect of a long-term future. And its implications take in not just our...

In the last two days we've looked at a discussion of a possible SETI observable, a 'shielding swarm' that an advanced civilization might deploy in the event of a nearby supernova. As with Richard Carrigan's pioneering searches for Dyson swarms in the infrared, this kind of SETI makes fundamentally different assumptions than the SETI we've grown familiar with, where the hope is to snag a beacon-like signal at radio or optical wavelengths. So-called 'Dysonian SETI' assumes no intent to communicate. It is about observing a civilization's artifacts. Both radio/optical SETI and this Dysonian effort are worth pursuing, because we have no idea what the terms of any discovery of an extraterrestrial culture will be. The hope of receiving a deliberate signal carries the enthralling possibility that somewhere there is an Encyclopedia Galactica that we may one day gain access to, or at the least that there is a civilization that wants to talk to us. A Dysonian detection would tell us that...

If you’re on the Moon and learn that there has been a major solar eruption, your best course of action is to get inside an appropriate shelter somewhere below ground, where you can be shielded from its effects. By analogy, wouldn’t a future civilization on Earth be able to shield itself from the effects of a supernova or gamma ray burst by burrowing into the planet? In their paper on stellar explosions and risk mitigation, Milan ?irkovi? and Branislav Vukoti? argue against the idea, which runs into problems on multiple levels. For one thing, while the duration of gamma ray emissions is generally short -- on the order of a hundred seconds or less -- the pulse of accelerated cosmic rays from a supernova or GRB blast is likely to last much longer, perhaps a matter of months or even years. Digging to avoid the worst of the effects would take you deep into the ground indeed. The authors cite work showing that you would need to burrow up to 3 kilometers below the surface before the...

Alastair Reynolds’ 2008 novel House of Suns contains what must be the most outrageous solution for an endangered civilization I’ve ever encountered. Set some 6 million years in the future, the story involves technologies at the Kardashev Type III level -- in other words, civilizations that are capable of harnessing the energy of entire galaxies. At one point, a supermassive star whose pending death threatens a local civilization is enclosed in an enormous ‘stardam,’ made out of remnant ‘ringworlds’ from a long-lost culture that litter the galaxy. I believe we’re normally considered to be at about Kardashev level 0.7, so a feat like this is utterly the stuff of science fiction, but in Reynolds’ hands it makes for a robust tale. Here’s how future humans discuss it in the novel: To dam a star, to enclose it completely, would require the construction of a Dyson shell. Humans can shroud a star with a swarm of bodies, a Dyson cloud, but we cannot forge a sphere. Instead we approximate one...

It was inevitable that KIC 8462852 would spawn a nickname, given the public attention given to this mystifying star, whose unusual lightcurves continue to challenge us. 'Tabby's Star' is the moniker I've seen most frequently, but we now seem to be settling in on 'Boyajian's Star.' It was Tabetha Boyajian (Louisiana State) whose work with the Planet Hunters citizen science project brought the story to light, and in keeping with astronomical naming conventions (Kapteyn's Star, Barnard's Star, etc.), I think the use of the surname is appropriate. Planet Hunters works with Kepler data, looking for any dimming of the 150,000 monitored stars that may have gone undetected by the automated routines that hunt for repeating patterns. Boyajian's Star cried out for analysis, dimming in odd ways that flagged not the kind of planetary transit across the face of a stellar disk that researchers expected but something else, something that would make the star dim by as much as 22 percent, and at...

A candidate signal for SETI is a welcome sign that our efforts in that direction may one day pay off. An international team of researchers has announced the detection of "a strong signal in the direction of HD164595" in a document now being circulated through contact person Alexander Panov. The detection was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, in the Karachay-Cherkess Republic of Russia, not far from the border with Georgia in the Caucasus. The signal was received on May 15, 2015, 18:01:15.65 (sidereal time), at a wavelength of 2.7 cm. The estimated amplitude of the signal is 750 mJy. No one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study. Working out the strength of the signal, the researchers say that if it came from an isotropic beacon, it would be of a power possible only for a Kardashev Type II civilization. If it were a narrow beam signal focused on our Solar System, it would be of a power...

Claudio Flores Martinez has just finished an MSc at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany and is now enroute to a PhD in theoretical biology. He currently serves as a research assistant at the Developmental Biology Unit of EMBL and the University of Heidelberg's Centre for Organismal Studies. With three papers in Acta Astronautica under his belt, Claudio is already deep into theoretical evolutionary biology, and in particular the contingency vs. convergence debate. In the paper below, he discusses how these issues couple with the possible emergence and development of life on Europa and the potential biosignatures by which we might find it, a journey that takes us deep into the nature of living systems. Just what might we encounter under that Europan ice? by Claudio Flores Martinez “Science is an endless search for truth. Any representation of reality we develop can be only partial. There is no finality, sometimes no single best representation. There...

Oil companies involved in astrobiology? It doesn't seem likely, but in a roundabout way, it's true. A consortium including Chevron, Repsol, BP and Shell have a natural interest in developing better models for subsurface reservoirs and source rocks in microbe-rich carbonate environments. At the same time, NASA's Astrobiology Program is intrigued with how we could find bacterial structures on other worlds, and their role in planetary habitability. The result: Both Big Oil and NASA are supporting research into stromatolites, the calcium-carbonate rock structures built up by lime-secreting bacteria (technically, cyanobacteria, that draw their energy from photosynthesis). We can probe ancient life on Earth by studying these accreted structures, some of which go back more than 3.5 billion years. Erica Suosaari works for Bush Heritage Australia, an organization involved in conservation and land management. The Hamelin Station Reserve in Western Australia borders a nature reserve with vast...

If you’ve been following the KIC 8462852 story, you’ll want to be aware of Paul Carr’s Dream of the Open Channel blog, as well as his Wow! Signal Podcast, both of which make for absorbing conversation. In his latest blog post, Carr offers sensible advice about how to look at anomalies in our astronomical data. Dysonian SETI tries to spot such anomalies in hopes of uncovering the activities of an extraterrestrial civilization, but as Carr makes clear, this is an enterprise that needs to be slowly and patiently done, without jumping to any unwarranted assumptions. Let me quote Carr on this important point: ...we will have to be patient, since we will be almost certainly be wrong at first, or perhaps just unlucky in our search. We don't need to nail it exactly, but we will need to develop rough models of ET activity that distinguishes it from nature. These models would more or less fit the data that we think anomalous, would make testable predictions, and would show how to rule out at...

When Nikolai Kardashev looked into the question of where to find advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, he argued that the obvious starting point would be in the vicinity of extreme astrophysics. Active galactic nuclei (AGN) come to mind, or even the centers of comparatively quiet galaxies like our own. Clément Vidal picked up the same point in his The Beginning and the End (Springer, 2014), arguing persuasively that we should consider how black holes could be used, perhaps by manipulating the merger of such objects. And yes, this is astroengineering utterly beyond our skills, but possibly not those of an advanced ETI. Using black holes for energy is extreme, but Roger Penrose has imagined a super-civilization extracting black hole rotational energy by the injection of matter, and there are a number of other propositions on how such advanced engineering might work. Extracting energy from a black hole’s accretion disk might be the most efficient method, but lower-grade operations...

The SETI concepts now called ‘Dysonian’ are to my mind some of the most exhilarating ideas in the field. Dysonian SETI gets its name from the ‘Dyson spheres’ and ‘Dyson swarms’ analyzed by Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper. This is a technology that an advanced civilization might use to harvest the energy of its star. You can see how this plays off Nikolai Kardashev’s classification of civilizations; Kardashev suggested that energy use is a way to describe civilizations at the broadest level. A Type II society is one that can use all the energy of its star. In the film 2010, director Peter Hyams’ 1984 adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2010: Odyssey Two (Del Rey, 1982), we see an instance of this kind of technology at work, though it has nothing to do with a Dyson sphere. In the film, a dark patch appearing on Jupiter signals the onset of what Martyn Fogg has called ‘stellification,’ the conversion of a gas giant into a small star. Rapidly replicating von Neumann machines -- the...

Is the anomalous star KIC 8462852 undergoing a long-term dimming or not? We've looked at Bradley Schaefer's work on the star and the follow-ups disputing the idea from Michael Hippke and Daniel Angerhausen (NASA GSFC), with collaboration from Keivan Stassun and Michael Lund (both at Vanderbilt University) and LeHigh University's Joshua Pepper. Dr. Schaefer (Louisiana State University) believes the evidence for dimming is still strong, and in the post below explains why. He has also provided a link to a more detailed analysis with supporting graphs and figures for those who want to go still deeper (further information below). As we embark on the Kickstarter campaign to put 'Tabby's Star' in the sights of the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network -- an important project to which I have contributed and hope you will as well -- we continue to monitor this evolving story. No matter how it turns out, the Kepler data are iron-clad, so the success of the Kickstarter campaign is...

If the star KIC 8462852 is on your mind -- and the lively and continuing comments threads on the topic in these pages suggest that it is -- you'll want to know about a new campaign to support further study. 'Tabby's Star,' as it is informally known (after Tabetha Boyajian, whose work at the Planet Hunters project brought the star into prominence), continues to vex astronomers with its unusual light curves. What is causing the star to dim so dramatically remains problematic, with suggestions ranging from comet swarms to extraterrestrial engineering. A Kickstarter project is now in the works to support further investigation, hoping to extend an effort that has already begun. Boyajian's team has initiated observations on the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, a privately run effort that maintains telescopes around the world to make sure an object can be examined continuously. Four years of Kepler data have shown us that the dips in the light curves from KIC 8462852 are...