"With exoplanets we are entering new territory," says René Heller (Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics, Potsdam), talking about recent studies looking at axial tilt as a parameter for habitability on a planet. Heller is getting at the fact that while we've studied the axis of a planet's spin relative to the plane of its orbit rather thoroughly here in our own Solar System, we are a long way from being able to discern the axial tilt of exoplanets, much less make definitive statements about its effect on habitability. Right now we can say something about the size, mass and orbital period of many distant planets (and in a few cases, some of the components of their atmosphere) and that's about where our knowledge stops. Heller imagines the Earth with an axial tilt something akin to that of Uranus, whose equator and ring system run almost perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. Introduce such high obliquity to the Earth and the north pole would point at the Sun for a quarter of the...

Let me draw your attention to two interesting stories this morning, one harking back to the night in August of 1977 when the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State University recorded the famous 'Wow!' signal. For those unfamiliar with it, the 'Wow!' signal gets its name from Big Ear volunteer Jerry Ehman's annotation (several days later) on the signal's printout. 'Wow!' seemed appropriate for a signal that was 30 times stronger in volume than the background noise and took up a single 10 kilohertz-wide band on the receiver, an enigmatic 70-second narrow-band burst at almost precisely 1420 megahertz, the emission frequency of hydrogen. A message from an extraterrestrial civilization? 'Wow!' seemed to fit the bill, but it disappeared and despite more than 50 repeated searches by the Big Ear team, it never recurred. In this article for The Planetary Society, Amir Alexander calls the signal "...the single most intriguing result ever produced by the Search for Extraterrestrial...

Yesterday’s post looked at SETI and its assumptions, using the lens of a new paper on how the discipline might be enlarged. The paper’s authors, Robert Bradbury, Milan ?irkovi? and George Dvorsky, are not looking to supplant older SETI methods, but rather to broaden their scope by bringing into play what we are learning about astrobiology and artificial intelligence. It is perilous, obviously, to speculate on how an alien civilization might behave, yet to some extent we’re forced to do it in choosing SETI targets, and that being the case, why not add into the mix methods that go beyond our current radio and optical searches, methods that may have a better chance of success? The Engima of Contact A key to extending SETI’s reach is to question the very idea of contact. One assumption many of SETI’s pioneers had in common was that there was an inherent need to communicate with other species, and that this need would take the form of intentional radio beacons or optical messages. What...

Have you ever given any thought to intergalactic SETI? On the face of it, the idea seems absurd -- we have been doing SETI in one form or another since the days of Project Ozma and without result. If we can’t pick up radio signals from nearby stars that tell us of extraterrestrial civilizations, how could we expect to do so at distances like M31’s 2.573 million light years, not to mention even the closest galaxies beyond? Herein lies a tale, for what intergalactic SETI exposes us to is the baldness of our assumptions about the overall SETI attempt, that it is most likely to succeed using radio wavelengths, and that it may open up two-way communications with extraterrestrials. It’s the nature of these assumptions that we need to explore today. The Visibility of a Galactic Culture Let’s suppose, for example, that Nikolai Kardashev’s thoughts about types of civilizations are compelling enough to put to the test. A Kardashev Type III civilization is one that is able to exploit the energy...

Beamed propulsion continues to be a particular fascination of mine, which is why I want to start a discussion tomorrow of Jim Benford's latest paper on beamed sails and how they might be optimized for both performance and cost. Reading through Benford's work, however, I also came across Chris Wilson's recent articles in Slate, which discuss Jim and Gregory Benford's work on interstellar beacons and the SETI ramifications. I want to be sure to point to Wilson's How to Build a Beacon because I don't see 'Benford beacons,' as they're increasingly called, discussed much in the media, and Wilson does a fine job at setting the concept in context. Messages into Deep Time The two part Slate series (the first article is The Great Silence) considers humanity's legacy and relates it to the issues raised by SETI. The Arecibo message sent in the direction of the globular cluster M13 in November of 1974 is Wilson's point of departure. Carl Sagan and Frank Drake set up the famous message in the...

The on-again, off-again SETI search at the Allen Telescope Array is back in business as Jill Tarter and team focus in on some of the more interesting worlds uncovered by the Kepler space telescope and follow-up observations. You'll recall that last April the ATA was in hibernation, having lost its funding from the University of California at Berkeley, which had operated the Hat Creek Observatory in northern California where the ATA is located. It took a public campaign to raise the funds needed for reactivation and new operations, as well as help from the US Air Force in the form of its own assessment of the ATA's applicability in its space situational awareness studies, which include developing a catalog of orbiting space objects. The SETI Institute, along with third-party partners and volunteers, has set up SETIstars.org as a fund-raising operation specifically targeting the ATA -- it's important to realize that getting the array back in operation is a first step in the larger...

Could life exist on a world with a methane rather than a water cycle? The nitrogen-rich atmosphere of Titan, laden with hydrocarbon smog, is a constant reminder of the question. Cassini has shown us the results of ultraviolet radiation from the Sun interacting with atmospheric methane, and we've had radar glimpses of lakes as well as the haunting imagery from the descending Huygens probe. Our notion of a habitable zone depends upon water, but adding methane into the mix would extend the region where life could exist much further out from a star. Chris McKay and Ashley Gilliam (NASA Ames) have been actively speculating on the possibilities around red dwarfs and have published a recent paper on the subject. It's intriguing, of course, that with methane we get the 'triple point' that allows a material to exist in liquid, solid or gaseous form at a particular temperature and pressure. That makes Titan 'Earthlike' in the sense that our initial view showed a landscape with the clear signs...

If you're looking for a new tactic for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Princeton's Edwin Turner may be able to supply it. The duo are studying how we might find other civilizations by spotting the lights of their cities. It's an exotic concept and Loeb understates when he says looking for alien cities would be a long shot, but Centauri Dreams is all in favor of adding to our SETI toolkit, which thus far has been filled with the implements of radio, optical and, to a small extent, infrared methods. Image: If an alien civilization builds brightly-lit cities like those shown in this artist's conception, future generations of telescopes might allow us to detect them. This would offer a new method of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence elsewhere in our Galaxy. Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA). Spotting city lights would be the ultimate case of detecting a civilization not through an intentional beacon but...

by Dave Moore Dave Moore, a frequent Centauri Dreams contributor, tells me he was born and raised in New Zealand, spent time in Australia, and now makes his home in California. "As a child I was fascinated by the exploration of space and science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, who embodied both, was one of my childhood heroes. But growing up in New Zealand in the 60s, anything to do with such things was strictly a dream. The only thing it did lead to was to getting a degree in Biology and Chemistry." But deep space was still on Dave's mind and continues to be, as the article below, drawing on his recent paper in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, attests. "While I had aspirations at one stage of being a science fiction writer," Dave adds, "I never expected that I would emulate the other side of Arthur C. Clarke and get something published in JBIS." But he did, and now explains the thinking behind the paper. The words from "Science Fiction/Double Feature" in the Rocky...

It makes perfect sense to me that we usually think of extraterrestrial intelligence in terms of technology. After all, when we listen to the stars for the whisper of a distant signal, we're saying that SETI is all about finding something that was produced with tools, like a beacon. Or if we extend the thought to science fiction, we might dream of studying alien civilizations through their ruins on long-dead worlds, learning about them by studying what they once built. After all, this is how we do archaeology, digging up spear-points or the bricks of ziggurats, the things that a culture leaves behind that it built with its tools. But will we always confine the idea of intelligence to the presence of an artifact? Science writer and Astronomy Now editor Keith Cooper examines the question in Dolphins, Aliens, and the Search for Intelligent Life, an incisive new essay for Astrobiology Today, one that offers us a new technology that may prove that intelligence doesn't necessarily need...

Most people think that SETI is worth doing, whether or not they actually believe there are other technological civilizations in the galaxy. Ben Zuckerman, a professor of astronomy at UCLA, is certainly in the skeptics' camp, thinking there are no technological ETs in the Milky Way, but he's quoted in this story from QUEST (KQED San Francisco) as calling for more SETI. "Given that the costs are not very high," says Zuckerman, "why not continue the search?" Zuckerman, who once worked with Carl Sagan in graduate school, no longer thinks we live in a crowded galaxy, but a potential discovery of this magnitude justifies the relatively modest expenditure. It's not surprising to find Jill Tarter echoing Zuckerman. The recent funding problems of the Allen Telescope Array have not daunted the woman who more than anyone else has come to represent the search for other intelligent life. And although she believes we may one day come to the 'extraordinary conclusion' that we really are alone, the...

Is there a 'goldilocks' class of meteorite, one in which we can say that conditions were just right for producing the stuff of life? That's one of the conclusions scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center are reaching by studying samples taken from twelve carbon-rich meteorites, nine of them recovered from Antarctica. Their evidence shows that some of the building blocks of DNA, which carries the genetic blueprint for life, were most likely created in space before falling to Earth through meteorite and comet impacts. Thus we move closer to answering a key question: "People have been discovering components of DNA in meteorites since the 1960's, but researchers were unsure whether they were really created in space or if instead they came from contamination by terrestrial life," said Dr. Michael Callahan of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "For the first time, we have three lines of evidence that together give us confidence these DNA building blocks actually...

By Larry Klaes Tau Zero journalist Larry Klaes gives us a look at a NASA publication whose authors tackle the biggest questions imaginable for our culture. Usefully, this volume, whose authors include major names in fields ranging from astrophysics to cultural evolution, is available online at no charge. As Larry points out, it deserves wide readership, for the issues of our place in the universe and how we respond to potential extraterrestrial contact via SETI will guide our future, both on Earth and in space. It is often difficult to get a wider perspective on existence, especially when you and the rest of your species have been stuck in one place for all but the smallest and most recent of times. This has certainly been the case with the species known as humanity. While a few ancient philosophers guessed that we live on a world surrounded by an immense amount of stars and space, it has only been in the last few centuries that both the scientific and general communities came to...

Just how the Moon originally formed is under renewed scrutiny given the finding that it contains larger amounts of water than previously thought. We'll look at that issue in depth another time, because it's far from resolved. The generally accepted account of the Moon's formation involves a giant impact with a planetary embryo that has been called Theia. The name is a nod to the Greek story of the titan that gave birth to Selene, the Moon goddess. After its formation, the Moon would have been closer to a much more quickly rotating Earth, inducing huge tidal forces that may have had repercussions on the evolution of the earliest life on the planet. All of this has a further bearing on life's emergence because a large moon can affect the tilt of a planet's rotation relative to its orbit around the star. The term for this degree of tilt is 'obliquity,' and its effects on global climate can be profound. If there is little or no tilt, the poles become colder and heat flows in their...

The canonical notion of the 'water hole' is that the kind of life we are looking for in our SETI searches will only thrive where there is liquid water. A quiet stretch of the radio spectrum, the water hole has two natural boundaries: The 18 cm emissions from the hydroxyl ion (OH) and the 21 cm emissions from neutral hydrogen. But the choice of frequencies for SETI is obviously not based on mere symbolism. The water hole is a window in the radio spectrum where radio emissions are not significantly absorbed by interstellar dust and other matter between the stars. It's a natural place to look, and SETI@Home users worldwide have used Arecibo data from the waterhole to participate in the hunt, in what has turned out to be a massive distributed computing project. But the latest SETI project to hit the news following the hibernation of the Allen Telescope Array last month goes where Arecibo cannot. This is a new effort at a storied place, the Green Bank facility in West Virginia. This is...

Tau Zero journalist Larry Klaes has been fascinated by SETI -- and its offshoot METI (Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) -- for a long time now. Here he steps back to look at METI in context, offering up an examination of the advantages of sending signals to the stars and the offsetting risks. We've looked at many viewpoints on the subject in these pages since Centauri Dreams came online in 2004. But has Larry hit upon a key fact that may trump the arguments of both sides? Is there something about human nature that makes METI more or less inevitable? By Larry Klaes SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, has been conducted by a variety of professional and amateur scientists since 1960 (or 1924 if you want to count a campaign that year which listened for any radio messages from the presumed natives of Mars). SETI primarily involves the passive listening or looking for transmissions from alien civilizations. More recent SETI projects have also attempted to...

What is 'space situational awareness,' and what does it have to do with SETI? The answer begins with the collision of a Russian Cosmos 2251 satellite with one of the 66 communications satellites that comprise the Iridium satellite constellation, a worldwide voice and data system. The collision, which occurred on February 10, 2009 produced hundreds of pieces of debris. The Air Force Space Command needs ways of tracking such debris, which poses a threat in the increasingly crowded skies above our planet. Enter the Allen Telescope Array, known primarily as a state-of-the-art center for the SETI effort to identify other intelligent species in the galaxy. The ATA caught the Air Force's eye as a way of tracking and cataloging man-made objects in orbit. Located in a volcanic valley near the Lassen National Forest in California, the array has proven its worth at this task in early tests, a fact that could inspire a new funding source for the observatory. And as we learned to our dismay...

Space writer Keith Cooper, the editor of the UK's Astronomy Now, is currently attending the Royal Astronomical Society's meeting in Llandudno, Wales -- in fact, the photo of him just below was taken the other day in Llandudno. But the frantic round of presentations hasn't slowed Keith down. When last spotted in these pages, he was engaged in a dialogue with me about SETI issues. That exchange got me thinking about having Keith talk to Michael Michaud, considering their common interests and realizing that they had already met at last year's Royal Society meeting where so many of these issues were discussed. Michael was kind enough to agree, and what follows is an exchange of views that enriches the SETI debate. Centauri Dreams readers know Michael Michaud to be the author of the essential Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials (Springer, 2006), but he's also the author of over one hundred published works, many of them on space...

Having just finished Iain Banks' The Player of Games, I'm thinking about the 'orbitals' he describes in his series of novels about the Culture, a vast, star-crossing civilization that can build space habitats in the form of massive rings. Orbitals are smaller than the kind of 'ringworld' Larry Niven envisioned, but huge nonetheless, bracelets of super-strong materials housing billions who live on their inner surfaces as they orbit a parent star. The visual effects Banks pulls off in describing these habitats are spectacular. And now a new paper by Duncan Forgan (University of Edinburgh) and Martin Elvis (Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has me wondering about the kind of mining activities it would take to produce the raw materials for such constructs. Forgan and Elvis are interested in what they describe as a multi-wavelength, multi-signal approach to SETI. We're used to the idea of huge radio dishes listening for extraterrestrial signals, but SETI is evolving through the...