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TOPIC: SETI


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Title: Exoplanets and SETI
Author: Jason T. Wright

The discovery of exoplanets has both focused and expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The consideration of Earth as an exoplanet, the knowledge of the orbital parameters of individual exoplanets, and our new understanding of the prevalence of exoplanets throughout the galaxy have all altered the search strategies of communication SETI efforts, by inspiring new "Schelling points" (i.e. optimal search strategies for beacons). Future efforts to characterize individual planets photometrically and spectroscopically, with imaging and via transit, will also allow for searches for a variety of technosignatures on their surfaces, in their atmospheres, and in orbit around them. Even in the near-term, searches for new planetary systems might even turn up free-floating megastructures.

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Finding Amazing Structures Hidden in Big, Complex, Dense, Raw Data - Marvin Weinstein (SETI Talks)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaCDHrW8aO8



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Prof Stephen Hawking backs venture to listen for aliens

Prof Stephen Hawking has launched a new effort to answer the question of whether there is life elsewhere in space.
The venture is said to be the biggest yet in support of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
The 10-year effort will listen for broadcast signals from a million of the stars closest to Earth.

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Search Amongst the Stars

Spoiler

BSRC Director Andrew Siemion's ScienceAtCal talk on SETI



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Title: SETI reloaded, Next Generation Radio Telescopes, Transients and Cognitive Computing
Author: Michael A. Garrett

The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) using radio telescopes is an area of research that is now more than 50 years old. Thus far, both targeted and wide-area surveys have yet to detect artificial signals from intelligent civilisations. In this paper, I argue that the incidence of co-existing intelligent and communicating civilisations is probably small in the Milky Way. While this makes successful SETI searches a very difficult pursuit indeed, the huge impact of even a single detection requires us to continue the search. A substantial increase in the overall performance of radio telescopes (and in particular future wide-field instruments such as the Square Kilometre Array, SKA), provide renewed optimism in the field. Evidence for this is already to be seen in the success of SETI researchers in acquiring observations on some of the world's most sensitive radio telescope facilities via open, peer-reviewed processes. The increasing interest in the dynamic radio sky, and our ability to detect new and rapid transient phenomena such as Fast Radio Bursts (FRB) is also greatly encouraging. While the nature of FRBs is not yet fully understood, I argue they are unlikely to be the signature of distant extra-terrestrial civilisations. As astronomers face a data avalanche on all sides, advances made in related areas such as advanced Big Data analytics, and cognitive computing are crucial to enable serendipitous discoveries to be made. In any case, as the era of the SKA fast approaches, the prospects of a SETI detection have never have been better.

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Intelligent civilizations rarer than one in a million

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have now used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look for intelligent radio signals from planets around 86 of these stars. While discovering no telltale signs of life, the researchers calculate that fewer than one in a million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have planetary civilizations advanced enough to transmit beacons we could detect. 
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Title: The SETI Episode in the 1967 Discovery of Pulsars
Authors: Alan Penny

In the winter of 1967 Cambridge radio astronomers discovered a new type of radio source of such an artificial seeming nature that for a few weeks some members of the group had to seriously consider whether they had discovered an extraterrestrial intelligence. Although their investigations lead them to a natural explanation (they had discovered pulsars), they had discussed the implications if it was indeed an artificial source: how to verify such a conclusion and how to announce it, and whether such a discovery might be dangerous. In this they presaged many of the components of the SETI Detection Protocols and the proposed Reply Protocols which have been used to guide the responses of groups dealing with the detection of an extraterrestrial intelligence. These Protocols were only established some twenty five years later in the 1990s and 2000s. Using contemporary and near-contemporary documentation and later recollections, this paper discusses in detail what happened that winter.

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Title: A new class of SETI beacons that contain information (22-aug-2010)
Authors: G. R. Harp, R. F. Ackermann, Samantha K. Blair, J. Arbunich, P. R. Backus, J. C. Tarter, the ATA Team

In the cm-wavelength range, an extraterrestrial electromagnetic narrow band (sine wave) beacon is an excellent choice to get alien attention across interstellar distances because 1) it is not strongly affected by interstellar / interplanetary dispersion or scattering, and 2) searching for narrowband signals is computationally efficient (scales as Ns log(Ns) where Ns = number of voltage samples). Here we consider a special case wideband signal where two or more delayed copies of the same signal are transmitted over the same frequency and bandwidth, with the result that ISM dispersion and scattering cancel out during the detection stage. Such a signal is both a good beacon (easy to find) and carries arbitrarily large information rate (limited only by the atmospheric transparency to about 10 GHz). The discovery process uses an autocorrelation algorithm, and we outline a compute scheme where the beacon discovery search can be accomplished with only 2x the processing of a conventional sine wave search, and discuss signal to background response for sighting the beacon. Once the beacon is discovered, the focus turns to information extraction. Information extraction requires similar processing as for generic wideband signal searches, but since we have already identified the beacon, the efficiency of information extraction is negligible.

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SETI Institute Gets $3.5 Million Donation

California-based SETI Institute has received a $3.5 million donation to beef up its radio search for extraterrestrials, the organization announced Wednesday.
The money came from Franklin Antonio, a co-founder and chief scientist of Qualcomm, a San Diego, Calif.-based firm that designs and manufactures digital wireless communications products and services.

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Title: Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence signals in astronomical spectra, including existing data
Authors: Ermanno F. Borra

The main purpose of this article is to make Astronomers aware that Searches for Extraterrestrial Intelligence can be carried out by analysing standard astronomical spectra, including those they already have taken. Simplicity is the outstanding advantage of a search in spectra. The spectra can be analysed by simple eye inspection or a few lines of code that uses Fourier transform software. Theory, confirmed by published experiments, shows that periodic signals in spectra can be easily generated by sending light pulses separated by constant time intervals. While part of this article, like all articles on searches for ETI, is highly speculative the basic physics is sound. In particular, technology now available on Earth could be used to send signals having the required energy to be detected at a target located 1000 light years away. Extraterrestrial Intelligence (ETI) could use these signals to make us aware of their existence. For an ETI, the technique would also have the advantage that the signals could be detected both in spectra and searches for intensity pulses like those currently carried out on Earth.

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