Several years ago Bhathal, a researcher at the University of Western Sydney, suggested that a likely form of extraterrestrial communication would be laser bursts. He set up a facility at his lab which sweeps a nearby volume of space, within about 100 light years, for laser bursts that come in a regular pattern. Any kind of communication would likely be distinguished from background noise by coming in repeated or non-random patterns.

And a few months ago, Bhathal found the kind of regular pattern he's been looking for. He's been analyzing it and seeking a repeat pattern in the same area of space ever since. Though he's cautious about claiming it as a genuine extraterrestrial signal, his discovery has been making local news. Read all about it in The Australian.

Image by Lynett Cook.

Brotherton, who organizes the Launchpad astronomy workshop for science fiction authors, has posted a couple of really great blog posts recently about how science fiction authors sometimes know more about the implications of science than scientists themselves. In one post, he just seems at first to be wishing that mainstream culture should pay more attention to science fiction, but then he adds:

Cloning was a scary fantasy, but not more, in movies and books, before the reality of Dolly the Sheep. Then to make sense of this development for public policy they called in experts like…doctors and clergy?

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The science fiction community had been talking about this for decades in serious ways and had a grasp of it better than even the people involved with the actual research. I mean, the creator of Dolly thought that cloning humans was a bad idea because if a couple cloned the father, say, to have a child, the mother would then find the child sexually attractive when he grew up. WTF??? Seriously, this was his position.

And then in another post, entitled "Scientists Sometimes Need To Think Like Science Fiction Authors," Brotherton examines a scientific proposal for focusing SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) scans, which is based on the assumption that alien civilizations would be doing the same thing we are: looking for exoplanets when they're eclipsing their suns. (I'm simplifying slightly here.) But science fiction writers will point out that it's a fallacy to assume that these alien civilizations are at the exact same level of technological development as ourselves. Assuming civiliation is a long-lived phenomenon, the aliens could be a century or more advanced than we are.

Both posts are well worth reading in their entirety, for a thought-provoking discussion of the ways in which pure science and science fiction can help to fill each other's gaps. Dolly The Sheep image by Monika Teal.

The Kepler satellite will use the same planet-finding method that's already found a few hundred planets outside our solar system: looking for subtle dips in stellar brightness. But it'll use more sensitive methods, looking for smaller, cooler planets that are closer to Earth and more hospitable to life.

Boss, who's just written a new book called The Crowded Universe, argues that Earthlike planets should be quite common:

First, if you talk to astronomers who look at young stars, they will tell you that when stars form, they tend to have a little bit of angular momentum, which means that they can't accrete all of their matter and they end up having a disk around them. Such disks are what planetary systems form out of, basically the leftovers from the star-formation process. Essentially all young stars have these disks, so we expect that these young stars at least have the possibility of having planetary systems.

Second, those who worry about planet-formation processes find that it's very hard to stop Earth-like planets, or some sort of large, rocky object, from forming. Earths in some sense are easier to build than Jupiters, but we already know from our extrasolar planet census that Jupiters exist around at least 10 percent, and probably around 20 percent, of stars. So Earths should be even more common than that.

Finally, and even more directly, the planetary searches are already beginning to find a new class of planets called super-Earths with masses maybe five, 10 or 15 times the mass of Earth that orbit a little closer to their star than our planet does. These guys occur on roughly one third of nearby solar-type stars. And these are sort of the oddballs in some sense, which I think are very much just the tip of the iceberg of the spectrum of Earth-like planets. In any theoretical model of planet formation that people talk about, there should be a ton of Earths compared to these oddball super-Earths, so when we do a complete census we should find a lot of Earths. If these oddballs are there 30 percent of the time and the Jupiters are there 20 percent of the time, that means the ones we can't quite see should be there essentially all the time. So it's a very compelling story, and all the evidence from several different directions points toward Earths being quite common.

He also believes that life is quite tenacious and it's likely that many of these planets have water on them, and comets dumping amino acids and other prebiotic chemicals, making life pretty likely. So many of these Earthlike worlds could turn out to have our alien cousins on them. [Scientific American]

Professor John Learned suggested that a civilization could attempt to initiate communication with other advanced civilizations by making unnatural alterations to Cepheids, relatively rare stars that other civilizations are likely to study:

Cepheids dim and brighten regularly, in a pattern that depends on their brightness. This lets astronomers measure the distance to the stars, helping to resolve mysteries such as the Universe's age and how fast it is expanding. As such, any sufficiently advanced civilization would want to monitor such stars, the scientists reasoned.

To send messages using a Cepheid, Learned and his colleagues suggest that extraterrestrials might change the star's cycle. A Cepheid becomes dimmer as ionized helium builds up in its atmosphere. Eventually, the atmosphere expands and deionizes, restarting the cycle.

Firing a high-energy neutrino beam into a Cepheid could heat its core and brighten the star early - "just as an electric pulse to the heart can make it skip a beat," Learned says.

Thus, the Cepheids might provide an intergalactic network of relays, which distant societies could use to broadcast messages to one another. But don't go warming up those neutrinos yet:

[T]he galactic internet would be slow - a Cepheid with a roughly one-day period could transmit about 180 bits per year. Such a transmission would require roughly a millionth of the star's energy, the researchers estimate.

For the time being, it makes more sense to comb through the 100 years' worth of data researchers have collected on the Cephids, searching for irregularities in the pulsing power. Learned estimates:

"Analyzing that data would take a graduate student a couple of months, and just think if it turned out to be correct."

At least the university's indentured academics know how they'll be spending their school year.

'Galactic internet' proposed [Nature]

The VLA is an awesome piece of technology. Instead of building larger and larger dishes to receive distant radio frequency energy signals, astronomers figured out in the 1940s that you could build an array of smaller dishes that act in concert. You can "tune" the array by moving the dishes relative to each other (the VLA dishes, 25 feet across each, move on railroad tracks). But the VLA was built in the 1970s on a backbone of analog technology. The upgraded array, when completed in 2012, will be known as the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA). Personally, I would have gone with Very Very Large Array.

Technically, the array isn't adding new dishes, but it is adding ultra-sensitive digital receivers and replacing the wiring between dishes with fiber optics. Most importantly, they're getting a new correlator. The correlator is the supercomputer that takes the signals from each dish and figures out how they fit together. All the new gear should make the EVLA about ten times as awesome as the original VLA, sensitive enough "in principle, to detect a signal as weak as a cell phone call from Jupiter," according to Scientific American. Image by: NRAO/AUI.

"The New Radio Sky." [Scientific American, Sept. 2008]

Jeffrey Lockwood, who teaches the course, plans to discuss the resulting works at this September’s SETI conference, “Searching for Life Signatures.” The students, some of whom are Wyoming natives, come from a variety of educational backgrounds, which have influenced their responses to the assignments:

Christine Ingoglia, a graduate student who entered the university's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing in the Fall of 2007, started with a basic description of our appearance: "We look like — two arms, two legs, head, torso, symmetrical." Similarly, fellow MFA student Meagan Ciesla's summary — "We need food, air, water, and think we're the most intelligent" — was reminiscent of a message transmitted from the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974, which described the chemical basis of life on Earth, and showed a picture of only one terrestrial species: Homo sapiens.

Other messages penned that first day of class in Laramie were more philosophical. "We are an adolescent species searching for our identity," wrote Ann Stebner, a senior English major completing a minor in Environmental Values. "We know our species' origins," wrote senior psychology major Dana Rinne, "but we fear individual deaths." Rinne, who plans to do graduate work in social psychology or cognitive psychology, described the course as an opportunity to contemplate the intersection of philosophy, science, and mind.

Plenty of schools offer courses in extraterrestrial life, and a few even have burgeoning futurology programs. But with xenocommunications entering the course catalog, can we expect more courses on how to engage the future? Could transhuman studies be next in the curriculum?

Writing for an Extraterrestrial Audience [LiveScience]

Lineweaver's idea kind of rocks SETI scientists' mission statement to the core. Ever since Carl Sagan's famously framed the ET question "are we alone?" as "Are there functionally equivalent humans elsewhere in the universe?" SETI folks have been trying to answer it. It's a gargantuan task, and one that that Lineweaver argues we're making worse by assuming that there is something about humans that is unique or special, or that life on Earth "wants" to be human.

If there is any tendency for life to evolve to get as functionally human-like as possible, then Lineweaver asks why haven't isolated part of Earth evolved human-like intelligence? Madagascar has been separated from Africa for millions of years, and should therefore be full of high-level primates instead of lemurs — apes' distant cousins. New Zealand (which because of its isolation Jared Diamond said was "the best opportunity we'll ever have to study life on another planet") should be filled with super-intelligent giant birds.

Lineweaver thinks that big brains aren't the be-all and end all of evolution. In fact, he argues that the answer to Sagan's question is "no" — functionally equivalent humans don't exist elsewhere in the universe. Instead, life elsewhere might be so weird as to be unrecognizable. "Intelligence" could easily take the form of some kind of system at profound disequilibrium with its environment — something like a hurricane or a star could be intelligent.

It's sounds like he's begging to get the SETI Institute's funding pulled, and to declare the entire SETI operation utterly useless, and in a sense he is. But he also thinks it's worth continuing the search because there's a lot of unexplored universe still out there to look at. And he admits he could be wrong — there could be a Planet of the Apes out there, too.

Lineweaver presented his theories at the Astrobiology Science Conference 2008.

SETI scientists have been looking for alien lasers for years now — part of the Optical SETI programs several universities and observatories across the country.

Those projects are still going full-bore, but scientists are hoping to increase their chances of success by building a detector that will look for near-infrared lasers, too. Just on the lower edge of the optical range of electromagnetic wavelengths, Andrew Howard and colleagues from UC Berkeley figure there's no good reason aliens wouldn't build a near-IR laser. And if they did, they'd obviously use it to broadcast complex signals to Earth containing detailed plans on how to build a device for interstellar travel.

Maybe that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but just in case, we'd better look for intelligent signals broadcast through gravity waves, too. These still-theoretical ripples in space-time are being tested for by the LiGO (Laser interferometry Gravitational wave Observatory) detector, mostly as a way to test astronomical theories. At least one researcher, Peter Hahn believes we should start analyzing the data for signs of ET, too.