* Astronomy

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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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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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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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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