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Hot Topic
Deep Space
Alien Life
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| Listening for ET: Two Decades |
| Topic: Alien Life |
01/07/05 |
| The SETI Institute predicts that we'll detect an extraterrestrial transmission within twenty years. Within a year, the first thirty dishes of a huge telescope array will be operational, forming the basis of a giant ear that listens for intelligent beings in space. |
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| Headshake to SETI Headfake |
| Topic: Alien Life |
09/12/04 |
| Did the famous screensaver, SETI@home, uncover the first strong evidence for an extraterrestrial signal? The SETI Institute's Seth Shostak discusses how hyperbole can misrepresent the last addition to a list of stellar candidates. |
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| Ashes of the Phoenix |
| Topic: Alien Life |
04/04/04 |
| What had become the first systematic attempt to search for another world's intelligent radio communications has wound down. Project Phoenix will transition to more advanced search methods, but its pioneering status has become part of history. |
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| Questioning The Prime Directive |
| Topic: Alien Life |
03/04/04 |
| It has become somewhat accepted that an extrasolar contact could be interpreted as a good 'artificial' signal if it arose from certain branches of mathematics. If another galactic civilization decided to reach us, they would send a beacon of bleeps akin to the digits of 'pi' or only prime numbers. |
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| Cracking the Stellar Primer |
| Topic: Alien Life |
12/02/03 |
| If an artificial signal ever were detected from another world, it would almost certainly be encoded or encrypted. Judging by isolated civilizations that contact each other's languages across time and space--such as the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writers and modern linguists. |
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| Arecibo Chronicle |
| Topic: Alien Life |
11/25/03 |
| Getting the big picture in the search for life elsewhere is a challenging balance between technology and philosophy. The SETI Institute's Seth Shostak reports from the world's largest radio telescope, Arecibo, about new signal processing methods. |
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| Mysteries of Wow |
| Topic: Alien Life |
10/21/03 |
| In August 1977, a sky survey conducted with Ohio State University's "Big Ear" radio telescope found what has become known as the 'Wow' signal. Registering an enormous signal strength, the shape of the signal had the characteristic rise and fall expected for its short 72 second lifetime. |
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| Dyson's Long Shot |
| Topic: Alien Life |
10/14/03 |
| Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson, famous for his designs of grand energy collectors called Dyson's Sphere, has put down a public bet: life will first be discovered elsewhere not on a planet or moon, but someplace other than what we could recognize as terrestrial turf. |
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| Star Light, Star Bright...Any Oxygen Tonight? |
| Topic: Alien Life |
03/17/03 |
| The possibility of complex life on other worlds may depend on green plant photosynthesis. But could this sunlight-dependent process evolve on worlds that orbit stars different from our sun? |
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| What Does ET Look Like from 40 Light Years Away? |
| Topic: Alien Life |
01/13/03 |
| The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission will have the technology to look for signs of life in the light reflected or emitted by planets orbiting nearby stars. But nobody knows exactly what signals life would emit. Clues from studies of Earth's early atmosphere are guiding the mission's technology development. |
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