The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is a collective term for scientific searches for intelligent extraterrestrial life, for example, monitoring electromagnetic radiation for signs of transmissions from civilizations on other planets.
Frank Donald Drake was an American astrophysicist and astrobiologist.
Extraterrestrial intelligence, or non-human intelligence (NHI), refers to hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrial life. No such life has ever been proven to exist in the Solar System except for humans on Earth, and its existence in other star systems is still speculative. The question of whether other inhabited worlds might exist has been debated since ancient times. The modern form of the concept emerged when the Copernican Revolution demonstrated that the Earth was a planet revolving around the Sun, and other planets were, conversely, other worlds. The question of whether other inhabited planets or moons exist was a natural consequence of this new understanding. It has become one of the most speculative questions in science and is a central theme of science fiction and popular culture.
SETI@home is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run as an Internet-based public volunteer computing project that employed the BOINC software platform. It is hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and is one of many activities undertaken as part of the worldwide SETI effort.
The SETI Institute is a not-for-profit research organization incorporated in 1984 whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to use this knowledge to inspire and guide present and future generations, sharing knowledge with the public, the press, and the government. SETI stands for the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence".
Seth Shostak is an American astronomer and author, and is currently the senior astronomer for the SETI Institute.
The Wow! signal was a strong narrowband radio signal detected on August 15, 1977, by Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope in the United States, then used to support the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal appeared to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and bore expected hallmarks of extraterrestrial origin.
Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO) is a radio astronomy observatory located near Big Pine, California (US) in Owens Valley. It lies east of the Sierra Nevada, approximately 350 kilometers (220 mi) north of Los Angeles and 20 kilometers (12 mi) southeast of Bishop. It was established in 1956, and is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The Owens Valley Solar Array portion of the observatory has been operated by New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) since 1997.
The Teen Age Message (TAM) was a series of interstellar radio transmissions sent from the Yevpatoria Planetary Radar to six solar-type stars during August–September 2001. The structure of the TAM was suggested by Alexander Zaitsev, Chief Scientist at Russia's Institute of Radio-engineering and Electronics. The message's content and target stars were selected by a group of teens from four Russian cities, who collaborated in person and via the Internet. Each transmission comprised three sections: a sounding, a live theremin concert, and digital data including images and text. TAM was humanity's fourth Active SETI broadcast and the first musical interstellar radio message.
The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), formerly known as the One Hectare Telescope (1hT), is a radio telescope array dedicated to astronomical observations and a simultaneous search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). The array is situated at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Shasta County, 290 miles (470 km) northeast of San Francisco, California.
First contact is a common theme in science fiction about the first meeting between humans and extraterrestrial life, or of any sentient species' first encounter with another one, given they are from different planets or natural satellites. It is closely related to the anthropological idea of first contact
Arrival II, alternatively titled The Second Arrival, is a 1998 American science fiction direct-to-video film directed by Kevin S. Tenney. The film is a sequel to the 1996 film The Arrival. It was written by Mark David Perry and based on characters created by David Twohy. The film stars Patrick Muldoon, Michael Sarrazin, Jane Sibbett, Catherine Blythe, Michael Scherer, and Larry Day.
H. Paul Shuch is an American scientist and engineer who has coordinated radio amateurs to help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Robert Hansen Gray was an American data analyst, author, and astronomer, and author of The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
The cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact is the corpus of changes to terrestrial science, technology, religion, politics, and ecosystems resulting from contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. This concept is closely related to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), which attempts to locate intelligent life as opposed to analyzing the implications of contact with that life.
Technosignature or technomarker is any measurable property or effect that provides scientific evidence of past or present technology. Technosignatures are analogous to biosignatures, which signal the presence of life, whether intelligent or not. Some authors prefer to exclude radio transmissions from the definition, but such restrictive usage is not widespread. Jill Tarter has proposed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) be renamed "the search for technosignatures". Various types of technosignatures, such as radiation leakage from megascale astroengineering installations such as Dyson spheres, the light from an extraterrestrial ecumenopolis, or Shkadov thrusters with the power to alter the orbits of stars around the Galactic Center, may be detectable with hypertelescopes. Some examples of technosignatures are described in Paul Davies's 2010 book The Eerie Silence, although the terms "technosignature" and "technomarker" do not appear in the book.
Breakthrough Listen is a project to search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the Universe. With $100 million in funding and thousands of hours of dedicated telescope time on state-of-the-art facilities, it is the most comprehensive search for alien communications to date. The project began in January 2016, and is expected to continue for 10 years. It is a component of Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives program. The science program for Breakthrough Listen is based at Berkeley SETI Research Center, located in the Astronomy Department at the University of California, Berkeley.
HD 164595 b is a confirmed exoplanet orbiting around a Sun-like star HD 164595 every 40 days some 94.36 light-years away. It was detected with the radial velocity technique with the SOPHIE echelle spectrograph. The planet has a minimal mass equivalent of 16 Earths.
Eric Korpela is a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, He is the director of the SETI@home project, a distributed computing project that was launched in 1999 to use individuals computers to analyze data collected in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Korpela notes that with modern-day mobile devices having greater capacities than personal computers did in 1999, SETI@home has developed an Android app to analyze data gathered by the Breakthrough Listen SETI project.
