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Astronomy

Stellar Habitable Zones: Don’t Forget the Sunscreen
August 15, 2006
Astronomers concerned with the origin of life on earth have long thought about the “habitable zone” (sometimes called continuously habitable zone, or CHZ) of our solar system.  They’ve discussed this aerobee-shaped zone around our sun – or any star – mainly in terms of locations where the temperature would permit water to exist as a […]
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SETI

SETI: Shut Up and Keep Looking
July 25, 2006
On Space.com, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute answered the critics who think they’re “barking up the wrong tree.”  Well-meaning people send him emails explaining why there is “still no confirmed chitter from the cosmos” after 46 years of looking.  The top four include: (1) aliens use more advanced technology, (2) the Fermi Paradox means […]
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Astronomy

Paper View:  Why SETI Hears Only a “Great Silence”
June 30, 2006
Enrico Fermi posed a curious question in 1950: “Where is everybody?”  If life emerges on planets as a consequence of evolution, there should be other intelligent civilizations out there, and some of them must have colonized other worlds.  He thought there must have been plenty of time for galactic colonizers to achieve technologies far beyond […]
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SETI

Researcher Denies SETI Is a Religion
June 3, 2006
Apparently irritated by charges that SETI research is like a religion (see, for instance, the article by novelist Michael Crichton mentioned in our 12/27/2003 entry), David Darling of the SETI Institute has issued a response.  On Space.com, his title was direct: “Of Faith and Facts: Is SETI a Religion?”  The answer was a forthright NO […]
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Intelligent Design

Solar Eclipses Unique to Earth, SETI Researcher “Finds”
May 4, 2006
Like many before him, Seth Shostak pondered the significance of total solar eclipses for the one planet with observers to appreciate them.  “OK, I’ve done the math,” the SETI Institute director said for SETI Thursday on Space.com.  “What you always suspected might be true … is true: namely that the best place in the solar […]
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Astronomy

Astrobiology Ten Years Later: Can It Justify Its Funding?
April 17, 2006
Astrobiology just turned ten years old, but is experiencing growing pains, partly due to a starvation diet.  This “science without a subject” (as George Gaylord Simpson quipped about its predecessor, exobiology) is struggling to justify itself at the Congressional feeding trough.  Proponents tout it as the most important subject in the universe.  Why, then, is […]
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Origin of Life

The Astrobiology Sky Is Falling
March 13, 2006
Rocco Mancinelli (Principal Investigator, SETI Institute) made an impassioned plea on Space.com for continued funding of astrobiology projects, calling threatened funding cuts a “national disaster” if not reversed.  And what is astrobiology?  He defined it as “the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe.”  His reasons for keeping astrobiology […]
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SETI

Deities for Atheists, or Atheism for Dummies?
March 9, 2006
Michael Shermer wrote a book review in Science entitled “Deities for Atheists.”1  The article reviewed George Basalla’s recent book, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (Oxford, 2005).  Basalla (historian of science and technology, U of Delaware) contends that SETI is the continuation of an ancient religious quest.  If so, who are the […]
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Biology

Alien Engineering: Is It Intelligent Design?
February 16, 2006
The SETI Institute finished airing a 2-part series on the History Channel called Alien Engineering (it will be rebroadcast on Feb. 18).  The series, featuring SETI Institute scientists Seth Shostak and Frank Drake, asks the following questions: Prepare for an exercise in imagination.  Suppose that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert and we humans […]
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Origin of Life

SETI Tries to Stretch the Habitable Zone
February 9, 2006
Can life exist outside the circumstellar habitable zone, that ring of life around a star where the temperature is comfy?  “For more than 150 years,” Ker Than wrote for LiveScience, “…this zone has been defined as a narrow disk around a star where temperatures are moderate enough that water on the surface of a planet […]
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Intelligent Design

A Whale of a SETI Tale
January 31, 2006
Disney’s Fantasia 2000 had an episode that pictured whales gliding through the air as if in outer space.  Lawrence Doyle of the SETI Institute connected whales with space in another way.  His article discussed whale language as a sign of intelligence.  Appealing to information theory and entropy, Doyle discussed how scientists deduce the syntax and […]
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Cosmology

SETI vs. Intelligent Design
December 3, 2005
Intelligent Design proponents have often pointed to the similarity between what they are doing and what SETI is doing.  For example, SETI is attempting to detect evidence of intelligence in coded signals from space, and design biologists are detecting evidence of intelligence in the DNA code.  Seth Shostak, Director of the SETI Institute, decided to […]
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Education

SETI: Search for Educational Targets Inc.
November 18, 2005
SETI may be the laughingstock of Congress, refused funding since William Proxmire gave it his Golden Fleece Award in the 1980s, but privately it is moving apace.  The Science Channel gave it prominence in its weekly report Friday, visiting with pioneering signaler and listener Frank Drake.  It surveyed everything from the first humble attempts to […]
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Origin of Life

Extraterrestrials Likely to Be Unicellular
October 25, 2005
An AP story printed at HeraldNet jokes that extraterrestrial life probably won’t look like “the negligee-clad Number 6 from [Battlestar] Galactica, the television series that features a genocidal war between humans and their robot creations.”  Instead, according to the authors of a new book about extraterrestrial life, you would need a microscope to see it.  […]
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Early Man

Is Archaeology Like SETI, or is SETI Like Religion?
September 24, 2005
Archaeologists have their Rosetta Stone, but so far, SETI investigators have no artifacts.  Still, Douglas Vakoch wrote for Space.com, archaeologists and anthropologists can teach SETI researchers how to prepare for encountering “exotic cultures with strange languages.”     Vakoch recounted the interest in this angle at an anthropology conference last year: One of the best-attended […]
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