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Category: alien life

In a few years, powerful new telescopes will usher in a search for habitable worlds outside our solar system. And TRAPPIST-1—a dim, tepid star just a smidge larger than Jupiter—is one of the first places we’ll look. It’s only forty light years away, and it’s home to several promising, Earth-sized exoplanets.

Three siblings, described today in the journal Nature, are the first exoplanets ever discovered around an “ultracool dwarf” star. And they’re a jackpot when it comes to the search for alien life. Each planet is similar in size to Earth or Venus and probably rocky. The planets all skirt the edge of the so-called habitable zone. Finally, these potential Earth twins are so close to us that we can begin studying their atmospheres right now.

“This is basically a paradigm shift,” study co-author Julien de Wit told Gizmodo. “If these planets have atmospheres, they really are the best places to look for life.”

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“The station regularly passes out of range of the Tracking and Relay Data Satellites (TDRS) used to send and receive video, voice and telemetry from the station,” a spokesperson for NASA told ValueWalk.

The only problem with this explanation, of course, is that it’s so much more boring…”

It is, of course, highly unlikely that this was some alien ship. That said, those tracking and relay stations are fixed and known locations. Also, the range and power of the ISS communication systems are well known, non-classified public domain knowledge. I suck at math, but it should only be a matter of taking the exact time and duration of this outage and comparing it to the tracking and relay station stats.

A horseshoe-shaped apparition has UFO trackers seeing stars.

For hardcore UFO believers, it’s a case almost too good to be true. A mysterious, horseshoe-shaped object appeared along the Earth’s horizon in NASA’s live feed from the International Space Station—and then the feed was cut.

Cue the X-Files music.

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Microscopic spaceships powered by Earth-based lasers are being developed to hunt for extra-terrestrial life in Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours.

The £70m Breakthrough Starshot concept involves creating a tiny robotic spacecraft, no larger than a mobile phone chip, which would carry cameras, thrusters, a power supply and navigation and communication equipment.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner have all joined the project’s board giving it major backing.

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Forget about generation ships, suspended animation, or the sudden appearance of a worm hole. The most likely way for aliens to visit us — whatever their motive — is by sending robotic probes. Here’s how swarms of self-replicating spacecraft could someday rule the galaxy.

Top image by Alejandro Burdisio via Concept Ships.

Back in late 1940’s the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann wondered if it might be possible to design a non-biological system that could replicate itself in a cellular automata environment, what he called a universal constructor. Von Neumann wasn’t thinking about space exploration at the time, but other thinkers like Freeman Dyson, Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas later took his idea and applied it to exactly that.

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