Adactio: Links—Tagged with seti

A Black Cloud of Computation

SETI—the Search for Extra Terrestrial Information processing:

What we get is a computational device surrounding the Asymptotic Giant Branch star that is roughly the size of our Solar System.

8 DOM features you didn’t know existed - LogRocket Blog

If you ignore the slightly insulting and condescending clickbaity title, this is a handy run-down of eight browser features with good support:

extra arguments in addEventListener(),
scrollTo(),
extra arguments in setTimeout() and setInterval(),
the defaultChecked property for checkboxes,
normalize() and wholeText for strings of text,
insertAdjacentElement() and insertAdjacentText(),
event.detail, and
scrollHeight and scrollWidth.

The Golden Record

We asked you to tell us what you’d put on a new Golden Record. Here’s what you chose.

Ever thought about what you’d put on the Voyager golden record? Well, what are you waiting for? Your website can be your time capsule.

The search for another intelligence (Upsideclown)

A wonderful short story from Matt. I can see this one staying with me.

ARP Observatory (@ArpObservatory) | Twitter

In July we started receiving audio signals from outside the solar system, and we’ve been studying them since.

Tweets contain sound samples on Soundcloud, data visualisations, and notes about life at the observatory …all generated by code.

ARP is a fictional radio telescope observatory, it’s a Twitter & SoundCloud bot which procedurally generates audio, data-visualisations, and the tweets (and occasionally long-exposure photography) of an astronomer/research scientist who works at ARP, who is obsessive over the audio messages, and who runs the observatory’s Twitter account.

[1701.01109] Fast Radio Bursts from Extragalactic Light Sails

We examine the possibility that Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) originate from the activity of extragalactic civilizations. Our analysis shows that beams used for powering large light sails could yield parameters that are consistent with FRBs.

I’m guessing Paul Gilster may have thoughts on this.

Winston Churchill’s essay on alien life found : Nature News & Comment

Churchill, as it turns out, had some pretty solid ideas on SETI.

Churchill was a science enthusiast and advocate, but he also contemplated important scientific questions in the context of human values. Particularly given today’s political landscape, elected leaders should heed Churchill’s example: appoint permanent science advisers and make good use of them.

How a Couple of Guys Built the Most Ambitious Alien Outreach Project Ever | Science | Smithsonian

One might think sending messages to other stars would be a massive, expensive job. No. It isn’t. The Cosmic Call was essentially a crowdfunded hobby project.

Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars

We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis.

Radio SETI Observations of the Anomalous Star KIC 8462852 (PDF)

We have made a radio reconnaissance of the star KIC 8462852 whose unusual light curves might possibly be due to planet-scale technology of an extraterrestrial civilization.

Nothing to report yet.

A fascinating guest post by Brian McConnell on Centauri Dreams: what if there’s a galactic equivalent to the internet, allowing civilisations to communicate with a system analogous to packet switching.

Unfortunately this kind of focussed signalling would be hard to detect. But on the other hand, it could explain the Fermi paradox.

The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy - The Atlantic

The most interesting anomaly uncovered by a Zooniverse project since Hanny’s Voorwerp.

Project Kronos on Vimeo

A beautiful bit of design fiction.

Archeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication edited by Douglas A. Vakoch

A free PDF download from NASA on all things SETI, specifically the challenges of interspecies interstellar communication.

The Last Pictures: Contemporary pessimism and hope for the future by Paul Glister

From the cave paintings at Lascaux to the Pioneer plaques and Voyager golden records to Trevor Paglen’s “The Last Pictures” project, Paul Glister examines the passage and preservation of art and information through time. Fascinating.

Or perhaps, as Paglen envisions, those who find a Pioneer Plaque, a Voyager Record, or one of our electromagnetic transmissions will be interested enough to search us out, coming upon a future Earth where all that is left of humanity are our terrestrial ruins and that artificial ring of geosynchronous satellites, with one of them having a particular golden artifact bolted to its pitted hull. In that scenario, about all that would be left for the visiting ETI to do in terms of learning about us would be grand-scale dumpster diving.

Link tags: seti

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