Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

Expect startling social effects when the 1,500 people who walk across Shibuya Crossing at every light change can become a temporary cloud of distributed computing power. In the summer of 2000, I visited David P. Anderson, technical instigator of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. I knew I had arrived at the right place when I spotted the WELCOME ALL SPECIES doormat. The University of California Space Sciences Laboratory in the Berkeley Hills is still the mother ship of community computation, nerve center of the largest cooperative computing effort in the world. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a privately funded scientific examination of extraterrestrial radio signals in search of messages from alien civilizations.

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The other pieces of the puzzle are all around us now but haven’t joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on the Internet auction site eBay is part of it. At least one key global business question is part of it: Why is the Japanese company Do-CoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while U.S. and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure?

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In Helsinki and Tokyo you can operate vending machines with your telephone and receive directions on your wireless organizer that show you how to get from where you are standing to where you want to go.6 “Lovegety” users in Japan find potential dates when their devices recognize another Lovegety in the vicinity broadcasting the appropriate pattern of attributes. Location-based matchmaking is now available on some mobile phone services.7 When I’m not using my computer, its processor searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m one of millions of people around the world who lend their computers to a cooperative effort—distributing parts of problems through the Internet, running the programs on our PCs while the machines are idle, and assembling the results via the Net. These computation collectives produce enough supercomputing power to crack codes, design medicines, or render digital films.8 Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: They enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before.

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind
by Susan Schneider
Published 1 Oct 2019

See also software, mind viewed as Sawyer, Robert, Mindscan, 82–84, 86–87, 95 Scharf, Caleb, 41–42 Schisler, Josh, 120–21, 145 Schneider, Susan The Language of Thought, 126 at Starshot Initiative, 41–43 Schwitzgebel, Eric, 68 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 101, 105–9, 106 Searle, John, 19–22, 20, 158n4 self viewed as illusion, 76, 77, 137, 161n10 sensory processing “hot zone,” 38 separation of mind from body, ability to imagine, 51, 55, 57 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 101, 105–9, 106 SIM and SIM* (software instantiation view of/approach to the mind), 134–42. See also software, mind viewed as singularity, approach of, 10–11 Siri, 37 slavery and AI consciousness, 4, 39 small-N or N=1 approach, 63, 100 social development, human, versus technological progress, 2 software, mind viewed as, 7–8, 120–47 abstract nature of programs and, 131–33, 132 alien/extraterrestrial AI and, 119 change, self’s survival of, 143–44 computational theory of mind, 23–25, 78–81, 158n4 functional immortality and, 135, 137 merging humans with AI and, 78–81 Mind-Body Problem and, 127–30, 139, 141 nonviability of, 126, 130–34 patternism and, 78–81, 125, 127, 134, 143–44 SAM (software approach to the mind), 124–27 SIM and SIM* (software instantiation view of/approach to the mind), 134–44 Suozzi, Kim, and, 120–22, 121, 133, 138, 144–46, 145 uploading and, 122–26, 133, 136–37, 146–47 soul theory, 76, 77, 88 spatiotemporal continuity, 85–89, 86–87, 93, 127, 163n10 speed superintelligence, 111 Star Trek: The Next Generation (TV show), 135–37 Star Wars (film), 12–13, 33 Starshot Initiative, 41–43, 42 substance dualism, 128–29, 140–41 substrate independence and transferring substrates, 24, 92–94, 150 Summit supercomputer, 11–12 Suozzi, Kim, 120–22, 121, 133, 138, 144–46, 145 superintelligence, 35–36, 109–19 symbolic/language of thought approach, 161n11 Synapse (U.S.

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So even if one is comfortable reasoning from the human case, the human case does not actually support the claim that the members of the most advanced alien civilizations will be superintelligent. This is a valid objection, but I think the other considerations that follow show that alien intelligence is also likely to be superintelligent. 2. Alien civilizations may have already been around for billions of years. Proponents of SETI (“the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”) have often concluded that alien civilizations would be much older than our own, if they exist. As the former NASA chief historian, Steven Dick, observes: “all lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically [it] ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.”3 This is not to say that all life evolves into intelligent, technological civilizations.

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Aaronson, Scott, 64 ACT test, 50–57, 60, 65, 67 Active SETI, 105–9 afterlife of the brain, 8, 145 AGI (artificial general intelligence), 9, 43 AI (artificial intelligence), 1–15, 148–50 alien/extraterrestrial, 5, 98–119 (See also alien/extraterrestrial AI) consciousness issues, 2–6 (See also consciousness) development of, 9–10 implications, importance of thinking through, 2–3, 10 Jetsons fallacy and, 12–13 merging humans with AI, 6–8, 72–81 (See also merging humans with AI) mind design, concept of, 1 postbiological, 99 singularity, approach of, 11–12 software, mind viewed as, 7–8, 120–47 (See also software, mind viewed as) transhumanism, 13–15 (See also transhumanism) uncertainties and unknowns regarding, 15 AI consciousness, problem of, 3–6, 16–32, 148–49 alien intelligences, postbiological, 5 alien/extraterrestrial AI, 110–11 biological naturalism, arguments against, 18–22, 34, 158n4 capability of machines for consciousness, 17–18 Chinese Room thought experiment and, 19–22, 20, 34, 148 control problem, 4–5 ethical treatment of conscious/potentially conscious AIs, 39, 67–69, 149 isomorph thought experiment and, 26–31, 57, 158nn13–14, 159nn10–11 “problem of other minds” and, 158n3 slavery and, 4, 39 techno-optimism, arguments for, 18, 23–26, 31, 34 value placed on humans by, 5 “Wait and See Approach” to, 33–34, 45 AI slavery, 4, 39 Alcor, 121, 145 alien/extraterrestrial AI, 5, 98–119 BISAs (biologically inspired superintelligent aliens), 113–19 consciousness, 110–11 control problem and, 104–5 postbiological cosmos approach, 99–104 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 101, 105–9, 106 software theory, 119 superintelligent AI minds, encountering, 109–19 Alzheimer’s disease, 44, 58 Amazon, 131 Arrival (film), 107 artificial general intelligence (AGI), 9, 43 artificial intelligence. See AI asbestos, 66 Asimov, Isaac, “Robot Dreams,” 57 astronauts and conscious AI, 41–43, 42, 103 Battlestar Galactica (TV show), 99 Bello, Paul, 159n1 Berger, Theodore, 44 Bess, Michael, 12 Big Think, 126 biological naturalism, 18–22, 34, 158n4 biologically inspired superintelligent aliens (BISAs), 113–19 Black Box Problem, 46 black holes, 10 Blade Runner (film), 17, 57 Block, Ned, 159n1, 162n11 “The Mind as the Software of the Brain,” 134 body.

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past)
by Cixin Liu
Published 11 Nov 2014

It’s worth some attention, and we should systematically analyze the matter in depth. Signed: XXX Date: XX/XX/196X II. Research Report on the Possibility of Technology Leap Due to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence 1. Current International Research Trends [Summary] (1) The United States and other NATO states: The scientific case and the necessity for SETI are generally accepted, and strong academic support exists. Project Ozma: In 1960, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, searched for extraterrestrial intelligence with a radio telescope 26 meters in diameter. The project examined the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani for 200 hours using ranges near the 1.420 gigahertz frequency.

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Starting from a higher vantage point, we should develop a comprehensive strategy and set of principles so that we can respond appropriately when technological leaps occur. Fields where technological leaps are most likely: Physics: [omitted] Biology: [omitted] Computer Science: [omitted] The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): Of all fields, this is the one in which the possibility for a technology leap is greatest. If a leap occurs in this field, the impact will exceed the sum of technology leaps in the other three fields. [Full Text][omitted] [Instructions from Central Leadership] Distribute this article to appropriate personnel and organize discussion groups.

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The transmission system was automated, and the monitoring system incorporated two IBM minicomputers. The data processing capability became far more advanced, and it was able to simultaneously monitor forty thousand channels. “But later, as people gained perspective, they had a better appreciation of the difficulty of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the leadership lost interest in Red Coast. The first change was reducing the base’s security rating. The consensus was that the extreme secrecy around Red Coast was unnecessary, and the security detail at the base was reduced from a company to a squad, until eventually only a group of five security guards were left.

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System
by Ray Jayawardhana
Published 3 Feb 2011

He called them black dwarfs and correctly estimated the threshold to be about 8 percent of a solar mass. A paper on his fndings appeared in the Astrophysical Journal the following year. The moniker we use today comes from Jill Tarter, better known for her pioneering efforts in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and often considered the role model for Jodi Foster’s character in the movie Contact. The only child of a former pro-football player, Tarter grew up a tomboy in upstate New York. She adored her father, who passed away when she was twelve. After completing a degree in engineering physics at Cornell University, she stayed on to take graduate courses.

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Besides, they can target more-distant stars, thus a much larger sample of hosts. So these missions offer the best prospects for fnding a life-bearing alien world in our lifetime. Of course, our frst indication of life elsewhere could come from an entirely different endeavor: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, through artifcial radio (or optical) signals. The modern efforts began in 1960 with Frank Drake, then at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He used the 26-meter radio dish at Green Bank, Virginia, to examine two nearby stars for signals at frequencies near that emitted by neutral hydrogen, a reasonable choice because hydrogen is the most common element in the universe.

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Radiometric dating: A technique for dating materials, based on a comparison of radioactive isotopes and their decay products, given known decay rates. Red dwarf: A star with a much lower mass than the Sun (about 10-50 percent of a solar mass) but a higher mass than a brown dwarf. It is the most common type of star in the Galaxy. Seti: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Solar mass: The amount of mass in the Sun. It is a common unit for expressing masses of stars. The Sun is about a thousand times more massive than Jupiter and about 330,000 times more massive than the Earth. Spectral Lines: Bright (emission) or dark (absorption) lines superimposed on the spectrum of an object.

Extraterrestrial Civilizations
by Isaac Asimov
Published 2 Jan 1979

Better yet, should we find them? Is it safe? These are the questions that must be asked once we agree that we are not alone, and astronomers are asking them. The whole matter of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has now become so common, in fact, that it has been abbreviated to save trouble in referring to it. Astronomers now refer to it as SETI, from the initials of the phrase “the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.” The first scientific discussion of SETI that offered a hope of carrying through the search successfully came only in 1959. It is natural to suppose, then, that the question of intelligence other than our own is of recent vintage.

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We can look for the evidence and someday, perhaps, find it, but until then, we can’t reasonably assign human intelligence to the dolphin. Besides, even if our definition of human intelligence on the basis of fire is unfair and self-serving on some abstract scale, it will prove useful and reasonable for the purposes of this book. Fire sets us on a road that ends with a search for extraterrestrial intelligence; without fire we would never have made it. The extraterrestrial intelligences we are looking for, then, must have developed the use of fire (or, to be fair, its equivalent) at some time in their history, or, as we are about to see, they could not have developed those attributes that would make it possible for them to be detected.

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The evidence is clearcut neither for nor against and must await further and better testing. Nevertheless, if life is present, there seems very little chance that it is anything more than very primitive in nature—no more than on the level of bacterial life on Earth. Such simple life would be quite sufficient to excite biologists and astronomers, but as far as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is concerned, we are left with what is overwhelmingly likely to be zero. We must look elsewhere. *There may be small amounts of water in the solid state (ice) held to the asteroids and other small worlds by chemical bonds that don’t depend on gravitational forces for their efficacy.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars
by Lee Billings
Published 2 Oct 2013

Sunlight filtered into the living room through a cobalt stained-glass window, splashing oceanic shades across an old man perched on a plush couch. Frank Drake looked blue. He leaned back, adjusted his large bifocal glasses, folded his hands over his belly, and assessed the fallen fortunes of his chosen scientific field: SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “Things have slowed down, and we’re in bad shape in several ways,” Drake rumbled. “The money simply isn’t there these days. And we’re all getting old. A lot of young people come up and say they want to be a part of this, but then they discover there are no jobs. No company is hiring anyone to search for messages from aliens.

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Bracewell, The Galactic Club: Intelligent Life in Outer Space (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1974). Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Nature, vol. 184 (1959), pp. 844–46. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Delacorte Press, 1992). I quote Drake from page 27. Stanislaw Lem, Summa Technologiae (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; first edition, 1964). Translated by Joanna Zylinska, this is the first complete English translation of Lem’s prescient classic on cosmic evolution.

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Pearman, “Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life and Interstellar Communication: An Informal Discussion,” in Interstellar Communication, A. G. W. Cameron, ed. (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1963), pp. 287–93. Iosif Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966). Walter Sullivan, We Are Not Alone: The Continuing Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, rev. ed. (New York: Dutton, 1993). Otto Struve, “Proposal for a Project of High-Precision Stellar Radial Velocity Work,” The Observatory, vol. 72 (1952), pp. 199–200. CHAPTER 2: Drake’s Orchids J. D. Bernal, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1929).

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
by Martin J. Rees
Published 14 Oct 2018

That will disappoint those searching for aliens but would imply that our Earth could be the most important place in the galaxy, and that its future is of cosmic consequence. It would plainly be a momentous discovery to detect any cosmic ‘signal’ that was manifestly artificial—radio ‘beeps’, or flashes of light from some celestial laser scanning the Earth. Searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) are worthwhile, even if the odds seem stacked against success, because the stakes are so high. Earlier searches led by Frank Drake, Carl Sagan, Nikolai Kardashev, and others didn’t find anything artificial. But they were very limited—it’s like claiming that there’s no life in the oceans after analysing one glassful of seawater.

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See also robots air traffic control, 108 Alcor, 81–82 Aldrin, Buzz, 138 aliens, intelligent: communicating through shared mathematical culture, 160, 168; with different perception of reality, 160, 190; early history of speculation on, 126–27; Earth’s history seen by, 1–2; likelihood of, 154–56, 162; possibly pervading the cosmos, 8, 156; search for, 156–64. See also planets; SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) Allen, Woody, 178 ALMA radio telescope in Chile, 207 AlphaGo, 86–87, 88, 106, 191 AlphaGo Zero, 87 Alzheimer’s disease, failure of drugs for, 212 Ambrosia, life-extension start-up, 80 Anders, Bill, 120 Anderson, Philip, 176 Andromeda galaxy, 178 animal research, ethics of, 221 Anthropocene, 3, 31 antibiotic resistance, 72 antimatter, 169 Apollo programme, 120, 137, 139, 144, 145 Archimedes, 165 Arkhipov, Vasili, 18 Armstrong, Neil, 120, 138 arts and crafts, resurgence of, 98 Asilomar Conference, 74–75 assisted dying, 70–71 asteroid impact: collapse in global food supplies and, 216; existential disaster compared to, 114; on Mars, sending rock to Earth, 129; nuclear destruction compared to, 15, 18; planning for, 15–16, 43; as rare but extreme event, 15, 76 asteroids: establishing bases on, 149; travel to, 148 astrology, 11 atoms: aliens composed of, 160; complexity and, 172–74; as constituents of all materials, 165–66, 168; hard to understand, 195; number in visible universe, 182; quantum theory of, 166, 205 Bacon, Francis, 61 battery technology, 49–50, 51 Baumgartner, Felix, 149 Baxter robot, 106 Before the Beginning (Rees), 186 The Beginning of Infinity (Deutsch), 192 Bethe, Hans, 222 The Better Angels of Our Nature (Pinker), 76 Bezos, Jeff, 146 big bang: birth of universe in, 124; chain of complexity leading from, 164, 214; conditions in particle accelerator and, 111; intelligent aliens’ understanding of, 160; physical laws as a given in, 197–98; possibly not the only one, 181, 183, 184–85 (see also multiverse) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 224 biodiversity: loss of, 32–33, 66; our stewardship of, 35 bio error, 73, 75, 77–78 biofuels, 32, 52 biohacking, 75, 78, 106 biotech: benefits and vulnerabilities of, 5, 6; concerns about ethics of, 73–75; concerns about safety of, 73, 74, 75, 76, 116, 218; responsible innovation in, 218, 225; threat of catastrophe due to, 76, 109–10; unpredictable consequences of, 63.

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See also AI (artificial intelligence) Rockström, Johan, 32 Roomba, 106 Rosetta space mission, 142 Rotblat, Joseph, 222 Royal Society of London, 61 Rumsfeld, Donald, 189 Russell, Stuart, 103, 106 Safire, William, 139 Sagan, Carl, 120–21, 133, 156, 223 satellite technology, 140–42 Saturn, 142–43, 214 Schrödinger’s equation, 166, 176 science: discouraging trends for young talent in, 211–12; diverse practices and styles in, 205–6; as a global culture, 214–15; great unifying ideas of, 174–75; hierarchy of, 175–77; need for public understanding of, 213–15; new technology and instruments for, 206–7; philosophy of, 203–5 scientific method, 202 scientists: aging of, 209–10, 211; amateur, 157, 212; arc of a research career, 208–11; engaging with the public, 9–10; independent of research universities, 212–13; intellectual abilities of, 202–3; involvement with ethical issues, 74–75, 221–24; philosophers and, 203–5 sea level rise, 39 security measures, 219–20 self-awareness: AI and, 107, 153; mystery of the brain and, 193. See also consciousness self-driving vehicles, 92–95, 102–3 sensor technology, 88, 102–3, 143 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 156–64. See also aliens, intelligent; planets Shockley, William, 68–69 Shogi, 87 short-termism, 28–29, 32, 45, 225, 226. See also timescales silicon chip, complexity of, 173 Silicon Valley, push for eternal youth in, 80–81 Simpson, John, 222 the singularity, Kurzweil on, 108 The Skeptical Environmentalist (Lomborg), 42 smallpox virus, 73 smart grids, 48 smartphones, 6–7, 83, 84, 91, 104, 216 Smith, F.

Beyond: Our Future in Space
by Chris Impey
Published 12 Apr 2015

It can also let us vault over uncertainties in biological evolution and look for the hallmarks of intelligence and technology. For decades, science fiction writers have woven stories of aliens who are biologically bizarre or who have eclipsed us with their technology. Scientists play this game too, and it’s known by the acronym of SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In an influential paper published in Nature in 1959, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison argued that a search was warranted even though there was no evidence for life any place other than Earth. They wrote: “The reader may seek to consign these speculations wholly to the domain of science-fiction.

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Cocconi and P. Morrison 1959. Nature, vol. 184, pp. 844–46. 22. “The Drake Equation Revisited. Part 1,” a retrospective by Frank Drake in Astrobiology Magazine, online at http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=610. 23. SETI 2020: A Roadmap for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, ed. by R. D. Ekers, D. Culler, J. Billingham, and L. Scheffer 2003. Mountain View, CA: SETI Press. 24. “Neuroanatomy of the Killer Whale (Orcinus orca) from Magnetic Resonance Images” by L. Marino et al. 2004. The Anatomical Record Part A, vol. 281A, no. 2, pp. 1256–63. 11: Living Off-Earth 1.

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Frank Drake likes to say that the dish could hold 100 million boxes of breakfast cereal or all the beer drunk on Earth in a single day. 13. “The Great Filter—Are We Past It?” by R. Hanson 1998, an unpublished paper archived online at http://hanson.gmu.edu/greatfilter.html. 14. “Where Are They? Why I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Finds Nothing” by N. Bostrom 1998. MIT Technology Review, May/June, pp. 72–77. 14: A Universe Made for Us 1. Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge, ed. by D. Broderick 2006. Giza, Egypt: Atlas and Company. 2. The evanescence of our civilization and cultural artifacts is sobering, given the technological prowess we exhibit.

Cosmos
by Carl Sagan
Published 1 Jan 1980

They believed that their audiences would be progressively disinterested as Mars was revealed to be less and less like the Earth. And yet the Martian landscapes are staggering, the vistas breathtaking. I was positive from my own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics—the origin of life, the Earth, and the Cosmos, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe. And I was certain that this interest could be excited through that most powerful communications medium, television. My feelings were shared by B. Gentry Lee, the Viking Data Analysis and Mission Planning Director. We decided, gamely, to do something about the problem ourselves.

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But a serious, rigorous, systematic search will come soon. The preparatory steps are now underway, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. It is comparatively inexpensive: the cost of a single naval vessel of intermediate size—a modern destroyer, say—would pay for a decade-long program in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Benevolent encounters have not been the rule in human history, where transcultural contacts have been direct and physical, quite different from the receipt of a radio signal, a contact as light as a kiss. Still, it is instructive to examine one or two cases from our past, if only to calibrate our expectations: Between the times of the American and the French Revolutions, Louis XVI of France outfitted an expedition to the Pacific Ocean, a voyage with scientific, geographic, economic and nationalistic objectives.

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We will know what else is possible. Because we will share scientific and mathematical insights with any other civilization, I believe that understanding the interstellar message will be the easiest part of the problem. Convincing the U.S. Congress and the Council of Ministers of the U.S.S.R. to fund a search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the hard part.* In fact, it may be that civilizations can be divided into two great categories: one in which the scientists are unable to convince nonscientists to authorize a search for extraplanetary intelligence, in which energies are directed exclusively inward, in which conventional perceptions remain unchallenged and society falters and retreats from the stars; and another category in which the grand vision of contact with other civilizations is shared widely, and a major search is undertaken.

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars
by Jo Marchant
Published 15 Jan 2020

Perhaps the best candidate occurred in August 1977, when a volunteer astronomer at the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio witnessed a surge of radio waves at 1,420 MHz in the constellation Sagittarius, so striking that he circled it on the printout and wrote “Wow!” in the margin. The signal was never detected again and never explained.* In 2015, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner helped to push the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) toward the mainstream when he donated $100 million to create a project called Breakthrough Listen, based at the University of California, Berkeley. That’s enough money to develop new search technologies such as machine learning and buy thousands of hours on the world’s top telescopes; enough to earn the support of some of astronomy’s top names*; enough to target a million nearby stars.

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In other words, speculating about alien societies is really driving a discussion about humanity: what’s important to us; who we are; what our future holds. Just as looking for life elsewhere makes us question how life relates to the cosmos and even the essence of what life is, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been forced to grow into something more profound. Again, we become part of something bigger. Human nature, rather than being the universal, inevitable state of intelligent beings, becomes one point within a vast ocean of possibility. I think that changes how we see humanity. Even if an alien signal never comes, the very concept gives us an “other” against which to locate ourselves, just as the Polynesian navigators visualized unseen islands to find their way against the stars

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repeated and unexplained radio bursts: University of California, Berkeley, “Distant Galaxy Sends Out 15 High-energy Radio Bursts,” press release, August 30, 2017, https://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/30/distant-galaxy-sends-out-15-high-energy-radio-bursts/. “exotic small-scale scientific enterprise”: Michael Michaud, “Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” in Dick, Life Beyond Earth, 295. most sophisticated civilizations: Susan Schneider, “Alien Minds,” in Dick, Life Beyond Earth, 189–206. see intelligence as a tool: Mark Lupisella, “Life, Intelligence, and the Pursuit of Value in Cosmic Evolution,” in Dick, Life Beyond Earth, 159–74.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission
by Jim Bell
Published 24 Feb 2015

See Golden Record Red dwarf stars, 280–281 Reducing environment, 139 Remote sensing, 19–20, 29 Reseau marks, 175 Resonance, orbital, 115, 120, 126 Rhea, 142, 150, 243 Rings Jupiter, 128, 144 Neptune, 185, 210–211 Saturn, 134–135, 142–145, 149–150 Uranus, 144, 184–186 Robotic sensors, 19–20, 29 Rocket launch technologies, 61–69 Ross 248 star, 281 Roth, Lorenz, 130–131 RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators), 56–57 Ryle, Martin, 80 Sagan, Carl, 1, 2, 11–12, 21, 23–24, 34, 72–77, 79, 82–83, 84, 85, 231–237, 238, 281 Sagan, Linda Salzman, 75–76, 83, 85 Saturn atmosphere, 134, 139–141 Bell’s childhood telescope viewings, 13, 133–134 Cassini mission, 25–26, 156, 157, 158–159, 189, 237–238 Flandro’s gravity assist research, 43–46 internal structure, 208 magnetic field, 73, 135, 178 moons, 131, 135, 142, 143, 145–148, 150, 151, 158–159, 166, 241, 243 Pioneer mission, 23, 73, 135–136, 139, 149 rings, 134–135, 142–145, 149–150 Voyager mission, 23, 30, 31–32, 47, 48, 49, 133–159 Scan platform, 56, 110–111, 153–159, 173–174, 230 Scarf, Fred, 154 Schurmeier, Harris “Bud,” 48 Science, 115, 263, 265–266, 287 Science Steering Group, 16, 107, 261 Seaborg, Glenn T., 275–276 Seaborgium, 276 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 75, 77, 80, 87 Sequencers, 64–69 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 75, 77, 80, 87 Shapiro, Irwin, 144 Shoemaker, Gene, 35 Sirius, 113, 290 Slingshots, 41–47, 105–106 Smith, Brad, 35–36, 59–61, 118–119, 205 Soderblom, Jason, 217 Soderblom, Larry, 34, 123, 146, 182, 214–217, 219 Solar nebula, 208 Solar system formation of, 169 photographs of, 231–238 planets, 241–243 size of, 242 Solar wind definition of, 17 interstellar space boundary, 243–251, 271–272 Neptune flyby data, 200 Uranus flyby data, 37, 171, 178–179, 181, 185 Southwest Research Institute, 266 Space exploration future of, 293–296 government funding of, 21–26 Space shuttles, 195 Space travel or tourism, 289–290, 295–296 Spectrometers, 16, 252 Spilker, Linda, 66–67, 119, 157–158, 162 Spirit, 10, 19, 26, 84, 230, 238–239 Squyres, Steve, 84, 238 Stars, 280–281, 283–285, 289 Stewart, Homer Joe, 45 Stockman, David, 22 Stone, Edward C., 16–18, 36, 37, 38, 49, 77, 107, 135, 142, 148, 153–154, 159, 170–171, 175, 177, 179, 209, 235, 246–251, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259–263, 265–271, 277, 292 Sun.

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(NASA/JPL) Middle: Plaque designed by Sagan, Drake, Lomberg, and others for the Voyager missions, and engraved onto the cover of the Voyager Golden Record. (NASA/JPL) Bottom: Explanation of the symbols and markings used on the Voyager plaque. (NASA/JPL) In the early 1970s, Sagan; his wife, the artist and writer Linda Salzman Sagan; and the pioneering Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomer Frank Drake acted on the idea put forward by science journalist Eric Burgess and author Richard Hoagland that humanity shouldn’t miss the opportunity to include a message of some kind on these high-tech emissaries that were about to be cast out forever into interstellar space.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future
by Brian Clegg
Published 8 Dec 2015

(Čapek) Rutherford, Ernest Rydberg blockade Sagan, Carl scaling aliens and SF creatures and space elevator and Schawlow, Art Schmitt, Harrison Schrödinger’s equation science fiction (SF) abbreviations for alien claims influenced by approaches Armageddon portrayal in beam weapons in careers inspired by climate change theme in definition of dinosaur portrayal in energy inventions in fantasy compared to genetic engineering in gravity use in matter transmitters in nanotechnology in physics laws in reality inspired by rocket belts in scaling issues in space travel in technology implications of teleportation in Sculley, John Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) sensory enhancement Serviss, Garrett P. SETI. See Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence 7-league boots SF. See science fiction Shannon, Claude Shelley, Mary Shenoy, Krishna The Shockwave Rider (Brunner) silicon Siri The Six Million Dollar Man The Sky at Night Skylark series (Smith) Slate, David sleep learning Smith, E.

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Contact, originally a 1985 novel by science communicator Carl Sagan, was made into a movie starring Jodie Foster that is often considered one of the best sci-fi movies for its science content and portrayal of a scientist. In the movie, an alien signal carries not the seeds of an invasion force but the instructions to enable human beings to join the star-traveling civilizations. The script centers on Dr. Ellie Arroway, who is employed by SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence program, at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. (Interestingly, in real life we have sent out a burst of information from Arecibo, our single largest dish, in an attempt to communicate with others in the universe.) Arroway and her colleagues receive a signal from Vega, a star also known as Alpha Lyrae, which is the fifth brightest star as we observe it, about 25 light-years in distance.

The Simulation Hypothesis
by Rizwan Virk
Published 31 Mar 2019

Another explanation is that we don’t have the right tools to see them or aren’t scanning the right frequencies. A recent article in MIT Technology Review went over the parameters that a search for extraterrestrial intelligence would need and found that there were eight dimensions in the search grid that need to be examined. The searches to date have only been done (through organizations like SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), on one fraction of one of these dimensions, so we have a long way to go!63 But another explanation is that there are no other civilizations, which would also be consistent with the simulation hypothesis.

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“simulated reality,” 75 physical world, creation of, 219–221 physics, new, 126–27 physics, old (classical), 124–26 physics engines, 16–17, 36–37, 123, 162, 176–78, 235, 283–84 physics engines vs. rendering engines, 51 “The Physics of Everything Else” (Vallée, TED talk, 2011), 240–41 picture element (pixel), 163 pixelated reality, 161 pixels 3D pixels and particles, 164–65 and 3D rendering engines, 59 characteristics of, 255 created by rendering engine, 51 definition of, 10 games rendered using, 2D to 3D, 42–44 information rendered as, 53 and particles, 162–64 physics engines vs. rendering engine, 51 and quanta, 167–69 rendered pixels, 135 value of, 162–64, 181, 262 and video game languages, 33 and virtual space (pixelated world), 181–82 pixels, experiments for evidence, 255–266 Planck, Max, 167–68, 290 Planck constant, 168, 267 Planck length, 168–69, 175, 181–82 Planck time, 181–82 Planetfall, 29 Plato, 201, 270–71 Play Labs, 6 player characters (PCs), 82, 280–81 player game state, 30 PMR (Physical Matter Reality), 157, 173–74 PNG, 163–64 Podolsky, Boris, 261 Pole Position, 34, 35f Pong, 24–25, 32, 32f possible futures, 12 posthuman civilization, 111–13 Princeton’s Advanced Engineering Research Lab (PEAR), 76 probability wave for a particle, 128f procedural generation, 47 procedurally generated world, 51 “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess” (Shannon, 1950), 85 Project Blue Book, 232 purely deterministic model, 125 Q QI (quantum indeterminancy), 11, 124 QI, philosophical questions raised by, 140–41 Qiyamah, Day of, 221–23 quanta, 10, 126–27, 161, 166–67, 181–82 quanta, of space, 167–69 quantized space and time, 173–76, 288 quantized time, 171–74 quantum computers, 257–260, 267, 273–74 quantum cryptography, 261 quantum entanglement, 179–182, 259–260 quantum entanglement and simulation, 261–63 quantum error correction, 259–260, 263 quantum foam, 168 quantum indeterminacy (QI), 11, 124, 134–35, 139–140, 253, 255, 257, 267, 282–83 quantum leap, 10, 127 quantum mechanics, 133, 168, 254–55, 259 quantum physics many worlds interpretation, 148–150 as new physics, 126–27 physical reality as quantized, 281–82 and physical world, 122–23 quanta in, 166–67 rendering engines based on QI, 283–84 and subjective reality, 10–13 quantum probability wave, 10–11, 130, 253 quantum probability wave, collapse of, 129–130 quantum superposition, 132–34 qubits (quantum bits), 258 quests, 285–86 quests and achievements, 210–11 quests and storylines, 41 R Raiders of the Lost Ark, 38 random number generators (RNGs), 76 raster image, 163–64 Ready Player One, 56–57, 61 “real object” definition, 68–69 reality nature of, 6 world views and religion, 5 real-time motion controls, 36 real-world rendering, 67 rebirth, 201 Reid, Harry, 232 reincarnation, 285–86 reincarnation, theoretical model, 205–8, 206f religion, mysticism and simulation hypothesis, 13–16 remote viewing, 243–44 rendered pixels, 135 rendered world, 42 rendering engine, 3D, 59 rendering engine rules, 138 rendering engine vs. physical engine, 51 rendering engines 2D to 3D, 58–59 and 3D world rendering, 66–67, 123 based on quantum indeterminacy, 282–83 for real world, 3D printers as, 69–71 and Simulation Point, 63–64 speed of, 66–67 rendering engines, speed of, 66 rendering engines vs. physical engines, 51 The Republic (Plato), 5, 270 resource argument, 250–52 retrocausality, 146 retrocausation, 160 Ricard, Matthieu, 207 Ringel, Zohar, 251–52 RNGs (random number generators), 76 role-playing games (RPGs), 38 role-playing games (RPGs), graphical, 39–42 room-scale VR, 55–56 Rosen, Nathan, 178, 261 RPGs (role-playing games), 38 RPGs (role-playing games), graphical, 39–42 Rucker, Rudy, 251–52 Rumi, 183 Rutherford, Ernest, 125, 167–68 Rutherford-Bohr planetary model, 125 S Samsara, 201 Sauvageau, Joe, 254–55 Savage, Martin J., 255 Saved by the Light (Brinkley, 1994), 229–230 Schrödinger, Erwin, 125, 132–34 Schrödinger’s Cat, 132–34, 140, 149, 259 science, goal of, 6 Science Advances, 251–52 scroll of deeds, 222–23 Second Life, 4, 45–46, 50, 56, 71, 177, 180, 191, 209–10, 213 Sedol, Lee, 87 Sega Genesis, 38 The Self-Aware Universe (Goswami), 133 self-contained world (video games), 2–3 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 236 seventh yoga, 197–99 Shannon, Claude, 23, 85–86, 104 Siddhartha Gautama, 203 simple programs, 266 The Sims, 4 simulated artificial intelligence (SAI), 281 simulated consciousness, 17–18 simulated world, 3 Simulation Argument, 5, 24–26, 110–11, 112f simulation game, 3–4 simulation hypothesis, 16 AI, gods and angels, 226–28 and conscious based arguments, 267 and dreams, 196–97 experiments for, 254–55 to explain the unexplainable, 20–21 fundamental question of, 4–5 the Great Simulation, 19–20 implications of Plato’s allegory of the cave, 270–71 OBEs, remote viewing, telepathy and other “unexplained” phenomena, 241–44 and parallel universes, 159–160 and quantum indeterminacy (QI), 139–140 and quantum physics, 10–13 and quests, 213–14 in religion and mysticism, 13–16 and resource based arguments, 267 and science fiction, 6–10 and simulations, computation and chaos, 18–19 storage of consciousness, 117 video game model based on karma, 211–13 virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and simulated consciousness, 16–18 as world explanation, 118–19 simulation hypothesis, arguments/experiment categories evidence of conditional rendering, 248–49 evidence of consciousness, 248 evidence of negation, 248 evidence of pixels or computation, 249 Simulation point, 20, 25–26 simulation point, stages current stage, 49–52 definition of, 26–27 reaching stage 9, 92–94 stage 0: text adventures and game worlds (1970s to mid-1980s), 27–31 stage 1: graphic arcade and console games (1970s-1980s), 32–38 stage 2: graphical adventure / RPG games (1980s- 1990s), 38–42 stage 3: 3D rendered MMORPGs and virtual worlds (1990s-Today), 42–48 stage 4: immersion using virtual reality, 54–62 stage 5: photorealistic augmented and mixed reality (AR, MR), 62–66 stage 6: real-world rendering: light-field display and 3D printing, 66–72 stage 7: mind interfaces, 72–77 stage 8: implanted memories, 77–80 stage 9: artificial intelligence and NPCs, 82–84 stage 10: downloadable consciousness and digital immortality, 100 stage 11: reaching the simulation point, 107–8 simulation point, defining, 107–8t simulation point, stage 9 requirements ability to create further AI, 94 learning over time, 93–94 Natural Language Processing (NLP), 92 natural language response, AI/NPCs, 92 physical interactions, 94 spatial awareness, 94 voice output, AI/NPCs, 93 voice recognition, AI/NPCs, 93 simulations, 153–55 simultaneity between events, 12 single-player text adventures, 27–31 singularity, 82, 100–101 The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil, 2005), 101 Siri, 88 Six Yogas of Naropa (Tsongkhapa), 192, 198 skeptics: resource argument, 250–52 Skyfall, 70 SNLP (statistical NLP), 89–90 social media and AGI, 98 Sony PlayStation VR headset, 60 Sophia (robot), 91, 91f souls, 285–86 Space Invaders, 34, 35f, 36, 82, 87, 208, 273 space time, 181–82 space time, instant travel, simulation overview, 176 quantum entanglement, 176, 180–81 teleportation, 176–78 wormholes, 176, 178–180 SpaceWar!

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe
by Marcus Chown
Published 22 Apr 2019

It all started with my book What a Wonderful World: Life, the Universe and Everything in a Nutshell, which was supposed to be about everything—though that is, of course, impossible. It did, however, cover everything from finance to thermodynamics, holography to human evolution, and sex to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. What, I wondered, should I include in my talk, and what should I leave out? It was then that I got the idea of talking about my “Top 10 bonkers things about the world.” The great thing was that this was a movable feast. So, if the audience looked bored with one of my bonkers things, I would drop it from the next talk and include something else that would hopefully get a better reception.

…

There was a hope that a candidate subatomic particle might turn up at the Large Hadron Collider, the giant particle accelerator near Geneva in Switzerland. But so far, no joy. In idle moments, I daydream about whether there might not be dark stars, dark planets, and dark life, and that the real reason a fifty-year search for extraterrestrial intelligence has drawn a blank is that the dark stuff is where all the action is, with the chaos of galactic commerce going on all around us. Invisibly. But, in addition to the 4.9 percent ordinary matter and the 26.8 percent dark matter, a whopping 68.3 percent of the mass of the universe is dark energy (remember: all energy has an equivalent mass—it weighs something—according to Einstein’s famous E = mc2 formula).

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
by Carl Sagan
Published 8 Sep 1997

Matthews, editors, Near-Earth Resources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 192 CHAPTER 20, DARKNESS Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? (New York: Delacorte, 1992). Paul Horowitz and Carl Sagan, "Project META: A Five-Year All-Sky Narrowband Radio Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Astrophysical Journal, vol. 415 (1992), pp. 218-235. Thomas R. McDonough, The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1987). Carl Sagan, Contact: A Novel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985) . CHAPTER 21, TO THE SKY! J. Richard Gott III, "Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects," Nature, vol. 263 (1993), pp. 315-319.

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We are now, on an unprecedented scale, listening for radio signals from possible other civilizations in the depths of space. Alive today is the first generation of scientists to interrogate the darkness. Conceivably it might also be the last generation before contact is made—and this the last moment before we discover that someone in the darkness is calling out to us. This quest is called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Let me describe how far we've come. The first SETI program was carried out by Frank Drake at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, in 1960. He listened to two nearby Sun-like stars for two weeks at one particular frequency. ("Nearby" is a relative term: The nearest was 12 lightyears—70 trillion miles—away

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 27 Feb 2012

If we consider the possibility that we may rank as primitive among the universe’s technologically competent life-forms—however rare they may be—then the best we can do is to keep alert for signals sent by others, because it is far more expensive to send than to receive. Presumably, an advanced civilization would have easy access to an abundant source of energy, such as its host star. These are the civilizations that would be more likely to do the sending. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (affectionately known by its acronym, SETI) has taken many forms. Long-established efforts have relied on monitoring billions of radio channels in search of a radio or microwave signal that might rise above the cosmic noise. The SETI@home screensaver—downloaded by millions of people around the world—enabled a home computer to analyze small chunks of the huge quantities of data collected by the radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico.

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—The review required by subsection (a) shall include (1) an assessment of the direction of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s astrobiology initiatives within the Origins program; (2) an assessment of the direction of other initiatives carried out by entities other than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to determine the extent of life in the universe, including other Federal agencies, foreign space agencies, and private groups such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute; (3) recommendations about scientific and technological enhancements that could be made to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s astrobiology initiatives to effectively utilize the initiatives of the scientific and technical communities; and (4) recommendations for possible coordination or integration of National Aeronautics and Space Administration initiatives with initiatives of other entities described in paragraph (2).

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Kennedy, USS, 5 Johnson, Lyndon B., 66–67, 124 Johnson Space Center, 8, 220 Journey to Inspire, Innovate, and Discover, A: Moon, Mars and Beyond, 146 Jupiter, 32, 33, 37, 40, 46, 52, 85, 88, 102, 112, 115, 117, 128, 157, 201, 245, 246 slingshot effect and, 119–20 Jupiter-C rocket, 126 Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO), 169–70 Kazakhstan, 121, 123 Kelvin, Lord, 108 Kennedy, John F., 4, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17, 79, 136, 219, 225 “Moon” speech of, 13, 79, 148–49, 191–92 Kennedy Space Center, 14–15, 16, 140, 145, 161, 220, 229 Kepler, Johannes, 115 Kinsella, Gary, 249–50 Korea, Republic of (South Korea), xiv Korean War, 149 Korolev, Sergei, 123–24, 126 Kubrick, Stanley, 128–29 Kuiper Belt, 168, 245 Kuwait, 27 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis, 173, 176 Lagrangian points, 72, 145, 173–76 gravity and, 172–74 launches from, 177 libration paths and, 174 NASA satellites and, 176 Laika (dog), 122 Langley, Samuel P., 216–17 Laplace, Pierre-Simon de, 117–18 Large Hadron Collider, 80, 82 lasers, 167 Lauer, Matt, 210–11 Launching Science, 169–70 Leno, Jay, 144–45 Le Verrier, Urbain-Jean-Joseph, 248 L5 Society, 175 life: chemical components of, 35–36 diversity of, 34–35 extinction episodes of, 49 extraterrestrial, see extraterrestrial life on Mars, 48, 259 search for, 41, 325 light, 30, 90, 93, 258 speed of, 109, 164, 195 LightSail-1, 167 Lindbergh, Charles, 110 Lindsay, John, 67 Lockheed Martin, 236 Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, 23 long-period comets, 46–47 Lovell, Jim, 112 low Earth orbit (LEO), 113 Luna 9 rover, 70 Luna 13 rover, 70 Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, 149–50 Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, 149 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), 150 MacHale, Des, 234 Madonna, 203 Magellan, Ferdinand, 95, 96 Major Mysteries of Science (Garbedian), 110 Manhattan Project, 80 many-body problem, 117–18 Mars, 7, 8, 14, 40, 46, 55, 77, 115, 129, 168, 188, 195, 200, 209 cratering on, 52 Earth viewed from, 27 life on, 48, 259 methane on, 31, 78, 138 proposed mission to, 78–79, 81–83 rocks ejected from, 48–49 rovers on, 130–33, 134, 138, 163, 198 Soviet achievements and, 122 water on, 48, 134, 138, 201, 227 Mars Express Orbiter, 138 Mars Global Surveyor, 138 Marshall Space Flight Center, 67 Mars Society, 236 mass extinction, 51 McAuliffe, Christa, 243 McDonald’s, 238 McNair, Ron, 234 Mécanique Céleste (Laplace), 117 Mercury (god), 108 Mercury (planet), 52, 115, 118 orbit of, 248 Mercury program, 7, 114 MESSENGER probe, 139 meteorites, 48 Tunguska River impact of, 50 see also asteroids methane, 30 on Mars, 31, 78, 138 on Titan, 138–39 Mexico, 50 microscope, 85–86 Microsoft, 136 microwaves, 41, 90, 91–92, 129, 141 microwave telescope, 91–92 Milky Way galaxy, 34, 41, 93, 97–101, 143, 147, 259 Andromeda galaxy and, 118–19 orbit of stars in, 118 radio emissions from center of, 90 Shapley-Curtis debate on, 98–101 Mir space station, 6, 165, 319 Mitchell, Edgar, 3 Mongols, 205–6 Moon, xiii–xiv, 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, 21, 46, 47, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72, 86, 89, 97, 111–12, 119, 132, 149, 186, 195, 196, 200, 220, 245 cratering on, 50, 57 Earth viewed from, 27 40th anniversary of landing on, 144 proposed return mission to, 55–56, 76–77, 83 rocks ejected from, 48 Soviet achievements and, 122 see also Apollo program, Apollo 11 motion, third law of, 153, 158 multiverse, 259 NanoSail-D, 167 NASA Flexibility Act of 2004, 330 National Academy of Public Administrations, 322 National Academy of Sciences, 11, 98, 325 National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, xv, 4, 58, 66, 125, 252, 265–91, 328 access to information in, 273–74 aerospace vehicle in, 282–84 amended text of, 265–91 appropriations in, 284–85, 286 awards in, 278–79 civilian-military liaison in, 271 congressional reporting in, 271 excess land in, 272 insurance in, 281–84 international cooperation in, 271, 291 inventions in, 276–78 jurisdiction in, 290 launch vehicle contracts in, 285–86 lawsuits in, 279–80 misuse of name in, 285 National Advisory Committee in, 272–73 prize authority in, 286 property leases in, 289 property rights in, 276–77 purpose and objectives of, 265–67 recovery authority in, 290 security in, 274–75 transfer of functions in, 273 upper atmosphere research in, 290–91 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2000, 326–27 National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), 59–60, 89, 114, 162, 166–68, 192, 199–200, 203, 219, 305, 306, 309 acquisition of space science data and, 314–15 additional activities of, 313–14 aero-space transportation technology integration plan of, 323–24 anchor tenancy contracts and, 308–9 Astronaut Pen of, 194 budget of, xiv, 10, 12, 15, 56, 75, 150, 169–70, 209–10, 212, 228, 237 carbon cycle research program of, 325–26 civil rights movement and, 66–67 creation of, 5–6, 66–67, 125, 267 decision making at, 146 deputy administrator of, 328 divisions of, 9 Earth science data sources and, 315–16 economic impact of, 237 expert input and, 146–47 Exploration Award of, 146–47 functions of, 265–72 future and, 252–53 Human Space Flight Innovative Technology program of, 324 international politics and, 5–7 Mars rovers and, 130–34 new Mars mission and, 77–78 new Moon mission and, 56, 77–78 number of employees of, 236 Obama on role of, 11–12 Obama’s vision of, 11–17 100th anniversary of flight initiative and, 326 payloads of, 313–14 political partisanship and, 4–5, 13–14 reorganization of, 329 scientific value of, 9–11 spending by, xv, 7–9, 25, 193–94, 331–32, 333–35 statutory provisions applicable to, 293–94 use of government facilities and, 309 vision statement of, 68 working capital fund of, 328 see also specific centers, programs, and vehicles National Air and Space Museum, 7–8, 23, 144 National Commission on Excellence in Education, 58 National Defense Education Act of 1958, 125 National Defense Scholarships, 125 National Geographic channel, 231 National Institute of Standards and Technology, 12, 306–7 National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, 306 National Institutes of Health, 209 National Museum of Natural History, 98 National Research Council, 169, 322 National Science Foundation, 11–12, 23, 125, 219, 305 National Security Council, 124 National Space Grant College and Fellowship Act of 1987, 295–303 administrative services, 301 appropriations, 303 competitive awards, 303 contracts, 298–99 fellowship program in, 300–301 functions of, 297–98 grants in, 298–99 identity of needs in, 299 personnel services in, 301 purpose of, 295–96 regional consortium in, 300 reports to Congress in, 302–3 review panel in, 301 National Space Institute, 175 National Space Society, 146, 175, 236 National Space Symposium, 222 National Technical Information Service, 304 “Nation at Risk, A,” 58 Natural History, xiii NBC, 144, 178 Neptune, 27, 36, 46, 115, 119, 157 discovery of, 248 Netherlands, 7 neutrinos, 94 Newcomb, Simon, 216 New Horizons spacecraft, 168 New Scientist, 123 Newton, Isaac, 65, 113–17, 119, 153, 158, 192, 247, 257 New York, N.Y., 96, 124, 224, 238 New York Times, 55, 96, 110, 124, 216–17 NEXT ion propulsion system, 170 Nigeria, 23 nitrogen, 101, 239, 240, 258 Nixon, Richard M., 4–5, 225 Nobel, Alfred Bernhard, 88 Nobel Prize, 88–89, 94, 206 North Atlantic Drift current, 93 North Carolina, 109, 216 Northrop Grumman, 236 Norway, 7 NOVA (TV series), 231 novae, 100 NRA, 236 nuclear power, 159, 168–69 numbers: Arabic, 205 increasing powers of, 237–38 Obama, Barack, 11, 14–16, 76, 186–87, 252 space policy and, 77 Obama administration, 75 Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, 311 Office of Human Spaceflight, 323–24 Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications, 323 Office of Management and Budget, 318 Office of Research and Technology Applications, 303–4, 305 Ohio, 4–5, 184–85 O’Neill, Gerard K., 8, 175 Onizuka, Ellison, 243 Opportunity (Mars exploration rover), 130–32, 138 orbits, 113–20 of Earth, 115 elongated, 115–16 free fall and, 119 many-body problem and, 117–18 of Mercury, 248 of Pluto, 115 sling-shot effect and, 119–20 of stars, 118 suborbital trajectories and, 114 three-body problem and, 116–17 of Venus, 115 Orellana, Francisco de, 197 organic chemistry, 36, 48 Origin of Species (Darwin), 98 oxygen, 31, 35–36, 101, 158, 239, 240, 258 ozone, 51, 93 Pakistan, 49 Panama Canal, 87 panspermia, 48–49, 259 Parliament, British, 217 “Passport to the Universe” (Druyan and Soter), 256 Pegasus, 108 Penzias, Arno, 92 perturbation theory, 118 Peru, 196–97 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 203 photosynthesis, 31 Pigliucci, Massimo, 75–83 Pioneer anomaly, 244–45, 248–51 Pioneer program: Pioneer 0, 245 Pioneer 3, 245 Pioneer 4, 245 Pioneer 5, 245 Pioneer 9, 245 Pioneer 10, 118, 244–45, 247, 248–50 Pioneer 11, 168, 244–45, 247, 249 Pioneer 12, 245 Pioneer 13, 245 Pizarro, Gonzalo, 196–97 planetary motion, first law of, 115 Planetary Society, 166–67, 193, 236, 250 Pluto, 82, 112, 118, 128, 168, 195, 201 orbit of, 115 Pravda, 121 Prescott, William H., 196 Presidential Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, 59–60, 146 President’s Commission on Higher Education, 125 Prince (singer), 203 Principia (Newton), 113 Project Prometheus, 169–70 propulsion: alternate fuels for, 157–59 antimatter drive and, 170–71 chemical fuel for, 163 electricity and, 165 in-space, 170 ion-thruster engine and, 164–65, 170 nuclear power and, 159, 168–69 rocket equation and, 153–54, 157 and slowing down, 155–56 solar sails and, 159, 165–67, 170 third law of motion and, 153, 158 xenon gas and, 164–65 Proxima Centauri, 195–96 Ptolemy, Claudius, 34, 65 pulsars, 29 Qatar, 5 quasars, 91 R-7 rocket, 126 racism, 66–67 radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), 168–69 radio telescopes, 91 radio waves, 28–29, 30, 31, 39, 90–91 radium, 96 RAND Corporation, 218 Ranger 7 spacecraft, 70 Reagan, Ronald, 5, 6 relativity, general theory of, 94–95, 101, 248, 250 relativity, special theory of, 195–96 Republicans, 4–5, 15, 17, 224–25 Resnik, Judith, 243 robots, 129, 134 in space exploration, 57, 89–90, 128, 130–32, 187, 198, 199, 202 rocket equation, 153–54, 157 rockets: flybys and, 157 liquid-fueled, 192 phallic design of, 222–23 propulsion of, see propulsion Rodriguez, Alex, 114 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 94, 96, 135 Royal Society, 216 Russia, xiv, 6, 22, 162, 168 ISS and, 319 Star City training center of, 73, 74, 207 Sagan, Carl, 27, 28, 43, 193, 256 Salyut space module, 6 Sarge (comedian), 234 satellites, xiii, xiv, 60, 71, 94 communication, 129 first US, 124–25 Saturn, 31, 82, 112, 115, 119, 138, 157, 168, 210, 225, 245 radio emissions from, 90–91 Saturn V rocket, 15, 127, 154, 158, 172, 214, 219, 220, 229 as a wonder of the modern world, 232–33 Schmitt, Harrison, 69, 132 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 153 science, 206, 226 Arabs and, 205–6 discovery and, 98 emerging markets and, 209–10 literacy in, 57–59, 230–31, 235–36 multiple disciplines and, 209–10 Scientific American, 223 scientific method, 86 Scobee, Dick, 242 Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation, 146 Senate, US, 5, 146, 328 Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee of, 272 and appointments to Commission on Future of Aerospace Industry, 316 Appropriations Committee of, 321, 329 Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee of, 288, 321, 323, 324, 329 sense of wonder, 64–65 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 206 Sesame Street (TV show), 257 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 41, 325 Shapley, Harlow, 98–101 Shatner, William, 180 Shaw, Brewster, 221 Shepard, Alan B., 114 short-period comets, 46 Siberia, 50 Sims, Calvin, 55–62 Sirius, 178 Skylab 1 (space station), 214 slingshot effect, 119–20 Smith, George O., 175 Smith, Michael, 242 Smithsonian Institution, 216 solar sails, 159, 165–67, 170 solar system, 34, 259 many-body problem and, 117–18 perturbation theory and, 118 solar wind, 176, 235, 245 solid rocket boosters, 155 Soter, Steven, 256 sound, speed of, 108–9 sound barrier, 109 South Africa, xiv South Pole, 76 Soviet Union, xiii, 8, 94, 133, 194, 215, 218 US rivalry with, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 see also Sputnik space, space exploration: colonization of, 57, 60, 102–3 cosmic microwave background in, 92, 94–95 cross-discipline endeavor in, 24–25, 230 culture and, 72–74, 147–48, 210–11 early attitudes toward, 217–18 economic motivation for, 200–201 factions against, 8–10 in Galef/Pigliucci interview of author, 75–83 inventions statute and, 311 justification for funding of, 78–81 militarization of, 60 numbers employed in, 236–37 politics and, 3–5 proposed programs and missions for, 201–2 robots and, 57, 89–90, 128, 130–32, 187, 198, 199, 202 significance of, 102 Soviet achievements in, 122–26 special interests and, 5, 236–37 stellar nurseries in, 93 technological innovation and, 12 US-Soviet rivalry and, 5–6, 59, 79, 87, 121–27, 133, 192, 219 war as driver of, 219–20 Space Cowboys (film), 162 Space Exploration Initiative, 8 Space Foundation, 221–22 Spaceguard Survey, The: Report of the NASA International Near-Earth Object Detection Workshop, 50 space junk, 176 space shuttle, 7, 12, 25, 109, 160–62, 165, 201, 202, 228, 281 contingency funding for, 321–22 fuel of, 158 launch costs of, 320–22 main parts of, 154–55 pricing policy for, 314 retirement of, 14–16, 143, 214 speed of, 222 use policy for, 312–13 weight of, 155 see also specific vehicles Space Station Freedom, 6, 8 Space Studies Board, 169 Space Technology Hall of Fame, 221, 230–31, 237 Space Telescope Science Institute, 10, 23, 135–36 Space Transportation System, 314 space travel, 191–98 coasting in, 247 in Colbert–author interview, 186–88 danger of, 198 financing of, 193–94 in Hollywood movies, 194–95 Moon missions and, 192–93 robots and, 198 special relativity and, 195–96 Space Travel Symposium, 111 Spain, 7, 87 spectroscopy, 30 Spirit (Mars exploration rover), 130–33, 138 Spitzer Space Telescope, 139 Sputnik, xiii, 5, 59, 79, 113–14, 133, 192, 218 50th anniversary of, 226 US response to, 122–24 Star City (training center), 73, 74, 207 Stars & Atoms (Eddington), 107 Star Trek (TV series), 3, 164, 170 45th anniversary of, 178–81 human behavior and, 180 technology of, 179 Star Trek: The Motion Picture (film), 37–38 Star Wars (film series), 131 State Department, US, 312 Stewart, Jon, 4 Stone, Sharon, 203 subatomic particles, 94 Sugar, Ron, 221 Sun, 27, 28, 29, 33, 46, 58, 72, 97, 112, 117, 118, 138, 195, 245 Copernican principle and, 34 energy emitted by, 93 fusion in, 101 neutrinos emitted by, 94 planets’ orbits and, 115 Superconducting Super Collider, 6–7, 80–81 Sweden, 7 Swift, Philip W., 223 Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, 139 Switzerland, 7 Sykes, Wanda, 17 Systems of the World, The (Newton), 113 Taj Mahal, 88 Tamayo-Méndez, Arnaldo, 122 TASS, 123 Taylor, Charles E., 219 technology, 89, 200, 226 aero-space integration plan for, 323–24 in alien observation of Earth, 29–32 CRDAs policy on transfer of, 304–6 energy conservation and, 96 engineering, 95 Industrial Revolution and, 95 information, 95 leadership and, 23 multiple disciplines and, 135–37 nonsectarian philosophies and, 206 predicting future of, 215–16 progress in, 218–19 space exploration and, 135 of Star Trek, 179 US lag in, 21–22 telescopes, 71, 82, 85–86, 94, 141, 225 microwave, 91–92 radio, 91 ultraviolet, 93 Tereshkova, Valentina, 122 Texas, 6 Thompson, David, 221 three-body problem, 116–17 Three Gorges Dam, 22, 233 Three Mile Island meltdown, 168 Titan, 31 Huygens probe to, 138–39 methane on, 138–39 Today Show (TV show), 210–11 Tonight Show (TV show), 144–45 Toth, Viktor, 250 Townsend, W.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

For more than a decade, ordinary people had been not just willing but also eager to turn part of their computer’s run cycles over to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project. The SETI@ home distributed computing initiative has been wildly successful for almost a decade. It sends out chunks of data (or “work units”) to computers all over the world, and the users then send the results back. Users’ willingness to share their untapped computing power means that the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project does not need to purchase extra supercomputers or rent time on them. The distribution here is essentially a free gift, and requires little from the participants beyond their signing up, and then allowing the data chunks to flow in and the results to flow out.

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 22 Oct 2012

And if it does, some of its signals will leak out into space, spreading through the galaxy at the speed of light. It wasn’t long before twentieth-century astronomers began seriously to consider the feasibility of listening for signals from space using their newly developed radio telescopes. And the serious search for extraterrestrial intelligence began with one man. DRAKE AND HIS EQUATION The first serious ET hunter was the astronomer Frank Drake, who worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. In 1960 he set up an experiment to search for signs of life in distant solar systems by listening in to electromagnetic signals at radio-wave frequencies.

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After many hours of recorded data over several months had been examined, no interesting signals were found apart from one, which turned out to have come from a high-flying aircraft. But Drake was not disappointed. He has always maintained that the process was like buying a lottery ticket: he knew he would have been incredibly lucky if something had been found. Undeterred, the following year he organized the very first conference on SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and invited along every other scientist he knew to be interested in the subject at the time (all twelve of them). In order to focus their minds, he devised a mathematical formula for calculating the number of civilizations, N, in our galaxy whose radio signals would be detectable on Earth.

Statistics hacks
by Bruce Frey
Published 9 May 2006

roulette fair payouts gambler's fallacy about overview ROUND function 2nd ROUNDDOWN function 2nd ROUNDUP function 2nd rule of four rule of two rule of two plus two Index [SYMBOL] [A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M] [N] [O] [P] [Q] [R] [S] [T] [V] [W] [X] [Y] [Z] Sackrowitz, Harold 2nd safe cracking Sagan, Carl 2nd Salkind, Neil 2nd sample size coin toss and effect size and 2nd sampling error and statistical significance and 2nd samples <Emphasis>t</> tests and cluster defined 2nd discrete/continuous objects in efficient extraterrestrial life inferential statistics and predicting baseball games statistical significance of sampling errors 2nd sampling frame 2nd sampling unit 2nd SAS software SAT 2nd Saxbe, Darby scale invariance scores [See also scores: (see also test scores\\] [See also scores: (see also test scores\\] central tendency of consistency in correlation coefficient defined error high level of measurement likelihood of higher observed 2nd 3rd ordinal level of measurement percentage of predicting 2nd reliability of 2nd 3rd standardized 2nd T scores 2nd true 2nd 3rd validity of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) sensitivity serendipity, interpreting SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Shadish, W.R. shared variance 2nd short-stacked shuffling cards significance [See statistical significance] simple linear regression [See linear regression] single substitution format six degrees of separation six-sided dice 2nd skips Skorupski, William 2nd slips SLOPE function slot machines small-world problem 2nd 3rd Smart Shuffle (iTunes) Smith, Will Soter, Steven 2nd Spears, Britney 2nd species, discovering specificity splitting hands 2nd 3rd SPSS software 2nd St.

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There is so much data being collected as part of systematic efforts to scan the skies, no one person or even one computer can possibly analyze it all. You can help! SETI@home is a Berkeley University-based program that arranges for regular people with regular home or office computers to receive some of this data, so their computers can analyze it when they're not doing something else. SETI is the acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The program works like a screensaver and can be downloaded for free at http://setiathome.berkely.edu. The data won't make sense to you when you get it, but your computer will begin to use statistical analyses to sort through the signal information, looking for the telltale nonrandom narrow bandwidths that might mean another planet has reached the level of sophistication to produce something like Gomer Pyle or Melrose Place.

Exoplanets: Hidden Worlds and the Quest for Extraterrestrial Life
by Donald Goldsmith
Published 9 Sep 2018

If the Milky Way contains civilizations whose stage of development roughly mimics our own, they, too, might employ radio waves for their localized radio and television communications, for radar systems, and even, as we have occasionally done, to signal their existence to the cosmos. Although funding for SETI, the generic term for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, has often been scarce (or, in the case of efforts financed by the United States government, eliminated by statute in 1994 and never again proposed)1, SETI-oriented astronomers have completed a variety of investigations that either surveyed the sky or directed their attention toward particular stars.

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See Photons Red dwarfs, 43, 45, 82–83, 107–8, 119, 167, 170–71 Red giants, 100, 187 Rees, Martin, 212 Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, 46, 196 Sahu, Kailash, 83 Sasselov, Dimitar, 157 Saturn, 22, 58, 66, 71–72, 79, 96, 98, 101–2, 115, 117, 121, 128, 138, 164–65, 212 Schilling, Govert, 3 Seager, Sara, 191–92 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 86, 102 Shankman, Cory, 23 Silicates, 108 Silicon, 137, 153, 219–20 Solar eclipse, 75 Sound waves, 89, 122, 202 South African Large Telescope (SALT), 196 Southwest Research Institute, 141 SPACE Act, 222 Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), 203 Spectroscopic analysis, 8, 17–18, 30, 47–49, 62, 66, 71, 111, 122, 129, 172, 182, 194, 199, 211 SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch), 73 Spitzer Space Telescope, 79, 81, 104–7, 119, 178, 191 Spring tides, 149 Stanford University, 154 Stars brown-dwarf, 41, 69, 82 composition of, 151–52 distances of, 6–18, 31–59, 62, 77, 205–20 energy generation in, 56, 67, 82–83, 99–100, 119–20, 137, 152, 218 flares on, 31, 56, 123, 169–79, 189 formation of, 41 lifetimes of, 171 luminosity of, 43–44, 82, 93, 101–13, 117–19, 152, 163, 169, 172, 185, 207 masses of, 31–32, 79, 81 metallicity of, 153 subgiant, 99 Stein 2051 B, 83 Subgiant stars, 99 Sub-Neptunes, 129–33, 138, 144 Super-Earths, 129–33 SuperWASP, 110 Tabby’s Star, 92–95 Temperatures suitable for life.

How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1997

Or by starting an interplanetary dialogue? In a Saturday Night Live skit, the long-awaited reply from outer space was “Send more Chuck Berry.” These are not just questions for late-night dorm-room bull sessions. In the early 1990s NASA allocated a hundred million dollars to a ten-year Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Scientists were to listen with radio antennas for signals that could have come only from intelligent extraterrestrials. Predictably, some congressmen objected. One said it was a waste of federal money “to look for little green men with mis-shapen heads.” To minimize the “giggle factor,” NASA renamed the project the High-Resolution Microwave Survey, but it was too late to save the project from the congressional ax.

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Perhaps this answers the rhetorical question in the sporting equipment ad: The average man’s IQ is 107. The average brown trout’s IQ is 4. So why can’t a man catch a brown trout? Intelligence isn’t for everyone, any more than a trunk is, and this should give SETI enthusiasts pause. But I am not arguing against the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; my topic is terrestrial intelligence. The fallacy that intelligence is some exalted ambition of evolution is part of the same fallacy that treats it as a divine essence or wonder tissue or all-encompassing mathematical principle. The mind is an organ, a biological gadget. We have our minds because their design attains outcomes whose benefits outweighed the costs in the lives of Plio-Pleistocene African primates.

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Of course no one really knows whether these four habits formed the base camp for the ascent of human intelligence. And no one knows whether there are other, untried gradients to intelligence in biological design space. But if these traits do explain why our ancestors were the only species out of fifty million to follow that route, it would have sobering implications for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A planet with life may not be enough of a launching pad. Its history might have to include a nocturnal predator (to get stereo vision), with descendants that switched to a diurnal lifestyle (for color) in which they depended on fruit and were vulnerable to predators (for group living), which then changed their means of locomotion to swinging beneath branches (for hands and for precursors to upright posture), before a climate shift sent them from the forest into grasslands (for upright posture and hunting).

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

That’s because M13 will have moved from its 1974 location, relative to Earth. Of course the Arecibo team knew this, but milked the press opportunity anyway. Still, other star systems might be more profitable targets for radio telescope probes. And what intelligence they detect might not be biological. This assertion came from SETI (which stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Headquartered in Mountain View, California, just a few blocks from Google, the now fifty-year-old organization tries to detect signs of alien intelligence coming from as far away as 100 trillion miles. To catch alien radio transmissions, they’ve planted forty-two giant dish-shaped radio telescopes three hundred miles north of San Francisco.

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Rubin, Andrew “Runaround” (Asimov) Safe-AI Scaffolding Approach Sagan, Carl SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems Schmidt, Eric Schwartz, Evan Scientist Speculates, The (Good, ed.) Searle, John self-awareness Self-Aware Systems self-improvement self-preservation September 11 attacks serial processing SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Shostak, Seth Silicon Valley Singularitarians Singularity definitions of Kurzweil and technological Singularity Is Near, The (Kurzweil) Singularity Summit Singularity University Sir Groovy Siri 60 Minutes Skilling, Jeffrey Smart Action smart phones see also iPhone software complexity of malware see also programming solar energy space exploration “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” (Good) speech recognition SRI International stealth companies Sterrit, Roy Stibel, Jeff Stuxnet subprime mortgage crisis Symantec SyNAPSE Technological Risk (Lewis) technology journalism Terminator movies terrorism 9/11 attacks Thiel, Peter Thinking Machines, Inc.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
by Jeff Hawkins
Published 15 Nov 2021

And the tombstone must have cosmic-scale duration: not only must it be visible from parsecs away, it must last for millions if not billions of years, so that it is still proclaiming its message when other flashes of intellect intercept it long after our extinction. Broadcasting prime numbers or the digits of π won’t cut it. Not as a radio signal or a pulsed laser beam, anyway. They certainly proclaim biological intelligence, which is why they are the stock-in-trade of SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and science fiction, but they are too brief, too in the present. So, what signal would last long enough and be detectable from a very great distance in any direction? This is where Hawkins provoked my inner Huxley. It’s beyond us today, but in the future, before our firefly flash is spent, we could put into orbit around the Sun a series of satellites “that block a bit of the Sun’s light in a pattern that would not occur naturally.

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Think of how much we would appreciate knowing that intelligent life existed elsewhere in our galaxy. For many people, it would completely change their outlook on life. Even if we couldn’t communicate with the extraterrestrial beings, it would be of immense interest to us to know that they exist or once existed. This is the goal of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), a research program designed to find evidence of intelligent life in other parts of the galaxy. Beyond the fact that we once existed, we could communicate our history and our knowledge. Imagine if the dinosaurs could tell us how they lived and what led to their demise. That would be immensely interesting and perhaps vitally useful to us.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

Kingsley in The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in the Optical Spectrum, vol. 2, S. A. Kingsley and G. A. Lemarchand, eds. (1996) Proc. WPIE 2704: 102–16. 67. N. S. Kardashev, "Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations," Soviet Astronomy 8.2 (1964): 217–20. Summarized in Guillermo A. Lemarchand, "Detectability of Extraterrestrial Technological Activities," SETIQuest 1:1, pp. 3–13, http://www.coseti.org/lemarch1.htm. 68. Frank Drake and Dava Sobel, Is Anyone Out There? (New York: Dell, 1994); Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Scientific American (May 1975): 80–89.

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The more informed recent view is that, even if the likelihood of a star's having a planet with a technology-creating species is very low (for example, one in a million), there are so many stars (that is, billions of trillions of them), that there are bound to be many (billions or trillions) with advanced technology. This is the view behind SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—and is the common informed view today. However, there are reasons to doubt the "SETI assumption" that ETI is prevalent. First, consider the common SETI view. Common interpretations of the Drake equation (see below) conclude that there are many (as in billions) of ETls in the universe, thousands or millions in our galaxy.

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Seth Shostak provided "an estimate of between 10,000 and one million radio transmitters in the galaxy." Marcus Chown, "ET First Contact 'Within 20 Years,' " New Scientist 183.2457 (July 24, 2004). Available online at http://www.new scientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6189. 71. T. L. Wilson, "The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Nature, February 22, 2001. 72. Most recent estimates have been between ten and fifteen billion years. In 2002 estimates based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope were between thirteen and fourteen billion years. A study published by Case Western Reserve University scientist Lawrence Krauss and Dartmouth University's Brian Chaboyer applied recent findings on the evolution of stars and concluded that there was a 95 percent level of confidence that the age of the universe is between 11.2 and 20 billion years.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris
Published 30 Jun 1988

It is to employ radiotelescopes to listen for electromagnetic signals—radio or television transmissions—beamed into space by alien civilizations. Such a signal, transmitted using only a few cents’ worth of electricity, travels at the speed of light and could be intercepted by radiotelescopes on Earth across distances of many thousands of light-years. This was the realization behind what came to be called SETI—the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI was first proposed in 1959 by two scientists, Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison. “The probability of success is difficult to estimate,” they noted, “but if we never search, the chance of success is zero.”9 The first SETI experiment, Project Ozma, was conducted in the early 1970s by the American astronomer Frank Drake.

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Their dominance in the universities, which had been founded largely to study Aristotle, constituted an obstacle to acceptance of the Copernican system advocated by Kepler and Galileo. Science. Systematic study of nature, based upon the presumption that the universe is based upon rationally intelligible principles and that its behavior can therefore be predicted by subjecting observational data to logical analysis. SETI. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, by using radiotelescopes to listen for signals transmitted by intelligent alien beings. Sextant. Instrument employed to measure the elevation of astronomical objects above the horizon. Based upon an arc equal to a sixth of a circle, sextants are more compact and easier to use than are the quadrants that preceded them.

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uniformitarianism, 225–229 nuclear fusion and, 248, 252–254 scientific age-dating, 221–229 thermodynamics and, 246–248, 254 ancient Greeks’ conception of, 26n conditions necessary for intelligent life on, 372–374 death of the sun and, 270 four elements as composition of, 69 mean distance from the sun (est.), 123–124 measuring velocity of, 179–180 orbit of (est.), 136–137, 138 Renaissance exploration of, 47–59 retrograde motion of, 23 stellar fusion of elements and, 279–280 triangulation of the stars and, 136–137 Eccentrics of Ptolemy, 29–30 Eddington, Arthur Stanley, 38n, 170, 203, 210, 211, 253, 272 Eddington’s number, 38n Egypt (ancient), 20 Eightfold way (hadron arrangement), 311 Einstein, Albert, 10, 11, 15, 177–178, 182–204, 211, 212, 283, 302, 364 four-dimensional space-time continuum and, 197, 198, 199–202 on Galileo, 83, 94–95 general theory of relativity of, 178, 185, 191, 196–197, 200–204 gravitation and, 120 inertial and gravitational mass and, 34, 193–196 Lemaître’s origin of the universe and, 212 on mystery of science, 385 on Newton, 103, 121 nuclear weapons and, 252, 254 quantum indeterminacy and, 290–291 quantum physics and, 178, 200 special theory of relativity of, 178, 183, 185, 191–194, 197, 200 symmetry and, 307 thought experiments of, 91, 184–185, 196–197 unified field theory and, 186, 332–333 Electromagnetic field theory, 185–188 Electromagnetism, 187, 293, 294, 295, 297 weak nuclear force and, 315, 316–318, 326, 337, 345 Electrons, 256, 257–258 early-universe theory and, 343 as fermions, 292 inflationary universe hypothesis and, 360 symmetry and, 307 Electroweak theory, see Unified electroweak theory Elements atomic nuclei of, 257 big bang as source of, 272–273, 281 cosmic element abundance curve, 277, 278 stellar nuclear fusion as source of, 271–272, 275–280 in the sun, 164–165 terrestrial, 69 Elliptical nebulae, 144, 146, 148, 152, 161–162, 165 beyond the Milky Way, 175 island universe theory of, 161, 171, 172, 173 Emission lines, 164 Emission nebula, 143 Enceladus (satellite of Saturn), 156 Epicycles of Ptolemy, 29 Equinoxes, precession of, 23n Erikson, Leif, 56n Essay on the Principle of Population, The (Malthus), 237 Euclid, 40, 41, 62, 116 Euclidean geometry, 26, 198–199 Eudoxus, 25–27, 33, 65 Evolution, theory of, see Darwinism Expansion of the universe, 205–215, 354–356, 392–393 general theory of relativity and, 205, 208–209, 210–214 Exploding stars, 167 Extraterrestrial life, 368–380 conditions necessary for, 372–374 networking of interstellar communications to determine, 375–380 SETI projects and, 371–372, 374 Falling bodies, law of, 84, 90–94 Faraday, Michael, 185–186, 188, 190 Fermi, Enrico, 212, 273, 292, 374 Fermilab accelerator, 319–320, 322, 324–325, 326, 336 Fermilab Tevatron, 340 Fermions, 292, 294 bosons and, 328 Feynman, Richard, 311n, 352, 363 Fibonacci series, 305, 306 Ficino, Marsilio, 65, 77 Field theory, 186–187 See also Quantum field theory; Unified field theory; Yang-Mills gauge field theory Finite universe, infinite universe and, 200–204 First law of thermodynamics, 247 Fission bomb (atomic bomb), 252 Fitz-Roy, Robert, 233, 245 Flamsteedjohn, 115, 153, 156 Flatness problem, inflationary universe hypothesis and, 359 Fossils, scientific age-dating of, 222–229 Four-dimensional geometry, 199, 202 Four-dimensional space-time continuum, 197, 198, 199–202 Fowler, Willy, 276, 277, 278 Fraunhofer, Joseph, 10, 139, 163–164 Fraunhofer lines, 164 Free quarks, 344 Fusion bomb (hydrogen bomb), 252, 253 Galactic plane, 159 Galaxies, 167–175 quasars and, 174 redshift-distance relation of, 207–208, 209–211, 214 stars in, 144 superclusters of, 175, 214 See also Milky Way galaxy Galilei, Galileo, 11, 69, 71, 83–101, 107, 130, 167 Einstein and, 185 inertia experiments of, 34, 91–94 law of falling bodies and, 84, 90–94 observations of planets by, 88–90, 101 Roman Catholic Church persecution of, 11, 84, 96–100 solar system and, 88–90, 123, 132 telescope and, 84, 86–88, 95–96 thought experiments of, 90–91, 92, 93–94 velocity of light determined by, 179–180 Galilei, Vincenzo, 84 Gamma Draconis, 137, 139 Gamma rays, 293, 297 Gamow, George, 212–214, 262, 263, 264 big bang and, 273–274, 277, 279 Gauge field theory, see Yang-Mills gauge field theory Gauss, Karl Friedrich, 199, 308 Gell-Mann, Murray, 294n, 310–311, 317, 330, 332, 336, 337, 340 General theory of relativity, 120, 178, 185, 191, 196–197, 200–204 expansion of the universe and, 205, 208–209, 210–214 quantum genesis hypothesis and, 362–363 scientific testing of, 203–204 space-time continuum of, 31, 32 string theory and, 330, 331 symmetry and, 307 Genes, natural selection and, 241–242 Geology radiometric age-dating and, 251–252 scientific age-dating and, 221–229 Geometry, 25–26, 40, 110 euclidean, 26, 198–199 four-dimensional, 199, 202 space-time, 364–365 symmetry in, 303–304 Giant stars, 70 lifetime of, 266–271 Glashow, Sheldon, 313, 314–317, 321, 326, 333 Global symmetry, 309–310 Globular star clusters, 170–171 Glossary of terms, 391–411 Gluons, 293–294, 312 Gödel, Kurt, 384, 385 Gold, 279 Gold, Thomas, 275, 338 Grand unified theories (GUTs), 327–328, 332–334 early-universe theory and, 345, 348 Gravitation, 293–298 contraction of the sun and, 247–248 Einstein’s conception of, 120 general theory of relativity and, 196–197 Kepler’s theories of, 94 Newton and, 103, 107–109, 113–118, 120–121, 177 stellar energy and, 280 string theory and, 330, 331 unified field theory and, 346 Gravitational mass, 194–195 equality of inertial mass and, 195–196 Graviton, 330 Graviton decoupling, 346n Great Chain of Being, 223 Greece (ancient), 20 conception of inertia in, 34–35 conception of time in, 217–220 Earth as conceived by, 26n Grossmann, Marcel, 190, 199–200 Guth, Alan, 356–357, 361–362 h (quantum of action), 286, 287 Hadrons, 311, 330 Hakluyt, Richard, 128 Hale, George Ellery, 168, 208 Half-life of radioactive materials, 250–252 Halley, Edmond, 103, 112–116, 127, 128, 131, 137, 201n publication of the Principia and, 118 Halley’s comet, 70n, 112, 113, 117, 131 Harrison, John, 129–130 Hawking, Stephen, 356, 362–364 Heavy hydrogen, 264–265 Heisenberg, Werner, 286, 287, 288, 291, 302, 333, 351–352 Heisenberg indeterminacy principle, 351–352 Heliocentric universe Aristarchus and, 35–36, 38, 43 Copernicus and, 63–68 Kepler and, 77–82 Helium, 250, 343 big bang and, 273 composition of the sun and, 265–266 stellar fusion and, 272, 278–279 Helium-3, 264–265 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 246–247, 248 Henderson, Thomas, 139 Henry the Navigator, Prince, 50–52, 53, 54, 55 Heraclitus, 33, 367 Hereditary traits, transmission of, 242 Herman, Robert, 213, 214 Herodotus, 50–51 Herschel, John, 163, 241 Herschel, William, 143, 144, 150–159, 395 Hertzsprung, Ejnar, 259, 260 Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, 259–260, 261, 263, 266 tree of stars and, 267–270 Heyerdahl, Thor, 56n Hipparchus, 29, 124 History of the universe, 415–429 stairway depiction of, 341–348 Hoffmann, Banesh, 179n Hooft, Gerard’t, 318 Hooke, Robert, 112–113, 115, 118, 137 Hooker, Joseph, 240, 244 Hoskin, Michael, 201n Hoyle, Fred, 211, 274–277, 278 Hubble, Edwin, 161, 172–174, 207–210, 211–212, 274 Hubble law, 208–210, 214 Hubble Space Telescope, 389–390 Huggins, William, 165, 167 Humason, Milton, 173, 274 Hume, David, 151 Hutton, James, 205, 225–226 Huxley, Aldous, 119 Huxley, Thomas, 243, 244–245, 247 Huygens, Christian, 118, 120, 125, 130, 136 Hyades (star cluster), 203, 259 Hydrogen atoms of, 256, 260 big bang and, 273 composition of the stars and, 260 composition of the sun and, 265–266 stellar fusion and, 272, 278–279 Hypatia, 42 Hyperdimensionality, 332–334 Imaginary numbers, 363 Imaginary time, 363, 364 Incompleteness theorem, Gödel’s, 384–385 Inertia ancient Greeks’ conception of, 34–35 Aristotle and, 92–94 Descartes on, 106 Einstein and, 193–195, 196 Galileo’s experiments on, 34, 91–94 Newton and, 34, 94, 116–117, 177 Inertial mass, 193–195 equality of gravitational mass and, 195–196 Infinite universe, finite universe and, 200–204 Inflationary universe hypothesis, 345, 356–360, 361, 362 model of, 275n Initial conditions, problem of, 122 Integer spin particles, 292 Interferometry, 180, 181 Interstellar communications network, 375–380 Interstellar space flights, 374–376 Invariance theory, 193 symmetry and, 307 Inverse-square law, 108n gravitation and, 117 Kepler’s third law and, 112–113, 114, 115, 117 Iron, 165, 279 stellar evolution and, 140–141 stellar fusion and, 275, 276–280 Irrational numbers, 305n Islamic astronomical scholarship, 43 Island universe theory of elliptical nebulae, 161, 171, 172, 173 Isospin, 31, 309 Jeans, James, 166, 167n John Paul II, Pope, 100n Jupiter, 25, 72, 112, 117 Galileo’s observation of, 88, 90 mean distance from the sun (est.), 124 satellites of, 88, 90, 158, 179 Kaluza, Theodor, 332 Kaluza-Klein theory, 332 Kant, Immanuel, 75, 143, 144–148, 150, 161, 246 Kelvin, Lord, 186, 246, 247–248, 249, 250, 280, 282 Kepler, Johannes, 66, 69, 71, 74–82, 84, 107, 136, 167, 182, 205, 346 astronomical unit estimated by, 125 date of Creation estimated by, 220 Galileo and, 94–96, 97, 98 mean distances of planets from the sun as measured by, 124 solar system and, 75, 78–82, 123 Kepler’s laws, 79–81 inverse-square law and, 112–113, 114, 115, 117 Newton’s laws and, 81, 108n, 112–113, 115 Keynes, John Maynard, 104 Kirchhoff, Gustav, 164–165 Klein, Oskar, 332 Kopernik, Mikolai, see Copernicus, Nicolaus Koran, the, 43 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 236 Lamarckism, 236 Lambert, Johann Heinrich, 144, 149–150, 161 Laplace, Pierre-Simon de, 161, 290–291 Large Magellanic Cloud, 70, 175, 327 Law of falling bodies, 84, 90–94 Law of universal gravitation, 81 Laws of thermodynamics, 247 Lead, 279 Leavitt, Henrietta Swan, 169–170, 171, 172, 258 Le Gentil, Guillaume, 133–134 Lemaître, Georges, 210–211, 212, 214, 274 Leptons, 294–296, 350 Light as electromagnetic field, 187n, 188 velocity of, 179–180 Light-year, 38 Linde, Andrei, 393–394 Linear time, 220–225 Lithium, 278, 343 Little Dipper, 57 Lobachevski, Nikolai Ivanovich, 199 Local Group of galaxies, 175 Local symmetry, 309–310 Locke, John, 118, 119, 223 Longitude, determination of, 128–130 Lookback time, 174 Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon, 181, 182, 191, 197, 203 Lorentz contractions, 181–182 special theory of relativity and, 181, 191 Lucretius, 33, 90n, 201, 369 Luther, Martin, 67, 369 Lyell, Charles, 217, 225, 226–229 Darwin and, 229, 231, 232, 239, 242, 243, 244 Mach, Ernst, 190–191, 386 Magellan, Ferdinand, 48, 56n, 59 Magellanic Clouds, 70, 169–170, 171, 175, 327 Magnesium, 165, 272 Magnetic monopoles, 356–357 Malthus, Thomas, 237 Many body problem, 121 Mars, 117 Kepler’s study of, 78–79 life on, 394 mean distance from the sun (est.), 124 measurement of diameter of, 125 retrograde motion of, 24, 25 spacecraft mission to, 371 triangulation of, 126, 130 Mason, Charles, 132–133 Mass inertia and, 193–195, 196 Newton’s laws and, 116–117 relativistic time dilation and, 192–193 Mathematical Syntaxis (Ptolemy), 28–29 Matter building blocks of, 294–296 electromagnetism and, 193 Maury, Antonia, 258, 259 Maxwell, James Clerk, 10, 185–188, 190, 255 Maxwellian velocity distribution theory, 263 Medici, Cosimo de, 95, 96 Mendel, Gregor, 242 Mercury, 23, 68, 279 death of the sun and, 270 mean distance from the sun (est.), 124 transit of, 131 Messier, Charles, 157 Meteorites, 252 Michelson, Albert, 180, 182 Michelson-Morley experiment, 11, 180–181, 188 aether drift theory and, 188, 192 Micrometry, 125 Microwave radiotelescope, 213, 347 Milky Way galaxy, 48, 96, 144, 145, 146, 149, 152, 161, 162 big bang and, 272–273 dark nebulae in, 144, 158 diameter of, 171 early-universe theory of, 341 ecology of, 266–267 elements in, 277 galaxies beyond, 175 Galileo’s observation of, 89, 90 location in the solar system of, 168–175 spectroscopy and, 166 spiral arms of, 153, 174 Milton, John, 76, 83, 101 Mimas (satellite of Saturn), 156 Minkowsky, Hermann, 197–198 Moon, 22 Galileo’s observation of, 88, 90 Newton’s laws of gravitation and, 107 Moon rocks, 252 Morrison, Philip, 371 Music, symmetries in, 304–305 Mutuality of gravitation, 117–118 NASA’s interstellar spacecraft study, 375 Natural selection theory of evolution, see Darwinism Navigation astronomy as tool for, 20–21, 47–49, 52 determination of longitude and, 128–130 Nebulae, 151–152 bright, 143–144 elliptical, 144, 146, 148, 152, 161–162, 165 Herschel’s study of, 150–159 island universe theory of, 161, 171, 172, 173 nature of, 144 planetary, 143, 157 spiral, 144, 162, 165–166 Nebular hypothesis, 161, 162, 165–166 defects in, 166–173 Ne’eman, Yuval, 311 Neoplatonism, 64, 65 Networking of interstellar communications, 375–380 Neutrino decoupling, 344 Neutrinos, 264, 265, 327, 344 Neutrons, 256 as fermions, 292 quarks and, 296, 338, 340 symmetry and, 307 Neutron star, 279 Newton, Humphrey, 113, 115–116 Newton, Isaac, 101, 103–122, 127, 128, 152, 161 the calculus invented by, 106, 108–110 date of Creation estimated by, 220 Einstein and, 177, 178, 183, 184, 193n gravitation and, 103, 107–109, 113–118, 120–121, 177 inertia and, 34, 94, 116–117, 177 Kepler’s third law and, 81, 108n, 112–113, 115 the Principia of, 103, 115–118, 119, 120–121 reflecting telescope of, 110–112 stellar distances measured by, 136 Newton’s first law, 116–117 Newton’s second law, 117 Newton’s third law, 117 Nickel, 277 Nitrogen-14, 251 Noneuclidean geometries, 198, 199 Novikov, Igor, 280 Nuclear energy, 248 Nuclear forces, see Strong nuclear force; Weak nuclear force Nuclear fusion, 248, 252–254, 367 See also Stellar nuclear fusion Nuclear physics, 211–212 Nuclear weapons, 252–254 Nucleons, 293, 294 Observational astrophysics, 168 Olbers, Wilhelm, 201n Olbers’s paradox, 201n Oldenburg, Henry, 111, 112 “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (Einstein), 193 On the Heavens (Aristotle), 28, 69 On the Revolutions (Copernicus), 63, 64, 65, 66, 67–68, 84, 98 Öpik, Ernst, 275–276 Oppenheimer, Robert, 279, 310 Optics, 110, 163, 187 Oresme, Nicole, 64–65 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 68, 116, 236, 242, 243–244, 245, 248 Origin of the universe, see Cosmogony Orion Nebula, 157 Oxygen, 272 Pangenesis theory of Darwin, 242 Parallax (triangulation), 125–126, 127, 130 of the stars, 136–141 Parity violation in the weak nuclear force, 313 Particle physics -cosmology link, 335–348 time and, 337–340 Pauli, Wolfgang, 292, 310, 333 Pauli exclusion principle, 292, 293 PEP accelerator, 333 PETRA accelerator, 333 Photinos, 333 Photon decoupling, 343 Photons, 258, 264–265, 318, 337 early-universe theory and, 343 released by the big bang, 212n, 213, 214 Pi, value of, 40 Pi mesons, 318 Planck, Max, 183, 193, 258, 286 Einstein and, 204n Planetary nebulae, 143, 157 Planetesimals, 167n Planets, 22–23 Copernicus and, 68 elliptical orbit of, 66 extrasolar, 394–395 Kepler’s laws and, 79–81 mean distances from the sun (est.), 124 measuring distances via micrometry and triangulation, 125–126, 127 Newton’s laws and, 107, 117, 120–121 retrograde motion of, 23, 24, 25, 26–27 spacecraft missions to, 370, 371 transit of, 130–136 See also names of planets Plato, 19, 25–26, 27, 31, 62, 64, 65, 75, 145, 217 Pleiades (star cluster), 259, 263 Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for, 269–270 Plutarch, 33, 39, 40 Poincaré, Henri, 181–182, 193, 201 Polaris (North Star), 57 Pole star, 52 Political power, use of astronomy for, 22 Polo, Marco, 47, 49–50, 54 Popper, Karl, 383 Portable telescopes, 163 Positrons, 308 Pound, James, 137, 153 Precession of equinoxes, 23n Primordial atom, 211, 212 Principia (Newton), 103, 115–118, 120–121 publication of, 118–119, 120 Printing press, invention of, 62–63 Probes in interstellar flight, 374–375, 376 Project Ozma (SETI experiment), 372 Proton accelerators, 319–326 Proton-antiproton collider, 324–326 Proton-proton chain reaction for stellar nuclear fusion, 263–265, 272, 278 Protons, 262, 264–265 as fermions, 292 half-life of, 327 heat of stars and, 260–261 penetration of the Coulomb barrier by, 262, 264–265 quarks and, 338, 340 symmetry and, 307 Ptolemy, Claudius, 28–31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 62, 63, 69, 72, 124, 145 Islamic astronomy and, 43 Pythagoras, 35, 217 Pythagorean doctrine of celestial harmony, 75–77 Q and A time for interstellar radio signals, 376, 377, 378 Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), 297, 311, 312, 313 Quantum electrodynamics (QED), 297, 315–316 Quantum field theory relativistic, 297, 337 string theory and, 328 symmetry and, 312–313 Quantum genesis hypothesis, 351, 362–365 Quantum indeterminacy, 287–288 Einstein and, 290–291 proton action and, 262 quantum genesis hypothesis and, 365 Quantum leap, 288 Quantum mechanics, 200, 257 string theory and, 330, 331 Quantum numbers, 31 Quantum physics, 178, 183, 186, 200, 286–299, 367 four fundamental forces in, 293–294, 295 standard model theories for, 292–299 symmetry and, 307–309 Quantum principle, 286–287 Quantum tunneling, 262–263 Quantum vacuum, 351–352 Quarks, 293, 294–295, 350 antiquarks and, 344 big bang and, 338, 339, 340 inflationary universe hypothesis and, 360 symmetry and, 312 Quasars, 174, 390 Radioactive decay, 293 Radioactivity, 248, 249–254, 255, 256 Radio astronomy, 213–214 Radiometric age-dating, 250–252 age of the solar system by, 266 Radio telescopes, 213, 347 SETI projects and, 371–372, 374, 376 Radium, 249, 250 Red giant stars, 269, 270 Redshift-distance relation of galaxies, 207–208, 209–211, 214 Reflecting telescope, 110–112, 154, 168 Refracting telescope, 152–157, 158 Relativistic quantum field theories, 297, 337 Relativistic time dilation, 192–193 Relativity (term), 193, 285–286 See also General theory of relativity; Special theory of relativity Renaissance, 47–59 Retrograde motion of planets, 23, 24, 25 Eudoxus and, 26–27 Roman Catholic Church Copernicus’s heliocentric theory and, 67 persecution of Galileo by, 11, 84, 96–100 Rubbia, Carlo, 322–323, 324–326 Russell, Henry Norris, 168, 259–260, 261 Rutherford, Ernest, 249–250, 256, 282 Salam, Abdus, 313, 314, 316, 317, 321, 326 Sandage, Allan, 174, 351 Saturn, 23, 43, 73, 117 mean distance from the sun (est.), 124 Saturn (cont.) rings of, 81 satellites of, 156 triangulation of, 136 Scientific age-dating, 221–229 Second law of thermodynamics, 247 SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence), 371–372, 374 Shapley, Harlow, 168–172, 208 Silver, 277, 279 Slipher, Vesto, 206–208, 210 Smith, William, 221, 222 Sodium, 165 Solar fusion, 263–265 Solar system age of, 266 comets as products of, 69n Copernicus’s model of, 65–66, 123, 124 Galileo and, 88–90, 123, 132 Kepler and, 75, 78–82, 123 location of Milky Way in, 168–175 mean distances of planets from the sun in (est.), 124 measuring proportions of, 123–126 Newton’s laws and, 117, 120–121, 123 origin of (computer model), 167n space probes from other stars in, 374–375, 376 Tycho and, 73, 123 Solar telescopes, 168 Spacecraft, 81, 104, 252, 370–371 Space probes in interstellar flight, 374–375, 376 Spacetime continuum, 31, 32 four-dimensional, 197, 198, 199–202 Spacetime geometry, 364–365 Special theory of relativity, 11, 178, 183, 185, 191–194, 197, 200 Lorentz contraction as key element in, 181, 191 quantum physics and, 297 symmetry and, 307 Spectroscopy, 144, 162–166 Bohr and, 257–259 Spiral nebulae, 144, 162, 165–166 Milky Way galaxy and, 171, 172, 175 redshifts of, 207–208, 209–210 Star clusters, 259, 263, 270, 271 age of, 269 globular, 170–171 Stars, 19–25 aberration of starlight, 139 double, 168 exploding, 167 Galileo’s observation of, 89, 90 lifetime of, 265–271, 280 quantum tunneling and, 262–263 spectral classes of, 258–260 tree of, 260, 267–270 Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for, 259–260 triangulation of, 127, 136–141 variable, 168–169, 170, 172, 173, 208, 274 Stellar energy, 256–266, 280 Stellar nuclear fusion, 263–271 as source of elements, 271–272, 275–280 String theory, 328–332, 347n, 391 Strong nuclear force, 292, 294, 295, 296, 297, 346 quantum chromodynamics and, 311, 312 symmetry of, 309 Sun, 65 age of nuclear fusion and, 248, 252–254 thermodynamics and, 246–248 ancient astronomy and, 22 composition of, 164–165, 265–266 lifetime of, 265–266, 270–271 See also Heliocentric universe Superconducting super collider, 326, 340 Supernovae, 61, 70–71, 167, 268, 270, 276, 327, 391–392 Superstring concept, 332–333 Supersymmetry, 312, 328–334 early-universe theory and, 345, 348 inflationary universe theory and, 359 Symmetry, 320–334, 348 asymmetries and, 313 GUTs and, 327–328, 332–334 mystery of the universe and, 385–386 string theory and, 328–332 supersymmetry and, 328–334 unified electroweak theory and, 313–314, 317–318, 321–326 Telescopes Galileo’s improvement on, 84, 86–88, 95–96 Herschel and, 152–157, 158 Newton and, 110–112 radiotelescopes, 213, 347 reflecting, 110–112, 154, 168 refracting, 152–157, 158 zenith, 137 Teller, Edward, 212, 263 Thermodynamics, 246–248, 254 symmetry of law of, 307 Thermonuclear fusion, 261–262 Tides, Newton’s laws and, 117 Time cyclical, 217–220 imaginary, 363, 364 linear, 220–225 lookback time, 174 particle physics-cosmology link and, 337–348 special theory of relativity and, 191, 192–193 timekeeping by the stars, 21–22 Tin, 275, 279 Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo, 49, 55, 58, 59 Transit of the planets, 130–136 Translational symmetries, 304 Tree of life, 238–239 Triangulation, see Parallax Tryon, Edward, 353–355, 361 Tycho (Tycho Brahe), 61, 69, 70–73, 74, 77, 97, 124, 167 Kepler and, 77–79 solar system and, 73, 123 Unified electroweak theory, 313–314, 317–318, 321–326, 345 big bang and, 336–337 Unified field theory, 186, 299, 308–309, 332–333 experimental versions of, 346–348 Uniformitarianism, 225–229, 233 “Up” quarks, 296, 312 Uranium, 249, 250 Uranus, 155–156 Ussher, James, 220, 224 Vacuum genesis of the universe, 351–356, 361, 362, 393–394 Variable stars, 168–169, 170, 172, 173, 208, 274 Venus, 68 angular diameter of, 154 death of the sun and, 270 Galileo’s observation of, 88–89 mean distance from the sun (est.), 124 parallax of, 130–131 spacecraft mission to, 370–371 transit of, 131, 132, 133, 135 Vinci, Leonardo da, 59, 67n, 381 Virtual particles, 351–352, 353 Weak nuclear force, 293, 294, 295, 296, 298 electromagnetism and, 315, 316–318, 326, 337, 345 quantum chromodynamics and, 312, 313 Weinberg, Steven, 313–314, 317–318, 321, 326, 331–332, 333, 334, 336 Wheeler, John Archibald, 346, 364, 365 White dwarf stars, 267, 268, 269 Wigner, Eugene, 273, 307, 308 Wilkinson, David, 391 Wilson, Robert, 213, 320, 322 WMAP, 391 W particles, 317, 318, 321–322, 326, 337, 345, 352–353, 356 Wren, Christopher, 112, 113 Wright, Thomas, 145–146, 147 X rays, 248, 293, 297 Yang, Chen Ning, 302, 309–310, 311, 312–313 Yang-Mills gauge field theory, 309–313 string theory and, 330 Zenith telescope, 137 Z particles, 317, 318, 321–322, 326, 337, 345, 352–353, 356 About the Author TIMOTHY FERRIS, called “perhaps the best popular-science writer in the English language today” by the Christian Science Monitor and “the best science writer of his generation” by the Washington Post, is the bestselling author of Seeing in the Dark, The Whole Shebang, and The Red Limit, among other books.

Interplanetary Robots
by Rod Pyle

It's incredible that the Voyagers have lasted long enough to become interstellar explorers in their own right, but what about the idea of creating purpose-built spacecraft to explore nearby stars? With the explosion in exoplanet discoveries in the past two decades—now numbering over 3,500 confirmed finds, with many, many thousands more suspected—we have increasing reason to believe that some of these planets may be suitable for life. Various projects, like SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—have been listening in for decades, hoping to detect a radio signal from a society orbiting a distant star, with no confirmed successes. As with our explorations of Mars, we are lowering our sights somewhat, hoping to find at least basic life—perhaps on the level of bacteria, or with luck something more complex—on a planet orbiting a nearby star.

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United States, 43, 51–52, 228 See also names of specific missions and programs Rocket Lab, 94 Roosevelt, Theodore, 26 Ross 248 (star), 212 Ruppe, Harry, 159 Russia / Russian Federation German rocketry and, 42 Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and, 319 Luna-Glob program, 322 sample-return missions, 232–33 V-2 missile technology and, 42 See also Soviet Union Rutan, Burt, 93 S/2009 S1 (moon of Saturn), 283 Sagan, Carl, 35, 36 record attached to Voyagers and, 213, 215–16 on Viking mission images, 135, 136 sample-return missions Exobiology on Mars (ExoMars), 318 Mars 5M, 231–33 Mars 2020 rover, 315–16 Mars Ascent Vehicle, 144 simplifying robotic rendezvous and docking of Martian samples, 235–37 See also soil samples/experiments samples ExoMars mission, 318 Sample Transfer Technology team, 316 sample-tube-grab, 315–16 San Gabriel Mountains, California, 19, 20 Saturn AREE rover for moons of, 166 Enceladus Life Finder (ELF) mission, 296–97 Grand Tour of outer planets, 173, 174, 177 imaged by Voyager 1, 200 Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn (MJS) flyby, 183–84 moons of, 202–203, 204, 287, 290–94 Pioneers and, 177–78, 180 rings of, 200–202, 201, 284–89, 285 Cassini's final orbits and, 294 composition of, 286, 287 early astronomers on, 284–85 gaps in, 286 mechanism of formation of, 286–87 names of, 285, 285 shadows cast upon, 288 size of, 286 spokes, 288 width of, 288–89 storms in (2005 and 2010), 289 Voyager mission to, 196, 199 See also Cassini Saturn mission Saturn rockets, 159, 163 Saturn IB rocket, 111, 113–14, 158 Saturn V rocket, 105, 114, 114, 115, 158, 222, 228, 325 Saturn S-IVB stage, 160, 163 Sauder, Jonathan, 167 scan platform Cassini Saturn mission, 277 Galileo mission, 258 Schiaparelli, Giovanni, 11 Schurmeier, Bud, 176, 177 Sea of Storms (Oceanus Procellarum), 56, 86 Sea of Tranquility (Mare Tranquillitatis), 54, 87 Seitz, Frederick, 221 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 217, 218 “Seven Minutes of Terror” (video), 21–22 SFOF (Space Flight Operations Facility), 28, 269 Shenzhou 5, 323 SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals), 305 shielding, radiation, 184, 185 Shoemaker Levy 9 (comet), 253 side-scan sonar, 301 S-IVB stage, 160, 163 sky crane system, 102, 272, 303 Skylab, 159, 163 Small Lander for Investigating the Moon (SLIM), 324 sodium, 195 Soffen, Gerald, 135–36 soil samples/experiments Lunokhod missions, 91, 92 Mars 2020 rover and, 304, 306–307 Soviet Mars 3, 225–26 Surveyor spacecraft, 84, 87 Venera 14, 153 from Viking missions, 120–24, 137–40 See also sample-return missions solar nebula, 257–58 solar panels, 73, 90, 166, 310 solar-wind steering petals, 71 solid fuel, 242 solid oxide electrolysis, 143–44 Sotheby's auction house, 92 South Pole-Aitkin Basin, 47 Soviet Sputnik mission (1957).

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
by Diane Ackerman
Published 9 Sep 2014

But now they and the Dalai Lama (a science aficionado) are also aware, from mindful moment to moment, of an invisible dimension that includes neurons, quarks, Higgs bosons, MRIs, condensation nuclei, white dwarfs, DNA, and a googolplex of others. Elsewhere on Earth, over 5.2 million Internet-connected computers, citizen scientists are helping SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) monitor radio telescope data through the SETI@home project, hoping to catch a message from alien life forms in some distant star system. SETI’s senior astronomer, Seth Shostak, believes that the first calling card from aliens may well be detected on home computers, not by official scientists at radio telescopes arrayed in India, Australia, Puerto Rico, or Chile.

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Luke’s Hospital, 78 Salem witch trials, 207 salmon, 60, 65 salt deposits, 31 sandhill cranes, 161 San Diego Zoo, 151 sand mandala, 174–75 Sandy, Hurricane, 31, 43, 44–47 oyster beds smothered by, 57 Sanjay Gandhi National Park, 78 Santiago, 77 Sapolsky, Robert, 298 Sapsucker Woods Bird Sanctuary, 193–94 scallops, 57, 60 schizophrenia, 176, 282, 285 science, 11 scientific reasoning, 219–20 Scotland, 132 Scots pine, 132 Scripps Research Institute, 151 sea grapes, 61 sea levels, 32, 41, 51 sea lions, 144, 147 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 175 sea squirt, 61 seaweed, 61 sediment, 31–32 sedum, 83, 87–88 self-awareness, 216–17, 219 self-cleaning clothes, 181 sensory overload, 197 Seoul, 192 sepsis, 183 Serengeti, 126 Seurat, Georges, 246 sex, biology of, 293–96 Shakespeare, William, 259 Shanghai, China, 192 sharks, 147 Shark Valley, 129, 315 sheep, 71, 267 Shelley, Mary, 212–13 shellfish, 60 Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, 52 Shostak, Seth, 175 shrews, 115 shrikes, 74 Siberia, 161 Siju-Rewak Coridor, 124 silicon retinas, 13 silver, 182–83 Singapore, 78 singing, 93 Sinhyung Cho, 102 skin, 257 Skinner, B.

Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
by Carl Zimmer
Published 9 Mar 2021

But its disappointing results drained the fuel out of exobiology’s rocket engines. NASA engineers built more probes to land on Mars, but they were mostly designed to work out the planet’s geology and atmosphere, not to search for hints of life. In the years after Viking 1, the closest thing to a search for life was an eavesdropping project. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI for short, was a NASA program that would scan the sky for radio communications from alien civilizations. JPL offered up its network of radio telescopes as our interstellar ears. Despite hostility from Congress, NASA managed to scrape together enough funds to keep developing plans for SETI through the 1980s.

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Douglas, xvi Russell, Michael, 245–48 Sagan, Carl, 253–54, 262 samaras, 107–9, 113 Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, 6 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, 203–9, 226 Saturn, 260, 261 Schrieffer, Robert, 287 Schrödinger, Erwin, 187–91, 195, 262 Science, 257 Scientific American, 247 Scientific Revolution, 128 Scripps Research Institute, 285 seabed environment, 153–56 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 255, 259 Secor, Stephen, 67–70, 72–75, 77, 124 sensibility, 139–43 sex cells, 184–85 sexual parasitism, 213–15 sexual reproduction, 105–7 Shapiro, Ben, 25 Shelley, Mary, 147–49 Shewmon, Alan, 58 Siberia, 46 Simmel, Marianne, 267–68 siphonophores, 153 slime molds, 80–89, 105, 113, 124 Smith, Kelly, 272–73, 276 Smith College, 268 snakes, metabolism of, 67–77, 124 Snethlage, Cedric, 12 Société de Biologie, 45–46 somas, 3, 5 Soviet Union, 178 space travel, 47–48, 251.

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth
by Juan Enriquez
Published 15 Feb 2001

Geological Survey NASA JET PROPULSION LABORATORY The International Astronomical Union ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation THE DAVID AND LUCILE PACKARD FOUNDATION The Paul G. Allen Foundation THE MOORE FOUNDATION The Universities Space Research Association THE PACIFIC SCIENCE CENTER The Foundation for Microbiology SUN MICROSYSTEMS Hewlett-Packard. Those who founded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) hoped 100,000 global citizens would sign up … More than two million did. And SETI@home is now the world’s largest community computer project … With 280,000 years of processing time available … And a network that grows every week.10 AIDS researchers soon copied this model, linking more than 100,000 PCs in over eighty countries … Creating the world’s largest academic computing site … Designed to understand and attack a virus that mutates very rapidly.11 (And of course, volunteer networks can morph into business networks.

Warnings
by Richard A. Clarke
Published 10 Apr 2017

Morrison, who was born just before World War II, is an astronomer with a Ph.D. from Harvard and decades of experience leading space-exploration projects at NASA. He is also generally regarded as the person who focused the world’s attention on the threat from asteroids and is a leader in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In Cosmic Catastrophes, he slowly made the case for worrying about asteroid impact in the way a good prosecutor would carefully and convincingly lay out his evidence to a jury. He began off-planet. For over three centuries, humans had been looking at the moon through telescopes.

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See Gulf War Personal investment, of critics, 187–88 Personalized medicine, 331–32, 342 Personal responsibility, sense of, 185–86 Persuasion campaign, 364–65 Pessimism, 2, 3, 50, 236 “Pet Rock problem,” 321 Piccone, Michele, 380n Pielke, Roger, Jr., 254 Planetary Defense Program Office, 317, 322–23 Plant elevation, and Fukushima nuclear disaster, 89–90 Plaquemines Parish, 39 Plutonium spheres (pits), 83 Polar ice melt, 239, 245–52, 258–60, 360 Political threshold problem, 321–22 Polk Prize, 226 Pollack, James B., 273 Pomona College, 327 Pontchartrain, Lake, 40 Ponzi, Charles, 105 Ponzi scheme, 102–3, 105, 110–11, 113, 115 Population bomb, 192–93 Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich), 192–93 Population growth, 16, 192–93 Predictions, 13–15 Predictor (possible Cassandra), 168, 170, 182–86 President’s Daily Briefing, 24, 35 Prevention strategy, 362–64 Prince, Chuck, 145, 154, 156, 157 Professional investment, of critics, 187–88 Programmable logic controller (PLC), 291–92 Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electronic Threats (Weiss), 286 Protein & Cell, 340 Providian, 152 Prykarpattyaoblenergo, 284–85 Public Health Service, 354–55 Pulitzer Prize, 50, 226 Putin, Vladimir, 285 Pyrrho of Elis, 185 Questioners, 184–85 Radiation exposure, 88 Ramadi, Iraq, 69 Rampart Investment Management, 101, 102, 105, 106, 109, 110 Raqqa, 68 Reacting, Ronald, 26 Reagan, Ronald, 21, 32, 277–78, 280 Recombinant DNA technology, 336–40 Red Army, 25, 26, 266 Red Team (Zenko), 379n Regulatory capture, 94–95, 96, 98, 115, 177–78 Reid, Ann, 222 Reis Crater, 307 Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke), 313 Response Availability, 170–71 Response strategies, 358–64 hedging, 361–62 mitigation and prevention, 362–64 surveillance, 359–60 Responsibility, diffusion of, 176–77, 215, 235, 321, 348 Revkin, Andrew, 244 Ribozymes, 328 Ring of Fire, 94 RNA, 327–28 Robock, Alan, 261, 273–74, 277–82 Robo-traders, 211 Roche, 225 Rockefeller Institute, 193 Roedersheimer, Keefe, 205 Rolling Stone (magazine), 338 Rometty, Ginni, 209 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 213 Roper, William, 214 Ross, Bill, 136 Ross, Lee, 184 Royal Academy, 345 Royal Air Force, 10 Royal Navy, 9 Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, 253 Rubenstein, Ariel, 380n Ruby, Jack, 99 Rumsfeld, Donald, 28–29 Russo, Rene, 219 Rutgers University, 261 Sagan, Carl, 273–77 Sago Mine disaster, 129–30 Salling, John Peter, 122 Samuel, Arthur, 381n San Bruno pipeline explosion of 2010, 293–94 Sandler O’Neill & Partners, 154 Sandworm, 285 Sanriku earthquake of 869, 77–81, 91, 97–98 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), 157 Sarin, 23, 230 Satisficing, 116, 117, 180–81, 319, 322, 359 Savage, Stefan, 297–98 Scacco, Gus, 149 Scanning for problems, 354–56 Scarface (movie), 99 Scenario modeling, 360, 363–64 Schapiro, Mary, 118–19 Schlesinger, Michael, 240–41 Schneider, Stephen, 241 Science (journal), 242 Science Story (show), 226 Scientific American, 278–79 Scientific method, 248–49 Scientific reticence, 79–80, 186–87, 234, 248–49, 259, 335 “Scope neglect,” 174 Sea-level rise, 238, 244–60, 360 Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), 304 Seawalls, and Fukushima nuclear disaster, 77, 85, 89–90, 92–93 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 100, 105–12, 114–20, 189–90 Security by obscurity, 270 Seismologist Warns, A (Ishibashi), 91–92 Selection effect, 380n Self-confidence, 184, 240, 365 Self-interest, of critics, 187–88 Sendai, Japan, 80, 81, 82 Sentinel intelligence, 3, 16, 356 “Separation of parts” policy, 270 September 11 attacks, 7–9, 230, 361–62 Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (Lawrence), 57 Sextus Empiricus, 185 Shearson Lehman, 162 Shia Muslims, 63 Shoemaker, Gene, 306–7 Shultz, George, 280 Siberian Unified Dispatch Control Center (SUDCC), 290 Siegel, Jeremy, 157–58 Siegfried Line, 10 Sieur de Bienville, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, 41 Signal and the Noise, The (Silver), 15 Signal from noise, separating, 356–58 Silver, Nate, 13, 15 Silver mining, 128–29 Simon, Herbert, 180–81, 322 Simons, Daniel, 175 Singularity, the, 209 60 Minutes (TV show), 119, 162, 244 Skepticism, 151–53, 168, 185, 240, 248–49 Skynet, 205 Smith & Wesson, 99, 109 Snowden, Edward, 211 Solid rocket boosters, and Challenger disaster, 11–13 Somalia, 65 Soothsayers, 1–2 “Sophistication effect,” 187 South Africa, 42–43 Soviet Union, 25–26, 266, 267–68, 271, 273–74, 277–78 Spaceguard goal, 312–17, 319 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 11–13 SpaceX, 202 Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, 195, 198, 217, 221–24 Spielberg, Steven, 101 Split-strike conversion, 103–5 SSH (Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydro), 289–2917 Stalin, Joseph, 174, 213 Standard project hurricane (SPH), 52–53 “Standing start,” 266 Stanford University, 89, 184, 192, 226, 337, 338 Steam engine, 174–75 Stock trading.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

As a result, it would be clearly identifiable as an artificial phenomenon. Unfortunately, however, the frequencies of such waves would be too low to penetrate the Earth's ionosphere. But they could be detected by suitable radio observatories in space. The community involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has for decades guided their efforts by the hypothesis that extraterrestrials would use submeter-wavelength radio for interstellar communication.13 As noted above, the best place to conduct such research is the back side of the moon. However, it is a striking fact that despite searching since 1960 using ever more powerful instrumentation, ground-based SETI researchers have detected no such signals.

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See also propellants and propulsion Rosenberg, Sanders, 145 Rosetta spacecraft, 130 Rostoker, Norman, 177 Rotary Rocket, 32 Russia, current space launch capabilities, 35–37 comparison of space launch systems, 36 Rutan, Burt, 29 RWGS (reverse water-gas shift reaction), 147–48, 149 Sabatier reaction (methanation reaction), 102, 146, 147, 342, 343 Sagan, Carl, 220–21, 223, 240, 287, 332 salmon fishery, restoring, 227–29 Samsung, 53 Sandia Lab, 180 Santa Fe Institute, 262 Santarius, John, 83 satellites, 28, 38, 40, 48 antisatellite systems, 63–64 CubeSat revolution, 54–56 fighter satellites, 63–65 microsatellites, 36, 37–38 rise of microlaunchers, 37–38 use of in skyhook, 93–94 See also antisatellite systems (ASAT); communications and data satellites; reconnaissance satellites; solar energy, solar power satellites (SPS) Saturn Express (concept project), 200–201 Saturn system, 155, 181, 200–201 discoveries of, 152 exploration spacecraft to, 153 Saturn's moons, 152, 164 Titan-based methane-propelled NTR excursions to other Saturn moons, 164 water on, 155–56, 157, 163, 164, 165 See also specific moons (i.e., Dione, Enceladus, Titan) solar system energy resources of, 159 statistics on getting to and back from, 162 tides of, 155–56 Titan-Saturn ferry, 163–64 Saturn V (rocket), 11, 36, 41, 102, 107, 108, 329, 343 Schiller, Friedrich, 327 Schmitt, Harrison, 83 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 235 Scientific American (journal), 283 scoops, magnetic. See magnetic sails (magsail) SDIO (Strategic Defense Initiative Organization) (US), 13 Seager, Sara, 244, 245 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 256–57, 258 SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space), 29, 34 seed spaceships (Noah's Ark Eggs), 209–14 SEI (Space Exploration Initiative), 343 self-replicating complex systems, 231–32, 236. See also nanotechnology SETI, 256–57, 258 SFS (Small Falcon Spaceship), 111–12 Shackleton Crater (on the moon), 76 Shakespeare, William, 22, 34 SHARAD ground-penetrating radar, 14, 106 Shelley, Percy B., 334 Shergotty (SNC meteorite), 343 Sieck, Paul, 180 silicon, 72, 82–83, 149, 171, 232, 285, 303–304 single-stage rocket systems, 40–41, 45, 344 payloads for one and two stage reusable rockets, 42 skyhook, 93–97, 115–17 Skylab space station, 118, 132 Slough, John, 179 SLS rocket (NASA), 36, 77, 132, 134, 157 Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact (SPARC), 177 Small Falcon Spaceship (SFS), 111–12 Smolin, Lee, 262, 263 SNC meteorites, 119–20, 343 Snyder, Timothy, 308 Socrates, 312 SoftBank Group, 53 Sojourner (Mars lander), 105 solar energy, 31, 34, 57, 73, 76, 159, 265, 304 limited availability in outer solar system, 167, 173–74 sending from moon back to earth, 82–83, 90 solar power satellites, 34, 57–60 use of on Mars, 111 solar flare, 101, 343 solar light pressure at 1 AU, 200 solar sails, plate 13, 116, 196–98, 221, 234, 235, 258, 344 use of as reflectors to increase solar flux, 222–23 use of to amplify brightness of stars, 237–38 See also IKAROS solar sail spacecraft; light sails solar wind, 73, 74, 87, 88 solar-wind pushed magsail, 203, 204 Soyuz (Russian space launch system), 36 space activism, how to achieve, 327–31 what individuals can do, 331–34 space business parks, 50–51 Space Exploration Initiative, 105 spaceflights/space travel commercial benefits of communications and data satellites, 51–56 developing commercial energy system in space, 57–60 fast global travel on Earth, 40–43 going beyond Earth orbit, 66–68 orbital industries, 48–50 orbital research labs, 47–48, 50 space business parks, 50–51 space tourism, 45–47 fundamentals of rocketry, 43–45 change of mass ratio and payload of a rocket, 44 health effects of long-duration spaceflight, 133–35 military uses and deterring a war, 60–66 outer solar system need for advanced second or third generation systems to settle, 173–74 statistics on getting to and back from, 162 program of action to achieve, 328–31 what individuals can do, 331–34 reasons for pursuing for the challenges, 271–86 for the future we can create, 315–25 to gain more freedom, 301–25 for the knowledge gained, 249–69 need for a frontier and challenges, 272–74, 275–84 for survival of humanity, 287–99 spin-offs from space program, 284–86 STEM graduates in US (1960–1990), 285–86, 285 See also interstellar travel Space Frontier Foundation, 332–33 Space Internet, 53 space launches comparison of space launch systems, 36 costs of, 89–90 consequences of cheap space launches, 24–28 for developing solar power satellite systems, 57–58 getting to a $200 per kilogram cost, 27–28 importance of a two-stage system to reduce costs, 39–45 lower costs allowing for orbital industries, 49–50 See also commercial benefits of spaceflight Elon Musk and development of SpaceX, 30–37 impact of cost-plus contracts, 22–24, 330–31 need for reusable spacecraft, 21–23 rise of microlaunchers, 37–38 skyhook as alternate means of Earth-to-orbit transit, 93–94 See also propellants and propulsion space power, use of and deterring a war, 60–66 Space Resources (Lewis), 136 Spaceship One, 29 space superiority vs. space supremacy, 62–63 space tourism, 45–47 SpaceX, plate 6, plate 7, 12, 19–21, 21, 27–28, 53, 77, 84, 175, 211, 328 development of SpaceX, 30–37 heavy-lift rockets, 107 Interplanetary Transport System plan, plate 7, 107–10 Mini BFR, 110–12, 339 See also Starship (rocket) (SpaceX) planned 2023 artists’ cruise around, plate 9 sending Tesla Roadster past Mars, 11 size of, 39–40 Starlink satellites, 53 and two-stage systems, 41, 45 See also Falcon (rocket) (SpaceX); Musk, Elon SPARC (Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, 177 specific impulse (Isp), 45, 143, 160–61, 163, 193–94, 296, 297, 341, 344 spherical tokamak (ST), 175–76, 176, 180 “spheromak,” 180 spin-offs from space program, 284–86 STEM graduates in US (1960–1990), 285–86, 285 Spire Lemur-2 CubeSats, plate 4 Spirit rover (NASA), 106 SPS (solar power satellites), 34, 57–60 Sridhar, K.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military
by Neil Degrasse Tyson and Avis Lang
Published 10 Sep 2018

Siming Yang, Peng Liu, Mingda Yang, Qiugu Wang, Jiming Song, and Liang Dong, “From Flexible and Stretchable Meta-Atom to Metamaterial: A Wearable Microwave Meta-Skin with Tunable Frequency Selective and Cloaking Effects,” Scientific Reports 6 (2016), 21921, doi: 10.1038/srep21921; “Iowa State engineers develop flexible skin that traps radar waves, cloaks objects,” Iowa State University, Mar. 4, 2016, news release, www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/03/04/meta-skin (accessed Apr. 20, 2017). Re the design differences between the F-117A and the B-2, Moore’s law over ten years gives 6.67 doubling cycles, which equals a factor of 100 increase in computing power. 65.At a meeting held by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in 1976, the vice president for R & D at Hewlett Packard, Bernard Oliver, quoted from a 1971 report by NASA’s Project Cyclops (in which he participated) that introduced the term “water hole”: “Nature has provided us with a rather narrow band in this best part of the spectrum that seems especially marked for interstellar contact.

…

Oliver then remarks, “It is easy to dismiss this as romantic, chauvinistic nonsense, but is it? We suggest that it is chauvinistic and romantic but that it may not be nonsense.” See Bernard M. Oliver, “Colloquy 4—The Rationale for a Preferred Frequency Band: The Water Hole,” SP-419 SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, history.nasa.gov/SP-419/s2.4.htm (accessed Apr. 20, 2017). 66.For a historical overview of what are generally termed nonlethal weapons, see Ando Arike, “The Soft-Kill Solution: New Frontiers in Pain Compliance,” Harper’s (Mar. 2010), 38–47. Re the USAF’s ADS system, Arike writes, “Active denial works like a giant, open-air microwave oven, using a beam of electromagnetic radiation to heat the skin of its targets to 130 degrees and force anyone in its path to flee in pain—but without injury, officials insist, making it one of the few weapons in military history to be promoted as harmless to its targets” (38).

…

Office of the Secretary of Defense. “Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2016.” 117FA69. Apr. 26, 2016. Oliver, Bernard M. “Colloquy 4—The Rationale for a Preferred Frequency Band: The Water Hole.” SP-419. SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, 1977. Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Parry, J. H. The Age of Reconnaissance. London: Phoenix Press, 1963. Peebles, Curtis. High Frontier: The U.S. Air Force and the Military Space Program.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time
by Michael Shermer
Published 1 Jan 1997

Pseudoscience and Pseudohistory Okay, so ghosts are bunk, along with most claims that fall under the heading of pseudoscience, by which I mean claims presented so that they appear scientific even though they lack supporting evidence and plausibility. The search for extraterrestrial life is not pseudoscience because it is plausible, even though the evidence for it thus far is nonexistent (the SETI—Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—program looks for extraterrestrial radio signals). Alien abduction claims, however, are pseudoscience. Not only is physical evidence lacking but it is highly implausible that aliens are beaming thousands of people into spaceships hovering above the Earth without anyone detecting the spacecrafts or reporting the people missing.

…

They were nearly off the scale in both conscientiousness and openness to experience, giving them that balance between being open-minded enough to accept the occasional extraordinary claim that turns out to be right, but not so open that one blindly accepts every crazy claim that anyone makes. Sagan, for example, was open to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence which, at the time, was considered a moderately heretical idea; but he was too conscientious to accept the even more controversial claim that UFOs and aliens have actually landed on earth (Shermer 2001). The psychologist David Wulff (2000), in a general survey of the literature on the psychology of mystical experiences (a subset of weird things), concluded that there were some consistent personality differences: Persons who tend to score high on mysticism scales tend also to score high on such variables as complexity, openness to new experience, breadth of interests, innovation, tolerance of ambiguity, and creative personality.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

It connects individual computers via the Internet into a giant virtual supercomputer in order to tackle complex computational tasks that no individual computer could solve alone. For years, scientists have been harnessing the processing power of home computers to create virtual supercomputers tasked with solving real scientific problems. The most famous example is SETI@home, or Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home, a program that harnesses home computers to analyze radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life in the universe. Folding@home is a similar system created by biologists and medical researchers at Stanford University in an effort to solve one of the greatest mysteries of human biology: how proteins fold.

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Lab mobile phone games closing generation gap with as creating communities in real-world spaces for developing countries as motivational platforms for challenging hobbies for social innovation as social motivation platforms of social participation and volunteer work Molyneux, Peter Moses, Edwin mutual regard “naches,” narrative ARGs Nature NCAA Football 10, negative stress Neolithic era Nesse, Randolph Never Saw It Coming (Cerulo) Neversoft New Games Book New Games movement New Stone Age Nike+ Ning Nintendo Nobel Peace Prize O’Donnell, Martin Olympic Games organizational ARGs Outliers (Gladwell) oxytocin Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) participation bandwidth gamers as valuable source of party games PDAs Pearsall, Paul Peggle Persuasive Games Peterson, Christopher Pew Internet & American Life Project phasing Piazza, Alberto pilot experimentation “ping,” planetary simulation games planet craft PlayStation 3 (PS3) Pleasures of Sorrow and Work, The (de Botton) Plusoneme.com Polack, Trent Pong Popit Popović, Zoran Portal positive psychology positive stress (eustress) postconcussion syndrome posttraumatic bliss poverty Prensky, Marc prosocial emotions protein-folding games Putnam, Robert pwnage Quest to Learn Reiss, Allan resource building Rigopulos, Alex Robertson, Margaret Rock Band 2 Rock Band series role-playing games leveling up in satisfying work in rules, as game trait Salen, Katie Sameshima, Pauline satisfying work actionable next steps in ARGs as turning real world tasks into blissful productivity of in casual games clear goals in in crowdsourcing and massive collaboration projects “endgame” payoff in as fix for reality in games vs. work in reality guarantee of productivity in intrinsic rewards of leveling up in in MMORPGs as pushing to limit of abilities resource building in in social network games types of unnecessary obstacles in Schwartz, Aaron B. Scrabble Season Showdown Secrets of the Ancient Games (podcast series) Seed seed ATMs self-help paradox Seligman, Martin Selvadurai, Naveen SETI@home (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home) shared intentionality Shirky, Clay Shop Class as Soul Craft (Crawford) Simon, Nina Sims 3 Sims games single-player games casual games as smart meters Smithsonian American Art Museum social connections ambient sociability and ARGs and closing generation gap in combating loneliness with community-building games and in crowd games in crowdsourcing and massive collaboration projects eye contact and touch in strengthening of as fix for reality forging new relationships vs. strengthening of existing intrinsic rewards of introverts and in massive multiplayer games in mentoring in party games prosocial emotions and social conjunctions and social network games and in social participation tasks (SPTs) in transitory public sociality trash-talking and see also collaboration social innovation games social network games and applications alternate reality asynchronous gameplay in dance-offs and dance quests in in forecasting genre in global collaboratories prosocial emotions generated by satisfying work in social connectivity in social innovation as social motivation platforms of social participation and volunteer work trash-talking in user profiles in video sharing in social participation games crowd mobilization efforts of empowerment of for energy conservation epic wins in heroic purpose in social connectivity in as taking advantage of leading-edge technology wish-granting social participation tasks (SPTs) “social presence,” sound tracks Spore stealth social innovation Sudnow, David Suits, Bernard SuperBetter supercomputers “super-empowered hopeful individuals” (SEHIs) game platform for organizing of Super Monkey Ball 2 Superstruct sustainable engagement economy epic wins as crucial in Sutton-Smith, Brian SXSW Interactive Tapscott, Don Tarter, Jill Teaching Digital Natives (Prensky) teamwork see also collaboration ten-thousand-hour theory Tetris Texas Hold ‘Em Theory of Fun for Game Design, A (Koster) Thompson, Clive Tomasello, Michael Tombstone Hold ‘Em Top Secret Dance-Off transitory public sociality trash-talking Twenge, Jean M.

The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise
by Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher
Published 1 Dec 2009

Private networks include dedicated farms of small commodity servers used with grid middleware to allow for parallel computing. Other private networks include corporate offices where personal computers are used after hours for parallel computing. One of the most well known public network examples of grid computing is the SETI@home project. This project uses computers connected to the Internet in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Individuals can participate by running a program on their personal computers that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. It then sends the results back to the central system that aggregates completed jobs. This type of public network grid computing is known as CPU scavenging.

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Grid computing implementations vary, and some are wholly dedicated to grid computing all day, whereas others are utilized as other types of computers during the day and connected to the grid at night when no one is using them. For grids that are utilizing surplus capacity, this approach is known as CPU scavenging. One of the most well-known grid scavenging programs has been SETI@home that utilizes unused CPU cycles on volunteers’ computers in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence in radio telescope data. There are obviously drawbacks of utilizing spare capacity that include unpredictability of the number of hosts and the speed or capacity of each host. When dealing with large corporate computer networks or standardized systems that are idle during the evening, these drawbacks are minimized.

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Servers, optimal number for data centers, 491–492 Service behavior during failure, stress testing, 265 Service providers, clouds, 435–436 Services, splitting work responsibility by, 331–332 Services affecting performance, identifying for stress testing, 265 Session environments, saving, 403–404 Session storage avoiding, 403–404, 405 centralizing, 404, 405 decentralizing, 404, 405 Set method, 382 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 429 SETI@home project, 429 Sharding, definition, 311 Shards, definition, 311 Shared infrastructure, grid benefit, 457 Shareholder test, 24 Shareholder value, dilution by data cost, 415 Shareholder values, leadership alignment with, 74–75 ShareThis, case studies, 507–508 Slavery, abolition of, 80 Slivers, definition, 311 SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) criteria, postmortem review, 145 goals, 80–81, 83 guidelines, architectural principles, 198 Software as a Service (SaaS), 427–428 Software engineers, roles and responsibilities, 33–34 Specific architectural principles, 198 Speed cloud computing benefit, 441–442 tradeoffs in business, 287 Splitting databases by customer, 365–367.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

Many critics thought Nakamoto had ruined the system by refusing to guarantee results. They wanted his computational puzzles as a “proof of work” to verify transactions also to accomplish “good works.” They wanted bitcoin’s computations to calculate complex protein folds for cancer therapy or to do search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) calculations for the discovery of other intelligent beings in space or to fathom intricate feedback loops in the models of global warming. But a measuring stick cannot be part of what it measures. A currency generates value by measuring value. If what it is doing is already deemed valuable, money becomes just another self-referential loop, where elites define what should be deemed important.

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches
by Marshall Brain
Published 6 Apr 2015

Human beings love to imagine the arrival of extraterrestrials to our small planet. As a species we have created hundreds of books, stories and movies about extraterrestrial arrival. Every day there is a new report of a UFO somewhere in the world. And there is a very well known effort called SETI - the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - that hopes to intercept radio signals from intelligent life on other planets. Just think of all of the popular movies that have explored the possibility of extraterrestrials. Here is a sampling of blockbuster films in this genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey The Abyss Alien, Aliens Apollo 18 Avatar Battle: Los Angeles Chicken Little Close encounters of the Third Kind Cloverfield Cocoon Contact Cowboys and Aliens District 9 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Godzilla The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I An Number Four Independence Day Invasion of the Body Snatchers Lost in Space Megamind Mission to Mars Signs Species Star Wars Star Trek Stargate Super 8 Superman The Thing Transformers War of the Worlds The X Files It is clear that human beings enjoy thinking about extraterrestrials and the arrival of extraterrestrials on earth.

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
by Melanie Swan
Published 22 Jan 2014

Blockchain 3.0: Efficiency and Coordination Applications Beyond Currency, Economics, and Markets Blockchain Science: Gridcoin, Foldingcoin As blockchain technology could revolutionize the operation of other fields, innovators are starting to envision how the concepts might apply to science. So far, the main thread is related to peer-to-peer distributed computing projects for which individual volunteers provide unused computing cycles to Internet-based distributed computing projects. Two notable projects are SETI@home (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, which uses contributed computing cycles to help analyze radio signals from space, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence), and Folding@home (a Stanford University project for which computing cycles are used to simulate protein folding, for computational drug design and other molecular dynamics problems).

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

As we mentioned, the transition from Type 0 to Type I is the most dangerous one, since we still have all the savagery, fundamentalism, racism, and so on of the past. It is possible that one day, when we visit the stars, we may find evidence of Type 0 civilizations that failed to make the transition to Type I (for example, their atmospheres may be too hot, or too radioactive, to support life). SETI (SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE) At the present time, the people of the world are certainly not conscious of the march toward a Type I planetary civilization. There is no collective self-awareness that this historic transition is taking place. If you take a poll, some people might be vaguely aware of the process of globalization, but beyond that there is no conscious awareness that we are headed to a specific destination.

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Quantum computers Quantum dot computers Quantum theory computers and, 1.­1, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 medicine and nanotechnology and superconductors and Railroad industry Ramjet fusion propulsion system Rasputin, Grigori Rattner, Justin, 4.­1, 4.­2 Reagan, Ronald Recession of 2008, 7.­1, 7.­2, 8.­1 Reeve, Christopher Relativity, theory of Remodeling in 2100 Replicators Cave Man Principle and, 4.­1, 4.­2 creation of anything with feasibility issue gray-­goo scenario living tissue, creation of plastic 3-­D images, creation of self-­assembly (bottom-­up approach) to social impact of Resurrecting extinct life-­forms Resveratrol Richter, Ronald Robotics/­AI ASIMO robot, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 bodily enhancements brain science and Cave Man Principle and, 2.­1, 2.­2 common sense and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 consciousness and, 2.­1, 2.­2 driverless cars emotional robots expert systems and far future (2070) friendly AI history of human job market and human-­robot merger human-robot social interaction, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 immediate recognition and medicine and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 midcentury (2030) mind control of robots by humans modular robots, 2.­1, 4.­1 musical robots nanobots, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 near future (present to 2030) pattern recognition and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 remote-­controlled and autonomous robots reverse engineering the brain for self-replicating robots, 2.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 singularity and software limitations on soldier robots space travel and, 2.­1, 6.­1, 6.­2, 6.­3, 6.­4 surrogates and avatars “takeover” threat posed by robots, 2.­1, 2.­2 top-down and bottom-up approaches to, 2.­1, 2.­2 Rohrer, Heinrich Rose, Michael RP-­6 mobile robot Rubin, Gerry Rutan, Burt, 6.­1, 6.­2 Sagan, Carl, 6.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 Scanning tunneling microscope Schentag, Jerome Schopenhauer, Arthur Schrö­dinger, Erwin Schultz, Tanja Schuster, Stephan C.­ Schwabl, Mike Schwartz, Peter Schwarzenegger, Arnold Second Life (Website) Self-­assembly Self-­awareness Self-replicating robots, 2.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 Sen, Ayusman SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program Severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) Shakespeare, William Shape-­shifting technology Shaw, George Bernard Shen, Weimin Shopping in 2100, 9.­1, 9.­2 Shostak, Seth Silicon chips, limitations of, 1.­1, 1.­2, 4.­1 Silva, Alcino Simon, Herbert Simon, Julian Simonyi, Charles Sinclair, David, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 Singapore Singularity Sirtuins SixthSense project 6th Day, The (movie) Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (Condorcet) Slingatron Smalley, Richard, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 Smart dust Smith, Adam Smith, Gerald Social robotics Solar power Solar sail propulsion system Sonograms Sonoluminescence Space elevator SpaceShip spacecraft, 6.­1, 6.­2, 6.­3 Space solar power (SSP) Space travel, itr.­1, 6.­1 asteroid landing big bang research booster-­rocket technologies cost of Europa exploration far future (2070) genetic engineering of humans for human-­robot merger and life in space, search for, 6.­1, 8.­1 Mars landing/­colonization Martian moon landing midcentury (2030) moon landing/colonization, 6.­1, 6.­2 nanotechnology and, 6.­1, 6.­2 near future (present to 2030) planets outside the solar system, search for private initiatives robotics and, 2.­1, 6.­1, 6.­2, 6.­3, 6.­4 space elevator tourism water in space, search for, 6.­1, 6.­2 weightlessness problem See also Starships Spinal cord injury treatments Sports and games, 8.­1, 9.­1 STAIR (Stanford artificial intelligence robot), 2.­1, 2.­2 Starships antimatter rocket propulsion system nanoships nuclear rocket propulsion system ramjet fusion propulsion system solar sail propulsion system Star Trek series, itr.­1, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 1.­4, 1.­5, 2.­1, 2.­2, 3.­1, 4.­1, 8.­1, 8.­2 Star Wars saga, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 1.­4, 2.­1, 8.­1 Steam power Steffens, John Stem cell technology Stewart, Potter Stock, Greg, 2.­1, 3.­1, 3.­2 Stormer, Horst Stratton, Mike Sullivan, Mark Superconductors telekinesis and Surgery Surrogates Surrogates (movie), 1.­1, 2.­1, 2.­2 Sussman, Gerald Swarming behavior, 6.­1, 6.­2 Tachi, Susumu Taleyarkhan, Rusi Taylor, Doris, 3.­1, 3.­2 Taylor, Theodore Technologies as utilities Technology, four stages of Telekinesis Telepresence Telomeres of a cell Terminator movies, 1.­1, 2.­1, 2.­2, 4.­1 Terraforming of Mars Terrestrial Planet Finder Terrorism, 3.­1, 8.­1 Tesla Roadster Test tube babies Things to Come (movie) 3-­D technology Three Mile Island nuclear accident Thurow, Lester, 7.­1, 7.­2, 7.­3, 7.­4 Tidman, Derek Time Machine, The (Wells) Tissue engineering, 3.­1, 3.­2 Toffler, Alvin and Heidi Total Recall (movie) Tour, James Tourism industry Tourism in space Trains, maglev Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (movie) Transistors, 1.­1, 4.­1 Tsien, Joseph Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin Tundra, melting of Turing, Alan Twister (movie) 2001 (movie) Type 0-IV civilizations.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

Synaptics is briefly highlighted in Carol Levin, “Here’s Looking at You,” PC Magazine (December 20, 1994): 31. Carver Mead’s web site also provides detailed information on this research at the “Physics of Computation-Carver Mead’s Group” at <http://www.pcmp.caltech.edu/>. 28 The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute conducts research on other signs of life in the Universe, its primary goal being the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The institute is a nonprofit research organization, funded by government agencies, private foundations, and individuals, which in turn provides funding for several dozen projects. For more information, see the SETI Institute web site, <http://www.seti.org>. 29 The author is dictating portions of this book to his computer through the continuous speech recognition program called Voice Xpress Plus from the dictation division of Lernout & Hauspie (formerly Kurzweil Applied Intelligence).

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates
by John Logie
Published 29 Dec 2006

Grokster, 128–41 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 23 Morpheus, 136 MP3, 4, 9, 10–13, 40, 56, 59, 62–65, 80, 82, 85– 88, 91, 94–96, 102–4, 109, 111, 113, 119, 135 wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om Index MP3.com: my.mp3.com, 59, 77–82; Beam-It, 77, 79 MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), 6, 82, 105–6, 123, 125, 149 MTV (Music TeleVision), 41, 43 Napster: popularity of, 3–6; roots in hacker community 32–44; iconography 35, 127; associated with theft, 52– 56, and Betamax standard 58; efficiencies of 59; ties to rock and hip-hop 63–64; positioned as enabling piracy, 67–68; 77–82, community building features of 96; as revolutionary 109–10 Napster 2.0, 122, 127, 135 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 25–26 NET (No Electronic Theft) Act of 1997, 49, 52, 141 New York Times, 44, 74, 86, 105, 115, 116, 122, 129, 131 Newton, Isaac, 69 Nixon, Richard, 42 Northeastern University, 4, 37, 40 NWA (Niggaz With Attitude), 41 Oberholzer, Felix, 54 OED (Oxford English Dictionary), 68–70 Oliver, Kenneth, 132 open source software, 9 Parody Doctrine, 123 Patel, Marilyn Hall, 56–57, 67 pathos, 7, 54 Patterson, Lyman Ray, 45–49 PDF (Portable Document Format), 143–46 Peel, John, 87 peer-to-peer, Napster as model 3–5, 43–44; post-Napster Pa r l orPr e s s Index popularity 6; debates over 6–8,12, 20–21, 51, 76, 83, 100, 107, 114–17, 120–21, 126, 143, 146; use by colleges 14, 19, 145; putative impact on record sales 54; users portrayed as thieves, 60; efficiency of 64–65, 77, 86; dependence upon “shared folders” 92–93, 98–99; downloads of motion pictures, 105; potential of, 126, 127, 141, 143,145–48 ; as foundational to Internet, 128–29 permission requests, 15, 24, 42–43, 55, 61, 69, 82–83, 100–4, 143, 147, 149, 150 Perry, Lee “Scratch,” 124 photocopier, 140 Pierre-Louis, Stanley, 92 piracy, in Ukraine 9–11, VCR as tool for 57; shifts in meaning 67–84 Pirates of the Caribbean, 71, 73, 76 plagiarism, 131 player piano, 129 Pop, Iggy, 10–11 Porter, James E., 20, 130 Presley, Elvis, 42 public domain, 8, 100–3, 126, 147 public policy, 7, 43, 61, 108 R.E.M., 10 Rader (Slashdot pseudonym), 112–13, 117 Rakoff, Jed, 81 record industry, 11, 39, 116–18 record labels, 3, 4, 11, 35, 90, 112 reel-to-reel tape, 117 Rehnquist, William, 139 Rhapsody, 122, 135 Rhetoric Review, 130, 156 rhetorical theory, 7, 38, 107–8, 120–21 wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om 163 RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America): suit against Napster 6, 34; lawsuit campaign against users of peerto-peer networks by, 6, 86–93, 97, 99, 121; use of hyperbole, 52–56, 66, 68, 77–82; positioned as tyrant 110; price-fixing 112; uploading of bogus fules 119; arguments against copying music onto computers, 134–35; participation in Grokster case,136 Richardson, Eileen, 40 Ritter, Jordan, 33 Robertson, Michael, 77–83 Robin Hood, 106 Rosen, Hilary, 79, 82 Ross, Andrew, 31–32, 35, 44 Rothstein, Edward, 116 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 20 Scalia, Antonin, 137 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society): Port Huron Statement, 27 Seabiscuit: variable prices of editions across media 72–76 Secor, Marie, 120 Segaller, Stephen, 26–28 Selfe, Cindy, 130 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 105 SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), 147–48 Sharman BV, 136 Slashdot, 112–14 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1999, 101, 129, 141 Sony, 57, 108, 122, 133, 137-39 Sony v. Universal Studios, 57-8, staple article of commerce doctrine, 133-40 Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om 164 Souter, David, 137–40 Soviet Union, 115–18 Spider-Man, 18 spyware, 12 Stallman, Richard, 28, 39, 83, 84; Free Software, 28; GNU, 28; GPL (general public license), 28 Stapp, Scott, 53 stasis theory, 107, 120–21 steganography, 70 Stevens, Cat, 104 Stevens, John Paul, 133 Stevenson, Adlai, 116 Stooges, The, 10 Streamcast, 131, 136–40 Strumpf, Koleman, 54 students, 4,14–20, 51, 131, 141, 145–46 Sullivan, Lorraine, 93–96 TEACH Act, 16–19, 141 Thomas, Clarence, 137 Thomas, Douglas: Hacker Culture, 23 Time (magazine), 34, 38, 52 Tucker, Carlton, 23 U.S.

The Lights in the Tunnel
by Martin Ford
Published 28 May 2011

Another major player in this area is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). This special software, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, allows individuals to donate unused computer time to a variety of scientific projects, including SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), climate prediction, cancer research, astrophysics, and many others. The software to participate in these programs can be downloaded from the web.* *[ http://folding.stanford.edu and http://boinc.berkeley.edu ] In the future, we can anticipate that grid computing will become increasingly important.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

Clarke novel 2003 Liftport Group is formed to develop space elevators 2011 First European Space Elevator challenge takes place 2070 Japanese scientists claim to have developed a working elevator 40 Alien intelligence Have you ever wondered what would happen if scientists discovered compelling evidence of intelligent life existing on another planet? Or how we’d respond to an intelligent civilization that decided to pay us a visit in person? Believe it or not, some sensible people at SETI—an organization dedicated to finding other forms of intelligent life out in space—have been thinking about this. The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is a fascinating organization full of hugely intelligent and ferociously curious people. Their job is to find out whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets, which, as Arthur C. Clarke once pointed out, is one of the most fascinating and important questions that we can ask.

Peer-to-Peer
by Andy Oram
Published 26 Feb 2001

It sounded crazy at first: He proposed using the computing power of home PCs to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. But Gedye was serious. He had contacted Woody Sullivan, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington and an expert in the theory behind SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Woody had steered him to Dan Werthimer, a SETI researcher at UC Berkeley. The four of us—Gedye, Werthimer, Sullivan, and I—met several times over the next year, trying to assess the viability of Gedye’s idea. We decided that existing technology was sufficient, though just barely, for recording radio data and distributing it over the Internet.

…

WorldOS Corporation Devices as Peers Bluetooth Brazil Project dHTTP (Distributed HTTP) Endeavors Technology, Inc. Jini Distributed Computation 2AM Applied MetaComputing Centrata Datasynapse Distributed.net DistributedScience Entropia Parabon Computation Popular Power Porivo Technologies, Inc. SETI@home: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Ubero United Devices, Inc.: Individuals Accelerating Science Distributed Search Engines gonesilent.com (aka InfraSearch) OpenCOLA Plebio WebV2 File Sharing CuteMX.Com (GlobalScape, Inc.) File Navigator Free Haven Freenet Gnutella Hotline Communications, Ltd. Jungle Monkey Mojo Nation Napster Ohaha OnSystems, Inc.

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy
by Moiya McTier
Published 14 Aug 2022

That could appear as chemical or light pollution, giant constructed objects like a Dyson sphere built to collect maximum stellar energy, or coherent electromagnetic signals. Your astronomers have been searching for encoded radio signals from other star systems since the 1960s. An American radio astronomer named Frank Drake originally spearheaded the work until the institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence eventually took it up. Founded by Jill Tarter6—one of the few humans for whom I have nothing but respect—SETI’s work has been ridiculed by many human astronomers, but it’s always been one of my favorite human organizations because it dared to wonder what other interesting creatures I might hold.

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece
by Michael Benson
Published 2 Apr 2018

It was a remarkably assured performance, particularly given the riskiness of the subject. “Those parameters are poorly known,” Sagan had written with considerable understatement. Such back-of-the-envelope calculations had been worked out before, of course, most famously by astronomer Frank Drake as an analytical tool for the first meeting in 1961 of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—a meeting that Sagan had attended. After a lot of debate, the SETI group had produced a figure of between a thousand and a hundred million civilizations in the Milky Way alone—a rather wide spread, to be sure, but on the other hand, either figure would be extraordinary. In his paper, Sagan had attempted to refine this, working up an estimate of something on the order of 106 extant advanced technical civilizations in the Milky Way alone—a round million—and had even hazarded that the most likely distance to the nearest such community was several hundred light years.

…

Michael, 125 North, Alex, 391–94 Novros, Lester, 92, 93 Noyes, Eliot, 117, 123–24, 124n, 126 O’Brien, Robert, 85–86, 88, 111, 139–40, 152, 334–36, 335, 338, 357, 389–91, 393, 413, 414, 420 background of, 389–90 at 2001 screening, 409 Odyssey (Homer), 1–3, 10, 51, 68–69, 74, 128n, 147, 214 Of Mice and Men, 210 Oliver Twist, 262 Olivier, Laurence, 355 Ono, Yoko, 247 Oparin, Alexander, 213 Ordway, Fred, 82–85, 92, 94, 95, 97–99, 101–3, 114n, 118, 124–27, 124n, 136, 138, 195, 426 lawsuit of, 407–8 Orff, Carl, 356 Orwell, George, 108 “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting” (Clarke), 53–54, 87, 143, 144n Ozu, Yasujirō, 439 Pahnke, Walter, 98–100 Pal, George, 415 paleoanthropology, 10, 231, 264, 265 African Genesis (Ardrey), 71–73, 144–45, 261 Palihakkara, Sheha, 26 Palmquist, Philip, 269 Paramount Pictures, 390 Parker, Charlie, 290 Parys Mountain, 240 Paths of Glory, 4, 184 Pederson, Charlene, 359–60, 361, 383 Pederson, Con, 47, 92–93, 130, 137, 138, 242–43, 260, 319, 321, 322, 323, 340, 351, 365, 393, 403–4, 436 Trumbull and, 403–4 Pereira, Harry, 14–16 Perry, Frank, 90 Pešek, Luděk, 76, 136 Peter Pan, 252 Peterson, Floyd, 374 Pickens, Slim, 268 Pierce, John R., 125 Pike, Kelvin, 153, 161, 172, 179, 180–83, 197, 198, 209, 210, 255, 259, 314 Planetary and Space Science, 19 Planet of the Apes, 316, 423 Pocket Books, 32 Pohlad, Bill, 433 Polanski, Roman, 226, 306–7, 346 Polaris Productions, 25, 32, 34, 44, 52, 58–59, 61, 62, 76, 80, 88, 89, 91, 98, 103–4, 329–30 Ordway and Adams’s lawsuit against, 408 Pollock, Jackson, 347 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 380 Powell, Aubrey, 143n Powell, Ivor, 153, 159, 160, 201, 217, 225, 322, 380 Powell, Michael, 262 Powers, Stefanie, 160 Preminger, Otto, 140, 159, 190, 191, 243 Pressburger, Emeric, 262 prewar gauze, 381–82 Profiles of the Future (Clarke), 49 Prometheus, 73 Prospect of Immortality, The (Ettinger), 115n psilocybin, 98–99 Psycho, 356 Publishers Weekly, 239–40 Queen Elizabeth, RMS, 397, 405, 406–7 Questar telescope, 27, 29, 46, 56 RAF Spitfire, 117 Raiders of the Lost Ark, 259 Rain, Douglas, 71, 374–78, 399, 442 Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), 98, 99 Ramsey, Clark, 336, 337 RAND Corporation, 76 Randi, James, 415–16 Ran Muthu Duwa, 25, 26 Raven-Hart, R., 17 rear projection, 268 Red Alert (George), 58 Regent’s Park Zoo, 265, 267, 280 Requiem (Ligeti), 9, 360, 361, 363 Residu, 246 Reyes, Benn, 374, 398 Richter, Dan, 246–51, 250, 260–61, 263–68, 279–83, 285–96, 298–303, 305–15, 311, 317, 368, 369, 384, 433 Clarke and, 261, 308 drug habit of, 247, 264, 280–81, 292–94 film credit of, 400–401 as Moonwatcher, 261, 268, 281, 282, 289, 291, 293, 299, 306–15, 311, 401 as Polka Dot Man, 383–86, 387 Richter, Jill, 247, 261, 306 Riordan, Eugene, 126, 127 Road to the Stars, 252 Robards, Jason, 90 Robocop, 423n Rocket Publishing Co., 17, 204 Rolls-Royce Rocket Division, 411 Ross, Alex, 360 Rossiter, Leonard, 139 Rothko, Mark, 347 Royal Albert Hall, 246, 247 Rubinger, Bob, 24–25 Ryan, Robert, 90 Ryder, Winston, 380 Saarinen, Eero, 118 Sagan, Carl, 11, 18–21, 64–66, 84, 213–14, 385 Saint Laurent, Yves, 140 Sands of Mars, The (Clarke), 32 Sarris, Andrew, 419 satellites, 56–57, 125 Saturn, 136–38, 144 Saving Private Ryan, 259 Scheider, Roy, 442 Schurmann, Gerard, 356 science fiction, 8, 19, 28–29, 36–39, 69, 79, 84–86, 94, 108–9, 264–65, 269, 433–34 Scientific American, 344 Scotchlite, 269, 295 Scotland, 243–45, 245, 395, 396 Scott, George C., 90, 186 Séance on a Wet Afternoon, 35 Segal, Mort, 333 Selassie, Haile, 232 Seldes, Gilbert, 35 Sellers, Peter, 41, 43, 262, 315, 433 “Sentinel, The” (Clarke), 20–21, 22, 30, 31, 44, 48, 53, 54, 88, 89, 102 Serendib, 26 SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), 19 Seventh Seal, The, 200 Shadow on the Sun, 37, 38, 44, 45, 48, 139 Shapiro, Michael, 422 Shapley, Harlow, 69 Shaw, Artie, 35, 38, 62 Shaw, Robert, 90, 91 Shay, Don, 343–44 Shepperton Studios, 111–12, 147–50, 151–57, 153 flies and bats at, 156, 157 Shining, The, 175, 438 Shrimpton, Jean, 284 Sight & Sound, 438–49 Silence, The, 35 Silent World, The (Cousteau), 21 Silverstein, Maurice, 409, 420 Simpson, Roy, 279–82, 292–94 Simpsons, The, 433 Singer, Alexander, 35 Skeleton Coast, 271 Skinner, B.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
Published 14 Jun 2021

Science writer Michael Shermer found that iconic brains like paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and astronomer Carl Sagan scored off the charts in both conscientiousness and openness to experience, indicating an ideal balance between being pliant enough to accept the occasional kooky claim that turned out to be correct, but not so credulous that they fell for every outlandish theory they stumbled across. “Sagan, for example, was open to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which, at the time, was considered a moderately heretical idea,” said Shermer. “But he was too conscientious to accept the even more controversial claim that UFOs and aliens have actually landed on earth.” Long story short, sometimes when something sounds too wacky to be true, it really is that delightfully—truthfully—wacky.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

‘Strong AI’ is a super intelligence so powerful that it can supposedly experience ‘emotions, intuitions, and feelings to the point of becoming aware of its own existence’, says the Dutchman Lex Coors, one of the stars of the data-centre industry.49 The more optimistic believe that such an entity will become a reality in the next five to 10 years, once humanity has produced 175 zettabytes of data — enough for an AI to learn and perfect itself by processing data itself through ‘deep learning’. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute with NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), has even put forward a theory that is equally fascinating and disturbing: the main form of intelligence in the universe is already electronic in nature. Our intelligence, in essence animal, is but a ‘transient phenomenon’, a step in a process of evolution culminating in the emergence of a post-biological life constituted by machines.50 The sceptics belittle this as forever remaining in the realm of science fiction or fantasy.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

It was harder to determine North Korea’s nuclear head count back then. Now we just type it into the search field. Prayer Science has looked for God, or a higher intelligence. Over the last century, there have been numerous well-funded efforts to scan the universe for radio emissions that might register life, for example, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Carl Sagan cogently compared this effort to a prayer: lifting your gaze to the heavens, sending up data, and waiting for a response from a more intelligent being. We hope that this superbeing can capture, process, and return an answer. In the midst of the AIDS crisis, psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ, of the University of California San Francisco, invited psychic healers from as far as 1,500 miles away to pray for ten subjects, each with advanced AIDS.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

NASA has turned the project into a game where you earn points for “being a mapmaker” or “counting impact craters.” As these projects are voluntary, they attract only participants passionate about the subject and motivated to engage with a group of people to help solve real challenges. The same principle applies to SETI@home, which stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” set up in 1999 by Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In the essay “Sharing Nicely,” Yale Law School Professor Yochai Benkler pointed to the world’s largest distributed computer network to highlight the trend toward sharing and to prove the potential of a distributed network.

Space 2.0
by Rod Pyle
Published 2 Jan 2019

It hosts an annual conference, is engaged in political activities with regard to space and spaceflight, and publishes a monthly newsletter. Membership is open to all. Address: 9318 Warren Street, Silver Spring, MD, 20910 Phone: (623) 271-2045 Email: info@spacefrontier.org Web: spacefrontier.org THE SETI INSTITUTE The SETI Institute supports the search for extraterrestrial intelligence through direct observation and other research. It also participates in astrobiology research. The Institute offers scholarships and research opportunities, as well as a wide array of public engagement programs. The newsletter is free, and membership is not required. Address: 189 Bernardo Avenue, Suite 200, Mountain View, CA 94043 Phone: (650) 961-6633 Email: info@seti.org Web: seti.org SPACE STUDIES INSTITUTE The SSI was founded by Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s and continues to pursue his dream of space settlement.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

These figures are shorter than estimates typically plugged into the Drake equation for the lifetime of a communicating civilization. The 1961 estimates were 1,000 to 100 million years. Could we detect regular broadcast signals from distant stars? It’s not likely, given the technology at our end. Our SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) efforts bank more on the hopeful prospect that advanced ETs will want to communicate with us and are able to build superpowerful beacons to do so. Have we ever built such beacons? No. Will we do so? It’s hard to say. Already some fret that interstellar broadcasts would paint a target on our back.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

Merit is sometimes based wholly on impersonal attributes, such as the precise location of your 3-D printer (for local manufacturing) or home Wi-Fi router (so someone can connect), how much processing capability you have on your server (for use by an organization such as SETI in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence), or whether you are available to work at an awkward time (for taxi, delivery, or emergency service). Indeed, there is a whole range of Peers Inc collaborations where location or timing is the attribute of greatest importance, and still others where no money is transacted or where the “peer” is a device.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

Although Kurzweil and Tegmark are both smart enough or canny enough to dismiss the existence of extraterrestrial minds, most of the movement is intoxicated by the view that we are not alone. The usual conclusion is that intelligent life on other planets is so easy, so determined by material forces, that it is “inevitable.” Expressing this assurance is SETI, the “search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” a collective effort conducted on hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe searching through electromagnetic debris for a glint of mind elsewhere in the universe. Nothing has turned up in thirty-five years or so, but Yuri Milner, the great Russian physicist-investor, has pumped another $100 million into the cause in his “Breakthrough Listen” project.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

Our job is to accelerate current projects, such as the TMT, the SKA and the James Webb, and to initiate a more ambitious Moon-based array. $ $ $ MOVING FROM THE SEARCH for microbial aliens and habitable exoplanets, we turn now to the holy grail and, in the public mind at least, the ultimate glory: the hunt for alien civilisations. This is the mission of the SETI Institute – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, started by astronomer Frank Drake in the 1960s. Drake is famous for his attempt to estimate the number of alien civilisations in our galaxy that might be broadcasting radio signals at any given time. His lower estimate is 20, the upper estimate is 50 million, and, despite criticism over the years, just the merest chance that we might hear a signal from an alien civilisation has captured the imagination of millions.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Jan 2003

Terrorism and Justice: Some Useful Truisms 9. A Passing Nightmare? Afterword Notes Index HEGEMONY OR SURVIVAL Chapter 1 Priorities and Prospects A few years ago, one of the great figures of contemporary biology, Ernst Mayr, published some reflections on the likelihood of success in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.1 He considered the prospects very low. His reasoning had to do with the adaptive value of what we call “higher intelligence,” meaning the particular human form of intellectual organization. Mayr estimated the number of species since the origin of life at about fifty billion, only one of which “achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.”

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
by David Christian
Published 21 May 2018

Explaining the origins of life on Earth and trying to figure out if something similar might have emerged elsewhere in our universe are among the most difficult problems facing modern science. At the moment, we know of only one planet with life. Astrobiologists are searching for life elsewhere through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program, which began in 1960, but so far they have found none. For now, we are confined to studying the origins of life on Earth. Even that is extraordinarily difficult, as it means trying to determine what was happening on our planet almost four billion years ago, when Earth was very different.

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight
by Chris Dubbs , Emeline Paat-dahlstrom and Charles D. Walker
Published 1 Jun 2011

A host of luminary scientists rounded out the passenger list: Carl Sagan, NASA adviser and director of Cornell's Laboratory for Planetary Studies; German-born rocket designer and space visionary Krafft Ehricke; Marvin Minsky, the man breaking ground with artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); radio astronomer Frank Drake, director of the Arecibo Observatory, who was pioneering the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; and physicist Robert Enzmann, who had developed ideas about nuclear-powered rockets. As Asimov would later explain in one of his regular articles in The Magazine ofFantasy and Science Fiction, he had been recruited the previous spring by Richard Hoagland, "who was aflame to lead a party of idealists" to see the launch of Apollo 17.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

People blog whatever the heck suits their fancy. If someone blogs, “I feel awesome today! Just wanted to share,” you might assume it interests only the blogger’s friends and family, and there’s no value for the rest of the world. Such remarks just get thrown out there to an imaginary audience, like search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) transmissions, scattered to oblivion in an attempt to reach nonhuman yet attentive ears, somewhere, someday, maybe, if they exist. Bloggers shout, unheard, into the void. As with most applications of predictive analytics (PA), Eric and Karrie’s system repurposes data. Whatever the intended purpose and target audience of the bloggers, they are delivering a wellspring of raw material that lies dormant, waiting to be reinterpreted by listening to it in a new way that uncovers new meaning and insight.

Lost at Sea
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Oct 2012

They carry on looking at the night sky. “No,” Robbie says, finally, “I don’t think there’s anything up there tonight.” First Contact If we are ever contacted by aliens, the man I’m having lunch with will be one of the first humans to know. His name is Paul Davies and he’s chair of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Post-Detection Science and Technology Task-group. They’re a group of distinguished scientists and will be, come the big day, the planet’s alien welcome committee. His is an awesome responsibility, and one he doesn’t take lightly. “Imagine a civilization that’s way in advance of us wants to communicate with us and assist us in our development,” Paul says.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

To make a definitive leap into artificial reality, we’ll need both more ingenuity and more computational power. Fortunately, both could be at hand. The SETI@home project has enabled people around the world to donate their idle computer time to sift radio waves from space, advancing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In connection with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project, CERN—where, earlier, the World Wide Web was born—is pioneering the GRID computer project, a sort of Internet on steroids that will allow many thousands of remote computers and their users to share data and allocate tasks dynamically, functioning in essence as one giant brain.

Beautiful security
by Andy Oram and John Viega
Published 15 Dec 2009

OPEN SOURCE HONEYCLIENT: PROACTIVE DETECTION OF CLIENT-SIDE EXPLOITS 145 The Future of Honeyclients There are over 240 million websites on the Internet today (and of course the number keeps growing by leaps and bounds), and there’s not one group that can cover all of those websites with honeyclient technology. To better fight these attackers that damage our machines and steal our data, we need to band together and learn from each other. We should envision a future where honeyclients take a SETI@home (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at home”) approach, in which each honeyclient is able to process its own data and send it back to a central database repository that can more effectively correlate the data. This can help us identify targeted domains: for example, if company A’s employees are being targeted by company B in order to compromise someone’s computer and steal corporate documents.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Nature In Focus News 480: 161–162. 40. Pew Research Center (2014). Economies of Emerging Markets Better Rated During Difficult Times. Global Attitudes Project. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center. Chapter 3, “Inequality and Economic Mobility.” 41. Merali, Zeeya (2015, July 20). “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Gets a $100-Million Boost.” Nature. Retrieved from www.nature.com/news. 42. United Nations Development Programme (2010). The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development. Human Development Report 2010. New York: United Nations. 43. The Economist (1997, May 8).

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

Oberg, “Mars Probe Went off Course.” 11. Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton and edited by Edward Hutchings, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985), 343. 12. Sarah Scoles, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (New York: Pegasus Books, 2017). 13. John Noble Wilford, “In ‘Contact,’ Science and Fiction Nudge Close Together,” New York Times, July 20, 1997, www.nytimes.com/1997/07/20/movies/in-contact-science-and-fiction-nudge-close-together.html?mtrref=www.google.com. 14. T. C. Chamberlin, “The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses,” Science (old series) 15, no. 92 (1890), reprinted in Science, May 7, 1965, available at http://arti.vub.ac.be/cursus/2005-2006/mwo/chamberlin1890science.pdf. 15.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

More areas open up to peer production as the principle of peer-to-peer is applied not only to reduce costs for variable capital (i.e. living labour), but also to cheapen constant capital (infrastructure, machineries etc.). That could be the deeper implication of the SETI@home project. SETI@home is a favourite example in hacker literature, mingling high technology with fascination for science fiction. SETI stands for: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. SETI searches for intelligent alien life by scanning for radio signals from outer space. The huge task of analysing the data received is distributed to volunteers who lend spare capacity on their personal computers. For a succession of years the project has out-performed state-of-the-art supercomputers at a fraction of the cost.21 The SETI@home project is not as dramatic as the controversies surrounding filesharing networks, nor does it have the zeal of grassroots journalism.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

Left, 73-75 Rockefeller, John D., 60, 72 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 276 Roper surveys, 233 Rosilin Institute, 195 Roundworms, 197-198 Rule of twos Asia and, 115-116 China and, 115-116 in gender roles, 247 in market shares, 111-113 in politics, 112-114 in self-correcting systems, 8, 111-116 Russia capitalism in, 54, 134-137 economic crisis in, 51 education in, 215 Gorbachev economics, 48 gross domestic product, 68 in New Economy, 8, 136-139, 291 nuclear bombs, 135 predictions about, 169 U.S. economic leadership and, 70-71 World War II, 14 San Francisco, 72, 73, 188, 216 Santa Fe Institute, 264 Satellites, 50, 89, 233 Saudi Arabia, 250 Savings, 117,120 Scenarios for prosperity, 10 334 Schroeder, Gerhard, 94, 122 Schweitzer, Gerhard, 205 Science. See Wild science Scotland, 195 Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), 221 Seattle, 26, 72 Secretary of the Treasury, 292 Seinfeld, 234 Self-correcting systems, 111-116 Servers, 27 Shanghai, 110,124, 128, 182-185 Silicon Valley axis of innovation, 72, 73 business model, 44-45 entrepreneurial education, 87 job openings in, 82 nanotechnology in, 205 vs.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

Human curiosity has proved time and again to be an unstoppable drive, and these two endeavors—the development of AI and the search for ET—will undoubtedly continue at full speed. Which one will get to its target first? To even attempt to address this question, we have to note that there’s one important difference between the search for extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations and the development of artificial intelligence. Progress toward the “Singularity” (AI matching or surpassing humans) will almost certainly take place, since the development of advanced AI has the promise of producing enormous profits. On the other hand, the search for life requires funding at a level that can usually be provided only by large national space agencies, with no immediate prospects for profits in sight.

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt
Published 14 May 2018

The one earmark of civilization that is likely to be recognized across the universe is number. In Carl Sagan’s science-fiction novel Contact, aliens in the vicinity of the star Vega beam a series of prime numbers toward earth. The book’s heroine (played by Jodie Foster in the movie version of Contact) works for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She realizes, with a frisson, that the prime-number pulses her radio telescope is picking up must have been generated by some form of intelligent life. But what if aliens beamed jokes at us instead of numbers? We probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish the jokes from the background noise.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 1991

There is no direct way to prove whether creatures capable of language, art, agriculture, or drug abuse exist elsewhere in the universe, because from Earth we could not detect the existence of those traits on planets of other stars. However, we might be able to detect high technology elsewhere in the universe if it included our own capacity to send out space probes and interstellar electromagnetic signals. In Chapter Twelve I shall examine the on-going search for extraterrestrial intelligent life. I shall argue that evidence from a quite different field—studies of woodpecker evolution on Earth—instructs us about the inevitability of evolving intelligent life, and hence about our uniqueness, not only on Earth but also in the accessible universe. EIGHT BRIDGES TO HUMAN LANGUAGE The gulf between animal vocal communication and human speech has traditionally been viewed as unbridgeable.

The Music of the Primes
by Marcus Du Sautoy
Published 26 Apr 2004

One can imagine a different chemistry or biology on the other side of the universe, but prime numbers will remain prime whichever galaxy you are counting in. In Carl Sagan’s classic novel Contact, aliens use prime numbers to contact life on earth. Ellie Arroway, the book’s heroine, has been working at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, listening to the crackle of the cosmos. One night, as the radio telescopes are turned towards Vega, they suddenly pick up strange pulses through the background noise. It takes Ellie no time to recognise the drumbeat in this radio signal. Two pulses are followed by a pause, then three pulses, five, seven, eleven, and so on through all the prime numbers up to 907.

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

Napster is the most famous peer-to-peer technology, even though it is not exactly peer-to-peer. (There is a central server that keeps a database of who has what; the music itself is kept on other people's machines.) But Napster is the horse and buggy in this transportation system. It is only the beginning. Consider the SETI project. SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—scans the radio waves for evidence of intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. It does this by recording the noise of the radio spectrum that we receive on planet Earth. This noise is then analyzed by computers, looking for telltale signs of something unexplained.28 Who cares about wandering X-Files types?

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022

15 Likewise, CRISPR genetic modification technologies could change what it means to be human. Shouldn’t more than just a few scientific bodies or government officials have a chance to weigh in on what kinds of experiments and modifications we feel comfortable with, and which ones go far beyond our moral boundaries?16 Or consider the work of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and its offshoot Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. METI, a very small coalition of scientists, has already started sending messages into deep space in the hopes of alerting other life forms in the universe to our existence. But a growing number of astrophysicists and ethicists are calling for a ban on such deep-space messaging—at least until humans can collectively agree on it.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

We can have an interesting argument based on incomplete evidence, and we can write down the kind of evidence that would decrease our uncertainty. We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens. I praised Carl Sagan for disavowing gut feelings about alien life. But one can (and Sagan did) make a sober assessment of what we would need to know in order to estimate the probability.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

This particular foray out onto the tightrope represents the distinction between well-rooted speculation and declarative superstition – demonstrating, with a degree of irony, that the objective truth of science can send out imaginative probes just as daring as, and considerably better founded than, any form of supernaturalism. The next ‘dart’, ‘Searching under the lamp-post’, on the same subject but in lighter vein, takes a somewhat sceptical look at one approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The final piece in this section both continues the thread of science-based speculation and sets out with unmistakable clarity a crucial distinction: that between the ‘soul’ as detachable inhabitant of an afterlife and the ‘soul’ as locus of the human spirit, its deep well of intellectual and emotional capacity; between the soul of established religion and wistful supernaturalism, and the soul as celebrated in the title of this collection, and in Richard’s introduction to it.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

He was a bestselling author; his TV show Cosmos had been a hit; for more than a decade he had averaged two guest slots a year on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, which for anyone who wasn’t Bob Hope was pretty remarkable. And he had long worried about nuclear weapons – one of the reasons he gave for his interest in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was that success would show that technological civilizations did not have to head down the path to supernova suicide. But until the early 1980s he had not used his charisma and nous to campaign on that or any other political issue, even though friends on the left, such as Stephen Schneider, had long encouraged him to do so.* The TTAPS results might not have been enough to turn Sagan into a campaigner on their own – a brush with death on the operating table and a new marriage seem also to have had a lot to do with it – but they gave him ammunition.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

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All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein
Published 17 Dec 2008

The couple is also a major supporter of Conservation International, a group that seeks to preserve the earth’s “hot spots.” These areas make up only 1.4 percent of land surface but contain some 60 percent of terrestrial plant and animal species. Gordon Moore, Paul Allen, William Hewlett, David Packard65: Congress ridiculed NASA’s controversial Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program and cut its funding in the mid-1990s. At that point, SETI managers ran to the Forbes 400 list to find potential funders. Moore, Allen, Hewlett, and Packard were among those willing to fund the search for alien life within our galaxy. They put up a cumulative $20 million to extend the program, but the search is proving painstakingly slow.

The Mission: A True Story
by David W. Brown
Published 26 Jan 2021

As Jonathan flipped through the pages, his pediatrician said in passing that, hey, I have these tickets for a talk by Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer, and do you want to go instead of me? Jonathan nearly said no—his destiny was in medicine. The offer even offended him on some level. I’m going to be a doctor—what don’t you understand about that? But for whatever reason he said OK. Drake, one of Sagan’s colleagues at the university, had worked on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the sixties and seventies, and in that evening’s lecture, he outlined the latest science from the radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. And once again, there was Jonathan, on this ball of rock swinging round the sun, and there was this guy Drake speaking, revealing Arecibo findings that were helping to unlock the secrets of the universe, and with every word and across each passing minute, Jonathan could feel the physician’s life slipping away like a lab-coated ghost leaving his body.

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection
by Gardner Dozois
Published 23 Jun 2009

His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. Coming up are several new novels, including Weaver, Flood, and Ark. As the disquieting story that follows suggests, perhaps it’s better if the search for extraterrestrial intelligence doesn’t succeed. . . . Near the centre of the Moon’s far side there is a neat, round, well-defined crater called Daedalus. No human knew this existed before the middle of the twentieth century. It’s a bit of lunar territory as far as you can get from Earth, and about the quietest.

…

“Of course you understand the importance of it being on Farside.” For the millionth time in my life he had set his little brother a pop quiz, and he looked at me as if I was catastrophically dumb. “Radio shadow,” I said. To be shielded from Earth’s noisy chatter was particularly important for SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to which my brother was devoting his career. SETI searches for faint signals from remote civilisations, a task made orders of magnitude harder if you’re drowned out by very loud signals from a nearby civilisation. He actually applauded my guess, sarcastically. He often reminded me of what had always repelled me about academia—the barely repressed bullying, the intense rivalry.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch
Published 30 Jun 2011

Here we have physical objects very unlike each other, and whose behaviour is dominated by different laws of physics, embodying the same mathematical and causal structures – and doing so ever more accurately over time. Of all the physical processes that can occur in nature, only the creation of knowledge exhibits that underlying unity. In Arecibo, Puerto Rico, there is a giant radio telescope, one of whose many uses is in the Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). In an office in a building near the telescope there is a small domestic refrigerator. Inside that refrigerator is a bottle of champagne, sealed by a cork. Consider that cork. It is going to be removed from the bottle if and when SETI succeeds in its mission to detect radio signals transmitted by an extraterrestrial intelligence.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders
by Joshua Foer , Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton
Published 19 Sep 2016

Gordon opened the observatory in 1963, aiming to study the scattering of radio waves off molecules in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. Since then, significant astronomical discoveries have been made at Arecibo, including the detection of the first planets outside our solar system. The telescope has also been at the center of several projects in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1974, astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan wrote the Arecibo message, a binary string that was beamed from the telescope toward the star cluster M13 some 25,000 light-years away. If the message is eventually decoded by an intelligent race, the extraterrestrial recipients will be greeted with a 23-by-73-pixel bitmap image depicting a human being, chemical formulas, the solar system, and even the telescope itself.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

As of mid-2004, Folding@home had amassed contributions of about 840,000 processors contributed by more than 365,000 users. 169 SETI@home and Folding@home provide a good basis for describing the fairly common characteristics of Internet-based distributed computation projects. First, these are noncommercial projects, engaged in pursuits understood as scientific, for the general good, seeking to harness contributions of individuals who wish to contribute to such larger-than-themselves goals. SETI@home helps in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Folding@home helps in protein folding research. Fightaids@home is dedicated to running models that screen compounds for the likelihood that they will provide good drug candidates to fight HIV/AIDS. Genome@home is dedicated to modeling artificial genes that would be created to generate useful proteins.

Caribbean Islands
by Lonely Planet

Resembling an extraterrestrial spaceship grounded in the middle of karst country, the Arecibo Observatory looks like something out of a James Bond movie – probably because it is; 007 aficionados will recognize the saucer-shaped dish and craning antennae from the 1995 film Goldeneye . In reality this 20-acre ‘dish’, set in a sinkhole among clusters of haystack-shaped mogotes, is planet earth’s ear into outer space. Involved in the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme, the telescope, which is supported by 50-story cables weighing more than 600 tons, is used by on-site scientists to prove the existence of pulsars and quasars, the so-called ‘music of the stars.’ Parque De Las Cavernas Del Río Camuy UNDERGROUND CAVERNS ( 898-3100; Hwy 129 Km 18.9; adult/child US$12/6, parking US$2; 8am-5pm Wed-Sun & holidays) This park is home to one of the largest cave systems in the world and is definitely worth a stop (but call ahead if it’s been raining – too much water causes closures).