How to Fix The Drake Equation - Where Are The Extraterrestrials?

The Drake Equation Is Broken; Here's How To Fix It

It's long been theorized that the first detection of extraterrestrial intelligence will come from radio waves. But it's possible that what's out there may go well beyond what anyone has dreamed to look for until now

In 1961, scientist Frank Drake wrote down a simple-looking equation for estimating the number of active, technologically-advanced, communicating civilizations in the Milky Way. From first principles, there was no good way to simply estimate a number, but Drake had the brilliant idea of writing down a large number of parameters that could be estimated, which you would then multiply together. If your numbers were accurate, you'd arrive at an accurate figure for the number of technologically advanced civilizations that humanity could communicate with, within our own galaxy, at any given moment. It's a brilliant idea in concept, but one that's become less and less useful as we've learned more about our Universe. As it stands today, the Drake equation is broken, but we know enough about the Universe to construct an even better framework.

The Drake equation, to be specific, said that the number of civilizations (N) we have at any given time within our galaxy, is equal to the product of seven different unknown quantities from astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology, each of which builds off of the previous element. They are:

1. R∗, the average rate of star formation,
2. fp, the fraction of stars with planets,
3. ne the average number stars-with-planets that have one that could support life,
4. fl, the fraction of those planets that developed life,
5. fi, the fraction of life-bearing planets that developed intelligent life,
6. fc, the fraction of these intelligence-having planets that are technologically communicative across interstellar space, and
7. L, the length of time such a civilization can broadcast-or-listen.

Multiply these numbers all together, in theory, and that will give you the number of technologically advanced, broadcasting civilizations we have in the Milky Way today.

Only, there are huge problems with this setup. There are a number of unspoken assumptions that simply writing down the equation this way makes, that simply don't reflect reality. Problems for its modern-day usefulness include:

• The fact that the equation was written before the Big Bang was validated and the Steady State model was disfavored.
• The equation assumes that only one planet per star system could support life.
• That intelligent, technologically advanced life will never spread to other worlds.
• And that broadcasting-and-listening-for radio signals is the method by which an intelligent species would choose to communicate across interstellar space.

That last assumption, in ; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: Georgia, Cambria, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; font-size: 21px; font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures; margin-bottom: 1.6rem; margin-top: 1.6rem;"> This doesn't mean, however, that there aren't other worlds out there with intelligent life on them! Despite our uncertainties about what's out there or whether/how they might attempt to search for or contact us, the possibility of intelligent, communicative, or spacefaring extraterrestrials is one of tremendous interest to not only scientists, but all of humanity. Many of the steps of the Drake equation may be problematic, and they contain the major issue that there are huge uncertainties associated with them: so large that they render any conclusion about N, the number of civilizations within our galaxy, meaningless. But it's 2018 now, and there are a huge number of things we know about our galaxy and our Universe that we didn't know in 1961. Here's a better approach.

1.) Ns: the number of stars in our galaxy. Why estimate the rate of star formation when we can simply look at the number of stars we have today? We know how large our galaxy is, how thick it is, how large the central bulge is, and what their mass distribution is. Based on what we can observe with extremely powerful all-sky and pencil-beam (where you look at one narrow region very deeply) surveys, we can simply state that there are between 200 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy. An uncertainty that's only a factor of 2 is pretty good, and tells us that we have a very optimistic starting point: each star has a chance for success. Let's pick the larger number here.

2.) fp: the fraction of stars with planets. This is one we can keep from the original Drake equation, but in the aftermath of Kepler, it isn't all that interesting. Why? Because it's close to 100%! The fraction of stars with planets around them, based on the number of stars we've surveyed and what we've learned about them, is somewhere in the ballpark of at least 80%. To say "the fraction of stars with planets" is 1 is a nice, easy victory for the optimists out there.

Moon and clouds over the Pacific Ocean, as photographed by Frank Borman and James A. Lovell during the Gemini 7 mission. Earth, around our Sun, has the right conditions for life. But what about other stars

3.) fH: the fraction of stars with the right conditions for habitability. This gets more interesting now! Of the major classes of stars, how many of them have worlds that could support life? A star like our Sun — with our Sun's mass, radius, and lifetime — could do it, as evidenced by our existence. But what about a more massive star? At some point, they'll be massive enough to burn through their fuel too quickly, and intelligent life could never arise.

On the other end, a low-mass star may be too unstable, flaring and blowing off a planet's atmosphere, or with little enough ultraviolet light that life cannot arise. We might worry about if there are enough heavy elements to support life on a world, or if a certain location in the galaxy renders the environment too chaotic for life. These may be unknowns, but we can probably safely say that at least a quarter, or 25%, of stars in our galaxy can have a potentially habitable planet.

4.) np: the number of worlds around habitable stars with the right conditions for life. This is something we've learned a tremendous amount about from our exoplanet studies, but tremendous questions remain. What makes a world habitable? In the early solar system, Venus, Earth, and Mars all had similar conditions. In the outer Solar System, worlds like Enceladus and Europa, with sub-surface oceans, may have underwater life. In systems with gas giants at Earth-like locations, large moons could see life arise on them. Although the uncertainties are very large here, I think it's a fair estimate to say that of the stars which can have a potentially habitable world, on average there will be one world that clearly has the best chance for life. That's the world we're interested in, and so we'll say np = 1.

At this point, by the way, we can multiply those first four numbers together to get an estimate for the number of worlds with good chances at life within our galaxy: 100 billion. That's a promising start.

5.) fl: the fraction of these worlds where life arises. This is a great time to line up with Drake again, because this is one of the great unknown questions in the search for life beyond Earth. Of all the potentially habitable worlds, how many of them take that first incredible step, where life arises from non-life? Or, if primitive life originates in interstellar space, how many worlds see life take hold on the surface, in the oceans, or in the atmosphere? We don't even know the answer for our own Solar System, where it's arguable that we may have as many as 8 other worlds where life arose at some point. Life may be common; optimistically, it may have a 10% chance of arising from non-life. Or, alternatively, it could be exceedingly rare: a one-in-a-million shot or worse.

Signatures of organic, life-giving molecules are found all over the cosmos, including in the largest, nearby star-forming region: the Orion Nebula. Someday soon, we may be able to look for biosignatures in the atmospheres of Earth-sized worlds around other stars.

The uncertainties here are huge, and any number that you can pick is as ill-motivated as any other. Someday in the future, we'll have the capability of performing our first tests, however. When our telescope technology enables us to determine the atmospheric contents of worlds, we can look for the presence or absence of biosignatures like methane, molecular oxygen, and carbon dioxide. It will be indirect evidence, but it should be an incredible step towards inferring whether worlds have life on them or not. If we say there's a 1-in-10,000 chance that a potentially habitable world has life on it, as good a guess as any, that means there are 10 million worlds in the Milky Way where life exists.

6.) fx: the fraction of life-having worlds with complex, differentiated organisms. Defining life as "intelligent" or not is a hazy prospect at best, as even the top scientists still argue over the classification of dolphins, great apes, octopi, and many other organisms as intelligent or not. What no one will argue about, however, is whether an organism is complex and differentiated: with different body parts with different functions and structures, in a macroscopic, multicellular arrangement. It took billions of years of life thriving on Earth until we evolved the first multicellular organism, and then hundreds of millions of years more until we developed gender in reproduction; without both, out-competing single-celled life would be impossible, as they'd out-evolve the larger forms of life.

Again, Earth is our only laboratory for this, but let's be optimistic in the absence of evidence, and assume there's a 1-in-1,000 chance that a world that starts with a primitive, replicating, information-encoding strand of life can lead to something like the Cambrian explosion. That gives us 10,000 worlds in the Milky Way teeming with diverse, multicellular, highly differentiated forms of life. Given the distance between the stars, that means there's likely another planet where this has occurred just a few hundred light years away.

7.) ft: the fraction of those worlds which presently house a scientifically/technologically advanced civilization. This is a superior question to the ones asked by the Drake equation. Who cares if this is the first or the tenth time a technologically advanced civilization arose? Who cares if they're using radio waves? Who cares if they blow themselves up or self-extinct, or whether they have spacefaring ambitions or not? The big question is whether there are extraterrestrials who are intelligent the way we're intelligent, and that means scientifically and technologically advanced.

There's no evidence for this anywhere other than Earth, of course, which means there's a huge range of possibilities. It could be easy, like 1% of them get there, or it could be a freak coincidence that humanity arose at all, and the odds could be more like one-in-a-billion. Here on Earth, it's been about 500,000,000 years since the Cambrian explosion, and we've only had a technologically advanced species on the planet for less than 1,000 years. Assuming humanity lasts for a few thousand more in this state, that means that Earth will have spent 1-in-100,000 of our time with complex, differentiated organisms in a technologically advanced state.

Even with 10,000 such worlds in the Milky Way, there's only approximately a 10% chance, under these estimates, that another scientifically/technologically advanced civilization exists at the same time as us.

Once intelligence, tool use, and curiosity combine in a single species, perhaps interstellar ambitions become inevitable.

But with all that said, it's those last three numbers — fl, fx, and ft — that have such large uncertainties that make accurate estimates an impossibility right now.

Knowing how many worlds there are out there in the Milky Way with life on them, and finding even one, would have tremendous implications for our existence, and for understanding our place in the Universe. Taking even the next step, and learning that there were complex, differentiated, large organisms on a world, like we have with the fungal, animal, and plant kingdoms on Earth, would revolutionize what's possible. And finally, the chance we'd have to have communication, visitation, and a knowledge exchange with a scientifically or technologically advanced alien species would forever alter the course of humanity. It's all possible, but there's so much more we need to know if we ever want to find out. We must take these steps; the rewards are too great if there's even a chance of learning these answers.

Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is the founder and primary writer of Starts With A Bang! His books, Treknology and Beyond The Galaxy, are available wherever books are sold.

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UFO Researchers Video "Mothership" Over NC

UFO researchers release video of strange craft hovering in the night sky over NC town

Video of yet another claimed UFO sighting over North Carolina has hit YouTube, this time in Columbus, a Polk County town 85 miles west of Charlotte.

The video, shot at night, features a hovering v-shaped object illuminated by six lights.

"Whatever it is, it seems to be dropping," says the unidentified man behind the camera. "I'd like to know what the heck those six lights are."

The YouTube channel The Hidden Underbelly referred to the object as as a "huge mother ship."

Multiple UFO Witnesses, Missing Time and Close Encounter With Aliens

Mysterious sightings are being reported on this eerie stretch of the A30

Windwhistle Hill on the A30 is a hotbed for supernatural sightings, according to one UFO researcher.

Gloria Heather Dixon, from the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA), has uncovered many tales of "strange lights, sounds, figures and shapes, unusual and eerie phenomena" on the stretch of road between Crewkerne and Chard.

She has connected alleged UFO sightings on the mysterious hill, "named very aptly because of the winds whistling through the tall treetops", with the area's history of highwayman, smugglers, a dead witch and even the devil itself.

Mrs Dixon, alongside other researchers at the BUFORA, has investigated the area near Cricket St Thomas, delving into archives and interviewing those who claim to have witnessed strange goings-on.

Mrs Dixon wrote on the BUFORA website: "A book published in the late seventeenth century referred to a number of mystical reports made during the year 1662 by the people of Chard and Crewkerne.

"Reports of strange visions and incidents have continued to date and according to the literature during the seventeenth and eighteenth Century Windwhistle had a history of highwaymen and smugglers in this area.

"The A30 used to be a coaching route from London to the West Country and highwaymen could hide in the beech trees waiting for the carriages with their cargoes of valuables.
"It has been suggested that the Windwhistle Inn near the summit was the central point for these highwaymen, who would use the wells and caves all around the area to hide their treasures and also the bodies of those they had robbed. The story goes that some skeletons have been discovered in these hideouts."

She also notes that Alan Holt, in his book on East Somerset, comments that Windwhistle Hill itself is haunted by a witch, who was allegedly knocked down by a stagecoach many decades ago.

However, her research focuses on one particular interview with a local mother, Kate Walker, who was travelling between Yeovil and Chard with her family when she experienced two strange sightings on the same stretch of road.

Mrs Dixon wrote: "As they came to the top of the hill Kate and her family all observed a huge orange light diffused by cloud, to their left-hand side and at the far end of Windwhistle Hill .

"It seemed to be right beside the road, not very high up, and was partially obscured by cloud, but they did not feel any alarm as there was a power station and pylons further along.
"However, as they drove nearer to the light, it was easier to observe and Kate states it was massive and totally static and very low and bright.
"She describes it as being cigar shaped and vast in size, maybe 200-300 feet, and she estimates the light to be approximately 800-1000 feet above them.
"As they got closer she noticed that the pub on the right hand side of the road, The Windwhistle Inn , was almost in total darkness, except for a light in a small upstairs window."

Mrs Dixon writes that Kate looked up again at the light, which by that time was almost on top of the family.

It is then said that Mrs Walker "lost" around half an hour, a space of time that was unaccounted for in her memory.

Mrs Dixon writes that just a few days after the "puzzling incident", the family encountered another altogether more chilling experience in virtually the same spot.

They are said to have seen two people in front of them, on the left hand verge, with one appearing to be lying down, and the other standing.

She wrote: "Their initial thoughts were that someone had been injured and went to slow down, when to their astonishment, the person standing took one step out in front of them..one foot remained on the grass verge at the roadside and other foot was right over the centre of the road.
"Kate described the figure as being abnormally tall with legs that were horrendously long and thin.
"Her husband swerved to the far side of the road, and around the figure, and they kept on driving and did not look back, they all agreed that there was no one who could possibly have legs that long."

Mrs Dixon also writes that fellow researcher Robert Moore conducted research into this particular area in order to establish whether similar cases have been documented, and he is said to have uncovered observations of unusual lights and an entity over a ten year period at Cricket Malherbie which is within 3km north-west of Windwhistle Hill.

She also recounts four different reports in the Yeovil Weekly News.

One witness told of a strange incident experienced by her husband, grandson and herself in 1991, which involved what they perceived as a tall strange figure, which they claim was looking through the farm window followed a few days later by their observations of a 'saucer-shaped object.

Another witness tells of a similar experience to the Walker family on Windwhistle Hill in 1975, which happened to her mother and father.

A third witness tells of a strange experience on Windwhistle Hill whilst driving a lorry either in 1976 or 1977. He claims that his lorry went out of control as though by some "strange force". He felt as though the lorry was hovering over the road whilst he was experiencing this.

Finally, a fourth witness tells of how she and her husband observed a very large unidentified object,
silver and shaped like a humming top, near Windwhistle Hill in November 1959. They watched it as though 'hypnotised' from about 23.00 to 09.00 hrs the next morning and for some reason felt unable to tell anyone.

Mrs Dixon writes: "It appears that there is a history of odd occurrences in this area and certainly Windwhistle Hill is steeped in the traditional folklore of strange lights, visions and figures with ghostly highwaymen and galloping horses.

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Are Aliens Real? Our Technology May Prevent Us From Finding Out

Do Aliens Exist? Human Technology May Prevent Us From Finding Out

Every evening in Maui, a telescope perched atop a volcano captures particles of light in the universe with the world’s largest digital camera. Normally it searches for asteroids dancing across the cosmos. But one night last October, it locked its gaze onto something remarkable, an unidentified flying object moving quickly through space, seemingly from another solar system.

Or at least that’s what astronomers at the University of Hawaii concluded when they discovered it. At first, they thought it was a comet, then an asteroid. But within a month, they realized the object was long and thin and unlike any asteroid known to science. They named it ‘Oumuamua—a Hawaiian word that means “messenger from the distant past.”

Thousands of miles away, a Harvard astronomer named Avi Loeb learned of the mysterious object as well. Soon, he began pondering an enticing possibility: that ‘Oumuamua was actually an alien spacecraft sending signals back to its creators. This theory may sound a bit out there. But Loeb isn’t some crackpot looking for little green men in a spaceship. He and his colleagues are part of a growing number of top-tier scientists who are applying the same rigorous standards they use on other scientific issues to tackle one of the biggest questions facing humanity: Are we alone in the universe?

Americans have long been fascinated by the possibility of alien visitors. A 2001 Gallup Poll (the most recent one available) found that 33 percent of Americans believed aliens have visited the Earth. But scientists—both inside and outside the U.S. government—have been reluctant to take such claims seriously. From the 1947 weather balloon crash in Roswell, New Mexico, to crop circles in England, they’ve largely joined the debate only to debunk some very dubious claims. They’ve also lamented the lack of distinction most people make between alien landings—which haven’t occurred—and the possibility of future alien contacts (which could indeed happen). “We always get the UFO question,” says Dan Werthimer, astronomer at University of California, Berkeley. During public appearances about the search for alien life, Werthimer says, people often say, “why bother, because E.T.’s already landed here and kept secret in some military installation.”

But while UFO claims are often hoaxes or the work of conspiracy theorists, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—alien life just as smart and technologically advanced as humans—is a legitimate scientific field.Driving this quest to find life on other planets: hundreds of millions of dollars and super-powerful new telescopes that look ever deeper into the universe.  

Experts disagree on how intelligent life might try to contact humans. But the resurrected field, known as SETI, is largely based on the assumption that extraterrestrials—if they are out there and actually trying to chat—might use the same type of tech that we use to communicate with one another—from radio signals to flashes of light.

Yet that conjecture speaks to SETI’s central irony. Just as our attempts to find extraterrestrials are becoming more advanced, just as scientists are increasingly confident we aren’t the only intelligent beings in the universe, humans are creating more technology-produced noise than ever before, undermining our ability to detect potential alien transmissions.

In fact, SETI scientists say, we are making so much noise, if E.T. tried to phone our home, we might never get the message.

Look Who’s Talking

In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi articulated a riddle—now known as Fermi’s paradox—that speaks to a core question SETI scientists are trying to answer: If intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, why haven’t we found it yet? Since experts estimate the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, you’d think it would be populated with civilizations other than our own.

One problem: money. The search for extraterrestrials is very expensive. And the U.S. government and private universities have mostly avoided funding the required research. The first professional SETI conference, held in Green Bank, West Virginia, was in 1961, just months after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to travel into space. In the 1980s, NASA devoted $1.5 million to $2 million per year to the search for sentient life in outer space, and in 1990, Congress approved $100 million for new technology—a significant amount of funding for the field. But just a few years later, NASA axed that program. “Not a single Martian has said, ‘Take me to your leader,’” Democratic Senator Richard Bryan of Nevada said during the budget vote that canceled the funding. “And not a single flying saucer has applied for FAA approval.” NASA hasn’t funded SETI research since, a decision that pushed aliens to the fringes of astronomy.

Yet in 2015, SETI researchers finally received the necessary funding. And it came in a plot twist reminiscent of the movie Contact—in which a SETI researcher clashes with government authorities, only to be rescued by a mysterious billionaire.

In real life, SETI’s wealthy benefactor isn’t secretive. His name is Yuri Milner, and he’s a Russian physicist and venture capitalist. Named for Gagarin, he sees it as our “galactic responsibility” to acknowledge the profound luck of our intelligence—and search elsewhere for its equal. He also dreams about the impact such a discovery would have on humanity. “There are these moments, that are very rare, that we all feel like one,” he says. “The rest of the time, we are divided.”

Milner decided to bankroll the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, pledging $100 million over 10 years for an international project called Breakthrough Listen. “Obviously, there’s no guarantee,” he says. “The chance of finding it in the next 10 years is small. [But] the significance of that potential discovery is so large that even the small probability justifies the effort.”

About a third of Milner’s funding goes to the SETI program at the University of California, Berkeley. Andrew Siemion, its alien hunter in chief, stumbled onto the field after 9/11 left him searching for meaningful work. Since then, he has dedicated his career to trying to find a sign—any sign—that can be explained only by the existence of technologically advanced alien life. “The most interesting property of the universe is the fact that intelligent life exists within it,” he says. Siemion is determined to find out if it exists beyond Earth. “I believe it to be the most fundamental question we can ask as scientists.”

Milner’s money has vastly improved Siemion’s ability to tackle that question. The funding has given him and his colleagues the ability—and time—to stare across the universe, using some of the most powerful telescopes on the planet. “It’s an absolute revolution in our capabilities,” he says.

 This artist’s impression shows the first interstellar asteroid: `Oumuamua. This unique object was discovered on 19 October 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawai`i. Subsequent observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that it was traveling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. `Oumuamua seems to be a dark red highly-elongated metallic or rocky object, about 400 metres long, and is unlike anything normally found in the Solar System. M. Kornmesser/ESO

Most of these instruments are radio telescopes—giant, ultra-sensitive dishes that receive faint signals from very far away. Yet these instruments don’t search the cosmos for sound; they search it for light. Radio waves constitute a portion of the light spectrum—the band that alien technology would most likely use to reach us, many astronomers believe.

Alien hunters look for radio waves because humans are so fond of using them. Radio waves can travel miles, letting us hear our favorite talk show while we drive. They can also traverse light-years and be crammed with information, which is why they carry our television broadcasts, our mobile calls, and GPS locations. Because radio waves are so versatile, SETI scientists believe our galactic neighbors might use them to reach out and say, “Sup?” 

Scientists classify radio waves by how often they crest; that measurement is the wave’s frequency. The tighter the crests, the higher the frequency. When it comes to radio waves from beyond Earth, scientists tune to frequencies between 1 and 10 gigahertz. “That’s the range in which our atmosphere is pretty transparent and the galaxy is pretty quiet,” says astronomer Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, which has long been the leader in the field. Going below that window catches too much noise from the rest of the galaxy, like radiation from planets or even the humming of a distant black hole. The atmosphere blocks frequencies higher than about 10 gigahertz. But nestled in that quiet window are 9 billion possible frequencies, or channels, that aliens could be using.

When the modern search for extraterrestrial intelligence began in the 1960s, scientists could listen to just one channel at a time. Today, they can tune in to tens or even hundreds of millions of channels at once, listening for a single note from faraway millions of times over. This vast capacity increases the odds of us catching an alien message when it arrives. But it also delivers a ridiculous number of other signals. “Every 10 seconds, you get a signal,” says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute. “You’d go nuts if you had to look at all this stuff.”

The new era of SETI is rapidly expanding the investigation. Milner’s money gives Siemion at Berkeley the means to purchase blocks of expensive observing time on some of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world—from West Virginia to China. Scientists are looking at more stars, gathering weaker signals and eavesdropping on new regions of the sky, like the barely studied Southern Hemisphere, the gateway to the crowded heart of the Milky Way.

The infusion of cash helps not only expand the search but also rule out possibilities. We have no galactic caller ID, and so every plausible signal must go through a battery of tests to confirm whether it’s E.T. on the other end of the line. So far, not a single signal has passed those tests.

Yet as Tarter famously put it, concluding that we must be alone, simply because we haven’t heard aliens yet, is like scooping up a cup of seawater and deciding there are no fish in the oceans. Scientists have calculated we need to comb about a million star systems to find new friends.

So far, says Shostak, “we’ve looked at only a few thousand.”

Alien Emojis

Beginning in 1998, an unidentified radio signal left astronomers at the Parkes Observatory telescope in New South Wales, Australia, stumped. They knew the sound was coming from somewhere nearby, but they had no idea of what it was. Finally—after 17 years of searching—they found the culprit: impatient staffers opening a microwave oven while it was still running.

Though SETI scientists believe aliens would likely use similar technology as we do on Earth, that assumption poses a fundamental, possibly insurmountable, challenge to their search: Our own chatter makes it immensely difficult. Cellphones, Wi-Fi and GPS all rely on radio waves. Those waves occupy the same channels researchers use to listen to for E.T. And because our devices are so much closer to the telescopes, the signals are much stronger. “If E.T. is broadcasting in the cell phone band,” says Werthimer, “we’ll never find him.” Every time we text an emoji, we potentially make SETI research more difficult. Sorting the alien wheat from the human chaff, says Siemion, is the hardest part of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Local regulations mitigate the interference. South Africa is currently building a massive array of radio dishes and trying to move local television and phone service to radio-free technology to reduce the disturbance they will otherwise pose. Federal and state quiet zones shelter the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and its staffers help neighbors produce less interference. Sometimes, they even drive around in a van equipped with a radio antenna to track down chatter.

South Africa is currently building a massive array of radio dishes

But such measures aren’t enough. Astronomers want to build telescopes in places where there are fewer people, but it’s not easy. The remote location of the Parkes telescope might make it conducive for hearing E.T., but it also increases the risk of disruption from livestock. The electric fences corralling the animals emit radio waves that interfere with SETI work more than cellphones do. “We probably have more problems with cows around Parkes than these other things,” says Matthew Bailes, an astronomer at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. Nearly everything we do generates signals, and eliminating them essentially means eliminating modern life.

Even when the land is silent, though, radio interference still comes from above. An ever-increasing number of satellites broadcast signals from the sky that radio telescopes pick up. Eradicating this sort of interference says Tarter, consumes about half the computing power of her institute’s SETI research. That’s a bit like your phone spending half its energy ignoring your neighbor’s calls or text messages.

Astronomers who study natural phenomena, like clouds of space dust or dying stars, can ignore everything that looks artificial. But scientists looking for alien life can’t do the same. The types of noises that are interfering with the search, says Siemion, are “exactly what we’re looking for.”

Which means impatiently waiting for a frozen dinner to heat up could potentially ruin our chance of finding another civilization.

‘Delicate Creatures’

Not everyone, however, is convinced that the assumptions of radio astronomy make sense. Shelley Wright, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, is one of them. As she sees it, there’s no knowing what technology another civilization might possess and what means it might use to say hello. “There’s really no reason to think aliens would use the radio over laser,” says Wright, “over something else we haven’t even invented yet.”

Fiction has articulated the problem well. In Story of Your Life, for instance, an expert translator struggles to decipher an alien language (the 1998 novella was the basis for the movie Arrival). Or in Babel-17, a 1966 science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delaney, only a poet can understand an otherwise indecipherable message from another galaxy.  

When it comes to hearing aliens, we may be victims of our assumptions about how they would talk to us. We tend to think of the radio as the best means of communications because it was the first such technology that humans invented, says Wright. But with our most powerful technology, she says, we could theoretically pack all the internet’s contents into a message sent tens of thousands of light-years away through a laser beam—which means another civilization could do the same

And so Wright and others are developing a new field of astronomy. It’s called optical SETI, and its instruments are focused on a different band of the light spectrum than radio astronomy, looking instead at the same waves our eyes take in, along with infrared frequencies, which are just a smidge longer. It’s also a technology we suspect aliens might use because humans have found it so powerful.

Young man taking picture on a crossroad, rear view, Tokyo, Japan 

Wright is leading an optical SETI project to build a pair of observatories, faceted like giant soccer balls, in California. She hopes to turn prototypes on this year and to be watching the entire sky within six years. They will look for bright bursts of light as if searching for a superpowered camera flash from an alien photographer.

But like radio astronomy, optical SETI isn’t foolproof. It works only in dark and clear skies. The technology can also be overly sensitive—optical telescopes are “delicate creatures,” says Paul Horowitz, a physicist at Harvard who is collaborating with Wright. The way to reduce false alarms is to use more than one instrument simultaneously. (Apparently, it takes at least two eyes to spot the alien in the room.) “Multiple observatories,” Horowitz says, “are the only way to go for these things that go bump in the night and only rarely.”

Then again, it’s entirely possible that extraterrestrials have evolved beyond devices—or never created them in the first place.

Thousands of Planets

On April 8, 2009, NASA’s satellite-based Kepler telescope delivered its first image. Scientists pointed the instrument at a patch of sky tucked under the wing of the Cygnus constellation, the swan that flies across the Milky Way. The goal: to find Earth-like planets.

Alone at the NASA Ames Research Center in Northern California that night, Natalie Batalha, an astrophysicist with the Kepler mission, watched the first image arrive on her computer monitor. She describes it like a champagne glass slowly filling with bubbles. When the picture was complete, Batalha saw immediately that Kepler had delivered a revelatory view of the universe. “It looked like you’d dumped a bunch of salt on black paper,” she says, still in awe of the picture. “Just so many stars.”

Since that moment, Kepler and other projects have revealed a new truth about the universe: It is unspeakably rich in planets. The tally climbs every week or two, with the current total nearing 4,000. This number alone boosts the hope of finding intelligent life. “When you realize that every pinpoint of light has a planet,” she says, “you start to see the galaxy differently,” says Batalha. “It would be foolish not to look.”

This illustration shows NASA's Cassini spacecraft diving through the plume of Saturn's moon Enceladus, in 2015 JPL-Caltech/NASA

This illustration shows NASA's Cassini spacecraft diving through the plume of Saturn's moon Enceladus, in 2015 JPL-Caltech/NASA

These discoveries have completely reframed the odds behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Those odds were outlined by Frank Drake, the father of modern SETI. He calculated the number of civilizations that could be sending us a signal right now by considering a string of variables: how often life-friendly stars are formed, the proportion of these that have orbiting planets and the fraction of these planets that are habitable, among other factors. The larger the numbers for all these components, the higher the chances of finding E.T. Even if every other variable stays the same, the number of planets we now know about changes the equation dramatically. Finding extraterrestrial intelligence may no longer be a question of “if” but rather one of “when.”

So far, we are still waiting. A 72-second signal detected in 1977 generated brief excitement but was never heard again. Astronomers now think the noise was generated by gas from a comet. In the 16 years that physicist Gerry Harp has been hunting aliens at the SETI Institute, he says only one signal has looked promising, but that turned out to be from a satellite.

Likewise, the Green Bank Telescope’s ultra-sensitive receptor found no trace of alien messages coming from ‘Oumuamua. Loeb, the Harvard astronomer who led the investigation, says there’s a chance the telescope could have missed a flickering signal. But the scientists weren’t surprised by the noiselessness that followed.  

Like many who devote their careers to listening for aliens, they are accustomed to radio silence.

Source

It wasn't until a week or so later when I replayed the movie and discovered an object going incredibly fast. I thought it might be a glare or some sort of issue with my phone camera. My phone was basically 100% new at the time, so I realized that wasn't an issue.

The object was moving so fast, I barely even noticed it in the movie playback. My eye seemed to catch it. It lasted for a brief second and vanished.

I managed to stop the video and made a GIF image of it in slow motion.

When I zoom in on it, I can see what appear to be antennas. This object was going far too fast to be man-made, but slow enough to be caught on camera.

When I saw this object, I mainly was surprised that I caught a UFO on camera. I do have the original video clip.

How Technology and UFO Reporting Has Changed

How UFO Reports Change With the Technology of the Times

Fears of Zeppelins, rockets, and drones have replaced the “celestial wonders” of ancient times. 

 In 1896, newspapers throughout the United States began reporting accounts of mysterious airships flying overhead. Descriptions vary, but witnesses frequently invoked the century’s great technological achievements. Some sources reported dirigibles powered by steam engines. Others saw motorized, winged crafts with screw propellers. Many recalled a flying machine equipped with a powerful searchlight.

As technologies of flight evolve, so do the descriptions of unidentified flying objects. The pattern has held in the 21st century as sightings of drone-like objects are reported, drawing concern from military and intelligence officials about possible security threats.

While puzzling over the appearance of curious things overhead may be a constant, how we have done so has changed over time, as the people doing the puzzling change. In every instance of reporting UFOs, observers have called on their personal experiences and prevailing knowledge of world events to make sense of these nebulous apparitions. In other words, affairs here on earth have consistently colored our perceptions of what is going on over our heads.

Reports of weird, wondrous, and worrying objects in the skies date to ancient times. Well into the 17th century, marvels such as comets and meteors were viewed through the prism of religion—as portents from the gods and, as such, interpreted as holy communications.

By the 19th century, however, “celestial wonders” had lost most of their miraculous aura. Instead, the age of industrialization transferred its awe onto products of human ingenuity. The steamboat, the locomotive, photography, telegraphy, and the ocean liner were all hailed as “modern wonders” by news outlets and advertisers. All instilled a widespread sense of progress—and opened the door to speculation about whether objects in the sky signaled more changes.

Yet nothing fueled the imagination more than the possibility of human flight. In the giddy atmosphere of the 19th century, the prospect of someone soon achieving it inspired newspapers to report on tinkerers and entrepreneurs boasting of their supposed successes.

The wave of mysterious airship sightings that began in 1896 did not trigger widespread fear. The accepted explanation for these aircraft was terrestrial and quaint: Some ingenious eccentric had built a device and was testing its capabilities.

But during the first two decades of the 20th century, things changed. As European powers expanded their militaries and nationalist movements sparked unrest, the likelihood of war prompted anxiety about an invasion. The world saw Germany—home of the newly developed Zeppelin—as the likeliest aggressor. Military strategists, politicians, and newspapers in Great Britain warned of an imminent attack by Zeppelins.

The result was a series of phantom Zeppelin sightings by panicked citizens throughout the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in 1909, then again in 1912 and 1913. When war broke out in August 1914, it sparked a new, more intense wave of sightings. Wartime reports also came in from Canada, South Africa, and the United States. In England, rumors that German spies had established secret Zeppelin hangars on British soil led vigilantes to scour the countryside.

In the age of aviation, war and fear of war have consistently fueled reports of unidentified flying objects. A year after Nazi Germany’s surrender, Sweden was beset by at least a thousand accounts of peculiar, fast-moving objects in the sky. Starting in May 1946, residents described seeing missile- or rocket-like objects in flight, which were dubbed “ghost rockets” because of their fleeting nature. Rockets peppering Swedish skies was well within the realm of possibility—in 1943 and 1944, a number of V-1 and V-2 rockets launched from Germany had inadvertently crashed in the country.

At first, intelligence officials in Scandinavia, Britain, and the United States took the threat of ghost rockets seriously, suspecting that the Soviets might be experimenting with German rockets they had captured. By the autumn of 1946, however, they had concluded it was a case of postwar mass hysteria.

The following summer, a private pilot by the name of Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen nine flat objects flying in close formation near Mt. Rainier. Looking back on the event years later, Arnold noted, “What startled me most at this point was the fact that I could not find any tails on them. I felt sure that, being jets, they had tails, but figured they must be camouflaged in some way so that my eyesight could not perceive them. I knew the Air Force was very artful in the knowledge and use of camouflage.”

Given the name “flying saucers” by an Associated Press correspondent, they quickly appeared throughout the United States. Over the following two weeks, newspapers covered hundreds of sightings.

News of these reports circled the globe. Soon, sightings occurred in Europe and South America. In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atomic bomb tests, and tensions between the United States and the USSR, speculation ran rampant.

Finding themselves on the front line of the Cold War, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain considered the United States the most likely culprit. West Germans thought the discs were experimental missiles or military aircraft, while Germans in the communist Eastern bloc considered it more likely that the whole thing was a hoax devised by the American defense industry to whip up support for a bloated budget.

Others had more elaborate theories. In 1950, former U.S. Marine Air Corps Major Donald Keyhoe published an article and book titled The Flying Saucers Are Real, in which he contended that aliens from another planet were behind the appearance of the UFOs. Based on information from his informants, Keyhoe contended that government authorities were aware of this, but wished to keep the matter a secret for fear of inciting a general panic.

Such a claim about UFOs was new. To be sure, at the turn of the century during the phantom airship waves, some had speculated that the vessels spotted might be from another planet. Already at that time, people were deeply interested in reports of prominent astronomers observing artificial “canals” and structures on Mars. Evidence of Martian civilizations made it seem conceivable that our interplanetary neighbors had finally decided to pay us a visit. Still, relatively few bought into this line of reasoning.

But by going further, Major Keyhoe struck a chord in a timely fashion. In the aftermath of World War II and over the course of the 1950s, it seemed that science and engineering were making remarkable strides. In particular, the development of guided rockets and missiles, jet airplanes, atomic and hydrogen bombs, nuclear energy, and satellites signaled to many that there were no limits—not even earth’s atmosphere—to technological progress. And if our planet were on the verge of conquering space, it would hardly be a stretch to imagine that more advanced civilizations elsewhere were capable of even greater feats.

But all this raised a question. Why were the extraterrestrials visiting us now?

Keyhoe believed that aliens had been keeping us under observation for a long time. Witnessing the recent explosions of atomic weapons, they had decided the inhabitants of planet Earth had finally reached an advanced enough stage to be scrutinized more closely. Still, there was no reason for alarm. “We have survived the stunning impact of the Atomic Age,” Keyhoe concluded. “We should be able to take the Interplanetary Age, when it comes, without hysteria.”

The flying saucer era had begun. Not everyone would remain as sanguine as Keyhoe. As concerns over global nuclear annihilation and environmental catastrophe grew during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, claims about UFOs took on ever more ominous tones.

Times changed. And so, again, did the UFO phenomenon.