For 70 years, humanity has tried listening for radio emissions coming from other star systems. This is like sitting at home and waiting for a phone call that may never come or trying to hear noises from around our own singular farm house. Avi Loeb thinks a next step is to look around our yard. …
Dyson spheres (aka Dyson Swarms) are hypothetical structures where civilizations build solar power satellite collection around a star. We currently generate about 50 megawatts from space based solar power out of a total of about 20 terawatts. The total solar energy that hits the earth is about 10,000 times more and the total energy from …
Astronomers decided to look for partially constructed Dyson spheres and other megastructures around stars. They determined that half-built Dyson spheres or megastructures would be easy to see with our telescopes. They made a fairly comprehensive search and found seven candidate stars. The candidate stars are all white dwarfs. They also eliminated stars where other astrophysical …
Here is update on the analysis of the remains of interstellar meteor IM1. There was a paper claiming the IM1 remains were coal ash but that is disproved. The detection threshold of surveys which rely on reflected sunlight sets the minimum size of a detectable object as a function of its distances from the observer …
Earth orbiting satellites have the speed to counter the Earth’s gravity. The mean orbital velocity needed to maintain a stable low Earth orbit is about 7.8 km/s (4.8 mi/s), which translates to 28,000 km/h (17,000 mph). However, this depends on the exact altitude of the orbit. A statite, or static satellite, would use a solar …
NASA’s James Web found trace of dimythyl suflide (DMS) in th atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b and DMS is a biomarker of life. K2-18b’s atmosphere consists of mainly hydrogen, along with small amounts of methane and carbon dioxide. On Earth, the DMS molecule is only associated with microbial life. We have to wait for the existence …
The Voyager 1 spacecraft is expected to continue its mission until about 2025. Its radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) will no longer supply enough power to operate its scientific instruments. NASA is limiting the Voyagers’ processes to keep them operating until 2030. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977. They are identical probes that …
Avi Loeb discusses his expectation that unmanned alien space probes would vastly outnumber manned alien spaceships. This is certainly the case for the human space program where we have sent out about one hundred manned missions but have sent tens of thousands of unmanned missions over seventy years. In an interview, Avi explained that it …
Harvard’s Avi Loeb reports that the Galileo Project just completed the early analysis of 57 spherules from the crash site of the first recognized interstellar meteor, IM1. How do they know the meteor was of interstellar origin? It was detected before impact and was traveling at a speed beyond solar system escape velocity and from …
A researcher makes the case that in cosmic scale terms, it is a very fast transition from having the start of intelligence and technology to becoming a Dyson sphere scale civilization. A Dyson Swarm or Dyson Sphere civilization would be one that uses all of the energy of a star to power its civilization. The …
Harvard professor Avi Leob team of two dozen researchers and support staff spent two weeks and 1.5 million dollars on bringing a tenth of a millionth of the debris mass from the IM1 interstellar meteor to the deck of their ship. They plan to analyze this material thoroughly in the coming weeks and publish the …