Wow! signal
In een vorige blog besprak ik de Breakthrough Initiatives en hun Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1. Dit buitenaardse signaal uit de regio Proxima Centauri was echter niet het eerste.
Eerder was er de Wow! signaal.
Tag: SETI
Universe calling Earth
Er komen vreemde radiosignalen uit het dichtstbijzijnde sterrenstelsel en wetenschappers proberen te achterhalen wat deze betekenen. De signalen komen nooit van buitenaardse wezens, totdat is aangetoond dat het wel zo is.
Where is everybody?
In the book “Aliens: the World’s leading scientists in search for extraterrestrial life” by Jim Al Khalili I read the following anecdote of one of those leading scientists: Enrico Fermi.
Modern METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
In 1932, Karl Jansky serendipitously observed radiation coming from the Milky Way at Bell Labs, thereby inaugurating the science of radio astronomy. By this point, the evidence that humans were the only intelligent species in the solar system was mounting, but Jansky’s breakthrough turned the entire galaxy into fertile hunting grounds for extraterrestrial life.
Talking to Aliens?!
In 1961, nine of the smartest individuals in the United States received a rather unusual letter in the mail. It consisted of a long string of binary digits and a short message: “Here is a hypothetical message received from outer space. It contains 551 zeros and ones. What does it mean?” Neither the sender nor his recipients knew it at the time, but this letter would later serve as the prototype for the first message for extraterrestrial intelligence ever broadcast into space. Its initial test run on Earth, however, was a total failure.