VIDEO: Do Any Exoplanets Have Intelligent Occupants? Fascinating talk.

Though I have been very busy with school, I still want to bring ATS some interesting stories, talks and information that the mainstream media either doesn't cover or doesn't cover in depth or in a "dumbed down" manner. (You know, the whole writing stories to an American 8th grade level thing).



By now many of you have seen the movie Interstellar. What you may not know is that there is much going on currently in the fields of astrobiology, planetary science and exoplanet research that is almost as thrilling.

And the much of the science being done now may one day make such an adventure possible.
SEE: The Science of Interstellar: Look Beyond the Wormhole

Here is a fascinating talk and debate on the search for intelligent aliens in our Milky Way Galaxy which you probably didn't see.



It is not the same old, same old either SETI talk either.

Among topics talked about:

One trillion planets in our Milky Way Galaxy. Perhaps 1,000 civilizations as a very conservative estimate.

The possibility that large scale astroengineering could be found in data from NASA's Kepler mission.[/ur]

How the Earth-centric view of what life and intelligence are may miss other forms of life and intelligence.

Searching for crystalline life on a comet.

Searches for Dyson Spheres.

SETI as the Archeology of our future.

Looking at the nearest stars with next-gen telescopes which will be able to detect life through biomarkers.

The average age of intelligent alien civilizations is most likely 2 billion years older than ours.

The evolution of consciousness and its role in intelligence.

Personal Sidenote:

One of the ideas I have had, am currently researching and working on in my spare time with someone more adept at writing python and other code than I, is looking through Kepler lightcurve data for the predicted signature of both [url=http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/02/the-search-for-stars-with-wormholes-at-their-center.html]natural and engineered wormholes. In the future we hope to go through microlensing data from the upcoming WFIRST/AFTA mission as well.

Of course no wormhole has ever been discovered but there have been some searches for them.

Conventional wisdom and mainstream cosmology suggests that they are purely theoretical objects. And since we have no observational evidence for the negative mass matter or negative energy which would stabilize one searches for them are kind of on the fringe of the fringe.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't look however. The search for artificial wormholes also falls under SETI since obviously someone would have to construct them.

As you saw in Interstellar, a wormhole could provide future space travellers a short cut to some of the tantalizing distant worlds we are discovering with Kepler and other instruments.

BTW: I've talked with 3 of the panelists in the video in the past (Dan Werthimer, Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull who I have talked with the longest).

I hope you find the video as interesting as I did.

a reply to: JadeStar

I cannot watch the video on my device.

But S&F for the post nevertheless. I am especially following these very closely:

One trillion planets in our Milky Way Galaxy. Perhaps 1,000 civilizations as a very conservative estimate.

The possibility that large scale astroengineering could be found in data from Kepler.

How the Earth-centric view of life and intelligence may miss other forms of life and intelligence,

Searching for crystalline life on a comet.

Searches for Dyson Spheres.

originally posted by: swanne
a reply to: JadeStar

I cannot watch the video on my device.

But S&F for the post nevertheless. I am especially following these very closely:

One trillion planets in our Milky Way Galaxy. Perhaps 1,000 civilizations as a very conservative estimate.

The possibility that large scale astroengineering could be found in data from Kepler.

How the Earth-centric view of life and intelligence may miss other forms of life and intelligence,

Searching for crystalline life on a comet.

Searches for Dyson Spheres.

All fascinating things. If you want I can post a video about the past and current search for Dyson Spheres and what future searches may look like.

The possibility of crystalline life on comets idea was new to me and I hope to dig up more information on that.

I also have a good video on the search for large scale astroengineering using Kepler data.

a reply to: JadeStar

Thanks, but unfortunately videos take eternity to load on my device.

But yes, Dyson spheres are quite fascinating. A world stretched all around a star. Since the sphere hides the star from outside observers, such system would go unnoticed in the dark sky, unless of course the system passes in front of a light source or something.

Large scale astroengineering is what excites me the most, for I happen to be writing on these in my yet-to-come novel.