I posted recently about Tabby’s Star, also known as the “Alien Megastructure Star”. In the SETI Institute seminar video below, Prof. Jason Wright of Penn State University reviews what’s known about the star and discusses the latest findings on the star in the context of searches for “Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies”.
From the caption:
In 1960 two seminal papers in SETI were published, providing two visions for SETI. Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison’s proposed detecting deliberate radio signals (“communication SETI”), while Freeman Dyson (“artifact SETI”), proposed detecting the inevitable effects of massive energy supplies and artifacts on their surroundings. While communication SETI has now had several career-long practitioners, artifact SETI has, until recently, not been a vibrant field of study.
The launch of the Kepler and WISE satellites have greatly renewed interest in the field, however, and the recent Breakthrough Listen Initiative has provided new motivation for finding good targets for communication SETI. Dr. Wright will discuss the progress of the Ĝ Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies, including its justification and motivation, waste heat search strategy and first results, and the framework for a search for megastructures via transit light curves. The last of these led to the identification of KIC 8462852 (a.k.a. “Tabby’s Star”) as a candidate ETI host. This star, discovered by Boyajian and the Zooniverse Planet Hunters, exhibits several apparently unique and so-far unexplained photometric properties, and continues to confound natural explanation.
The Planetary Radio program had a recent interesting interview with Philip Lubin, Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara, and Travis Brashears, an undergrad at UC Berkeley, about their proposal to accelerate a tiny wafer sized lightsail spacecraft up to 10-25% of the speed of light using an array of lasers and sending the sail to a nearby star: Interstellar Dreams Turn Real – The Planetary Society
The key element of the concept is the use of a phased array of many commercially available lasers rather than one hugely powerful laser. The concept is presented on their Directed Energy website and on the DEEP-IN page at UCSB. Lubin’s team has won two grants from the NASA Innovative Advance Concepts (NIAC) program to develop the concept further: DEEP IN Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration – NASA.
Lubin gave a seminar at the SETI Institute in 2014 about the use of such a phased array of lasers for not only propulsion but also for defense against large objects heading for earth: Video: Philip Lubin (UCSB) on planetary defense with beamed power. Find resources on this at DE-STAR (Directed Energy Planetary Defense).
Our goal is to directly engage all humanity in space exploration. We want to send your dreams and aspirations to the stars! With our basic funding goal of $30,000, we will put your data on a custom spacecraft that will be launched in 2017 initially into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), then to more distant missions to the moon, Mars, etc in subsequent missions. In the future, we intend to offer the Humanity Chip to all spacecraft being launched.
With 25 days to go, they have gotten $5,515 pledged towards a $30,000goal.
Check out the marvelous imagery shot by high speed cameras of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches and landings:
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Speaking of rockets, here is an intro to “rocket science” by James Macfarlane of the UK company Airborne Engineering given at the recent at the Electromagnetic Field event in Guildford.
