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http://geocities.com/mfrenchy2002seti/
Mike French's SETI
Mike French's SETI
Mike French's SETI
Mike French's SETI
Mike French's SETI
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Are They Out There? The bottom line again: there is no credible evidence for extraterrestrial visits to earth. Investigations of UFO reports yield: 90% explained easily as: Venus or other bright stars and planets, airplanes and helicopters, searchlights and lasers, airships, satellites, birds, weather balloons, internal reflections of dashboard lights, ball lightning, or other phenomenon. Of the remaining 10%, about half can be explained after modest investigation: trying to recreate the scene, examining photos, finding additional witnesses, and similar common-sense probing. The remaining 5% remain unexplained. Despite millions of UFO sightings and thousands of abductions, there remains not one single conclusive piece of evidence that extraterrestrials have visited Earth. Such an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. Messier 31, a galaxy like our own, about 100,000 light-years across, containing several hundred billion stars. Given the vastness of the universe, surely they are out there, right? Well, yes, but the question is how out is "out there"? If we consider our galaxy, the Milky Way, we can estimate the number of advanced civilizations via a handy little formula called the Drake equation. N = R*npflfifcL N = the number of communicating Galactic civilizations R* = the rate of star formation: 1 per year in the Galaxy np = the number of habitable planets formed by each star fl = the fraction of habitable planets upon which life arises fi = the fraction of life-bearing planets that evolve intelligence fc = the fraction of civilizations the choose to communicate L = the civilization's lifetime in years People's estimates will differ since some of the quantities in the Drake equation are fairly unconstrained since we have only one example (us) to look at. But the chance that another civilization is available to speak with us is nonzero, and so . . . we are searching: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI. There are two main SETI strategies: eavesdropping and listening for beacons. In eavesdropping mode, we target nearby stars and listen intently for radio leakage. In beacon mode, it is assumed that the civilization will be broadcasting loud and clear, so the search is usually all-sky and confined to narrow frequency bandwidths. NASA is putting little energy into SETI at the moment. Most of the SETI is getting done by the Planetary Society who have three ongoing radio-frequency searches, one optical search, and a program called SETI-at-home, which is a screen saver program that sifts through radio data while your computer is idle, looking for signals. If you want to help out, click on the above link. Bottom line: no civilizations detected yet. Frank Drake, early SETI pioneer, aboard Starship Enterprise. So keep reporting UFOs, require hard, reproducible evidence, and support your local SETI researcher.