SETI Institute

Ground-Control: An Opera in Space

SETI Talks archive: http://seti.org/talks The investigation of the origins of life has been hindered by what we think we know about current living organisms. This includes three assumptions about necessary conditions: 1) that it emerged entirely on Earth, 2) that it is dependent on the availability of liquid water, and 3) that it is coextensive with the emergence of molecules able to replicate themselves. In addition, the three most widely explored alternative general models for a molecular process that could serve as a precursor to life also reflect reductionistically-envisioned fragments of current living systems: e.g. container-first, metabolism-first, or information-first scenarios. Finally, we are hindered by a technical concept of information that is fundamentally incomplete in precisely ways that are critical to characterizing living processes. These all reflect reductionistic "top-down" approaches to the extent that they begin with a reverse-engineering view of what constitutes a living Earth-organism and explore possible re-compositional scenarios. This is a Frankensteinian enterprise that also begins with assumptions that are highly Earth-life specific and therefore unlikely to lead to a general exo-biology. The approach Dr. Deacon will outline instead begins from an unstated conundrum about the origins of life. The initial transition to a life-like process necessarily exemplified two almost inconceivably incompatible properties: 1) it must have involved exceedingly simple molecular interactions, and 2) it must have embodied a thermodynamic organization with the unprecedented capacity to locally compensate for spontaneous thermodynamic degradation as well as to stabilize one or more intrinsically self-destroying self-organizing processes. This talk will explore the origins of life problem by attempting to identify the necessary and sufficient molecular relationships able to embody these two properties. From this perspective Dr. Deacon will develop a model system - autogenesis - that redefines biological information and opens the search for life's origin to cosmic and planetary contexts seldom considered.

SETI Talks archive: http://seti.org/talks A new generation of telescopes is coming online. Operating at wavelengths from radio, through optical, to gamma ray, they are particularly well-suited to time-domain survey science -- essentially, making large-format movies of the sky. These telescopes will have the capability to tell us about how black holes grow: through stupendous mergers that shake the very fabric of space-time, through swallowing huge volumes of ten million degree gas, and through shredding stars that happen to pass too close. Dr. Croft's talk will particularly focus on the capabilities of the next generation of radio telescopes, including the Square Kilometer Array, due to come online during the next decade, and its precursor facilities, including the Allen Telescope Array (which also continues to undertake SETI surveys). These instruments are due to transform our understanding of the growth of the enormous black holes that lurk at the heart of almost all galaxies.

SETI Talks archive: http://seti.org/talks Claudio Maccone, IAA Stephane Dumas, SETI League, Eastern Canada Coordinator mathematical seti Claudio Maccone and Stephane Dumas have developed new techniques that could be used in the task of analyzing possible SETI signals in a mathematical fashion. Claudio and Stephane will talk about the new ideas in the book 'Mathematical SETI' published in 2012. This book is intended for University-level courses on SETI and related fields for graduates, post-graduates and researchers, and so a preliminary background isassumed in college mathematics (like basic calculus, probability and stochastic processes), and also a basic background in astronomy and astronautics. Claudio and Stephane will give an introduction to the topics covered in the book, including: 1) the Statistical Drake Equation and its extension to the Evolution of Life, Human History and "Entropy Progress", 2) the FOCAL spacecraft mission to the Sun's radio gravitational lensing location, and 3) the use of the Karhunen-Loeve Transform (KLT) which can be used to analyze radio signals and extract potential SETI communications.

SETI Talks archive: http://seti.org/talks The search for signals out of noise is a problem not only with radio signals from the sky but in the study of animal communication on Earth. Like SETI radio signal searches, dolphin sound analysis includes the detection, recognition, analysis, and interpretation of signals. Dolphins use three main types of acoustic signals and many of these sounds have been a challenge to measure and categorize due to their graded and overlapping nature. The goal of this talk is to provide perspective from dolphin communication studies and lessons learned about signal detection and recognition.

Chat with Wild Dolphin Project's Denise Herzing and SETI Institute Scientists Laurance Doyle, Gerry Harp and Franck Marchis. #SETIChat