Project Oasis: Part I
Project Oasis was the second SETI-related Summer Faculty Fellowship Study in Engineering System Design funded by NASA in cooperation with the American Societ...
Posts by Category
literature
Technosignatures literature roundup
Reviewing the literature is an important part of the research process. It gives you a deeper knowledge of the field and prevents you re-inventing the wheel. ...
ETI does not exist
In a paper in 1980 [1], mathematical physicist Frank Tipler presented his argument that if extraterrestrial intelligent beings exist they would already be in...
Rationale for the water hole
Searching the ‘water hole’ for extraterrestrial signals had already been proposed nearly a decade earlier as a result of the 1971 Cyclops Project [1] but in ...
The Arecibo message of November, 1974
In 1974, the Arecibo Observatory became capable of transmitting radio signals at a maximum effective power that was twenty times the combined power of all po...
Why are extraterrestrials not on Earth?
After a series of papers on searching for communication signals from extraterrestrial civilisations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], Michael Hart at NCAR in Boulder, Col...
A search strategy for finding extraterrestrial radio beacons
Building on the work of the Cyclops Project from 1971, Robert Dixon (a member of the signal processing group during the Cyclops Project) from Ohio State Univ...
Project Cyclops - Part II
This is my second post on Project Cyclops, a NASA study from 1971 that proposed a system for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence. These are my notes from...
Project Cyclops - Part I
The Cyclops study was a 1971 Summer Faulty Fellowship Program in Engineering Systems Design, funded by NASA in cooperation with the American Society for Engi...
Waiting times and longevity
Around the same time as several other papers proposing how best to conduct a search for extraterrrestrial intelligence [1,2,3,4,5], Sebastian von Hoerner pub...
The Drake equation
Following the first formal proposal in 1959 by Cocconi and Morrison [1] that humanity was capable of detecting interstellar communications from other intelli...
Kardashev classification scheme for extraterrestrial civilisations
In 1964, Nikolai Kardashev published a paper on how an extraterrestrial civilisation could maximise the information it transmitted to other stars [1]. He cal...
Interstellar communications by optical masers
In 1961, a paper published in Nature by Schwartz and Townes [1] was the first to propose that extraterrestrial intelligence may use an optical beam for commu...
Dyson spheres
I am currently reading the earliest SETI papers to get a better understanding of the core ideas in the field and how these have evolved. These are my notes o...
Project Ozma
In 1960, Frank Drake carried out the first experiment to detect radio signals from from an extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) based on a strategy proposed b...
Communications from superior galactic communities
I recently read one of the first papers on the search for exoplanet technosignatures published in Nature in 1959 by Cocconi and Morrison [1]. You can see my ...
The search for interstellar communications
One of the first papers on the search for exoplanet technosignatures was published in Nature in 1959 by Cocconi and Morrison [1]. The authors assume that the...
What exoplanets can see technosignatures from Earth?
A recent paper in Nature [1] caught my attention because it reversed my perspective on the topic. Rather than focussing on whether we can see life elsewhere,...
tutorials
My opinionated template for new Python projects
Over the years, I’ve experimented with different tools and learnt about various best practices in software engineering. These things are always in flux and s...
How to add in-text citations in jekyll-scholar format in VS Code using Zotero
This post documents how to “cite while you write” in VS Code using the reference manager Zotero and the Better BibTex extension when you are using the static...
How to use jekyll-scholar with GitHub Pages
Jekyll-scholar is a plugin that generates bibliographies and in-text citations, formatted according to any one of hundreds of citation styles. Getting it to ...
How to get an overview of a research topic in two days
I have spent about seven working days learning about five different topics that came out top in the decision matrix that resulted from my process for choosin...
How to set up a Bluehost subdomain for a GitHub pages site
I already have a personal website with a page about my previous research, so I decided to point my open research GitHub pages to a subdomain there rather tha...
How to set up a GitHub pages website on a Mac
First things first. Getting started with open research involves choosing and setting up a way to share your work. I have previously created several websites...
notes
AI misuse: pathogenic DNA
Biotechnology has now advanced to the stage where it is not only possible to synthesise a DNA sequence of your choice in the lab, but to mail-order it from c...
Exoplanet biosignatures
In the last few decades we have discovered that Earth-like planets are common around other stars and many of these planets are likely to be habitable, i.e. o...
Recognising AI sentience
Right now the most advanced artificial intelligence is unaware of its existence and has no capacity to feel anything. It is based purely on a series of matri...
Technosignatures
Technosignatures are signals that indicate the existence of technology (i.e. artifacts created from the practical application of scientific knowledge) – eith...
AI for decoding non-human languages
A.I. has become incredibly powerful for translating human languages. Could it be used to glean information from non-human languages? The impact of understand...
planning
Why I’m choosing technosignatures as my next research topic
The first step in any research cycle is to choose a topic. This time around, I used a decision matrix to rank a list of topics by their impact, neglectedness...
How to choose a research topic
For most of my academic career, my choice of research topic was driven by curiosity, some sort of “gut feeling”, and a desire to make a difference, discover ...
The benefits of process mapping and my research process
For several years I worked as a consultant in a large engineering firm, building advanced machine learning models for predictive maintenance of their equipme...