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literature

Project Oasis: Part I

9 minute read

Project Oasis was the second SETI-related Summer Faculty Fellowship Study in Engineering System Design funded by NASA in cooperation with the American Societ...

Technosignatures literature roundup

5 minute read

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

9 minute read

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

6 minute read

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

4 minute read

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?

5 minute read

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...

Project Cyclops - Part II

17 minute read

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

25 minute read

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

6 minute read

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

9 minute read

Following the first formal proposal in 1959 by Cocconi and Morrison [1] that humanity was capable of detecting interstellar communications from other intelli...

Interstellar communications by optical masers

3 minute read

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

4 minute read

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

3 minute read

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...

The search for interstellar communications

4 minute read

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...

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tutorials

My opinionated template for new Python projects

3 minute read

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 use jekyll-scholar with GitHub Pages

4 minute read

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 set up a GitHub pages website on a Mac

3 minute read

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...

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notes

AI misuse: pathogenic DNA

1 minute read

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

6 minute read

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

6 minute read

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

6 minute read

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

5 minute read

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...

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planning

How to choose a research topic

13 minute read

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 ...

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