extraterrestrial

6 Articles

Exploring The Sounds And Sights Of Alien Worlds

December 2, 2024 by 14 Comments

The 20th century saw humankind’s first careful steps outside of the biosphere in which our species has evolved. Whereas before humans had experienced the bitter cold of high altitudes, the crushing pressures in Earth’s oceans, as well as the various soundscapes and vistas offered in Earth’s biosphere, beyond Earth’s atmosphere we encountered something completely new. Departing Earth’s gravitational embrace, the first humans who ventured into space could see the glowing biosphere superimposed against the seemingly black void of space, in which stars, planets and more would only appear when blending out the intense light from the Earth and its life-giving Sun.

Years later, the first humans to set foot on the Moon experienced again something unlike anything anyone has experienced since. Walking around on the lunar regolith in almost complete vacuum and with very low gravity compared to Earth, it was both strangely familiar and hauntingly alien. Although humans haven’t set foot on Mars yet, we have done the next best thing, with a range of robotic explorers with cameras and microphones to record the experience for us here back on Earth.

Unlike the Moon, Mars has a thin but very real atmosphere which permits the travel of soundwaves, so what does the planet sound like? Despite what fictional stories like Weir’s The Martian like to claim, reality is in fact stranger than fiction, with for example a 2024 research article by Martin Gillier et al. as published in JGR Planets finding highly variable acoustics during Mars’ seasons. How much of what we consider to be ‘normal’ is just Earth’s normal?

Continue reading “Exploring The Sounds And Sights Of Alien Worlds” →

The GREMLIN sensor suite contains several sensing modalities to detect, track, characterize and identify UAP in areas of interest. (Credit: US AARO)

US’s UFO-Hunting Aerial Surveillance System Detailed In Report

November 17, 2024 by 16 Comments

Formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) is a category of observations that are exactly what the UAP label suggests. This topic concerns the US military very much, as a big part of national security involves knowing everything that appears in the skies. This is the reason for the development of a new sensor suite by the Pentagon called GREMLIN. Recently, a new report has provided more details about what this system actually does.

Managed by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) within the DoD, GREMLIN blends many different sensors, ranging from radar to ADS-B and RF monitors, together to establish a baseline and capture any anomalies within the 90-day monitoring period to characterize them.

UAPs were a popular topic even before the 1950s when people began to see them everywhere. Usually taking the form of lights or fast-moving objects in the sky, most UAP reports can be readily classified as weather balloons, satellites like Starlink, airplanes, the Northern Lights, the ISS, or planets like Mars and Venus. There are also curious phenomena such as the Hessdalen lights, which appear to be a geological, piezoelectric phenomenon, though our understanding of such natural lighting phenomena remains limited.

But it is never aliens, that’s one thing we know for sure. Not that UFO’s don’t exist. Really.

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: March 17, 2024

March 17, 2024 by 16 Comments

A friend of ours once described computers as “high-speed idiots.” It was true in the 80s, and it appears that even with the recent explosion in AI, all computers have managed to do is become faster. Proof of that can be found in a story about using ASCII art to trick a chatbot into giving away the store. As anyone who has played with ChatGPT or its moral equivalent for more than five minutes has learned, there are certain boundary conditions that the LLM’s creators lawyers have put in place to prevent discussion surrounding sensitive topics. Ask a chatbot to deliver specific instructions on building a nuclear bomb, for instance, and you’ll be rebuffed. Same with asking for help counterfeiting currency, and wisely so. But, by minimally obfuscating your question by rendering the word “COUNTERFEIT” in ASCII art and asking the chatbot to first decode the word, you can slip the verboten word into a how-to question and get pretty explicit instructions. Yes, you have to give painfully detailed instructions on parsing the ASCII art characters, but that’s a small price to pay for forbidden knowledge that you could easily find out yourself by other means.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: March 17, 2024” →

Avi Loeb And The Interstellar Lottery

March 4, 2024 by 94 Comments

Except for rare occasions, I don’t play the lottery. Like many of you, I consider state-run lotteries to be a tax paid only by people who can’t do math. That’s kind of arrogant coming from a guy who chose to go into biology rather than engineering specifically because he’s bad at math, but I know enough to know that the odds are never in your favor, and that I’d rather spend my money on just about anything else.

But I’m beginning to get the feeling that, unlike myself and many others, Harvard professor Avi Loeb just might be a fan of playing the lottery. That’s not meant as a dig. Far from it. In fact, I readily concede that a physicist with an endowed chair at Harvard working in astrophysics knows a lot more about math than I do. But given his recent news splashes where he waxes on about the possibility that Earth has been treated to both near misses and direct hits from interstellar visitors, I’m beginning to think that maybe I’m looking at the lottery backward.

Continue reading “Avi Loeb And The Interstellar Lottery” →

Would We Recognize Extraterrestrial Technology If We Saw It?

July 28, 2023 by 92 Comments

There’s a common critique in science fiction series like Star Trek about the extraterrestrial species not looking ‘alien’ enough, as well as about their technology being strangely similar to our own, not to mention compatible to the point where their widgets can be integrated into terrestrial systems by any plucky engineer. Is this critique justified, or perhaps more succinctly put: if we came across real extraterrestrial life with real extraterrestrial technology, would we even notice? Would an alien widget borrowed of an alien spacecraft even work with our own terrestrial spacecraft’s system?

Within the domain of exobiology there are still plenty of discussions on the possible formation and evolutionary paths conceivable within the Universe, but the overarching consensus seems to be that it’s hard to escape the herding effect of fundamental physics. For lifeforms, carbon-based chemistry is the only reasonable option, and when it comes to technology, it’s hard to not end up at technology using the same physical principles which we presume to exist across the Universe, which would practically guarantee some level of interoperability.

What’s notable here is that over the past years, a number of people have claimed to have observed potential alien technology in our Solar System, in particular the ʻOumuamua asteroid in 2017 and a more recent claim by astrophysicist Abraham Loeb regarding an interstellar meteor that impacted Earth in 2019, which he says could be proof of ‘alien technology’. This raises the question of whether we are literally being pummeled by extraterrestrial spacecraft these days.

Continue reading “Would We Recognize Extraterrestrial Technology If We Saw It?” →

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: July 9, 2023

July 9, 2023 by 8 Comments

Good news this week from Mars, where Ingenuity finally managed to check in with its controllers after a long silence. The plucky helicopter went silent just after nailing the landing on its 52nd flight back on April 26, and hasn’t been heard from since. Mission planners speculated that Ingenuity, which needs to link to the Perseverance rover to transmit its data, landed in a place where terrain features were blocking line-of-sight between the two. So they weren’t overly concerned about the blackout, but still, one likes to keep in touch with such an irreplaceable asset. The silence was broken last week when Perseverance finally made it to higher ground, allowing the helicopter to link up and dump the data from the last flight. The goal going forward is to keep Ingenuity moving ahead of the rover, acting as a scout for interesting places to explore, which makes it possible that we’ll see more comms blackouts. Ingenuity may be more than ten-fold over the number of flights that were planned, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for retirement quite yet.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: July 9, 2023” →