Lifeboat Foundation

If aliens sent you an encrypted binary message, could you answer? René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, wants to hear from you.

Last month, Heller posed a hypothetical question as part of the #SETIDecryptChallenge: “Suppose a telescope on Earth receives a series of pulses from a fixed, unresolved source beyond the solar system,” he wrote. “It turns out the pulses carry a message.”

The encrypted message is a vast sea of 0’s and 1’s. You can see it here, but here’s a GIF for your convenience.

Continue reading “This Astrophysicist Posed an Alien Challenge and the Internet Is Racing to Solve It” »

Deep Space Industries and the Luxembourg Government announce partnership to commercialize space resources.

Asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries, together with the Luxembourg Government and the Société Nationale de Crédit et d’Investissement (SNCI), the national banking institution in Luxembourg, have signed an agreement formalizing their partnership to explore, use, and commercialize space resources as part of Luxembourg’s spaceresources.lu initiative.

The Luxembourg Government will work with Deep Space Industries to co-fund relevant R&D projects that help further develop the technology needed to mine asteroids and build a supply chain of valuable resources in space.

Continue reading “Prospector-X™: An International Mission to Test Technologies for Asteroid Mining” »

An international team of astronomers has discovered three Earth-sized exoplanets, all orbiting the same star just 40 light-years from us, the 16-nation intergovernmental research organization ESO reported on Monday.

The scientists have deemed all three planets potentially habitable, an exciting turn in the hunt for “exoplanets,” a term for planets that orbit a star other than our sun.

And it could bring us closer to finding extraterrestrial life.

Continue reading “3 Newly Discovered Nearby Planets Are a Game Changer in The Hunt For Alien Life” »

In a few years, powerful new telescopes will usher in a search for habitable worlds outside our solar system. And TRAPPIST-1—a dim, tepid star just a smidge larger than Jupiter—is one of the first places we’ll look. It’s only forty light years away, and it’s home to several promising, Earth-sized exoplanets.

Three siblings, described today in the journal Nature, are the first exoplanets ever discovered around an “ultracool dwarf” star. And they’re a jackpot when it comes to the search for alien life. Each planet is similar in size to Earth or Venus and probably rocky. The planets all skirt the edge of the so-called habitable zone. Finally, these potential Earth twins are so close to us that we can begin studying their atmospheres right now.

“This is basically a paradigm shift,” study co-author Julien de Wit told Gizmodo. “If these planets have atmospheres, they really are the best places to look for life.”

Continue reading “This Tiny Star Is Now the Best Place to Hunt for Alien Life” »

A new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets, plus a revised Drake’s equation, produces a new, empirically valid probability of whether any other advanced civilizations have ever existed.

“The station regularly passes out of range of the Tracking and Relay Data Satellites (TDRS) used to send and receive video, voice and telemetry from the station,” a spokesperson for NASA told ValueWalk.

The only problem with this explanation, of course, is that it’s so much more boring…”

It is, of course, highly unlikely that this was some alien ship. That said, those tracking and relay stations are fixed and known locations. Also, the range and power of the ISS communication systems are well known, non-classified public domain knowledge. I suck at math, but it should only be a matter of taking the exact time and duration of this outage and comparing it to the tracking and relay station stats.

Continue reading “WTF Was That Thing Near the International Space Station?” »

VIDEO: It’s time for something new.

Little green men seem a little unimaginative.

Microscopic spaceships powered by Earth-based lasers are being developed to hunt for extra-terrestrial life in Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours.

The £70m Breakthrough Starshot concept involves creating a tiny robotic spacecraft, no larger than a mobile phone chip, which would carry cameras, thrusters, a power supply and navigation and communication equipment.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner have all joined the project’s board giving it major backing.