FOR READERS Today’s reader topic comes from QSFer Scott: Did you ever run across something in a spec fic book that you didn’t understand – sci fi, sex, whatever – that you had to look up? Writers: This is a reader chat – you are welcome to join it, but please do not reference your own works directly. Thanks! Chat on FacebookChat on MeWe
There’s something heavy in the outer reaches of our solar system. At least, it seems that way. Hints of it are scattered across the farthest reaches of our sun’s neighborhood — that something 5 to 10 times the mass of Earth tugging on nearby objects with its gravity. No one’s ever seen it, as this phantom has eluded years of searches by telescopes. In fact, not everyone believes it’s real. For now, most astronomers refer to it as “Planet 9.” Now, the famous theoretical physicist Edward Witten has published a paper on how to track down this specter haunting our … Read more
Humans have been searching for signs of extraterrestrial (ET) life for decades. We’ve been listening carefully for strange radio signals, looking for signatures of the artificial altering of stars and digging up rocks on Mars. But alas, so far, we’ve found nothing. As far as we can tell, we’re alone. But it could be that we’re looking in the wrong places. We know that life can appear around stars like our sun, and we know that stars like our sun will turn into white dwarfs (small, dense stars that are stellar core remnants approximately the size of planets) at the … Read more
A man crouches on the Oregon forest floor late at night, peering between the trees for signs of nocturnal life. The scene is pitch-black but his face and hands are visible in infrared footage, and he scans the landscape with a thermal camera, looking for a heat signature that would indicate he isn’t alone. Suddenly, a red blob emerges in the distance. “Do you see that?” he whispers. “It’s something big.” But could it be Bigfoot, North America’s fabled apelike creature? That’s the question this man — author and explorer Russell Acord — and his colleagues are trying to answer, … Read more
While the truth might be out there, technological aliens don’t seem to be — at least not yet. New results from the most comprehensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program ever undertaken — which surveyed 1,327 nearby stars for signals from intelligent beings — have turned up empty. “There’s certainly nothing out there glaringly obvious,” Danny Price, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of a paper about the results, which were published in The Astrophysical Journal, told Live Science. “There’s no amazingly advanced civilizations trying to contact us with incredibly powerful transmitters.” While the team … Read more
In 1950, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi — who led the team that created the first-ever nuclear reactor, the inadequately named Chicago Pile-1 — and a few of his colleagues were discussing UFOs during their lunch break. The conversation prompted Fermi to ask his companions, “Where is everybody?” [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens] Fermi meant that the lack of visits by ET is distinctly odd. The Milky Way harbors hundreds of billions of stars and is about 13 billion years old, so there has been plenty of time and opportunity for alien civilizations to rise and spread throughout the … Read more
The Pentagon, at the direction of Congress, a decade ago quietly set up a multi-million dollar program to investigate what are popularly known as unidentified flying objects—UFOs. The “unidentified aerial phenomena” claimed to have been seen by pilots and other military personnel appeared vastly more advanced than those in American or foreign arsenals. In some cases they maneuvered so unusually and so fast that they seemed to defy the laws of physics, according to multiple sources directly involved in or briefed on the effort and a review of unclassified Defense Department and congressional documents. The Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, … Read more