seti (Page 11)

SETI, which uses down time on the computers of thousands of volunteers to search for intelligent signals from space, has a potential problem?besides information, a broadcast to us from an alien intelligence could also carry a computer virus.

While this may sound like an idea from a science fiction movie, Leonard David writes in space.com that physicist Richard Carrigan takes it seriously. He thinks SETI should figure out how to decontaminate any signals it receives.
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Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, says, “Our cosmic importance depends on whether we are alone or not. The main aim of science is to take steps toward answering the big questions.” Now a Swedish university is funding a chair for a professor of the paranormal and SETI says they’re being taken seriously?it’s a start.

Sweden’s Lund University will appoint Europe’s first professor of parapsychology, who will start work in 2004. He’ll study and teach hypnosis, clairvoyance and other edge subjects. “Verifying the existence of paranormal phenomena does not seem to be a promising field of science,” complains philosophy professor Sven Ove Hansson. He”ll find out that’s not true?as Dreamland listeners know, there’s a lot of scientific evidence to back up these ideas.
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The primitive horseshoe crab lived on the Earth 250 million years ago, and is still with us today. Now scientists think they can use its blood to detect life on other planets. When a horseshoe crab is injured, its blood, which is the color blue, clots in order to keep infection out. “One of the reasons the horseshoe crab has survived for so long is its advanced immune system,” says biologist Norman Wainwright. “This system can be used to find microbial life.” Scientists have put the crab’s blood enzymes into a hand-held instrument that can test for signs of life.
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Astronomers around the world have searched the skies for ET using data from radio telescopes, looking for signals from another civilization. Now Nobel laureate Charles Townes thinks we should return to the old-fashioned method of looking through telescopes because bright bursts of laser light would indicate intelligent life is out there.

He says, “A civilization out there could be a thousand years ahead of us. It seems possible that some being on a planet orbiting a nearby star could send a bright enough beam that we could see it blinking.” Townes believes skeptics who don?t believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life are a vanishing species.
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