19th & 20th SETI Articles

"Alien Touchdown At The Human Buffet" discusses the likelihood of aliens coming to Earth and eating humans. The author recognizes that human's physical ability is very limited which is why it's such a surprise that humans are at the top of the food chain. We can't run fast, we have poor sight, hearing and smell and nothing on our skin to protect us. Therefore the author draws the conclusion that we will be eaten by aliens who are far more physically advanced as well as equally or more intelligent than us.

After reading multiple SETI articles, people who have claimed to have seen aliens typically mention something about greys which sounds like an alien race. "Greys" is a brief article discussing the various characteristics of these aliens. Greys are the most described race by individuals who have claimed to have been abducted. They have been reported to be very short in height and different shades of gray. They can clone themselves very easy and feed off of human and animal proteins and fluids. They obtain energy from "life energy" humans emit. 

17th & 18th SETI Articles

Tony Lucas walks through a typical abduction in the article "Night Visitors and Alien Abductions".  Lucas says that victims typically see a beaming light into their window while they are sleeping. They are awake but cannot move and the aliens are usually at the foot of their bed. The aliens are constantly reassuring the victim that what they are doing is for the greater good. They take the victim into their spacecraft and run tests. More than not, the victim has to do something dealing with reproducing. Many victims have claimed to see half alien-half human babies on the spacecraft. The aliens then return the human back to where they found them. The abductee doesn't remember any of the majority of the events until weeks or months later, but has unexplainable bruises or scars. 

Someone asked the question "What do aliens look like?" at abduct.com. The person who answered said that aliens do not look like what they do in Hollywood movies or TV. Aliens have been reported from abductees to anywhere from 3 inches to 15 feet tall. Some of them resemble humans in some sense, others are just balls of light. Aliens can also look like large praying mantises. Their skin type as well as color have been documented all over the spectrum. Basically, an alien can look like anything according to this answer.

15th & 16th SETI Articles

Theresa J. Thormond Morris writes about her claimed alien contact in "Alien Contact Experiences". Morris believes that she has had contact with aliens multiple times and now she wants to reveal the secret. Aliens often visited her in her red hammock outside. One time her alien friend Gus let her go on a ride in the spacecraft! She'd be gone for days in alien time but only minutes in Earth time. This memoir of Theresa and her alien friends was very amusing. She's crazy.

"Psychic Attack by Reptilians" by Eric Cooper is another interesting story I found on the internet. Cooper believes that he has come into contact with aliens. He claims the extraterrestrials would take over his wife's body and use her as a medium for communication. This has happened to him a couple times. He also believes that since he is part of the Grey species, Reptilians have had set a psychic attack on him since the Greys and Reptilians are enemy species. Cooper concludes with "I believe my purpose here is too educate and be a benefactor to abductees who have a hard time dealing with what they don't know." Cooper should proof read before he submits his memoir. Wrong too. 

13th & 14th SETI Articles

"The Hunt For Aliens" by Seth Shostak discussing the progress that has been made to find aliens. Today, SETI is taken more seriously than it has in the past. Back when it was first established, not many people viewed SETI as a legitimate science. SETI scientists had to work very hard to use telescopes and other important instruments used to attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. Now, there is a specialized optical telescope at Harvard that searches for laser pluses from space. There is also the Allen Telescope Array at Berkeley to pick up radio waves. A lot more is being done to communicate with other intelligence. 

The article "Alien Sociology" by Seth Shostak talks about if we did come in contact with aliens, what would they do? All movies about martians typically deals with harvesting various minerals on our planets or breeding experiments. Shostak argues that breeding experiments would not be a possibility because humans don't breed with animals. Just as human have different DNA than animals, extraterrestrials will have different DNA (if any at all) than humans as well. Also, aliens will not harvest Earth. If there are nearby extraterrestrials, that means Earth's precious minerals are not rare. Their planet as well as other planets are made up of the same things and there is no need for them to take from Earth. Shostak believes aliens will simply come here to learn more about humans, just as humans are doing to them.

11th & 12th SETI Articles

"The Allen Telescope Array" is an article explaining what the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is and its purpose. In 2001, 42 antennas were built and in October 2007 the ATA started its observations. The ATA is a large number of dishes set up to make SETI observations at centimeter wavelengths. It is also used for radio astronomy. These dishes can observe our galaxy and other galaxies as well as gamma rays and radio sources. 

The article "Our Mission" explains what the SETI Institute is set out to do. It was founded in 1984 and now over 150 scientists work for this non-profit organization. The SETI has three different headquarters called the Center for SETI Research, the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, and the Center for Education and Public Outreach. Its sole purpose is to understand the origin of life and the possibility of life on other planets. 

9th & 10th Articles

The article "SETI" is about the history of SETI. According to the article, the origin of the search extraterrestrial intelligence was Cornell University in 1959 when Giuseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison suggested using microwaves to communicate with aliens. It also discusses Project Ozma which was the first program to attempt to communicate with extraterrestrials. Other more recents projects Pioneer 10 and 11 which has engraved messages and Voyager 1 and 2 which both contain recorded audio. All four of these have left our solar system forever.

"Aliens Love Turkey?" discusses the large number of UFO sightings in Turkey as well as claimed contact with aliens. The author notes that Turkey citizens are typically very casual about sharing their UFO stories because it is so common to have UFO sightings in Turkey. The author provides no reasoning as to why this is.

7th & 8th SETI articles

The article "The Chance of Finding Aliens" by Govert Schilling and Alan M. MacRobert discusses the history of how the search for extraterrestrial intelligence became a point of interest. According to this article, the beginning of the search for life on other planets started with Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison in September 1959. They suggested that radio telescopes should be used to communicate with other intelligence. Another focal point of this article is the Drake equation. The Drake equation is important because it makes SETI tangible. The difficult part of it is to estimate the numbers to insert into the equation. Each number can vary from person to person and each greatly changes the final result. 

"Life on Ceres: Could the Dwarf Planet be the Root of Panspermia" written by Ian O'Neill is about Ceres and the likelihood of it supporting life. Ceres is a dwarf planet that is located on the astroid belt that orbits around the sun. There is a large possibility that it may contain water. This is not the only reason scientists are enthusiastic about Ceres. It also has low mass just like Earth. All these qualities make it the best candidate for life in the solar system outside of Earth. These question will be answered once the Dawn spacecraft reaches Ceres in approximately five years. 

5th & 6th SETI articles

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4332916.html?series=88

The article "10 Most Brilliant Innovators of 2009: Kepler Space Telescope" by Logan Ward discusses the recognition the Kepler Space Telescope received. This relates to SETI because the purpose of the Kepler Mission is to find Earth-like planets outside galaxy in hopes of finding other intelligent life. I also chose this article because we have a paper due about the Kepler Mission.

http://www.astrosociety.org/pubs/mercury/9902/vakoch.html

"The View from a Distant Star: Challenges of Interstellar Message-Making" by Douglas A. Vakoch is an article that includes multiple ways to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence. This includes messages that could be seen from Earth, encoded pictures, and other options. Plenty of these have been attempted but none have been successful.

Two New Articles

http://www.seti.org/feature/weird-seti

The article, "Weird SETI" by Seth Shostak discusses the different approaches to contact extraterrestrial intelligence other than radio. The article includes neutrinos which are a much more expensive way to communicate. It also mentions entangled particles as well as searching for gravity waves. "Weird SETI" was interesting because we have focused on FM radio waves as way to communicate so I enjoyed learning about new methods of contacting aliens.

http://www.seti.org/Page.aspx?pid=1374

"Celebrating IYA: 400 Years After Galileo" by Edna DeVore is about celebrating the first astronomical telescope. Galileo created his telescope in August 1609. Without the telescope, we would not be where we are today in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Summaries for Readings due September 10

The article "Searching for Interstellar Communications" by Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison discusses what radio frequencies we should use in order to communicate interstellar. On these frequencies, the authors think we should include prime numbers or other simple mathematical patterns. It also talks about how we would receive an answer. According to this article, it would years to receive an answer since stars are light years away.

"What It Was Like Before Ozma" by Louis Berman includes many of the historic scientists we talked about in class such as Karl Gauss, Joseph von Littrow, and Charles Cros and their ideas of showing other intelligence that we occupy Earth.  Most of the ideas sound ridiculous today. The person I found most interesting in this article was Grote Reber who built a huge radio dish in his backyard in hopes of communicating with other intelligence.

Rachel Edgar Physics 103

http://www.good.is/post/why-aliens-wont-abduct-you/

The author, Seth Shostak, of this article is saying that no one has been abducted by aliens. Or at least the two percent of Americans that have claimed to have been. His argument is that there would be more physical evidence of these abductions than just the stories of the individuals who claimed to have been taken away by aliens. Most of the abductees stories have to deal with the aliens removing eggs or sperm because of reproduction problems of their race. The author says that there is no logic to these stories because we do not know how aliens reproduce. 

http://www.space.com/searchforlife/090716-seti-alien-appearance.html

The article "What Will Aliens Really Look Like" by Seth Shostak discusses how aliens would really appear. Shostak argues that aliens would not look like those we see on TV or in movies. Those Hollywood aliens look too much like us. Instead, he suspects that they'll look like machines.