Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence - looking in the wrong direction?

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17-nation project to look for life in remote galaxies

(see original here)

ASHOK B SHARMA
Posted online : Sunday, January 7, 2007

CHIDAMBARAM, JAN 6: In search of life 30,000-plus light years away from our solar system, scientists on earth have finalised plans to set up a Square Kilometre Array (SKA) housing 8,000 antennae and discs, occupying a surface area of 50,000 sq metres. This SKA would be a hundred times more powerful than the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) commissioned near Pune.

The project, to take off after selecting the site in 2008 and to be completed by 2020, will be supported by 17 nations including India, at an investment of around $2 billion.

"The antennae will help scientists tap bio-signatures existing in the universe outside our planet," said the Govind Swarup, Fellow of the Royal Society and professor emeritus at the Pune-based National Centre for Radio Astrophysics. The proposed SKA will enable scientists to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Swarup is here in Chidambaram to participate in the 94th Indian Science Congress.

Swarup said that according to the Drake Equation, there are about 10,000 planets in the universe where there can be a possibility of existence of life.

Swarup, who is actively associated with the project, has suggested that each of the 8,000 antennas should be of 12-metre diameter. He suggested that India can effectively make its contribution by developing software and antennas for the project, which would cover 15% of the total cost.

He revealed that South Africa and Australia have been shortlisted for the site of the SKA project.

"The decision on the site is likely to be taken in 2008 and thereafter the issue of fund-raising will be finalised by 2010," he said.

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Tata Consultancy Services and Persistent Vision have evinced interest in the project, said Swarup. "I am working to form a core group for software specialists based in Pune to work on the project," he said.

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Of course looking for electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrial beings is a perfectly useless exercise. Any communications over interstellar or intergalactic distances are not going to be possible with a technology that is limited to light velocity. Communication by electromagnetic waves is fine for our planetary needs and may barely suffice for extension through our solar system, but it would be woefully inadequate for anything more distant than - say the outer planets.

So why are we looking in that direction?

Apparently, there is a high level cover-up of the real facts of extraterrestrial intelligence visiting and interacting with mankind. Dr Steven Greer has been investigating the reality of the continuous presence - denied by press and officials - of extraterrestrial presence and contact with humans. His books and the video witness testimony available on the Disclosureproject site detail what he found and I recommend you get and read them. Especially interesting is his latest work - Hidden Truth Forbidden Knowledge - which goes into detail on the cover-up of any information that indicates alien contact, and chronicles how he got involved in this research in the first place.

Greer has established CSETI, the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where he says:

"A thorough review of existing data and documents concerning "UFO's" indicates that the Earth has been visited by ETI and Extraterrestrial Spacecraft (ETS) for decades, if not centuries, and that this contact has intensified since 1947. The existence and authentication of top secret documents confirming the retrieval of crashed ETs and their occupants, the numerous photographs and films showing ETS, the reports of thousands of credible civilian and military observers, and the presence of associated landing all provide compelling evidence for the ongoing contact between ETI and Humans."

I would also recommend you get "Fastwalkers" - a recently released feature-length video that documents the fact of numerous alien visits on this planet and of contact that has been established. You will hear some first hand accounts of how the evidence is covered up by our governments, slotting the spiny question into a "national security", military category, where no real data is allowed to escape into our very controlled media and public knowledge.

Fastwalkers features a host of investigators of the phenomenon and makes the case that instead of letting military handle all contact, we must open up to these visitors, who probably see us as a dangerous, rogue race of beings on the way to destroying our planet's environment and perhaps ourselves, with our fixation on war and outdated but profitable petrochemical energy technologies.

A few links to follow:

http://www.disclosureproject.org/

http://www.safespaceproject.com/

http://www.exopolitics.org/

http://www.theblackvault.com/

http://www.robsimone.com/

http://www.hbccufo.org/

http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/

http://www.brumac.8k.com/

See also:

Can We Please End The UFO Cover-Up?

Hacker uncovers UFO evidence
I also got access to Excel spreadsheets. One was titled "Non-Terrestrial Officers." It contained names and ranks of U.S. Air Force personnel who are not registered anywhere else. It also contained information about ship-to-ship transfers, but I've never seen the names of these ships noted anywhere else.

Missing laptop found in ET hunt
No ET signals have been found by SETI(at)home, but at least the program finally turned out to have some use: Locating a stolen computer, which dutifully checked in to the SETI database to help in the search...

France opens secret UFO files covering 50 years (originally published on PhysOrg)
The CNES fields between 50 and 100 UFO reports ever year, usually written up by police. Of these, 10 percent are the object of on-site investigations, Patenet said.

Other countries collect data more or less systematically about unidentified flying objects, notably in Britain and in the United States, where information can be requested on a case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act. "But we decided to do it the other way around and made everything available to the public," Patenet said. The aim was to make it easier for scientists and other UFO buffs to access the data for research.

The website itself -- which crashed host servers hours after it was unveiled due to heavy traffic -- is extremely well organised and complete, even including scanned copies of police reports. To visit the website: http://www.cnes-geipan.fr .

Understanding UFO Secrecy in the 21st Century
While not new - Steven Greer wrote this in 1999 - the article spells out clearly and without distracting emotional garbage, why UFO data are being kept top secret to this day, and what the dangers are of a closed military group dealing with the matter. Change is urgently needed, today as it was back at the end of the last century. We must insist on transparency, lest we be judged by the disastrous results of the "diplomacy" of military minds. This is a call to action that unfortunately has not found a proper echo in these last few years.

SETI Makes Alien Contact?
According to Dr. Steven Greer, yes, SETI has received multiple extraterrestrial signals. This news he says, is confirmed by senior employees within the SETI program.

"We have confirmation - and I'm not going to give the name yet because we are trying to coax this guy out of the closet - but one of the senior people in the SETI project, which is the Carl Sagan Search for Extraterrestrial project, has confirmed to the Disclosure Project that they have received multiple extraterrestrial signals," Greer said.

Galactic Cointelpro - Covert Counterintelligence Program against Extraterrestrial contactees
In this excellent article, Michel Salla describes how the US intelligence agencies have, with a long-term program of disruption and debunking, effectively neutralized what seems to have been a perceived threat that people in direct contact with extraterrestrials could bring about changes in earth politics and social systems in preparation for humanity's entry into the larger community of space civilizations.

Not only did the US authorities know that the extraterrestrial presence is real, they did everything to ridicule and split UFO investigators and set them against each other.

Alternate "life" styles: scientists predict the possibility of a Shadow Biosphere
... Scientists Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart realized that as a civilization advances they begin to use the available electromagnetic spectrum for communication more fully and efficiently until ultimately their radiative emissions are indistinguishable from blackbody radiation. In other words, when we look out into space with telescopes to search for signs of alien life (SETI for example) we will likely mistake it for being just a regular old hot rock! So either three things must be true to find life through a telescope: 1. The civilization is at a very precise moment in its development, 2. The civilization wants to be found and so sets aside some broadcast space for a message, 3. We know their decompression algorithm and what frequency band to apply it to.

It's this last possibility that relates to the shadow biosphere in a philosophical sense. Unless we know how to interpret the signs of such life, we may not be able to distinguish it from the natural background.

New telescope may find alien life: square kilometre array SKA

The square kilometre array is one of the most ambitious science projects ever conceived and when completed will be the world's most powerful radio telescope, thousands of times more capable than anything currently available.

The 1.5 billion euro project involves the construction of about 3000 dishes which, when linked together, have a total collecting surface of about one square kilometre.

IBM developing exascale computer for the Square Kilometre Array

April 2012 - IBM has just been awarded a contract that challenges the company to handle an exabyte of data every single day. To put that in context, the Internet currently handles around 499 Petabytes of data every day. An exabyte is 1,024 Petabytes, meaning more than double the data.

The reason this exascale system is required is to support the largest and most sensitive radio telescope being developed by the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) consortium. The SKA is set to come online in 2024 and will be capable of collecting multiple exabytes of data from a telescope 50x more sensitive than anything that has gone before.