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+---
+title: "Alessandra Ricca"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandra_Ricca"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:33.829973+00:00"
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+---
+
+Alessandra Ricca is a computational chemist whose research focuses primarily on theoretical chemistry. She researches modeling properties of organic compounds in the gas and ice phases, emphasizing the formation, reactivity, spectroscopy, and optical properties of the researched compounds. In Astrophysics and Analysis at NASA, Ricca studies PAH infrared spectroscopy and nanograins in the interstellar medium. She loads data into the NASA Ames PAH IR Spectroscopic Database (PAHdb), which helps interpret JWST data. In NASA Solar System Workings, Ricca studies ammonia hydrates on Charon and other icy bodies, in which she interprets data collected by the Cassini mission, which detected small, large, and macromolecular organics near the Enceladus plume. The goal of this project is to determine if these substances were derived from life or abiotic processes. In addition to her work at NASA, Ricca is a Senior Research Chemist at the SETI Institute.
+
+
+== Early life and education ==
+Ricca was born to an Italian father and a Swiss mother in Sanremo, Italy. Her family was heavily focused on medicine, as her father was an M.D., and her mother helped him with cancer detection testing. From a young age, she enjoyed watching the TV series Medical Center and was influenced by her family to become a doctor, as her father was a surgeon. She also has a brother who is five years younger than her.
+Ricca has an Italian and Swiss dual citizenship. After spending her early years in Italy, she attended a religious boarding school in Monaco in 9th grade. The boarding school experience shocked her, from French being the primary language spoken at the institution to sharing a room with thirty girls. She then transferred to Geneva, Switzerland, to finish high school and attended the University of Geneva. Once again, all her classes were in French. In college, she initially majored in biochemistry but later switched to chemistry, as biochemistry was a newer field that was relatively harder to understand. Ricca also wanted to major in medicine but eventually became interested in research: "I’m very curious, and I like to solve things. I’m a problem solver, so I became more interested in research, and I realized that I was distancing myself more and more from being a practitioner or even a surgeon."
+Ricca received her Bachelor of Science degree (B.S.) and Master of Science (M.S.) from the University of Geneva in December 1988 and March 1989, respectively. She studied organic chemistry in college and later began a PhD in Zurich, Switzerland. However, she eventually left and went to Geneva for a PhD in theoretical chemistry in collaboration with the University of Geneva's pharmaceutical department. In July 1993, she received a PhD. in Physical chemistry from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. After receiving her PhD, she decided to stay in Switzerland but later moved to the Bay Area when she received a National Research Council Research Associateship at NASA Ames Research Center. In 1995, she became a NASA Ames Postdoctoral Fellow. Since she had a J-1 visa, she had to leave after two years and went to London, England for another postdoc. She became a Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London She eventually returned to the United States and worked with Professor Charles Musgrave on calculations in material science at Stanford from 1997 to 1998. She was also hired by Eloret Corporation to work on thermochemistry and nanotechnology. When the nanotechnology project ended, she began to work on PAHs with scientists in Code S and eventually studied space science.
+
+
+== Personal life ==
+Ricca is married and has two daughters, one in college and the other in high school. She also has two black cats and a hamster. Ricca likes to travel with her family and hike long trails with her husband in Hawaii. In addition, she enjoys music, singing, and the arts, often attending concerts and art exhibits. She also likes to do gardening, photography, and do-it-yourself projects.
+Ricca is proud of her family: "I think having a family and nice kids and a great husband, whose support is really great." She also dreamed of coming to the United States when she was younger, and she fulfilled that dream by moving to the U.S. alone. Her first inspirations were her parents and the people she met who helped her throughout her life.
+Ricca also enjoys reading classical French literature, which she didn't when she was younger. She prefers reading in French, her native language, stating that "I just take pleasure in reading [French literature] because I can capture all the subtleties, which are very often lost to me in English." To her, reading Proust "is like a painting with all these colors. It’s like a piece of art and gives me great enjoyment."
+
+
+== Other activities ==
+From 2001 to 2008, she mentored students attending summer programs at the University of Notre Dame and UC Berkeley. In 2005, she was a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and from 2006 through 2008, she was a mentor for the Summer Research for Undergraduates Program in Astrobiology at the SETI Institute. She was also a referee for the Journal of Physical Chemistry, Chemical Physics, Chemical Physics Letters, and Astrophysical Journal. In addition, she has published many articles and has been invited to peer review them as well.
+A piece of advice that she would give younger students is to stay focused and tenacious: "You have to really be extremely perseverant because you get rejection after rejection. You have to be willing to keep going on and on and not get discouraged if you get a lot of negative comments. You have to have a lot of grit. You need to be very passionate to overcome all these kinds of barriers."
+
+
+== Honors and awards ==
+She won the 1997 Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology and the 2008 NASA Honor Award. She also won the 1999 ELORET Thermosciences Institute Outstanding Achievement Award and the 2000 and 2002 ELORET Superior Achievement Award.
+
+
+== References ==

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+title: "Avi Loeb"
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:07.760062+00:00"
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+---
+
+Abraham "Avi" Loeb (Hebrew: אברהם (אבי) לייב; born February 26, 1962) is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He chaired the Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020, and founded the Black Hole Initiative in 2016.
+Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In 2015, he was appointed as the science theory director for the Breakthrough Initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
+Loeb has published popular science books including Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (2021) and Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars (2023).
+Since 2017, Loeb has made a series of claims that alien space craft may be in the Solar System. He has argued that ʻOumuamua and other interstellar objects, including the reputedly interstellar meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08, are potential examples of such craft. These claims have been widely rejected by the scientific community. In 2023, he claimed to have recovered spherules formed by the impact of CNEOS 2014-01-08 that he alleged could be evidence of an alien starship, but the location in the ocean where he recovered the spherules was based on mistaking a seismic signal from a truck for the impact of the meteor. During an appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, he also claimed that whether an ancient "sophisticated civilization" existed on Earth before humanity is a credible question to ask. Loeb tends to publicize his results before undergoing peer review, contributing to a climate of sensationalism around his claims.
+
+== Life and career ==
+Loeb was born in Beit Hanan, Israel, in 1962. He took part in the Talpiot research program while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces at age 18. While in Talpiot, he obtained a BSc degree in physics and mathematics in 1983, an MSc degree in physics in 1985, and a PhD in plasma physics in 1986, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). During his doctoral studies, Loeb conducted research at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Yavne. His PhD thesis focused on the modeling of plasma acceleration of charged particles. From 1983 to 1988, he was invited by the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative to work on a new propulsion method for high-speed projectiles. Between 1988 and 1993, Loeb was a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he started to work in theoretical astrophysics under the supervision of John Bahcall.
+In 1993, he moved to Harvard University as an assistant professor in the department of astronomy, and was tenured three years later. Since 2007, he has been Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Since 2012, Loeb became the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard.
+Loeb has written eight books, including the textbooks How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form? and The First Galaxies in the Universe. He has co-authored many papers on topics in astrophysics and cosmology, including the first stars, the epoch of reionization, the formation and evolution of massive black holes, the search for extraterrestrial life, gravitational lensing by planets, gamma-ray bursts at high redshifts, the use of the Lyman-alpha forest to measure the acceleration/deceleration of the universe in real time, the future collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, the future state of extragalactic astronomy, astrophysical implications of black hole recoil in galaxy mergers, tidal disruption of stars, and imaging black hole silhouettes.
+Together with his postdoc James Guillochon, Loeb predicted the existence of a new population of stars moving near the speed of light throughout the universe. Together with his postdoc John Forbes and Howard Chen of Northwestern University, Loeb made another prediction that sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets have been transformed into rocky super-Earths by the activity of the black hole Sagittarius A*.
+Together with Paolo Pani, Loeb showed in 2013 that primordial black holes in the range between the masses of the Moon and the Sun cannot make up dark matter. In 2025, Loeb, in collaboration with Oem Trivedi, proposed that dark matter could consist of remnants of Planck Stars formed after the evaporation of primordial black holes. Loeb led a team that reported tentative evidence for the birth of a black hole in the young nearby supernova SN 1979C. In collaboration with Dan Maoz, Loeb demonstrated in 2013 that biomarkers, such as molecular oxygen (O2), can be detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the atmosphere of Earth-mass planets in the habitable zone of white dwarfs.
+In 2018, he served a term as chair of the board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).
+
+=== Life in the universe ===
+In 2013, Loeb wrote about the "Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe", noting that the Cosmic Microwave Background would temporarily have been at temperatures compatible with liquid water around 15 million years after the Big Bang. In April 2021, he presented an updated summary of his ideas of life in the early universe.
+In 2020, Loeb published a paper about the possibility that life can propagate from one planet to another, followed by the opinion piece "Noah's Spaceship" about directed panspermia.
+
+=== Claims about alien life ===
+Loeb's claims about alien life have attracted sustained criticism from other scientists. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University referred to Loeb's claims as "ridiculous sensationalism" which represent "a real breakdown of the peer review process and the scientific method". Some of Loeb's claims have been described as conspiracy theories, with USA Today referring to Loeb's speculation about 3I/ATLAS as an "outlandish conspiracy theor[y]." Other scientists have described Loeb's theories as "nonsense", comparable to the idea that "the moon is made of cheese."
+In 2024, Loeb delivered a speech in which he declared his view that the Messiah will be an alien who arrives from outer space.
+
+==== ʻOumuamua ====

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+title: "Avi Loeb"
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+---
+
+ʻOumuamua was the first confirmed interstellar object detected in the Solar System. In December 2017, Loeb cited ʻOumuamua's unusually elongated shape as one of the reasons the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia should listen for radio emissions from it to see if there were any unexpected signs that it might be of artificial origin, although earlier limited observations by other radio telescopes such as the SETI Institute's Allen Telescope Array had produced no such results. The Green Bank Telescope observed the asteroid for six hours, detecting no radio signals.
+On October 26, 2018, Loeb and his postdoctoral student Shmuel Bialy submitted a paper exploring the possibility that ʻOumuamua is an artificial thin solar sail accelerated by solar radiation pressure in an effort to help explain the object's non-gravitational acceleration. The consensus among other astrophysicists was that the available evidence is insufficient to consider such a premise, and that a tumbling solar sail would not be able to accelerate. In response, Loeb wrote an article detailing six anomalous properties of ʻOumuamua that make it unusual, unlike any comets or asteroids seen before. By 2021, there was widespread consensus in the scientific community that 1I/ʻOumuamua had properties entirely consistent with a naturally occurring object, perhaps made of nitrogen ice, or a comet-like body that was altered by warming as it travelled through the solar system.
+On November 27, 2018, Loeb and Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate, proposed a search for ʻOumuamua-like objects that might be trapped in the Solar System as a result of losing orbital energy through a close encounter with Jupiter. They identified four candidates (2011 SP25, 2017 RR2, 2017 SV13, and 2018 TL6) for trapped interstellar objects that dedicated missions could visit. The authors pointed out that future sky surveys, such as with Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, could find many more.
+In public interviews and private communications with reporters and academic colleagues, Loeb has become more vocal about the prospects of proving the existence of alien life. On April 16, 2019, Loeb and Siraj reported the discovery of a meteor of interstellar origin. Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, a popular science account of ʻOumuamua by Loeb, was published in 2021. A followup book, Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars, was published on August 29, 2023.
+
+==== The Galileo Project ====
+
+In July 2021, Loeb founded the Galileo Project for the Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. The project was inspired by the detection of ʻOumuamua and by release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). As stated on the project's website, the aim is:
+
+Given the recently discovered abundance of Earth-Sun systems, the Galileo Project is dedicated to the proposition that humans can no longer ignore the possible existence of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs), and that science should not dogmatically reject potential extraterrestrial explanations because of social stigma or cultural preferences, factors which are not conducive to the scientific method of unbiased, empirical inquiry. We now must 'dare to look through new telescopes', both literally and figuratively.
+The three main avenues of research are:
+
+Obtaining high-resolution images of UAPs and discovering their nature
+Searching for and research of ʻOumuamua-like interstellar objects
+Searching for potential ETC satellites
+Unlike other similar projects, the goal of the Galileo Project is to search for physical objects, and not electromagnetic signals, associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment. The project was covered by many independent publishers, among them Nature, Science, The New York Post, Scientific American, The Guardian, etc. To allegations that studies of UFOs is pseudoscience, Loeb answers that the project aims not to study UFOs based on previous data, but to study Unidentified Aerial Phenomena "using the standard scientific method based on a transparent analysis of open scientific data to be collected using optimized instruments".
+
+===== CNEOS 2014-01-08 =====

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+title: "Avi Loeb"
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+category: "reference"
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+
+In 2014, the US Department of Defense observed a fireball entering the atmosphere. Loeb made a series of claims about this event, from the meteor being from outside the Solar System to its likely area of impact based on, among other things, a seismic signal that occurred around the same time, all culminating in 2023, when Loeb announced that he had found interstellar material on the ocean floor that he asserted came from the meteor and could be remnants of an extraterrestrial starship. These claims were criticized by other scientists as hasty, sensational, and part of a pattern of improper behavior. Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at the University of Western Ontario, argued the material can be explained as non-interstellar, noting that measurements from Defense Department data are opaque and error-prone. Brown further said he was disturbed by Loeb's lack of engagement with relevant experts. In March 2022, the U.S. Space Force affirmed that their 2014 data indicated an interstellar origin, while the following month NASA stated the evidence for this was inconclusive.
+Astrophysicist Steve Desch, at Arizona State University, commented "[Loeb's claims are] polluting good science—conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room", and said several of his colleagues are consequently refusing to engage with Loeb in the peer review process. Monica Grady from the Open University argued that the evidence for Loeb's claims is "rather shaky" and pointed more plausibly to terrestrial pollution. Patricio A. Gallardo in an American Astronomical Society paper similarly concluded the samples were consistent with coal ash contamination. Loeb subsequently authored a preprint saying chemical analysis ruled out coal ash contamination and indicated extrasolar origins. Loeb and Morgan MacLeod proposed a tidal disruption mechanism that could cause meteors to be ejected into trajectories leading to the described observations. In 2024 planetary seismologist Benjamin Fernando led a team that analyzed the seismic signals that led Loeb to search that specific region of the ocean, and they concluded that the seismic signals from one of the sensors used was in fact caused not by a meteor, but by a truck driving near the sensor, so that, "Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place."
+
+==== 3I/ATLAS ====
+
+In 2025, ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System), the NASA-funded survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, observed a comet approaching from the constellation of Sagittarius at an interstellar velocity. Loeb hypothesized in the press that this, the third known interstellar object, could be an alien device with potentially malevolent intent. He based these speculations on his calculations of the likelihood of a comet of natural origins having these characteristics. "The retrograde orbital plane of 3I/ATLAS around the Sun lies within 5 degrees of that of Earth... The likelihood for that coincidence out of all random orientations is 0.2 percent," Loeb told Newsweek. He further claimed that the brightness of 3I/ATLAS implies an object that is around 20 kilometers in diameter which is "too large for an interstellar asteroid." 3I/ATLAS' trajectory will bring it close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, a path Loeb calculated as having a probability of just 0.005 percent. "It might have targeted the inner Solar System as expected from alien technology," he added. Richard Moissl, Head of Planetary Defence at the European Space Agency told Newsweek: "There have been no signs pointing to non-natural origins of 3I/ATLAS in the available observations." Since then, observations have reported evidence of 3I/ATLAS containing water, which is a substance commonly found in comets.
+Independent assessments have resoundingly rejected the idea that 3I/ATLAS is anything except a comet. Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate said that "We certainly haven't seen any technosignatures or anything from it that would lead us to believe it was anything other than a comet". Similarly, NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya stated that "all evidence points to it being a comet." In the face of this growing body of evidence, Loeb conceded that 3I/ATLAS is "most likely" a comet, though he continued to speculate about its supposed technological nature regardless.
+
+== Media appearances ==
+In 2006, Loeb was featured in a Time magazine cover story on the first stars, and in a Scientific American article on the Dark Ages of the universe. In 2008, he was featured in a Smithsonian magazine cover story on black holes, and in two Astronomy magazine cover stories, one on the collision between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy and the second on the future state of our universe. In 2009, Loeb reviewed in a Scientific American article a new technique for imaging black hole silhouettes. Loeb received considerable media attention after proposing in 2011 (with E.L. Turner) a new technique for detecting artificially-illuminated objects in the Solar System and beyond, and showing in 2012 (with I. Ginsburg) that planets may transit hypervelocity stars or get kicked to a fraction of the speed of light near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
+He has been profiled a number of times, including in Science magazine, Discover, and The New York Times. He has been interviewed by Astronomy magazine, by Lex Fridman, 
+Let's Get Haunted,
+Joe Rogan, Mick West, and by the H3 Podcast. On August 24, 2023, The New York Times published an article about Loeb and his search for signs of extraterrestrial life.
+Loeb also regularly writes opinion essays on science and policy.
+In February 2026 a large poem about Avi Loeb titled The Avi Loeb Interstellar was printed by Jane Hirshfield in Poets for Science and later published by Dr. Loeb to his Medium page.
+
+== Honors and awards ==
+Loeb has received many honors, including:

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+title: "Avi Loeb"
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:07.760062+00:00"
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+---
+
+1987 – The Kennedy Prize of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
+2002 – Guggenheim Fellowship
+2004 – Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the Faculty of Physics & Einstein Center for Theoretical Physics of the Weizmann Institute of Science
+2006/7 – John Bahcall Lecturer at the Tel Aviv University
+2006 – Salpeter Lectureship at Cornell University
+2012 – Time magazine's 25 most influential people in space.
+2012 – Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
+2012 – Galileo Galilei Chair (Cattedra Galileiana) Award of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy
+2013 – Chambliss Astronomical Writing Award from the American Astronomical Society, for How Did the First Stars and Galaxies Form? (2010)
+2014 – Member of the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
+2015 – Elected Fellow of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) SETI Permanent Committee
+2015 – Elected Member of the American Physical Society (APS)
+2020 – Appointed to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology
+
+== See also ==
+UFO conspiracy theories
+CNEOS 2014-01-08
+
+== Selected publications ==
+Abraham Loeb, Adam Hibberd, and Adam Crowl (2025). "Intercepting 3I/ATLAS at Closest Approach to Jupiter with the Juno spacecraft". arXiv.
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+
+Avi Loeb's home page
+Loeb's recent preprints
+Loeb's published papers
+Search for Interstellar Monuments (Avi Loeb; Scientific American; September 2021).
+Kloor, Keith (January 27, 2023). "Why is a Harvard astrophysicist working with UFO buffs?". www.science.org. Retrieved June 17, 2023.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_SETI_Research_Center-0.md

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+---
+title: "Berkeley SETI Research Center"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_SETI_Research_Center"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:40.165825+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Berkeley SETI Research Center (BSRC) conducts experiments searching for optical and  electromagnetic transmissions from intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. The center  is based at the University of California, Berkeley.
+The Berkeley SETI Research Center has several SETI searches operating at various wavelengths, from radio, through infrared, to visible light. These include SERENDIP, SEVENDIP, NIROSETI, Breakthrough Listen, and SETI@home. The research center is also involved in the development of new telescopes and instrumentation.
+The Berkeley SETI Research Center is independent of, but collaborates with, researchers at the SETI Institute. No unambiguous signals from extraterrestrial intelligence have been found.
+
+
+== Breakthrough Listen ==
+
+The Berkeley SETI Research Center also hosts the Breakthrough Listen program, which is a ten-year initiative with $100 million funding begun in July 2015 to actively search for intelligent extraterrestrial communications in the universe, in a substantially expanded way, using resources that had not previously been extensively used for the purpose. It has been described as the most comprehensive search for alien communications to date. Announced in July 2015, the project is observing for thousands of hours every year on two major radio telescopes, the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and the Automated Planet Finder telescope.
+
+
+== SETI@home ==
+
+The center also created the SETI@home, an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform, hosted by their Space Sciences Laboratory. Its purpose is to analyze radio data from radio telescopes for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence.
+
+
+== SERENDIP ==
+
+The SERENDIP program takes advantage of ongoing "mainstream" radio telescope observations and  analyzes deep space radio telescope data that it obtains while other astronomers are using the telescope. SERENDIP observations have been conducted at frequencies between 400 MHz and 5 GHz, with most observations near the so-called Cosmic Water Hole (1.42 GHz (21 cm) neutral hydrogen and 1.66 GHz hydroxyl transitions).
+
+
+== SEVENDIP ==
+
+SEVENDIP, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Visible Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations, was a project using visible wavelengths to search for extraterrestrial life's intelligent signals from outer space.
+
+
+== NIROSETI ==
+
+The NIROSETI (Near-InfraRed Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program searches for artificial signals in the optical (visible) and near infrared (NIR) wavebands of the electromagnetic spectrum.  It uses the Nickel 1-m telescope at the Lick Observatory in California, USA. The instrument saw its first light on 15 March 2015 and was commissioned in January 2016.
+The NIROSETI instrument employs a new generation of near-infrared (900 to 1700 nm) detectors, cooled at −25 °C, that have a high speed response (>1 GHz) and gain comparable to photomultiplier tubes, while also producing very low noise, and significantly reducing false positives. Its field-of-view is 2.5"x2.5" each, and focuses
+on detecting short (nanosecond) pulsed laser emissions. The NIROSETI instrument is also being used to study variability of very short natural near-infrared transient phenomena.
+
+
+== See also ==
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Berkeley SETI Research Center Highlights, 5 min video by Berkeley University at YouTube.
+Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home (SETI@Home)
+Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner kick off new search for E.T., $100 million funding to search star catalogue using SETI@home software, July 2015.

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+---
+title: "Bruce Maccabee"
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+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Maccabee"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:10.136169+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Bruce S. Maccabee (May 6, 1942 – May 10, 2024) was an American optical physicist employed by the United States Navy, and a ufologist.
+
+
+== Biography ==
+Maccabee received a B.S. in physics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from American University, Washington, D.C.  In 1972 he began his career at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, White Oak, Silver Spring, Maryland; which later became the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division.  Maccabee retired from government service in 2008.  He has worked on optical data processing, generation of underwater sound with lasers and various aspects of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) using high-power lasers.
+Maccabee was also a pianist who performed at the 1997 and 1999 MUFON symposia. He lived in Allen County, Ohio, and was married to Jan Maccabee. He died at his home in Lima, Ohio, on May 10, 2024 at the age of 82.
+
+
+== Ufology ==
+Maccabee was interested in UFOs from the late 1960s when he joined the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and was active in research and investigation for NICAP until its demise in 1980. He became a member of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) in 1975 and was subsequently appointed to the position of state director for Maryland, a position he held until his death. In 1979 he was instrumental in establishing the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) and was the chairman for about 13 years. He later served on the National Board of the Fund.
+His UFO research and investigations included the Kenneth Arnold sighting (June 24, 1947), the McMinnville, Oregon, (Trent) photos of 1950, the Gemini 11 astronaut photos of September, 1966, the September 1976 Tehran UFO incident, the New Zealand sightings of December 1978, the Japan Airlines (JAL1628) sighting of November 1986, the numerous sightings of Gulf Breeze UFO incident, 1987–1988, the "red bubba" sightings, 1990–1992, including his own sighting in September, 1991, the Mexico City video of August, 1997 (which he deemed a hoax), the Phoenix Lights sightings of March 13, 1997, 2004 Mexican UFO incident and many others.
+Maccabee also carried out historical research and was the first to obtain the secret "flying disc file" of the FBI, what he called "the REAL X-Files". In addition, he collected documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Air Force, the United States Army, and other government agencies.
+Maccabee was the author or coauthor of about three dozen technical articles and more than a hundred trade articles about UFOs over the last 30 years, including many which appeared in the MUFON UFO Journal and MUFON Symposium proceedings. Among his papers was a reanalysis of the statistics and results of the famed Battelle Memorial Institute Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, a massive analysis of 3200 Air Force cases through the mid-1950s. (See Identification studies of UFOs.)  Another was a reanalysis of the results of the Condon Committee UFO study from 1969. (Like many others, Maccabee concluded that Edward Condon lied about the results.)
+In addition, he also wrote or contributed to half a dozen books on the subject of UFOs and appeared on numerous radio and television shows and documentaries as an authority on the subject.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Bruce Maccabee - Homepage
+Bruce Maccabee - Homepage - Biography
+Bruce Maccabee at IMDb

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+title: "Carl Sagan"
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+---
+
+Carl Edward Sagan (; SAY-gən; November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist and science communicator. Initially an assistant professor at Harvard, Sagan later moved to Cornell, where he was the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He played an active role in the Mariner, Viking and Voyager programs. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and several popular science books, starting with The Cosmic Connection. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for The Dragons of Eden.
+He co-wrote and narrated the 1980 documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries and won two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. Cosmos, the companion volume, was the bestselling science book to date.
+A lifelong science fiction fan, Sagan entered the genre with Contact, which was adapted as the film of the same name. He was a founding member and first president of the Planetary Society. He proposed the Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1.
+He had a lifelong interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life and is generally credited with contributions to the Arecibo message, with a much more significant role developing the Pioneer plaques and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any intelligence that might find them. He promoted skepticism and the scientific method, particularly in his penultimate book The Demon-Haunted World. He popularized a toolkit for critical thinking. He made famous the maxim "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The phrase "Billions and billions" was attributed to him, although he never said it; he did use it as the title of hislast book. Sagan received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal. He married three times and had five children. After developing myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62 on December 20, 1996.
+
+== Early life ==
+
+=== Childhood ===
+
+Carl Edward Sagan was born on November 9, 1934, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York City's Brooklyn borough. His mother, Rachel Molly Gruber (1906–1982), was a housewife from New York City; his father, Samuel Sagan (1905–1979), was a Ukrainian-born garment worker who had emigrated from Kamianets-Podilskyi (then in the Russian Empire). Sagan was named in honor of his maternal grandmother, Chaiya Clara, who had died while giving birth to her second child; she was, in Sagan's words, "the mother she [Rachel] never knew." Sagan's family lived in a modest apartment in Bensonhurst. He later described his family as Reform Jews, one of the more liberal of Judaism's four main branches. He and his sister agreed that their father was not especially religious, but that their mother "definitely believed in God, and was active in the temple [...] and served only kosher meat." During the worst years of the Great Depression, his father worked as a movie theater usher.
+According to biographer Keay Davidson, Sagan traced his analytical inclinations to his mother, who had been extremely poor as a child in New York City during World War I and the 1920s, and whose later intellectual ambitions were sabotaged by her poverty, status as a woman and wife, and Jewish ethnicity. Davidson suggested she "worshipped her only son, Carl" because "he would fulfill her unfulfilled dreams." Sagan traced his sense of wonder to his father, who spent his free time giving apples to the poor or helping soothe tensions between workers and management within New York City's garment industry. Sagan said: "My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method."
+He described a defining moment in his development, when his parents took him to the 1939 New York World's Fair. He recalled his vivid memories of several exhibits there. One, Futurama, included a moving map, which, as he recalled, "showed beautiful highways and cloverleaves and little General Motors cars all carrying people to skyscrapers, buildings with lovely spires, flying buttresses—and it looked great!" Another involved a flashlight shining on a photoelectric cell, which created a crackling sound, and another showed how the sound from a tuning fork became a wave on an oscilloscope. He saw an exhibit of the nascent medium of television. He later wrote: "Plainly, the world held wonders of a kind I had never guessed. How could a tone become a picture and light become a noise?" Sagan saw one of the fair's most publicized events: the burial at Flushing Meadows of a time capsule, which contained mementos from the 1930s to be recovered in the far future. Davidson wrote that this "thrilled Carl." As an adult, Sagan and his colleagues would create similar time capsules to be sent out into space.
+During World War II, Sagan's parents worried about the fate of their European relatives, but he was generally unaware of the details of the ongoing war. He wrote, "Sure, we had relatives who were caught up in the Holocaust. Hitler was not a popular fellow in our household... but on the other hand, I was fairly insulated from the horrors of the war." His sister, Carol, said that their mother "above all wanted to protect Carl... she had an extraordinarily difficult time dealing with World War II and the Holocaust."

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+title: "Carl Sagan"
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+
+He wondered what the stars were, but no one could give him a clear answer. He recalled:  As soon as I was old enough, my parents gave me my very first library card. I think the library was on 85th Street, an alien land. Immediately, I asked the librarian for something on stars. She returned with a picture book displaying portraits of men and women with names like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. I complained, and for some reason then obscure to me, she smiled and found another book—the right kind of book. I opened it breathlessly and read until I found it. The book said something astonishing, a very big thought. It said that the stars were suns, but very far away. The Sun was a star, but close up...
+I was innocent of the notion of the inverse square law for light propagation. I had not the ghost of a chance of calculating the distance to the stars. But I could tell that if the stars were suns, they had to be very far away—farther away than 85th Street, farther away than Manhattan, farther away, probably, than New Jersey. The Cosmos was much bigger than I had guessed.
+He said: "The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me." At age six or seven, he and a close friend took trips to the American Museum of Natural History. They were impressed by the displays of dinosaur fossils and nature dioramas and by the Hayden Planetarium. Sagan's parents nurtured his growing interest in science, buying him chemistry sets and reading matter. Per biographer Ray Spangenburg, Sagan's desire to understand the Cosmos became a "driving force in his life, a continual spark to his intellect, and a quest that would never be forgotten." His fascination with outer space deepened after reading Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars books. In 1947, he discovered Astounding Science Fiction, which introduced him to more hard science fiction speculations: "Each month I eagerly awaited the arrival of Astounding. I read Verne and Wells, read, cover‐to‐cover, the first two science‐fiction anthologies that I was able to find, devised scorecards, similar to those I was fond of making for baseball, on the quality of the stories I read. Many ranked high in asking interesting questions but low in answering them."
+
+=== Education ===

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+title: "Carl Sagan"
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+
+=== Marijuana advocacy ===
+Sagan was a user and advocate of marijuana. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X", he contributed an essay about smoking cannabis to the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered. The essay explained that marijuana use had helped to inspire some of Sagan's works and enhance sensual and intellectual experiences. After Sagan's death, his friend Lester Grinspoon disclosed this information to Sagan's biographer, Keay Davidson. The publishing of the biography Carl Sagan: A Life, in 1999 brought media attention to this aspect of Sagan's life. Not long after his death, his widow Ann Druyan went on to preside over the board of directors of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), a non-profit organization dedicated to reforming cannabis laws.
+
+=== UFOs ===
+In 1947, the year that inaugurated the "flying saucer" craze, the young Sagan suspected the "discs" might be alien spaceships. Sagan's interest in UFO reports prompted him on August 3, 1952, to write a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson to ask how the United States would respond if flying saucers turned out to be extraterrestrial. He later had several conversations on the subject in 1964 with Jacques Vallée. Though quite skeptical of any extraordinary answer to the UFO question, Sagan thought scientists should study the phenomenon, at least because there was widespread public interest in UFO reports.
+Stuart Appelle notes that Sagan "wrote frequently on what he perceived as the logical and empirical fallacies regarding UFOs and the abduction experience. Sagan rejected an extraterrestrial explanation for the phenomenon but felt there were both empirical and pedagogical benefits for examining UFO reports and that the subject was, therefore, a legitimate topic of study."
+In 1966, Sagan was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force's UFO investigation project. The committee concluded Blue Book had been lacking as a scientific study, and recommended a university-based project to give the UFO phenomenon closer scientific scrutiny. The result was the Condon Committee (1966–68), led by physicist Edward Condon, and in their final report they formally concluded that UFOs, regardless of what any of them actually were, did not behave in a manner consistent with a threat to national security.
+Sociologist Ron Westrum writes that "The high point of Sagan's treatment of the UFO question was the AAAS' symposium in 1969. A wide range of educated opinions on the subject were offered by participants, including not only proponents such as James McDonald and J. Allen Hynek but also skeptics like astronomers William Hartmann and Donald Menzel. The roster of speakers was balanced, and it is to Sagan's credit that this event was presented in spite of pressure from Edward Condon." With physicist Thornton Page, Sagan edited the lectures and discussions given at the symposium; these were published in 1972 as UFO's: A Scientific Debate. Some of Sagan's many books examine UFOs (as did one episode of Cosmos) and he claimed a religious undercurrent to the phenomenon.
+
+He wrote: Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is 'in contact' with extraterrestrials. I am invited to 'ask them anything.' And so, over the years I've prepared a list of questions. These extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, 'Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.' Or the Goldbach Conjecture. So then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat's Last Theorem. So I write out the simple equations and the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like 'Should we be good?' I almost always get an answer. Anything vague, especially involving conventional moral judgments, these aliens are extremely happy to respond to. But on anything specific, where there is a chance to find out if they actually know anything beyond what most humans know, there is only silence. Something can be deduced from this differential ability to answer questions.
+He noted: "It's a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would be immediately recognized as such. It's even more challenging to such formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in 'Ten Questions to Ask an Alien.'"
+
+== Death ==
+
+After suffering from myelodysplasia for two years and receiving three bone marrow transplants from his sister, Sagan died from pneumonia at the age of 62 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle on December 20, 1996. He was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Ithaca, New York.
+
+== Legacy ==
+Sagan has been credited with inspiring a generation of scientists and science popularizers. Simon Singh dedicated Big Bang to "Carl Sagan, James Burke, Magnus Pyke, Heinz Wolff, Patrick Moore, Johnny Ball, Rob Buckman, Miriam Stoppard, Raymond Baxter, and all the science TV producers and directors who inspired my interest in science."
+The Sagan Teaching Awards at the University of Chicago are named in his honor.
+Discover Magazine named The Cosmic Connection as one of the 25 best science books of all time.
+In 2013, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington joined Ann Druyan for the opening of the Carl Sagan Archives. Speakers included Carolyn Porco, Bill Nye and Kip Thorne. In 2014, Druyan and Seth MacFarlane produced Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson.
+He received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences for "distinguished contributions in the application of science to the public welfare." He was denied membership in the academy, reportedly because his media activities made him unpopular with many other scientists.

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+
+Annual Award for Television Excellence—1981—Ohio State University—PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
+Apollo Achievement Award—National Aeronautics and Space Administration
+NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal—National Aeronautics and Space Administration (1977)
+Emmy—Outstanding Individual Achievement—1981—PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
+Emmy—Outstanding Informational Series—1981—PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
+Fellow of the American Physical Society–1989
+Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal—National Aeronautics and Space Administration
+Helen Caldicott Leadership Award – Awarded by Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament
+Hugo Award—1981—Best Dramatic Presentation—Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
+Hugo Award—1981—Best Related Non-Fiction Book—Cosmos
+Hugo Award—1998—Best Dramatic Presentation—Contact
+Humanist of the Year—1981—Awarded by the American Humanist Association
+American Philosophical Society—1995—Elected to membership.
+In Praise of Reason Award—1987—Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
+Isaac Asimov Award—1994—Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
+John F. Kennedy Astronautics Award—1982—American Astronautical Society
+Special non-fiction Campbell Memorial Award—1974—The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
+Joseph Priestley Award—"For distinguished contributions to the welfare of mankind"
+Klumpke-Roberts Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific—1974
+Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement—1975
+Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Medal—Awarded by the Soviet Cosmonauts Federation
+Locus Award 1986—Contact
+Los Angeles Times Book Prize's 1996 Science and Technology category for The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
+Lowell Thomas Award—The Explorers Club—75th Anniversary
+Masursky Award—American Astronomical Society
+Miller Research Fellowship—Miller Institute (1960–1962)
+Oersted Medal—1990—American Association of Physics Teachers
+Peabody Award—1980—PBS series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage
+Le Prix Galabert d'astronautique—International Astronautical Federation (IAF)
+Public Welfare Medal—1994—National Academy of Sciences
+Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction—1978—The Dragons of Eden
+Science Fiction Chronicle Award—1998—Dramatic Presentation—Contact
+UCLA Medal–1991
+Inductee to International Space Hall of Fame in 2004
+Named the "99th Greatest American" on June 5, 2005, Greatest American television series on the Discovery Channel
+Named an honorary member of the Demosthenian Literary Society on November 10, 2011
+New Jersey Hall of Fame—2009—Inductee.
+Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) Pantheon of Skeptics—April 2011—Inductee
+Grand-Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword, Portugal (November 23, 1998)
+Honorary Doctor of Science (Sc.D.) degree from Whittier College in 1978.
+Was given the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association's Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award.
+
+=== Posthumous recognition ===
+
+==== Sites named after him ====
+In 1993, Sky & Telescope held a contest to replace the name of the Big Bang model. Suggestions included "Hubble Bubble", "Bertha D. Universe" and "SAGAN" ("Scientists Awestruck at God's Awesome Nature".) The panel, including Sagan, Timothy Ferris and Hugh Downs, turned them down.
+In 1997, the Sagan Planet Walk was opened in Ithaca, New York. It is a walking-scale model of the Solar System, extending 1.2 km from the center of The Commons in downtown Ithaca to the Sciencenter, a hands-on museum. The exhibition was created in memory of Sagan, who was an Ithaca resident and Cornell Professor. Professor Sagan had been a founding member of the museum's advisory board.
+The landing site of the uncrewed Mars Pathfinder spacecraft was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station on July 5, 1997.
+Asteroid 2709 Sagan is named in his honor, as is the Carl Sagan Institute for the search of habitable planets.
+On November 9, 2001, on what would have been Sagan's 67th birthday, the Ames Research Center dedicated the site for the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos. "Carl was an incredible visionary, and now his legacy can be preserved and advanced by a 21st century research and education laboratory committed to enhancing our understanding of life in the universe and furthering the cause of space exploration for all time", said NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin. Ann Druyan was at the center as it opened its doors on October 22, 2006.
+On October 21, 2019, the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Theater was opened at the Center for Inquiry West in Los Angeles.
+His papers, comprising 595,000 items, are archived in the Library of Congress.
+
+==== Awards named after him ====
+Sagan has at least three awards named in his honor:
+
+The Carl Sagan Memorial Award presented jointly since 1997 by the American Astronomical Society and The Planetary Society,
+The Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science presented since 1998 by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences (AAS/DPS) for outstanding communication by an active planetary scientist to the general public—Carl Sagan was one of the original organizing committee members of the DPS, and
+The Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science presented by the Council of Scientific Society presidents (CSSP)—Sagan was the first recipient of the CSSP award in 1993.
+
+==== Awards given to him ====
+August 2007 the Independent Investigations Group (IIG) awarded Sagan posthumously a Lifetime Achievement Award. This honor has also been awarded to Harry Houdini and James Randi.
+In 2022, Sagan was posthumously awarded the Future of Life Award "for reducing the risk of nuclear war by developing and popularizing the science of nuclear winter." The honor, shared by seven other recipients involved in nuclear winter research, was accepted by his widow, Ann Druyan.

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+
+==== In popular culture ====
+Robert Zemeckis's Contact was based on Sagan's novel of the same name. The movie was completed after his death. It ends with the dedication "For Carl." His photo can also be seen in the film.
+The Beastie Boys paid homage to Sagan on To the 5 Boroughs: "I've got billions and billions of rhymes to flex / 'Cause I've got more rhymes than Carl Sagan's got turtlenecks."
+Sagan's son Nick wrote several episodes in the Star Trek franchise. In an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise entitled "Terra Prime", a quick shot is shown of the relic rover Sojourner, part of the Mars Pathfinder mission, placed by a historical marker at Carl Sagan Memorial Station on the Martian surface. The marker displays a quote from Sagan: "Whatever the reason you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you." Sagan's student Steve Squyres led the team that landed the rovers Spirit and Opportunity successfully on Mars in 2004.
+In September 2008, musical compositor Benn Jordan released Pale Blue Dot, a tribute to Sagan's life.
+Beginning in 2009, a musical project known as Symphony of Science sampled several excerpts of Sagan from his series Cosmos and remixed them to electronic music. To date, the videos have received over 21 million views worldwide on YouTube.
+The 2014 Swedish science fiction short film Wanderers uses excerpts of Sagan's narration of his book Pale Blue Dot, played over digitally-created visuals of humanity's possible future expansion into outer space.
+In February 2015, the Finnish-based symphonic metal band Nightwish released the song "Sagan" as a non-album bonus track for their single "Élan". The song, written by the band's songwriter/composer/keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen, is an homage to Sagan's the life and work.
+In February 2019, the progressive metal band Dream Theater dedicated their song named "Pale Blue Dot" to Sagan.  It opens with an audioclip from Nick Sagan saying "Hello from the children of planet Earth."
+In 2019, Sagan's daughter Sasha released For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in our Unlikely World, which depicts life with her parents and her father's death when she was fourteen. Building on a theme in her father's work, Sasha Sagan argues in For Small Creatures Such as We that skepticism does not imply pessimism.
+Cosmos was named one of the Books That Shaped America by the Library of Congress. In 2022, the audiobook recording of Sagan's Pale Blue Dot was selected for inclusion in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
+He is featured in Emer Reynolds's documentary The Farthest, about the Voyager program.
+In 2023, a movie Voyagers by Sebastián Lelio was announced with Sagan played by Andrew Garfield and with Daisy Edgar-Jones playing Sagan's third wife, Ann Druyan.
+Recordings and archival video of Sagan were used extensively in two 2025 films, Elio and The Life of Chuck.
+Druyan tells of a porter who refused to let Sagan pay him for handling baggage. He told Sagan, "You gave me the universe."
+
+== Books ==
+
+== See also ==
+List of peace activists
+Neil deGrasse Tyson
+
+== Explanatory notes ==
+
+== References ==
+
+=== Citations ===
+
+=== Cited references ===
+Achenbach, Joel (1999). Captured by Aliens: The Search for Life and Truth in a Very Large Universe. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-684-84856-3. LCCN 99037592. OCLC 41606346.
+Davidson, Keay (1999). Carl Sagan: A Life. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-25286-3. LCCN 99036206. OCLC 41580617.
+Morrison, David (2006). "Carl Sagan: The People's Astronomer". AmeriQuests. 3 (2). doi:10.15695/amqst.v3i2.84. ISSN 1553-4316.
+Head, Tom, ed. (2006). Conversations with Carl Sagan (1st ed.). Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-57806-736-7. LCCN 2005048747. OCLC 60375648.
+Poundstone, William (1999). Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-0-8050-5766-9. LCCN 99014615. OCLC 40979822.
+Spangenburg, Ray; Moser, Kit (2004). Carl Sagan: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-32265-5. LCCN 2004015176. OCLC 55846272.
+Terzian, Yervant; Bilson, Elizabeth, eds. (1997). Carl Sagan's Universe. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-57603-1. LCCN 96040511. OCLC 36130681.
+Terzian, Yervant; Trimble, Virginia (January 1, 1997). "Carl Sagan (1934–1996)". Bulletin of the AAS. 29 (4).
+
+== External links ==
+
+The Seth MacFarlane collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan archive, 1860-2004 (bulk 1962-1997). The Library of Congress
+The Carl Sagan Portal (CarlSagan.com)
+Carl Sagan at IMDb
+Carl Sagan discography at Discogs
+FBI Records: The Vault – Carl Sagan at fbi.gov
+David Morrison, "Carl Sagan", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2014)
+Scientist of the Day – Carl Sagan at Linda Hall Library
+Carl Sagan – Great Lives, BBC Radio, December 15, 2017
+"A man whose time has come" (archived) – Interview with Carl Sagan by Ian Ridpath, New Scientist, July 4, 1974
+"Carl Sagan's Life and Legacy as Scientist, Teacher, and Skeptic" (archived), by David Morrison, Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
+"NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) 19630011050: Direct Contact Among Galactic Civilizations by Relativistic Interstellar Spaceflight", Carl Sagan, when he was at Stanford University, in 1962, produced a controversial paper funded by a NASA research grant that concludes ancient alien intervention may have sparked human civilization.
+Carl Sagan demonstrates how Eratosthenes determined that the Earth was round and the approximate circumference of the earth (via YouTube)

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+Sagan attended David A. Boody Junior High School, in his native Bensonhurst and had his bar mitzvah when he turned 13. In 1948, when he was 14, his father's work took the family to Rahway, New Jersey, where he attended Rahway High School. He was a straight-A student but was bored because his classes did not challenge him and his teachers did not inspire him. His teachers realized this and tried to convince his parents to send him to a private school, with an administrator telling them, "This kid ought to go to a school for gifted children, he has something really remarkable." However, his parents could not afford to do so. Sagan became president of the school's chemistry club, and set up his own laboratory at home. He taught himself about molecules by making cardboard cutouts to help him visualize how they were formed: "I found that about as interesting as doing [chemical] experiments." He was mostly interested in astronomy, studying it in his spare time. In his junior year of high school, he discovered that professional astronomers were paid for doing something he always enjoyed. "That was a splendid day—when I began to suspect that if I tried hard I could do astronomy full-time."
+Before finishing high school, Sagan entered an essay writing contest in which he explored the idea that human contact with advanced extraterrestrials might be as disastrous for people on Earth as Native Americans' first contact with Europeans had been for Native Americans. The subject was considered controversial, but his rhetorical skill won over the judges and they awarded him first prize. When he was about to graduate from high school, his classmates voted him "most likely to succeed" and put him in line to be valedictorian. In 1950, Sagan wrote the essay "Space, Time, and the Poet" for his high school newspaper. In it, he mused on man's place in the universe as expressed by poets like T. S. Eliot and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and "the work containing perhaps the greatest poetry—the Bible." He graduated from Rahway High School in 1951.
+He attended the University of Chicago as it was one of the few colleges he had applied to that would accept a 16 year old. Robert M. Hutchins, its chancellor, had recently retooled the College of the University of Chicago into an "ideal meritocracy" built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations, and early entrance to college. 
+He joined the Ryerson Astronomical Society. He wrote "College was the fulfillment of my dreams. I found teachers who not only understood science, but were actually able to explain it. … I was a physics student in a department orbiting around Enrico Fermi; I discovered what true mathematical elegance is from Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar; I was given the chance to talk chemistry with Harold Urey; over summers I was apprenticed in biology to H. J. Muller at Indiana University; and I learned planetary astronomy from its only full-time practitioner at the time, G. P. Kuiper." The Miller-Urey experiment, conducted in 1952, sparked his interest in the origin of life. Under Urey, he wrote "Radiation and the Origin of the Gene." He recalled that "science was presented as an integral part of the gorgeous tapestry of human knowledge. It was considered unthinkable for an aspiring physicist not to know Plato, Aristotle, Bach, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Malinowski and Freud—among many others."
+He was awarded a Bachelor of Liberal Arts with general and special honors in what he quipped was "nothing." In 1955, he earned a Bachelor of Science in physics. He went on to do graduate work at the University of Chicago, earning a Master of Science in physics in 1956 and a Doctor of Philosophy in astronomy and astrophysics in 1960. His doctoral thesis, under the direction of Kuiper,  was "Physical Studies of the Planets". During his graduate studies, he spent summers working with Kuiper, as well as chemist Melvin Calvin and physicist George Gamow. He credited Kuiper with teaching him back-of-the-envelope calculations: "A possible explanation to a problem occurs to you, you pull out an old envelope, appeal to your knowledge of fundamental physics, scribble a few approximate equations on the envelope, and see if your answer comes anywhere near explaining your problem. If not, you look for a different explanation. It cut through nonsense like a knife through butter."
+In 1958, Sagan and Kuiper worked on the classified military Project A119, a secret United States Air Force plan to detonate a nuclear warhead on the Moon and document its effects. Sagan had a Top Secret clearance at the Air Force and a Secret clearance with NASA. In 1999, an article published in the journal Nature revealed that Sagan had included the classified titles of two Project A119 papers in his 1959 application for a scholarship to University of California, Berkeley. A follow-up letter to the journal by project leader Leonard Reiffel confirmed Sagan's security leak.
+
+== Career and research ==

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+
+From 1960 to 1962, Sagan was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Meanwhile, he published an article in 1961 in the journal Science on the atmosphere of Venus, while also working with NASA's Mariner 2 team, and served as a "Planetary Sciences Consultant" to the RAND Corporation.
+After the publication of Sagan's Science article, in 1961, Harvard University astronomers Fred Whipple and Donald Menzel offered Sagan the opportunity to give a colloquium at Harvard and subsequently offered him a lecturer position at the institution. Sagan instead asked to be made an assistant professor, and eventually Whipple and Menzel were able to convince Harvard to offer Sagan the assistant professor position he requested. Sagan lectured, performed research, and advised graduate students at the institution from 1963 until 1968, as well as working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, also located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
+In 1968, Sagan was denied academic tenure at Harvard. He later indicated that the decision was very unexpected. The denial has been blamed on several factors, including that he focused his interests too broadly across a number of areas (while the norm in academia is to become a renowned expert in a narrow specialty), and perhaps because of his well-publicized scientific advocacy, which some scientists perceived as borrowing the ideas of others for little more than self-promotion. An advisor from his years as an undergraduate student, Harold Urey, wrote a letter to the tenure committee recommending strongly against tenure for Sagan.
+Long before the ill-fated tenure process, Cornell University astronomer Thomas Gold had courted Sagan to move to Ithaca, New York, and join the recently hired astronomer Frank Drake among the faculty at Cornell. Following the denial of tenure from Harvard, Sagan accepted Gold's offer and remained a faculty member at Cornell for nearly 30 years until his death in 1996. Unlike Harvard, the smaller and more laid-back astronomy department at Cornell welcomed Sagan's growing celebrity status. Following two years as an associate professor, Sagan became a full professor at Cornell in 1970 and directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies there. From 1972 to 1981, he was associate director of the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research (CRSR) at Cornell. In 1976, he became the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences, a position he held for the remainder of his life.
+Sagan was associated with the U.S. space program from its inception. From the 1950s onward, he worked as an advisor to NASA, where one of his duties included briefing the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. Sagan contributed to many of the robotic spacecraft missions that explored the Solar System, arranging experiments on many of the expeditions. He often challenged the decisions to fund the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station at the expense of further robotic missions. Sagan assembled the first physical message that was sent into space: a gold-plated plaque, attached to the space probe Pioneer 10, launched in 1972. Pioneer 11, also carrying another copy of the plaque, was launched the following year. He continued to refine his designs. He contributed to the Voyager Golden Record, a sample of the sights and sounds of Earth sent with the Voyager space probes in 1977. Among much else, it features music by Bach, Beethoven and Chuck Berry.
+
+=== Scientific achievements ===

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+Former student David Morrison described Sagan as "an 'idea person' and a master of intuitive physical arguments and 'back of the envelope' calculations", and Gerard Kuiper said that "Some persons work best in specializing on a major program in the laboratory; others are best in liaison between sciences. Dr. Sagan belongs in the latter group."
+Sagan's contributions were central to the discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus. In the early 1960s no one knew for certain the basic conditions of Venus' surface, and Sagan listed the possibilities in a report later depicted for popularization in a Time Life book Planets. His own view was that Venus was dry and very hot as opposed to the balmy paradise others had imagined. He had investigated radio waves from Venus and concluded that there was a surface temperature of 500 °C (900 °F). As a visiting scientist to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he contributed to the first Mariner missions to Venus, working on the design and management of the project. Mariner 2 confirmed his conclusions on the surface conditions of Venus in 1962.
+Sagan was among the first to hypothesize that Saturn's moon Titan might possess oceans of liquid compounds on its surface and that Jupiter's moon Europa might possess subsurface oceans of water. This would make Europa potentially habitable. Europa's subsurface ocean of water was later indirectly confirmed by the spacecraft Galileo. The mystery of Titan's reddish haze was also solved with Sagan's help. The reddish haze was revealed to be due to complex organic molecules constantly raining down onto Titan's surface.
+Sagan further contributed insights regarding the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, as well as seasonal changes on Mars. He also perceived climate change as a growing, man-made danger and likened it to the natural development of Venus into a hot, life-hostile planet through a kind of runaway greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect would change the Earth's climate system. Sagan and his Cornell colleague Edwin Ernest Salpeter speculated about life in Jupiter's clouds, given the planet's dense atmospheric composition rich in organic molecules. He studied the observed color variations on Mars' surface and concluded that they were not seasonal or vegetational changes as most believed, but shifts in surface dust caused by windstorms. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect.
+Sagan is also known for his research on the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation.
+As of 2017, Sagan is the most cited SETI scientist and one of the most cited planetary scientists.
+He edited Icarus from 1975 to 1979. In 1980, he cofounded the Planetary Society.
+
+=== Science popularization ===
+
+Sagan wrote the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on Life, later updated by his first wife, the biologist Lynn Margulis. Sagan's first popular science book was The Cosmic Connection. He introduced the Cosmic Calendar in The Dragons of Eden, which won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He delivered the 1977 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on The Planets.

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+Sagan and Ann Druyan co-wrote the 13-part PBS documentary Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. It drew on earlier documentaries, notably Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. The production involved the recreation of the Library of Alexandria. It covered an array of scientific subjects, including the evolution of stars and how it is linked to the evolution of life. Frederic Golden wrote "The series' name comes from the Greek word for the ordered universe, the antithesis of chaos. It is an apt choice. Cosmos is nothing less than Sagan's attempt to make sense out of what is for many people the hopelessly baffling world of 20th century science. To unfold his story he roves through two millennia of scientific progress, often shuttling back and forth over the centuries like some Wellsian time traveler. One moment he is seated in a cafe on the Aegean island of Samos, home of Pythagoras and Aristarchus, explaining the first stirrings of Greek scientific prowess. At another moment, he is strolling through the venerable Cavendish Laboratories of England's Cambridge University, recounting the birth of modern atomic physics. Sagan makes science as palatable as the apple pie he lovingly cuts up in a Cambridge University dining room in order to make a point about matter." He offers an optimistic and a perspective of humans' place on Earth, arguing that "We are a way for the cosmos to know itself." Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 countries, making it the most widely watched series in the history of American public television until Ken Burns's The Civil War in 1990. Cosmos won an Emmy and a Peabody. It featured music by Bach, Vivaldi, Vangelis and others.
+The accompanying book was well received. James Michener wrote "Mr. Sagan's essay, a spin-off from his hugely successful television show, is a cleverly written, imaginatively illustrated summary of his geological, anthropological, biological, historical and astronomical ruminations about our universe. His references comprise the entire scope of human history. His treatment, necessarily abbreviated, is highly personal. He is always readable, and because his mind ranges so far and wide, he seems exactly the right man for the job."
+He wrote the introduction to Stephen Hawking's bestseller A Brief History of Time. In 1988, Magnus Magnusson moderated a discussion between Sagan, Hawking and Arthur C. Clarke, God, the Universe and Everything Else. He wrote a sequel to Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot. The title refers to the view of Earth from the Voyager spacecraft.
+Sagan said that there were at least two reasons for scientists to share the purposes and findings of science. Simple self-interest was one: much of the funding for science came from the public, and the public therefore had the right to know how the money was being spent. If scientists increased public admiration for science, there was a good chance of having more public supporters. The other reason was the joy of communicating one's own excitement about science to others.
+He wrote: "Among the best contemporary scientist-popularizers, I think of Stephen Jay Gould, E. O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas and Richard Dawkins in biology; Steven Weinberg, Alan Lightman and Kip Thorne in physics; Roald Hoffmann in chemistry; and the early works of Fred Hoyle in astronomy. (And while requiring calculus, the most consistently exciting, provocative, and inspiring science popularization of the last few decades seems to me to be Volume 1 of Richard Feynman's Introductory Lectures on Physics.)"
+
+=== Science fiction ===
+Sagan wrote that science fiction led him to science. He added that, while most of the science fiction he read in his youth didn't hold up, "the best of science fiction remains very good indeed. There are stories that are so tautly constructed, so rich in the accommodating details of an unfamiliar society that they sweep me along before I have even a chance to be critical. Such works include Robert Heinlein's The Door into Summer; Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination and his The Demolished Man; Jack Finney's Time and Again; Frank Herbert's Dune, and Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz." Sagan was acquainted with science fiction fandom through his friendship with Isaac Asimov, and he spoke at the Nebula Awards ceremony in 1969. Asimov described Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own, the other being computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky. Sagan briefly served as an adviser on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. He proposed that the film suggest, rather than depict, extraterrestrial superintelligence. In 1971, he participated in a panel on Mars with Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Bruce C. Murray and Walter Sullivan, published as Mars and the Mind of Man. Sagan turned his pen to science fiction with Contact. He needed a way for his heroine, Ellie Arroway, to get from Earth to Vega, so he asked his friend Kip Thorne for advice on the physics of wormholes. This led to original research by Thorne on closed timelike curves.
+
+=== Skepticism ===
+Sagan promoted scientific skepticism against pseudoscience. He credited Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science and Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds with teaching him critical thinking. In 1974, he challenged Immanuel Velikovsky to a debate. He was a critic of practices like crystal healing and astrology. In a column for Parade, he proposed a "Baloney Detection Kit", a phrase coined by Arthur Felberbaum, a friend of his wife Ann Druyan. He expanded on it in his penultimate book, The Demon-Haunted World. He lamented the fact that most newspapers had a daily column on astrology and very few had even a weekly column on astronomy.
+To mark the tenth anniversary of Sagan's death, David Morrison, a former student of Sagan, recalled "Sagan's immense contributions to planetary research, the public understanding of science, and the skeptical movement" in Skeptical Inquirer. He taught a Senior Seminar on "Critical Thinking".

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+One of his most famous quotations, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", is called the "Sagan standard" by some. It was based on a nearly identical statement by fellow founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, Marcello Truzzi, "An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof." This idea had been aphorized in Théodore Flournoy's From India to the Planet Mars (1899) from a longer quote by the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace as the Principle of Laplace: "The weight of the evidence should be proportioned to the strangeness of the facts."
+He noted that science's predictive power distinguished it from pseudoscience: "If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians and mystics, but you'll do much better with scientists. They will tell you where on Earth to stand, when you have to be there, and whether it will be a partial eclipse, a total eclipse, or an annular eclipse. They can routinely predict a solar eclipse, up to the minute, a century in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate."
+
+=== Other interests ===
+In his later years, Sagan proposed organizing a search for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that might impact the Earth but postponing the development of the technological methods needed to defend against them. He argued that all of the numerous methods proposed to alter the orbit of an asteroid, including the employment of nuclear detonations, created a deflection dilemma: if the ability to deflect an asteroid away from the Earth exists, then one would also have the ability to divert a non-threatening object towards Earth, creating an immensely destructive weapon. In a 1994 paper he co-authored, he ridiculed a three-day-long "Near-Earth Object Interception Workshop" held by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1993 that did not, "even in passing" state that such interception and deflection technologies could have these "ancillary dangers."
+Sagan remained hopeful that the natural NEO impact threat and the intrinsically double-edged essence of the methods to prevent these threats would serve as a "new and potent motivation to maturing international relations." Later acknowledging that, with sufficient international oversight, in the future a "work our way up" approach to implementing nuclear explosive deflection methods could be fielded, and when sufficient knowledge was gained, to use them to aid in mining asteroids. His interest in the use of nuclear detonations in space grew out of his work in 1958 for the Armour Research Foundation's Project A119, concerning the possibility of detonating a nuclear device on the lunar surface.
+He was an advocate for basic research, pointing out that it might prove to have practical applications in the future: "Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar, and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn't dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it 'X-rays'; Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn't planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mold; Watson and Crick weren't imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA…"
+
+=== Sagan's number ===
+Sagan's number is the number of stars in the observable universe. This number is reasonably well defined, because it is known what stars are and what the observable universe is, but its value is highly uncertain.
+
+In 1980, Sagan estimated it to be 10 sextillion in short scale (1022).
+In 2003, it was estimated to be 70 sextillion (7 × 1022).
+In 2010, it was estimated to be 300 sextillion (3 × 1023).
+
+=== "Billions and billions" ===
+After Cosmos aired, Sagan became associated with the catchphrase "billions and billions", although he never actually said it. He rather used the term "billions upon billions."
+Richard Feynman used the phrase "billions and billions" many times in his Lectures on Physics. However, Sagan's frequent use of the word billions and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions with a 'b'", in order to distinguish the word from "millions") was spoofed by Johnny Carson. Sagan was a friend of Carson's and a frequent guest on the Tonight Show.
+Other comedians followed Carson's lead, including Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers, Bronson Pinchot, Penn Jillette, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa satirized the line in the song "Be in My Video". Sagan took this all in good humor, and his final book was titled Billions and Billions, which opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of this catchphrase, observing that Carson was an amateur astronomer and that Carson's comic caricature often included real science.
+In 1993, engineers at Apple Computer code-named the Power Macintosh 7100 "Carl Sagan" in the hope that Apple would make "billions and billions". The name was only used internally, but Sagan was concerned that it would become a product endorsement and sent Apple a cease-and-desist letter. Apple complied, but engineers retaliated by changing the internal codename to "BHA" for "Butt-Head Astronomer." In November 1995, after further legal battle, an out-of-court settlement was reached and Apple's office of trademarks and patents released a conciliatory statement that "Apple has always had great respect for Dr. Sagan. It was never Apple's intention to cause Dr. Sagan or his family any embarrassment or concern."
+As a humorous tribute to Sagan and his association with the catchphrase "billions and billions", a sagan has been defined as a unit of measurement equivalent to a very large number of anything.

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+
+=== Criticisms ===
+While Sagan was widely adored by the general public, his reputation in the scientific community was more polarized. Critics sometimes characterized his work as fanciful, non-rigorous, and self-aggrandizing, and others complained in his later years that he neglected his role as a faculty member to foster his celebrity status.
+One of Sagan's harshest critics, Harold Urey, felt that Sagan was getting too much publicity for a scientist and was treating some scientific theories too casually. Urey and Sagan were said to have different philosophies of science, according to Davidson. While Urey was an "old-time empiricist" who avoided theorizing about the unknown, Sagan was by contrast willing to speculate openly about such matters. Fred Whipple wanted Harvard to keep Sagan there, but learned that because Urey was a Nobel laureate, his opinion was an important factor in Harvard denying Sagan tenure.
+Sagan's Harvard friend Lester Grinspoon also stated: "I know Harvard well enough to know there are people there who certainly do not like people who are outspoken." Grinspoon added:
+
+Wherever you turned, there was one astronomer being quoted on everything, one astronomer whose face you were seeing on TV, and one astronomer whose books had the preferred display slot at the local bookstore.
+Some, like Urey, later believed that Sagan's popular brand of scientific advocacy was beneficial to the science as a whole. Urey especially liked Sagan's 1977 book The Dragons of Eden and wrote Sagan with his opinion: "I like it very much and am amazed that someone like you has such an intimate knowledge of the various features of the problem... I congratulate you... You are a man of many talents."
+Sagan was accused of borrowing some ideas of others for his own benefit and countered these claims by explaining that the misappropriation was an unfortunate side effect of his role as a science communicator and explainer, and that he attempted to give proper credit whenever possible.
+
+=== Social concerns ===
+
+At the height of the Cold War, Sagan became involved in nuclear disarmament efforts by promoting hypotheses on the effects of nuclear war, when Paul Crutzen's "Twilight at Noon" concept suggested that a substantial nuclear exchange could trigger a nuclear twilight and upset the delicate balance of life on Earth by cooling the surface. In 1983, he was one of five authors—the "S"—in the follow-up "TTAPS" model (as the research article came to be known), which contained the first use of the term "nuclear winter", which his colleague Richard P. Turco had coined. In 1984, he co-authored the book The Cold and the Dark: The World after Nuclear War and in 1990, the book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race, which explains the nuclear-winter hypothesis and advocates nuclear disarmament. Sagan received a great deal of skepticism and disdain for the use of media to disseminate a very uncertain hypothesis. A personal correspondence with nuclear physicist Edward Teller around 1983 began amicably, with Teller expressing support for continued research to ascertain the credibility of the winter hypothesis. However, Sagan and Teller's correspondence would ultimately result in Teller writing: "A propagandist is one who uses incomplete information to produce maximum persuasion. I can compliment you on being, indeed, an excellent propagandist, remembering that a propagandist is the better the less he appears to be one." Biographers of Sagan would also comment that from a scientific viewpoint, nuclear winter was a low point for Sagan, although, politically speaking, it popularized his image among the public.
+Sagan believed that the Drake equation suggested that a large number of extraterrestrial civilizations would form, but that the lack of evidence of such civilizations highlighted by the Fermi paradox suggests technological civilizations tend to self-destruct. This stimulated his interest in identifying and publicizing ways that humanity could destroy itself, with the hope of avoiding such a cataclysm and eventually becoming a spacefaring species. Sagan's deep concern regarding the potential destruction of human civilization in a nuclear holocaust was conveyed in a memorable cinematic sequence in the final episode of Cosmos, "Who Speaks for Earth?" Sagan had already resigned from the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board's UFO-investigating Condon Committee and voluntarily surrendered his top-secret clearance in protest over the Vietnam War. Following his marriage to his third wife (novelist Ann Druyan) in June 1981, Sagan became more politically active—particularly in opposing escalation of the nuclear arms race under President Ronald Reagan.

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+In March 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative—a multibillion-dollar project to develop a comprehensive defense against attack by nuclear missiles, which was quickly dubbed "Star Wars". Sagan, along with other scientists, spoke out against the project, arguing that it was technically impossible to develop a system with the level of perfection required, and far more expensive to build such a system than it would be for an enemy to defeat it through decoys and other means—and that its construction would seriously destabilize the "nuclear balance" between the United States and the Soviet Union, making further progress toward nuclear disarmament impossible.
+When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons, which would begin on August 6, 1985—the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—the Reagan administration dismissed the dramatic move as nothing more than propaganda and refused to follow suit. In response, US anti-nuclear and peace activists staged a series of protest actions at the Nevada Test Site, beginning on Easter Sunday in 1986 and continuing through 1987. Hundreds of people in the "Nevada Desert Experience" group were arrested, including Sagan, who was arrested on two separate occasions as he climbed over a chain-link fence at the test site during the underground Operation Charioteer and United States's Musketeer nuclear test series of detonations.
+He was an advocate for free speech and civil liberties. His professor Edward Condon, during the McCarthy era, was accused by HUAC of being a "revolutionary in physics". Sagan quotes Condon as replying: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B. C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws…", going on to invoke Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell. The committee was not amused. "But the most they were able to pin on Condon, as I recall, was that in high school he had a job delivering a socialist newspaper door-to-door on his bicycle." When visiting the Soviet Union, he and Druyan would smuggle in banned books.
+
+In a speech given at Monticello on July 4, 1992, Sagan emphasized the importance of science to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and democracy in America: It is a fact of life on our beleaguered little planet that widespread torture, famine and governmental criminal corruption are more likely to be found in tyrannical than in democratic governments. Why? Because the rulers of the former are much less likely to be thrown out of office for their misdeeds than the rulers of the latter. This is the error correction machinery in politics.
+He notes that "New ideas, invention, and creativity in general, always spearhead a new kind of freedom—a breaking out from hobbling constraints. Freedom is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of science—which is one reason the Soviet Union could not remain a totalitarian state and remain technically competitive. At the same time, science—or rather its delicate mix of openness and skepticism, and its encouragement of diversity and debate—is a prerequisite for continuing the delicate experiment of freedom in an industrial and highly technological society."
+
+He concludes: Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit.
+
+== Personal life and beliefs ==
+Sagan was married three times. In 1957, he married biologist Lynn Margulis. The couple had two children, Jeremy and Dorion Sagan. According to Margulis, Sagan left her to do the majority of the domestic duties, believing he was above them. Their marriage ended in 1964. Sagan married artist Linda Salzman in 1968 and they had a child together, Nick Sagan, and divorced in 1981. During these marriages, Carl Sagan focused heavily on his career, a factor which may have contributed to Sagan's first divorce. In 1981, Sagan married author Ann Druyan and they later had two children, Alexandra (known as Sasha) and Samuel Sagan. Carl Sagan and Druyan remained married until his death in 1996.
+Sagan was a proponent of the search for extraterrestrial life. He urged the scientific community to listen with radio telescopes for signals from potential intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms. Sagan was so persuasive that by 1982 he was able to get a petition advocating SETI published in the journal Science, signed by 70 scientists, including seven Nobel Prize winners. This signaled a tremendous increase in the respectability of a then-controversial field. He may have contributed to Frank Drake's Arecibo message, a radio message beamed into space from the Arecibo Observatory on November 16, 1974, aimed at informing potential extraterrestrials about Earth.
+Sagan was chief technology officer of the professional planetary research journal Icarus for 12 years. He co-founded The Planetary Society and was a member of the SETI Institute Board of Trustees. Sagan served as Chairman of the Division for Planetary Science of the American Astronomical Society, as President of the Planetology Section of the American Geophysical Union, and as Chairman of the Astronomy Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
+While teaching at Cornell University, he lived in an Egyptian revival house perched on the edge of a cliff in Ithaca. While there he drove a red Porsche 911 Targa and an orange 1970 Porsche 914 with the license plate PHOBOS.

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+
+=== Naturalism ===
+Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about the conventional conceptualization of God as a sapient being. For example: Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others—for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein—considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws.
+On atheism, Sagan said in 1981: An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.
+
+Sagan also commented on Christianity and the Jefferson Bible, stating "My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts, the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document."
+
+Sagan thought that spirituality should be scientifically informed and that traditional religions should be abandoned and replaced with belief systems that revolve around the scientific method, but also the mystery and incompleteness of scientific fields. Regarding spirituality and its relationship with science, Sagan stated: 'Spirit' comes from the Latin word 'to breathe'. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word 'spiritual' that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything
+outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our feelings in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage, such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
+An environmental appeal, "Preserving and Cherishing the Earth", written primarily by Sagan and signed by him and other noted scientists as well as religious leaders and published in January 1990, stated that "The historical record makes clear that religious teaching, example, and leadership are powerfully able to influence personal conduct and commitment... Thus, there is a vital role for religion and science."
+In reply to a question in 1996 about his religious beliefs, Sagan said he was agnostic. Sagan maintained that the idea of a creator God of the Universe was difficult to prove or disprove and that the only conceivable scientific discovery that could challenge it would be an infinitely old universe. His son, Dorion Sagan, said, "My father believed in the God of Spinoza and Einstein, God not behind nature but as nature, equivalent to it."
+
+In 2006, Druyan edited Sagan's 1985 Glasgow Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology into a book, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, in which he elaborates on his views of divinity in the natural world.
+
+Late in his life, Sagan's books elaborated on his naturalistic view of the world. Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, published posthumously, contains essays written by him on such topics as his views on abortion; it also contains an essay by Ann Druyan about the relationship between his agnostic and freethinking beliefs and his death.
+He wrote of the universality of physical law:
+
+We detect the light from distant quasars only because the laws of electromagnetism are the same ten billion light years away as here. The spectra of those quasars are recognizable only because the same chemical elements are present there as here, and because the same laws of quantum mechanics apply. The motion of galaxies around one another follows familiar Newtonian gravity. Gravitational lenses and binary pulsar spin-downs reveal general relativity in the depths of space. We could have lived in a universe with different laws in every province, but we do not. This fact cannot but elicit feelings of reverence and awe.
+He went on: "Why should a few simple laws of Nature explain so much and hold such sway throughout this vast Universe? Isn't this just what you might expect from a Creator of the Universe? Why should some religious people oppose the reductionist program in science, except out of some misplaced love of mysticism?"

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Korpela-0.md

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+---
+title: "Eric Korpela"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Korpela"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:59.151367+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Eric Korpela is a research astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, He is the director of the SETI@home project, a distributed computing project that was launched in 1999 to use individuals computers to analyze data collected in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Korpela notes that with modern-day mobile devices having greater capacities than personal computers did in 1999, SETI@home has developed an Android app to analyze data gathered by the Breakthrough Listen SETI project.
+
+
+== Scientific work ==
+Korpela is known for his assessment of putative signals from extraterrestrial intelligence. He was skeptical about the claim that 234 signals detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey may be from extraterrestrial intelligence, suggesting instead that this may be due to instrumental effects or the method by which the data was analyzed. When a radio signal was detected from the vicinity of the star HD 164595 that some interpreted as a possible signal from extraterrestrial intelligence, Korpela was skeptical, noting "there's really nothing about this 'signal' that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient." Korpela said he was unimpressed by this signal, observing that SETI@home had detected millions of similar signals in the past. He suggested the signal could not be differentiated from signals generated by space-based human technologies, adding "there's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view." In reviewing criteria for a more credible signal from extraterrestrial intelligence than the signal from HD 164595, Korpela said that a credible signal would be detectable from two telescopes on two continents, with the best candidate signals originating from a single point in space. Signals from extraterrestrial intelligence should also be continuous, he suggested.
+Looking to future best practices for announcing possible detection of extraterrestrial intelligence, Korpela argued that putative detections should be confirmed by another telescope before being reported to the public. He also advocated the use of the Rio Scale to give "some realism" to possible detections. If a signal is confirmed to be from extraterrestrial intelligence, he advocates not replying without a decision by the world community.
+According to Korpela, among the promising targets for future SETI searches are TRAPPIST-1 and Proxima b.
+Korpela suggested that extraterrestrial intelligence may be motivated to contact humans because they may have evolved to be curious.
+
+
+== Most cited papers ==
+
+
+=== Related to SDETI ===
+DP Anderson, J Cobb, E Korpela, M Lebofski et al. (2002) SETI@ home: an experiment in public-resource computing   - Communications of the ACM, 2002  45: p. 56-61. [2] According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited  2001  times
+E Korpela, D Werthimer, D Anderson, J Cobb, M Lebofsky  (2001) SETI@ home—massively distributed computing for SETI.  Computing in science & engineering 3 (1), 78-83 [3] According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited  629  times  
+DP Anderson, E Korpela, R Walton.  (2005) High performance task distribution for volunteer computing.  First International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing (e-Science'05 ) [4] According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited  241  times  
+
+
+=== Other topics ===
+JEG Peek, C Heiles, KA Douglas, MY Lee, J Grcevich, S Stanimirović, et al . (2011) The GALFA-HI survey: data release 1. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series 194 (2), 20 According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited  176  times  [5] 
+ME Putman, JEG Peek, A Muratov, OY Gnedin, W Hsu, KA Douglas, et al (2009) The disruption and fueling of M33. The Astrophysical Journal 703 (2), 1486 According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited  115  times  [6] 
+S Bowyer, TW Berghöfer, EJ Korpela (1999) Extreme-ultraviolet emission in abell 1795, abell 2199, and the coma cluster. The Astrophysical Journal 526 (2), 592 According to Google Scholar, this article has been cited  110  times  [7] 
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Korpela's Berkeley SETI Research Center page
+Korpela's Google Scholar page
+Korpela's Academia.edu page
+Korpela's ORCID page

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_164595-0.md

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+---
+title: "HD 164595"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_164595"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:44.854251+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+HD 164595 is a wide binary star system in the northern constellation of Hercules. The primary component of this pair hosts an orbiting exoplanet. The system is located at a distance of 92 light years from the Sun based on parallax measurements, and is drifting further away with a radial velocity of 2.0 km/s. Although it has an absolute magnitude of +4.81, at that distance it is too faint to be viewed with the naked eye, having an apparent visual magnitude of 7.07. The brighter star can be found with binoculars or a small telescope less than a degree to the east-northeast of Xi Herculis. HD 164595 has a relatively large proper motion, traversing the celestial sphere at an angular rate of 0.222″ yr−1.
+The spectrum of the primary, component A, presents as a G-type main-sequence star with a stellar classification of G2 V. It is considered an excellent solar twin candidate, although it has a lower logarithm of metallicity ratio, at −0.06 compared with 0.00. The estimated mass, radius, and luminosity of this star are all similar to the Sun, and the level of magnetic activity in the chromosphere is comparable to solar levels.
+The secondary member, component B, is a magnitude 12.5 star at a projected separation of 2,509±27 AU from the primary. It is a small red dwarf of spectral class M2.5 V. Periodic variations in the light curve of this star suggest a rotation period of 43.5 days.
+
+
+== Planetary system ==
+HD 164595 has one known exoplanet, HD 164595 b, which orbits HD 164595 A every 40 days. It was detected with the radial velocity technique with the SOPHIE echelle spectrograph. Since the inclination of the orbital plane is unknown, only a lower bound on the mass of the object can be determined. The exoplanet has a minimal mass equivalent of 16 Earths.
+
+
+== Signal observation and SETI ==
+In 2016, HD 164595 briefly attracted media attention after it was reported that a possible SETI signal had been detected from the direction of the star in the previous year. The signal was only heard once and never confirmed by other telescopes, and is thought to have been due to terrestrial interference.
+On 15 May 2015, a brief, single radio signal at 11 GHz (2.7 cm wavelength) was observed in the direction of HD 164595 by a team led by N. N. Bursov involving Claudio Maccone at the RATAN-600 radio observatory. The signal may have been caused by terrestrial radio-frequency interference or gravitational lensing from a more distant source. It was observed only once (for two seconds), by a single team, at a single telescope, giving it a Rio Scale score of 1 (insignificant) or 2 (low). Discussions in the media from 29 August 2016 onwards featured speculation that the signal could be caused by an isotropic beacon from a Type II civilization.
+The senior astronomer of the SETI Institute, Seth Shostak, stated that confirmation by another telescope is required. Astronomer Nicholas Suntzeff of Texas A&M University stated that the signal is in a military frequency band, and that it could have been a satellite downlink, implying that some such systems may be kept secret and therefore would be unknown to SETI scientists.
+SETI and METI studies followed with the Allen Telescope Array and the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory. Also, scientists at Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley observed HD 164595 using the Green Bank Telescope as part of the Breakthrough Listen program. No signal was detected at the position and frequency of the transient reported by the RATAN group.
+The Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences has since released an official statement that the signal is of a "most probable terrestrial origin".
+
+
+== See also ==
+Arecibo message, a three-minute-long message sent into space
+HD 162826
+Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852)
+Wow! signal, possible alien radio signal
+
+
+== Footnotes ==
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Resolution_Microwave_Survey-0.md

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+---
+title: "High Resolution Microwave Survey"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Resolution_Microwave_Survey"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:47.121859+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) was a NASA project that was to scan ten million frequencies using radio telescopes. A decade in the making, the objective was to find transmissions from alien intelligences. The primary point of observation for the project was the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory in Puerto Rico. The project began in October 1992 with SETI researcher Jill Tarter on board. However, one year later, first-term Nevada Senator Richard Bryan was responsible for removing funding for the project.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+Morrison, Philip (1995). Nothing is Too Wonderful to be True. Volume 11 of Masters of Modern Physics. Springer. ISBN 1-56396-363-9.
+
+
+== External links ==
+The NASA High Resolution Microwave Survey
+BEACON eSpace at Jet Propulsion Laboratory: NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey: The first Year of the Sky Survey
+Social implications of NASA’s high resolution microwave survey
+The Current State of Target Selection for NASA's High Resolution Microwave Survey

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_panspermia-0.md

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+---
+title: "Information panspermia"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_panspermia"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:50.655684+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Information panspermia is the concept of life forms travelling across the universe by means of transmission of compressed information representing said life forms e.g. via genome coding, which can then enable the recovery of intelligent life.
+
+
+== Name ==
+The concept was invented and coined by Vahe Gurzadyan, and then listed by Stephen Webb as Solution 23 to the Fermi paradox: "The Armenian mathematical physicist Vahe Gurzadyan has posited an interesting hypothesis: we might inhabit a Galaxy 'full of traveling life streams' –  strings of bits beamed throughout space."
+
+
+== Background ==
+Kolmogorov complexity is defined as the length of the shortest computer program which enables the complete recovery of an object. Gurzadyan showed that the complexity of the human genome is relatively low due to non-random parts in the genomic sequences. Moreover, he noticed that since the genomic information on the terrestrial life, starting from bacteria up to humans, contains essential common parts, the entire terrestrial life information can be compressed and transmitted, as he estimated,  to over Galactic distances via Arecibo-type antenna. Von Neumann automata networks or some other mechanism can perform the decoding of the information package. Within this concept, one can even assume that terrestrial life itself might be a result of such an information package.
+Information panspermia has been discussed by Gurzadyan and Roger Penrose within the scheme of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, i.e. the possibility of transmission of information from pre-Big Bang aeon to ours via the cosmic microwave background radiation.
+
+
+== Influence on strategy of analysis of intelligent signals ==
+This concept assumes a different strategy of the study of the cosmic signals based on universal compressing and decoding principles.
+Information panspermia is discussed in: 
+"Gurzadyan’s idea offers a straightforward practical consequence: we should study alleged SETI signals from the point of view of the algorithmic information theory and we should try to identify and decode possible bit strings hidden in the noise."
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_communication-0.md

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+---
+title: "Interstellar communication"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_communication"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:53.012163+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Interstellar communication is the transmission of signals between planetary systems. Sending interstellar messages is potentially much easier than interstellar travel, being possible with technologies and equipment which are currently available. However, the distances from Earth to other potentially inhabited systems introduce prohibitive delays, assuming the limitations of the speed of light. Even an immediate reply to radio communications sent to stars tens of thousands of light-years away would take many human generations to arrive.
+
+
+== Radio ==
+The SETI project has for the past several decades been conducting a search for signals being transmitted by extraterrestrial life located outside the Solar System, primarily in the radio frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Special attention has been given to the Water Hole, the frequency of one of neutral hydrogen's absorption lines, due to the low background noise at this frequency and its symbolic association with the basis for what is likely to be the most common system of biochemistry (but see alternative biochemistry).
+The regular radio pulses emitted by pulsars were briefly thought to be potential intelligent signals; the first pulsar to be discovered was originally designated "LGM-1", for "Little Green Men." They were quickly determined to be of natural origin, however.
+Several attempts have been made to transmit signals to other stars as well. (See "Realized projects" at Active SETI.) One of the earliest and most famous was the 1974 radio message sent from the largest radio telescope in the world, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. An extremely simple message was aimed at a globular cluster of stars known as M13 in the Milky Way Galaxy and at a distance of 30,000 light years from the Solar System. These efforts have been more symbolic than anything else, however. Further, a possible answer needs double the travel time, i.e. tens of years (near stars) or 60,000 years (M13).
+
+
+== Other methods ==
+
+It has also been proposed that higher frequency signals, such as lasers operating at visible light frequencies, may prove to be a fruitful method of interstellar communication; at a given frequency it takes surprisingly small energy output for a laser emitter to outshine its local star from the perspective of its target.
+Other more exotic methods of communication have been proposed, such as modulated neutrino or gravitational wave emissions. These would have the advantage of being essentially immune to interference by intervening matter.
+Sending physical mail packets between stars may prove to be optimal for many applications. While mail packets would likely be limited to speeds far below that of electromagnetic or other light-speed signals (resulting in very high latency), the amount of information that could be encoded in only a few tons of physical matter could more than make up for it in terms of average bandwidth. The possibility of using interstellar messenger probes for interstellar communication — known as Bracewell probes — was first suggested by Ronald N. Bracewell in 1960, and the technical feasibility of this approach was demonstrated by the British Interplanetary Society's starship study Project Daedalus in 1978.  Starting in 1979, Robert Freitas advanced arguments
+
+ for the proposition that physical space-probes provide a superior mode of interstellar communication to radio signals, then undertook telescopic searches for such probes in 1979 and 1982.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Interplanetary Internet
+List of interstellar radio messages
+Universal translator
+Gravitational lens
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+ Media related to Interstellar communication at Wikimedia Commons

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotropic_beacon-0.md

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+---
+title: "Isotropic beacon"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotropic_beacon"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:54.219251+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+An isotropic beacon is a hypothetical type of transmission beacon that emits a uniform EM signal in all directions for the purposes of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.
+
+
+== Isotropic beacons and their relation to SETI ==
+An isotropic beacon can be any transmitter that emits a uniform electromagnetic field. However, the term is most commonly used to describe a transmitter used by a civilization to call attention to itself over interstellar distances to extraterrestrial creatures. The isotropic beacon uses the Kardashev scale. The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to use. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. The Kardashev scale has three designated categories, which are a Type I civilization, also called a planetary civilization, that can use and store all of the energy available on its planet. A Type II civilization, also called a stellar civilization, can use and control energy at the scale of its planetary system. A Type III civilization, also called a galactic civilization, can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy.  Project Cyclops is and was one of the first looks at the theoretical framework of what it would take to create such a device.
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Margot-0.md

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+title: "Jean-Luc Margot"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Margot"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:11.340627+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Jean-Luc Margot (born 1969) is a Belgian-born astronomer and a UCLA professor with expertise in planetary sciences and SETI.
+
+
+== Career ==
+Margot has discovered and studied several binary asteroids with radar and optical telescopes. His discoveries include (87) Sylvia I Romulus, (22) Kalliope I Linus, S/2003 (379) 1, (702) Alauda I Pichi üñëm, and the binary nature of (69230) Hermes.
+In 2000, he obtained the first images of binary near-Earth asteroids and described formation of the binary by a spin-up process. Margot and his research group have studied the influence of sunlight on the orbits and spins of asteroids, the Yarkovsky and YORP effects.
+In 2007, Margot and collaborators determined that Mercury has a molten core from the analysis of small variations in the rotation rate of the planet. These observations also enabled a measurement of the size of the core based on a concept proposed by Stan Peale.
+In 2012, Margot and graduate student Julia Fang analyzed Kepler space telescope data to infer the architecture of planetary systems. They described planetary systems as "flatter than pancakes." They also showed that many planetary systems are dynamically packed.
+Margot proposed an extension to the IAU definition of planet that applies to exoplanets.
+Between 2006 and 2021, Margot and collaborators measured the spin of Venus with a radar speckle tracking technique.  They measured the orientation and precession of the spin axis.  They also measured the duration of the length of day and the amplitude of length-of-day variations, which they attribute to transfer of momentum between the atmosphere and the solid planet.
+Since 2016, he has conducted searches for technosignatures using large radio telescopes with UCLA students.  Volunteers can contribute to SETI  through the "Are we alone in the universe?" citizen science collaboration.   
+
+
+== Honors and awards ==
+Margot was awarded the H. C. Urey Prize by the American Astronomical Society in 2004. The asteroid 9531 Jean-Luc is named after him.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, UCLA
+Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA
+Personal web page

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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_SETI-0.md

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+---
+title: "Laser SETI"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_SETI"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:00.298199+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+LaserSETI is a network of optical instruments distributed around the world designed to observe "all of the sky, all of the time" in search of laser pulses originating outside of the Solar System. LaserSETI could give evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth as it searches for techno-signatures in the form of these laser pulses or high intensity monochromatic light sources. The technology, which consists of straightforward optical and mechanical components, was prototyped and subjected to rigorous preliminary tests before the first light in 2019. While the LaserSETI network of observatories is still in construction as of 2024, strategic placement of the current and future observatories will lend the network its capability for all-sky monitoring once it is complete. 
+With consistent all-sky monitoring, even relatively rare events could be found via LaserSETI monitoring. LaserSETI can discover pulses over a wide range of pulse durations, and is especially sensitive to millisecond, non-repeating pulses that may have been overlooked in previous astronomical surveys.
+
+== History ==
+
+LaserSETI started in 2015 as a program of the SETI Institute, though the official name was not made public until 2016. Founded by Eliot Gillum, the project began with a small team dedicated to the design, construction  and scientific priorities of initial prototypes. In August 2017, the crowdfunding goal of $100k was reached, which the team used to initially deploy one camera to analyze the quality of the observations. 
+In 2018, the first two cameras were manufactured. This same year, the SETI Institute announced that they were going to be able to deploy eight cameras instead of four, meaning that they could fully monitor two independent fields-of-view.
+In 2019, SETI announced that the final logistics were being worked out for the placement of LaserSETI's first observatory at RFO's (Robert Ferguson Observatory) idyllic facility, in Sonoma County. By August 6th of 2019, the installation at RFO was complete and LaserSETI had its first light.
+In August 2021, a second LaserSETI station was installed at the Haleakalā High Altitude Observatory Site in Hawai'i, which is owned and operated by Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawai’i. This second LaserSETI observatory was operational by Dec 2021.
+
+In May 2024, the team grew with the contribution of Franck Marchis, Director of Citizen Science at the SETI Institute & Project lead, Lauren Sgro as Outreach Manager, and Tom Esposito as Science Software Manager, with the goal of accelerating the growth of the LaserSETI Network. The group will oversee the manufacturing of additional stations, their installation in the Northern Hemisphere, and the development of the software architecture. 
+In July 2024, two new LaserSETI instruments were installed in Sedona, Arizona, making for the third LaserSETI observatory. As of Spring 2025, the instruments have been focused and are fully operational. In August 2025, the LaserSETI team — in collaboration with the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) at Mayaguez Department of Marine Sciences and UPR at Arecibo's Dr. Abel Mendez — installed three more instruments at Isla Magueyes, Puerto Rico. These instruments overlap in field of view with the previously installed observatories.
+Six more observatories are currently under construction and slated for installation outside the United States. Note that cameras are installed in pairs with their diffraction gratings at 90 degrees to each other.
+
+== LaserSETI Instruments ==
+
+Each LaserSETI instrument is made up of two wide-field, highly sensitive large format CCD cameras fitted with 24mm SLR lenses, attached to an optical transmission grating, and set within a sturdy 3D printed weather-durable frame with Pyrex windows. Residing at the base of the instrument is a PC to implement data reduction from the high-speed data from the cameras, and a hard drive to store the raw data. Images are read out more than a thousand times a second. 
+A second computer at the top of the instrument supplies GPS capabilities for precise clocking as well as a gyrometer and accelerometer to measure any vibration in the system to help avoid error, and an internal camera providing monitoring capabilities of the instrument itself. The components are cost effective for this level of “all sky, all the time” technology since most are COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf), with only the transmission grating and stainless steel enclosure being custom made.
+Each instrument can monitor approximately 75 degrees of the sky, and each observatory consisting of two instruments with overlapping fields of view has a combined field of view of 120 degrees down to 30 degrees above the horizon.
+
+== LaserSETI Network ==
+The cameras operate fully automatically, initiating data acquisition at astronomical sunset and ceasing at astronomical sunrise. Each night's data capture begins with a calibration field of view (FOV) followed by a period of acquisition on the sky which gathers data referred to as science frames. The calibration frames serve as astrometric and photometric references. Subsequently, science frames undergo processing—including dark current subtraction, sky field correction, and bad pixel removal—on board the station. The processed frames are then transmitted to the network for storage and further analysis.
+Currently, the data are stored on a private server, but plans are in place to provide open access to the data on a decentralized platform allowing universities and students to access to the data and develop their own data analysis algorithms. Additionally, live feeds of the cameras from two of the three current observatories are available on the website (https://laserseti.net/status/). 
+Upon the completed installation of 15 instruments across 7 sites—including Hawaii, California, Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, the Caribbean, and the Himalayas—by early 2026, the network will be capable of observing 58% of the sky. Future expansions are projected to extend coverage to the Southern Hemisphere, featuring an updated instrument design and enhanced sensitivity.
+
+== LaserSETI Science ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_SETI-1.md

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+---
+title: "Laser SETI"
+chunk: 2/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_SETI"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:00.298199+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The main science goal of the LaserSETI project is to monitor the skies for extrasolar laser pulses. To do so, LaserSETI cameras creates signatures from natural and non-natural sources that are easy to distinguish from each other using slit-less spectroscopy. The different wavelengths of light coming from a star or other body will be spread into a full spectrum by the grating combined with each camera. In contrast, a monochromatic pulse only consists of one wavelength of light and will not produce a full spectrum and would be easily identifiable by the LaserSETI pipelines. There are no currently known monochromatic laser sources in nature, so any such detection by LaserSETI could indicate extraterrestrial intelligence or a previously unknown astrophysical process.  
+Meteors that enter Earth’s atmosphere are also detected by LaserSETI. Surveying meteor activity can help scientists to track fireballs, meteroid orbits, and even assist in meteorite recovery on the ground. Due to its final all-sky nature, LaserSETI might even be able to determine the cause of observed events often attributed to meteoroid activity such as “sky flashes,” which are brief flashes of light that appear as if they are blinking stars. Due to its spectroscopic capabilities, LaserSETI can distinguish and study the composition of natural objects like meteors, whereas hypothetical objects, such as relativistic meteors, could be additionally distinguished by speed.  
+LaserSETI will also be able to detect the re-entry of man-made debris, both planned and unplanned. Such objects can be distinguished from natural objects like meteors based on qualities like their velocity across the sky. The LaserSETI survey will be able to study the brightness and trajectory of man-made debris, like fragments of spacecraft from launches. 
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language-0.md

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+---
+title: "Lincos language"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:05.189707+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Lincos (an abbreviation of the Latin phrase lingua cosmica) is a constructed language first described in 1960 by Dr. Hans Freudenthal in his book Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1. It is a language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form, for use in interstellar radio transmissions. Freudenthal considered that such a language should be easily understood by beings not acquainted with any Earthling syntax or language. Lincos was designed to be capable of encapsulating "the whole bulk of our knowledge".
+
+
+== Concepts and range ==
+The Lincos "dictionary" is intended to be transmitted first before any additional messages. It teaches natural numbers by a series of repeated pulses, separated by pauses. It then teaches >, <, =, +, -, by examples such as . . . . . > . . . (an extended pause is shown around > in this example so as to suggest to an alien that > is a new separate symbol; otherwise, an alien might think that the whole pattern is a new symbol of unknown meaning). In introducing =, unary notation is shown for numbers: . = 1, . . = 2, and so on. This progresses to multiplication, division, variables, and constants, then propositional logic, set theory, and first-order logic. The dictionary tries to introduce questions by leaving mathematical expressions unsolved (e.g., ? x x + 101 = 11).
+The next section of the Lincos dictionary introduces a word for second, "Sec", by playing pulses of various lengths, followed by Sec, and the number of seconds, "until the receiver may be expected to remark that the numbers... are proportional to the durations", thus teaching both that Sec is a unit of time, and exactly how long it is. It then introduces means for measuring durations, referring to moments in time, and talking about past and future events.
+Freudenthal's third section is perhaps the most complex, and attempts to convey the concepts and language necessary to describe behavior and conversation between individuals. It uses examples to introduce actors speaking to each other, asking questions, disapproving, quoting other people, knowing and wanting things, promising, and playing. The first steps (having already introduced sets of numbers and questions) are to introduce some new symbols (distinctive patterns of pulses), say that they are NOT numbers, and transmit sequences showing two of these new symbols separated by the word "Inq" (inquiry), followed by a question about an equation, then the symbols reversed, followed by the answer (example below). It is thus expected that, after many repetitions, the recipient will determine that these new symbols are entities asking and answering the questions, rather than some other context for the questions.
+Finally, the fourth section describes the concepts and language relating to mass, space, and motion. This last section goes so far as to describe physical features of human beings and of the Solar System.
+A second book by Freudenthal, planned but never written, would have added four more sections to the dictionary: "Matter", "Earth", "Life", and "Behavior 2". Other researchers have since extended the language somewhat on their own. One example is CosmicOS. Another is a second-generation Lingua Cosmica developed by the Dutch-Swedish astronomer and mathematician Alexander Ollongren of Leiden University, using constructive logic.
+Freudenthal's book on Lincos discusses it with many technical words from linguistic and logical theory, usually without defining them, which may have reduced its general interest, though the main chapters can be understood without these technical terms: appellatives, binding, formalization, function, lexicology, logistical, ostensive, quasi-general, semantics, syntax, variables, etc.
+
+
+== Use ==
+For decades, no actual transmissions were made using Lincos; it remained largely a theoretical exercise, until Canadian astrophysicists Yvan Dutil and Stéphane Dumas, working at the Canadian Defense Research Establishment, created a noise-resistant coding system for messages aimed at communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations. In 1999, the astrophysicists encoded a message in Lincos and used the Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope in Ukraine to beam it towards close stars. This is known as Cosmic Call. The experiment was repeated (using other close stars as target) in 2003. The message was a series of pages describing some basic mathematics, physics and astronomy. The Dutil–Dumas experiment was promoted by an organization called Encounter 2001.
+Some researchers have explored the similar issues in communicating with intelligent animals such as cetaceans. Lincos messages (even if sent by pulses of sound rather than radio) are complex and need to reach the most patient, logically oriented members of the target species. A far simpler approach aimed at average members of a species can cover numbers, >, <, =, +, -, and time.
+
+
+== Examples ==
+An example of Lincos from section 3 of Freudenthal's book, showing one individual asking another individual questions:
+
+Note the difference between "good" and "bad" as compared to "true" and "false"; 10/4 is a true answer to the question, so Ver ("true") would be a valid response, but since it wasn't reduced to lowest terms, it wasn't what Ha wanted and so he responded Mal ("bad") instead. The book separately teaches Ver and Fal for true and false.
+Another example, showing meta-conversation:
+
+
+== See also ==
+
+Active SETI
+Alien language
+METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
+SETI
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Bibliography ==
+Freudenthal, Hans (1960). Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
+Ollongren, Alexander (2013). Astrolinguistics. New York: Springer. Bibcode:2013adls.book.....O.
+
+
+== External links ==
+
+Were it Perfect, Would it Work Better? Survey of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse Archived 2020-11-09 at the Wayback Machine (Bruno Bassi)

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_radio_messages-0.md

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+---
+title: "List of interstellar radio messages"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_radio_messages"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:06.443642+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+This is a list of notable interstellar radio messages (IRMs) transmitted from Earth. Many of these were sent in the aim of searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), and are often called 'active SETI' or 'METI' (Messages to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) projects.
+
+
+== Notable transmissions ==
+Stars to which messages were sent include:
+
+
+== Other projects ==
+Some other projects include:
+
+Poetica Vaginal (1986)
+Discovery Channel Message (2005)
+Craigslist Messages (2005)
+CNES Cosmic Connexion (2006)
+Doritos Advert (2008)
+Sent Forever
+Penguin UK
+Whilst not an interstellar message, it is also worth mentioning The Morse Message (1962), which was sent to Venus.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Classification of interstellar radio messages
+Who Speaks for Earth?
+Earth calling: A short history of radio messages to ET
+Interstellar Radio Messages
+SETI: Terminating the transmission
+Self-Decoding Messages
+Breakthrough Message

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_planets-0.md

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+---
+title: "Lists of planets"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_planets"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:25.056391+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+These are lists of planets. A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is neither a star nor its remnant. The best available theory of planet formation is the nebular hypothesis, which posits that an interstellar cloud collapses out of a nebula to create a young protostar orbited by a protoplanetary disk. There are eight planets within the Solar System; planets outside of the solar system are also known as exoplanets.
+
+As of 23 April 2026, there are 6,273 confirmed exoplanets in 4,694 planetary systems, with 1,049 systems having more than one planet. Most of these were discovered by the Kepler space telescope. There are an additional 1,978 potential exoplanets from Kepler's first mission yet to be confirmed, as well as 976 from its "Second Light" mission and 4,787 from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission.
+
+
+== In the Solar System ==
+For a list of geophysical planets in the Solar System, see: List of gravitationally rounded objects of the Solar System. This also includes a list of the eight planets according to the IAU definition.
+For a list of objects in the Solar System once but no longer generally considered planets, see: List of former planets
+For a list of objects in the Solar System, including planets, that have been or are believed to exist, but either have not been proven or have been disproven, see: List of hypothetical Solar System objects
+
+
+== Outside the Solar System ==
+
+List of directly imaged exoplanets
+List of exoplanet extremes
+List of exoplanet firsts
+List of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler space telescope
+List of exoplanets observed during Kepler's K2 mission
+List of exoplanets discovered by the TESS mission
+List of extrasolar candidates for liquid water
+List of terrestrial exoplanet candidates for atmosphere detection
+List of hottest exoplanets
+List of coldest exoplanets
+List of multiplanetary systems
+List of circumbinary planets
+List of nearest exoplanets
+List of nearest terrestrial exoplanet candidates
+List of potentially habitable exoplanets
+List of proper names of exoplanets
+List of largest exoplanets
+List of smallest exoplanets
+List of transiting exoplanets
+List of exoplanets and planetary debris around giant stars
+List of exoplanets and planetary debris around white dwarfs
+List of extrasolar planetary collisions
+
+
+=== Lists of exoplanets by year of discovery ===
+List of exoplanets discovered before 2000 (31)
+List of exoplanets discovered between 2000–2009 (375)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2010 (109)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2011 (179)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2012 (149)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2013 (149)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2014 (869)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2015 (144)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2016 (1498)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2017 (152)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2018 (300)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2019 (169)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2020 (256)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2021 (253)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2022 (313)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2023 (304)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2024 (284)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2025 (138)
+List of exoplanets discovered in 2026 (102)
+Extrasolar systems
+List of multiplanetary systems
+List of exoplanets discovered using the Kepler space telescope
+List of stars with proplyds
+List of rogue planets
+Exoplanets by method of detection
+
+List of exoplanets detected by radial velocity
+List of transiting exoplanets
+List of exoplanets detected by microlensing
+List of exoplanets discovered via astrometry
+List of directly imaged exoplanets
+List of exoplanets detected by timing
+Records in exoplanet detection
+
+List of exoplanet extremes
+List of exoplanet firsts
+Potential terrestrial exoplanets
+
+List of nearest terrestrial exoplanet candidates
+List of potentially habitable exoplanets
+
+
+== Fictional or non-scientific planets ==
+For a list of planets as used in astrology, see: Planets in astrology
+For a list of supposed planets not based on scientific evidence, see: Planetary objects proposed in religion, astrology, ufology and pseudoscience
+For lists of planets in fiction, see: Fictional planets of the Solar System, Extrasolar planets in fiction § List, and List of Star Wars planets and moons
+
+
+== Mixed ==
+List of planet types (etymologically accepting of multiple categories)
+
+
+== See also ==
+Lists of astronomical objects
+Classical planet
+Definition of planet
+List of exoplanet search projects
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+The NASA Exoplanet Archive
+The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopaedia — Catalog Listing accessed in 2015-09-28
+Exoplanet Data Explorer accessed in 2015-09-28
+"Open Exoplanets Catalogue". Retrieved 2017-02-27.
+Wright, J. T.; Fakhouri, O.; Marcy, G. W.; Han, E.; Feng, Y.; Johnson, John Asher; Howard, A. W.; Fischer, D. A.; Valenti, J. A. (2011-04-01). "The Exoplanet Orbit Database". Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. 123 (902): 412–422. arXiv:1012.5676. Bibcode:2011PASP..123..412W. doi:10.1086/659427. ISSN 0004-6280. S2CID 51769219.

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Signal-0.md

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+---
+title: "Lone Signal"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Signal"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:08.938069+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Lone Signal was a crowdfunded active SETI project designed to send interstellar messages from Earth to a possible extraterrestrial civilization. Founded by businessman Pierre Fabre and supported by several entrepreneurs, Lone Signal was based at the Jamesburg Earth Station in Carmel, California.
+The project's beacon, which commenced continuous operations on June 17, 2013, transmitted short, 144-character messages by citizens of Earth to the red dwarf star Gliese 526, located 17.6 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Boötes. Gliese 526 has no known planets. The Lone Signal team hoped to earn US$100 million to construct a network of satellite dishes across the Earth's surface, which could beam messages to many regions of the Milky Way galaxy. The project ceased transmission shortly after it began, due to lack of funding, having operated roughly from June to August 2013.
+
+
+== Message components ==
+Lone Signal's message design had two components: a binary unmodulated hailing component and an 8-bit frequency-modulated message component, with each bit in the latter represented by a separate frequency.
+The hailing message was a sequence of prime numbers as used in Carl Sagan's Contact, and then a message based on the design of planetary scientist Michael W. Busch. The message is meant to be easily deciphered, and uses operators and symbols from mathematics and logic to give coherent statements about the laws of physics and Earth's location in the galaxy. It was also meant to provide a sufficient key to decipher the linguistic message component. The hailing message was to repeat on average three times in order to allow the recipient to decode it at any time when observation begins, with some parts repeating more often than others.
+The message component was to consist of brief, 144-character statements provided by the general public. These statements, with widely varying languages and contents, were posted from the Lone Signal website. Individuals who have signed up to send messages with Lone Signal, collectively known as the "beaming community", were permitted to send one message for free, and thereafter required to purchase "message credits" of $0.25 per message sent in order to fund the operation of the project. The content of messages sent via Lone Signal could be syndicated to the Twitter and Facebook accounts of beaming community members as desired. It was in this beaming community user space that an attempt was being made to extend the syntax used in the hailing message to communicate in a way that, while neither mathematical nor strictly logical, was nonetheless designed to be understandable given the prior definition of terms and concepts in the hailing message.
+
+
+== Potential dangers and detectability ==
+Various commentators have identified several dangers with messaging extraterrestrial intelligence, which chief scientific officer Jacob Haqq-Misra covered in a 2013 paper before joining Lone Signal. In his paper, Haqq-Misra stated that while ordinary communication which might involve inadvertent leakage into space would not pose a threat, the dangers of actively beaming messages to extraterrestrial intelligences, and hence a determination of whether or not such beaming activities should be carried out, are uncertain.
+Upon becoming an executive of Lone Signal, Haqq-Misra stated his belief that extraterrestrial civilizations probably already know of humanity's existence, and reaffirmed his position that the cultural impact of extraterrestrial contact is unknowable. He based this belief on the fact that various other radio sources have been broadcasting into space for decades, and would be detectable to any civilization with sufficiently large radio telescopes. At the same time, though, the previous messages from the most powerful beaming sources were intermittent, while Lone Signal aimed to establish the first continuous beam to space.
+
+
+== Notes ==
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+
+Official web site
+Lone Signal Media Channel on YouTube
+Extending the syntax used by the Lone Signal Active SETI project
+Lone Signal's message: Don't wait for aliens to drop in, call them first
+Testing SETI Messages (Extended version)

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METI_International-0.md

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+---
+title: "METI International"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METI_International"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:15.065249+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+METI International, known simply as METI, is a non-profit research organization founded in July 2015 by Douglas Vakoch that creates and transmits interstellar messages to attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). It is based in San Francisco, California.
+
+
+== Overview ==
+METI targets nearby stars and researches the nature of the messages to send. On October 16, 17, and 18, 2017, it sent a message consisting of a scientific and mathematical tutorial to the red dwarf Luyten's Star, just over 12 light years from Earth. The message was sent from a radio transmitter at the EISCAT research facility in Tromsø, Norway. 
+METI's aim is to build an interdisciplinary community to design interstellar messages, within the context of the evolution of intelligence and language. In May 2016, it convened the meeting “The Intelligence Of SETI: Cognition And Communication In Extraterrestrial Intelligence” in Puerto Rico. In May 2018 in Los Angeles, it held “Language in the Cosmos” in conjunction with the International Space Development Conference. to examine the connection between astrobiology and linguistics. On March 22, 2017, it held a workshop in Paris examining the question "What is life?" from an extraterrestrial perspective.
+METI also conducts an optical search of extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Its optical observatory in Panama looks for laser pulses from advanced civilizations. It has examined anomalous stars like the nearby red dwarf star Ross 128, as well as HD 164595, 94 light years from Earth. None of the searches has yielded evidence of artificial signals.
+
+
+== Criticism ==
+American scientist and science-fiction author David Brin has questioned "whether small groups of zealots should bypass all institutions, peer critique, risk appraisal or public opinion, to shout ‘yoohoo’ into a potentially hazardous cosmos" and so force a fait accompli on humanity.
+Numerous other authors and scientists have expressed similar concerns, generally known as the Dark forest hypothesis of ETI, including Stephen Hawking. Of particular interest in science fiction is Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past, exploring the theory and some of its implications.
+
+
+== Notable members ==
+Notable members of METI's Board of Directors and Advisory Council include:
+
+Iván Almár, Consultant, Konkoly Observatory of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
+Setsuko Aoki, Professor of Policy Management, Keio University, Japan
+Jacques Arnould, Ethics Advisor, Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES), France
+Jerome H. Barkow, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, Canada
+Nelly Ben Hayoun, Designer of Experiences, Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios, UK
+Lowry Burgess, Professor of Art, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
+Kerri Chandler, Founder of Madhouse Records, USA
+Nathaniel C. Comfort, Professor of History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, USA
+Paul Davies, Regents' Professor and Director of the Beyond Center, Arizona State University, USA
+Steven J. Dick, Former Chief Historian, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), USA
+David Dunér, Professor of History of Science and Ideas, Lund University, Sweden
+George Dvorsky, chair of the board, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, Canada
+José Gabriel Funes, Professor of Philosophy of Nature, Catholic University of Córdoba, Argentina
+Ellen Howell, Senior Research Astronomer, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, USA
+Chris Impey, Associate Dean, College of Science and Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona, USA
+Mary Lee Jensvold, Director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI), Central Washington University, USA
+James Kasting, Evan Pugh University Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA
+Arik Kershenbaum, Fellow of Girton College at the University of Cambridge, and author of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy, UK
+Guillermo A. Lemarchand, Researcher and Science Policy Consultant, UNESCO, Argentina
+Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Professor of Natural Sciences and Humanities, University of Wyoming, USA
+Roger Malina, Arts and Technology Distinguished Chair and Professor of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
+Lori Marino, Founder and executive director, Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, Inc., USA
+David Messerschmitt, Roger A. Strauch Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, USA
+Anson Mount, Actor; known for his portrayal of fictional character, Cullen Bohannon, in the AMC western drama series, Hell on Wheels, and Captain Christopher Pike in season two of Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, USA
+Elisabeth Oberzaucher, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, Austria
+Alexander Ollongren, Professor Emeritus at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Netherlands
+Serpil Oppermann, Past President, EASCLE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment), Turkey
+Irene Pepperberg, Research Associate, Harvard University, USA
+Ted Peters, Research Professor Emeritus in Systematic Theology and Ethics, Graduate Theological Union (GTU), USA
+Stephen G. Post, Director, Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics, Stony Brook University, USA
+Ian Roberts, Professor of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, UK
+Holmes Rolston III, University Distinguished Professor and Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, Colorado State University, USA
+Vandana Singh, Professor and Chair of Physics and Earth Sciences, Framingham State University, USA
+Susan Stryker, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, University of Arizona, USA
+Koji Tachibana, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Chiba University, Japan
+John Traphagan, Professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow, University of Texas at Austin, USA
+Douglas Vakoch, President of METI, USA
+Ariel Waldman, Global Director, Science Hack Day, USA
+
+
+== See also ==
+
+Active SETI — METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)
+Fermi paradox — Lack of evidence that extraterrestrials exist
+SETIcon – Public conventions on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
+Zoo hypothesis — Hypothesis that suggests humanity is effectively caged on Earth
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+
+METI Website

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Lebofsky-0.md

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+---
+title: "Matt Lebofsky"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Lebofsky"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:01.507389+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Matt Lebofsky is an Oakland, California-based multi-instrumentalist and composer. Growing up in New York he studied piano/composition with Arthur Cunningham from 1978 to 1988. As a performer/composer he is currently active in several bands such as Lunar Mistake, miRthkon, MoeTar, Secret Chiefs 3, Bodies Floating Ashore, The Fuxedos, Three Piece Combo, Research & Development, Midline Errors, Fuzzy Cousins and JOB. He is also a long-time prolific member of the Immersion Composition Society Origin Lodge. He toured nationally in 2006 as a member of  Faun Fables, and throughout 2000–2001 as a member of Species Being, and released three albums and toured internationally with Mumble & Peg from 1995 to 2002.
+Matt is also a computer programmer, webmaster, and database/systems administrator at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, working with Breakthrough Listen since 2015, and as a core member of the small staff developing/maintaining the world's largest volunteer computing project SETI@home (since its inception at the University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory in 1997). He also works on the open-source general distributed computing engine BOINC, and designed levels for the iPhone video game Tap Tap Revenge.
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle-0.md

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+---
+title: "Mediocrity principle"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:12.540998+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The mediocrity principle is the philosophical notion that "if an item is drawn at random from one of several sets or categories, it's more likely to come from the most numerous category than from any one of the less numerous categories". The principle has been taken to suggest that there is nothing very unusual about the evolution of the Solar System, Earth's history, the evolution of biological complexity, human evolution, or any one nation. It is a heuristic in the vein of the Copernican principle, and is sometimes used as a philosophical statement about the place of humanity. The idea is to assume mediocrity, rather than starting with the assumption that a phenomenon is special, privileged, exceptional, or even superior.
+David Bates ascribed the mediocrity principle to Sebastian von Hoerner, who as early as 1961 wrote the following:
+
+Because we have no knowledge whatsoever about other civilizations, we have to rely completely on assumptions. The one basic assumption we want to make can be formulated in a general way:
+
+Anything seemingly unique and peculiar to us is actually one out of many and is probably average.
+
+
+== Extraterrestrial life ==
+The mediocrity principle suggests, given the existence of life on Earth, that should life exist elsewhere in the universe, it will typically exist on Earth-like planets.
+
+
+== Measurement of distance to stars ==
+The mediocrity principle was implicitly applied during the 17th century, when astronomers attempted to measure the distance between distant stars and the Earth. By assuming that the Sun was just an average star, and that some stars seemed brighter simply because they were closer to us, they were able to estimate how far these stars were from the Earth. Although this method was flawed due to the differences among stars, it gave astronomers at that time a rough idea of how far the stars were from the Earth. For example, James Gregory, Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens were able to estimate the distance between Sirius and the Earth through this method.
+
+
+== Comparison with other approaches ==
+The mediocrity principle is in contrast with the anthropic principle, which asserts that the presence of an intelligent observer (humans) limits the circumstances to bounds under which intelligent life can be observed to exist, no matter how improbable. Both stand in contrast to the fine-tuning hypothesis, which asserts that the natural conditions for intelligent life are implausibly rare.
+The mediocrity principle implies that Earth-like environments are necessarily common, based in part on the evidence of any happening at all, whereas the anthropic principle suggests that no assertion can be made about the probability of intelligent life based on a sample set of one (self-described) example, who are necessarily capable of making such an assertion about themselves.
+It is also possible to handle the Mediocrity Principle as a statistical problem, a case of a single data point statistics, also present in the German tank problem.
+
+
+== Longevity estimation ==
+
+The mediocrity principle can also be used to estimate the future life expectancy of presently observable objects, and is especially useful when no hard data is available. Richard Gott extended the mediocrity principle to argue that if there is nothing special about observing an object in the present moment (Tnow), then one can expect the present moment to occur randomly between the start (Tstart) and the end (Tend) of the observed object's longevity. Therefore, the total longevity of an observable object can be expected (with 50% confidence) to lie in the interval 1/3 ⋅ Tstart < Tnow < 3 ⋅ Tend. This estimation technique was derived after a 1969 visit to the Berlin Wall, which was constructed eight years earlier. Gott reasoned that there was nothing special about the timing of his visit, so the above equation (with T = 8) estimates that the Berlin Wall would be likely to last for at least 2.67 years but no longer than 24 years. (The Berlin Wall fell 20 years later, in 1989.) 
+
+Longevity estimation reflects the maxim "old things tend to last and new things tend to disappear." Most applications of longevity estimation use a 95% confidence interval, which decreases the precision of the estimate by drastically increasing the interval of estimation. One useful estimation made on this confidence interval is the survival of Homo sapiens, which is thought to have emerged around 200,000 years ago. If there is nothing special about our observation of species now, in the 21st century, then longevity estimation (with T = 200,000 and a confidence interval of 95%) yields a projected timespan of between 5,100 and 7.8 million years during which the human species will be extant. 
+Some other projected lifespans (with 95% confidence) include industrial technology (estimated to last somewhere between 7 years and 10,000 years), the internet (between 7 months and 975 years), and Wikipedia (between 6 months and 772 years). Jim Holt analyzed longevity estimation and concluded that our understanding of humor and number will survive for at least one million years. Humans share these traits with other species, which implies we share these traits with some common ancestor that lived millions of years ago.
+
+
+== Other uses ==
+David Deutsch argues that the mediocrity principle is incorrect from a physical point of view, in reference either to humanity's part of the universe or to its species. Deutsch refers to Stephen Hawking's quote: "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies". Deutsch wrote that Earth's neighborhood in the universe is not typical (80% of the universe's matter is dark matter) and that a concentration of mass such as the Solar System is an "isolated, uncommon phenomenon". He also disagrees with Richard Dawkins, who considers that humans, because of natural evolution, are limited to the capabilities of their species. Deutsch responds that even though evolution did not give humans the ability to detect neutrinos, scientists can currently detect them, which significantly expands their capabilities beyond what is available as a result of evolution.
+
+
+== See also ==
+
+
+== Notes ==
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+
+Goodwin, Gribbin, and Hendry's 1997 Hubble Parameter measurement relying on the mediocrity principle The authors call this the 'Principle of Terrestrial Mediocrity' even though the assumption they make is that the Milky Way Galaxy is typical (rather than Earth). This term was coined by Alexander Vilenkin (1995).

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalaw-0.md

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 source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalaw"
 category: "reference"
 tags: "science, encyclopedia"
-date_saved: "2026-05-05T11:09:49.474589+00:00"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:13.794258+00:00"
 instance: "kb-cron"
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data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIROSETI-0.md

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+---
+title: "NIROSETI"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIROSETI"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:17.557890+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The NIROSETI (Near-InfraRed Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is an astronomical program to search for artificial signals in the optical (visible) and near infrared (NIR) wavebands of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is the first dedicated near-infrared SETI experiment. The instrument was created by a collaboration of scientists from the University of California, San Diego, Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Toronto, and the SETI Institute. It uses the Anna Nickel 1-m telescope at the Lick Observatory, situated on the summit of Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California, USA. The instrument was commissioned (saw its first light) on 15 March 2015 and has been operated for more than 150 nights, and is still operational today.
+
+
+== Overview ==
+
+The NIROSETI project is designed to detect infrared pulses. Near-infrared offers a possible way for signal transmission since there is a decrease in both interstellar extinction and Galactic background compared to optical wavelengths. The near-infrared bands remain largely unexplored because instruments capable of capturing short pulses of infrared light have only recently become available.
+The NIROSETI instrument makes use of the 1-meter optical Nickel telescope located at the Lick Observatory in California to search for near-infrared (laser) transmissions from extraterrestrial communication or technosignatures. This project was funded by the Bill and Susan Bloomfield Foundation and is based upon a predecessor called Lick Optical SETI instrument, conducted between 2001 and 2006. Shelley Wright leads the team that built and operates the NIROSETI program.
+The NIROSETI instrument employs a new generation of near-infrared (900 to 1700 nm) detectors, cooled at -25 °C, that have a high speed response (>1 GHz) and gain comparable to photomultiplier tubes, while also producing very low noise, and significantly reducing false positives. Its field-of-view is 2.5"x2.5" each, and focuses
+on detecting short (nanosecond) pulsed laser emissions. The NIROSETI instrument is also being used to study variability of very short natural near-infrared transient stars.
+
+
+== Targets ==
+The NIROSETI survey has been designed for observing several thousand objects over a few years, and commenced full operations on 28 January 2016. During a clear night of observations, about 20 to 30 objects are observed. Because infrared light penetrates farther through gas and dust than visible light, this search will extend to stars thousands of light-years away. The initial target sample is mostly main-sequence and giant stars located within 50 parsecs from Earth, drawn from the Breakthrough Listen program target list.
+The sample of targets also includes 82 galaxies for being the nearest representatives of the five major morphological classes of galaxies (20 spirals, 36 ellipticals, 15 dwarf spheroidals, 9 irregulars, and 2 lenticular galaxies), as well as stars that triggered alarms on other targeted SETI surveys.
+A significant drawback is that the extraterrestrial laser signals would need to be transmitted in the direction of the Solar System in order to be detected.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
+SETI@home
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Center for Astrophysics Space Science Optical and Infrared Laboratory

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kardashev-0.md

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+---
+title: "Nikolai Kardashev"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kardashev"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:56.788435+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Nikolai Semyonovich Kardashev (25 April 1932 – 3 August 2019) was a Soviet and Russian astrophysicist best known for the Kardashev scale, which measures a civilization's status in technological evolution based on the amount of energy it is capable of harnessing and using. He was also the deputy director of the Astro Space Center of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
+
+
+== Early life ==
+He was born in Moscow to a family of professional revolutionaries involved with the Bolshevik Party. His parents were Semyon Karlovich Brike and Nina Nikolaevna Kardasheva; his father was an important member of the party, and his mother joined as well before the October Revolution in 1917. Both of his parents were arrested during the Great Purge of 1937 and 1938. His father was ultimately shot and his mother was assigned to labor camps and would not be released for many years. Due to his parents’ absence, he was sent to an orphanage from which he was then taken by his mother's sister after a great deal of effort. His aunt then died during World War II when he was 16 years old and he then had to live on his own in a large communal flat. His mother was released in 1956, by which time Nikolai had completed university.
+
+
+== Education ==
+He attended Moscow State University in the astronomy division of the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. He concentrated his studies based on his interest in radio astronomy, a topic that was new and developing at the time. After graduating in 1955, he worked at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute and received his doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences in 1962.
+
+
+== Career ==
+He joined the Space Research Institute (IKI) of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1967. He became deputy director of IKI in 1977. During the dissolution of the USSR, Nikolai became the director of the Astro Space Center of the Lebedev Physical Institute. In 1978, Nikolai started a space satellite project known as RadioAstron. The program endured for more than 30 years and a space satellite named Spektr-R was finally launched in 2011. The mission RadioAstron has become important for modern observational astrophysics.
+In 1964, at a conference in Soviet Armenia, he presented a paper titled "Передача информации внеземными цивилизациями" ("Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations"). The paper proposed what would become known as the Kardashev scale, the idea of measuring a civilization's technological advancement based on the amount of energy it is able to use, with a civilization that can use all the energy of a planet defined as Type I (the other Types, II and III, were defined as civilizations that can use all the energy of a star and a galaxy, respectively). He also proposed Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which replaced conventional radio transmission lines with magnetic tape recordings; it was demonstrated in 1967.
+He may have predicted the existence of pulsars before they were actually discovered, in his paper ‘Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations'.
+
+
+== Organizations ==
+He was an active participant of the International Astronomical Union, for which he was: Vice-president of Executive Committee (1997–2003), vice-president of Commission 51 Bio-Astronomy (1982–1991), Organizing Committee Member of Commission 40 Radio Astronomy (1967–1985), Member of Division B Facilities, Technologies and Data Science (2019), Member of Division F Planetary Systems and Astrobiology (2019), Member of Commission 40 Radio Astronomy (2015), Member of Commission 51 Bio-Astronomy (2015), Member of Division III Planetary Systems Sciences (2012), Member of Division X Radio Astronomy (2012), and Member of Special Nominating Committee (2000–2003).
+He was a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Division of General Physics and Astronomy: first as a corresponding (associate) member (12 December 1976), then as a Full Member (21 March 1994), and served as director of the Russian Academy of Sciences Council on Astronomy from 1999 until his death.
+He was a participant of the Committee on Space Research as vice president from 1982 to 1986.
+
+
+== Awards and honors ==
+In 1980 he shared the USSR's State Prize for the development and experiments with the orbital radio telescope KRT-10, and in 1988 he shared the USSR's State Prize for the discovery of Radio Recombination Lines. In 2012, Nikolai received the Grote Reber Gold Medal for innovative lifetime contributions to radio astronomy.
+
+
+== Movie career ==
+His first association with the movie industry was in 1981. He was asked to be a consultant on the set of Petlya Oriona, a Russian television series documentary. He played himself in a TV show episode on the documentary series Space's Deepest Secrets in 2018 as well as playing himself in a TV show episode on the documentary series Horizon in 2018.
+
+
+== Death ==
+Kardashev died on 3 August 2019, at the age of 87.
+
+
+== Publications ==
+Kardashev, Nikolai (1985). "On the Inevitability and the Possible Structures of Supercivilizations". The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Developments. Vol. 112. Boston. pp. 497–504. Bibcode:1985IAUS..112..497K. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-5462-5_65. ISBN 978-90-277-2114-3. S2CID 118286044.{{cite book}}:  CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
+1963 - "Candidate of Science" dissertation, later promoted to higher level of doctoral thesis.
+1964 - “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations” which presented a classification of civilizations based on their degree of power consumption spanning 20 orders of magnitude, which became known as the Kardashev Scale.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Astronomical engineering
+Drake equation
+Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)
+Planetary civilization
+Orders of magnitude (power)
+Orders of magnitude (energy)
+Technological singularity
+World energy supply and consumption
+
+
+== Notes ==
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_State_University_Radio_Observatory-0.md

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+---
+title: "Ohio State University Radio Observatory"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_State_University_Radio_Observatory"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:18.786493+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+The Ohio State University Radio Observatory was a Kraus-type radio telescope located on the grounds of the Perkins Observatory at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio from 1963 to 1998. Known as Big Ear, the observatory was part of Ohio State University's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. The telescope was designed by John D. Kraus. Construction of the Big Ear began in 1956 and was completed in 1961, and it was finally turned on for the first time in 1963.
+The main reflector of Big Ear—The Flat Reflector—measured approximately 103 meters by 33 meters, giving it the sensitivity equivalent to a circular dish measuring nearly 53 meters in diameter.
+The observatory completed the Ohio Sky Survey in 1971, and from 1973–1995, Big Ear was used to search for extraterrestrial radio signals, making it the longest running SETI project in history. In 1977, the Big Ear received the Wow! signal. The observatory was disassembled in 1998 when developers purchased the site from the university and used the land to expand a nearby golf course.
+
+
+== History ==
+From 1965–1971, the Big Ear was used to map wideband radio sources for the Ohio Sky Survey, its first sky survey for extraterrestrial radio sources.
+
+In 1977, the Big Ear recorded an unusual and possible extraterrestrial radio signal, which became known as the Wow! signal. The observation would prove to be unique, since no similar signals were ever detected afterwards. Later research indicated the phenomenon was possibly caused by a transient brightening of hydrogen.
+The Big Ear was listed in the 1995 Guinness Book of World Records under the category of "Longest Extraterrestrial Search":
+
+The longest-running full-scale SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project is the Ohio SETI Program at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, which has searched the universe for extraterrestrial radio signals for 22 years, beginning in 1973.
+
+
+== Surveys ==
+Andromeda Galaxy (1963)
+Ohio Sky Survey (1965–1971)
+SETI (1973–1995)
+
+
+== See also ==
+List of astronomical observatories
+Radio astronomy
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Kraus, John D. (1995) [1976]. Big Ear Two: Listening for Other-Worlds (2 ed.). Cygnus-Quasar Books. ISBN 1-882484-12-6.
+
+
+== External links ==
+The Big Ear Memorial Site Archived 2005-02-04 at the Wayback Machine
+Big Ear Inventor John Kraus Dies
+Video presentation and tour of "Big Ear": [1], [2], [3]

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSonATA-0.md

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+---
+title: "OpenSonATA"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSonATA"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:20.026297+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+Open SonATA stands for Open SETI on the Allen Telescope Array and is the open source version of the software are used for signal detection by the SETI Institute on the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). The software currently runs on Linux and macOS operating systems and is intended to be ported to multiple platforms. The Allen Telescope Array uses the  OpenSUSE operating system on the SonATA computers.
+Before the release of the code to the public setiQuest had to find all instances that conflicted with the GPL license they looked to release it in.
+With the release of Open SonATA 2.1, setiQuest released the source code to the public under the GPL License. setiQuest has included "ways to help" in their documentation of the software. The source code can be found in setiQuest's GitHub repository.
+Open SonATA is closely related to the setiQuest project.
+
+
+== References ==

data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919+21-0.md

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+---
+title: "PSR B1919+21"
+chunk: 1/1
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1919+21"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:03.970343+00:00"
+instance: "kb-cron"
+---
+
+PSR B1919+21 is a pulsar with a period of 1.3373 seconds and a pulse width of 0.04 seconds. Discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell on 28 November 1967, it is the first discovered radio pulsar. The power and regularity of the signals were briefly thought to resemble an extraterrestrial beacon, leading the source to be nicknamed LGM, later LGM-1 (for "little green men").
+The original designation of this pulsar was CP 1919, which stands for Cambridge Pulsar at RA 19h 19m . It is also known as PSR J1921+2153 and is located in the constellation of Vulpecula.
+
+
+== Discovery ==
+In 1967, a radio signal was detected using the Interplanetary Scintillation Array of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge, UK, by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The signal had a 1.337302088331-second period (not in 1967, but in 1991) and 0.04-second pulsewidth. It originated at celestial coordinates 19h 19m  right ascension, +21° declination. It was detected by individual observation of miles of graphical data traces. Due to its almost perfect regularity, it was at first assumed to be spurious noise, but this hypothesis was promptly discarded. The discoverers jokingly named it little green men 1 (LGM-1), considering that it may have originated from an extraterrestrial civilization, but Bell Burnell soon ruled out extraterrestrial life as a source after discovering a similar signal from another part of the sky.
+The original signal turned out to be radio emissions from the pulsar CP 1919, and was the first one recognized as such. Bell Burnell noted that other scientists could have discovered pulsars before her, but their observations were either ignored or disregarded. Researchers Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle identified this astronomical object as a rapidly rotating neutron star immediately upon their announcement.
+Before the nature of the signal was determined, the researchers, Bell Burnell and her PhD supervisor Antony Hewish, considered the possibility of extraterrestrial life:
+
+We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem – if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe[,] how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell first?
+
+
+== Nobel Prize controversy ==
+When Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1974 for their work in radio astronomy and pulsars, Fred Hoyle, Hewish's fellow astronomer, argued that Jocelyn Bell Burnell should have been a co-recipient of the prize.
+In 2018, Bell won the $3-Million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her work.
+
+
+== Cultural references ==
+The English post-punk band Joy Division used an image of CP 1919's radio pulses on the cover of their 1979 debut album, Unknown Pleasures.
+German-born British composer Max Richter wrote a piece inspired by the discovery of CP1919 titled Journey (CP1919).
+The English indie rock band Arctic Monkeys used a sound based on the pulses in their music video for "Four Out of Five."
+
+
+== See also ==
+Variable star
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Hewish, A.; Bell, S. J.; Pilkington, J. D. H.; Scott, P. F.; Collins, R. A. (24 February 1968). "Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source". Nature. 217 (5130): 709–713. Bibcode:1968Natur.217..709H. doi:10.1038/217709a0. S2CID 4277613.
+"K3PGP Experimenter's Corner – Pulsars (List of pulsars for amateur radio astronomers)". K3PGP.org. Archived from the original on 2012-02-10. Retrieved 2008-02-25.
+"Pulsar Astrometry with the VLBA (Study of Pulsar Parallax, PSR B1919+21 is one of the pulsars studied)". Cornell University. 2004-01-21.
+
+
+== External links ==
+Bell, Jon (1996-12-19). "A Tutorial on Radio Pulsars: The discovery of pulsars". Archived from the original on 2012-09-03. Retrieved 2013-06-28.
+Manchester, R. N.; Hobbs, G.; Khoo, J. "Recording of the first-discovered pulsar CP1919 (PSR B1919+21) made at the Parkes radio telescope in April 2012". CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science: Pulsar Group. Archived from the original on 2016-03-10. Retrieved 2013-06-30.

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+---
+title: "Pascal Lee"
+chunk: 1/2
+source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal_Lee"
+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:02.753389+00:00"
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+---
+
+Pascal Lee (Chinese: 李天龍; born 1964) is a Hong-Kong-born scientist who is the co-founder and chairman of the Mars Institute, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, and the Principal Investigator of the Haughton–Mars Project (HMP) at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He holds an ME in geology and geophysics from the University of Paris, and a PhD in astronomy and space sciences from Cornell University.
+Lee's research focuses on Mars, asteroids, and impact craters, in particular in connection with the history of water on planets and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. He is known internationally for his work on Moon and Mars analogs in the Arctic, Antarctica, and other extreme environments on Earth. He is the author and co-author of over 100 scientific publications, and first proposed the "Mars Always Cold, Sometimes Wet" model of Mars evolution based on field studies of the geology of Earth's polar regions.
+In 1988, Lee wintered over for 402 days at Dumont d'Urville Station, Adélie Land, Antarctica, where he served as the station's chief geophysicist. He also participated in five summer campaigns in Antarctica as a geologist and planetary scientist, in particular as a member of the US Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program.
+In 1997, Lee initiated the Haughton–Mars Project (HMP), an international multidisciplinary field research project centered on science and exploration studies at the Haughton impact crater and surrounding terrain on Devon Island, Arctic Canada, viewed as an analog site for the Moon and Mars. Lee has led over 18 HMP field expeditions to date, including the "Northwest Passage Drive Expedition" in April 2009 and May 2010, and continues to serve as the HMP's Director in support of research for NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.
+Pascal Lee is widely recognized for his efforts to advance the human exploration of Mars, in particular via its asteroid-like moons Phobos and Deimos.
+Lee is a recipient of the United States Antarctic Service Medal and the Space Frontier Foundation's Vision to Reality Award.
+Lee is an FAA-certified helicopter flight instructor and lives in Santa Clara, California.
+
+== Early years ==
+Pascal Lee was born in 1964 (Hong Kong) and attended St. Joseph's Primary School in Wan Chai. At age 8, he went to boarding school in France where he first attended Le Petit College de la Tournelle in Septeuil, Yvelines, then the Ecole Saint Martin de France in Pontoise, near Paris.
+After graduating with a B.S. in physics from the University of Paris, Lee went on to earn an M.E. in geology and geophysics from the University of Paris's Institute of Science and Technology (IST). He began Mars research as a student intern under Audouin Dollfus at the Paris Observatory and Philippe Masson at the University of Paris-Sud.
+While in college in Paris, Pascal Lee was an active member of the Cosmos Club de France, a space exploration society founded by space scientist and author Albert Ducrocq. In 1982, Lee was elected the Cosmos Club de France's General Secretary and served in that position until 1987.
+From November 1987 to February 1989, Lee spent over a year in Antarctica on national service duty. Upon his return, he moved to the United States to begin graduate studies in astronomy at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
+
+== Cornell years ==
+Pascal Lee studied astronomy and space sciences at Cornell, and worked as a research and teaching assistant for his thesis adviser Joseph Veverka, and the late Carl Sagan. Pascal Lee's PhD thesis dissertation was titled: "Physical properties and processing of asteroid regoliths and interiors".
+As a graduate student, Lee participated in several NASA planetary spacecraft missions, including Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune and its large moon Triton, Galileo's flyby of asteroids 951 Gaspra and 243 Ida, and Mars Observer.
+In 1993, Pascal Lee was awarded the Cornell University Department of Astronomy Eleanor Norton York Award.
+In 2004, Lee returned to Cornell to teach for a semester as Visiting assistant professor of astronomy.
+
+== Mars missions ==
+In 1999, Pascal Lee collaborated as a Participating Scientist on the NASA Mars Polar Lander mission.
+In 2001, Lee was Principal Investigator of the "H2O Mars Exploration Rover" (HOMER) mission concept proposed jointly by the SETI Institute and the Boeing Company to NASA's Mars Scout program. HOMER was the first mission to Mars proposed by the Boeing Company.
+In 2006, Lee was Principal Investigator of the "Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration" (PRIME) Mars mission concept study proposed jointly by the Mars Institute, Optech, and MDA to the Canadian Space Agency.
+Lee is currently Principal Investigator of the NASA "Hall" mission concept study, a New Frontiers-class Phobos and Deimos sample return mission concept study.
+
+== Mars Institute ==
+In 2002, Pascal Lee and space entrepreneur Marc Boucher co-founded the Mars Institute, an international non-profit public benefit research organization dedicated to advancing the scientific study, exploration, and public understanding of Mars.
+Mars Institute-USA is based at the NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field, California. Mars Institute-Canada is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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+title: "Pascal Lee"
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:02.753389+00:00"
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+---
+
+== Haughton–Mars Project ==
+The Haughton–Mars Project is an international multidisciplinary field research project centered on science and exploration studies at the Haughton impact crater and surrounding terrain on Devon Island, Arctic Canada, viewed as an analog site for the Moon and Mars.
+The Haughton–Mars Project Research Station or HMPRS, at 75°26′N, 89°52′W, is the world's largest privately operated polar research station. In 2005, the HMPRS was selected to become a node of the Canadian Space Agency's newly formed Canadian Analogue Research Network or CARN program. The HMP RS is managed and operated by the Mars Institute in collaboration with the SETI Institute, and currently supports research from both NASA and the Canadian Space Agency.
+Pascal Lee's principal collaborators on the HMP at NASA Ames Research Center are Christopher McKay (HMP Technical Monitor), Terry Fong (Director, Intelligent Robotics Group), and Brian Glass (Director, Autonomous Technologies Group). Lee's key collaborators on the HMP at the Mars Institute include Stephen Braham (HMP Deputy Lead and Chief Field Engineer), John Schutt (HMP Base Manager and Chief Field Guide), and Kira Lorber (HMP Logistics Manager).
+
+== Pressurized rovers ==
+In May 2003, Lee led an Arctic winter expedition to drive the Mars Institute's Mars-1 Humvee Rover from Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, to Cape McBain on Devon Island across the Wellington Channel's 40 km of sea-ice. The Mars-1, bright red in color, is a modified M997 military ambulance Humvee manufactured by AM General of Mishawaka, IN. Accompanying Lee were American explorer John Schutt and Canadian Inuit field guides Paul Amagoalik and Joe Amarualik of Resolute Bay. The crossing was a success and the Mars-1 has since been serving on the Haughton–Mars Project as a mobile field lab and concept vehicle for future pressurized rovers to be used on the Moon or Mars. NASA's first simulated pressurized rover field traverse was conducted at the Haughton–Mars Project in July 2008 using the Mars-1. Lee commanded the mission while Andrew Abercromby of the NASA Johnson Space Center served as field lead of the rover traverse investigation.
+In April 2009, Lee led the Northwest Passage Drive Expedition to ferry a second Humvee, the bright yellow Moon-1 Humvee Rover, from Kugluktuk, Nunavut, to Devon Island, on sea-ice. Accompanying Lee were veterans John Schutt and Joe Amarualik, expedition technician Jesse Weaver, and cameraman Mark Carroll of Jules Verne Adventures. The team succeeded in driving 494 km in 8 days from Kugluktuk to Cambridge Bay, along the fabled Northwest Passage, establishing a record for the longest distance driven on sea-ice in a road vehicle. Plans to drive on from Cambridge Bay to Resolute Bay were abandoned due to extremely rough sea-ice conditions. At one point along the drive from Kugluktuk to Cambridge Bay, the Moon-1 partially fell through a lead (crack in the sea-ice), but was ultimately rescued by the expedition team. The Moon-1 was eventually flown from Cambridge Bay to Resolute Bay where it waited a year before completing its journey to Devon Island.
+In May 2010, Lee led the second and final phase of the Northwest Passage Drive Expedition by driving the Moon-1 Humvee Rover from Resolute Bay, Cornwallis Island, to Domville Point, Devon Island. Accompanying Lee were veterans John Schutt, Joe Amarualik, Jesse Weaver, and Mark Carroll, and documentary director Jean-Christophe Jeauffre of Jules Verne Adventures. The 150 km journey, of which 60 km were on sea-ice, took 12 days. The Moon-1's arrival on Devon Island was hailed as in important success for the Haughton–Mars Project, as it opened the way for dual pressurized rover simulations using the two Humvee rovers working in tandem.
+Lee also participated in field tests of NASA's Surface Exploration Vehicle (SEV), formerly known as the Lunar Exploration Rover (LER) or Small Pressurized Rover (SPR). In August 2008, Lee was pilot scientist of the first field test of the SEV, which was conducted under the auspices of the NASA Desert RATS project at the Black Point Lava Flow site in Northern Arizona. NASA Astronaut Rex Walheim was pilot commander of the 1-day mission. The SEV was developed at the NASA Johnson Space Center principally under the leadership of astronaut Michael Gernhardt and robotics engineer Robert Ambrose.
+
+== Mars habitats ==
+In 1998, Pascal Lee proposed the creation of a Mars Lander-like habitat at Haughton Crater on Devon Island to support field studies of requirements for future human Mars exploration. After co-founding the Mars Society, Lee led the development, establishment, and early operation of the "Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station" or FMARS, the world's first simulated Mars habitat. The FMARS was conceived by Lee to serve as a new research element of the Haughton–Mars Project. The Mars Society collaborated on the HMP through the 2001 field season, but since 2002, the society is no longer a partner of the HMP.
+
+== Drake equation ==
+Based on probable values for the Drake equation, Pascal Lee proposed that the number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way is 1 or very close to 1, implying that we are alone. The main contributor to such a low number is the fraction developing intelligent life, which is based on how much time it took for intelligent life (Homo erectus) to develop compared to the overall age of Earth (4.6 billion years).
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+Haughton–Mars Project
+Mars Institute
+SETI Institute

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+---
+title: "Paul Horowitz"
+chunk: 1/1
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+category: "reference"
+tags: "science, encyclopedia"
+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:16:49.478579+00:00"
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+---
+
+Paul Horowitz (born 1942) is an American physicist and electrical engineer, known primarily for his work in electronics design, as well as for his role in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (see SETI).
+
+
+== Biography ==
+At age 8, Horowitz achieved distinction as the world's youngest amateur radio operator.  He went on to study physics at Harvard University (A.B., 1965; A.M., 1967; Ph.D., 1970), where he has also spent all of his subsequent career.  His early work was on scanning microscopy (using both protons and X-rays).  Horowitz has also conducted astrophysical research on pulsars and investigations in biophysics.  His interest in practical electronics has led to a handful of inventions, including an automated voting machine and an acoustic mechanism for landmine detection, and an electronic Morse Code/Baudot code keyboard using a diode matrix and 66 TTL integrated circuits for Amateur Radio use.  Since 1974 he has taught a practical course in electronics whose lecture notes became one of the best known textbooks in the field: The Art of Electronics (coauthored with Winfield Hill and James MacArthur).
+Horowitz was one of the pioneers of the search of intelligent life beyond the Earth, and one of the leaders behind SETI. This work has attracted both admiration and criticism. Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr has sharply criticized Horowitz for wasting the resources of the university and the efforts of graduate students on such an endeavour. Carl Sagan provided a strong rebuttal to Mayr's criticism, and pointed out that many eminent biologists and biochemists had endorsed SETI with the statement: 
+
+We are unanimous in our conviction that the only significant test of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence is an experimental one. No a priori arguments on this subject can be compelling or should be used as a substitute for an observational program.  We urge the organization
+of a coordinated, worldwide, and systematic search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Sagan was believed to have based the main character in his novel Contact partly on Horowitz.
+Horowitz led the META and BETA SETI projects.  Horowitz and Sagan reported that, in the course of project META, they had detected 37 signals "which survived all our cuts" and cannot be positively identified.
+On September 10, 1988 the university's 84-foot radio dish detected "an enormous spike which was 750 times noise. If you converted the radio signal into audio it would sound just like a tone. It would sound like a flute." All 37 signals, however, have been single events which have never been heard again. The software company 37signals has been named after these signals.
+Horowitz holds professorial appointments at Harvard in both physics and electrical engineering. He has also served as a member of the JASON Defense Advisory Group.
+
+
+== Works ==
+Horowitz, Paul; Hill, Winfield (1989). The Art of Electronics. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37095-7.
+Horowitz, Paul; Hill, Winfield (2015). The Art of Electronics (3 ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521809269.
+Horowitz, Paul; Hill, Winfield (2020). The Art of Electronics: the X-Chapters (1 ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1108499941.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Official webpage at Harvard
+Research group webpage
+Transcript of interview for PBS's Nova

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+title: "Philip Morrison"
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+
+Philip Morrison (November 7, 1915 – April 22, 2005) was a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is known for his work on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and for his later work in quantum physics, nuclear physics, high energy astrophysics, and SETI.
+A graduate of Carnegie Tech, Morrison became interested in physics, which he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He also joined the Communist Party. During World War II he joined the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, where he worked with Eugene Wigner on the design of nuclear reactors.
+In 1944 he moved to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where he worked with George Kistiakowsky on the development of explosive lenses required to detonate the implosion-type nuclear weapon. Morrison transported the core of the Trinity test device to the test site in the back seat of a Dodge sedan. As leader of Project Alberta's pit crew he helped load the atomic bombs on board the aircraft that participated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, he traveled to Hiroshima as part of the Manhattan Project's mission to assess the damage.
+After the war he became a champion of nuclear nonproliferation. He wrote for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and helped found the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. He was one of the few ex-communists to remain employed and academically active throughout the 1950s, but his research turned away from nuclear physics towards astrophysics. He published papers on cosmic rays, and a 1958 paper of his is considered to mark the birth of gamma ray astronomy. He was also known for writing popular science books and articles, and appearing in television programs.
+
+== Early life and education ==
+Philip Morrison was born in Somerville, New Jersey, November 7, 1915, the only son of Moses Morrison and Tillie Rosenbloom. He had a younger sister, Gail. The family moved to Pittsburgh when he was two. He contracted polio when he was four, and as a result wore a caliper on one leg, and spent his last years in a wheelchair. Because of his polio, Morrison did not commence school until the third grade.
+On graduating from high school he entered Carnegie Tech, planning to major in electrical engineering. While there he became interested in physics. He earned his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in 1936. He then entered  the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his PhD in theoretical physics in 1940 under the supervision of J. Robert Oppenheimer, writing his thesis on "Three Problems in Atomic Electrodynamics".
+In 1938, Morrison married Emily Kramer, a girl he had known in high school, and a fellow Carnegie Tech graduate. They divorced in 1961. In 1965 he married Phylis Hagen. They remained together until Phylis died in 2002.
+
+== Manhattan Project ==
+After he finished his Ph.D. Morrison took a position as an instructor at San Francisco State College. In 1941 he became an instructor at the University of Illinois. In December 1942, with World War II raging around the globe, he was recruited by Robert F. Christy to join the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago in January 1943. There he worked with Eugene Wigner on the design of nuclear reactors.
+Concerned about the danger from the German nuclear energy project, Morrison helped persuade the director of the Manhattan Project, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., to initiate the Alsos Mission in order to gather information on it.
+With the work in Chicago winding down in mid-1944, Morrison moved to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico as a group leader. His first task was to help determine how much plutonium a bomb would require. He calculated that 6 kilograms (13 lb) would be sufficient. He then worked with George Kistiakowsky on the explosive lenses required to detonate the implosion-type nuclear weapon.
+Morrison transported the core of the Trinity test gadget to the test site in the back seat of a Dodge sedan. He was an eyewitness to the test on July 16, 1945, and wrote a report on it. A month later, as leader of Project Alberta's pit crew, he helped load the atomic bombs on board the aircraft that participated in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, Morrison and Robert Serber traveled to Hiroshima as part of the Manhattan Project's mission to assess the damage.

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+title: "Philip Morrison"
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+---
+
+== Activism ==
+Morrison returned to Los Alamos, where he remained until 1946. He turned down an offer from Ernest O. Lawrence to return to Berkeley, and instead accepted an invitation from Hans Bethe to join him at the physics faculty at Cornell University.
+After surveying the destruction left by the use of the atom bomb in Hiroshima, Morrison became a champion of nuclear nonproliferation. He wrote for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and helped found the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. He testified before Congress on the need for civilian control of nuclear energy, and participated in the Civil Rights Congress in New York and the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in 1949. That year, Life magazine included his image in a gallery of "America's 50 most eminent dupes and fellow travellers".
+Morrison had joined the Communist Party while he was at Berkeley. The House Un-American Activities Committee devoted four pages of a 1951 report to his activities, and in 1953, he was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Theodore Paul Wright, the Acting President of Cornell, was put under great pressure from board members and alumni to fire Morrison, but Bethe remained supportive, and Robert R. Wilson declared that Morrison had "demonstrated his patriotism by the distinguished role he played in the wartime development of the atomic bomb."
+Deane Malott, who became president of Cornell in 1951, was much less sympathetic, and instructed Morrison to curtail all activities beyond his academic field. Morrison agreed to do so in 1954. He was one of the few ex-communists to remain employed and academically active throughout the 1950s.
+In 1999, writer Jeremy Stone alleged that Morrison had been the Soviet spy Perseus, a charge that Morrison strongly and credibly rebutted. Stone accepted his rebuttal.
+
+== Academic work ==
+
+Morrison co-wrote a paper with Leonard I. Schiff in 1940 in which they calculated the gamma rays emitted by the process of K-electron capture. Initially at Cornell after the war, Morrison continued working in nuclear physics, collaborating with Bethe on a textbook, Elementary Nuclear Theory (1952), one of the early treatments of the relatively new field.
+In 1954, Morrison published a paper with Bruno Rossi and Stanislaw Olbert in which they explored Enrico Fermi's theory of how cosmic rays travel through the galaxy. Morrison followed this up with a review of theories of the origins of cosmic rays in 1957. A 1958 paper in Nuovo Cimento is considered to mark the birth of gamma ray astronomy.
+In collaboration with Giuseppe Cocconi, Morrison published a paper in 1959 proposing the potential of microwaves in the search for interstellar communications, a component of the modern SETI program. This was one of the first proposals for detecting extraterrestrial intelligence. He conceded that "The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but
+if we never search, the chance of success is zero."
+Morrison remained at Cornell until 1964, when he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He remained there for the remainder of his career, becoming institute professor in 1976, and Institute Professor Emeritus in 1986. In 1963, working in collaboration with a student of his, James Felten, Morrison had investigated the effect of inverse Compton scattering, an important source of cosmic x-rays and gamma rays. At MIT, Morrison teamed up with Bruno Rossi's x-ray group there, and also with Riccardo Giacconi's group at nearby American Science and Engineering. Morrison became deeply involved in the exploration of the cosmos through its x-ray and gamma ray emissions. In a 1960 paper, he noted the similarities between pulsars and quasars. He returned to this in 1976, applying his model to the radio galaxy Cygnus A.
+
+== Media work ==
+
+Morrison was known for his numerous books and television programs. He produced 68 popular science articles between 1949 and 1976, ten in issues of Scientific American. He provided the narration and script for Powers of Ten in 1977. With his wife, Phylis, they turned the same material into a coffee table book in 1982. He also appeared as himself in the science documentary film Target...Earth? in 1980. In 1987, PBS aired his six part miniseries, The Ring of Truth: An Inquiry into How We Know What We Know, which he also hosted. In addition, he was a columnist and reviewer of books on science for Scientific American starting in 1965.
+In later life he was a critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative. He authored or co-authored a number of books critical of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, including Winding Down: The Price of Defense (1979), The Nuclear Almanac (1984), Reason Enough to Hope (1998) Beyond the Looking Glass (1993).
+
+== Recognition ==
+Morrison was a fellow of the American Physical Society, and chairman of the Federation of American Scientists from 1973 to 1976. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the International Astronomical Union, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
+Over his lifetime, Morrison received numerous honors and awards. He delivered the 1968 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on Gulliver's Laws: The Physics of Large and Small, and the 1982 Jansky Lectureship before the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He was awarded the Presidential Award and Pregel Prize of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Babson Prize of the Gravity Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Westinghouse Science Writing Award, the American Association of Physics Teachers' Oersted Medal, the Dickinson College Priestly Medallion, Minnesota Museum of Science Public Science Medal, the American Institute of Physics' Andrew Gemant Award, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific's Klumpke-Roberts Award, the John P. McGovern Science and Society Award, the William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement. and, with his wife Phylis, the Walker Prize by the Boston Museum of Science.

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+title: "Philip Morrison"
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+category: "reference"
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+date_saved: "2026-05-05T13:17:16.347245+00:00"
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+---
+
+== Death ==
+Morrison died in his sleep of a respiratory failure at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 22, 2005. He was survived by his stepson Bert Singer.
+
+== In popular culture ==
+In the 2023 film Oppenheimer, directed by Christopher Nolan, Morrison was portrayed by actor Harrison Gilbertson.
+
+== Bibliography ==
+Bethe, Hans A.; Morrison, Philip (1952). Elementary Nuclear Theory. New York: Wiley.
+Charles Babbage (with Emily Morrison) (1956)
+My Father’s Watch (with Donald Holcomb (Prentice Hall, 1974)
+Morrison, Philip; Morrison, Phylis (1982). Powers of Ten: a book about the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero. Redding, Connecticut: Scientific American Library. Bibcode:1982ptba.book.....M.
+The Ring of Truth (with Phylis Morrison) (Random House, 1987)
+Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True (A Faraday dictum) (American Institute of Physics, 1994)
+Winding Down: The Price of Defense (Times Books, 1979)
+The Nuclear Almanac (Addison Wesley, 1984)
+Philip Morrison's Long Look at the Literature: His Reviews of a Hundred Memorable Science Books (ISBN 0-7167-2107-4 Freeman, 1990)
+Reason Enough to Hope (MIT Press, 1998)
+Beyond the Looking Glass (1993)
+
+== Notes ==
+
+== References ==
+Sartori, Leo; Tsipis, Kosta (2009). Philip Morrison 1915–2005 (PDF). Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved February 8, 2013.
+
+== External links ==
+
+"13th Killian Award Lecture—Philip Morrison (1985): Looking at astronomy through Philip Morrison's perspective". Infinite History. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved January 31, 2017.
+"Interview with Philip Morrison". War and Peace in the Nuclear Age. WGBH. 1986. Retrieved March 22, 2016.

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+title: "Poetica Vaginal"
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+
+Poetica Vaginal was an art project by American scientist and bioartist Joe Davis and an interstellar signal briefly transmitted in 1986 from the MIT Millstone Radar, in Massachusetts. Davis converted vaginal contractions into an analog signal and digitally mapped the input into a phonetic audible representation (or voice). The project was able to send out a few test signals consisting of this data to the intended targets. However, the United States Air Force shut down the project before it sent out the bulk of the message.
+
+
+== References ==

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+---
+title: "Project Ozma"
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+
+Project Ozma was a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) experiment started in 1960 by Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake, at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank at Green Bank, West Virginia. The object of the experiment was to search for signs of life in distant planetary systems through interstellar radio waves.  The program was named after Princess Ozma, ruler of the fictional land of Oz, inspired by L. Frank Baum's supposed communication with Oz by radio to learn of the events in the books taking place after The Emerald City of Oz.  The search was publicized in articles in the popular media of the time, such as Time magazine and was described as the first modern SETI experiment.
+Drake used a radio telescope with a diameter of 85 feet (26 m) to examine the stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani near the 1,420 MHz marker frequency, the equivalent of wavelength of 21 centimeters which corresponds to the energy of a photon emitted from a hydrogen atom during "spin-flip" transition. Both are nearby Sun-like stars that then seemed reasonably likely to have inhabited planets.  A 400 kilohertz band was scanned around the marker frequency, using a single-channel receiver with a bandwidth of 100 hertz. The information was stored on tape for off-line analysis. Some 150 hours of intermittent observation during a four-month period detected no recognizable signals.  A false signal was detected on April 8, 1960, but it was determined to have originated from a high-flying aircraft.
+The receiver was tuned to wavelengths near 21 cm, which is the wavelength of radiation emitted naturally by interstellar hydrogen; it was thought that this would be familiar, as a kind of universal standard, to anyone attempting interstellar radio communication.
+A second experiment, called Ozma II, was conducted with a larger (300 feet (91 m)) telescope at the same observatory by Patrick Palmer and Benjamin Zuckerman, who intermittently monitored 670 nearby stars for about four years (1972–76). They examined a 10 MHz bandwidth with 52 kHz resolution and a 625 kHz bandwidth with 4 kHz resolution.  The spectrometer was centered on the 21 cm hydrogen line in the rest frame of each observed star.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Ozma problem
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== Further reading ==
+Drake, F. D. "Project Ozma," Physics Today, 14, 140 (1961).
+Drake, Frank, "Project Ozma: The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence," Proceedings of the NRAO Workshop held at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank, West Virginia, Workshop No. 11, May 20-22, Kellermann, K.I., and Seielstad, G.A., eds., p.23 (1985).

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+title: "SERENDIP"
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+---
+
+SERENDIP (Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations) is a Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program originated by the Berkeley SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
+SERENDIP takes advantage of ongoing "mainstream" radio telescope observations as a "piggy-back" or "commensal" program. Rather than having its own observation program, SERENDIP analyzes deep space radio telescope data that it obtains while other astronomers are using the telescope.
+
+
+== Background ==
+The initial SERENDIP instrument was a 100-channel analog radio spectrometer covering 100 kHz of bandwidth. Subsequent instruments have been significantly more capable, with the number of channels doubling roughly every year. These instruments have been deployed at a large number of telescopes including the NRAO 90m telescope at the Green Bank Observatory and the Arecibo 305m telescope.
+SERENDIP observations have been conducted at frequencies between 400 MHz and 5 GHz, with most observations near the so-called Cosmic Water Hole (1.42 GHz (21 cm) neutral hydrogen and 1.66 GHz hydroxyl transitions).
+
+
+== Projects ==
+SERENDIP V was installed at the Arecibo Observatory in June 2009. The digital back-end instrument was an FPGA-based 128 million-channel digital spectrometer covering 200 MHz of bandwidth.  It took data commensally with the seven-beam Arecibo L-band Feed Array (ALFA).
+The next generation of SERENDIP experiments, SERENDIP VI was deployed in 2014 at both Arecibo and the Green Bank Telescope. SERENDIP VI will also look for fast radio bursts, in collaboration with scientists from University of Oxford and West Virginia University.
+
+
+== Findings ==
+The program has found around 400 suspicious signals, but there is not enough data to prove that they belong to extraterrestrial intelligence. In September–October 2004 the media wrote about Radio source SHGb02+14a and its artificial origin, but scrutiny has not been able to confirm its connection with an extraterrestrial civilization. Currently no confirmed extraterrestrial signals have been found.
+
+
+== See also ==
+Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)
+List of volunteer computing projects
+Radio source SHGb02+14a
+SETI
+SETI@home
+BLC1
+Wow! signal
+
+
+== References and notes ==

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+title: "SETI Institute"
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+
+The SETI Institute is a not-for-profit research organization incorporated in 1984 whose mission is to explore, understand, and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe, and to use this knowledge to inspire and guide present and future generations, sharing knowledge with the public, the press, and the government. SETI stands for the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence".
+The institute consists of three primary centers: The Carl Sagan Center, devoted to the study of life in the universe; the Center for Education, focused on astronomy, astrobiology and space science for students and educators; and the Center for Public Outreach, which produced a general science radio show and podcast, "Big Picture Science", until 2025 when the show became independent, and "SETI Talks", its weekly colloquium series.
+
+== History ==
+The SETI Institute was incorporated as a 501(c)(3) California nonprofit organization in 1984 by Thomas Pierson (former CEO), and Dr. Jill Tarter. Financial and leadership support over the life of the SETI Institute has included Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Bernard Oliver, David Packard, William Hewlett, Gordon Moore, Paul Allen, Nathan Myhrvold, Lewis Platt, and Greg Papadopoulos. Two Nobel laureates have been associated with the SETI Institute: Charles Townes, key inventor of the laser, and the late Baruch Blumberg, who developed the Hepatitis B vaccine. Within the SETI Institute, Andrew Siemion heads the SETI effort. Seth Shostak, along with journalist Molly Bentley, is the co-host of Big Picture Science, which was produced by the Institute until the show became independent in January, 2025. Dr. David Morrison was the director of the Carl Sagan Center, until August 2015, when Nathalie Cabrol was appointed as director. Edna DeVore, the director of education and public outreach beginning in 1992, retired in 2018, at which time Pamela Harman became the new director of education. The SETI Institute is headquartered in Mountain View, California. In 2015, Silicon Valley businessman Bill Diamond was appointed as CEO.
+On 13 February 2015, scientists (including David Grinspoon, Seth Shostak, and David Brin) at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, discussed Active SETI and whether transmitting a message to possible intelligent extraterrestrials in the cosmos was a good idea. That same week, a statement was released, signed by many in the SETI community, that a "worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent". On 28 March 2015, a related essay was written by Seth Shostak and published in The New York Times.
+In January 2019, it was reported that the institute was looking for moons around 486958 Arrokoth.
+
+== Primary centers ==
+
+=== Carl Sagan Center ===
+
+The Carl Sagan Center is named in honor of Carl Sagan, former trustee of the institute, astronomer, prolific author and host of the original "Cosmos" television series. The Carl Sagan Center is home to over 80 scientists and researchers organized around six research thrusts: astronomy and astrophysics, exoplanets, planetary exploration, climate and geoscience, astrobiology and SETI. Guided by the astrobiology roadmap charted by the Drake Equation, the scientists of the Carl Sagan Center endeavor to understand the nature and proliferation of life in the universe and the transitions from physics to chemistry, chemistry to biology and biology to philosophy. Most of the research undertaken within the Carl Sagan Center is funded by grants from NASA, while SETI endeavors are funded exclusively by private philanthropy. The institute's SETI researchers use both radio and optical telescope systems to search for deliberate signals from technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.
+The SETI Institute employs over 100 researchers that study all aspects of the search for life, its origins, the environment in which life develops, and its ultimate fate. They include Laurance Doyle, Peter Jenniskens, Pascal Lee, Mark R. Showalter, Franck Marchis, and Janice Bishop.
+
+=== Center for Education ===
+The Center for Education promotes STEM education through NASA and NSF-funded programs aimed at teaching and inspiring children, young adults and educators in physical sciences with emphasis on astronomy and astrobiology.
+The Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors program brings research to American middle and high school teachers. Selected science educators take a crash-course in astronomy and experience two sorties on the SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) modified 747 aircraft, operated by NASA and the German Space Agency.
+In 2016, the institute received a five-year grant from NASA for an institute-conceived STEM program for the Girl Scouts of the USA. In partnership with the University of Arizona, the Girl Scouts of Northern California and the Girl Scouts of the USA, the SETI Institute launched "Reaching for the Stars: NASA Science for Girl Scouts." This will develop a new series of merit badges based on a STEM curriculum for girls aged 5 to 18.
+Funded by the National Science Foundation, SETI Institute operates a summer internship program for college students. Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) is an eight-week summer internship that pairs students with institute mentor/scientists.
+Bringing the Excitement of NASA Science to the Nation's Community Colleges, NASA Community College Network is a newly funded (2021) initiative to bring NASA subject matter experts (SME), research findings, and science resources into the nation's community college system.

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+title: "SETI Institute"
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+---
+
+=== Center for Public Outreach ===
+The Center for Public Outreach brings the work of the SETI Institute and other leading research organizations, to the general public through its weekly lecture series "SETI Talks." It produced the national radio show and podcast, Big Picture Science, until January, 2025.  The program continues to be co-hosted by the institute's senior astronomer, Seth Shostak and its executive producer, journalist Molly Bentley. The award-winning general science program engages the public with modern science research through lively and intelligent storytelling and interviews with leading authors, educators and researchers in wide-ranging disciplines.
+The institute's weekly colloquium series – SETI Talks, is an in-depth one-hour lecture featuring leading researchers from around the world in astronomy, astrophysics, aerospace technology, astrobiology, machine learning and more. Lectures are free of charge, open to the public and presented at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, California. All SETI Talks are video-taped and archived on YouTube. Over 350 lectures are available on-line, and indexed on the institute's website.
+
+== Instruments ==
+Instruments used by SETI Institute scientists include the ground-based Allen Telescope Array; several ground-based optical telescopes, such as the Shane telescope at Lick Observatory, the W.M. Keck telescopes and IRTF in Hawaii; and the Very Large Telescopes in Chile. They also use space-based telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, Kepler, TESS, and the Herschel Space Telescope.
+SETI scientists are involved in space missions, including the New Horizons mission toward Pluto, the Cassini mission previously in orbit around Saturn, the Mars Rovers Opportunity and Curiosity, the Kepler mission, and the TESS mission. They also cooperate with NASA in the CAMS meteor-tracking network.
+
+== Funding supporters ==
+Funding for SETI Institute programs comes from a variety of sources. Contrary to popular belief, and their Form 990, no government funds are allocated for its SETI searches – these are financed entirely by private contributions. Other astrobiology research at the SETI Institute may be funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, or other grants and donations. TeamSETI is the SETI Institute's worldwide membership and support organization.
+
+== See also ==
+
+== References ==
+
+== External links ==
+
+The SETI Institute Official Website
+Big Picture Science Radio Program Official Website
+Colloquium Series (including archives of past lectures)
+"SETI: Astronomy as a Contact Sport – A conversation with Jill Tarter" Archived 2016-04-14 at the Wayback Machine, Ideas Roadshow, 2013
+Official NASA Community College Website

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+title: "Sebastian von Hoerner"
+chunk: 1/1
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+---
+
+Sebastian Rudolf Karl von Hoerner (15 April 1919 – 7 January 2003) was a German astrophysicist and radio astronomer.
+He was born in Görlitz, Lower Silesia. During WW II, von Hoerner served in the German Army on the Eastern Front. A bullet struck a pair of binoculars he was wearing on a strap around his neck, ricocheted up and blinded him in one eye. He was sent to Germany to recover and was there when the Front collapsed. After the end of World War II he studied physics at University of Göttingen. He obtained his doctorate at the same university in 1951 as Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Together they conducted simulations that studied the formation of stars and globular clusters. He continued this work at Astronomical Calculation Institute (University of Heidelberg) with Walter Fricke. He obtained his habilitation in 1959 at the University of Heidelberg. In 1962 he moved to National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia), where he collaborated, inter alia, with Frank Drake. He worked there, among others on the analysis of work and technical optimization of radio telescopes. His research led to the development of a new method for the construction of radio telescopes, homology, later used in the construction of many of them. During this time, he was actively involved in discussions on SETI, the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy, and the possibilities interstellar travels. He was skeptical on these issues.
+In 1961, he published an article in which he was not optimistic about the survival time of species using machines. At the outset, he noted that the current state of mind (primacy of science, developing technology, searching for interstellar communication) is just one of many possibilities and in the future it can be replaced by other interests. Moreover, according to him, the progress of science and technology on Earth was driven by two factors – the struggle for domination and the desire for an easy life. The former leads to complete destruction, the latter to biological or psychical degeneration. Von Hoerner assumed that any civilization must disappear after some time and listed 4 possible causes of such a catastrophe:
+
+total destruction of life on the planet
+destroying only intelligent beings
+mental or physical degeneration
+loss of scientific and research interests (related to cause 3.)
+He estimated the average duration of civilization at 6,500 years. He suggested the succession of technological species on a given planet over a time distance of hundreds of millions of years, and each habitable planet (one in 3 million stars) during its existence "produces" an average of 4 technological species. With these assumptions, the average distance between civilizations in the Milky Way is 1,000 light-years. Von Hoerner's calculations also show that the probability of establishing first contact with a civilization in the same phase of development as the earthly one is 0.5%. The most likely such contact is with a civilization that will be 12,000 years old and with a 75% probability that it will not be the first civilization on this planet.
+Hoerner died in Esslingen am Neckar, Baden-Württemberg, at age 83. His daughter, Hanna von Hoerner, was also an astrophysicist.
+
+
+== References ==
+
+
+== External links ==
+Biography at David Darling's Encyclopedia of Science
+Vita of Sebastian von Hoerner at von Hoerner & Sulger website
+Interview with Sebastian von Hoerner
+
+
+== Publications ==
+von Hoerner S., 1960, Z. Astrophys. 50, 184
+von Hoerner S., 1963, Z. Astrophys. 57, 47

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+Stuart Kingsley (born May 15, 1948, in Stoke Newington, London, England) is considered a pioneer in the Optical Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence, also known as Optical SETI (OSETI).
+While traditional SETI efforts survey the sky in hopes of finding radio transmissions from a nearby civilization, the optical approach to SETI seeks to detect pulsed and continuous wave laser beacons signals in the visible and infrared spectrums. In other words, instead of "listening" for extraterrestrial intelligence, Optical SETI "looks" for it.
+Kingsley received a B.Sc. Honors and Ph.D. in electronic and electrical engineering from The City University (London, England), and University College London, England in 1972 and 1984, respectively. He moved to the United States in 1981 and went to work for Battelle Columbus Division as a principal research scientist, becoming a senior research scientist in 1985. He left Battelle in 1987 and established his own photonics consultancy business, Fiberdyne Optoelectronics.
+Kingsley is the Director of The Columbus Optical SETI Observatory, which is currently working to achieve nonprofit status. Since 1992 he has been the VP for Engineering at SRICO, Inc.  Kingsley retired from Srico, Inc. and returned to England in 2008, meaning that the Columbus Optical SETI Observatory has effectively moved to Bournemouth.
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+== External links ==
+Introduction to the COSETI
+The SETI League's Optical SETI Committee Chair
+The Bournemouth Optical SETI Observatory