organization:extraterrestrial intelligence

I Built a Stable Planetary System with 416 Planets in the Habitable Zone - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/i-built-a-stable-planetary-system-with-416-planets-in-the-habitable-zone

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Photograph by Kevin Dooley / FlickrWhen Frank Drake was a boy, growing up in 1930s Chicago, his parents, observant Baptists, enrolled him in Sunday School. By the time he was 8 years old, he suspected his religion, and others around the world, were, to some extent, environmentally determined—local chance events helped shape them. He began to think the same might be true of civilization, for humans and, perhaps, aliens as well—but he thought it better to keep these thoughts to himself. But not for long: He would go on to found S.E.T.I., the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and laid out a simple way to estimate the number of civilizations within our galaxy that we could hope to listen-in on. It’s an equation that looks like this: N (the number of communicable civilizations in the (...)

If ET Calls, Think Twice About Answering - Issue 48: Chaos
▻http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/if-et-calls-think-twice-about-answering

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Valencia, Spain, Oct. 6, 2006. After four long days, the 57th International Astronautical Congress draws to a close, and two prominent members of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Permanent Committee decide to resign in protest. One is Michael Michaud, an author and former U.S. diplomat who helped establish the first SETI protocol—a set of rules, published in 1989, that delineate what to do should we detect an extraterrestrial signal. He sought to create a second protocol on whether SETI should move to a new phase. Instead of just passively listening for signals from other civilizations, should we send out a signal of our own? The question roiled the small, cerebral, and normally collegial community of SETI scientists. “That gradually got testy,” Michaud says. “People (...)