The Boy Who Cried Alien
Last weekend, I finally watched Contact, a sci-fi film adapted from Carl Sagan’s novel with the same name. If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend it. The story of Contact is based on true-life alien search projects: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). SETI is not a specific project, but rather a broad concept. As presented in the movie, most of the SETI programs are trying to hear an alien radio conversation.
Of course, these efforts to search for extraterrestrials have not yielded any conclusive results to date. The Wow! signal is one of the famous examples, named because the scientist who found him wrote Wow! next to the signal in 1977. The origin of this radio signal has never been determined, and scientists have not seen it since.
The repeating fast radio burst (FRB) is a discovery that is making headlines about aliens in recent years. FRB is a transient high-energy radio signal usually from outside the Milky Way. These events in the universe that release massive amounts of energy are typically one-time occurrences. However, one of them grabbed the interest of scientists because it appears to erupt every 16.35 days. But disappointingly, scientists continue to consider aliens as the least likely explanation for this phenomenon.
Astronomers’ discoveries are always labeled as extraterrestrial, but they can almost always be explained by natural phenomena. Another example is a series of unusual brightness fluctuations seen in a star in 2015. It has been widely reported as possibly being caused by a Dyson sphere under construction. Every now and then, there are news stories like these that cry wolf. I’m not sure when we will find aliens, but I do know that this crying wolf story always makes people excited.
Read More
The Wow! Signal: An alien missed connection?
Mysterious fast radio bursts from deep space ‘could be aliens’
No, Astronomers Probably Haven’t Found ‘Alien Megastructures’