Spaceflight 🚀🔭 #PlanetNine is likely to be the fifth largest 📏 #planet 🪐 in the #SolarSystem 🌌 https://www.independent.co.uk/space/nine-planet-solar-system-b2500389.html
An advanced #extraterrestrial civilization could potentially detect 🔭 signs of life on Earth. But the #scale of the #universe 🌌 is incredibly vast. Even at the speed of light, signals 📶 from #Earth 🌏 have only reached a very small portion of our #galaxy. https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2023/07/15/can-extraterrestrial-life-detect-us/
Any civilisation 👽 reading our messages could be billions of years ahead of humans. “If so they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/23/stephen-hawking-warns-against-seeking-out-aliens-in-new-film
👽 “Look at the mess we made when #Covid hit. We’d be like headless chickens 🐓. We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, #scientifically, #socially, and #politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/dec/29/if-aliens-contact-humanity-who-decides-what-we-do-next
Number of #planets 🪐 discovered outside the #SolarSystem (5824) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-exoplanets-by-method
Given the currently 5983 confirmed #planets 🪐 https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu, the 100–400 billion stars in the #MilkyWay 🌌 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way and 200 billion to 2 trillion #galaxies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy in the observable 🔭 #universe, do you expect #intelligent life exists
In the Universe
In the Milky Way
In our Solar System
I know that I know nothing
Poll ended at .
Our so-called #radio bubble, which streams out in all directions—north and south, east and west—thus measures just 200 light years in diameter. That’s a flyspeck in a #galaxy 🌌 that measures 100,000 light years 📏 across and a #universe that is a staggering 94 billion light years https://time.com/6242921/why-extraterrestrials-havent-contacted-earth
#JWST wouldn't be able to detect 🔭 faraway planets as small as #Earth or as close to their parent #stars, because of the glare ☀️ https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66950930
@WestportObservatory live stream 📆 Sep 17 2025 MET https://www.youtube.com/live/Z89ByhXuA7c
WAS September 2025 - Adam Frank, Professor of Astrophysics – The Search for Life in the Universe
Over 6,000 #exoplanets 🪐 have been found. #Pandora 🔭 will study a star system for up to 24 hours 🕕 at a time to determine if the conditions for #life exist. Pandora will fly for the relative pocket-change amount of $20 million 💵 https://time.com/7335787/pandora-space-telescope-exoplanet-life/
#NASA’s Pandora Mission https://science.nasa.gov/mission/pandora
Launch 🚀 2026 https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/8026/
By positioning a handful of #SpaceTelescopes 🔭 with 1-meter mirrors at the focus of the solar ☀️ lens, astronomers could capture a rich, 800-by-800-pixel image of an #exoplanet 🪐. This focus is more than 550 times farther from the Sun than Earth—three times the distance #NASA’s #Voyager 1 has traveled in its nearly 50-year trip. The full mission could fly by 📆 2034, would involve half a dozen spacecraft traveling three times as fast https://www.science.org/content/article/sun-s-gravitational-lens-could-reveal-alien-planets-surfaces
0xPsiOn Jan. 11, the #Pandora SmallSat launched 🚀 atop a #SpaceX rocket. Science observations 🔭 start in February, with the first users being the core working groups across the #UnitedStates and #Canada. Pandora’s main goal is to focus on 20 #exoplanet-host star systems for a long period to disentangle signals coming from exoplanets from the signals coming from their stars https://astro.cornell.edu/news/pandora-satellite-launches-exoplanet-observation
Pandora satellite launches for exoplanet observation | Department of Astronomy
Tasked with studying exoplanet systems around small stars, the refrigerator-sized satellite is the first in NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program – small-scale missions designed to train early-career scientists, including Trevor Foote, Ph.D. ’24, a former member of the research group led by faculty member Nikole Lewis.
#Oxygen provides roughly a factor of 16 times more energy. Without oxygen, scientists believe life is limited to “small sub-centimeter type life”. We’re talking about something like 35 percent of all stars in the #galaxy 🌌 without oxygen https://www.astronomy.com/science/animal-life-unlikely/
📆 April 2025 Strongest hints yet of #biological 🦠 activity : high levels of sulfur-based gases like DMS and DMDS 124 light years away, concentrations thousands of times stronger 📈 than on Earth.
The accepted classification for #scientific discovery would be below a 0.00006% probability they occurred by chance. The researchers say between 16 and 24 hours of follow-up observation 🔭 time with #JWST may help them reach the five-sigma significance https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/strongest-hints-of-biological-activity
Unintentional "leaked signals" are millions-fold weaker than intentional #METI signals 📶. Given the number of messages already sent to target stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI#Transmissions, do you expect a reply
#DarkForest #SETI #FermiParadox #Extraterrestrial #DoctorWho
In my lifetime
Until the time of my great-great-grandchildren
Possibly after the next 1000 years
As a measure to #exterminate all life on Earth
Poll ended at .
Only a fraction of the vast multidimensional parameter search space 🌌 has been explored so far —a situation compared to searching for a needle in a #cosmic haystack. Either #technoemissions are sufficiently rare that none has illuminated Earth during the 65 yr of #SETI searches, or they have indeed intersected our planet but have so far eluded detection. Should the current commitment to the search for life elsewhere persist, a discovery 📡 could be closer than ever https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae394b
#Earth 🌏 can be found on one of the #MilkyWay’s 🌌 outlying spiral arms – the #Orion-Cygnus arm, sitting at a point roughly halfway from the #galactic centre to its outer rim. To reach either, you’d have to travel about 25,000 lightyears https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/where-earth-in-milky-way
Picture : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:236084main_MilkyWay-full-annotated.jpg
#BreakthroughListen will scan the the skies 🌌 with the aid of the #MeerKAT Telescope 🔭*. They are targeting a million nearby stars ✨ https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9xium4
* 🗺️ https://graphhopper.com/maps/?point=Karoo+Array+Telescope&layer=Esri+Satellite
#BreakthroughListen : Join the search by harnessing your computer's 💻 spare processing power http://seti.berkeley.edu
The difference between a high-power, targeted #METI transmission 📶 and the passive leakage of media signals : If you want to communicate with a camp on the other side of the lake, you could kneel down at the end of the lake and slap the water in #Morse code. If they are spectacularly technologically advanced, they might build instruments that would be able to parse out your Morse code. But then you whip out your laser-pointer and point it at their dock" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/magazine/greetings-et-please-dont-murder-us.html
How much of the #Galaxy 🌌 have we actually searched for #extraterrestrial life ? One glass 🥛 of the ocean 🌊. Are there fish 🐟 in it ? 🤔 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAeTqnRbItg
Searching for Aliens, with Neil deGrasse Tyson
“The #SETI field has been starved of resources for so long that there is still a ton of work to do that could have been done decades ago. We can very quickly make a lot of progress in this field without a lot of effort.”
“It’s a great sign that the winds are changing at #NASA.” It is the first time NASA has given funding to a non-radio #technosignature search https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/the-real-science-behind-setis-hunt-for-intelligent-aliens/
📆 1993 The $12 million needed to keep the #SETI program alive for the next year was eliminated from the #NASA budget. Spending on the project would have amounted to less than one-tenth of 1 percent 🥜 of the $14.6 billion 💰 budget https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/07/us/ear-to-the-universe-is-plugged-by-budget-cutters.html?pagewanted=1%2F
📆 2018 #NASA hasn't funded 💵 the search 📡 for #extraterrestrial intelligence for 25 years https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/seti-technosignatures-nasa-jill-tarter/558512/
📆 2026 #Astronomers are using #China's 🇨🇳 #FAST radio telescope 📡 to chase after 100 intriguing signals https://www.space.com/space-exploration/search-for-life/this-seti-program-is-chasing-down-its-final-100-signals-could-one-of-them-be-from-aliens
A tour of the Allen #Telescope Array 📡 including the data center by @ScottManleyHimself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnWR7A0Qiy8
How SETI Designed A Telescope To Look For Extraterrestrial Civilizations
Space Catitude 🚀@spaceflight
Actually, I think "never". The few intentional signals were a drop in the bucket -- too limited and too brief. Fun, but I suspect no one will hear them.
It's more likely we'll be noticed by leakage and that we'll make the first discovery of ETI via leakage before that happens. Some (any) time in the next millennium. That's my bet.
@TerryHancock Looking back on the last fifty years, I assume that in the next 50 years it will become technically feasible to transmit #METI signals permanently in all directions. The question is whether we should expect future generations to deal with the possible consequences 🤔
LordHivemindofCeres 
@spaceflight in the spirit of the question I answered milky way, but tbh some days I'm not sure it exists even on earth...
@LordHivemindofCeres that's why the Solar System has such a low percentage 😜
@LordHivemindofCeres should also be considered for #SETI as of #StephenHawking https://spacey.space/@spaceflight/112356246185904354
Spaceflight 🚀 (@[email protected])
Any civilisation 👽 reading our messages could be billions of years ahead of humans. “If so they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria” https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/23/stephen-hawking-warns-against-seeking-out-aliens-in-new-film #SETI
Edelruth, PBS Passport Holder@LordHivemindofCeres @spaceflight
Octopi is our strongest example imho 😎
Kevin RussellNone. No life evidence at all. No dirty soup bowls, no long extinguished camp fires. This only "evidence" is mathematics.
-Fermi
I❤KITTENS@spaceflight In the Universe, but apparently not in our Galaxy ;)
@seth73 intelligent life would probably avoid broadcasting 📣, as experience shows that civilizations with superior technology often oppress or destroy others
#Ocean 🌊 worlds, and the potentially #habitable ones among them, may be more common than scientists already thought. The researchers saw 10 to 1000 times more water 💧 than prior work had previously estimated. “There isn’t really a reasonable scenario where that much water is delivered by #comets ☄️" https://www.science.org/content/article/alien-worlds-may-be-able-make-their-own-water
6070 #exoplanets 🪐 found as of January 8, 2026 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-exoplanets-by-method
