Posts Tagged ‘Astrophysicist’

“Although searches for extraterrestrial intelligence have thus far come up empty-handed, the United Nations appears to be preparing for eventual ‘first contact.’ Many media outlets are carrying the story that Mazlan

Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist who heads the UN’s Office for Outer Space Affairs in Vienna — already charged with things like keeping track of satellites to prevent Kessler Syndrome and coordinating the international response to any earth-impacting asteroids — will be the first person to meet with aliens if they do show up.”

Mazlan Othman, a Malaysian astrophysicist, is set to be tasked with co-ordinating humanity’s response if and when extraterrestrials make contact. She will set out the details of her proposed new role at a Royal Society conference in Buckinghamshire next week. The 58-year-old is expected to tell delegates that the proposal has been prompted by the recent discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting other starts, which is thought to make the discovery of extraterrestrial life more probable than ever before.

Mrs Othman is currently head of the UN’s little known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa).

Below is a list of participants with this UNOOSA group, what their roles are and where they are from. These will be the folks setting up who speaks, what they will say to the aliens etc. I think this should be open to the public. Perhaps we should be involved somehow. Any ideas?

For almost half a decade, the SETI project has unsuccessfully searched for alien life. However, SETI may be looking for the wrong kind of signals from extraterrestrials, believe two researchers.

University of California, Irvine astrophysicist Gregory Benford and his twin, James – a fellow physicist specializing in high-powered microwave technology – believe there is a better approach to locating aliens.

In two studies appearing in the June issue of the journal Astrobiology, the Benford brothers, along with James’s son Dominic, a NASA scientist, examine the perspective of a civilization sending signals into space – or, as Gregory Benford puts it, “the point of view of the guys paying the bill.”

The physics professor says: “Our grandfather used to say, ‘Talk is cheap, but whiskey costs money’. Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources. Broadcasting is expensive, and transmitting signals across light-years would require considerable resources.”

Assuming that an alien civilization would strive to optimise costs, limit waste and make its signalling technology more efficient, the Benfords propose that these signals would not be continuously blasted out in all directions but rather would be pulsed, narrowly directed and broadband in the 1-to-10-gigahertz range.

“This approach is more like Twitter and less like War and Peace,” says James Benford, founder and president of Microwave Sciences Inc. in Lafayette, Calif.

Their concept of short, targeted blips – dubbed “Benford beacons” by the science press – has gotten extensive coverage in such publications as Astronomy Now. Well-known cosmologist Paul Davies, in his 2010 book The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, supports the theory.

This means that SETI, which focuses its receivers on narrow-band input, may be looking for the wrong kind of signals. The Benfords and a growing number of scientists involved in the hunt for extraterrestrial life advocate adjusting SETI receivers to maximize their ability to detect direct, broadband beacon blasts.

But the question remains: where do we look? The Benfords’ frugal-alien model points to our own Milky Way galaxy, especially the centre, where 90 percent of its stars are clustered.

Gregory Benford says: “The stars there are a billion years older than our sun, which suggests a greater possibility of contact with an advanced civilization than does pointing SETI receivers outward to the newer and less crowded edge of our galaxy.

“Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.” 

Thanks to  http://www.ufocasebook.com  and http://sify.com

KEN PFEIFER MUFON NEW JERSEY

WWW.WORLDUFOPHOTOS.ORG

Mario Borghezio, an Italian member of the European Parliament, says the European Union needs to focus on UFOs and he wants the EU to set up an “observatory” to catalogue incidents of people seeing UFOs in the sky. Serious, thorough research would expose a “systematic cover-up” of UFOs, he said. In his latest press release, Mr. Borghezio quotes an Italian astrophysicist named Massimo Teodorani: “The phenomenon of UFOs is a real manifestation which can be estimated through the physics and the astronomy.”

Italian European Member of the Parliament Mario Borghezio, sponsored the draft resolution that, if passed, would require EU governments to declassify their secret files on UFOs.
The declaration also calls for a research center to investigate alien life. So far, Thirty-One European Members of the 736-seat Parliament Support of Borghezio’s UFO initiative.

 Borghezio said, “Many members of the scientific community have been looking into the issue of UFOs and have denounced the systematic covering up of information on the subject.” He pointed out that the 33rd General Assembly of the United Nations had officially recognized the existence of UFOs in 1978. We encourage you to write the European Members of Parliament.

Thanks to the Filer Files and the Daily Mail.co.uk 

KEN PFEIFER MUFON NEW JERSEY

WWW.WORLDUFOPHOTOS.ORG