Intelligent life – News, Research and Analysis – The Conversation

July 4, 2023

All animal intelligence was shaped by just 5 leaps in brain evolution

Andrew Barron, Macquarie University

From jellyfish to genius, the amazing diversity of animal minds around us evolved through five major changes in the computational capacity of brains.

Scientists think there are 300 million habitable planets in the Milky Way, and some may be home to intelligent life. Bruno Gilli/ESO

May 6, 2022

Blasting out Earth’s location with the hope of reaching aliens is a controversial idea – two teams of scientists are doing it anyway

Chris Impey, University of Arizona

This year, two groups of astronomers plan to send messages containing information about humans and the location of Earth toward parts of space they think may be home to intelligent life.

The Parkes Observatory radio dish, the second largest telescope in the southern hemisphere, has a ‘multibeam’ receiver which can search 13 places in the sky simultaneously for signs of intelligent life. Shutterstock

September 27, 2019

Curious Kids: what has the search for extraterrestrial life actually yielded and how does it work?

Danny C Price, Swinburne University of Technology

The Universe is mind-bogglingly large and with the latest technology, the search is only just starting to heat up.

An artist’s impression of Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. It is the first planet that NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed to orbit in a star’s habitable zone - the region around a star where liquid water, a requirement for life on Earth, could persist. NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

January 14, 2019

Curious Kids: why has nobody found any life outside of Earth?

Josh Calcino, The University of Queensland and Jake Clark, University of Southern Queensland

Life could exist in another solar system in a different part our galaxy. Or in another galaxy far away. We don’t have the perfect technology yet to study such far away places but we’re still trying.

Here, an alien crew member, Saru on Star Trek: Discovery. We often rely on science fiction to guide our expectations of alien life. We can hope lessons about accepting beings very different from yourself can be extracted by the series end. (Courtesy of CBS Studios)

October 5, 2017

Star Trek discovery of alien life veers away from likely reality

Nathalie Nguyen-Quoc Ouellette, Queen's University, Ontario

Star Trek: Discovery explores our corner of the block – just a fraction of the galaxy. Some stars are better candidates for intelligent alien life, and it may not be anything like we imagine.

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