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  • 2016-10-25 (xsd:date)
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  • Scientists Say Strange Signals Are 'Probably' Coming from Extraterrestrial Intelligence? (en)
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  • On 10 October 2016, astronomers Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier from Quebec’s Université Laval uploaded an early draft of a paper titled Discovery of Peculiar Periodic Spectral Modulations in a Small Fraction of Solar-type Stars to the preprint repository arXiv.org. This paper was ultimately published in the November 2016 issue of the scientific journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, of which Phys.org reported as follows: Borra’s prediction, however reasonable, makes for remarkably circular logic. The idea, which he described in a 2012 paper was highly speculative, suggested that technology now available on Earth could be used to send signals that have the required energy to be detected at a target located 1000 light years away. Simply stated, the prediction was this: So Borra and co-author Trottier searched a database of spectral signals from 2.5 million stars and found 234 that fit the prediction. After arguing that instrumental defects and other obvious explanations couldn’t explain the findings, the team made the suggestion that these findings might confirm Borra’s theory: The story went viral when these conclusions were highlighted in an article in the UK’s Independent, which, in its headline made the claim that Strange messages coming from the stars are ‘probably’ from aliens, scientists say. The use of the word probably likely comes from an enigmatic note made on the ArXiv website that hosted a pre-publication version of the paper by Borra and Trottier: Speaking with snopes.com by e-mail, Borra said that he and Trottier never used the word probably in their work. The actual paper never used that title, either (as is evidenced by the less sexy title of the final published version) and at no point in the study did the scientists maintain the signals were probably from aliens. In fact, they argued the following: The Mark Zuckerberg/Stephen Hawking joint venture to listen for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence — Breakthrough Listen — while making plans to take a closer look at these stars, remains skeptical, as reported on Phys.org: The director of the SETI Research Centre at the University of California Berkeley was also muted in his response to the study, as reported by New Scientist: (en)
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