Colloq Abstract - Siemion
November 18, 2019
11:00am Mountain
Andrew Siemion (UC Berkeley/SETI)
Determining the Prevalence of Intelligent Life in the Universe
Abstract
In the last five years there has been a dramatic expansion in efforts to identify and search for indicators of distant technologically-capable life. These major new programs have two primary drivers; one, the growing body of knowledge suggesting that all known precursors to life on Earth occur commonly throughout the universe and two, significant infusions of funding from private philanthropy. The modern astronomy landscape is proving to be fertile ground for these new efforts, with new facilities, instrumentation, algorithms and public datasets providing opportunities to improve upon previous experiments by many orders of magnitude and in some cases opening up completely novel parameter space.
Here I will review the current state-of-the-art in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, with a focus on experimental efforts to detect radio emission indicative of a non-human artificial origin.
