The Long-term Persistence Of Microbial Biospheres Introduces A Temporal Bias 1 Into The Drake Equation: Implications For The Search For Extraterrestrial Life

by Keith CowingSeptember 10, 2026September 10, 2026

[eartharxiv.org] The Drake equation was designed to estimate the number of communicative technological civilisations, not the prevalence of life. Its lifetime term therefore describes a detectable technological phase that may […]

SETI & Technosignatures

Identifying Casual SETI Transmissions And Ultra-Faint RFI With Cumulant Imaging

by Keith CowingSeptember 8, 2026September 8, 2026

[astro-ph.IM] Techniques for identifying radio beacons transmitted by extra-terrestrial civilizations are well advanced.

Waste-heat temperature–luminosity phase space. Existing midinfrared searches occupy the warm band (orange); cold computational radiators fall in the far-infrared/submillimetre band (green) towards the CMB floor. Grey lines show 345-GHz flux-density contours for a source at 100 pc, from equation (10), which is linear in the fractional waste-heat luminosity 𝑓 on the vertical axis; the figure thus covers partial swarms and complete spheres (𝑓 = 1) alike. Markers indicate a complete 1 L⊙ cold sphere, the level of the archival debris-survey limits (Section 6.1), and the domain of warm mid-infrared searches. -- [astro-ph.IM]

SETI & Technosignatures

Slysh Haloes: The Waste Heat Of Cold Computing As A Submillimetre Technosignature

by Keith CowingSeptember 2, 2026September 2, 2026

[astro-ph.IM] Searches for Dysonian waste heat have operated almost exclusively in the mid-infrared and are therefore sensitive primarily to technology radiating at 100-600K. We argue that mature, computation-dominated civilisations may […]

Bill Diamond (left), SETI Institute President and CEO, and ETH President Joël Mesot seal the partnership at ETH’s main building in Zurich. (Image: Daniel Winkler / ETH Foundation)

Astrobiology (general)

The SETI Institute And ETH Zurich Join Forces To Search For The Origin Of Life

by Keith CowingSeptember 1, 2026September 1, 2026

[SETI Institute]. The question of how life originated and whether it exists elsewhere in the universe has fascinated humanity for centuries. Now, ETH Zurich and the SETI Institute in California […]

A preliminary image towards Voyager 1 created using visibilities correlated from COSMIC raw voltages. The synthesised beam (resolving element) of the VLA for this observation is shown in the bottom left of the image, with the white cross indicating the major and minor axis of the elliptical Gaussian. This image was created from five 2 Hz channels at a central frequency of 8420.4191 MHz. A candidate for voyager can be seen towards the bottom left as a red excess close to the shape of the synthesised beam. Further validation of this detection is ongoing. Only the left circular polarisation was imaged.-- [astro-ph.IM

SETI & Technosignatures

The VLA and High-Frequency SETI: Expanding The Search for Life

by Keith CowingAugust 21, 2026August 21, 2026

[astro-ph.IM] The Commensal Open-Source Multimode Interferometer Cluster (COSMIC) runs software that searches for technologies elsewhere in the Universe (“technosignatures”) using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). Specifically, it […]

A large radiotelescope on Earth searches for life elsewhere - Grok via Astrobiology.com

SETI & Technosignatures

International Law and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

by Keith CowingAugust 20, 2026August 20, 2026

[Proceedings of the IAU]. The search for extraterrestrial life, especially intelligent life, is among the most profound scientific endeavors.

Analysis workflow for the Gaia DR3 astrometric stellar-engine limits.

SETI & Technosignatures

Gaia DR3 Limits on Stellar Engine Technosignatures in Nearby Stars

by Keith CowingAugust 19, 2026August 19, 2026

[astro-ph.GA] An operating stellar engine that transfers momentum to its host star could produce an approximately persistent transverse acceleration during the Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3) observing epoch.

Where the Dyson sphere on and off fits of M77 differ most, and how new photometry changes the comparison. In each panel, the upper sub-panel shows the median posterior AGENT-on (solid red) and AGENT-off (dashed blue) model spectra with shaded 16–84% posterior bands and the fitted photometry overplotted (open black circles), while the lower sub-panel shows the percent deviation of the AGENT-on model relative to the AGENT-off model, with the shaded band giving the 1σ uncertainty propagated in quadrature from the two independent fits. -- [astro-ph.GA]

SETI & Technosignatures

The Ĝ Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. V. When Galaxies Glow with Industry

by Keith CowingAugust 14, 2026August 14, 2026

[astro-ph.GA] We present the most robust stellar population synthesis (SPS)-based search for galaxy-spanning technological waste heat to date, applied to 129 nearby galaxies spanning a wide range of spectral energy […]

Ciara Sypherd, Ph.D. candidate in bioengineering (Pil Rosted Christensen) [Harvard]

SETI & Technosignatures

Decoding Animal Communication With AI

by Keith CowingAugust 2, 2026August 2, 2026

[Harvard] Fresh off degrees in astrobiology and aerospace engineering at Arizona State University, Ciara Sypherd took on a one-year research position at the University of Copenhagen to study how neural […]