Olivia
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StarioniX
@StarioniX
Space. Astronomy. Science.
The future of humanity beyond Earth
Earth Orbit
Joined July 2011
99 Following
112 Followers
97 Posts
@Aaarhii distributed satellites completely sidestep the issue. Since each satellite orbits independently like a normal planet, they never try to act as a single rigid system, eliminating the equilibrium problem entirely
What most people imagine as a “Dyson sphere” — a solid shell surrounding a star — is something Dyson himself never proposed. In fact, such a structure is physically impossible. Let’s break down what space megastructures designed to collect stellar energy actually look like, and why one star became SETI’s biggest mystery for several years.
The Original Idea from 1960 — It’s Not What You Think
Physicist Freeman Dyson published his concept in the journal Science, developing an idea from Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker. Dyson proposed not a solid sphere, but a swarm of independent objects orbiting a star — and, crucially, he added one key detail: such a structure would have to radiate excess heat in the infrared at around 10 microns, making it detectable.
Why a Solid Sphere Is Physically Impossible
A rigid shell surrounding a star would not remain in gravitational equilibrium — it simply cannot “orbit” the star as a single body the way a planet does. Any collision with space debris could threaten to shatter the structure, sending the fragments crashing into the star. Calculations show that surrounding the Sun with 1 km² panels would require roughly 30 quadrillion such panels and at least 100 quintillion tons of material — essentially, you would have to dismantle an entire planet for parts.
That’s Why a Swarm Is the Only Realistic Option
A Dyson swarm — independent collector satellites orbiting a star rather than a connected structure — could be built gradually, piece by piece, without requiring the material of an entire planet all at once. Partial swarms that capture only a fraction of a star’s energy are considered far more realistic than complete coverage.
The Star That Became a Global Sensation for Several Years
In 2015, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian and a team of volunteers from the Planet Hunters project discovered that the star KIC 8462852 was dimming irregularly, by as much as 22% of its brightness, with no periodic pattern typical of ordinary planets. Astronomer Jason Wright openly proposed the possibility of a megastructure. Follow-up observations with the Spitzer and Swift telescopes found no excess infrared emission that would be expected from a Dyson swarm — leaving uneven clouds of dust, possibly from a destroyed moon orbiting the star, as the most likely explanation.
The Search Never Stopped
In 2024, a project with the fitting name Hephaistos identified several stars with unexplained infrared excesses as potential candidates — although natural explanations, such as warm dust, remain far more likely.
The Most Important Takeaway
The most realistic way to detect a Dyson-level extraterrestrial civilization is not by directly observing a gigantic structure, but by looking for something that shouldn’t be there: a star behaving in a way that doesn’t make sense for a natural object. So far, every such discovery has turned out to be dust rather than engineering — but the fact that we now know what to look for, and where to look, is already half the battle.
If humanity ever started building a swarm around the Sun, where should we begin: Mercury or the asteroids?
Luke Skywalker watched two sunsets on Tatooine 20 years before astronomers even confirmed the existence of planets beyond our Solar System. Now we know: such worlds are real, and they might even be more common than systems like ours. Let's break down what circumbinary planets are.
The first confirmed "Tatooine"
In 2011, the Kepler telescope detected Kepler-16b — a Saturn-sized gas giant 245 light-years from Earth that completes a full orbit around BOTH of its stars every 229 days. The stars themselves — 69% and 20% of the Sun's mass — orbit each other every 41 days, staying five times closer together than Earth is to the Sun, meaning closer than Mercury is to the Sun.
A teenage NASA intern found it
In 2020, the TESS telescope detected TOI-1338 b — a planet almost seven times larger than Earth, orbiting a pair of stars (one brighter, at 5,976 K, one dimmer, at 3,657 K) every 95 days, while the stars themselves circle each other every 15 days. The planet is gaseous and not habitable.
A second planet was found in that same system — using a new method
In 2023, a second planet was discovered around that same pair of stars (renamed BEBOP-1): BEBOP-1c, with 65 times Earth's mass — found using the radial-velocity method, applied to a circumbinary planet for the first time ever. It's only the second known system with multiple planets orbiting two stars at once; the first, Kepler-47, sits 5,000 light-years away.
Detecting these planets is technically difficult
Light from two stars at once "muddies" the data, so the BEBOP project specifically looks for pairs where the secondary star is much dimmer than the primary — that way, its signal doesn't interfere with observations. Because of this, most circumbinary planets found so far belong to pairs with noticeably different brightness levels, rather than "evenly matched" pairs.
The most counterintuitive fact
The first circumbinary planet was actually found back in 2005, before Kepler-16b — it just wasn't confirmed as unambiguously. Some astronomers go even further and suggest that almost all stars might be born in pairs, with solitary stars like our Sun eventually "breaking away" from a partner over time. If that's true, two-sun systems aren't the exotic case — they're close to the norm, and our lone Solar System is the statistical outlier.
If you had to pick a planet to live on — one sun, like ours, or two, like Luke Skywalker's?
@CortexaX what used to be pure science fiction is turning out to be the cosmic norm
Luke Skywalker watched two sunsets on Tatooine 20 years before astronomers even confirmed the existence of planets beyond our Solar System. Now we know: such worlds are real, and they might even be more common than systems like ours. Let's break down what circumbinary planets are.
The first confirmed "Tatooine"
In 2011, the Kepler telescope detected Kepler-16b — a Saturn-sized gas giant 245 light-years from Earth that completes a full orbit around BOTH of its stars every 229 days. The stars themselves — 69% and 20% of the Sun's mass — orbit each other every 41 days, staying five times closer together than Earth is to the Sun, meaning closer than Mercury is to the Sun.
A teenage NASA intern found it
In 2020, the TESS telescope detected TOI-1338 b — a planet almost seven times larger than Earth, orbiting a pair of stars (one brighter, at 5,976 K, one dimmer, at 3,657 K) every 95 days, while the stars themselves circle each other every 15 days. The planet is gaseous and not habitable.
A second planet was found in that same system — using a new method
In 2023, a second planet was discovered around that same pair of stars (renamed BEBOP-1): BEBOP-1c, with 65 times Earth's mass — found using the radial-velocity method, applied to a circumbinary planet for the first time ever. It's only the second known system with multiple planets orbiting two stars at once; the first, Kepler-47, sits 5,000 light-years away.
Detecting these planets is technically difficult
Light from two stars at once "muddies" the data, so the BEBOP project specifically looks for pairs where the secondary star is much dimmer than the primary — that way, its signal doesn't interfere with observations. Because of this, most circumbinary planets found so far belong to pairs with noticeably different brightness levels, rather than "evenly matched" pairs.
The most counterintuitive fact
The first circumbinary planet was actually found back in 2005, before Kepler-16b — it just wasn't confirmed as unambiguously. Some astronomers go even further and suggest that almost all stars might be born in pairs, with solitary stars like our Sun eventually "breaking away" from a partner over time. If that's true, two-sun systems aren't the exotic case — they're close to the norm, and our lone Solar System is the statistical outlier.
If you had to pick a planet to live on — one sun, like ours, or two, like Luke Skywalker's?
A stellar Coat of Many Colors for Dolly Parton, forever among the stars 💗
@vmrmax the Vulcan mistake is what ultimately gave us Einstein's General Relativity
The math says something's out there. Ten years of searching say nothing's been found yet. And 2026, according to the hypothesis's own author, could be the year we finally learn the truth. Let's break down why Planet Nine still hasn't been found.
The evidence isn't the planet itself — it's its "fingerprints"
In 2016, astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at Caltech noticed something: the orbits of at least six of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects are aligned in the same direction to a degree that's statistically unlikely to be coincidence. The simplest explanation is the gravity of an unseen, massive planet pulling them all in the same direction. Nobody has actually seen the planet itself — only its gravitational "signature" on its neighbors' orbits.
It's genuinely hard to physically spot
By calculations, Planet Nine should sit somewhere between 400 and 800 astronomical units from the Sun (for comparison, Neptune is only 30 AU out) and complete one orbit every 10,000 to 20,000 years. At that distance, it receives a minuscule amount of sunlight and reflects even less — it's like searching for a piece of coal on a football field at night, without even knowing which half of the field to look at.
The search has already narrowed — and that's real progress
Previous sky surveys — Pan-STARRS1, the Zwicky Transient Facility, the Dark Energy Survey — have already ruled out 78% of the zone where the planet could theoretically be hiding. That leaves the final 22% to check, and that's exactly where the search gets hardest: that patch of sky cuts through the densest part of the Milky Way, where the stars themselves blind the instruments.
New hope — a telescope that just came online
In March 2026, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile entered its final commissioning phase. Its camera — 3.2 gigapixels, the largest ever built for astronomy — scans a new patch of sky every 40 seconds and compares it against previous images, looking for anything that's shifted position. Batygin himself considers the hypothesis easily falsifiable, and says that this year, with Rubin's data, we'll know one way or another whether the planet exists.
And an unexpected candidate has turned up
By comparing archival infrared data from the IRAS and AKARI telescopes taken 23 years apart, astronomers spotted a faint dot that had shifted by 47.5 arcminutes — potentially an object more massive than Neptune, sitting around 500-700 AU out. But even Batygin jokingly admits: if this gets confirmed, it might turn out not to be the planet they originally predicted at all, but some entirely different body.
History has been through something like this before
In the 19th century, astronomers similarly noticed an anomaly in Mercury's orbit and "predicted" a hidden planet, Vulcan, orbiting inside it. Decades of searching turned up nothing — the anomaly was eventually explained by Einstein's general relativity, not a new planet. That's not proof Planet Nine doesn't exist either, but it's a reminder: convincing math doesn't always mean there's a real object out there.
If Rubin finds nothing this year, would that mean the planet isn't there — or just that the search isn't over yet?
Saturn’s rings are made up of 90–95% water ice - the same resource that we are already trying to extract from the Moon and asteroids. The mass of this ice is roughly ten quintillion tons. And yet, not a single company is even considering mining it there. Let’s break down why.
What the rings are actually made of
According to the Cassini mission, Saturn’s rings are 90–95% crystalline water ice, with only a few percent consisting of silicates and organic compounds. Their total mass is roughly 10¹⁹ kg. The particles in the rings range from tiny dust grains to chunks as large as a house.
Why water ice is valuable in space
It’s the same principle as with lunar craters: water can be used as drinking water, converted into oxygen through electrolysis, and turned into rocket fuel. So, in theory, Saturn’s rings are a vast, almost untouched reservoir of exactly the resource that the space economy is already trying to extract closer to Earth.
But there’s a problem with the distance
Saturn is, on average, 1.43 billion km from Earth. The Cassini mission, which used gravity-assist maneuvers to save fuel, took 6.7 years to get there - one way. Even a signal from Saturn takes 83 minutes to reach Earth. For comparison, all the lunar ice mining projects discussed earlier involve journeys of a few days, not years.
And the rings are literally disappearing right now
NASA calculated that the “ring rain” - water ice continuously falling from the rings into Saturn’s atmosphere - removes enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every half hour. These calculations alone suggest the rings have a maximum lifespan of 300 million years; when additional material falling directly onto the planet’s equator is taken into account, that number drops to less than 100 million years. For comparison, Saturn itself is more than 4 billion years old.
The most revealing conclusion
Mining Saturn’s rings loses economically even before considering the distance: the same water ice already exists much closer - in craters on the Moon or on near-Earth asteroids, where the journey takes days rather than years. Saturn’s rings remain not a resource base, but rather a natural experiment that we can observe while it slowly dismantles itself.
If distance and time didn’t matter - would you become the first Saturnian ice miner?
@vmrmax whoever gets there first will likely make the rules, and that is the most dangerous part
Philosopher Robert Sparrow compared terraforming Mars to a tourist mindlessly smashing fragile icicles in a forest simply because he can. Another philosopher, Christopher McKay, who works at NASA, believes that if Mars is dead, changing it is not just permissible, but almost obligatory. Let's examine whether humanity has the moral right to change other planets.
Argument "against" #1: aesthetic blindness and hubris
Robert Sparrow based his objection on virtue ethics rather than on rights or consequences. Terraforming Mars is like ruthlessly smashing fragile, beautiful icicles simply because you can: the act itself reveals a "blindness to beauty," while the desire to remake an entire planet in our image reflects hubris — the human desire to act like a god. For Sparrow, the issue is not who would be harmed, but what kind of person one has to be to make such a decision.
Argument "against" #2: an irreplaceable scientific archive
According to researchers who have studied this debate, the argument based on scientific value is the least controversial of all: even some supporters of terraforming acknowledge that Mars is a unique source of data about the early history of the Solar System. If we transform its climate and geology, we will permanently lose the opportunity to study the planet in its original state.
Argument "for" #1: if there is no life there, there is no one to harm
Christopher McKay, a NASA planetary scientist who has written about the ethics of terraforming for decades, takes the opposite position: moral significance is always tied to life. Mars, as far as we know, is dead — meaning that, under traditional environmental ethics, there is simply no one or nothing there to protect. Some supporters of this position go even further: the spread of life has value in itself, and therefore transforming a dead planet into a living one is not destruction, but creation.
Argument "for" #2: survival of the species
Supporters such as Robert Zubrin appeal to humanity's nature as a species of pioneers, while others rely on a more pragmatic argument: if terraforming Mars could become insurance against the extinction of humanity or life in general, refusing to do it might turn out not to be caution, but a moral failure on a much greater scale.
The most unexpected nuance
One researcher who examined all six major arguments in this debate in detail concluded that the arguments for protecting Mars outweigh the arguments for intervention. But even critics acknowledge that this is not a final verdict, only the current state of the philosophical debate, in which astronomer Carl Sagan once took a distinct position: if even microbial life exists on Mars, preserving it is no longer a question of aesthetics or science, but a separate moral obligation.
And then there is the question of whom to ask
The least discussed but critical problem is not the ethics of intervention itself, but who has the right to make a decision on behalf of all humanity. No referendum, no global institution is currently empowered to decide the fate of an entire planet on behalf of 8 billion people — let alone on behalf of generations that have not yet been born.
Whose side are you on — Sparrow and his caution, or McKay and his willingness to act?
The math says something's out there. Ten years of searching say nothing's been found yet. And 2026, according to the hypothesis's own author, could be the year we finally learn the truth. Let's break down why Planet Nine still hasn't been found.
The evidence isn't the planet itself — it's its "fingerprints"
In 2016, astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at Caltech noticed something: the orbits of at least six of the most distant Kuiper Belt objects are aligned in the same direction to a degree that's statistically unlikely to be coincidence. The simplest explanation is the gravity of an unseen, massive planet pulling them all in the same direction. Nobody has actually seen the planet itself — only its gravitational "signature" on its neighbors' orbits.
It's genuinely hard to physically spot
By calculations, Planet Nine should sit somewhere between 400 and 800 astronomical units from the Sun (for comparison, Neptune is only 30 AU out) and complete one orbit every 10,000 to 20,000 years. At that distance, it receives a minuscule amount of sunlight and reflects even less — it's like searching for a piece of coal on a football field at night, without even knowing which half of the field to look at.
The search has already narrowed — and that's real progress
Previous sky surveys — Pan-STARRS1, the Zwicky Transient Facility, the Dark Energy Survey — have already ruled out 78% of the zone where the planet could theoretically be hiding. That leaves the final 22% to check, and that's exactly where the search gets hardest: that patch of sky cuts through the densest part of the Milky Way, where the stars themselves blind the instruments.
New hope — a telescope that just came online
In March 2026, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile entered its final commissioning phase. Its camera — 3.2 gigapixels, the largest ever built for astronomy — scans a new patch of sky every 40 seconds and compares it against previous images, looking for anything that's shifted position. Batygin himself considers the hypothesis easily falsifiable, and says that this year, with Rubin's data, we'll know one way or another whether the planet exists.
And an unexpected candidate has turned up
By comparing archival infrared data from the IRAS and AKARI telescopes taken 23 years apart, astronomers spotted a faint dot that had shifted by 47.5 arcminutes — potentially an object more massive than Neptune, sitting around 500-700 AU out. But even Batygin jokingly admits: if this gets confirmed, it might turn out not to be the planet they originally predicted at all, but some entirely different body.
History has been through something like this before
In the 19th century, astronomers similarly noticed an anomaly in Mercury's orbit and "predicted" a hidden planet, Vulcan, orbiting inside it. Decades of searching turned up nothing — the anomaly was eventually explained by Einstein's general relativity, not a new planet. That's not proof Planet Nine doesn't exist either, but it's a reminder: convincing math doesn't always mean there's a real object out there.
If Rubin finds nothing this year, would that mean the planet isn't there — or just that the search isn't over yet?
@Caarat1 just the thought of these worlds breaking our frameworks is mind blowing. Which of these three finds impresses you the most?
The darkest object in the universe absorbs 99% of the light that hits it. Planets that survived a supernova explosion, even though they technically shouldn't have. And another planet so strange that astronomers still can't agree on whether it even exists. Let's break down the strangest exoplanets we've found so far.
TrES-2b - darker than coal
This Jupiter-sized planet absorbs more than 99% of the light that hits it - less than 1% gets reflected back. For comparison, fresh asphalt reflects more light than this planet does. It glows a faint red purely from its own scorching heat, not from reflected starlight, since it orbits right up against its star.
The very first exoplanets ever found - and they orbit a dead star
In 1992, Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan discovered the first confirmed planets outside our Solar System - and they don't orbit an ordinary star at all, but a pulsar: the remnant of a star that went supernova. The pulsar spins 161 times a second, constantly hammering its planets with deadly radiation. The strangest part: these planets technically shouldn't exist at all - the supernova explosion should have destroyed everything nearby. The most likely explanation is that they formed AFTER the explosion, out of the dead star's debris. Astronomers gave them fittingly eerie names: Draugr, Poltergeist, and Phobetor.
J1407b - a planet that might not be a planet
In 2007, the star J1407 suddenly dimmed by 95% for several weeks. The cause turned out to be a giant ring system 180 million km across, 200 times bigger than Saturn's rings, and the object was nicknamed the "Super Saturn." But no repeat dimming has ever been observed since. The latest research suggests J1407b might not orbit any star at all - it could be a "rogue" planet that just happened to drift past in 2007 and will never come back into view again.
The most telling takeaway
All three share one thing in common: our tidy categories - "planet," "star," "moon" - often just can't keep up with reality. The darkest object turned out to be darker than any material on Earth. The first planets ever found shouldn't exist under the laws of physics. And the "Super Saturn" might not even be an orbiting planet at all, but a wanderer that passed through just once.
Which of these three strange finds impresses you the most?
In June 2026, a new AI algorithm sped up the search for extraterrestrial signals by 600 times. The project was developed jointly by Breakthrough Listen, the SETI Institute, and NVIDIA. The main problem it solves isn't a shortage of signals - it's a lack of a way to tell aliens apart from humanity's own Wi-Fi. Let's break down how AI is searching for life in space.
SETI's biggest problem isn't silence - it's noise
Radio telescopes capture enormous volumes of data, and the vast majority of "interesting" signals turn out to be Earth-made: cell networks, Wi-Fi, satellites. For years, classical algorithms couldn't filter out that noise fast enough. That's exactly where AI comes in.
The first major breakthrough already happened in 2023
A University of Toronto student, Peter Ma, trained a neural network on the Breakthrough Listen archive - 480 hours of observations across 820 nearby stars. The algorithm cut the number of "suspicious" signals needing review by 100x compared to classical methods, and turned up 8 signals that human researchers had missed in their first pass through the same dataset. None of them were confirmed as extraterrestrial - but the fact that AI found what humans overlooked changed the whole field's approach.
And by 2026, the speed jumped by orders of magnitude more
A new Breakthrough Listen tool, developed together with NVIDIA, processes data 600 times faster than previous systems. This isn't just a scientific novelty anymore: the system can be deployed directly at telescopes around the world, turning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a real-time global network.
The search has moved well beyond radio waves
Modern SETI looks for more than just radio signals - it also searches for optical laser flashes and even excess infrared heat that a megastructure like a Dyson sphere might emit, since any technologically advanced civilization inevitably "leaks" some of its energy as heat.
AI even rewrote the rules of the game itself
In June 2026, the International Academy of Astronautics updated its protocols for announcing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence for the first time in over 15 years. The reason is directly tied to AI and social media: clear mechanisms are now needed to distinguish a genuine discovery from a viral hoax or an algorithm's hallucination before the news spreads around the world.
The most telling takeaway
More than 65 years have passed since Frank Drake switched on the first telescope searching for an extraterrestrial signal in 1960 - and still no confirmed contact. AI's biggest achievement in this field so far isn't "finding aliens" - it's revealing just how much of what we mistook for noise was actually humanity's own echo.
When do you think AI will finally find something real - or will humanity just keep hearing its own echo?
Saturn’s rings are made up of 90–95% water ice - the same resource that we are already trying to extract from the Moon and asteroids. The mass of this ice is roughly ten quintillion tons. And yet, not a single company is even considering mining it there. Let’s break down why.
What the rings are actually made of
According to the Cassini mission, Saturn’s rings are 90–95% crystalline water ice, with only a few percent consisting of silicates and organic compounds. Their total mass is roughly 10¹⁹ kg. The particles in the rings range from tiny dust grains to chunks as large as a house.
Why water ice is valuable in space
It’s the same principle as with lunar craters: water can be used as drinking water, converted into oxygen through electrolysis, and turned into rocket fuel. So, in theory, Saturn’s rings are a vast, almost untouched reservoir of exactly the resource that the space economy is already trying to extract closer to Earth.
But there’s a problem with the distance
Saturn is, on average, 1.43 billion km from Earth. The Cassini mission, which used gravity-assist maneuvers to save fuel, took 6.7 years to get there - one way. Even a signal from Saturn takes 83 minutes to reach Earth. For comparison, all the lunar ice mining projects discussed earlier involve journeys of a few days, not years.
And the rings are literally disappearing right now
NASA calculated that the “ring rain” - water ice continuously falling from the rings into Saturn’s atmosphere - removes enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every half hour. These calculations alone suggest the rings have a maximum lifespan of 300 million years; when additional material falling directly onto the planet’s equator is taken into account, that number drops to less than 100 million years. For comparison, Saturn itself is more than 4 billion years old.
The most revealing conclusion
Mining Saturn’s rings loses economically even before considering the distance: the same water ice already exists much closer - in craters on the Moon or on near-Earth asteroids, where the journey takes days rather than years. Saturn’s rings remain not a resource base, but rather a natural experiment that we can observe while it slowly dismantles itself.
If distance and time didn’t matter - would you become the first Saturnian ice miner?
The darkest object in the universe absorbs 99% of the light that hits it. Planets that survived a supernova explosion, even though they technically shouldn't have. And another planet so strange that astronomers still can't agree on whether it even exists. Let's break down the strangest exoplanets we've found so far.
TrES-2b - darker than coal
This Jupiter-sized planet absorbs more than 99% of the light that hits it - less than 1% gets reflected back. For comparison, fresh asphalt reflects more light than this planet does. It glows a faint red purely from its own scorching heat, not from reflected starlight, since it orbits right up against its star.
The very first exoplanets ever found - and they orbit a dead star
In 1992, Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan discovered the first confirmed planets outside our Solar System - and they don't orbit an ordinary star at all, but a pulsar: the remnant of a star that went supernova. The pulsar spins 161 times a second, constantly hammering its planets with deadly radiation. The strangest part: these planets technically shouldn't exist at all - the supernova explosion should have destroyed everything nearby. The most likely explanation is that they formed AFTER the explosion, out of the dead star's debris. Astronomers gave them fittingly eerie names: Draugr, Poltergeist, and Phobetor.
J1407b - a planet that might not be a planet
In 2007, the star J1407 suddenly dimmed by 95% for several weeks. The cause turned out to be a giant ring system 180 million km across, 200 times bigger than Saturn's rings, and the object was nicknamed the "Super Saturn." But no repeat dimming has ever been observed since. The latest research suggests J1407b might not orbit any star at all - it could be a "rogue" planet that just happened to drift past in 2007 and will never come back into view again.
The most telling takeaway
All three share one thing in common: our tidy categories - "planet," "star," "moon" - often just can't keep up with reality. The darkest object turned out to be darker than any material on Earth. The first planets ever found shouldn't exist under the laws of physics. And the "Super Saturn" might not even be an orbiting planet at all, but a wanderer that passed through just once.
Which of these three strange finds impresses you the most?
@andersonsara992 Absolutely! 😇
In June 2026, a new AI algorithm sped up the search for extraterrestrial signals by 600 times. The project was developed jointly by Breakthrough Listen, the SETI Institute, and NVIDIA. The main problem it solves isn't a shortage of signals - it's a lack of a way to tell aliens apart from humanity's own Wi-Fi. Let's break down how AI is searching for life in space.
SETI's biggest problem isn't silence - it's noise
Radio telescopes capture enormous volumes of data, and the vast majority of "interesting" signals turn out to be Earth-made: cell networks, Wi-Fi, satellites. For years, classical algorithms couldn't filter out that noise fast enough. That's exactly where AI comes in.
The first major breakthrough already happened in 2023
A University of Toronto student, Peter Ma, trained a neural network on the Breakthrough Listen archive - 480 hours of observations across 820 nearby stars. The algorithm cut the number of "suspicious" signals needing review by 100x compared to classical methods, and turned up 8 signals that human researchers had missed in their first pass through the same dataset. None of them were confirmed as extraterrestrial - but the fact that AI found what humans overlooked changed the whole field's approach.
And by 2026, the speed jumped by orders of magnitude more
A new Breakthrough Listen tool, developed together with NVIDIA, processes data 600 times faster than previous systems. This isn't just a scientific novelty anymore: the system can be deployed directly at telescopes around the world, turning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a real-time global network.
The search has moved well beyond radio waves
Modern SETI looks for more than just radio signals - it also searches for optical laser flashes and even excess infrared heat that a megastructure like a Dyson sphere might emit, since any technologically advanced civilization inevitably "leaks" some of its energy as heat.
AI even rewrote the rules of the game itself
In June 2026, the International Academy of Astronautics updated its protocols for announcing the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence for the first time in over 15 years. The reason is directly tied to AI and social media: clear mechanisms are now needed to distinguish a genuine discovery from a viral hoax or an algorithm's hallucination before the news spreads around the world.
The most telling takeaway
More than 65 years have passed since Frank Drake switched on the first telescope searching for an extraterrestrial signal in 1960 - and still no confirmed contact. AI's biggest achievement in this field so far isn't "finding aliens" - it's revealing just how much of what we mistook for noise was actually humanity's own echo.
When do you think AI will finally find something real - or will humanity just keep hearing its own echo?
Are we the last - a question that has haunted humanity for decades. But cosmological calculations from recent years turn it on its head: mathematically, we are most likely not the last, but among the first. And that turns out to be even more unsettling. Let’s explore what it really means to be the “last civilization.”
First - why did the question arise in the first place?
The fear of being the last stems from the Fermi paradox: if intelligent life is a common phenomenon, we should be seeing traces of it everywhere. The silence of the cosmos suggests a grim possibility - perhaps we are not the first to reach this stage, but simply the last ones who have not yet disappeared like all those who came before us.
But the math says something quite different
A study by astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University calculated that red dwarfs - the most common type of star - are five times more numerous than stars like our Sun, and live, on average, 20 times longer. If intelligent life emerged evenly throughout the entire lifespan of stars, we would be far more likely to have appeared around a dim red dwarf than around a middle-aged yellow star. The fact that we emerged here and now is statistically - a 1-in-100 chance.
Avi Loeb of Harvard put it even more radically
The first stars capable of giving rise to life appeared just 30 million years after the Big Bang. The last stars - red dwarfs - will burn out only after 10 trillion years. According to Loeb’s calculations, the probability of life emerging in that distant future is 1,000 times higher than it is right now. The universe at the stage we are in now is not the end of the party. It is literally the first few minutes after the doors have opened.
So the question should be turned around
Not “are we the last civilization?” but “what does it mean to be one of the first?” The answer is more unsettling than it seems: being first means having no experience behind you. No civilization that has already gone through the path toward a mature technological society and left behind clues about how not to destroy itself. We are not inheritors of wisdom - we are the draft.
And there is another meaning to the word “last”
Oxford philosopher Toby Ord calculated in his book The Precipice that the cumulative existential risk to humanity this century is approximately 1 in 6. He calls the period that began with the first nuclear test in 1945 “the precipice” - a time when destructive power is already in our hands, but the wisdom to use it safely is not. Humanity came closest to self-destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when leaders at the time estimated the chances of nuclear war at 10–50%. According to Ord’s forecast, this dangerous phase will last at most a few centuries - after which humanity will either develop enough self-control or fail to survive its own technological power.
The most telling conclusion
Being first is more frightening than being last. The last at least knows that someone came before them - and perhaps left behind some answers. The first acts blindly, without instructions, without a safety net, and that is precisely why every decision made by this generation matters more than it seems.
What personally scares you more - being the last, or being the first to have to figure everything out on your own?
@AIMind_Ai we are literally writing the survival manual for those who come after us (if we make it)
Are we the last - a question that has haunted humanity for decades. But cosmological calculations from recent years turn it on its head: mathematically, we are most likely not the last, but among the first. And that turns out to be even more unsettling. Let’s explore what it really means to be the “last civilization.”
First - why did the question arise in the first place?
The fear of being the last stems from the Fermi paradox: if intelligent life is a common phenomenon, we should be seeing traces of it everywhere. The silence of the cosmos suggests a grim possibility - perhaps we are not the first to reach this stage, but simply the last ones who have not yet disappeared like all those who came before us.
But the math says something quite different
A study by astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University calculated that red dwarfs - the most common type of star - are five times more numerous than stars like our Sun, and live, on average, 20 times longer. If intelligent life emerged evenly throughout the entire lifespan of stars, we would be far more likely to have appeared around a dim red dwarf than around a middle-aged yellow star. The fact that we emerged here and now is statistically - a 1-in-100 chance.
Avi Loeb of Harvard put it even more radically
The first stars capable of giving rise to life appeared just 30 million years after the Big Bang. The last stars - red dwarfs - will burn out only after 10 trillion years. According to Loeb’s calculations, the probability of life emerging in that distant future is 1,000 times higher than it is right now. The universe at the stage we are in now is not the end of the party. It is literally the first few minutes after the doors have opened.
So the question should be turned around
Not “are we the last civilization?” but “what does it mean to be one of the first?” The answer is more unsettling than it seems: being first means having no experience behind you. No civilization that has already gone through the path toward a mature technological society and left behind clues about how not to destroy itself. We are not inheritors of wisdom - we are the draft.
And there is another meaning to the word “last”
Oxford philosopher Toby Ord calculated in his book The Precipice that the cumulative existential risk to humanity this century is approximately 1 in 6. He calls the period that began with the first nuclear test in 1945 “the precipice” - a time when destructive power is already in our hands, but the wisdom to use it safely is not. Humanity came closest to self-destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when leaders at the time estimated the chances of nuclear war at 10–50%. According to Ord’s forecast, this dangerous phase will last at most a few centuries - after which humanity will either develop enough self-control or fail to survive its own technological power.
The most telling conclusion
Being first is more frightening than being last. The last at least knows that someone came before them - and perhaps left behind some answers. The first acts blindly, without instructions, without a safety net, and that is precisely why every decision made by this generation matters more than it seems.
What personally scares you more - being the last, or being the first to have to figure everything out on your own?
A Rice University scientist has calculated that it would take Martian colonists just 6,000 years to turn into a new type of human. Meanwhile, another researcher published a formal academic manifesto back in 2015 demanding that Mars be "liberated from Earth" before the first human even lands there. Let's break down whether Mars will actually become a separate civilization - and what that would really take.
Independence isn't a question of "if" - it's "when"
Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute argued directly, in a paper for the journal New Space, that Mars should be freed from any Earth-based control before the first colonists arrive, to allow a second, fully independent branch of human civilization to emerge from scratch. Legal analysts reach a similar conclusion by a different route: throughout human history, colonies have sooner or later gained independence once they became capable of functioning without their home country - so there's no good reason to expect a Martian colony to be the exception.
How many people does it even take to make a "civilization"
Researcher Jean-Marc Salotti of the Bordeaux Institute of Technology, in a peer-reviewed study for Scientific Reports, calculated a specific minimum figure - 110 people. That's how many it would take to distribute all the necessary roles and resources so the colony isn't critically dependent on supplies from Earth.
And now for the wildest part - the body would change too
Evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon of Rice University argues that the accelerated rate of radiation-driven mutation, combined with conditions on Mars being so starkly different from Earth's, could trigger speciation far faster than classic "island" cases like Darwin's finches. By his estimate, a new type of human could emerge within just a few hundred generations - roughly 6,000 years. For comparison, Homo sapiens as a species has existed for about 300,000 years.
The legal groundwork for that independence is already being laid
In its own terms of service for flights to Mars, Starlink explicitly recognizes Mars as a "free planet" outside the jurisdiction of any Earth government. Lawyers consider that clause legally meaningless under international law, but it shows that even commercial companies are already preparing for a scenario of full autonomy.
The most telling wrinkle
Haqq-Misra proposes not waiting for conflict or rebellion, but designing independence in from the very start - colonists would give up their Earth citizenship, and Mars would stay outside any commercial or national control from Earth. The goal isn't political revenge; it's something closer to a controlled experiment: giving a civilization the chance to solve problems Earth never managed to.
If Mars's colonists, a few thousand years from now, physically stop being "just human" - is that still our civilization, or an entirely different one?
A Rice University scientist has calculated that it would take Martian colonists just 6,000 years to turn into a new type of human. Meanwhile, another researcher published a formal academic manifesto back in 2015 demanding that Mars be "liberated from Earth" before the first human even lands there. Let's break down whether Mars will actually become a separate civilization - and what that would really take.
Independence isn't a question of "if" - it's "when"
Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra of the Blue Marble Space Institute argued directly, in a paper for the journal New Space, that Mars should be freed from any Earth-based control before the first colonists arrive, to allow a second, fully independent branch of human civilization to emerge from scratch. Legal analysts reach a similar conclusion by a different route: throughout human history, colonies have sooner or later gained independence once they became capable of functioning without their home country - so there's no good reason to expect a Martian colony to be the exception.
How many people does it even take to make a "civilization"
Researcher Jean-Marc Salotti of the Bordeaux Institute of Technology, in a peer-reviewed study for Scientific Reports, calculated a specific minimum figure - 110 people. That's how many it would take to distribute all the necessary roles and resources so the colony isn't critically dependent on supplies from Earth.
And now for the wildest part - the body would change too
Evolutionary biologist Scott Solomon of Rice University argues that the accelerated rate of radiation-driven mutation, combined with conditions on Mars being so starkly different from Earth's, could trigger speciation far faster than classic "island" cases like Darwin's finches. By his estimate, a new type of human could emerge within just a few hundred generations - roughly 6,000 years. For comparison, Homo sapiens as a species has existed for about 300,000 years.
The legal groundwork for that independence is already being laid
In its own terms of service for flights to Mars, Starlink explicitly recognizes Mars as a "free planet" outside the jurisdiction of any Earth government. Lawyers consider that clause legally meaningless under international law, but it shows that even commercial companies are already preparing for a scenario of full autonomy.
The most telling wrinkle
Haqq-Misra proposes not waiting for conflict or rebellion, but designing independence in from the very start - colonists would give up their Earth citizenship, and Mars would stay outside any commercial or national control from Earth. The goal isn't political revenge; it's something closer to a controlled experiment: giving a civilization the chance to solve problems Earth never managed to.
If Mars's colonists, a few thousand years from now, physically stop being "just human" - is that still our civilization, or an entirely different one?
A Type III civilization would need to harness the energy of an ENTIRE galaxy - hundreds of billions of stars at once. Astronomers have already checked 100,000 galaxies looking for one. The result: zero. Let's break down what a Type III civilization actually is, and why it seemingly doesn't exist anywhere.
A scale that's hard to even picture
On the Kardashev scale, a Type III civilization harnesses the energy not of a single planet or star, but of an entire galaxy - roughly 4×10³⁷ watts, the combined output of hundreds of billions of stars. For comparison, Type II (a single star) is already "just" 4×10²⁶ watts - billions of times less. Back in 1964, Kardashev himself calculated that at an energy-consumption growth rate of just 1% a year, humanity would reach Type III status in roughly 5,800 years.
How you'd even spot one
The leading hypothesis: if a civilization envelops every star in a galaxy with "Dyson spheres" - swarms of energy collectors - those structures can't just absorb light forever; they have to radiate the excess as heat in the infrared range. So the entire galaxy would look dimmer in visible light and anomalously bright in infrared.
The search has already happened - and the result is disappointing
In 2015, a team led by Jason Wright at Penn State screened 100,000 galaxies using data from the WISE telescope as part of the G-HAT project. Not one showed signs of a civilization using more than 85% of its galaxy's starlight. Further analysis of the same dataset reached an even harsher conclusion: advanced Type III civilizations, as far as anyone can tell, simply don't exist in the nearby universe.
Why this is a paradox in itself
In 1975, astrophysicist Michael Hart pointed out that even slow interstellar colonization - ships traveling at just 0.1% of light speed, pausing 1,000 years at every star - would fill an entire galaxy in about 100 million years, just 1/100th of the Milky Way's age. The jump from Type II to Type III should be cosmologically fast. So either Type II civilizations are also essentially nonexistent, or something is systematically stopping them from advancing further.
There's an even more exotic version of Type III
Some researchers propose a different scenario: instead of enveloping billions of individual stars, an advanced civilization could tap the supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center as a single energy source for an entire "galactic club" - something like one shared power grid for the whole Milky Way, rather than billions of separate solar panels.
The most telling detail
In 2021, researchers from China and the Netherlands did flag two galaxies with suspiciously anomalous infrared emissions out of 21 surveyed - but even the study's authors stress these are only candidates, not a confirmed discovery.
If a Type III civilization really doesn't exist anywhere, does that mean reaching that level is nearly impossible - or that no civilization ever actually wanted to?
@tolik12308 that's exactly what makes the Fermi Paradox so haunting
A Type III civilization would need to harness the energy of an ENTIRE galaxy - hundreds of billions of stars at once. Astronomers have already checked 100,000 galaxies looking for one. The result: zero. Let's break down what a Type III civilization actually is, and why it seemingly doesn't exist anywhere.
A scale that's hard to even picture
On the Kardashev scale, a Type III civilization harnesses the energy not of a single planet or star, but of an entire galaxy - roughly 4×10³⁷ watts, the combined output of hundreds of billions of stars. For comparison, Type II (a single star) is already "just" 4×10²⁶ watts - billions of times less. Back in 1964, Kardashev himself calculated that at an energy-consumption growth rate of just 1% a year, humanity would reach Type III status in roughly 5,800 years.
How you'd even spot one
The leading hypothesis: if a civilization envelops every star in a galaxy with "Dyson spheres" - swarms of energy collectors - those structures can't just absorb light forever; they have to radiate the excess as heat in the infrared range. So the entire galaxy would look dimmer in visible light and anomalously bright in infrared.
The search has already happened - and the result is disappointing
In 2015, a team led by Jason Wright at Penn State screened 100,000 galaxies using data from the WISE telescope as part of the G-HAT project. Not one showed signs of a civilization using more than 85% of its galaxy's starlight. Further analysis of the same dataset reached an even harsher conclusion: advanced Type III civilizations, as far as anyone can tell, simply don't exist in the nearby universe.
Why this is a paradox in itself
In 1975, astrophysicist Michael Hart pointed out that even slow interstellar colonization - ships traveling at just 0.1% of light speed, pausing 1,000 years at every star - would fill an entire galaxy in about 100 million years, just 1/100th of the Milky Way's age. The jump from Type II to Type III should be cosmologically fast. So either Type II civilizations are also essentially nonexistent, or something is systematically stopping them from advancing further.
There's an even more exotic version of Type III
Some researchers propose a different scenario: instead of enveloping billions of individual stars, an advanced civilization could tap the supermassive black hole at a galaxy's center as a single energy source for an entire "galactic club" - something like one shared power grid for the whole Milky Way, rather than billions of separate solar panels.
The most telling detail
In 2021, researchers from China and the Netherlands did flag two galaxies with suspiciously anomalous infrared emissions out of 21 surveyed - but even the study's authors stress these are only candidates, not a confirmed discovery.
If a Type III civilization really doesn't exist anywhere, does that mean reaching that level is nearly impossible - or that no civilization ever actually wanted to?
In 1950, Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues one question over lunch that still has no answer: "So where is everybody?" The galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and plenty of time for even a slow starship to circle it completely. And yet - total silence. Let's break down why we see no traces of a galactic civilization.
The contradiction itself, in numbers
Even at a speed far slower than light, a starship would need roughly a million years to circle the entire Milky Way. The galaxy itself is about 10 billion years old. That's more than enough time for at least one civilization to have spread across the whole galaxy - and left some trace behind. Instead, total silence, which scientists have named the "Great Silence."
Explanation #1: they simply don't exist, or barely do
The "Rare Earth" hypothesis argues that the conditions for complex life are so specific - a stable rotational axis thanks to a large moon, plate tectonics, a giant nearby planet absorbing asteroids - that reproducing them elsewhere is nearly impossible. The related "Great Filter" theory (economist Robin Hanson, 1996) goes even further: somewhere on the path from lifeless matter to an interstellar civilization, there's at least one barrier that almost nothing gets past. The scariest part isn't that the filter exists - it's not knowing where it sits. If it's behind us, we're a rare exception, and we got lucky. If it's ahead of us, near-inevitable extinction is still waiting for humanity.
Explanation #2: they exist, but they're hiding
The "Dark Forest" theory, popularized by novelist Liu Cixin, argues the universe is a dangerous place, and every civilization, like a hunter in a dark forest, prefers to stay silent rather than draw the attention of potentially hostile neighbors. The problem with this version: it requires every single civilization to independently arrive at the exact same conclusion that hiding is necessary. It only takes one civilization deciding otherwise, and the "dark forest" instantly gets a bright campfire visible from everywhere.
Explanation #3: they're watching, but not interfering
The "Zoo hypothesis" offers the opposite scenario: advanced civilizations have known about Earth for a long time, but deliberately don't interfere - out of ethical considerations, or simply to avoid disrupting our natural development, like a wildlife preserve.
What if it's not about them at all, but about us
The least dramatic, but also least comforting, explanation: our search covers a literally tiny fraction of the sky, and humanity's radio broadcasting has only existed for about a hundred years - a drop in the ocean compared to the age of the galaxy. Silence so far just means "we haven't looked there yet," not "there's nobody there."
The most telling takeaway
All these hypotheses share one thing: none of them can be proven or disproven with the data we currently have. The Fermi Paradox isn't a riddle with a ready-made answer at the back of the textbook - it's a mirror that every generation of scientists looks into and sees its own fears or hopes reflected back.
Which explanation seems most plausible to you - and which one scares you the most?
In 1950, Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues one question over lunch that still has no answer: "So where is everybody?" The galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and plenty of time for even a slow starship to circle it completely. And yet - total silence. Let's break down why we see no traces of a galactic civilization.
The contradiction itself, in numbers
Even at a speed far slower than light, a starship would need roughly a million years to circle the entire Milky Way. The galaxy itself is about 10 billion years old. That's more than enough time for at least one civilization to have spread across the whole galaxy - and left some trace behind. Instead, total silence, which scientists have named the "Great Silence."
Explanation #1: they simply don't exist, or barely do
The "Rare Earth" hypothesis argues that the conditions for complex life are so specific - a stable rotational axis thanks to a large moon, plate tectonics, a giant nearby planet absorbing asteroids - that reproducing them elsewhere is nearly impossible. The related "Great Filter" theory (economist Robin Hanson, 1996) goes even further: somewhere on the path from lifeless matter to an interstellar civilization, there's at least one barrier that almost nothing gets past. The scariest part isn't that the filter exists - it's not knowing where it sits. If it's behind us, we're a rare exception, and we got lucky. If it's ahead of us, near-inevitable extinction is still waiting for humanity.
Explanation #2: they exist, but they're hiding
The "Dark Forest" theory, popularized by novelist Liu Cixin, argues the universe is a dangerous place, and every civilization, like a hunter in a dark forest, prefers to stay silent rather than draw the attention of potentially hostile neighbors. The problem with this version: it requires every single civilization to independently arrive at the exact same conclusion that hiding is necessary. It only takes one civilization deciding otherwise, and the "dark forest" instantly gets a bright campfire visible from everywhere.
Explanation #3: they're watching, but not interfering
The "Zoo hypothesis" offers the opposite scenario: advanced civilizations have known about Earth for a long time, but deliberately don't interfere - out of ethical considerations, or simply to avoid disrupting our natural development, like a wildlife preserve.
What if it's not about them at all, but about us
The least dramatic, but also least comforting, explanation: our search covers a literally tiny fraction of the sky, and humanity's radio broadcasting has only existed for about a hundred years - a drop in the ocean compared to the age of the galaxy. Silence so far just means "we haven't looked there yet," not "there's nobody there."
The most telling takeaway
All these hypotheses share one thing: none of them can be proven or disproven with the data we currently have. The Fermi Paradox isn't a riddle with a ready-made answer at the back of the textbook - it's a mirror that every generation of scientists looks into and sees its own fears or hopes reflected back.
Which explanation seems most plausible to you - and which one scares you the most?
The father of SETI, Frank Drake, personally regretted sending a message into space back in 1974. Meanwhile, the president of METI is convinced it's already too late to hide. Let's break down why scientists have spent decades unable to agree: should we tell aliens that Earth exists?
The case against - and it comes from the most authoritative voice
Stephen Hawking publicly warned that if an extraterrestrial civilization is advanced enough to reach us, it might see humanity the same way we see bacteria — not as equals, but as a resource. He compared such contact to Columbus's landing in the Americas, which didn't turn out well for Indigenous peoples. Supporters of this position include Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sean Carroll, and even Frank Drake himself, the founder of SETI, who later publicly regretted his own famous 1974 Arecibo transmission toward the star cluster M13.
The case for - from someone who actually sends the messages
Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, considers Hawking's warnings irrational: if a civilization is already capable of reaching Earth, it's surely already capable of picking up our accidental radio and TV signals, which have been leaking into space since the 1930s-40s. By that logic, it's already too late to hide, so it's better to deliberately control what message we send rather than rely on random leakage.
And here's the counter to that counter-argument
Opponents of METI point out that the "too late to hide" argument rests on a shaky assumption: that our accidental signals are even detectable at light-year distances in the first place. This has come to be known as the "Great Leakage Debate" — many scientists, including some critics of METI themselves, argue that the strength of our accidental leakage has been significantly overestimated, and that modern digital broadcasting actually radiates even less than old analog broadcasting did.
Messages have already been sent - more than once
The first attempt at contact dates back to 1962, aimed at Venus. The most famous is the 1974 Arecibo message sent to M13. In 2017, METI transmitted a science and math tutorial to Luyten's Star, a red dwarf 12 light-years from Earth - meaning any reply, if one ever comes, won't arrive for at least 24 years.
The most telling wrinkle in the whole debate
Back in 1989, SETI adopted a declaration of principles: no reply to a detected signal should be sent without international consultation. But those rules only cover responding to a signal already received - they do nothing to stop METI from sending brand-new messages on its own initiative, whenever it wants, without permission from the UN or any global body. The question of "who speaks for Earth" remains wide open.
This is one of those rare scientific disputes where both sides of the barricade are held by recognized astrophysicists, not amateurs. Which side are you on - Hawking's caution, or Vakoch's initiative?
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