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Timothy Ferris

Timothy Ferris Professor (Emeritus): University of California Berkeley Fellow: Guggenheim, AAAS Producer: Life Beyond Earth (PBS); Voyager Golden Record (NASA) Author: Coming of Age in the Milky Way (Morrow & Co.)
How will humanity first discover ET Life? Best guess: Biosignatures (but can�t really say with any assurance)� Future life detection possibilities include (biosignatures): Under the surface of Mars In the oceans of the Jovian moons In the spectrum of distant transiting exoplanets Time scale: guess: 10 � 20 years Life is cosmically commonplace Intelligent life seems rare, but it is difficult to assess post-hoc odds estimates with only one example (humanity) Fermi Paradox: If aliens visited Earth in the past it is unlikely that we would know More likely to detect artifacts of intelligence as these would endure longer Examples: Dyson spheres or planetary-scale engineering�
Networking of Interstellar Communications If several Galactic civilizations existed, self-replicating probes might efficiently build a Galactic Internet Published by Ferris in 1975 (before our terrestrial Internet!) 10 (say) probes (moving at 0.1 c, say) set up 10 stations and each then builds ten more probes, etc. Communications and reconnaissance network of a billion nodes can be created in only 100,000 years Civilizations can upload their histories when then become aware of the network Might be more efficient for humanity to find our local node than try to recreate everything ourselves