SETI & Crunching news

Every year SETI.Germany organizes an event in honor of the 41th Anniversary of the Wow! signal. This year's event takes place from 15 to 29 August . Further information can be found here .

A group of SETI astronomers led by Duncan Forgan, and including myself and BSRC director Andrew Siemion, has published a revised version of the Rio Scale. The Rio Scale is designed to predict the public impact a signal would have, like the Richter scale does for earthquakes. The prior version of the Rio scale, in addition to being rarely used, tended to overestimate the impact of low quality or low significance reports of detection.

Now all we have to do is convince other SETI astronomers and the press to use it.

There is a related article at GeekWire.

A calculator for Rio 2.0 scores in now available here.

The HBO series VICE will be broadcasting an episode with a segment entitled "Are we alone?" starting June 1 at 11pm EST. It will be available on HBO streaming service, HBO GO, at 7:30pm EST.

The segment includes interviews with the father of modern SETI, Frank Drake, and a SETI@home volunteer, John Fluth, who has been a part of the project nearly as long as I have. We'll be interested in seeing your reaction to this piece.

Trailers are available through facebook and twitter.