It's a moment that's been depicted countless times in science fiction -- but what would actually happen when extraterrestrials make contact via a signal picked up on Earth? The moment could come as early as the end of this decade: if aliens receive signals sent by NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) to the Pioneer 10 satellite in the 70s, for example. When the moment comes, the signal is most likely to be received by large ground-based telescopes such as FAST in China, the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico and the Parkes Telescope in Australia, says former NASA expert Sylvester Kaczmarek. There is no universally agreed rule on how scientists or governments would respond - or on questions such as whether aliens would have rights. But extraterrestrial-focused organisations including the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) drew up a framework in 2010.

A film premiering next month will shine a light on a secret U.S. group which UFO researchers claim is helping to cover up the discovery of alien spacecraft. The film, God versus Aliens, has interviews with two experts about the'Collins Elite', a supposed secretive group within the U.S. military which has helped to cover up alien abductions and crashed spacecraft since the 1950s. British director of the film Mark Christopher Lee said: 'A lot of people know about Majestic 12, a supposed committee of military leaders and politicians interested in UFOs: it's out there in pop culture, along with Area 51. 'But two of my interviewees believe that this is a smokescreen, and the real organization is the Collins Elite, based in the Wright Patterson Air Base [in Ohio]. 'These people are said to work in a private organization on behalf of the government, because there are no freedom of information requests (FOIA) to private companies.' The Wright Patterson Air Base was home to the Project Blue Book investigation into UFO reports which began in 1947 - and there have been previous rumors of a secret'UFO room' at the base.

A Harvard professor believes aliens will not make first contact with humans but instead will communicate with artificial intelligence. Avi Loeb shared the theory in a new documentary, God Versus Aliens, slated for July, in which he suggests extraterrestrials will send AI drones to Earth rather than'crewed' vehicles. Directed by British musician and TV director Mark Christopher Lee described Loeb as a'very active mind' but explained Loeb's suggestion is based on the vast distance aliens could have to travel to reach us. 'Loeb proposes that it's likely to be some form of AI because why would you send flesh and blood creatures?' Lee said. 'That means there's a possibility that their AI could just connect with AI and bypass humans, which is a bit scary to think about.

Futurists of the 1990s predicted that we'd be living underwater or riding flying cars by this point -- but now experts are warning of a much scarier future. Other predictions include making contact with aliens -- but whether or not that's a bad thing remains unknown. It's not all doom and gloom, though, with technology expected to have made the afterlife possible. AI'overlords' could turn everyone into serfs Right now, people are focused on AI potentially causing job losses - but the reality could be far worse. That's according to George Stakhov, chief strategy officer for the global ad agency DDB EMEA who created an AI tool named'The Uncreative Agency'.

Refined stellar yardstick helps astronomers improve stellar evolution models. A globular cluster as seen by the Hubble telescope. Researchers working on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts hunt for the same thing that their predecessors sought for decades--a sign that life arose, as Carl Sagan would say, on another humdrum planet around another humdrum star and rose up into something technologically advanced. It could happen any day. A weird, brief flash in the night sky.

If tech experts are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world. But those same experts don't agree on what kind of effect that transformation will have on the average person. Some believe that humans will be much better off in the hands of advanced AI systems, while others think it will lead to our inevitable downfall. How could a single technology evoke such vastly different responses from people within the tech community? Artificial intelligence is software built to learn or problem solve -- processes typically performed in the human brain.

Aliens could trigger apocalypse on Earth without even visiting our planet. That's according to a new study by scientists in Hawaii that claims ET could send humanity a message hiding malicious AI. We should consider deleting messages from aliens without reading them to avoid havoc on Earth, the researchers claim. Not only do these messages have the potential to contain AI that can shut down power systems, opening them can also alert aliens to our whereabouts. Aliens could trigger apocalypse on Earth without even visiting our planet.

January 5, 2018 --The idea that there might be gigantic alien structures orbiting a distant star just bit the dust. After citizen astronomers spotted data in 2015 revealing that KIC 8462852, a star about 1,000 light years away, was dimming and brightening in a strange way, one of many explanations proposed by astronomers involved some sort of "megastructures" orbiting the star – perhaps built by aliens to harvest stellar energy. That imaginative suggestion rocketed the star to fame. But Louisiana State University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian and colleagues collected more data on the star, nicknamed "Tabby's Star" for Dr. Boyajian, and they found that the star's strange flickering was thanks to something much more mundane: ordinary dust. We see it in many different ways, and the data that we took showed a clear signature of this being what we would see from dust," Boyajian says. This may be a disappointing outcome for those hoping for proof of an alien civilization. But Tabby's Star's rise to stardom highlights a deeply entrenched human psychological quirk: When presented with a puzzling phenomenon, our knee-jerk instinct is to ask not what created it, but who. Scientists say that as social animals, we are evolutionarily predisposed to see agency and intentionality in the world around us. And when it comes to astronomical mysteries, aliens seem to fit. "It's the duct tape of science," says Seth Shostak, senior astronomer for the SETI Institute. Because we don't know what aliens might do, they could explain anything. But why do we do that? "It's not just aliens," says Christopher French, a psychologist and founder of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. "We do have a natural tendency to assume that anything odd, or, superficially at least, inexplicable, that there must be some sort of intentionality behind it, some sort of intelligence, there must be a purpose, somebody or something has done that for a particular purpose.

If tech experts are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world. But those same experts don't agree on what kind of effect that transformation will have on the average person. Some believe that humans will be much better off in the hands of advanced AI systems, while others think it will lead to our inevitable downfall. How could a single technology evoke such vastly different responses from people within the tech community? Artificial intelligence is software built to learn or problem solve -- processes typically performed in the human brain.

There's no way of knowing when the machines will take over, but scientists have a prediction about the breakthrough that would have to occur in order for that to happen: the development of an artificial intelligence (AI) system that rivals our own brains. There's an interesting reason why such a system would almost certainly overtake human intelligence and precipitate the rise of machines than are smarter than us - not just equally smart. As director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI), Seth Shostak ends up thinking a lot about AI. He predicts we'll find AI in the universe before we will be able to find the biological beings that might have created it, since computers and various devices can travel great distances much more easily than living beings (just think of the rovers we've sent to Mars). Here on Earth, as well as on other planets, Shostak thinks the exponential rise of computers will eventually allow them to outsmart us.