The latest from Centauri Dreams

A New Tilt on SETI

The planets in our Solar System rotate around the Sun more or less in a plane (the ecliptic) that is tilted some sixty degrees with relation to the galactic disk. It's interesting to speculate that this could have ramifications in terms of the SETI hunt. Shmuel Nussinov (Tel Aviv University) considers the possibility that any extraterrestrial civilizations might try to contact us only after they had a fair idea we were here. And just as we are now trying, via Kepler and CoRoT, to track down small planets using the transit method, so too might extraterrestrials try to observe our transits, and having done so, to transmit a message.