Jessamyn Fairfield

speaker

401 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jessamyn Fairfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · What happens when you're struck by lightning? · 21 Jun 2026 podcast

And these are things that our civilization has been making for like 100 years or so now.

But basically the idea is if the band of radio emission is really, really narrow, then that couldn't have come from any sort of star eating another star or something.

It has to have come from an advanced civilization.

And we have not seen any of that yet.

Right.

So this new study actually proposes a reason why, which is that when people look at these signals that have been presumably if they if they did exist, they would have been transmitted over large swaths of the universe.

There has been a compensation for distortion that can come from that long transmission.

But no one had previously looked at within a solar system if those radio bands are being emitted.

How could they be distorted or changed?

And it turns out that actually space weather, you know, the stuff that is coming from the sun, like these sort of plasma ejections, any sort of really strong solar winds or different types of space weather that, you know, we are very used to seeing and seeing how that interacts with things like satellites here in our solar system, that would change the type of signals that SETI has been looking for as well.

And it would make them more broad in the radio frequency spectrum, which means that SETI might not have been able to detect them.

Exactly.

And one of the issues, now that we know that this is true, is they found that actually there would be really strong effects from what are called M-type dwarf stars, which is 75% of the stars in the Milky Way are that kind of star.

So lots of places that we might be looking for extraterrestrial life

we would see that kind of distortion and thus would not be able to pick up the sort of fingerprint in radio frequencies that we've been looking for.

Well, to me, the thing that's always interesting about this kind of like looking for these narrow frequency radio bands is like that presumes that all technological development would follow the same path that we've followed.

Which isn't necessarily true.

We're looking for the fingerprint of a civilization like ours.

We haven't found it yet.

And this kind of indicates one reason why.

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