Image (Credit): NASA provide of Kepler-22 b. (NASA)
We will have to wait for season two of Apple TV’s Pluribus series before learning more about the inhabitants of the fictional Kepler-22 b, which is the source of the “virus” that turned humans in to docile livestock. In the meantime, we can look into facts about the actual exoplanet.
potentially a rocky world, that is larger than Earth,
orbits within the habitable zone of a G-type host star (similar to our sun),
the only exoplanet discovered around this host star to date, and
about 635 light-years away.
You might also remember this exoplanet from HBO Max’s series Raised by Wolves. It is the exoplanet that the main characters escape to after a brutal war on Earth. Kepler-22 b is a strange world in the series, contained odd vegetation, bottomless pits, and an acidic sea. It is not what space dreams are made of, but at least it is not sending out signals to destroy other exoplanets hundreds of light-years away.
While we may not learn anything more about Kepler-22 b from Pluribus, I suppose it may encourage a few individuals to seek out information on the Kepler mission. Who knows, it may even stimulate more interest in our SETI efforts. Then again, if this is the future of space communications, we may want to reconsider the whole enterprise.
Credit:NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
Note: Under the Kepler numbering scheme, the “22” in Kepler-22 b means that it was the 22nd host star discovered, while the “b” indicates it was the first exoplanet found orbitting that host star.
If you have questions about UFOs, now fashionable called Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) to presumably add some seriousness and move it away from the kooky crowd, you might want to check out the upcoming film The Age of Disclosure. It will be available on November 21 on Amazon Prime as well as at select theaters.
Here is the trailer, which might entice you. It has the draw of many entertainment thrillers, and reminds me of the endless videos on YouTube and even Netflix describing secrets only a few know. It comes across as an updated version of the search for Bigfoot and the Arch of the Covenant rolled into one.
The film description states:
The Age of Disclosure is an unprecedented and revelatory film –featuring 34 senior members of the U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community– revealing a cover-up of the existence of non-human intelligent life and a secret war to reverse engineer technology of non-human origin.
The film exposes the profound impact the situation has on the future of humanity, while providing a look behind-the-scenes with those at the forefront of the bi-partisan disclosure effort.
An explosive documentary that reveals an 80-year global cover-up of non-human intelligent life and a secret war among major nations to reverse-engineer advanced technology of non-human origin. Featuring testimony from 34 U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community insiders, the film exposes the profound stakes for the future of humanity.
One of the officials in the trailer is Senator Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State Rubio. If there is any bit of truth to all of this, we should be asking for these UAP files instead of the Epstein files.
The films creator, Dan Farah, was on Real Time with Bill Maher last week discussing the film. You can find the podcast here. Mr. Farah discusses how these non-human actors live in the sea and seem to have appeared right around the time the nuclear age started. Of course, this is also after World War II when new forms of flight and related spying was underway, but why mess up the story.
Mr. Farah also seems surprised they are seen around our military facilities, as if this would not be a prime target for any outside party, human or otherwise. He then states:
…there’s been a few events where UAP activity over nuclear weapon sites has activated the missiles in some case and then turned them off in some cases. And it’s obviously a display of power of some sort. You know, your guess is as good as mine of what the intention is, but it’s concerning.
All of this sounds pretty amazing, yet I think it is more an amazing paste job of various quotes that are then repurposed to create a more dramatic story. For that reason, it may be better for the uninitiated, or just the regular newspaper readers who do not get their news from social media, to first go through the material from the very group set up to study all of this, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, as well as various congressional hearings on this matter. Then you can make up your own mind.
Here are a few congressional hearings to get you started on your search:
We already have too many conspiracies upsetting the public and breeding mistrust of all government entities. Its time to breath and read up on this material yourself.
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.
Applying a principle of “radical mundanity”, this paper examines explanations for the lack of strong evidence for the presence of technology-using extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) in the Galaxy – the Fermi paradox. With this principle, the prospect that the Galaxy contains a modest number of civilizations is preferred, where none have achieved technology levels sufficient to accomplish large-scale astro-engineering or lack the desire to do so. This consideration also leads to the expectation that no ETC will colonize a large fraction of the Galaxy, even using robotic probes, and that there are no long-duration high-power beacons. However, there is a reasonable chance that we may make contact on a short, by historical standards, timescale. This event would be momentous, but could still leave us slightly disappointed. Such a Universe would be less terrifying than either of the two possibilities in the quote generally attributed to Arthur C. Clarke on whether we are alone or not. Also, if there is a modest number of ETCs in the Galaxy, that would suggest that there is a large number of planets with some form of life.
Citation: Robin H.D. Corbet. A less terrifying universe? Mundanity as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox. arXiv.org (2025).
Credit: Image by Juan Agustín Correa Torrealba from Pixabay
Here is the next part of my conversation with ChatGPT, which builds on a from post a few weeks back (see The Future of AI and the Human Race). I had earlier asked ChatGPT about the possibility of AI becoming so powerful that it takes over the world. In my follow-up question, I asked “Is it possible that civilizations on other planets went down this same path developing AI and now those planets are completely under the control of that AI?”
ChatGPT agreed that AI-run exoplanets were certainly a possibility, and then went on to provide a useful list of items for astronomers and others as part of any search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI ) project, whatever its form. It says a lot about what we might look for and, on the other side of the coin, what might happen here if we cannot control our own AI.
Here is the response from ChatGPT:
Yes — it is absolutely possible, at least in theory. In fact, the idea that alien civilizations may have developed powerful AI that eventually dominated or replaced them is taken seriously by some scientists, philosophers, and SETI researchers. It’s one of several hypotheses meant to explain the Fermi Paradox — the question: “If intelligent life is common in the universe, why haven’t we seen any evidence of it?”
…if alien civilizations have been overtaken or replaced by powerful AI, we’d need to look for signs that differ from biological life. These are often called “technosignatures” — indicators of advanced technology in space.
Here are the most discussed possibilities:
🛰️
1. Megastructures
AI civilizations might build huge structures to capture or manipulate energy.
Most famous example: Dyson Spheres — giant constructs around a star to collect solar energy.
What we’d look for:
Stars that dim strangely (irregular or partial light-blocking)
Infrared excess (waste heat from large artificial structures)
🌟 Example: Tabby’s Star (KIC 8462852) sparked interest due to odd dimming — a potential (but unconfirmed) Dyson Sphere candidate.
🔥
2. Unusual Waste Heat
AI civilizations doing massive computation would produce a lot of heat, radiating in the infrared spectrum.
They might not glow visibly — but their waste heat might.
What we’d look for:
Galaxies or regions with excess infrared radiation, not explained by stars or dust.
🧠
3. Matrioshka Brains
A hypothetical structure made of nested Dyson shells built to maximize computing power around a star.
This could be the “home” of a superintelligent AI.
What we’d look for:
Stars that appear to be missing or emit only infrared
Odd energy usage patterns from a star system
📡
4. Non-natural Radio or Laser Signals
Traditional SETI still listens for structured, repeating, or narrow-band signals — which might come from:
AI probes communicating
Beacons left by extinct civilizations
Machine intelligence that uses EM signals for local tasks
What we’d look for:
Artificial radio pulses or bursts
Laser flashes between stars
🚀
5. Von Neumann Probes
Self-replicating robots designed to explore (or consume) the galaxy.
AI-run civilizations might send these out indefinitely.
What we’d look for:
Objects in our solar system behaving non-gravitationally
Anomalous interstellar visitors (e.g., ʻOumuamua sparked speculation — though nothing was confirmed)
🪨
6. Artificial Planetary Engineering
Planets might be reshaped, mined hollow, or covered in data-processing infrastructure.
What we’d look for:
Planets with strange albedo patterns
Orbital debris not matching natural formation
Lack of biological signatures where you’d expect them
👁️
7. Absence of Expected Life
A galaxy teeming with AI may show less chaos than one full of competing biological species.
What we’d look for:
An eerie quietness — stars undisturbed, systems oddly uniform, no wars or expansion
Could mean AI civilizations are efficient, hidden, or choose not to expand
🤫
Why might we not see anything?
They could be incredibly small and efficient
They may avoid detection for safety (“dark forest” theory)
Their tech may operate in physics regimes we don’t understand
Image (Credit): Artist’s rending of the Perseverance Mars rover on the Martian surface. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
”Based on data from the last 20 years, we found that if an extraterrestrial intelligence were in a location that could observe the alignment of Earth and Mars, there’s a 77% chance that they would be in the path of one of our transmissions — orders of magnitude more likely than being in a random position at a random time.”
Our Awesome Universe 