Coming This December: ET Intelligence

Introduction

The Foundation’s next Mensa Research Journal asks not just whether we’re alone — but what another form of intelligence might look like.

Unleashing intelligence for the benefit of humanity also means widening our sense of what intelligence is, where it might exist, and how science can tell the difference between wonder and evidence. The December issue, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, brings together leading thinkers who ground a sensational topic in data, logic, and curiosity — exploring how likely alien life may be, how we might recognize it, and what our own assumptions reveal about us.

Here’s what’s inside.

• A new classroom take on the Drake Equation uses it not as an answer machine, but as a conversation starter, a way to teach how we reason about the unknown.
• A reassessment of the Fermi Paradox suggests that Fermi’s doubt and Drake’s optimism can coexist — and that the silence of the stars might tell us something meaningful about our own expectations.
• Updated exoplanet data put fresh numbers behind Drake’s terms, turning abstract speculation into a more grounded estimate of cosmic possibilities.
• A challenge to the “hard-steps” model of evolution argues that intelligence may not be the long shot we thought, but an emergent feature once conditions align.
• A quantitative comparison of microbes versus civilizations weighs which we’re likelier to detect first and why both searches matter.
• A preview of how life may first be detected points to exoplanet atmospheres and biosignature gases, not radio beacons, as our best first clues.
• A game-theory model of the “Great Silence” imagines a galaxy full of listeners, each waiting for someone else to speak first.
• A reflection on human bias asks whether we could even recognize alien intelligence if it doesn’t resemble our own.
• And finally, an anonymous meditation, “Immaculate Constellation,” paired with the Department of Defense’s 2024 AARO report on unidentified anomalous phenomena, reminds us that discovery often begins in ambiguity.

Subscribe now to receive your MRJ issue on Extraterrestrial Intelligence this December — and every issue of the Mensa Research Journal, published by the Mensa Foundation.

While You Wait: Free Reading from the Frontier

• The Case for Technosignatures (Wright et al., 2022)
  Makes the case that alien technology — waste heat, engineered light, even planetary-scale industry —  could be easier to detect than alien biology and argues that SETI should be treated as mainstream science.
• Relative Likelihood of Success in the Search for Primitive vs. Intelligent Life (Lingam & Loeb, 2019)
  Weighs the numbers between two great searches: for microbes and for civilizations. The odds lean toward microbes, but either discovery would redefine life itself.
• NASA Technosignatures Workshop Report (2018)
  The official report that reopened NASA’s study of technosignatures, laying out how we might detect alien technology through radio, laser, or atmospheric clues.
• Starry Messages: Searching for Signatures of Interstellar Archaeology (Carrigan Jr., 2010)
  Introduces the idea of “interstellar archaeology”: searching for relics of long-lost civilizations, such as Dyson spheres, probes, or other evidence of vanished intelligence.

And here are a handful of others that landed on the cutting room floor. The issue’s jam-packed, but we couldn’t fit everything!

• Do We Live in a Simulation? On the Probability of a Posthuman Civilization Running an Ancestral Simulation (Greaves & Ord, 2021)
  A philosophical deep dive into the simulation hypothesis — not science fiction, but a serious analysis of whether advanced civilizations might simulate conscious beings like us.
• New Constraints on DMS and DMDS in the Atmosphere of K2-18 b from JWST MIRI (Madhusudhan et al., 2023)
  A cutting-edge JWST study probing the atmosphere of a potentially habitable exoplanet. It refines what we can (and can’t yet) say about chemical signatures of life beyond Earth.
• Sharpening the Fermi Paradox (Armstrong, 2013)
  A clear, quantitative update on Fermi’s famous question, examining how even modest assumptions make a silent galaxy statistically puzzling.
• Timelessness Strictly Inside the Quantum Realm (Oppenheim, 2021)
  A theoretical exploration of how “time” behaves — or fails to exist — in quantum systems, raising provocative implications for what consciousness and intelligence might mean at the smallest scales.

Because exploring intelligence beyond Earth is also an exploration of our own.