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SETI Finds Interesting Signal
Several readers sent in notes about an interesting signal discovered by SETI. No real evidence of Someone Out There, but not fully explainable either. Another reader submits a blurb suggesting that aliens should send spacemail, not signals: "Rutgers electrical engineering professor, Christopher Rose, has an article on Nature magazine's cover today describing the most efficient way for our civilization to be discovered by aliens. On this question of better to 'write or radiate', his conclusions: better not to send radio transmission, when physical media like DNA on an asteroid can declare a terrestrial presence. Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip. Rose has some great information payload sizes as examples (like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)."
slashdotted - try this http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1028302004 /
1/r^2 stands true for all electromagnetic waves. That means the intensity of the signal will decrease by the square of its distance.
A blog like any other.
how do we even know what to start looking for?
It is a common misunderstanding that the SETI project is decoding radio signals and trying to listen to some sort of alien language. What SETI is actually doing is looking for radio signals that are not from Earth. They are rather easy to find because as the Earth spins, it will create a very predictable increase and decrease in the frequency of radio waves that are not from Earth (simple doppler effect). Waves produced from the Earth have a near constant frequency because both the sender and receiver and spinning around the Earth at the same time.
An interesting signal is one that is from off-planet. It gets more interesting if the direction of origin is some other galaxy. It gets even more interesting if there is no scientific reason for any object in that galaxy to produce the signal. Finally, with all that checked, someone might try to see if the radio waves are transmitting an actual message - or we can beam our favorite Simpsons episodes right back to source to prove our own intelligence.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
SETI isn't looking for messages people are sending us, it's looking for evidence that somebody out there is communicating by radio. As an example, other civilizations within about fifty light-years or so would be able to pick up TV signals from us, and radio could be detected for almost twice the distance. None of these are intended as extra-terrestrial communications, but they'd be evidence that we're here.
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I sent in this article - very cool read and makes me wish for FTL travel!
...There are other oddities. For instance, the signal's frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. "The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that's rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet," Korpela says.
New Scientist is reporting that the signal "also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope...*snip*
Here is an article that is un-slashdotted as of 0057 Universal Time.
Sorry, but Vulcan women, and in fact Vulcans in general, aren't logical, they're just stoic. If they were really logical, they'd realize that logic can only be applied in situations where one has reliable axioms, which excludes the vast majority of all common situations (I say this as a math major). Furthermore, I'd wager that in cases where one doesn't have enough information to make a "logical" decision, it's usually much wiser to follow one's emotions.
Since the Vulcans are too dumb to figure this stuff out and follow a philosophy we abandoned that hit its peak and quickly declined about two thousand years ago, I'd say that they are too dumb to have actually created warp technology on their own and they must have just stolen the technology from another civilization.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Someone else posted this: Signal Candidate SHGb02+14a
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
I know scotsman.com looks fishy, but it's not a troll link, folks. It's news.scotsman.com, Scotland's national newspaper online. It's not a troll. I'll bet my karma on it. :)
I'll try to explain.
The radiation radiates from a point (more or less). As the radiation travels it forms an expanding sphere. The energy from the initial burst of radiation is spread out over the surface area of this sphere.
As the surface area is proportional to the square of the radius, the energy dissipates at a rate of 1/r^2.
For the energy to dissipate at a rate of 1/r^3 it would need to be spread throughout the sphere, as the volumne is proportional to the cube of the radius.
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About the only thing i can say to you is N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L
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===GEEK ALERT=== (You have been warned)
The original series specfically addressed Vulcan "logic" as more of an unemotional state. Their idea is to make a decision based on rational thinking, utilizing the facts at their disposal. The Vulcans/Surak felt they must follow such a course because their powerful emotions were destroying their society.
Furthermore, I'd wager that in cases where one doesn't have enough information to make a "logical" decision, it's usually much wiser to follow one's emotions.
Actually, that was sort of the point of Kirk and Spock's relationship. Spock tempered Kirk's impulses, while Kirk showed Spock that emotions can be a valuable asset when making decisions.
Since the Vulcans are too dumb to figure this stuff out and follow a philosophy we abandoned that hit its peak and quickly declined about two thousand years ago, I'd say that they are too dumb to have actually created warp technology on their own and they must have just stolen the technology from another civilization.
Have you been watching Enterprise? Those aren't Vulcans! They're dumbasses in robes and bowl cuts POSING as Vulcans! I'm willing to bet that they're really aliens created by future guy to slow down human development! The real Vulcans were shang-hied by future guy before they met Cochrane! Or maybe Enterprise just sucks. Hmm...
===/GEEK ALERT===
Putting the technobabble aside for a moment, the Vulcans were a plot device that Roddenbery used to explore the human condition. It's quite common in writing to take a human trait to an extreme or remove it so as to use the contrast to better explore the attribute. In the case of Star Trek, the "emotional" vs. "unemotional" contrast allowed the strengths and weaknesses of each approach to become obvious.
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1/r^2 stands true for all electromagnetic waves. That means the intensity of the signal will decrease by the square of its distance.
This isn't a true statement depending on what exactly you mean...
For one the range of the electromagnetic force is infinite (see this for more information).
Second the inverse square law comes from the fact that the area of the shell of radiation coming off of a point source (star for example) increases to the square of the radius from the source (basic geometry). Yet the amount of energy (number of photons in the case of electromagnetic radiation) that is in that shell of radiation is constant so the density of those photons reduces by the inverse of the square of the distance (See this for a graphical explination.)
So if you look at a given photon traveling through space its "signal" will not weaken with the square of the distance, if it did this universe would be a dark dark place (also it would break the concept of quanta).
Also if you have photons traveling parallel to each other then the inverse square law doesn't apply because you have not radius to begin with.
Now it is hard to get fully parallel photons but you can get close (lasers, maser, etc.) and the closer you get the greater the radius of the theoretical point source for the signal. The greater the radius of the point source the father the signal can propagate before the exponential effects of the inverse square law begins to take hold.
So yes it is likely that the inverse square law applies to signals such as these but the point source radius to use in the calculation can be relatively huge if you take steps to focus the signal (attempt to have the photons travel in a parallel beam).
Lasers aren't actually parallel. They are diffraction limited. The smaller the collimation the more quickly they diverge. A big diameter laser can have a lower divergence, but then the energy density is also lower. And still, over the distances we're talking about it would still be a huge spot size.
So here I am sitting around wondering when this will hit Slashdot, so I send the link to my buddies and stuff and go "damn, site's offline" and curse the script kiddies and go on with my day.
:)
But it was you guys all along! [StrongBad tear]
Seriously. To your credit, I first found out about SETI@Home on Slashdot and ran it for years on spare computers.
Now I have made SHGb02+14a my beeyotch.
Then you guys Slashdotted the article before my mom could see it.
If they were really logical, they'd realize that logic can only be applied in situations where one has reliable axioms, which excludes the vast majority of all common situations (I say this as a math major).
You say this as a math major who needs to do one of a) get his money back, b) pay more attention, or c) transfer to a better school.
Ok, that was harsh. You won't find a better school anywhere, so I guess it's not your fault.
Logic isn't a field of study that began in mathematics - it's a field of philosophy, specifically in epistemology (the study of how we come to know things). Actual logic is the doctrine that our ideas, to be correct, must conform to reality. That is, ideas must be derived from reality primarily by observation and by processes which are themselves derived from the actual relationships amongst actual things in the physical world (again, observation). Logic most specifically does not start with axioms from which all other knowledge is then derived.
Yeah, that philosophy was abandoned about two thousand years ago - and look what replaced it: the Dark Ages. If it hadn't been for Thomas Aquinas re-introducing that philosophy through the works of Aristotle, we might never have recovered from abandoning those oh-so-declined ideas.
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL