Slashdot Mirror
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!)."
No one's gunna pay attention to us until we have warp drive anyway.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
Well, the problem with radio signals is that they degrade so fast, and the fact that what we transmit will probably not be intelligible to any foreign species, they may get the drift that we are semi-intelligent, but probably not enough information to decipher where we are from or our purpose. With physical artifacts, as long as the beings can see visible light, there is a good chance that they can get a good jist of what we are trying to convey. We can draw pictures of humans and animals and plants on our planet, and possible draw basic symbols and graphs to make out basic mathematical concepts, and possibly the general location of Earth. While it would be much more difficult to locate a physical object than a radio signal, the short range of a radio way probably makes it impractical for long distance communication in space. Of course, there is the possibility of physical objects degrading with time, but with proper materials this should be pretty limited.
thisnukes4u.net
Pardon me while I step out to light up my giant "WELCOME TO EARTH" sign.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
slashdotted - try this http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1028302004 /
Oh what are you thinking?!
Everybody knows that if you send some genetically engineered organism into the vastness of space, it will only return far more advanced - and destroy us for sending it's ancestors to a dark and empty prison.
Duh.
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
Slashdotted my ass. We were never supposed to know about this. The government cover-up is underway.
...it read "PH1RST P0ST!!!"
Don't worry, NASA scientists have already modded them down.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
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.
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. :)
This is probably the key point. Yes, the energy density decreases with square of distance, but that just means you have to stare longer to see the signal. This is how telescopes can measure faint stars. If they look longer, more photons arrive. So if we sent a modulated signal (e.g., amplitude, frequency, phase) it would still reach other planets in a readible form. The modulation would just have to be very slow so they don't integrate the whole modulation over the "staring" period.
The first assumption I make is that it has to be water-based organic life. It has to be water...
Not necessarily. On a somewhat cooler world than ours with 4-5% flourine in the atmosphere, water would be immediately broken down into oxygen and hydroflouric acid, which is liquid in the -83 to 19.4 C range.
This works because "plants" could function by photosynthesis with HF in place of water and carbon tetraflouride in place of carbon dioxide to produce H-C-F chain compounds and liberate free flourine, with nickel as the catalyst in place of the magnesium in chlorophyll. We'd have to postulate higher UV energy levels as well to provide enough decomposition energy, but that goes along with a thinner atmosphere and lower temperatures without much of a stretch.
"Animal" soft tissues in this scenario would be about the same as the plants, but hard tissues would be produced by the reaction
{ H-C-F } + F2 -> { F-C-F } + HF
resulting in a teflon boned and shelled organism, probably one muther-tough sonofabitch. His main energy reaction would be
{ H-C-F } + F2 -> CF4 + HF
with a blood catalyst metal of titanium, which would result in colorless arterial blood and violet veinous, as the titanium flips back and forth between tri- and tetra-valent states. So he'd probably be a good deal more energetic than us 02-running organisms as well.
Given what we know about vulcanism on the outer moons and so forth, I wouldn't be surprised to find that a scenario along these lines is rather more probable around the universe than the local one we're familiar with.
Their technology would be rather different than ours too, since no terrestial style organic matter is possible, and there wouldn't be much around except flourides; no oxides, sulfides, silicates, or chlorides. All metallurgy would have to be electrical. Oh, and they probably wouldn't be good mountain climbers either, since flourides are structurally weak; nothing tough like granite to make mountains out of. So technological progress seems a trifle unlikely. But *shrug* they'd probably think that about Earth, too...
>Why bother?
Well, it's a feel-good PR thing and it probably cost next-to-nothing relative to the overall project and it maybe it helped get the project through appropriations.
"Look, here's our interplanetary probe, and oh, we've engraved our likeness on a plaque with a greeting in case anyone finds it! *wink*"
"Remarkable! What do you think aliens would do if they found it?"
"Oh, it's likely that an intelligent alien civilization will want to find the makers of this probe and pay us a visit to share their knowledge. Isn't that nice!?"
meanwhile, just outside the orbit of Neptune...
"Hey Glargh, look at this..."
"Oh, how cute -- another one of those 'hey, we are here please come visit' things. What should we do?"
"You know standing order #412,323.443!"
"Oh, right -- let's make it look like an accident. Hey, here's a nice, big asteroid in a goofy orbit between the 4th and 5th planet -- just a little nudge... there. Now, in about 100 orbital rotations or so, they'll get a visit they'll never forget!"
"Glargh, its moments like these when it all seems worthwhile."
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
ncevysbby is aprilfool rot13'ed
Nobody seems to have noticed this paragraph of the Article: So, everytime they detected it it started at 1420 MHz and then started shifting? How could asignal from 1000 Lightyears away react in such a way? Do you think the aliens restart the signal every time we are looking?
No, sorry, everyone. This looks pretty much. like a malfunction of the telescope in Arecibo.
You there, you must be almost thirty. Have you ever kissed a girl?