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SETI Researcher Quashes Signal Rumors
brainstyle writes "According to Dan Wertheimer of SETI the whole ET signal excitement is more hype than science. I told myself it was in all likelihood nothing special, but I'm still disappointed. Darn."
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With that much denial in one news report, you know it has to be a cover-up
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
No phone home?? darn!
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to believe this too. When will the aliens come so that we may bring rise to the war on inter-galactic terrorism?
~~par
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Instead of the story..
Dan, did you try to map the signal to a 3 dimensional shape? A cube maybe??
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I guess I'll have to take the signs and flares off my roof now. :(
I for one say good riddance to our alien radio-emitting overlords.
Obviously not intelligent.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
We should be fine as long as the signal isn't a countdown.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
What are you hoping they find?
Until they actually know what the source of the signal is, and not just it might be 'an unknown celestial event'. I will hope against hope that someone out there is as interested to talk to us as we are to it.
NPR has a cool piece regarding how radio may not be the best approach to looking for ET life.
It offers a free ipod.
A mention of a possible signal and someone comes out to vehemently deny it? Tinfoil time!
I, for one, retract my welcome of our new alien overlords.
Well done for spotting those subtle clues sherlock.
Radio waves and light [also a radio wave] travel at the same speed through space.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
How the poop are lasers "faster" than radio waves? I think you will find that C is a constant in this neck of the woods.
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The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Wait, lasers are faster then radio waves? The congress just amend some fundamental laws of physics?
Blaze a trail to the New World
"Nyy lbhe onfr..." was all they received. Their best attempts to decrypt the message were unsuccessful.
So now I don't have to be sure to drink my Ovaltine?
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
I try to keep the tinfoil hat in the closet as much as possible, but one can't resist...
Yesterday, we get this quote from Dan Wertheimer:
"It's the most interesting signal from SETI@home. We're not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it."
but today we get:
"It's all hype and noise. We have nothing that is unusual. It's all out of proportion."
and we also get Paul Horowitz:
"It's not much of anything at all. We're not investigating it further."
So yesterday the chief scientist for the project says it's the most interesting signal (which in and of itself just means it was a little different than the rest) and that they will continue to investigate it. But now today it's just a bunch of media hype and they aren't investigating it any further (I'm not sure who Horowitz actually is, but it seems a safe assumption, based on his comment, that he's associated with the project".
Yes, it COULD just be a case of "Oh wow!... Oh no, wait, nothing". Or it could be an outright coverup. I suspect it's something in between, but chains of comments like these really do lead a person down a particular path.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Correct me if I'm wrong, but both lasers are radio waves are electromagentic radiation--just different frequency and phasing--and both travel at the speed of light, c, 3.0E8 m/s.
"Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking." -Mary Poppins
In secret underground bases under the Arizona desert, why do you ask?
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/3621608.stm
see the 2 in the URL ? that denotes US based servers (bbc world edition) if its a 1 its UK servers, great and superquick for the UK but as most of the traffic here is US based its better/quicker to use the designated servers for that area
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that since they're both EM radiation, they both travel at the speed of light.
-Paul
so if this is really nothing and they at SETI aren't interested, where'd all the damn hype come from in the first place? thats what i dont get....who started it, and what happened to them?
i understand its so very probably not an ET signal...but what if it was?
Moo.
So no .... Elvis is alive ?
Really? I thought all EM radiation (i.e. light) propagated at the same speed through space at C = 2.998 x 10^8 m/s? I guess we have to totally redesign physics now that some forms of EM are faster than others . . .
My sources indicate that the message was along the lines of "take me to your leader", but the folks over at the SETI project want to wait until after the US election in November before replying. BTW, here's a sample of the results that users have submitted.
--When it's my time, I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather -- not screaming like all the passengers in his car
Like most of the geeks on this site, I'm afraid we are really all alone...
It is worth noting that TFA says that the signal in question in in the hydrogen absorbtion band. I remember reading old sci-fi stories that speculated that these frequencies would be a good candidate for interstellar communications, since interstellar hydrogen absorbs EM radiation in this frequency, sweeping it clear of noise. Obviously SETI feels the same way, or else they wouln't consider this signal to be "of interest".
If they have found an interstellar signal in this frequency, and it isn't artificial, will we have to revise our understanding of astrophysics? My understanding is that this can't be regular white noise. Maybe it's from our solar system (a naturally occuring local signal rather than interstellar). Or maybe it's something new.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
warning beacon. I've been wondering when it would drift close enough to be detected.
STAY AWAY! Mostly Harmless (but they're getting worse).
- Dan
I, for one, welcome nobody.
Now, in light of these facts, which are not denied in the BBC article, the "We're not investigating it further" type responses certainly sound like an attempt to prevent the media from getting their panties in a twist. "Actually it was a reflection from a weather balloon..."
I hope SETI does investigate. That's the whole point of the project, isn't it?
Let me be the first to say, that I for one welcome our newly-covered-up alien overlords!
It's a Bagel.
I picked up this signal on my modified home satelite dish, and was able to decode the following:
"4ll Ur B4s3 r B3l0ng 2 Us"
The Amazonians are looking for a little interplanetary snu-snu and Dan Wertheimer's been cooped up for so long "analyzing data" that he doesn't recognize the signal.
when we're all enslaved by aliens, the SETI nitwits will be remembered as traiters to the human race.
One thing faster than C may be how quickly people read slashdot. In the time that it took to write a reply about the laws of physics, five people saw this statement and posted corrections, without realizing that while they were typing, others were posting. I think that's a tribute to the immense number of Slashdot readers.
"Practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking." -Mary Poppins
They know its not a real signal because it said so.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
But saying laser sounds better. I mean it is fricken laser for cripes sake. I bet a *digital* laser, yeah...digital...would be faster.
Reminiscient of the "Flying Disk Found" and "It Was Just a Weather Balloon, Nothing To See Here, Folks" headlines that were about 24 hours apart back in 1947.
Pass me that Reynolds Wrap when you're through with it, okay?
It is making people more dumb for having read it.
A giant gyroscope-like device is being build on Okaido, Japan.
He continued: "With Seti@home having analysed some 50 trillion frequency bands, it is not surprising that a signal like this occurs purely due to chance."
it was all swamp gas, move along now, nothing to see here
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
"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.
:
The bionic Lemming says
A navigational Beacon? Rotating on a repair facility? Made to cover as much of an area as possible in times of distress?
Or do the aliens have Software written by their version of Microsoft - and they accidentally have a port opend that's now spewing out their version of Viagra spam?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Sorry, when I said faster I meant you can transmit data faster. So a given chunk of data would arrive quicker via laser than radio wave.
I think we should start looking for lasers over radio waves simply because you can send more data that way and it is more effcients. Same reason many space agencies are looking to change satellites over to lasers rather than radio then can transmit their data back to Earth much more quickly.
I say it again...Calvin and Hobbes said it best " the surest sign of intelligence out there is that they have not tried to contact us"
I told myself it was in all likelihood nothing special, but I'm still disappointed. Darn.
I think it is about time the world realizes that the ETs have been here all along and we are their handiwork. They've left us an important message which we refuse to acknowledge. We willfully blind ourselves to it. Why? Because we want an ET of our own making.
Look at it this way: The singularity already happened and the visible universe is the result. The real ETs are way too advanced to use cheesy low-tech EM signals for communication.
"With that much denial in one news report, you know it has to be a cover-up :)."
The neurolizer strikesagain!
Shouldn't that be shazbot?
If they came to Deadwood in 1876, they'd be "Bug-eyed C***s***ers!"
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
You're a dumbass. And so is the person who modded you up.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Lots of denial, without any explanations. We want to know why its all hype and noise, why it's not unusual, and why it's not a signal. In short, what did they realize it was?
I for one welcome our new non-existant alien overlords.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
no contact with extraterrestrials had been made
:^/
How many millions of light years are the signals for this anomaly occurring? I am buying stock in tin foil because there is no way they could have sent a response back and got a confirmation that the single was received in a few hours. Run for the hills, they're covering up something
I think you would probably find that the people who want to find extraterrestrial life really, guinuinely want to find it. They would neither risk being considered cranks by repeatedly saying "found one -- oops, psyche" nor would they willingly participate in a cover up if they did.
A lot of scientists already think of SETI as being a little flaky. Giving people reason to believe that more would be silly.
[ then again, since I can't prove a negative, I can't completely rule out the assertion either. =]
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The thought of a conspiracy to cover this up is nagging at me. Imagine if we *were* to be contacted by aliens, what do you think the repercussions would be with respect to religion, national security (U.S. as well as others), economics, science, politics, and so on? To veer off a bit to make my point, if we were hit by a very large meteor from outer space, society if it weren't completely wiped out *might* stand a chance at rebuilding.
But if something like extraterrestial contact were to happen to us as a society, our fundamental ideas of who we are, and more importantly where we're going would change so drastically that I think it would be beyond our level of common comprehension. I think the most serious implications would in fact be religious. I think that most people of faith are happy believing in a creator that created us, our world and that's about it. I don't remember running across any mono-theistic religions which dealt directly with the idea of ET's.
When I've posed this question to religious folk, they often just say that just because it wasn't in the Bible or Koran or Kaballa (sp?) or various other religious writings, doesn't imply that *God* didn't create other life forms outside our planet. He simply didn't tell us about them.
My point to this rant is both a question, and an answer. I think for many people it would be exciting to finally have a question like *are we alone in the universe* answered. I think the great majority though, would be scared shitless and chaos would ensue. Wasn't it about 60 + years ago that Orson Wells did his famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast? Weren't there more than a *few* people out there that were running around reporting lights in the sky, running for safety?
We like to think of ourselves as so much *smarter* than we were back then (collectively and generally) but I still think people would freak out (especially the religiously faithful) if it were found to be true that we were NOT the only intelligent life in the Universe.
About first contact involved ET's hammering earth into a pulp with millions of relativistic missiles before hunting down the remains of humanity?
Maybe we don't want to find these guys after all.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
The signal really is a TV broadcast, when decoded they found out that we are the most popular reality show in the universe. The aliens threatened to cancel us because it wouldn't be real anymore now that we know the truth. So they are hiding the truth from us in order to save our pla%$%$^&%^&+++
Nothing to see here, please move along.
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
they was probably testing some new weapons. Its hardly intention to broadcast on frequencies that lame civilizations use to find new targets for voyager-spam.
839*929
Government Cover Up.
How is this possible? Slashdot should be way ahead of Fark on this. This isn't the only case where slashdot is way behind either.
Klaatu barada nikto! Muhahahaha! ...
Uh, nevermind my outburst...
Oops, how did this get here?
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A navigational Beacon? Rotating on a repair facility? Made to cover as much of an area as possible in times of distress?
/me runs
Maybe a hollow sphere or ring rotating for artifical gravity? ie. DEATH STAR.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
He's a very prominent pysicist, astronomer, mathematician, that also writes damn fine electonics books.
for the hardcorest tinfoil hatters among us in the news today, as silent, flying Big Black Triangles sightings are on the rise...
Personally, I'm hoping this is some kind of military craft that is going to be unveiled soon, so we can check out whatever cool tech is inside.
This isn't offtopic in the least. This is a reference to the movie Contact where a genius solves the coded messages sent by the aliens in 3D. He's located on space station Mir at the time.
God if you're going to moderate someone down at least know what you're doing.
Or something so em-bare-ass-ing that they want to kill the hype before their screwup also makes it to the media, then *poof*, reduced funding...
the problem is that radio is broadcast and lasers are (more or less) point-to-point. if some orbital satellite is shooting data back to its planet, there's no laser shooting off to hit earth. even if, for some reason, an alien society is blasting lasers out into their night sky (or from satellites), the odds of them hitting earth are roughly one in umpy-bazillion. radio, on the other hand, goes out in waves, like ripples.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Y'know, I get really tired of all this bullshit I hear. It's bad enough to hear this bullshit when I interact with "normal" people -- do we really need this on slashdot as well?
Look everyone, making any sort of contact with an alien civilization would be such an incredible discovery, there's no way the government could ever keep it quiet. Christ, they can't even keep China from obtaining detailed blueprints on every single nuclear weapon in the US arsenal. So how are these nincompoops going to keep a bunch of scientists -- who have given up the chance to be reputable, respected, and published for the chance to discover life -- quiet? I don't care what kind of blackmail or torture or whatever technique they used -- there is no way they could keep all the scientists quiet. What's to stop a terminally ill SETI researcher from spilling the beans?
Guys, just relax. There is no conspiracy. The reason SETI has to vehemently deny shit like this is because the media blows everything completely out of proportion. They are trying to contain the situation before everyone picks it up and starts running with it. Occam's razor and all that jazz.
GMD
watch this
But even if it's not, the real question is whether the Government is swooping in to take over management of detecting and decoding of the Signal ala "Contact"
The denials mean little in themselves, but if the next day includes evidence of some Science oversight committee on flight to SETI@Home and various other radio observatories, and if a suspiciously high percentage of radio dishes start pointing in the same direction in the sky - well then interesting days may be ahead.
Letter To Iran
No, that would in one o' dose TOP
SECRET LABMO-TORIES de gubbnint keep stashed away underneath Virginia.
No, it's exactly the opposite. There is very low absorption on this frequency, which means the signal will propagate farther than in other frequencies.
will we have to revise our understanding of astrophysics? My understanding is that this can't be regular white noise.
From what I have read, it's a "marginally regular" white noise. That is, it has a shape that's somewhat unusual to find in noise, but not really impossible, just low probability.
I was really hoping that Jody Foster would decrypt the signals and be able to build a giant metal pod that would drop into the water.
Or maybe a giant planet would coem towards us and try to eat all our satelites.
Or maybe parasitic aliens would come use us as hosts and enslave us.
Oh the possibilities that could have been....
Ave Molech Setting
They may get here easier, but there's a catch there: It'd have to be pointed at us. That means one of several things:
1. They know we're here and are making a concerted effort to attempt contact us. This means they can't be more than a few light years away, and have already picked up OUR radio waves, meaning odds are we can hear their radio too.
2. They had to know that there was a habitable world here long enough ago to send a signal here on the random chance that there's somebody here to notice. (i.e. they live far enough away that when they sent the laser message, they couldn't know wether or not anybody was here to pick it up)
3. They missed a reciever and hit us by blind luck.
This would also limit us to detecting civilizations advanced enough to have already detected us, and have lasers with narrow enough beams that it's still coherent and good enough aim to still hit us accross great distances.
Non-coherent broadcasts like radio, on the other hand, travels in all directions, and would be expected to be used by civilizations less advanced than us, so we could detect nearly any industrial or better society (assuming we could resolve the signal and recognize it as a signal). Looking for this, we can detect any civilzation, wether they're looking for us or not.
Lasers are easier to detect if they get to us, but radio is much more likely to get to us.
Have we been so primed by TV and movies to expect fantastical aliens that we don't think that we may end up finding the technological equivalent to ourselves fifty or a hundred years ago?
i don't know what the BBC was on about. The signal SHGb02+14a is still in the top 25 candidates with a good score of 2.567e-09 so i assume they'll investigate further.
VStrider.
Or at the very least told we have to move along and vacate this planet? After all, we're receiving the signal *outside* of their planet...
I'm just waiting for the Galactic police to show up.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust any article that uses such poor english as "Except one, which has got stronger." (quoted from original article on NewScientist.com, 2nd or 3rd paragraph).
My theories on the signal:
1. Someone has secretly hacked a SETI antena and created the worlds strongest Wi-Fi hotspot!
or
2. Someone has set up a nearby hot spot and it's causing interference....
Not one for conspiracies but.... yeah, that "but" followed by ellipses is just a way for you to say that you suspect a conspiracy, without stepping up and actually admitting it. Or, because of a desire for the world to be interesting and mysterious, your mind is trying very hard to see a conspiracy in this story about a simple little noisy emission from wherever, when in fact you rationally know better.
FTA:"For six years, the Seti@home project has used a downloadable screensaver on millions of computers around the world to sift through data for anything unusual."
I mean, the screensaver might just one day solve one of the biggest questions to mankind. The same perky things that were thought to be obsolete years ago and brought you Hotbar and Gator. This world just keeps amazing me.
It said "Bluejacked!"
What is he looking for using an optical scope - smoke signals from the Anisazi?
http://www.space.com/searchforlife/optical_seti_00 0427.html
here is a decent story i found while researching the idea of doing it. looks like it is already a group in seti doing it.
What????
These denials would have happened now in any case, so they mean nothing in themselves.
The fact that someone like Wertheimer is at Arecibo now, and "preparing an observing run to follow up Seti@home analysis" is an interesting data point which seems a bit too coincidental.
If anything, this latest communication is only another point in favor of optimism.
P.S. I have contacts into the observatory who would ordinarily respond and are not doing so at the moment. I consider that another interesting data point.
I was kinda hoping some kind of right-wing religious response would get added to the Republican National Convention, calling for a constitutional amendment banning acknowledgment of life on other planets.
Or maybe Bush would propose a taxpayer-funded intergalactic missionary project to convert the poor pagan life forms into Christians.
It was really a couple guys on a polished part of the dish cracking open a Pepsi...
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
This is kind of what I think it is, but a good scientist wouldn't try to cover up their mistake, they would simply explain the mistake and try and learn from it.
So they are either (a) covering something real up, or (b) covering up their mistake and thereby making themselves look worse or (c) just really badly botched the PR side of things, which doesn't bode well for anything that might happen legitimately in the future.
Not sure which *I'D* like to chose in their shoes...
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Sorry, when I said faster I meant you can transmit data faster. So a given chunk of data would arrive quicker via laser than radio wave.
While one could argue that, I don't think that it really matters in this case. You're not trying to make christians out of them, you're just trying to say hello.
I think we should start looking for lasers over radio waves simply because you can send more data that way and it is more effcients.
It's not more efficient. What's more, the reason we see in visible light is that its EVERYWHERE. You wanna know why you don't see radio waves? Cause they're not that interesting from a fine perception viewpoint. Visible light is where its at in terms of resolution and color information. That's exactly why we shouldn't be looking for visible light lasers... they'd be indistinguishable from a sun until closer inspection.
Let's talk about efficiency for a second. Assume you don't know where humanity is or how close; you just want to say hi. So you're going to build a huge transmitting complex. And you're going to run it continuously for hundreds of years, because to build something that big and only run it for a brief span of time is futile.
So first off, you don't use any moving parts. You give it a foolproof powersupply and you put it out in outerspace so that there are no corrosive elements. Maybe it's in orbit around your planet. Most likely you put it in one of your planet's trojan points. No moving parts means no working fluid; if its a laser, its a crystal or diode laser. Your maximum efficiency is actually quite good, for a laser. Let's assume that you've got the monster of all nanotech processes and can actually build a diode laser of that scale (we sure as hell can't)... You're still pouring 70% of your input energy into heat generation. Then you've either got to collimate the beam and point it at every nearby star in turn, or spread it out, meaning that you're going to need even bigger diodes.
You could of course built a ground based facility and just keep a huge number of people on staff to tend to it and keep it running. But when was the last time humanity embarked on a plan longer than a single generation? For these people to do something like that, they would have to be immortal for all intents and purposes, or be VERY different in terms of how they think.
Okay let's switch to radio.
Advantage one: much better efficiency
Advantage two: intrinsically broadcast in nature
Advantage three: if you pick the right frequency, you can pick one where the universe is relatively quiescent
Advantage four: tunable chromaticity, meaning I can broadcast at different frequencies, or use frequency modulation for my message.
I think radio is definitely an obvious choice. That said, there are optical SETI projects around.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
If I was an alien I would do that...
Send out a ring at 142 Mhz...
To prove I'm not a ringing hydrogen cloud, I then...
Scan away much faster then normal bodies rotate (i.e. HEY I'm artificial)
If I was smart and wanted to send more data at a quite place in the spectrum would no one would look. I would make the scan rate look funky, such that lim t--> inf = MY SECRET FREQUENCY
here
You can have coherent radiation that isn't in a beam, but broadcast the same way radio is. However, since that sort of signal would also weaken with distance, it would be the same issue to detect that we have with radio. A laser beam would certainly reach us with much higher power from much larger distances, but it means it has to be aimed (quite precisely) at us, meaning they know/suspect/hope somebody is here listening, or they missed a reciever and we got a one-in-a-trillion lucky shot. The second is very unlikely, and the first means they're probably fairly close by and have detected us (meaning we could probably detect them by radio as well), and that they're advanced enough to have detected us and attempted to signal us with an interstellar laser beam. It's too Hollywood to assume that aliens are more advanced than us. It's just as likely that we end up detecting an industrial civilization no more advanced than ours as a hyper advanced civilization.
I'm not sure who Horowitz actually is
I'm not either, but I'm pretty sure he was wearing a black suit and sunglasses.
You can draw that conclusion if you wish, but in truth what I am saying is that the comments I listed form a chain that seems potentially illogical.
Either the signal was interesting to warrant further investigation, or it wasn't in the first place, or it was but then they discovered it wasn't.
If it does warrant further investigation, why stop investigating it now? What changed their minds in only a few hours? They certainly didn't expand on why it was hype and blown out of proportion. What are we left with? One day they say it's interesting and will be observed, the next day it's all hype and not being observed.
One of those statements is true while the other is false, OR something changed their minds and they haven't told us.
COULD there be a conspiracy here? Sure, there COULD be. My belief? They probably messed up the P.R. and nothing more.
So, you think my ellipses means "there really IS a consipracy!", but I'm flat-out telling you they actually mean "there almost certainly is not". Either statement fits after the "but", the second one is how I feel though.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
i mean sure, i've got my tinfoil tuxedo ready just like everyone else, but what difference does it make if it's intelligent life or not? personally i'm much more interested in whatever explanation emerges.
It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon.
just because it's not life, doesn't mean it can't be something we've never seen before.
oh and i *was* able to decode the message, it says "we are here to pump *clap* you up."
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
*sigh* now I have to put my foil helmut back on
Thank you! :) I went and looked him up afterwards (two seconds before would have removed my uncertainty... I plead laziness after being at work all day).
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
I quoted from this in the last /. topic about this signal - I'd like to hear what he has to say about this article from New Scientist which says:
The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second. What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. "It just boggles my mind," Korpela says.
I can understand they don't want to say there's aliens YET but come on - something weird is there...
This guy sounds like he doesn't believe in FM radio, either.
/frequency/? I mean, it would be much easier to extract the signal from noise, but so what? We *like* noise! In fact, if we make FM radio a common thing, the airwaves will fill up with rap music and commercial with fancy jingles, and then where will our news-and-classical-music stations be, eh? EH, EH?"
The guy who invented FM radio killed himself because everybody said stuff like, "Who on earth would want a signal that varied in
Earth rotates in just under 24 hours. Forty times that is 36 minutes. That's something in low orbit.
So what we have is an earth size planet with a fusion plant in low orbit!
Now we all recognize immediately that this claim (fusion plant in low orbit) is clearly not justified by the available data. My point is that the above claim in the article is, if anything, even less justified by the data currently available.
To put it another way, just because you are denying the existance of little green men, doesn't mean you are not a crackpot.
Squirrel!
The fact that the original slashdot story linked to a newscientist.com article should have been a tip-off...
... a tetrahedron (inscribed in a sphere), but he's too word murdered to realize that four points don't define a cube. Wanker.
"If [the aliens] are so smart, they'll adjust their signal for their planet's motion."
Only one thing I always say about this: It's a very naive to assume aliens are smart. We're not all that bright by the standards we seem to expect of aliens, and we used to be a lot dumber. We're just as likely to detect an early industrial civlization by their sitcom broadcasts as we are to detect some hyperadvanced godlike race beaming lasers at us accross the galaxy.
We got a return message from Alpha Centauri: "There Goes The Neighborhood."
Mystika
I remember in my astronomy class hearing about a G type star with a Jupiter sized planet some 100 light years away. If I remember correct the distance that planet was from its star it would have the same "protective" effects that Jupiter does for an M-class planet. I always thought it would be interesting if in about 30-40 years when I think it is most of out radio signals would reach that system if we started getting stuff back from them. We could have almost a hundred years to learn about each other before the respective "Hello Other world" programs got sent.
Good programmers drink beer to relieve job stress.
Great programmers drink hard liquor and work best hungover.
Veeger.
I'm betting it's an "Oh wow! ... Oh no, wait, nothing," but I'd like to know what they found that made them say "wait, nothing." Since they said, "We're not investigating it further," I'd like to know why not. That makes it sound like they just decided ahead of time it couldn't be anything, so they won't look at it. Well, how did they know to decide that?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Can someone explain to me why the shift in frequency is not being considered as the signal itself? It doesn't take rocket science to create and broadcast an FM signal, and we've even learned how to cope with the doppler effect as we drive along listening to the radio in our cars.
Perhaps 1420 is the start-of-message signal?
Realistically speaking, if I took a reading of a signal that always started the same way and behaved the same way no matter when I started, I would suspect an artifact of the equipment or software.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Ban reality TV now! Think of the damage to our interstellar image!
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
no, the correct answer was, "We, the Aliens, don't exist."
It would distract from the election were it true.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is getting into the premice for a novel but, if we can already detect large gas giant planets circling around stars, then it doesn't seem unlikely that that a more advanced civilization could detect our planet orbiting the sun. Assuming that is true, and assuming that the life form is aquainted with carbond based life that likes water, we might look pretty interesting. Of course there are a lot of "ifs" and assumptions in that but, it is fun to day dream about.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Now if you look on this site the 1400-1700 Mhz range is used by radio astronomy and weather satellites. So with that 3 questions:
Now I'm probably wrong on all of this. Which is why I love
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
With all the changes in opinion I thought it was a relative of John Kerry.
Ditto, I've been running the SETI client on 1 to 5 computers over the years since the project first came out. almost NOBODY except for the geeks has any idea what SETI is. I also don't think that scientists or astronomers care one whit what the general public thinks. Perhaps they picked up a signal from some governments secret satelite or something because I do find all this 'mainstream' press odd.
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
I understand it translates into a portion of code that proves prior art and blows the SCO case clean out of the water.
AT&ROFLMAO
But how can it be a cover-up if Bush or the Republican party is not involved?
It's all Bush's fault anyway that we haven't found any ET signal.
you think reality tv is bad for our image take a look at soup operas, most sitcoms, mentos ads and election campains.
Not to be picky or anything, but "hertz per second" is likely redundant.
/. were supposed to be smart. That's what I get for thinking.
Hertz (capitalized since it's a person's name) means "cycles per second". It's abbreviated "Hz".
If the signal is accelerating (or decelerating), then I suppose it could be Hz/s, but given the context, I don't think that's the case.
I thought people on
Plant a tree in a developing country.
On Enlightened Utopian Planet light years from Earth..... signal transmits YOU!
That it was some kid spinning his top in front of the recievers!
Flip flop flip flop flip flop
Unfortunately, reporters, editors and scientists often work at cross purposes. Reporters want to sell stories, editors want to sell magazines, and scientists want the public to hear about their research. When the science won't sell the story, there is often some creative writing that goes on.
That said, I was both misquoted and quoted out of context in the New Scientist article. The crux of the issue is that there really isn't much chance that the "signal" is actually extraterrestrial or even real. The point I was trying to make to the "New Scientist" reporter was that the combination of a stable frequency between observation and the rapidly changing frequency during an observation meant that it was unlikely that it was real, and that it was likely to be a spurious signal due to noise or interference. I reiterated that several times.
I don't know how that got misinterpreted to the point where the article claims I said the signal was unlikely to be interference or noise.
We don't have any plans for reobservation or monitoring, and I'd give 1000:1 odds that there's nothing there.
Support SETI@home
you didn't feel like putting your name on that comment.
Hopefully they won't watch the news then. They'll probably think they're suppose to start killing people.
"oh, so this is how the humans communicate, through the spilling of the red bodily fluid."
A blog about stuff.
Its a CHANGE in frequency! Like change in velocity is measured per second.. i.e., 9.8 m/s^2.
So 8 Hz/s = 8 1/s^2
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
An Alien space probe that was barely spinning would look like a planet spinning rapidly. Also, the signal could be synched with the probe's rotation and that would cause us to receive a signal which appears to start with a particular Mhz.
:\
--AC at work
The message has been found and translated. A text of the translation follows.
Hello,
I am Mr Buck Francisco, General Manager(Treasury) of Land
Bank, Helopkino, in the Alpha Centauri System.This is an urgent and
very confidential business proposition.
On earth date June 6, 2000,an alien Oil consultant/contractor with
the Alpha Centauri Institute of Mining and Metallurgy,
Mr. Darth Vader made a numbered time(Fixed) Deposit for
twelve earth months, valued at US$26,500,000.00,
(Twenty-six Million, five hundred thousand of your Earth US Dollars).
Upon maturity,I sent a routine notification to his forwarding
address but got no reply. After a month, we sent a reminder and
finally we discovered from his contract employers, the Centauri
Petroleum Corporation that Mr.Darth Vader died from a spaceship
accident.On further investigation,I found out that
he died without making a WILL,and all attempts to trace his next
of kin was fruitless.
I therefore made further investigation and discovered that
Mr.Darth Vader did not declare any kin or relations in all his
official documents,including his Bank Deposit paperwork in my
Bank. This sum of US$26,500,000.00 has carefully been fixed in my
bank for safekeeping.
No one will ever come forward to claim it.According to Helopkino
Law,at the expiration of 5 (five) earth years, the money will revert to the
ownership of the Government if nobody applies to claim the fund.
Consequently, my proposal is that I will like you as a Alien to
stand in as the owner of the money which was fixed deposited in my
bank. I am writing you because I as a public servant,i cannot operate
an alien account.
I want to present you as the owner of the funds so you can be able to
claim them with the help of my attorney. This is simple.I will like
you to provide immediately your full names and address so that the
Attorney will prepare the necessary documents which will put you in
place as the beneficiary of the funds.
The money will be moved out for us to share in the ratio of 80% for
me and 20% for you. The paperwork for this transaction will be done
by the Attorney.If you are interested, please reply immediately via
my SETI@home address and Upon your response,I shall then provide you
with more details and relevant documents that will help you understand
the transaction.Please observe utmost confidentiality, and be rest
assured that this transaction would be most profitable for both of
us because I shall require your assistance to invest my share in real
estate within your country.
Due to the nature of confidentiality in this Transaction our
communication can only be via SETI.
Awaiting your urgent reply via my email Above.
Thanks and my regards.
BUCK FRANCISCO.
Paul Horowitz is a physicist at Harvard who's primary claim to fame is being one of the co-authors of The Art of Electronics. The other author being Winfield Hill.
Paul is a damn smart guy, is pretty funny, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of electronics. I took the Physics 123 class with him and Tom Hayes at Harvard about 5 years ago so I have some sense of his intellect.
His primary research interests are with SETI, and he has old/surplus electronics from the projects META and BETA, among others in his office. He once popped off a Motorola 68000 processor from one of those project boards to loan me for a side project with the class (instead of using the 68008's that are employed toward the end of the course), and he called it "the DIP that ate Chicago" because it's so damn huge.
Since his research involves primarily electronics and the engineering aspects of building large arrays of radio receivers for SETI projects, he referred to himself as a "fallen physicist". He even called me that too because at the time I had physics undergrad degree, but was working at an engineering lab at MIT. (Of course now I'm back in physics grad school ;-) )
So anyway, I get the impression from him that he really knows what he's talking about, and I would tend to trust his scientific judgement about his research project. Now if you assume he's specifically lying or covering up, that's another story. But from a scientific point of view he knows what he's talking about.
make world, not war
That means you're the alien!!
Well, I'd be the last person to expect aliens to come calling from space, but I'm not against investigation. If you have several interesting signals from the same area of the sky, then it only makes sense to point a radio telescope at it for at least a few days and both monitor the hydrogen emmission continuously for a while, and also check the rest of the spectrum.
I wouldn't be surprised if the signal only showed up periodially if it were artificial. After all, they would probably be scanning the sky with a high-gain antenna. They'd expect a recipient to figure out the period and then be ready to capture whatever higher-speed data is being sent on some other frequency, or something like that.
Most likely this is just a natural phenomena. However, that makes it just as useful to study - it means we can learn something just the same...
Signal Candidate SHGb02+14a
C is a constant -- but the actual velocity of EM radition is not always C. The only time light travels at exactly C is in a perfect vacuum. Interstellar space is NOT a perfect vacuum. A sparse cloud of hydrogen has a small but measurable refractive index.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Did they just decide this wasn't really a story that fast? I would be less suspicious if they put the rebuttal up in its place. But no, nothing... Strange.
Letter To Iran
with whatever replaced the sr-71...
>> The signal is moving rapidly in frequency
:)
Isn't that the whole point of FM? (i.e. frequency modulation... varying the frequency to encode data?)
Couldn't it be a signal from a stationary source that's being modulated as a carrier wave? Think outside your tiny box once in a while...
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
...prominent mathematician? Oh ok, that explains it. ..folks move forward, nothing to see here.
NSA has his ass now and
Or maybe this hype and mistake was done on purpose.
They need to wake up interest of people again for S@H^2 and there is no X-Files to warm folks up this time. The source code of the seti@home clients cannot be released though, not even for the old S@H. Who knows what all the volunteers were really calculating all these years? Cracking codes?
I dont believe any project has the equipment to detect a typical TV broadcast off-planet. SETI is banking on another SETI-like program on an alien world which sends radio waves out seeking seekers, as they are not (to my knowledge) capable of detecting the kind of thing you're suggesting. Which makes it even more of a gamble and means no one is going to find anything through "stupidity."
Also, considering the "WOW" signal from a few decades ago it seems that perhaps the odds are against us. Maybe there was a SETI-like project, they sent the signal, and no one caught it properly and the next one won't be for a long time, if ever. Also, it may very well be that the WOW signal was of human origins anyway.
Not to mention an encrypted signal or laser light signal would go undetected.
Ummm...he's reported in the BBC article to be using optical telescopes. Are they simply wrong, or has he switched teams, so to speak?
Is that you ?
I'd say it's more the covering of the ass type cover-up.
SETI@home finds an "unusual" signal, knows it's probably just an as yet undiscovered scientific thing, but the media blows it all out of proportion with aliens and "ET calling back", and so now SETI is trying to call it all back so that when it does end up being a new scientific discovery, people don't completely flame them for it not being aliens.
Yes, I am female. No, I do not want to date you.
We're just as likely to detect an early industrial civlization by their sitcom broadcasts as we are to detect some hyperadvanced godlike race beaming lasers at us accross the galaxy.
No, we're not.
The odds of detecting an alien civilization that's within even a few hundred or thousand years of our own in terms of technology are ridiculously small. Think of how many million years of evolution are behind us, then try and imagine that by pure chance another species got to roughly the same place in time to beam some signals our way.
An alien race is going to be either incredibly primitive compared to ours, or unimaginably more advanced. In the former case, we won't be able to detect them, so pretty much anyone we have a chance of intercepting a signal from will have technology far greater than our own.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
This reporter was possibly a little hasty earlier and would like to reaffirm his allegiance to this country and its human president, after all it is the best system we have, for now.
we've even learned how to cope with the doppler effect as we drive along listening to the radio in our cars. :-)
You must have a really fast car
Find free books.
Guess I'll unpack my bags then :(
Thank god this was false. I mean, we're still a pre-warp society; we don't even have fusion drive or colony ships yet; to say nothing about Fusion beams or anything like that. We're still a good 132 RA away from those advancements.
I don't see why everyone is dissapointed. This could have been hostile Klackons with Class III shields and Mass Drivers.
I can't remember who it was who first pointed this out but I think it does throw the whole communicating with aliens thing into perspective.
"People talk about how we could communicate with aliens but we haven't even managed to communicate with one single other of the thousands of species on this planet yet."
Could someone explain me this please ?
(three lone gunmen mode on)Or are they trying to cover something up?(three lone gunmen mode off)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Perhaps the aliens need just 1 4:20 until their normal supplier comes through?
After all, the alien head does seem to be a pervasive symbol of the 420 crews.
Transistors and Beer!!
The story on the 'near miss' astroid had something along the same line: they shared information so soon, they didn't even knew squat about the information themselves.
In the end it proved to be nothing.
But what if this isn't ?
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
So what does this mean? We won't get a chance to see the hot Nordic alien babes? Darn, I was soooo hoping for a date this Friday night.
"Hi, Papa Johns..."
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
Do you notice that the text, as you displayed it here, takes the form of a signal plotted orthogonally?
Stare at it, from afar to see what I mean.
The frequency of an orbital shift would make it directionally dependent. i.e. the frequency of any shift would only work for one transmission vector. Additionally we don't know ehat the purpose of the signal is. If it were a local broadcast that is leaking to us then they would never correct because it would throw it off in the local frame. In other words they'd have to be intentionally beaming into space and more specifically, beaming exactly in our direction in our direction to make any frequency shift viable and neither is neccessary, for example transmisisons from Earth don't dopler shift for our orbit, and if they did you'd have to pick a direction you wanted to correct for, any frequency shift would throw the transmission off even more in teh opposite direction. This should tell you instantly that this guy is trying to knock down the theory rather than objectively assess on merit.
Moreover orbital frequency shifts would be relatively small, for this kind of shift to be caused by dopler effects would take a some very extreme delta V. I think it is likely to be an astronomical source but not for some of the intellectually dishonest reasons espoused by this guy.
So they are either (a) covering something real up, or (b) covering up their mistake and thereby making themselves look worse or (c) just really badly botched the PR side of things, which doesn't bode well for anything that might happen legitimately in the future.
Am I the only one who finds it quite normal to make a official statement when a previously announced milestone[1] is reached, no matter what the result is.
Therein saying that nothing was found - only one signal was found at all, and the signal looks strange but doesn't match what one would expect from "ET" (an artificial signal).
And then, when it gets twisted and hyped up, and what else, you take a more conservative stance to avoid any repeated "misunderstanding" and say "nothing special to see here, move along"?
Really, read the original article again. They make quite clear that they didn't found what they are looking for. Just that what they found looks interesting by itself, because they don't have a ready explanation for it.
I think the signal only got mention, because it was the only location left of 200 which got still a signal and so was the only intersting part left to elaborate on. There are only so many words to say "nothing found".
Maybe I am not paranoid enough, but for me that sounds of a standard case of "oh, people misunderstood what we wanted to say, let's stop it before it gets ugly". Or maybe it's because I see such misunderstandings every day due to my job.
[1] Finish of an analysis of an revisit of 200 locations SETI separated out as interesting.
Keep an eye on which arguments are silently dropped in replies. Not always, but often times it's very telling.
he probably spreads his research out over a variety of telescopes, I've only been aware of his radio efforts, but it doesn't surprise me if he does optical astronomical research as well. why not look up his research papers (follow the link in my other post) to see.
make world, not war
Basically the original reporter either was too stoned to make legible notes or he's an evil little prick that twisted the interview material to his own ends. Read the last few posts by this guy who was the person who was interviewed for clarification of what was really said:
http://slashdot.org/~SETIGuy
It's a "coverup" in the sense of covering up their own embarrassment at getting so excited over something which turned out to be nothing at all.
I can envision the scene in my mind right now... An intern or maybe a younger, less experienced scientist sees this signal, gets excited, and everybody starts buzzing about it. Someone eagerly leaks some information to the press, but sooner or later, cooler heads prevail. Now, with a little egg on their faces, they just want everyone to cool it and go away.
I don't think there's anything particularly suspicious here at all. People jump the gun all the time.
How do you correct an outgoing signal to "correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet" when you do not know in advance which planet the receiver will be on? If my transmitter in on the surface of my planet (or in low orbit above it), at any given moment in time my transmitter will be moving towards some stars, away from other stars, and not moving to or away from still others. How can I adjust my signal so that none of the stars with potential listeners sees a doppler shift as my transmitter moves?
What is more likely:
1: The media does what it does every day in regards to astronomy, inflates every story that might possibly have something to do with space aliens out of proportion? (With the result that both the original claims and more nuanced followups become exaggerated.)
2: The MIB.
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be easily described as sheer incompetence.
Silly. We all know the universe is only 6008 years old, so it's most likely that civilizations everywhere are at roughtly the same stage of development. And since we've only been transmitting radio waves for a little over a hundred years, that means we're only going to detect aliens within a hundred light years.
Let me give the Pope a call and get him to ask God if there are any that close...
Basically, it was just a magma displacement. Or maybe whales humping. Take your pick.
For many atheists, the search for extraterrestrial life takes the form of the search for a perfect life form - the parent poster's shiny happy aliens who will make everything okay. In essence, they are still searching for God on the other side of the clouds.
Other atheists are zealous advocates of the "Man's Destiny in the Stars" ideal of human progress, and search for God by believing that Man himself can become divine.
Adherents of the three great Western religions, on the other hand, look for God inside the human soul, not in the physical universe.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
That's not what the post says.
Also, a change in frequency and a change in frequency in relation to time are two different things.
The frequency changes from n to n+?. It's not talking about the rate of change. Had it been the rate of change, then you'd be correct. Also, my original post takes that possibility into account.
So we're not talking about a Doppler shift. We're talking about two (or more different frequencies).
Please read before you reply.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
Perhaps 1420 is the start-of-message signal?
1420 MHz is the frequency, and probably hasn't got anything to do with what is actually being received.
Something tells me this is the frequency you get when you hook up a busted up Speak N' Spell, tin foil and some mashed up Reese's Pieces... Is ET trying to call back to Drew Barrymore now that's she has turned out to be so hot and famous??
I, for one, welcome Noddy.
considering that homo sapiens has had the ability to listen + transmit for a very short period of time, it is much more likely to find more advanced civilizations.
for example, if we say the average technological civilization with the ability to transmit + receive signals would last 1 million years, from the time they obtain such an ability, it is much more likely to find civilizations that are between 100 and 1 million years old, than between 0 and 100 (i am stating that we are around 100 years old).
that is, unless you think that the average technological civilization will last a much shorter time, but i think that is unlikely. anyone have any guesstimates on that?
i guess i am also assuming a rate of technological advancement similar to our own. perhaps that is invalid. maybe the ETs have been around for a billion years, but only figured out radio in the last 100. hmph.
A recent (September 1) article in New Scientist magazine, entitled " Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away," implies that the Berkeley SETI@home project has uncovered a very convincing candidate signal that might be the first strong evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Alas, this story is misleading. According to Dan Werthimer, who heads up the Berkeley SERENDIP SETI project, this is a case of a reporter failing to understand the workings of their search. He says that misquotes and statements taken out of context give the impression that his team is exceptionally impressed with one of the many candidate signals, SHGb02+14a, uncovered using the popular SETI@home software. They are not.
This signal has been found twice by folks using the downloadable screen saver. That fact resulted in the Berkeley team putting it on their list of 'best candidates'. Keep in mind that SETI@home produces 15 million signal reports each day. How can one possibly sort through this enormous flood of data to sift out signals that might be truly extraterrestrial, rather than merely noise artifacts or man-made interference?
The scheme used is simple in principle (although the technical details are complex): SETI@home data come from a receiver on the Arecibo radio telescope that is incessantly panning the sky, riding "piggyback" on other astronomical observations. Every few seconds, it sweeps another patch of celestial real estate, and records data covering many millions of frequency channels. Some of these data are then distributed for processing by the screen saver. By chance, the telescope will sweep the same sky patch every six months or so. If a signal is persistent - that is to say, it shows up more than once when the telescope is pointed at the same place, and at the same frequency (after correction for shifts due to the motion of the Earth) - then it becomes a candidate. Of course, being persistent doesn't mean that the source is always on, only that it is found multiple times.
In February of this year, Werthimer and his colleagues took a list of two hundred of the best SETI@home candidate signals to Arecibo and deliberately targeted that mammoth antenna in the directions to which the scope was pointed when they were found. Once subjected to this closer inspection, all but one of these signals failed to show. That disqualifies them from being claimed as true detections of a persistent signal. The one that was found again, SHGb02+14a (the subject of the New Scientist article), will no doubt be observed yet again, but according to Paul Horowitz, who heads up the Harvard SETI efforts, the statistics of noise make it fairly likely that at least one of the candidates observed in February would reappear, even if all these signals were simply due to receiver fluctuations.
The article remarks on the strong drift of this signal, which it describes as puzzling. Of course, many terrestrial sources of interference, and in particular telecommunication satellites, show strong drifts due to changing Doppler effects as they wheel across the sky. (Incidentally, the technically inclined will want to note drift due to a planet rotating like Earth would be 0.15 Hz/sec, not the 1.5 Hz/sec mentioned in the magazine.) As for the distance of 1000 light-years claimed in the article's title, there is clearly no evidence supporting this number, other than the lack of known nearby stars in the beam.
The bottom line is that an experiment like SETI@home always has a candidate list, a table of those signals that look most promising. Indeed, you can find the current versions of this list on their web site. However, there is a great deal of difference between a candidate, and a convincing signal. If any of the major SETI experiments being run by the SETI Institute, by the Berkeley group, the folks at Harvard, or the Australians or Italians, discovers a signal that they think is of extraterrestrial origin, they will immediately take steps to confirm this, both with their own scientists and with observers at other
The Alien Anarchist's Cookbook
Here's just my observation about the whole signal "shifting" problem ...
... ie: doppler shift of the frequency. It was also noted by the author that any intelligent life transmitting a beacon signal should be "smart enough" to adjust the frequency to compensate for the shift, and that since the signal doesn't appear to be adjusted for doppler, it can't be an alien signal.
... a signal pointed toward one recipient and corrected for doppler may indeed be received at another point with increased shift because of doppler plus the correction factor. This would explain the wild swings in frequency shift.
First of all, it's doppler shift. Amateur radio operators deal with doppler shift in radio signals when operating amateur satellites. Basically, when either a transmitting station or receiving station are in motion, the transmitted signal will appear lower or higher in frequency at the receiving station, depending on whether the stations are moving closer together or further apart.
It was suggested in the article that the cause of the "drifting" would be due to planetary motion
Here's the problem with that assumption: It assumes that the aliens are intending earth as the recipient of the signal.
It's most likely that the subject signal is being pointed somewhere else and intended for someone else... not us.
It's important here to point out that doppler shift will vary between any two points. SO
Additionally, going on the theory here that we are not the intended recipients of the signal... and thus perhaps not directly in the path of the strongest part of the signal, also explains why reception was a bit weak here at earth.
Armchair scientists unite!
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Art Bell's "Coast to Coast" show last night had one of the real scientists (Sethian?) from the SETI institute say they same thing. This one of the many potentially interesting signals they get time to time, but not a barnburner.
There's never a Welshman around when you need one.
I heard about it last night when George Noory interviewed Seth Shostak on Coast-to-Coast AM.
"Wednesday's first hour guest, Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute discussed a recent New Scientist article which reported on mysterious radio signals, that some posit could be coming from an ET source. He believes the story is being over-hyped, as nothing has been proven as of yet about the signals which are just one of many candidates derived from the SETI@home Project."
It may take until early next week for the "normal" radio and television stations to hear about it. Slashdot was only a day late.
I think the most interesting thing about this signal is as follows:
...What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. "It just boggles my mind," Korpela... says.
New Scientist
I'm not sure how the act of first observing this signal is able to determine the starting frequency of the observed signal, unless (as already stated somewhere above) there is some kind of artifact resulting from the observation equipment. The article states however that the signal has been observed several different times (and I would assume using different detectors). If this is the case then my tiny mouse like brain can only think of 4 other possible explanations:
(1) Some type of faster than light communication between transmitter and reciever (I think Unlikely)
(2) Elaborate Practical joke (those crazy SETI folk)
(3) Seperate observations starting at the same point in the frequency drift (again unlikely given an oscillation at 37 hertz per second)
(4) Alien Magicological techniques.
I think that this fact coupled with the fact that the signal is at one of the main frequencies that Hydrogen readily absorbs and emits energy, makes this signal particularly interesting.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
I have to admit I was excited by the possibility! I mean ET contact is so significant that even a hint of a hint of a 1000:1 against chance is an amazingly profound event.
Unfortunately SETI is hopeless. Last week a paper came out making a convincing argument that it is far more energy efficient to SNAIL MAIL a stack of DVD's to ET than it is to try to broadcast a radio signal.
One needs stellar type energies to propagate a signal far enough to believe that even a modest percentage of the galaxy would see it. For example, most planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn emit strong radio signals, but when it comes to searching for planets in OTHER systems we still use gravitational effects observed based on the motion of a star in the same system.
SETIGuy should save Paul Allen some money and fire himself.
John
"Tinfoil hat."
This bit of slang entered mainstream-geekdom a while ago. It's used quite aggressively still, which I find surprising.
The most common invocation is as an almost superstitious ward preceding a post which the author wishes to introduce a rare concept or idea.
The reason I find it surprising is that, outside of geekdom, geeks are lumped together as one class. A fat, scruffy, bearded guy with a Linux t-shirt is precisely as alien to Joe Sixpack as a tinfoil-hat wearing UFO nutter.
So, my question is this (with apologies to John Lennon): is the tinfoil-hatter the nigger of the geek world?
To me, the aggressive hostility towards tinfoil-hatters within the community-of-the-dejected is a backlash against the ridicule individual geeks have undoubtedly received all their lives -- unwarranted, in their opinion. When lumped in with other victims - perhaps deserving ones - resentment ensues.
Do geeks secretly identify with tinfoil-hatters? Are they embracing their own victimhood? Do they require their own victimhood's integrity in order to maintain their own self-image?
I'm not asking these questions because I have the answers. What are your views?
...Your Ping Reply was 1,123,589,647,125,665 Seconds .....DISCONNECTED
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
Maybe civilizations self-destruct soon after the industrial age. It certainly looks that way from examining how the Earth is heading.
...he didn't strike me as being that intelligent.
From the atricle:
With Seti@home having analysed some 50 trillion frequency bands, it is not surprising that a signal like this occurs purely due to chance.
Signal... by chance? He makes it sound like signals pop up for no reason on a random basis with nothing causing them (let's not get into any subatomic physics or philosophy debates).
Well, personally I just heard of him, but he lost my respect for him with that statement.
You mean....
Aliens with frickin' lasers on top of their heads?
Couldn't it be a signal from a stationary source that's being modulated as a carrier wave? Think outside your tiny box once in a while... :)
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A Dyson shpere?
Actually, they managed to translate the signals...
-----begin translation-----
From: endwrekfjandromeda.gal
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http://www.list.interstel.hghvip.gal
claustrophobia fred infelicity babbitt cucumber latus invertible buckthorn mercedes crevice chime bagley apprehend bayonne craw acculturate addressograph coward lurid
-------end...or is it?-----------
There is NO E.T. CONSPIRACY. There is no super secret recovered ANYTHING out there that came from beyond Earth's orbit. NOTHING. It is true that certain disinformation groups within the Defence community have occasionally capitalized on the whole UFO mythology, but only to draw attention away from sensitive programs. The most substantial sightings of crashed UFO's were simply specially developed canisters carrying reconnaisance film re-entering the atmosphere after being deployed by low earth orbit spy satellites...namely the early KH series. Glowing orbs are nothing more than atmospheric phenomenon involving static electricity and/or naturally produced electromagnetic forces. Bright objects that seem to travel across the sky at impossible speeds and then change course are nothing more than over the horizon solar reflections that are being bounced off ice crystals in the upper atmosphere. And yes, those huge shiny weather baloons have been the cause of more than a few sightings. The most secretive, highly guarded secrets that our military possesses pertain to Weapon design...specifically High Energy weapons, including nuclear. There are ways to boost the effectiveness of nuclear weapons, and speed up their production that we ABSOLUTELY DO NOT want getting into the wrong hands. Of course, Clinton sold alot of our secrets to the Chinese, so we are not as secure as we used to be...but we still have a few tricks up our sleeves just in case. How do I know all this? 1.) I am close to someone who had dealings w/ both the Foreign Technology Division at WPAFB and the NRO, back when they were not even able to be spoken about. 2.) I have a relative who works for the CIA, and is in a position that requires he be privy to historical intelligence archives that are still classified TS-SCI. 3.) I am friends with a former member of the recently disbanded Jason group. These contacts of mine have made it clear to me that there is NO ALIEN CONSPIRACY...and have done so without divulging any damaging national secrets. That being said, I will say this: There are technologies being developed in secrecy that are simply amazing. They are the product of decades of persistent research and dozens of ingenious researchers. Some of them will benefit mankind and make life easier. Some of them will make us safer...and some of them are going to put us precariously close to self-destruction. Automated, networked warfighting machines are one of the worst ideas that has ever come out of our military thinktanks. These systems have so many weak links and so much potential for miscalculation that it would be suicide to depend on them for defense OR offense. But that's a different matter that I won't get into. IMHO, the one area of technology that I think will be developed under the greatest security, will be the ability to send optical communication back in time. It has already been shown that you can accelerate light faster than it's normal speed, and the result of doing this is that the initial signal is recieved before it is sent...a seemingly paradoxal phenomenon. What is really occuring is that the frequency of the light is accelating faster than the speed of the light itself, therefore causing the oscillation to appear before it has been started. Once this technology is developed far enough, it will be possible to warn anyone in the past possessing the device sending the message in the future about future events...allowing them to advise on different courses of action.
For these scientists to deny the greatest discovery in the history of human existence ever happened and was just "all hype and noise" is a crime against humanity as far as I'm concerned. In the fullness of time when the truth finally does come out (from a more open govt NOT the US and given that, SETI was just a dream, never to be realized) in maybe 15 years or so, these men will be looked upon as traitors to the human race. I hope they are happy with what they've done.
This kinda sounds like Roswell, doesn't it?
First a big-whig announces something cool. and then it gets retracted the next day.
INTERESTING.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
A powerful microsatellite sent up by Hammond Industries.
... um ... whatever big corporation that was in Contact)
(I think that's what it was called
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
If I were an advanced (even as young as ourselves) civalization one of my first space projects would be
to beam as much of my accumulated knowledge out into the vastness of the universe.
So it seems reasonable (to me) that such inteligent life might setup a system such as a three satalite transmitter that would far outlast even it's own limited lifespan.
Good thing the scientist who discovered the "Wow" signal was a cleanmouth. Could you imagine the scientific community talking about the "Holy Shit!" or the "Fuck me.." signal
"I told myself it was in all likelihood nothing special, but I'm still disappointed. Darn."
How many times do I wish that people would divorce themselves from WANTING scientific fact to be one way or the other. The nature of science is to discover truth--not to satisfy one's personal wishes and fancies. I bring this up because I am not sure we really WANT to find ET. How could we possibly have any better than a 50-50 guess of what the ramifications of such a discovery might be? It might be terrible, and with equal probability it might be good. We simply don't know, and anyone who proclaims it being one way or the other is clearly naive.
Another phenomena at work here is the "if it's going to happen, it's going to happen in our lifetime," which is something civilations have contended with for all history. Many if not all predicted that the end of the world would occur within their lifetime, and it didn't. It's the ego of man that wants to experience such an ultimate event in his lifetime, purely for the sake of curiosity. Same story here.
I would speculate that the odds of finding ET through SETI are almost surely (a.s.) 0. mainly because of the transmission power required. Secondly, because if ET is more advanced than us (which is not necessarily true, but would be a valid possibility) then he might have some very sophisticated way of detecting us, and probably would have done so already. That is an unknown, as is everything else here. And yet again, much ado about nothing.
the end.
*beep* *beep* *beep* At the third stroke it is 02:54 AM *beep* *beep* *beep* ....
.
Anybody got a sub-etha sens-o-matic to spare ?. I need to hitch a ride, been too long in this dump
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The Economic Times has a different take
3 7354.cms/
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/8
A short analysis of the press account of the signal here.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
We're just as likely to detect an early industrial civlization by their sitcom broadcasts as we are to detect some hyperadvanced godlike race beaming lasers at us accross the galaxy.
No, we're not. The odds of detecting an alien civilization that's within even a few hundred or thousand years of our own in terms of technology are ridiculously small.
---
That depends on how many civilizations exist at any one time doesn't it? We might miss 99.99999% of the civilizations that are out there because they are outside our tech level, but if there are 10^8 civilzations, then that's still a LOT of signals we could detect. The universe is a big place.
What makes you think that we could not detect a very wide range of signals anyway? If we walk along a path and see a snake we can communicate with it by stomping on the ground to sent it vibrations, even thought he snake is about as non-tech as it gets. The snake also communicates with us through its rattle or hiss and yet it can't even comprehend how much more advanced technically we are.
We come in peace. Take me to your lizard.
I don't know why the much better link with more information from seti.org wasn't posted instead of this short article.
These aren't the droids you're looking for.... he can go about his business
You think they want the Inter-galatic RIAA/MIAA suiing their whole civilization?
This kinda sounds like Roswell, doesn't it?
First a big-whig announces something cool. and then it gets retracted the next day.
INTERESTING.
Exhibiting anything but complete trust in Your Government means you are a Tinfoil Hatter. Go put on your tinfoil hat, you kook.
Doesn't this presume that the aliens are trying to send a signal toward us? If I'm figuring this right, to correct for Doppler from a moving sender, the adjustment depends entirely on the direction toward (and motion of) the intended receiver. If they're 1000 light years away, I'm not sure what we were doing >= 1000 years ago that would have attracted their interest, so the assumption that we're the intended recipients seems questionable.
And if the signal is being adjusted for some other intended receiver, might that receiver be in a different direction and might such an adjustment then contribute to the high frequency variation?
(there must be a faster way to send messages)
Eric
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fresh ideas for writers
I bet its some kind of extra-terrestrial "Pop-up" advertisment. I'm surprised the Vegans have not blocked ET's router...