SETI Researcher Quashes Signal Rumors

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories but... by fzammett · 2004-09-02 06:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

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

Re:This is not a cover-up. I repeat – This is by Eloquence · 2004-09-02 06:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

The BBC article is certainly high on denial and short on substance. I particularly dislike the intro: " It was reported on the internet that the signal had been found .." - Oh, these wacky Internet people are at it again. The New Scientist is also a print publication, and it did not report that a signal had been found, it reported that there was a particularly strong candidate signal, which showed certain interesting oddities which may very well rule it out from being artificial:

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.
This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.
Fishy and puzzling
The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is "fishy", he says. "If [the aliens] are so smart, they'll adjust their signal for their planet's motion."
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.

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?

Re:I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories but by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-02 06:24 · Score: 1, Interesting

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?

Re:This is not a cover-up. I repeat – This is by DHR · 2004-09-02 06:31 · Score: 5, Interesting

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?

Conspiracy by $lingBlade · 2004-09-02 06:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

Re:there is still hope by ravenspear · 2004-09-02 06:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

for the hardcorest tinfoil hatters among us

It's a shame that this whole situation still gets treated like this. A lot of people know and it still continues. All the data is there for anyone that wants to see it. SETI puts the face on it that mainstream scientists are willing to accept.

Re:c == c by Ned+in+California · 2004-09-02 06:49 · Score: 3, Interesting

Actually this is not quite right. c = c in a vacuum, but the interstellar medium is not a vacuum. The density of electrons makes the ISM a dispersive medium, and velocity of wave propagation is a function of frequency. So, for example, X-ray evidence of a gamma-ray burst arrives before the "afterglow" at radio frequencies. See Kraus, "radio astronomy" chapter 9.

Re:c == c by TeknoHog · 2004-09-02 06:55 · Score: 2, Interesting

Radio waves and light [also a radio wave] travel at the same speed through space.

#include <nitpick.h>

Both light and radio waves are electromagnetic waves. Light is not a radio wave any more than Linux is a Windows.

--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.

how does he explain the drift? by another+misanthrope · 2004-09-02 07:06 · Score: 2, Interesting

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...

Drift is puzzling by Tired+and+Emotional · 2004-09-02 07:13 · Score: 2, Interesting

What's really puzzling is the totally bogus "the planet would have to be rotating 40 times as fast as earth" claim.

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!

alien space probe. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-02 08:06 · Score: 1, Interesting

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 :\

Re:This is not a cover-up. I repeat – This is by Rich0 · 2004-09-02 08:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

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...

Re:This is not a cover-up. I repeat – This is by gad_zuki! · 2004-09-02 08:40 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

How do you correct outgoing signal... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-02 09:41 · Score: 1, Interesting

From another article on this signal:

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.

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?

Re:Wait a minute... by jnicholson · 2004-09-02 15:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

My interpretation: there was an interesting signal, so Dan Wertheimer said so. 'Interesting' may be a technical term amongst the SETI research community, which is the context in which he was speaking. We all took it to mean something else. Now he's clarifying. They are still continuing to observe the signal, in the sense that next time they get data from that bit of the sky, they'll look at it to see what's up - NOT in the sense that all telescopes will be trained on that part of the sky from now until they've figured out why the odd signal.

Just because it's the only current candidate, doesn't mean it's the only remaining candidate. Candidates come and go, probably fairly frequently.

We all got overexcited, and he's trying to bring us down again.

I'm looking forward to the next bit of data they get from that point in the sky. Unfortunately, it will probably be ultimately boring and probably won't be announced, so I'll die still curious. C'est la mort.

--
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies

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SETI Researcher Quashes Signal Rumors

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