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SETI Disrupted By Cell Phones in Airplanes?
Iphtashu Fitz writes "If, as recently mentioned, the FCC does allow wireless access on airplanes, could it effectively mean the end of the search for ET? NewScientist has a new article that explains how radio interference from airborne cellphones could drown out faint radio signals from space. Among other concerns astronomers have is that the second harmonic of many cell phones falls in a frequency band that reveals the molecular signature of newborn and dying stars, which is among the 2% of frequencies in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum reserved for use by radio astronomers. Michael Davis, director of projects at California's SETI Institute, stated that a single cellphone on an airplane 100 miles from a radiotelescope could exceed recommended radio noise levels by 10 times. A potential solution that astronomers have suggested is to install a miniture cell transceiver on each airplane, called a picocell, that would act as a relay using a frequency that wouldn't interfere with their work."
Shoot, this is one more reason not to have cell phones on airplanes during flight. I worry about the public's lack of concern for science especially given the extreme right wing movements going on right now in the USA, but people do not want to be remotely inconvenienced even if it means screwing science. Perhaps if the appeal can be made to them from a personal sanity perspective. I got a brief taste of how bad cell phones on planes can be last month on a flight that I wrote about it here.
Perhaps if this has to happen the picocell solution might be the way to go, but please let there be phone free zones on aircraft.
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Nothing against the organization, but did they really think they can reserve the entire sky for their software?
A mini cell on each plane that could play back a message saying something like "We told you not to use your cell phone, so turn it off!"
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
Still no intelligent life eh?
crazy dynamite monkey
Wouldn't an advanced civilization have developed a means of communication that can penetrate whatever disturbance would come from members of their civilization communicating while on aircraft?
this is why the aliens gave us cell phone technology.
always mosh clockwise
You want to install what in an aircraft?
As a government licensed aircraft mechanic I could tell you that is completely infeasible because there are simply too many airplanes in the sky to see that it is installed and the govenmental approvals to install such a device (unless the airplane is experimental everything installed in an airplane has to be FAA approved) along with the costs would see that this never happens.
My question is that isn't this already happening when people forget to turn off their cell phones and it sits in standy searching for a network?
Isn't it time to investigate satellites for this sort of thing? Pointing out instead of in? I know maybe this isn't ideal since the satellite is moving both relative to the earth and the sky, it would probably make it difficult to lock onto any signal that was found? I got a B's in Physics, someone help me out here.
Seems like this would solve a lot of interference problems though, and perhaps even give you much better results. Is it just the cost factor that keeps this from happening?
As TFA clearly states, cellphones adjust their power output as necessary - the closer the cell tower the weaker the signal a phone puts out. With a picocell on board the airplane all the phones would put out a minimal signal. If the picocell wasn't there then the phones would have to significantly increase their power output to reach the terrestrial towers 40,000 feet below.
Then of course there's the Sagan hypothesis that itellegant life has such a narrow time fram of existence before anihilating itself that either you dont overlap in time with you interplanetary peers or if you do they'll be dead by the time you manage to travel there.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think SETI is one of the most serious wastes of resources ever dreamed up. All that ridiculous funding could go to something much more important than trying to find something that probably wouldnt contact us even if it could...if it even exists... nail this as flamebait if you want, but if "ET" wanted to let us know he was there, he'd find a way to get around our cell phone signals. ;)
This is just a bunch of wacko's griping because they're bored waiting for....nothing.....to happen.
It should be pointed out that the problem is bigger than just SETI not being able to hear the aliens. most of the deep-sky viewing done form earth is done using radio telescopes. the problem with cell-phones on planes is that it potentially throws a ton of interfering signal data into the telescope's FOV. nevermind that nobody needs to be talking on their cell-phone while flying, I'd rather the telescopes keep working (there's way too much space up there for us to be the only intelligent thing in it).
-It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
A typical aircraft already has a high-powered weather radar dish, several VHF transmitters for voice communications (with air traffic control, etc), a transmitter to talk with the airlines' own ground control, and usually an AirPhone transmitter (for all those $5/min phones in every seat back). With all that RF noise going on, what's a few more very-low-power UHF cell phones??
That's just it. It's RF noise. Cell phones create modulated RF signals with harmonics on frequencies that radiotelescopes need to be listening on. Imagine trying to hear someone playing a flute from 30 miles away. Now imagine you're trying to hear that flute, standing 50 yards from a raging waterfall. That's like what radio telescopes do right now; it's tricky, but picking signals out of full-spectrum RF noise is what they are designed to do.
NOW imagine trying to hear that distant flute while standing 50 yards from a raging waterfall, and a band starts playing Sousa marches right in your ear. Even if the sound of the distant flute is still reaching you, you'll never ever be able to pick out its waveform from the sound of the band AND the white noise of the waterfall. Especially during the picolo solo.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
This is not the first time that this argument has been made. ...but the first time was 20-30 years before cell phones were invented.
Humanity has unleashed a veritable plethora of rf emitting devices. Television broadcast towers, satellites, anything electrical... they all leak rf that's thousands (if not millions) of times more powerful then the signals coming in from distant stars.
Banning cell phones on planes BECAUSE of this is like using a Sharpie marker to turn a sucking chest wound into a smiley face. You (the pen wielder) might feel better, but it's not going to solve the real problem one iota.
The real solution is to invest in building radio telescopy infrastructure on the far side of the moon. Either there, or in a heliocentric orbit on the opposite side of the sun at 1 AU. Those are the only two places in the universe that have are always shadowed from Earth based broadcasts.
Additionally, there are frequencies that are absorbed by the O2 in our atmosphere, so radiotelescopes in space would have better 'bandwidth' to observe.
Finally, it's unlikely that the cell phone industry will finally be convinced to go to pico-repeaters because of the inconvenience that radio telescopy scientists encounter. It'll be because pico-repeaters will make cell phones work in places they don't currently. Deep garages, underground installations, steel buildings, small valleys... these are economically driven reasons to adopt the technology. Scientists (the normal kind, not the mad kind) are usually poor, so the money just isn't there.
Pick your battles, and pick a winning strategy to get the tech you want. Radio telescopes... they ain't it.
3 scenarios guys:
1) Other civilizations are below our technological level....which means we won't see them at all.
2) They're equal to ours...and since we're unable to do much of anything beyond our little neighborhood, we won't see them at all.
3) They're far more advanced than us...which means they have the smarts to avoid detection so we won't see them at all.
Keeping this in mind, explain to me again why we need to change the entire commercial aircraft industry (FCC approval + FAA approval + thousands of aircrafts + world-compatible technology) when there are easier ways to try and avoid our RF interference (satellites, moon, probes, etc). TFA didn't impress me.
Have you SEEN Arecibo? Or the VLA? Compare that in size to our beloved rovers. Then let's talk about cost of transport to the moon.
I'm all in favor of the phone-free zones on aircraft (hell, if we put the phone-users together, maybe they'll bug each other enough until they realize how much they're bugging other people), but a long-shot science program hardly seems reason to ban them altogether.
People want to use their phones for work, or to contact their families, and if they already had the ability to use their cell phones in the air they'd consider it a major inconvenience. Calling it "remotely inconvenienced" is an understatement.
And "screwing science" is an overstatement. SETI is a fun idea but the odds of succeeding on any given telescope or any given day are so low that it hardly seems worth shutting down the planet so you can go look for aliens. It's a tiny, tiny project tucked into the corners (free telescope time, free computer time) of the scientific world.
It's not like they're going to find anything anyway... I do care about the interference with other astronomical work, though. And as if there aren't cell phones in enough places, damn, the last thing I want is to be on a plane with 50 people talking on their cell phones.
Too bad those little personal cell phone jammers are illegal in the States. Otherwise I'd carry one around with me. I'm sick of people too busy talking on the phone to drive, or walking down the aisle of the supermarket asking some poor nitwit on the other end of the phone, "Should I buy the ice cream? It's only got 9 million calories. Oooh, trash bags are on sale."
Maybe it's just me, but I don't want to hear people talking on their cell phone anywhere, but especially not in a crowded airplane.
I thought this article was about SETI?
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
In case you haven't worked it out yet, SETI uses radio astronomy equipment to listen for radio signals from outer space.
:)
/. blurb, I have pasted it here:
Reading comprehension is fun
The grandparent poster is claiming that this affects more than just the SETI people, this affects all radio astronomy. In case you cannot be bothered to read the article or the
Among other concerns astronomers have is that the second harmonic of many cell phones falls in a frequency band that reveals the molecular signature of newborn and dying stars, which is among the 2% of frequencies in this part of the electromagnetic spectrum reserved for use by radio astronomers.
There you go, actual science being disrupted, not searching for little green men.
Finkployd
Your underlying assumption is the signals we may dectect are accidentally or incidentally broadcast into space.
Deliberate broadcasts suffer from none of the drawbacks you describe.
You also assume that our use of the EM spectrum is the same as some other civilization's use of the EM spectrum.
Also an assumption everyone agrees with.
So your conclusion SETI won't work does not follow from your argument.
True, it probably won't work, but not in the manner you describe.
ET: "Can you hear me now?"
SETI Scientist: "Damn cell phone interference."
If cellphones on planes were a legitimate problem, wouldn't it be a problem everywhere else in the world where cellphones are already allowed on planes?
Sol (our sun) is a 3rd generation star, in what is considered one of the original galaxies in the 13.7 billion year old universe ( http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/earth_age_04 0817.html ) Sol about 5 billion years old and located 2/3 of the way out on the Orion arm which extends some 42,000 light years from the stellar nursury at the center. ( http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/MilkyWay_ SizeandShapeoftheMilkyWay.asp ) IIRC, centripital acceleration slowly pushes stars out from the center towards the edge. The Milky Way is approximately 10,000 lightyears thick at the edge and 30,000 light years think in the centre.
If we assume that intelligence and time since your sun was born have a positive correlation, this means the smarter aliens would be further from the galactic core, and this space covers approximately 11 billion cubic lightyears of a total 169 billion cubic lightyears, about 6.5% of the space. If we assume that the galaxy's 200 billion stars are evenly distributed over this volume (they aren't, the galaxy is denser towards the center), that gives us 13 billion stars with the possibility of intelligent life smarter than us. If we assume that 1% of them actually do harbor intelligent life (and that figure is probably way too high), that leaves us with 130 million stars, spread out over 11 billion cubic lightyears. Since we have an even distribution of stars, that means intelligent life will happen once every 85 million light years.
So the nearest intelligent life with an advanced society is 85 million light years away. Unless the alien race has discovered a means to FTL travel, if they left 85 million years ago, they would be arriving right now. Serious SETI research isn't aimed at meeting ET, or having a conversation, but confirming that extraterrestrial intelligence exists.
Free MacMini
Not that the search for extra terrestrial life isn't a worthy cause, but there's a better reason for picocells on airplanes.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong. When you make a connection to a cell phone tower, you'll connect to the closest towers. Usually this is only two or three. While you're on an airplane though, you tend to pick up many more (several dozen?) towers, and connect to all of them. You're also moving through a coverage area faster, taking up a whole swath of towers.
I know, boo hoo, they're using up the poor phone companies resources. But I'd rather not have to wait for a passing 747 to get out of range before I can make a call.
It makes more sense to have the plane be its own cell phone tower, and route the calls out through it and not taking up channels on normal cell phone towers. Oh yeah, and it'd be nice to cut out some of the interference.
Then again, I could be completely talking out of my ass. Hopefully someone in the know will come along and smite me or expend on this though/
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
This is a good Idea that would also work in restaurants.
Have seating like it used to be with smoking or nonsmoking. The no-smoking symbol in the overhead could be replaced with a cell phone icon, and cell use could be allowed only in some rows.
You don't want to sit with people gabbing on a phone through most of the flight, there could be seating accommodations. It used to be a regular part of air travel to be offered seating preference.
4)They're far more advanced than us and they are on their way now to put an end to all this nonsense. After all... The noisy humans might be causing interference with the "Aliens" FCC regulations. That or demand we convert to their religion or sell us beads for Earth and give us nasty diseases like most other advanced civilizations do when they meet less civilized societies.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Then you have the cost of hauling the stuff up there. Those radio telescopes are huge. That's a lot steel to even put in orbit, much less land on the lunar surface.
I still agree that it's a good idea, but not for the cost reasons.
As long as the windows are smaller than one wavelength.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
There is more to radio astronomy than the search for other life in the universe. There is more to..
Aircraft move very rapidly across a radio telescope's field of view, while stars are nearly stationary. This kind of noise is yet another argument for phased arrays of radio telescopes, networked together. Their parallax should be more than sufficient to distinguish Earth noise from stellar signals. Once in phased arrays, all the other benefits, from resolution to increased coverage, will arrive. Overcoming the inevitable aerial radio noise might just be the excuse we need to get to a more useable radio telescopy.
--
make install -not war
rendering an opinion and looking like a fool.
SETI is privatly paid for, no tax dollars are used.
About detecting:
The point is to find a signal that is evidence that another intelligent race has existed at sometime.
In that vain, they are looking for evidence, not direct transmissions. Like residual radio signals.
Talking would be great, not likly.
"if you want, but if "ET" wanted to let us know he was there, he'd find a way to get around our cell phone signals."
considering the power requirements to reach long distances, maybe not.
Just for clarification Just becaues you find evidence of another race, doesn't mean they have the capabilities to get to you.
there have been one or two unexplainable signals over the years. However if it's not repeatable, it's chalk up to noise.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Gaining knowledge should always trump some obnoxious lady in a grocery lineup asking her husband if they need more diapers. Frankly I think a good deal more constraints should be put on cellphones. No one should be allowed to drive and use one. No one should be allowed to get calls in movie theaters from one, and nobody should block legitimate scientific research. The thought that a generation of self-indulgent, self-important communication junkies would start screwing with astronomy is enough to make me sick.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If we assume that 1% of them actually do harbor intelligent life (and that figure is probably way too high), that leaves us with 130 million stars, spread out over 11 billion cubic lightyears. Since we have an even distribution of stars, that means intelligent life will happen once every 85 million light years.
Plugging your figures in google calc I get 1 civ every 85 cubic light years. You lost some digits in your calcs, and didn't convert down as was cubic light years not a direction.
This is the query that I sent.
what is (11 billion cubic lightyears) divided by 130 million) in cubic lightyears.
Also the actual arms contain nearly all of the stars there are large portions of really empty space even within your small guestimate of volume.