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The Scream Aliens Hear From the Earth
onehitwonder writes "Astronomers have discovered that the Earth emits awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, according to an article up at Space.com. The sounds are created by charged particles from the solar wind colliding with Earth's magnetic field. This article explains more about the sounds and links to an audio recording of it."
If anyone ever makes first contact with us, it will to complain about the noise. Not a good start.
that in space, no one can hear you whistle.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The usefulness of this discovery in finding planets or identifying if they have an atmosphere is interesting.
...any emission in any spectrum can be mapped to audible sound, I guess. Unless it carries information encoded in analog form meant to be replayed as sound, it will always sound like awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles.
It as interesting as the lengths they went to create a sensationalist headline
News pattern:
1. Find interesting scientific discovery that features emissions in any spectrum.
2. Map emission to audible sound.
3. Write "The screams X emits to anybody listening"
4. Profit.
Wait, no ??? line. I must have told it wrong.
What I do for a living: Build a GPS mobile game
The Earth should install Adobe Flash Player, then it would be completely silent unless aliens install the plug-in and the server isn't /.'d.
Our planet is also known to hum, a mysterious low-frequency sound thought to be caused by the churning ocean or the roiling atmosphere.
No, that's from our warp engines. How else do you move a planet around?
Earth sounds like a 16 kbps MP3 encoding of /dev/random
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Sounds like Ridley Scott and/or Jim Cameron has to make a new version of "Alien(s)" in which we *can* hear the scream. And frankly, if I remember the original correctly, all Lambert did was scream. Sheesh Lambert, shut the f**k up! And of course, this time, Ash has to be a hobbit robot.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Here's a copy on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI
mother nature is tone deaf?
that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening
Assuming that "aliens" can hear at all.
Of course "hearing" is based on the detection of vibrations in the surrounding medium - a sense that is very antiquated indeed - and available to even some of the most primitive organisms. On Earth. However it's difficult to use the mere existence of such a sense to apply it to possible creatures on entirely different worlds. Perhaps given very different environments with stranger density/pressure conditions other senses would be more vital for survival. Of course one could argue that as far as we know the conditions that are suitable for life would not be that different from our own, therefore hearing would probably have to exist.
And then we can argue that the "screeches", etc, are merely the way we choose to make our computers interpret this data.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The summary could have mentioned that although
somebody learned something new about the radiation produced by charged particles trapped in the Earth's magnetic field,
which seems fairly interesting. I wonder if anybody's got a model worked out yet to explain how a narrow planar beam gets generated.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
...it's a scream. To the aliens, it's the siren's call of potential conquest.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Can't another planet emit those noises ?
I suppose the answer is "Yes", if it has a magnetic field and if it orbits a usual star.
So, can't we use those noises to detect extrasolar planets ?
It is Britney Spears singing who has the size of a planet.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
...a million voices cried out at once...
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The emission could just as well be playing a Britney Spears song -- its just that the programmers at Kl'agnorf Multidimensional Muzzak borked their encoding routine.
(Unborking their encoding routine would probably cause an interstellar war, though, as the Intergalactic Association Of Recording Artists claims that Spears was clearly pirating Pu'oluk's Fuzzion album. And doing a poor job of it, which they privately concede they wouldn't have thought possible.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Dear Magrathea Customer Support,
it has come to our attention that the planet, namely the EARTH, which we purchased from you some millennia ago, may now be faulty. It appears to emit a high pitched screeching noise as it turns around its star. We are not sure at this point if it's perhaps an intermittent fault, however Benji can hear it every time he's out in his spaceship.
We understand that the planet is still covered by warranty, thus we would be grateful if you could send some engineers around to have a look at it. Mornings suit us best.
Kind regards
The Mice.
...you can hear Steve Ballmer throwing his chair.
Apply apropiate transform function to the sensors data stream, and you could hear 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' if you would...
So what?
What's in a sig?
FTA it seems more like they're talking about radiation.
aurora recordings on earth is known many years already. even when you can't see auroras, you can hear them in VLF range. for example http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/mcgreevy/
What about using our great friend vger (voyager) to relay back tv/radio signal to see what actually can be recieved from earth from large distances.
I used to think that space,com had some credibility, but it looks like they're willing to give up any principles of sound (ooops, pun unintended) reporting in the pursuit of a good headline
All that's happened is some scientists have concluded the solar wind interacts with our magnetic field to emit radio waves. Hardly a big deal, but I suppose it's a cheap, undemanding article that attracts the uniniatated (and slashdot readers) to their advertising.
So much for a decent science article
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Isn't it that sound cannot travel in vacuum? It needs a medium to travel. Is this some other kind of sound which travels without a medium? Or Is it that the summary of the article is not correct?
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
Further baffling the astronomers, the sun appears to emit a deep, villainous laugh.
If you take any kind of electro-magnetic wave and arbitrarily convert it to sound waves using a formula you've just made up, then amazingly it's going to sound awful. But the idea that the Earth is emitting "sound" that aliens may find "ear piercing" is misleading garbage.
The problem with this is, the "scream" a planet produces is insignificant to the SCREAM the star it orbits would produce.
Its like trying to hear what someone is saying when they are stood next to the speakers at a rock concert and you are on the other side of the stadium.
You would be better getting a video camera with a telephoto lens and trying to lipread :)
liqbase
they probably can't hear in that spectrum anyway, much like how a husband can tune out a jilted wife. /not married //no gf either ///hence i'm here
I blame Styx.
"Astronomers have discovered that the Earth emits awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening..."
It also shouts "Get yer tits oout fer the lads!" at any female comets that might be passing....
It's very likely the original auroral noise is much closer to your basic interstation FM hiss than "piercing chirps and whistles". Somebody put the noise through a FFT-like process which pretty much made up all the coherent beeps out of random noise.
But studying random noise seems a whole lot less interesting than trying to make out words from the chirps.
And here I was hoping to hear the new "Metal Machine Music", but planet Earth just can't compare, maaaan...
It's the cries of the Elder Things or the mimicking of Shoggoths. Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
These are radio waves.
And, since they don't penetrate our ionosphere, in order to do this
The knowledge could also be used by Earth's astronomers to detect planets around other stars, if they can build a new radio telescope big enough for the search.
Those radio telescopes would have to be built in space, not here on Earth.
If this is true wouldnt that be a way to find other planets that are like ours??
I think the important part is the distortion created in the general background scream. I don't know much about the possible methods of observation, but if the incomprehensible jabber of the star is distorted in a regular pattern (say a funny sequence of higher pitched clicks amid the chirping) which could look like an orbit when the position of the distortion over time is graphed, then there's a fair chance it's a planet. Or some other large body with a magnetic field... or a tiny body with an extremely large magnetic field :P
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Obviously a topic ripe with potential for humor, and once again Slashdot has attempted to meet the challenge. Some would say grandly, others would say falling short. It all depends on your sense of humor, of course.
On a more serious note...
There are those who believe that our emissions of radio and TV signals are advertising our presence to book ("To Serve Man") authors everywhere, and that letting our presence be known is a Really Bad Idea. (TM) They should be happy to hear that we're being drowned out quite effectively by the Earth, itself. From what I remember, a really good detector can fish signal out of this much noise, but you also have to have more of an idea what you're looking for.
Which also has implications for SETI and such. Maybe there's more noise out there than we anticipated. We knew that suns make some serious noise, as do Jupiter-type planets. I'm not sure we knew how much noise Earth-style planets make.
Plus there's the nature of "intelligent" signals themselves. You can listen to Morse code and pretty quickly come to the conclusion that it's modulated - not random noise. Even if the concept of a BFO is foreign, you can look at it on an oscilloscope and figure that out. Next would be an AM or FM modulated signal. Even if it's Brittany Spears, as others mention, you can probably figure out that it's a modulated signal. By the time you get to Adolph Hitler opening the Olympic Games it's starting to get rougher. But I guess if you hang a spectrum analyzer on the thing, you can figure out that it's a modulates signal, find the video fields, figure out that there's a second signal (audio) on a subcarrier, etc.
Now from first principles try to intercept and decode an HTDV signal, even without DRM. Or how about spread-spectrum communications, or the various cellphone signaling mechanisms. In fact, good signal compression turns *any* signal into noise. That's because if there were anything in the compressed output that looked regular, then the compression would have been evaluated as lacking. This is even before we try to add any encryption, but in fact some compression/archive programs include password protection, because it does so good a job of de-regularizing data that it practically is encrypted.
Which brings us to "Dpilot's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law" :
"Any sufficiently advanced communications technology is indistinguishable from noise."
(Need I state Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")
Which brings us back to SETI and Drake... Maybe the signals of interstellar communication are all around us - and we're just not smart enough to recognize and decode it - yet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Nah man, its not really chirps and whistles, their just using the wrong codecs to listen to it... try using mplayer!!!
Try playing it backwards.
"the Earth emits awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles"... which makes us the planetary equivalent of a Counting Crows concert. Nobody wants to be within earshot of either.
Kinda too bad the Earth's scream doesn't sound like Robert Plant's. Dontcha think?
More importantly: can we determine if the extra-solar planets we know of (or find) have magnetospheres?
The magnetosphere protects us from stellar and interstellar radiation. Without shielding, life as we know it on Earth could not exist (at least not exposed to the sky).
It would, I think, be very interesting to know the presence or lack of magnetospheres on planets outside the solarsystem.
Didn't these guys see Transformers. That's obviously a Decepticon signal............
Be gone from my sight or prepare to feel my flaming wraith!
You might be able to make out the Fab Four singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand".
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
That's why aliens aren't visiting us in large numbers. We have a giant bug-away!
Vorglons have no ears, you insensitive clod!
The first thing that came to my mind was this exchange from Alien:
Ripley: Ash, that transmission - Mother's deciphered part of it. It doesn't look like an S.O.S.
Ash: What is it, then?
Ripley: Well, I, it looks like a warning. I'm gonna go out after them.
Ash: What's the point? I mean by the, the time it takes to get there, you'll, they'll know if it's a warning or not, yes?
I'm sure it can be found somewhere in the electromagnetic spectrum. Quick, Someone transpose it make a press release! I'm running out of diapers here.
I'll give it a 78, Dick. It's got a really good beat and you can dance to it.
I love how sites like this talk about aliens as if it's a matter of fact that they are out there. It's like they are "definitely" out there but only "maybe" listening to us.
Yeah right. Way too much junk science these days. I'm guessing it is from scientists who grew up with TV.
Atmosphere, no. Magnetic field, yes.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
The aliens at Proxima Centurai are just settling down now for their TV coverage of the Athens Olympics 2004.
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html
As kids we used to tune in between the stations on our short wave radios to listen to charged particles emitting radio waves as they spiraled through the Earth's magnetic fields.
How is this process different?
Distinctive sounds as this means a magnetic field, which in turns means a liquid magnetic core, which means a geologically alive planet, and potentially life. Venus and Mars are not geologically alive and have much smaller magnetic fields.
I thought that Earth was supposed to sound like some screwed-up version of 'All Along the Watchtower'!
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Or solar flares. (What do you call solar flares made by stars other than sol?)
old broadcasts of HeeHaw streaming out into the Universe... with Minnie Pearl screeching "How-DEEEE!"
;)
So really, it's just the Earth saying hello
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
Maybe there's a simpler explanation.
Maybe there's just a great disturbance in the Force. As if a million souls are crying out in torment and just haven't been silenced at once.
Look for horses not zebras, folks.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Shouldn't we be able to pick up the radio noise generated by earth-like planets in other solar systems?
Clear, Dark Skies
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. In our drive to reach the highest possible customer satisfaction, your free replacement planet will be delivered today.
Your current planet will of course be recycled at no additional charge.
Thank you for choosing Magrathea Planetary Systems and we look forward to your future business.
...that my mother was hooked on a particular soap opera, called "As The World Turns."
Perhaps that could now be brought back in the form of "As The World Screams."
BTW, don't tell the televangelists about this. They'll probably want to try and find some way to organize a choir of all the system's planets. Gad, talk about "Music of the Spheres..."
Now, where did I put my industrial-grade earmuffs...?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
... we could be the alien equivalent of fingernails across a blackboard. That really knocks down our chances of survival.
for "Oh God I'm cummminnnnngggggg!"
...would hear the voice of Heath Ledger? I don't get it.
Or solar flares. (What do you call solar flares made by stars other than sol?)
Patent infringement.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I thought Earth was the Silent Planet.
Aliens on another planet: Can you hear the noise that planet is making? - Yeah, sounds dangerous, we should blast it. Hmm, as I recall a highway bypass is needed in that part of the galaxy... I'll get right on it!
Even further, could we inject a signals into that noise? Let's just piggyback on Sol's random transmissions with some geostationary equipment that can use physical waveguides. Properly designed they could provide a guidepost long after our species is JALOHC (just another layer of hydrocarbons).
I know this is borderline OT, but it's something I've wondered about recently.
Why is it that I can "see" when things are upside down, but there is no such audible distinction?
Is it because sight is reception of photons (EM), and hearing is pressure/vibration of air molecules?
Why is it that I can immediately know my book or TV is upside down, but not when my speakers have been turned upside down?
Is it that I can easily "see" in 2 dimensions, but that I only hear in 1 linear dimension?
I'm sure there's a simple answer, but I don't have a clear understanding. Thanks in advance.
The Universe's largest theremin!
Posted anonymously by cellocgw 'caue I foolishly modded someone
This is just plain shoddy reporting.
There is nothing new here: Earth's natural VLF emissions have been known and studied for decades. The only thing new here is a new standard of bad reporting.
Sigh.
...laura
IT WAS THE CRIES OF THE CARROTS! You see reverend maynard today is harvester day, and to them, it is the holocaust! (bad speller :P)
Or, to put it another way, it would be a lot like trying to find a planet in the visually by trying to differentiate the tiny tiny light the planet reflects from the LIGHT the star emits. :)
Still, it could be useful; it's clearly impossible to tell from this article. More potential avenues of planet detection can only serve to increase detection odds.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
If the earth whistles and no aliens are around to hear it, does it make a sound?
"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason." -- Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts] First contact - aliens with sensitive ears and planet buster bombs.
Those charged particles sound just like the new Dark Knight trailer!
This is a joke right?
The link in the story just shows a Batman trailer - Ah well..
How ironic that the natural sound of the planet being broadcast into space sounds incredibly like Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Aliens listening in might come to the conclusion that the inhabitants of the planet are all in possession of electric guitars, amps that go to eleven, and lots of high-quality cannabis.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The problem with this is, the "scream" a planet produces is insignificant to the SCREAM the star it orbits would produce.
Oh, I dunno about that. I do recall some years back reading a comment by an astronomer that the main source of EM signals from our solar system is Jupiter. This is due to its humongous magnetic field, which is apparently much stronger than the sun's (and Earth's). So the loudest such "screams" are probably coming from Jupiter, not the sun or Earth.
I wonder if anyone has detailed numbers on the topic? Maybe it's time to do a bit of googling ...
(I also remember reading an article that claimed that, for certain parts of the spectrum, our military radar systems greatly outshine both the sun and Jupiter. Those signals would be very obviously artificial, so our military are loudly announcing our presence to every astronomer in range since military radars were invented around 60 years ago. I wonder if there's anyone inside that sphere that's listening?)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Oh so the sound sample is the Batman trailer? Nice. Oh wait, that was an ad. Hmm I don't remember ordering one up.
Like *lots* of horses
Can you hear the cries of the planet? As if to say "I hurt, I suffer".
-- Bugenhagen, Final Fantasy VII, Observatory. He explains how all planets emit these sound waves but how ours cries in pain (and throws in the odd scream for good measure)
Yep I'm an FF geek. But then, I guess this isn't all that new if people have already based fiction on it.
I was expecting a rick-roll