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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.
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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
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Here's a copy on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI
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.
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...it's a scream. To the aliens, it's the siren's call of potential conquest.
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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 ?
...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.
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
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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
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.
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.