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Making It Hard For Extraterrestrials To Hear Us
quaith writes "US astronomer Frank Drake has told scientists at a special SETI meeting in London that earthlings are making it less likely that we will be heard in space. In the past, we used huge ground stations to broadcast radio and television signals which could be picked up relatively easily — according to astronomers' calculations anyway. Now we use satellites that transmit at 75 watts and point toward Earth instead of into space. In addition, we've switched to digital which makes the transmissions even fainter. Drake has concluded that very soon, in space no one will hear us at all. I guess we'd better keep listening."
This issue was already known to Drake when he formulated his famous equation -- a key parameter is the time window during which a civilisation is broadcasting radio signals.
So if a sufficiently advanced civilization (like ours) eventually develops radio technology that doesn't get far beyond their own planet, could this severely limit how much we would detect from other planets in the way of radio signals?
It reduces the probability that earth could be quickly located.
We gotta consider the possibility, that any extraterrestrials close enough to hear our signals in any reasonable amount of time, and with the sophistication to pinpoint us....
Might have the technology and desire to invade earth.
E.g. Consider earth itself... fast forward a few dozen generations...... massive overpopulation, lack of resources, land, severe overcrowding.
Extreme desire for another habitable place to live.
And then you detect an alien signal.. a foreign world. You step foot there, and you're greeted by basically an aboriginal species (compared to your civilization).
Habitable world, massive resources, very primitive 21st-century level technology, nothing compared to your 23rd century tech.
Oh.... so some colonists start travelling from earth to 'the new world' for a better life.
Settlers VS the Natives all over again.
It's happened before, it could happen again. Except us earth inhabitants could be the primitive natives / "Indians" / etc.
Scary, huh? :)
This is good news. And overdue.
We've been a stupidly noisy duck for far too long.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
the closest aliens are at least thousands of light years away, they haven't "missed" our radio signals, they still haven't heard them yet. And they'll have like 100 years of signals to figure us out.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Considering how the meeting between two civilizations, one more avanced than the other has generally gone badly for the majority of human history, it may not be such a bad idea to keep ourselves quiet until their intentions are shown to be peaceful/cooperative.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Do we WANT to be detected? Oh it would be wonderful if we could communicate with intelligent life somewhere other than earth (I am assuming there is intelligence here). But what if the species we contact are not peaceful? What if they're out looking for worlds to enslave? There certainly would be an advantage in staying quiet and being the first to "discover" a new civilization without giving up our own presence. That way we could study these new beings before deciding whether to risk contact or not.
Likewise, the same logic can be applied to an alien species. Why would they trust us? Why would they carelessly beam their presence out into space, not knowing who was going to listen in? It is certain, given our past history (you know, that part about strong humans usually ending up wiping out weaker ones through conquest), that we ourselves aren't exactly trust-worthy. Maybe they have heard us, and we failed the test, and we will never meet our neighbors. That is one possibility the "Drake Equation" fails to account for. Maybe we will be permanently assigned to the universe's "time out" box, because of our bad behavior - and we'll never know.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Has anyone considered the historical evidence of what happens when superior civilizations encounter lesser ones? The Native Americans, the Mayans, the Incas, the Australian Aborigines, the tribes of South America, the natives of Pacific Islands, to name a few, all cry out to humanity to avoid at all costs encounters of the first, second, and third kinds. We have no reason to expect anything but annihilation from advanced alien races- either they are truculent and violent like we are, or they will destroy us as a service to the rest of the galaxy. We do not wants aliens to find us!
And there's no reason to think that any other civilization would have such extra resources either.
I think it's a pretty ignorant statement to presuppose that any other civilization in the universe will necessarily irreparably rape and exploit their planet for resources as badly as we humans have.
not much, just being forced to manually insert line breaks into my comment
Why are so worried about finding aliens right now? Its like a child trying to throw a paper plane to the top of a mountain. We need better technology and it will be here soon. Best not worry where we're pointing our signals at the moment.
The flip side, of course, is that monitoring for radio signals is extremely cheap. It uses equipment that we already use for other purposes and a small number of researchers. The potential upside is huge, though. Discovering that an advanced civilization exists somewhere is such a big deal that there is no reason not to do something cheap and easy to find it.
I agree that the odds are stacked against us and that it is unlikely that we find anything. Even if we are lucky enough to pick up a signal, establishing communications would be difficult. The odds are stacked against us, no question. But we are a curious species and we just can't pass up an opportunity to learn something, especially when it costs us so little.
I can't believe this came from educated scientists.
Our communications signals are getting weaker, sure, but we still have other sources of clearly artificial radiation that are just as powerful as before. For example, military and weather radar. We regularly send out radar pusles powerful enough to compute the range to other planets in the solar system. Similarly, the Deep Space Network sends out powerful signals on various frequencies using highly directional beams when communicating with space probes.
It sure would suck for an alien species to evolve to have to come all the way out to earth and use humans as part of their reproductive cycle.
In the Western world, the economic return of having children is often considerably less than zero. Yet people keep doing it. I wonder why? Could it be that there are more things to consider than simple economics? I think that just might be possible.
Why do you think finding an Earth-like world within 100 light years is "unlikely"? We have already discovered worlds with liquid water. Unfortunately, so far they have been far too large for us... but that's just because the big ones are easier to find. In just the last year we have found several planets closer to earth's size.
Given our actual experience of the last couple of years, I don't think it's "unlikely" at all. I think it's quite likely indeed.
Maybe you just haven't been keeping up with the recent news?
Economically, it might be more expensive keeping the invasion fleet at home - better to have them wander the galaxy picking fights under the aegis of securing inter-galactic democracy - nothing worse than having trained killers hanging out in the 'burbs. Or they might even be space nomads looking for suitable planets to stop off at to eat, get sexy and reproduce before carrying on through space. Or, Earth might be home to a resource that is exceptionally valuable, such as haemoglobin(?!) or raw brains, to their sprawling empire making the journey potentially profitable for inter-galactic venture capitalists. So there are plenty of reasons why we can expect aliens to come calling - in fact is is surprising it hasn't happened already.
Haha actually that's a pretty good thought. Good encryption should yield a signal resembling one of maximum entropy... meaning that it would hardly be distinguishable from noise.
On the other hand, if it were not the data itself but the character of the signal that were detectable, that's another story altogether. For example, the equivalent of TCP/IP packets would be easily detectable as intelligent signals, regardless of the eventual content of those packets.