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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? :)
And this is a possible answer to the Fermi paradox. Well, after you accept that interstellar travel is not economically feasible.
Broadcast is not a great communication strategy. On-demand point-to-point communication takes over most things. Advanced civilizations go silent from the outside within a blink of them transmitting their first broadcast signals. There's no reason to think that we'll ever put serious effort into sending signals into the black given all the other things on our plate. And there's no reason to think that any other civilization would have such extra resources either.
Cheers.
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!
I keep asking this question: Why can't we detect ET's transmissions?
DRM'ed, no doubt.
There have been several attempts at sending radio messages into space specifically for communication purposes. Whether we keep that up or not is independent of our use of radio for intraplanentary communications.
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've been critical of SETI efforts for this reason. Much SETI effort was focused on looking for "carriers", big constant-frequency RF sources. Broadcast AM, FM, and analog TV (which was AM video, FM audio) have strong carriers, but that was hugely inefficient. About 80% of an analog TV station's power output wasn't conveying any information other than "We're here". As receivers improved, new RF technologies used weaker carriers, then suppressed carriers, and finally, with spread spectrum, dropped the whole concept of carriers. Many modern RF signals appear to be noise unless you understand the encoding. (The same thing happened to modems decades ago; at 300 baud, you heard tones; at 9600 baud and up, it sounded like white noise.)
I once pointed out to a speaker at Stanford promoting some SETI scheme that they couldn't detect any emission that the FCC would now license for a new application. He admitted that was true. For our civilization, there was less than a century of high-powered carriers. That's a narrow window to hit for SETI purposes.
Arguably, though, any sufficiently advanced civilization will monitor all RF passing through their solar system and will be able to detect anything which has a pattern which can be synched up. Although carriers are going away, all signals between distant points need some form of synchronization information. The synch information may be a tiny fraction of the transmitted data, but there has to be something upon which the receiver can lock.
We have large synchronized power grids. They'll get a signal that's 2x the line frequency. As the Earth turns, you get modulation of various sorts: frequency, phase, amplitude.
Amplitude goes down for oceans, and up for land. You get more 100 Hz for the Old World, and more 120 Hz for the New World. As different country-sized areas with the same line frequency pass into view, you get phase change.
It all has a nicely repetitive 24-hour period.
I keep asking this question: Why can't we detect ET's transmissions?
DRM'ed, no doubt.
Dude, if only that were true! You'd find aliens just by searching the pirate bay!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
I believe there is a general principle here that goes beyond the technology at hand: any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from white noise.
"Stultz, I wonder if there is actually life out there. We've been centuries monitoring the neno-kurflichsk time-fabric disturbance detector that any technologically advanced civilization should be sending out if...if... they sentients do exist. I mean, it is third grade stuff, anybody knows that time-fabric can be disturbed instantly, we keep doing it simultaneously to all the atoms of the universe, and still nothing for CENTURIES. Can you believe it?"
"Professor, I wonder... I have this crazy idea... maybe other other advanced civilizations use... radiowaves?"
"Stultz, you are an idiot or what?"
"I...I am just saying, maybe some less advanced civilizations..."
"Pluuhlease, that is enough! Are you serious? You should go back to elementary school. Have you forgot that radiowaves travel at the speed of light??, it is more than obvious that it is not the most convenient way to communicate with other civilizations... unless you want to wait another lifetime to send your response, and to where should we point the antennas, huh?. Have you forgot that we are talking about ASTRONOMICAL DISTANCES?? It would take centuries! Or even worse, those electromagnetic waves would be absorbed by black holes, bounced, even hit by the breshanistok matter! We would get nothing or everything scrambled, indistinguishable from white noise! Your question is simply retarded. We are trying to contact sentients, not idiots!"
And professor Breshanistok stood up upset and the graduate student Stultz watched the glowing monitoring holoscreen scratching his head.