Slashdot Mirror
Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins
liqs8143 writes "Astronomers from the United States have begun searching for alien life on 86 possible earth-like planets. A massive radio telescope that listens for signs of alien life is being used for this project. These 86 planets are short-listed from 1235 possible planets detected by NASA's Kepler telescope. The mission is part of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, launched in the mid 1980s. A giant dish pointing towards each of the 86 planets will gather 24 hours of data, starting from this week."
I would first search the exoplanets pointed to by the most interesting crop circles from the global crop circles database why do the hard work when the aliens have done it for us, just draw a line from the centre of the Earth, through the crop circle to the appropriate starsystem
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Open to the world? So all us nerds can search and sift through it with you using, for once, not only our bandwidth to help you Mr. Seti, but also our minds.
Carl Sagan quotes get you an automatic +5 on all posts.
Just be sure we're up on the latest copyright laws from alien worlds. We wouldn't want to get some giant metallic radiation sphere orbiting our planet as a cease and desist order!
I guess they are using a 24hr "block" of radio telescope time...
but it was just funny reading it. Like they are going to study
them for 24hrs for signs of intelligent life. As if it was their
"day length period". lol
Wow, I hope no one ever scans our planet "in the morning"
radio talk shows. Not good for first contact, haha.
-AI
Oooh, my nick is relevant again...
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
we need to take spectroscopic measurements of earth-sized and super-earth-sized planets to detect evidence of life's biochemistry. But our short-sited congress cancelled the Terrestrial Planet Finder. The most monumental scientific discovery of mankind would be life elsewhere, it will need a little investment which is so very minuscule compared to the money we waste on enriching mega-corporations, imperialism and warmongering.
..are the signs of alien life they will listen for?
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
I wonder how Green Bank measures up to ATA's technical capabilities. Interesting that one gets switched off just a few months before the other goes live. Kinda have a feeling the US tax payer got short changed yet again.
They'll intercept transmissions of our reality TV shows, decide that something like that can't be allowed to pollute the universe and then proceed to nuke the whole planet from orbit.
Not sure why the author felt it was necessary to repeatedly reference 'a radio telescope in rural West Virginia' without giving an
actual link or reference to the GBT instead of yet another self referential physorg link.
The Green Bank Telescope GBT (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/) is a very impressive instrument just from an engineering stand point.
If you're even in the area it's well worth visiting though it is a bit off the beaten path.
With it's spectrometer (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/gbsapp/) it's also a good instrument for interstellar medium (ISM) biochemistry surveys. That may be a more fruitful area of study unless of course somebody does pick up the Ff99x22dddlw race's version of an Olympic broadcast.
I guess they are using a 24hr "block" of radio telescope time...
but it was just funny reading it. Like they are going to study
them for 24hrs for signs of intelligent life. As if it was their
"day length period".
I thought the negative elevation angle aspect was even funnier, assuming the targets are distributed in the galactic plane. I'm guessing they will take multiple days to gather 24 hours total of data. Or, maybe we've gone thru the journalism filter, and we're gathering "one days observation" and the journalist though 24 hours sounded "more scientific".
I suppose they could be limiting themselves to stars "that never set" in other word declination > (scope latitude + reasonable beamwidth / sidelobes)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Damn! Alien sweeps week was last week. Nothing on but reruns now.
Have gnu, will travel.
sorry to disappoint you, but sightings of man's air and space craft, radio controlled aircraft, deliberate hoaxes, blimps, weather balloons, etc., and absurd declarations by a couple now senile military men seeking fame (which scores of others at the same place and time have denounced as fantasy) do not constitute proof of alien visitation of earth. I know this will be devastating to the whacked weird view you hold between your ears, and your tinfoil hat wearing cyberspace "friends", but the truth is there has never been any credible evidence whatsoever of alien space craft visiting this globe.
No alien life would intentionally broadcast it's planets location. They and we will send unmanned probes to interesting places for research. And then we would find a way to leverage the nature of the natural phenomenon to embed a signal. It's not inconceivable that someday we might be able to modulate a sun to transmit a signal on it's light. The place to look for signals is where you would be interested in looking anyway.
If they are intelligent lifeforms then is there any purpose to argue with them of who was first?
No. The one who has interstellar travel first will win. Any further arguments are unnecessary.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Not "Boil that dust-speck, boil that dust-speck, BOIL!"
Gently reply
they fund the SGC useing this.
From the relevant thread over at Seti@Home:
"Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field. " - Eric Korpela
These data must be collected over multiple observation sessions, the Green Bank Telescope schedule is available at https://dss.gb.nrao.edu/schedule/public. Next observations are in about 15 hours - May 16 05:15 PT
Occam's Razor - it's the simplest explanation that fits the observable facts.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
and rubber gloves.. who's got the gloves?
"secondary rim" and "cord in my arse" are fucking brilliant.
Lame! That site hasn't been updated since 2008. Either that, or that's when the aliens stopped making crop circles.
Neil deGrasse Tyson makes some interesting points in relation to this: (1) The five most common elements in the solar system are hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. (2) Of all the elements, the one that makes the most compounds is carbon -- there are more compounds containing carbon than all other compounds of all of the other elements combined. (3) Life on Earth is made mostly of H, O, C, N, plus some trace elements, and is based on C. ("Organic chemistry" means the chemistry of carbon compounds.)
In other words, we are made out of the most common available materials (discounting helium which doesn't react with anything so doesn't produce interesting chemistry), including the element that produces the most complex and varied chemistry. So if you are looking for complex chemistry (i.e. life) elsewhere in the galaxy, it actually does seem to be a reasonable starting point to expect that it is fairly likely to also be based on the most common elements available, and on the element that produces the most complex and diverse chemistry.
OK smartypants, how are you going to detect technology that doesnt exist yet? How will you categorise signiatures from biochemical processes that we have never seen or studied?
We either have to use our own experience as a reference point or not look at all. I vote we look and hope we get lucky.
How far away are these planets I wonder? What would they see (assuming there's life there) if they did a similar experiment and pointed a radio telescope at us - based on previous comments if they are more that 100 light years away (I assume they are) they would get nothing!
Earth-like planets? Carbonists! Discrimination! Unfair!
Your mothership is so large...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I, of course, submitted a direct link to the Berkeley press release but apparently the Slashdot editors decided the one that was most wrong was the one to pick. First, SETI isn't a project, it's a field of study conducted by a lot of institutions. Nobody would talk about "the Physics Project started 2100 years ago by Pythagoras" when describing a particle accelerator.
This project in particular, is conducted by the Berkeley SETI group which is known for their SETI@home project, Astropulse search for radio pulses and their the SERENDIP project The exciting parts are 1) This targets earthlike planets. 2) It uses the Green Bank Telescope, which is the biggest steerable dish around and 3) they are recording time domain data at 3.2 Gbps (because the observations are short duration) rather than the 64 Mbps they get at Arecibo. That allows them to cover 800MHz of instantaneous bandwidth, rather than the 2.5MHz they get at Arecibo (albeit at much higher sensitivity)
I understand the desire to link this to the ATA shutdown, but that give the mistaken impression that this is a project of the SETI Institute. And they didn't even put a link to SETI@home (where the data will be processed) in the story.
Support SETI@home
They should have gone ARM, really. Non-counting the legal battle they face with Intel for usage of the "86" trademark.
Maybe I am not fully understanding how SETI works, even though I use the home client, but this has always really caught me as strange. Lets say an alien world is actually broadcasting. Not only would they have to be broadcasting at the exact time we are looking for them (or rather, how ever many lightyears ago relevant to the star's distance), but the planet would have to be in view of the earth at the time, their transmisions would have to be able to penetrate both their atmosphere and ours, and they would have to be broadcasting in our direction. Seems to me that 24 hour observation of 80 some-odd planets at once is not going to yield enough data for us to make any kind of reasonable observation.
Using the technology you invented, in a small box called science which you came up with to organise your thoughts, logic and interpretations of the world to attempt to search for other beings with their own interpretations and orders and reasoning and perhaps non-carbon based.
Its futile.
Feed the starving millions in the world instead.
It wasn't the size of a football field. It was the size of a small car. It was just a lot closer than you realized.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Is this telescope even capable of detecting Earth-type leaky RF signals at such a great distance?
And if it's not, isn't this like cupping your ear and hoping to hear conversations in China?
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
:-)
This is the single greatest post I've ever seen on /.
help me fix this "Terrible" karma, please!
If you are more than idly interested in learning about SETI, they have a youtube channel here: http://youtube.com/user/setiinstitute/
They aren't looking for wasteful noise from neo-technological civilizations (but we'll take any unnatural signal we can get!). As you've pointed out, that might occur for a very limited period of time before their physicists move on to better communication technologies. But don't make the assumption that these people are "short sighted," (SETI is 50 years old) or aren't criticizing their own techniques, or actively exploring new ideas. They're looking for broadcast devices, robotic beacons, communications nodes, cross-talk between interstellar routers, gigantic mechanical artifacts, etc. The holy grail would be an alien satellite designed specifically to attract the attention of developing civilizations, like the one in Contact.
There are really good reasons to look in the radio spectrum. The radio range has a noted trough of low noise in 1-10GHz, which is an excellent candidate for communications, if not outright shining a beacon out to the farthest distances. It also penetrates mollecular clouds (and our atmosphere, for that matter) easier than optical and higher frequency light, which scatters easily, and doesn't take nearly as much energy to generate as X-ray and Gamma ray radiation. You will need an EE to further explain.
We may not be prepared to guess at alien biology or sociology, but we do get to project what we know about physics. "They" refers to technologically advanced civilizations.
- Some civillizations may be well beyond anything we can fathom (interdimensional beings, control over gravity, faster-than-light communication). But if they do exist (and that's a big leap), there's very little chance that they are the only other civilizations in the universe. If we make the assumption that "life is out there." We can expect there to be a tremendous variety of life forms and civilizations and some may be within our detection capabilities.
- They all most likely use electromagnetic radiation for communication, since it's the de-facto fastest way to move information through space. Cite wormholes or entanglement if you like, I'm not ignoring the possibility. The algorithms SETI uses pick out general anomalies in known radiation patterns. Even technologies we can't possibly understand have a good chance of emitting some kind of interesting radiation as a side effect.
- They will probably choose communications techniques that are easy to detect against most background sources and will certainly need to be very robust to get through the interstellar medium (charged particles) in the case of an interstellar signal. We might even make assumptions about the kinds of engineering practices another advanced civilization would employ: redundancy, longevity, efficiency. These can help constrain the behaviors we look for.
- If they have at least one outpost beyond their homeworld/star (even a satellite in their own solar system), they will be using directed communication. That means their directed beam is slowly sweeping out a wobbling, circular path across their sky. If we're lucky, and that direction is in line with our star, we might pick up a hint of their artificial signals.
- As the poster above mentions, we are made of some very common materials in the universe and in similar proportions (obviously profoundly more dense on average). That leads to a sound assumption about how life might be elsewhere. At the very least, this is our only /example/ and it's a good practice to focus on planets whose properties are not stupendously hostile to our form of biochemistry.
The thing I never hear spoken about (perhaps because it might be a depressing thought for SETI fans) is that, while it's not beyond imagining that other intelligent species can develop out there, the chances of us detecting them are staggering low, for lots of reasons that easily come to mind.
Taking Earth as an example. 4.5byr old, life only really taking off at the Cambrian, 540myr ago, when Earth is already half way to the grave (Sun will expire in 5byr). So given any "Goldilocks" planet around a sun like ours, only half it's life at most will be spent with any life on it.
Then there's climate events, like ice ages, which could be anything from 20-100kyrs apart but devastating to any established and densely populated technological civilisation.
Any intelligent species which survives its own immaturity would come to the conclusion that long-term survival and growth depends on becoming independent of the natural world, as "unnatural" as that sounds. A population will initially stabilise due to limits on life span and food production (ours will in 2100 at about 10bn people), but as technology develops and those natural limiting factors are "solved", population will inevitably increase again.
A civilisation with abundant food (obviously farming has been replaced by advanced GM or other methods), limitless energy (eg. fusion but probably a mixture of great things) and long life, faces a stark choice: Don't breed much anymore, or find new places to live.
Apart from being rather dismal, the former choice is not viable in the long term. The future on a single planet holds only an inevitable cycle of natural catastrophes, be it a meteor or climate change, undoing what they have achieved. Its own survival, political and social problems solved, the mature and stable civilisation will naturally look upwards, to the planets.
Now a civilisation during this period would be detectable. They'd have been transmitting radio in the past, as we do now. Once embarking on the colonisation of other planets, they'd be even more mindful of the possibility of other successful species like them and continuing to search and transmit.
But this period of time, where they are still "speaking our language" is very limited. A few thousand years at most. Because during that time, a species will change, inside and out. Having solved major problems, socially and technologically, working together and populating planets, they will see themselves no longer as "a species of a planet", bound and subject. They have become "citizens of space", self-determining and outward-looking, no longer identified with arbitrary limitations. I daresay such a civilisation would have different philosophies and priorities to us. Why would such a species want to find others who are, like us, still bound to their world, struggling, infighting, limited and immature?
Of course they want to find other life out there but, having the perspective of a strong, space-faring species, they would obviously prefer to contact others like them, or even more advanced, so they can learn new things. Confident, looking ever forward, their main question would not be a meek yet arrogant, "are we the only ones?" No, it would instead be a challenge to the universe and to themselves: "How do we contact those others who travel the stars? How do we achieve the next step for our species?" Those questions do not involve us.
All their prowess would be focussed on determining what kinds of communications and transport other advanced, multi-planetary species would be using. They would not be thinking "radio" anymore. They would be bent on discovering the deeper secrets of interstellar travel and communication. Indeed it would be an obsession because here they are, playing on the shore of an unlimited ocean. They must find a way to set sail, otherwise for all their great achievements, they