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No Intelligent Aliens Detected In Gliese 581
astroengine writes "Using an Australian very long baseline array (VLBA) of three radio antennae, the first very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) campaign has been carried out on a SETI target star: the famous Gliese 581 red dwarf. However, after 8 hours of observing the star — thought to play host to six exoplanets, two of which are in the star's 'habitable zone' — no alien signals were detected. This result isn't surprising, as the likelihood of us stumbling across intelligent aliens living in the Gliese 581 system transmitting radio is extremely slim, but it does validate VLBI as a very exciting means of using the vast amount of exoplanetary data (coming from missions such as the Kepler space telescope) for 'directed SETI' projects."
Earth is constantly broadcasting. Sure, it's meant for other humans on Earth, but we don't exactly shield it from going into space.
The hope is that aliens with similar technology would put off similar amounts of detectable EM.
The fact that we haven't detected them is proof of their intelligence, no? Would YOU want to be contacted by a race thats major claim to fame (as far as they can see) is "I Love Lucy"?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
This result isn't surprising [...] but it does validate VLBI as a very exciting means
I'm a little confused as how a negative result validates the excitement-quotient. Or how this could even be validated in a more meaningul sense -- there's no way of checking the data. Maybe it was a false negative and there's oodles of aliens there.
They might actually still be there and just be maintaining radio silence. We'll hear them eventually... when they show up in orbit around Earth.
This also assumes that if there was intelligent life in Gliese 581 that they would be post industrial revolution. The OP is an idiot, as is Timothy for making this front page.
Are you a bootynude or something such as that!?
I will reveal such true ferocity without a single problem along the way!
It's more about detecting existing signals, rather than waiting for a reply to ones we JUST sent out. I think they know what they're doing and don't need to drop by /. articles with our comments for confirmation of their methods
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
In Living Color? Absolutely Fabulous? Benny Hill reruns...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They are on the neutrino internet while we're still trying to get the photon internet working.
Erm... do you even know what SETI is ? Or the concept of a round-trip ?
1) If we had sent a signal, it would take 20 years to get there, and we could expect a reply in no less than 40 years. Twice your estimate.
2) That doesn't actually matter however since we didn't send a signal at all. All we did was listen for signals coming from there. In other words - we were hoping maybe they sent us a signal 20 years ago - or more likely just generally sent out a signal in case *anybody* answers, or even more likely that we could catch a listen-in on a signal that was never intended for outsiders to begin with. If an alien race has satelite television - then any of the beamed-up signals that don't quite hit the target keeps going through space - SETI is really about trying to pick up any that may have come our way.
The most likely result we could get from SETI would probably be accidental signals - on the basis that any aliens running a seti project is most likely to get such signals from us (we sent a lot of signals into space, none of it is actually intended for alien consumption).
A signal intending to be picked up by other species (as in Sagan's Contact) would be a bonus.
That is actually the biggest problem I have with SETI. We're just listening hoping somebody else is bothering to talk or we pick up some stray signal. Truth is, we may well end up in a situation where half a dozen intelligent species are doing the same. All listening to space, waiting for the other one to actually say something.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
They're probably using quantum entanglement or something even fancier.
Proves that the Tea Party has a Gliese 581 branch.
The point is if they are in a similar place in their technology as us, we would be receiving their 20 year old signals and there aren't any which is the problem with looking for folks like us. An intelligent life form could speak in a language made of chemistry (the way are cells talk to one another), and we won't hear that. They could be more primitive then us and we won't see that or hear that. They could be tremendously more advanced than us, and using our own advancing technology as a guide, would be producing noise across the EM spectrum, and looking for a signal in any one place might be futile. They may communicate point to point in very short very high energy bursts. They may not want to be seen by primitive species. The list of possibilities is almost endless, and point to real issues about how more advanced species might function in the universe, and there may be species as more advance compared to us as we are to bacteria. A couple tens of millions of years might do that for a sentient species.
So I believe the universe and specifically this galaxy is teaming with life. I just think the factor in the Drake equation that's going to mess with us is the symbol representing the technological state of a society. We have perhaps 20-50 years to go before technological singularity. That means the window of accessibility for a species being easily reachable may be less than 200 years. Making the ability to find others like us exceeding difficult.
... when there isn't any at all in the direction of us.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Not stupid at all. There was no broadcast. We were listening with our hands to our ears, not trying to phone them up. We were hoping to hear something from 20 years ago. That's a heartbeat on the scale of sapient civilizations. The likelihood that they'd develop radio sources precisely during the 20 years just before we start listening is pretty slim. More likely is that they heard US first and have 'gone dark' to keep us from hearing them when we'd inevitably get curious.
The problem is how distingishable was most of it from background noise just outside the solar system, or 20 light years away, even if you are trying to focus what comes from here specifically.
Anyway, if what we send away are our tv shows, they will conclude that here there isn't intelligent life too.
Just because there are no detectable radio signals doesn't mean there is no life, it may just be pre-industrial. WWII pushed us into the modern era. Without that we may still be using megabytes or even kilobytes and leaded gas. Maybe there is a planet with a single race and less aggressive tendencies, they may develop in a different fashion, while being advanced they may not be pumping massive RF for long-enough for us to detect. Not every species is going to be or was as addicted to TV and Radio as we are.
Can You beat up their God, God?
God says...
fled, and escaped.
19:13 And Michal took an image, and laid it in the bed, and put a
pillow of goats' hair for his bolster, and covered it with a cloth.
19:14 And when Saul sent messengers to take David, she said, He is
sick.
19:15 And Saul sent the messengers again to see David, saying, Bring
him up to me in the bed, that I may slay him.
19:16 And when the messengers were come in, behold, there was an image
in the bed, with a pillow of goats' hair for his bolster.
Who is presuming no life. It says that they didn't detect it. Nothing more nothing less.
On the other hand, could be radio is prehistoric technology to them. I've been having a lot of problems locating intelligent life on this planet lately.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
No radio message received does not imply there's no intelligent life there.
Maybe they went into planet-wide radio silence as soon as they received our first transmissions 100 years old, and have spent the last century busy preparing their invasion fleet.
In fact, they probably landed advance scouting parties on Earth to assassinate anyone who have knowledge of their #%!@#70824645[CARRIER LOST]
What makes the researchers think that aliens would even be using radio signals to communicate? And if they were intelligent, what's not to say that they were simply smart enough not to make as much noise as us humans? What, do you think every intelligent creature thinks of itself as an interplanetary HAM operator or something?
Having no detectable radio emissions does not preclude possibility of a civilization. Our civilization's emissions are already mostly in spread-spectrum format, which is by design indistinguishable from noise unless you know the encryption key. The transmitters we do have usually do not radiate omnidirectionally; that would be wasteful. Antennas are designed to cover the intended audience and minimize leakage outside of it, which makes detecting their radiation unlikely at any appreciable distance.
Futhermore, natural inverse square weakening of the signal makes the signal fade into the background before leaving the solar system anyway. Our TV and radio transmitters are not going to be heard outside the solar system. It is no coincidence that our satellites communicate with highly directional dishes. Directed signals are the only ones that will make it to the next star, so what SETI is really looking for is aliens who are actively broadcasting toward Earth. I don't know why they would be doing such a dumb thing, but who knows, maybe they are a not-too-intelligent life.
I have three dixie cups pointed at Gliese 581 and they haven't detected any intelligent life either. I guess I have a proof of concept as well? They'd better hope that their expensive radio telescopes can somehow compete with my much lower cost solution that achieved the same lack of results.
I wonder if anyone can answer this, though - how far away, is that star system? I ask because we've only been using radio waves ourselves for about what, the past 150 years or so? So that means other planets looking for us would have to be less than 150 light years away* in order for them to detect our broadcasts. Basically what I'm saying is, is that doesn't listening to that star system only prove that intelligent life that used radio waves didn't exist x amount of years ago, with x being how far away the planets are?
On that point, doesn't it make sense to point the telescopes towards areas of the galaxy that formed before ours and if so, is that where this system is located?
* This is my basic understanding of light speed and radio waves - if it's wrong, please let me know and correct me as to why.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
We've been doing that for, call it a century. Already it starts to fade: people get audio and video over the internet, generally on point to point wires or fiberoptics. Not hard to imagine that a century from now, we won't be sending much out into space either. It's a waste of power, if nothing else.
So if that's typical, if a civilization has only a few hundred years of spewing crap out into space, the chance our observation overlaps with them doing that is really small, given billions of years of time.
Also, maybe they *never* go through that phase. Maybe they just start out with point to point communication and stay there.
I would think they should be looking for ion engine signatures. That seems a more likely signal to span the distance.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
A large criticism that keeps coming up is that, if they're "more advanced" than us, they might not use radio waves for transmission of data.
But I assume no matter how advanced we as a society get, we'll continue using electricity, and the same could be presumed for other intelligent life. Transmitting power across power lines should generate SOME level of EM-spectrum signal, no? Could we detect that?
Okay, fine. Let's say they no longer use power lines and, say, transmit power wirelessly. Could we detect that?
SETI listens, they don't broadcast!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Perhaps the VLBA doesn't work?
After all, if they let us find them that easily, they wouldn't be very intelligent now would they?
https://www.google.co.uk/search?tbm=isch&q=calvin+and+hobbes+surest+sign+of+intelligent+life
So, I guess that you don't like Ms Hillary? So did your meth lab blow up? or are you into Oxicodone? did I spell that right? Them thar fellas down to the coal mine hates them Clintons too!
(Sarcasm)
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
If they ARE smarter, better, or more civilized, what makes you think they want to meet us?
the first very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) campaign has been carried out on a SETI target star:
Here is a rare case where a Slashdot summary is better than the original article, which simply claims to be "The First" VLBI SETI, which it isn't, not by a long shot.
This is spectral line VLBI, and I bet almost everyone who has correlated spectral line VLBI has thought "maybe this time..." they will get lucky and see an ETI signal. I know that when Demetrios Matsakis was doing ultra-narrow band spectral line searches for the US Navy in the early 1990's, we used to joke that it was "applied SETI," as it was hard to see how you could get Hz bandwidth spectral lines without an ETI behind it. (And, of course, he didn't find any, or else you would have heard about it then.)
Wonder if they’re saying the same thing about us?
HRH The Duke of Windsor
no alien signals were detected. This result isn't surprising
Tomorrow on Slashdot: Where Bears Poop.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What makes us intelligent enough to detect intelligent life?
1. Presumably, if post singularity species want to be found, they will, and if they don't, they won't.
2. We can't talk scientifically about such entities, as if they exist, they can pretty much manipulate the scientists into concluding whatever they want. Science studys the natural order - a species whose technology is equivalent to magic will be functionally just as 'supernatural' as though they were genuinely so.
3. If a post singularity alien society doesn't want us to detect them, they may well also not want us to detect other pre-singularity aliens, so in that case, that window for easy detection becomes 0 years wide. Given post singularitans who don't want to openly reveal themselves, the possibiltiy they want to censor pre-singularity civilizations is proportionately higher than that they want to let the little fish communicate unhindered and hide just themselves, and both alternatives are higher than the chance they want to facilitate pre-singularity civilizations meeting even while they hide.
Who is John Cabal?
" This result isn't surprising, as the likelihood of us stumbling across intelligent aliens living in the Gliese 581 system transmitting radio"
They mean Transmitting on frequencies that WE use. They could have had a different technology evolutionary path, One where they let their Nicola Tesla do a power distribution system like Ours wanted to do here. That kind of system would have made RF of limited use here. So they may have went to Masers or other technology. Maybe even higher frequencies that attenuate faster.
They also may have had a far higher IQ and never created the technology Plague like we have with the Creation of Television.
Just like how the Viking probe looked for life and only found sterile soil and we called Mars dead. When you look for evidence looking down a very narrow tube you will never see anything that is outside of that tube.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just because there are no detectable radio signals doesn't mean there is no life, it may just be pre-industrial. WWII pushed us into the modern era. Without that we may still be using megabytes or even kilobytes and leaded gas. Maybe there is a planet with a single race and less aggressive tendencies, they may develop in a different fashion, while being advanced they may not be pumping massive RF for long-enough for us to detect. Not every species is going to be or was as addicted to TV and Radio as we are.
I'm usually pretty quick to throw the 'arrogance' card myself but this isn't arrogance. We simple don't have any better way of detecting life over interstellar distances. Your point is completely valid. There might be life at Gliese 581, there might even be intelligent life but just can't tell. Hopefully some day we will come up with a better way of searching for life but given the distances involved I doubt it'll ever be any kind of direct observation. Look up the Drake equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation for a simplified mathematical approach to estimating the number of detectable civilizations out there. Life could be teeming in the universe but it may be next to impossible to find out for sure.
No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue...
One could argue that the Arecibo message was designed for alien consumption.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
There's no intelligent life there, just "I Love Lucy" reruns and presidential campaign commercials.
Since when is the lack of news considered to be news?
I have met aliens. From different places. It was not long after I had a conversation with God. I think I've atleast outlined what that what about here before.
Of the aliens I've met, none are probably not from the system on topic here, but I just can't help but recite the following story. While it is a good story, it's not, in my mind, really relevant for the big picture of the fate of the universe and the future of consciousness. I don't know why I would tell this story. I would not rule out mind control. Anyway. Here goes:
Nah. On secondt thought. I'll get back to that. It's a story about one of the groups of aliens I know to be here now. Basically they had a cold war thing going way over there a long long time ago and there was some everybody-killing thing that was supposed to kill only the enemies but went wrong or something or maybe both (or however many) sides had the kill-all-the-others-thing. Whatever it was, killed everybody. Except for some of the crew of a ship in space at the time and the lone tycoon who was flying around space for fun. And the power-elites who knew the end was potentially about to come and then saw it coming and took off, like they would. Anyway. Two ships, designed to last forever, left the planet within, I don't know, a thousand years. And now they're here. But it's all atmosphere or charachter ... something, which is beside the point in the grand scheme of things (i think, now, I might be an idiot/stupid/wrong/blind/mistaken, or something), so I'm not ging to go into anymore detail about all this at this point in time.
~Peace, love and anarchy,
Future Person
(Or did I dream it?)
It is a 50/50. It is likely to assume that highly developed intelligence would, at some point, harness the radio wave. They may, as we do now, and leave it behind for something better, but at some point they are likely to have used used it. If so, it is a detectable event. On the other hand they may not have used it yet, and if so they may be inferior or stronger, they may be on the brink of discovering radio waves or they may already have deemed it inferior to something better.
We may look, but what to look for?
So, I guess that you don't like Ms Hillary? So did your meth lab blow up? or are you into Oxicodone? did I spell that right? Them thar fellas down to the coal mine hates them Clintons too!
(Sarcasm)
Bill did his girlfriend and smoked his cigars after.
The problem is not that we can't detect the signal. We got all the hardware. The problem is that we might be well outside the radio signal range to be detected, as radio signal can only be carried so far by its power. But the best option for accurate detection would be to place a radio monitoring hardware just outside the orbit of Pluto for that purpose.
http://www.computing.edu.au/~bvk/astronomy/HET608/essay/
Actually we are broadcasting VERY little now, and most of what we are transmitting won't leave our own system. this is why if other life exists its gonna be hell to catch a signal as there is a very small window between finding out how to broadcast and switching to digital, if other life follows a similar pattern.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In the case that they were of equal or higher intelligence, what makes you think they would want to deal with us?
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Not that magnetohydrodynamic drive exhaust is undetectable but from my understanding, the only way we'd ever see a "signature" is if the engine were pointing directly at us. Given our size, constant movement, and the minuscule amount of ions actually released the probability of ever detecting anything is probably infinitely close to zero.
So, I guess that you don't like Ms Hillary? So did your meth lab blow up? or are you into Oxicodone? did I spell that right? Them thar fellas down to the coal mine hates them Clintons too!
(Sarcasm)
Bill did his girlfriend and smoked his cigars after.
This is all just my opinion and nothing more.
... extraordinarily masculine. And a turkeyneck. And shrill. And obsessive. And treacherous. And just ... unattractive. Like some nagging mother-in-law. How could any heterosexual man get a woody from her? ANd if you did get a hard-on from her somehow could you trust her not to bite it off in a fit of pent-up feministic rage?
Bill Clinton is one of the only men who can really be excused for cheating on his wife. He gets a pass and he earned it.
She's
I suspect theirs is a political marriage only. Totally loveless. Even the daughter Chelsea is just to appeal to American family values. It is just like when kings would marry queens of foreign countries to form an alliance. I think the Clintons just felt they'd get farther in politics with a similar partnership. Since he made president they may have been right.
and know its not a good idea to make lots of noise in case whoever is listening decides to kill them with relativistic weapons of mass destruction?
I think they should be looking for porn of any kind in the universe, now that would definitely show intelligent life.
2) That doesn't actually matter however since we didn't send a signal at all.
But we did!
The human race should not be here - its only with extreme circumstances we are; here is no life out there because there should not be.
This is true. Nearly all of what we have ever broadcast has been trashed into junk RF by the time it passes through our own heliopause. Voyager 1 and 2 are helping us learn that it is a fantastic filter aggressively scrubbing and sterilizing radio. Perhaps only a few terrifically strong military radar signals or intentional interplanetary signals (i.e. the powerful Arecibo transmissions) might have made it through. Decades of TV and radio have not. For practical purposes, our Sol system is silent. We are not emitting potent enough repeating signals of the sort we ourselves are seeking.
It is logical to expect a similar result for other planetary systems where something like a heliopause exists. RF would be trashed and never make it into interplanetary space.
For even more discouragement, remember that most of life on Earth does not use radio. A planet teeming with life might yet have nobody emitting even weak signals. Radio derives from the human need to communicate, constantly. Especially while driving. It is entirely possible that another similarly advanced species might not have that need to talk talk talk and entertain at a distance.
Anyway, the universe is a very big place. It's a long way down the road to the pharmacy, but that's nothing compared to the universe. Most of it is empty. On average, we don't actually exist at all. Sigh.
Sig for hire.
Even if they switch to digital, they would presumably still be broadcasting. Shouldn't the digital signals have distinctive patterns even if they would be hard to interpret?
Actually we are broadcasting VERY little now, and most of what we are transmitting won't leave our own system. this is why if other life exists its gonna be hell to catch a signal as there is a very small window between finding out how to broadcast and switching to digital, if other life follows a similar pattern.
"Radio Astronomy" by John Kraus has a section on this topic. Well obviously he predates the digital transition. Not all that surprisingly large scale planetary radar has the best range, but the strongest long term signal used to be the constant (hopefully stable freq) of AM radio transmission carriers. You can integrate the carrier over months I suppose if necessary, detectable long below the data level
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Most life on this planet is bacteria and viruses. They don't use radio. Most of the remaining life is a higher order of some sort, but still does not use radio. You have to go very far up the tree of life to find the one little branch where we alone are the single species using radio.
To put it another way, in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, every other form of life that has every existed or still exists hasn't had radio. None of them had it. We do, but only for the last 120 years or so and less than that for advanced forms of radio. Averaged out, not only has essentially no life form on Earth ever had radio, it has also essentially never happened. 1 species, 120 years, out of billions of species and billions of years.
It did. But by no means is this something that just happens in the course of life.
Sig for hire.
So we could never see our own Dr. Who episodes from 50 years ago bounced back to us?
If there is life it's either not advanced enough for radio, too advanced for radio or too xenophobic to use radio for fear of being detected. Ultimately it means practically nothing that anything was detected. In truth it doesn't even prove the radio issue. They wouldn't have detected a low power undirected radio signal like are used everyday here and a solar flare could have taken out the signal for the time they were looking and it could be back on this week. Without physically going there it's impossible to tell if there isn't life or intelligent life. You can only tell that there was when a signal was sent that there happened to be intelligent life. The odds are that any life detected will be gone before it's discovered.
Yes. You transmit in a band, so if you looked at a RF power by frequency chart, it would look like a (rounded) picket fence with the signal power going up and down on the pickets as the RF sources have / don't have data to transmit.
The problem is that most radio signals break down essentially just background radiation fairly soon after they're transmitted. If we send a signal into space using our current technology, it's unlikely that anyone nearby would be able to recognize it. It would take a civilization with transmission technology much stronger than ours to get detected. We're really looking for transmissions from more advanced civilizations that have the power to send a signal over large ranges in space.
No intelligent aliens were discovered at Gliese 581, just a bunch of dumbass aliens, there were plenty of those.
Telepathy doesn't have radio emissions, that's why you can't 'see' any life in the Universe.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
So no ET radio signals in the spectrum being monitored were emitted at a detectable level in the direction of earth, during an 8 hour period about 20 years ago?
Yeah there's only a short time between the telegraph and neutrino beams.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Maybe the various galactic civilizations are "teaming" with each other to make sure the amazingly primitive life on an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun in the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm doesn't detect them.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Perhaps that 8 hour window coincided with their sabbath.
Have gnu, will travel.
The difference is that digital (as we are doing it anyway) is a much cleaner signal. We can get the same coverage for way less radiated power.
I defy you to hang around the South and not get stupider (develop a Southern accent) after a while.
A sort of inverse galactic version of "no, YOU hang up"?
If the VLBI scan had found alien intelligence, that would have validated the technique. How does failure validated it? There's no way to distinguish between "no aliens" and "bad test" in this case.
If they're not smart enough to figure that out, would they count as "intelligent" to the aliens scanning us? I sure hope not.
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make install -not war
Exactly and as our digital technology gets better the amount of power we need drops so it is extremely doubtful anything will get through the Helipause except for the few (so far one that I know of,Arecibo) very VERY powerful transmissions.
Now consider that the alien listening has as wide a starfield as we have, the odds that he/she/it would be 1.-Pointed at earth when the broadcast reaches them and 2.-Wouldn't have that signal in some way blocked by one of their planets, solar activity, or even the revolution of their own planet must be so small as be impossible to calculate. After all how much of our own sky do we listen to 24/7/365?
So while I see no problem in letting donations fund this sort of research the odds of us hearing them or them hearing us, even if there were 100,000 planets with similar life and technology, must be worse than getting hit by lightning while winning the lotto for your third time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
They didn't speculate that aliens have planet-wide telepathy. They just said aliens might not have the need to constantly communicate at a distance. In fact that speculation excludes planet-wide anything for communication, because that would be "at a distance".
You're stupid, especially for calling them stupid. Turn off your computer and take a long walk.
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make install -not war
Just because you have demented fantasies about Hilllary Clinton that you insist on injecting into a conversation to which she's totally irrelevant doesn't mean anything about whether "we" are intelligent. Projecting meth heads like you don't subtract from the others of us who are intelligent. Like those of us now communicating with entangled quanta instead of with radio waves.
I will make Clinton relevant by pointing out that she's surely done more to help America's R&D into entanglement than you possibly could have.
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make install -not war
George Bush Sr, will you ever stop whining about getting beat? It was 20 years ago!
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make install -not war
I don't think even humans were meaningfully intelligent until the time we started broadcasting radio. SETI isn't looking for life, it's looking for intelligence. It takes only one species, in fact only one organism, transmitting recognizable RF for SETI to find it and meet its worthwhile goal. The rest of the planet's life might be interesting in other ways, but as long as it doesn't block RF its lack of RF use of its own doesn't mean anything.
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make install -not war
Shouldn't the digital signals have distinctive patterns even if they would be hard to interpret?
Nope. The most efficient possible communications look like pure noise. If there's any pattern to the signal, then you can transfer more information by varying that pattern, making it noiselike. This history of radio communications is of steady progress towards ever-more efficient and noiselike signals.
And only an AC emphasis on the C, would make such a deal about a typographical error... I can't remember hearing many idiots discussing the Drake Equation which either mean your IQ is 300 and you're comparing the conversation with your own lofty intellect, or you're just an insecure twit who adjusts their petty sense of self worth by pointing out ridiculous trivialities like typographical errors. Kudos on you blazing wit, perhaps next time you'd show more than half.
They might know of an ancient radiation, that haunts dismembered constellations. By then, the kin of flies and spiders will be the ones running things.
But they'll probably while their time away collecting stamps in a room all filled with Chinese lamps.
Interesting observations. There is a particularly interesting line of thought suggesting that if a post singularity society were to disassemble all or most of the matter in their solar system to convert into "computronium", that they would have to inhabit a limited region surrounding their star for energy reasons and limited from their distance from inner shell to outer shell for reasons of minimized time lag between the communication between inner and outermost shells.
Since the only radiation making it out of the system would be infrared, the system from any distance would look like a garden variety red dwarf. Since the being(s) locked around their star would be at one level vulnerable to traveling technology (and perhaps on a different level be virtually invulnerable), and be busily grinding out whatever interesting civilization they have in exclusion to whatever else was happening in the local galactic region. Such a civilization would almost certainly be interested only in watching, but not particularly motivated to stick their nose(s) into the bailiwick of primitive alien cultures. At best, they might toss occasional probes into deep space with some kind of quantum entangled communications device on board. Its a fun thought experiment.
No Intelligent Aliens Detected In Gliese 581
Does that mean that there are aliens, but not intelligent aliens there?
Send a message to the central black hole if you want to communicate with something.
It's been observing the universe for billions of years...
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
While yes by the time our signals get past the heliosphere they are sanitized and unrecognizable. However what is to say that an other intelligent species found an other way to communicate not using RF as we know it? What if they found a way to transmit data via (don't laugh) Subspace/hyperspace or an other way that we can not detect? Just because we can't pick it up doesn't mean it isn't out there. In the grand scheme of things we are only scanning a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, and I am sure if there are space faring species out there they found a way to communicate in a way that breaks the light barrier.
Somebody in this thread needs a hug,
or reading glasses.
But that had nothing to do with the SETI project now did it ? And these Australian dishes in question weren't involved in that either.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Unrelated event. That message wasn't sent to this star as part of this search. This was a listen-only exercise.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
More like an intergalactic version of "Should I call her, or wait for her to call me" ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
>Most of it is empty. On average, we don't actually exist at all. Sigh.
That's derived from a Douglas Adams joke which went as follows: there are an infinite number of planets in the universe since there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. Not all of them have life. x/0 = infinity, therefore x/infinite =0 therefore the average number of planets with life = 0.
It's quite funny but the mathematics is actually wrong. Even if we assume the physics were right (the universe probably isn't REALLY infinite, and doesn't hold an infinite amount of planets) the mathematics are still wrong because infinity is not a number, it's a number system with lots of different values.
Basicaly x/0 is infinite. y/0 is infinite but this does not mean that x/0 = y/0. Indeed it wouldn't make sense because that would simply to x = y and basically it would mean all numbers are equal to all other numbers...
Both are infinite, but they are not the same infinite (this is not that difficult - there are an infinite number of real numbers, there are an infinite number if integers too - but there are way more real numbers than integers, indeed we know the relationship. If we call the number of integers umpty, then the number of real numbers is umpty^umpty).
So Adam's last conclusion is just plain wrong: x/infinity does not equal zero. It equals something very close to 0, but it doesn't actually equal 0 (at least not for all values of x).
So on average, we do in fact exist- it's just a very small average.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
We picked up broadcasts of Alien Idol, that's how we know theres's no intelligence over there.
>To put it another way, in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, every other form of life that has every existed or still exists hasn't had radio. None of them had it.
That's an entirely unproven assumption. In fact many evolutionary biologists believe it's quite arrogant to assume we're the first or last technologically advanced species on the planet. 97% of all species that ever existed is extinct. We have no proof that none of them achieved technological civilizations - we don't have any proof that they did but that's beside the point.
If we get hit by a giant rock from space (like most other lifeforms on this planet did sooner or later) tomorrow - how much evidence of our existence will still be around in 10 million years ? A few slow-wearing roads, the odd bit of glass maybe ? How about a billion years ? Enough to be recognizable ?
It could well be that the first time anybody found out we ever existed is when they too visit the moon where the lack of erosion may let them find artefacts that survived there.
And what if a few other species made it ALMOST as far as we did before getting hit ? If we'd been hit just one century ago - there would be practically nothing to show we were ever hear even a million years later. Most of what we built that could survive natural destructive forces for more than that was only built in the last century. It was also only in the last century that we discovered radio. Hell as we speak the effect of erosion is starting to be a problem on some of our earliest surviving structures like the pyramids, and those are just a few thousand years old... in a few million years ? There won't be anything there that looks like a pyramid.
More-over there may not be anything there that looks like Egypt. In Dinosaurean times the Karoo desert was a freaking marshland. Since then the continents split -but they kept moving, in another few million a few of them are going to crash into each other on the opposite side of the world they started from... a new supercontinent constructed - can you imagine the impact of something like that on things as fragile as our little buildings and computer parts ?
Hell a dinosaurean race, or even a race from earlier than them may have been more technologically advanced than us - and left not a shred of evidence for us to find. We certainly have no proof either way, all we have are means of trying to estimate odds. The earth had 4.5 billion years, and life for the biggest chunk of that - and we've been here a fraction of a second. That's a LOT of fractions of a second, we really shouldn't just assume that our fraction was so damn special.
From this comes our general assumption that any species we do detect would be more advanced than us. Because we just discovered radio the other day - and we'd not even hear anybody for decades or even centuries after they did so.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You might want to reread that quote from Adams. He did not express any of the erroneous formulas that you stipulate. Here's the full quote in all its glory:
It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so if every planet in the Universe has a populations of zero then the entire population of the Universe must also be zero, and any people you may actually meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
So what he's actually saying is this:
X = # of worlds;
Y = # of inhabited Worlds;
X = infinite;
Y = finite;
infinite number >>> finite number (infinity has a higher magnitude than any finite number)
It follows: X/Y = 0 - epsilon, where epsilon approaches 0 infinitely close.
Thus: Average density of life per world so close to zero, that it functionally IS zero (remember, just like: 0.99999... = 1)
Summary: Any life one sees must be the product of a deranged mind. You could even go so far as calling it imaginary.
Actual summary: Expressing humorous quotes in terms of maths is exactly what it takes to take the humour out of them.
Errata (just like in any good book about maths): X/Y = 0 + epsilon
Actually it is quite unlikely that higher intelligence would evolve in a non-social species. The advantages of intelligence beyond a certain point only appear when several intelligent beings work together, i.e. communicate. A solitary high intelligence would not be much of an advantage for survival, and therefore won't be selected for. Therefore higher intelligence should always come with a desire to communicate.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, just assume that epsilon 0.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
However that was a one-time signal. We also have received a one-time signal (the so-called wow signal). We have waited for a repetition, to confirm it's really an alien signal. Since we never got a repetition, we concluded it was probably not a real alien signal. Anyway, we never answered.
If any aliens have received the Arecibo signal, and those aliens are somewhat like us, they also have waited for a repetition of that signal, and since that repetition never came, they'll not answer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, that and the inverse square law.
SETI is just not targeting the right part of electrical aether. Aliens more advanced than us (or just having had another technological development tree) probably use other kind of transmitting waves to communicate localy (namely tesla/longitudinal waves) so SETI can listen for long in the electromagnetic spectrum without detecting anything...
So you say the radio waves have somehow modified our brains to get more intelligent?
Also I don't think the old inventions needed less intelligence than the modern ones. The only difference is that back then, much fewer people were thinking about new inventions. But that's not related to radio waves at all, but more to common education (during most of the history, the vast majority of people couldn't even read and write) as well as there simply being more people on earth today.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I should think any year now we'll be having probes wandering all over the solar system driven with ion drives, pointed every which way. Some collimation of the exhaust is presumed for best performance, but it's exhaust and tuning it like a cutting laser seems excess optimization. It seems unlikely to matter over interstellar distances. Some 50 years hence we'll be moving megaton asteroids with the things. You ought to be able to see that from a long way off if it's pointed at you. I would think that from Gleise 581 that would be brighter even than the sun.
There's some difficulty in predicting what future signatures might be, but some physicist should be able to make a good guess. This is a question with only three or four possible answers, and we could look for them all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
We can run some numbers of course. Lets assume uber magic detectors 20lty away such that they can detect a photon per second and distinguish this from the background. Assume a collecting area of 10000m^2 and we just assume its a 1GHz signal. So that is 6.6x10^-25 J per photon and we need 1 photon per 10000m^2. At 20lty year the area of the sphere is 4.5x10^35 m^2 so we need 4.5x10^31 photons for a isotropic distribution. Or about 30MW. That is a lot of power to be leaking out into space. Of course you can't have such a magic detector either (the received single is 6.6x10^-25 Watts). Not sure there was ever a time we let enough power leak into space....
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but is this not a function of multiple-values-of-infinite, as like Hilbert's Hotel?
Infinite number of worlds, only (lets say) 1 in 1 million are inhabited. So inhabited worlds = infinity/1,000,000, which is still an infinite number. So there are an infinite number of inhabited worlds (A), and an infinite number of worlds period (W), but W is 1 million times larger than A.
Which I think is basically what you said, but I disagree with your conclusion- W/N=A is not "very close to zero", as it's still an infinitely large result (and infinitely large numbers are not very close to zero, by any normal metric).
Oops, should of course have read: epsilon < 0
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The problem is that we've now got to send out an errata slip explaining that Pluto is no longer a planet, so the diagram of the solar system we sent isn't accurate any more.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
No , it's just because digging you up as an example of what I mean in so short a time proves so easy.
Using one of Hillarys ostrichy cluesless buttlickers as an example of the general stupidity of the poplulation, priceless.
Clinton will be relevant for research when she donates her brain next week. She will be able to courier more diplomatic documents to more countries that could care less what she has to say, because shes stupid in any language, in the space that housed her previously unused brain.
What is more wonderous, is the amount of fools willing to overlook her obvious disrespectful corruption and condescension to her office and the people she represents. But then, the same fools elected her power mule to office so Hillary could go for Queen of the World.Bet she was pissed when the powers above gave Omama the gig and sent her to be an ineffective joke in high profile instead.
Suckers aren't just born, they must first register Democrat and stand in line for a lobotomy first as the naysayers in this hot little thread will show.
I give you a +1 informative for outing the cow publicly. Too bad her buttsuckers gave you a -1 troll.
Yeah, a great representation of the glory of our country, NOT. It was a bigger joke than the Carter administration with Billy pissing on the runway and avoiding the Libyan hit squad while Miss Lilly spat fourth cute Alzheimer induced bytes to the press. But then, Jimmy tried to set a good example for Hillbillary as a diplomat, by giving away the Panama Canal to China in order to enable them and screw us to the mat harder.
Yeah, some good example the Clintons were, might as well have urged the cast from "Married with Children" to recap their characters as a presidential family.
( my money is on Chelsea marrying Chas and Cher giving Hillary wardrobe help.)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
No one seemed to recall he was so stupid as a Governor that, he took the press with him on a hunting trip and when no game appeared, he began shooting random birds, most of them the Texas state bird, the Killdeer.
The real stupidity though are those who continually portray the Democrats and Republicans as being opposites or even enemies because of petty differences in policy meant to obscure important issues. Rather, they are one and the same party, ruling this country unopposed for more than a century now.
Too bad there isn't a reliable cure for Cranial Rectumitis.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The real challenge would to spend a month in New England and claim some sort of intellectual superiority. (It's always funny when the actual residents do)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I would think they should be looking for ion engine signatures. That seems a more likely signal to span the distance.
And gamma-ray bursts!
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
.. ok, so there weren't any "intelligent" aliens found ..
what about the dumb ones .. they'd fit right in at most political dinners .. send them an invite !
My favorite part of this is that if aliens sought for intelligent life on Earth this same way, in our 1600s, they would have found no intelligent life either.
They seem to be looking for a very specific development of intelligent life - one that has developed radio comm that we could interpret, and just seems so unlikely to me.
Of course, I could be just talking shit right now, because I dont know EXACTLY what they are expecting to be an answer to their signal.
I am not aware of any connection between the two, other than perhaps the Arecibo message was an inspiration for the SETI project. It's not that SETI is listening for the replies to the Arecibo message. It would be too early for that anyway. But if some alien civilisation send out messages similar to the Arecibo message, we might pick it up.
I was just pointing out that stating none of the signals were intended for alien consumption is slightly inaccurate. But it is true that alien civilisations would be more likely to pick up a signal that was intended for a recipient on Earth than one which we sent with the intention of reaching an alien civilisation.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Yeah, sounds like it. I thought it had been send a few times, but I may have been mistaken about that. If we seriously want alien civilisations to see it, we need to send it more often, and be more careful about the direction in which it is sent.
I'm not sure what repetition really confirms. The more interesting question is whether we were able to decode the signal in the first place.
Yeah, we could have resent the Arecibo message in the direction of the source of messages we think may be from alien civilisations. It's not that those who sent the message in the first place would hear the reply because it could arrive several generations later. But if there is still intelligent life there, somebody else could pick up the reply. Of course with alien life we don't know how long generations are. We don't even know if the concept of generations and even the concept of individuals will make sense in an alien civilisation.
Good point. We don't know how aliens would communicate. But if we want a chance to communicate with aliens, at least we should be using a method that would make communication possible if they communicate the same way as us.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Most fortunate. I could hardly blame aliens concluding on a retaliatory strike after an onslaught of Jersey Shore.
Sending the entire message again would be a good idea if we do want to communicate with aliens. An updated and slightly different version would be fine. If some aliens actually picked up both the original and the new message, how would they interpret it?
If they could figure out that the message was encoding information about the Sun and planets, and if they are able to confirm the presence of the larger planets and maybe even the four innermost planets, what are they going to think of the messages we sent? Pluto is probably too small for them to detect, and they are going to look on the different messages in horror as they realize an Earth sized planet has been vaporized within the last 40 years.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
is having Australian's look for intelligence.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Err, I don't think the number of species that used radio has anything to do with this, just the number of years radio signals have been emitted. Yes, it is still really small.
You're right about that, but I was responding particularly to the GP - who was apparently under the impression that THIS experiment had sent a signal out and was declared a failure for not receiving a reply.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You mean the guy who started out calling other people stupid and then proceeded to demonstrate his own lack of knowledge about the project? Your reply to that was like between 90 and 99% accurate, that is certainly a lot better than what you replied to.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Duh, just inverse the flux from the core and redirect trough the plasma coils.
Can I light a sig ?
SETI is a waste of money and time.
We need to make a bunch of assumptions.
1. There are planets out there that support life.
2. Life on this planet had evolved into a complex life form (beyond slim)
3. A member of this complex form of life had evolved enough to be intelligent.
4. This Intelligent life form will think mostly like us.
5. This life form grew up in a culture which has allowed technology to flourish.
6. This culture would have technology based on radio waves, and yet is stilly enough to have their own version of SETI
7. The culture if were to pick up the signals, they would be strong enough to recognize and pinpoint the sender
8. This culture would then be able to understand and decode/recognize it is from an other life.
9. This culture would then be able willing/able to send the message back.
10. We would be able to hear the message after light-years of interference of the signals.
Life on earth has been estimated to be on earth for 3 billion years. Humans for 2 million, modern culture for 10,000 years, Science to send and receive radio, 100 years, SETI level technology 50 years. 50/3000000000 = 0.00000166666667% That is just in the life span of earth.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
>that is certainly a lot better than what you replied to.
Being better than the guy I replied to is not my greatest achievement... that's basically being a tastier turd...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Many of the issues in these threads are discussed in the excellent book Where is Everybody?, which provides fifty solutions to Fermi's Paradox of why the Universe is not teeming with intelligent life.
However, you make an excellent point regarding the recent Heliopause discoveries, which occurred well after Stephen Webb's book came out in 2002. You might want to get in touch with the author and share your insight. I couldn't find an email address for him.
There's only one solution I can think of to the issue of RF transmissions being masked by the Heliopause. And that would be altering the spectrum of the Sun in a recognizable pattern.
For example, shooting a large (like, ridiculously large) amount of nuclear waste into the Sun might cause an alien spectral analysis to show an unexpected band of ionized depleted Uranium along with other elements in spent fuel. If that band appeared and disappeared yearly in a prime number or Fibonacci sequence, an alien astronomer with our level of technology or greater would be able to deduce:
1. The length of the Earth year and, I presume, the distance from the Sun to the Earth if they have their own Kepler mission.
2. The fact that Earth has achieved fission but not fusion nuclear power and related technologies.
3. That Earth has not yet annihilated itself through the discovery of nuclear technology.
4. That Earth is ready to receive a strong, directed communication that can penetrate the Heliopause.
5. What form of communication should be used to send the signal to Earth given the technology it possessed at the time the signal was initially transmitted. Perhaps that would involve altering their own star's spectrum if RF is impossible.
And many other facts.
However, there is a problem. No one seems to have done this yet. If it were possible, surely we would have seen such a beacon by now in all of our spectral analyses of all of the stars visible to us in the Universe.
Unfortunately, that would support solution number 50 in Webb's book: The Rare Earth. Sad, but apparently true at this time.
If we are going to propagate throughout the Galaxy, as we must do anyway to ensure survival within the next billion years before the Sun boils off the Earth's atmosphere, it looks like our civilization will be the one that solve's Fermi's paradox.
Everyone should know SETI is a waste of time, the Prime Directive means we won't find any intelligent life because we aren't advanced enough
Don't scientists nowadays study the most basic and primitive form of logical reasoning? Search for black swan you idiots(and no not talking about Talebs book).
I mean, if that's all you saw from us, what would you conclude?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Perhaps, but not necessarily continuously or over long distances. I could see language (admittedly a possibly necessary precursor to symbolic logic and high technology) evolving among a species that only collaborate for brief periods, hunting perhaps, but prefer to avoid each other the rest of the time. Or a species/culture that emphasizes strong bonds within the tribe/social group/etc but regards inter group communication as irrelevant unless they're physically present - perhaps an intensely nomadic culture where once you part ways you're unlikely to ever cross paths with someone again, or a species that communicates via tactile, chemical, or electrical signals or any other means that requires physical contact or close proximity.
I don't agree with your basic premise either, no doubt collaboration amplifies the benefits of higher intelligence, but that doesn't mean that there are no benefits to solitary individuals. For our species the incremental cost of intelligence is fairly high, our brains require a great deal of energy to operate, something upwards of 20% of our total energy consumption. But there's no reason to presume that on another planet a much more energy-efficient brain didn't evolve, or that the intelligent race isn't just considerably larger so the percentage of total energy consumed by the brain is lower, it's not like a large muscle takes any more brain cells to operate than a small one, the transmitting nerves do a great job of signal amplification.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
So the aliens there are so advanced that they can't be detected.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Are you sure such stellar beacons don't exist? They could be quite common and we just haven't looked at any of them closely enough to notice, it's not like we've done anything like a comprehensive survey of even our nearby stellar neighbors, much less monitored them closely enough to detect periodic minor variations in their spectrum.
Of course such an undertaking would require a massive expense and the willingness to discard enormous quantities of high-value material (nuclear waste is still quite valuable, generally only a few percent of the available energy has been extracted, we simply need different reactor designs to do better). Even if we decided to do such a thing we could only keep it up for a very brief period, in fact it might well take the entire Earth's supply of fissionables to do such a thing for even a brief time, and even that might not be enough to make a noticeable difference to the sun's spectra.
Even assuming some alien race had worked out the details and were doing such a thing, I don't know that we would notice - you'd have to be taking spectral measurements of that particular star at the moment when the "signal" was sent, and the odds of that are extremely low - there's a lot of other stars out there to look at. In fact the only way I can see it realistically being detected is if the star's output were to be modified virtually continuously for an extended period of time (I'm talking centuries, minimum), which is likely to be an extremely expensive proposition for dubious benefit, so it would likely have to be something without ongoing costs - perhaps permanently altering their sun's spectra to something extremely unlikely (if that's even possible) or building a sort of "ringworld" with gaps that would flash a non-random signal to anyone in-plane that was measuring their sun's luminosity. Shoot, at that level of engineering it might make sense to just rearrange a planetary system so that the orbits follow some obviously artificial pattern(prime multiples? Fibonacci-based orbital gaps?). That would be a pretty clear indicator of intelligence, and the stellar wobble would be detectable from out-of-plane as well given optics only a bit better than we currently have.
I think the most important thing to keep in mind it that it's not just space that separates us, it's time. Our species is likely about four billion years late to the "intelligent organic life that evolved around second-generation stars" party, to say nothing of other possibilities. Any life out there capable of generating a signal that could be detected at interstellar distances is likely far more advanced than us, certainly those capable of modulating their sun are, and may quite possibly have discovered technologies much better suited to interstellar communication than radio or optics. It could well be that alien races are filling the sky with chatter, and we just lack the technology to detect it. If that were the case then what would be the point of building giant beacons for low-tech worlds to detect? Who wants to communicate with a race so primitive they can't even detect basic melgionic transmissions? Especially if that technology isn't actually terribly advanced - it could be that most races only spend a few centuries in the gap between being able to do stellar spectroscopy and discovering melgionics, in which case massive stellar engineering projects would be a complete waste of time and resources - by the time we detected it, sent a "hello" signal, and received a response we'd likely have already developed melgionics ourselves.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Yeah we been broadcasting our location for more than 100 years now. We may well be alone in our local cluster at least we can sleep safe that no scary super advanced alien civilisation in need of food, water is living next door. Off course wait a few century and we might very well become that hungry alien invader to some poor green less advanced bastard!
A subset of infinity can itself be infinite.
OTOH - infinity is not well defined. (Mathematicians only pretend that it is.) Cantor thought about infinity too much and went insane.
ironic captcha: unfair
Agree. The first sentence is grammatically incorrect and the second is mathematically untrue. ("It is known that there is an infinite number of worlds, but that not every one is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite nuber of inhabited worlds.").
The way this kind of rubbish gets transformed into respected "reasoning" is one of the miracles of human thought.
The problem is how distingishable was most of it from background noise just outside the solar system, or 20 light years away, even if you are trying to focus what comes from here specifically.
With SETI Research, NASA, and others short on funding, it's time that the media industry trade groups pay their sharing to catch those on other planets tuning in with unlicensed televisions.
Beings from afar should be careful what they say in reply too.
http://www.france24.com/en/20120602-islam-free-speech-turkey-pianist-fazil-say-insulting-religious-values-twitter-muslim
I am more of a fan of the SITI project: http://telcontar.net/Misc/SITI/
Two aliens are looking down at the earth when one of them remarks, "It appears that the dominant species on this planet has developed space-based weaponry."
"Really?" replies the other, suddenly interested. "So they're an emerging Intelligence, then?"
"Nah, probably not." returns the first, "They have all the weapons pointed at themselves."
Oh? A single radio station can easily broadcast in the 50-100 kW range, and while some gets absorbed by the atmosphere and soil much of it leaks out into space. How many radio stations do you suppose are in operation worldwide at any given moment? A lot more than a thousand I'd bet.
For that matter a wifi device can radiate ~1/10 of a watt, multiply that by a billion people and you've got 100MW right there
We leak a lot of radio noise, nowhere near what say Jupiter does, but still an awful lot. Whether that noise can be distinguished from a natural phenomena at large distances.... well that's a whole different question
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Oh my, you're a fucking moron.
Due to a programming fault, the array was actually pointed at Texas. Still, the good news is the array worked as designed.
Yep, no idea whether such beacons are even possible. I can't remember where I read about it, and I don't know how much fissile material it would take to alter the spectrum. Probably a huge amount. Well, if we achieve fusion power, I guess there will be a lot of leftover Uranium to use for this purpose. Shooting raw Uranium ore into the Sun might indicate to the observer that fusion power has been achieved as well.
I guess it does make more sense to permanently alter the spectrum, perhaps by throwing asteroids with high metal content into the Sun continuously, which surely a Kardashev-level II civilization could do, but then you'd have the problem of variations in the spectral emissions that might just look random to an observer, even assuming they were continuously monitoring the star. Also, the K-II civilization might not be blessed (cursed?) with the incredibly large number of asteroids that we have, or may wish to use them for mining.
> Any life out there capable of generating a signal that could be detected at interstellar distances is likely far more advanced than us, certainly those capable of modulating their sun are, and may quite possibly have discovered technologies much better suited to interstellar communication than radio or optics.
Indeed, solutions 9-30 in Webb's book deal with these possibilities.
There is an infinite amount of numbers. Not all numbers are even. Therefore there is only a finite number of even numbers. QED. Nobel prize please.
No, I suggested correlation, not causation, between intelligence and radio waves. Much fewer people were thinking about new inventions partly as a consequence of the species as a whole being less intelligent. Fewer peaks in individuals than now, and far lower troughs among the majority. There are more people today smarter than all but the smartest of the 1890s, partly because we have so many more people but also because we have so many smarter and more smart.
Education and technological tools for amplifying the intellect have indeed changed the species to a more intelligent one. As has culture, partly from the economic pressure to survive using tools that both enhance intelligence and demand more of it.
If we were to discover aliens that had a lot of potential to be intelligent, but just swam around photosynthesizing in the daylight all day, we wouldn't be impressed. We're looking for fellows to learn from, not just about like another animal. It's the information that intelligent aliens would have that's attractive. Most 1700s humans on Earth were pretty dumb.
--
make install -not war
Yes. But if you look at it, Earth is only broadcasting in a very narrow part of the spectrum. We are just now developing the ability to broadcast on gigahertz frequencies. Who knows how many areas of frequency there are, that we simply haven't touched yet. Who's to say they need radio at all? I mean, it's kind of slow over long distances.
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And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
Actually, once we eventually start sending out probes far enough to use our sun as a gravitational lens (beyond 700AU, ~4 light-days. Voyager has only reached 113AU so far...) we will likely be able to simply look at an extra-solar planet's surface and spot any creatures moving around there, maybe even be able to read over their shoulder if the light there is bright enough, our detectors sensitive enough, and the solar system not too "dirty". Of course it's not exactly easy to aim such a telescope, you have to fly your probe to be exactly opposite the sun from your target and at 700AU even a few degrees of arc is a ferociously large distance. Still, it might be feasible to send out a fleet of thousands of tiny, high-sensitivity probes with ion drives in all directions so each could survey one tiny region of the sky looking for anything interesting. A heck of a lot cheaper than sending a probe all the way to another star to see what's there, we can save those for the systems where we've already seen something interesting and want to investigate more thoroughly.
Also works great for interstellar communication - put radio transceivers past the minimum focal point on each end of a line through two stars and they can communicate on an extremely tight band with very low power requirements. Sure, it's a little tricky keeping everything perfectly aligned, but for ongoing communication it sure keeps the power requirements down. Could easily be part of the reason we haven't detect other races - why build massive transmitters to shout across the galaxy when standing in the right place will let you talk in a whisper.
Hmm... I wonder... depending on the sensitivity and resolving power of your gravity-scope you might even be able to listen in on alien conversations by detecting the sound-induced vibrations in nearby solids, wouldn't that be incredible!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And only an AC emphasis on the C, would make such a deal about a typographical error... I can't remember hearing many idiots discussing the Drake Equation which either mean your IQ is 300 and you're comparing the conversation with your own lofty intellect, or you're just an insecure twit who adjusts their petty sense of self worth by pointing out ridiculous trivialities like typographical errors. Kudos on you blazing wit, perhaps next time you'd show more than half.
Nothing warms a troll's heart like knowing that you not only read it, but took the time to reply. Thank you for playing Feed The Troll!
Seriously, don't be a fuckin newb. Emotion < Reason.
You ought to be able to see that from a long way off if it's pointed at you.
Yeah, but directly?
The problem with that, probability-wise is that space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space, listen...
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
Also, the asteroids will be composed of pretty much the same material as the sun - remember the entire solar system is just the leftover bits of stellar nebula that didn't get sucked into the central star, and as such have pretty much the same elemental composition. The sun probably already contains at a few earth-masses worth of uranium already - after all it contains all but 0.14% of the mass in the solar system, and only about 3/4 of that is hydrogen, the rest is the same stuff as found everywhere else in the system. You could probably drop every asteroid, dust speck, and gas giant in solar system into the sun and not change its spectrum in the slightest, except maybe during the brief period that the metals were falling through the sun's outer atmosphere.
The more I think about it the more I like the obviously artificial orbits idea though - planets are something virtually every spacefaring race will presumably be looking for, and it's likely to be far less energy-intensive to rearrange a solar system than modulate a star directly.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think you're right. Back to the drawing board.
They checked for signals over an 8-hour period. Obviously the Gliese 581ers had the sense to go to bed at night instead of watching TV.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Good idea - better insert an animated gif of the Death Star while we're at it ;)
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
My apologies- I skimmed a different article and thought it was announcing a message sent 20 years ago arrived and there was no reply.
We seem to use a very different meaning of the word "intelligence". Intelligence as I understand it cannot be changed by education. At all. Education can enable you to make better use of it, that's all.
Also I doubt there are many people smarter than e.g. Isaac Newton living today. There may be a few (from pure statistics, you'd expect it), but certainly the humans as whole have not become more intelligent in the past new years. You may think we have invented so much more in the current time than in the past, but that's simply not true. Even in the medieval times, there were lots of inventions which we today just take as granted. Like the windmill, the water mill, innovations in the way you do agriculture ...
You seem to confuse intelligence with knowledge. Yes, we have more knowledge than people before us. Simple because we know the things the people before us have discovered, as well as those we ourselves have discovered. That doesn't mean we are more intelligent.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.