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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."
You have to wait another 20 years for a reply.... if it's 20ly away something traveling at C will take 20 years to get year... sure they'll have just gotten our signal, but even if they immediately send out a reply it takes another 20 years, idiots.
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.
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.
They're probably using quantum entanglement or something even fancier.
Proves that the Tea Party has a Gliese 581 branch.
... when there isn't any at all in the direction of us.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
part of GNAA if Don't feel that
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.
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?
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
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?
" 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.
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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?
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/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Perhaps that 8 hour window coincided with their sabbath.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
--
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
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.
>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 *
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.
.. 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.
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.
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.
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!
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
Due to a programming fault, the array was actually pointed at Texas. Still, the good news is the array worked as designed.
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
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.
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
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.