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No Transmitting Aliens Detected In Kepler SETI Search
astroengine writes "By focusing the Green Bank radio telescope on stars hosting (candidate) exoplanets identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope, it is hoped that one of those star systems may also play host to a sufficiently evolved alien race capable of transmitting radio signals into space. But in a study headed by ex-SETI chief Jill Tarter, the conclusion of this first attempt is blunt: 'No signals of extraterrestrial origin were found.' But this is the just first of the 'directed' SETI searches that has put some very important limits on the probability of finding sufficiently advanced alien civilizations in our galaxy."
I blame Jersey Shore
Radio signals can deattenuate with range, other aliens might not be running a SETI program (and therefore glowing in the sky because they transmit stuff to random stars), they might be much further away and so their signals haven't reached us yet. The universe is enormous, no doubt there's *someone* out there.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
What a shame if all this effort means Earth is the only planet to harbor intelligent life. Or worse, the first.
They've all moved on to cable TV.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
All it takes is an episode of "Single Female Lawyer" blacking out and sooner or later we'll get invaded by aliens.
I am officially gone from
Other aliens out there may have discovered what we haven't yet figured out:
Not everyone in the universe is nice.
Having a whole bunch of radio signals emanating from your planet is like saying "rob me! rape me! kill me!" to any wandering castoffs from alien civilization.
It might not even be organized military action; only pirates, or serial killers, or even just disaffected artists with a flesh fetish.
... to think that anything in line with typical-strength radio broadcasts (and which were not being specifically directed out towards the stars for an attempt to send an interplanetary signal) from a distant planet would have any chance of being decipherable from background noise if the origin of such a signal were even as near as the closest star?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And any signal we might detect would have most of its entropy shifted to the main signal block, followed by a little orderly decryption section, which to us, would also look like noise, so running your signal though a zipf analysis probably wouldn't work.
Frankly, I think the radio thing is a bit silly. The detectable radio interval for any civilization is likely to be quite short. Even we're moving to photonics wherever possible. We'd probably do better looking for light signals, or astronomical star sized objects that look like artifacts, or creating large area Casimir antennas in space capable of detecting wide area, coherent changes to virtual particle activity.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That they are cloaking their communications, is not only proof of alien intelligence, but a clear sign of hostile intent.
We must attack before they do.
Maybe so, but the agnostics are out in force looking for proof of nothing....
Perhaps I'm misreading the article but if the article is referring something like 3db bandwidth in the statement "candidate narrow-band radio signals (less than 5 Hz) between 1-2 GHz" they should mention a few terrestial examples. I can't think of any but I am willing to be educated.
One thing to take in to consideration is which of the 86 stars they pointed at and their distances from us. As long as they stuck to star systems in the Milky Way galaxy, all this really says is that other planet didn't have the capability to transmit radio frequencies up to 75,000 years ago (considerably longer for systems outside our galaxy). Considering we just got the capability only 107 years ago, if any alien race is roughly on par with our origins, speed of evolution, and technology advancement, we won't know if they exist for another several thousand years. That is if they haven't figured out how to break the light barrier and then we figure out how to detect it.
alien forms of MPAA and RIAA. Imagine worlds being destroyed for infringement.
I for one welcome our restrictive overlords.
what about the wow signal? was it the 70s SETI detected a seemingly broadcast like signal, they checked again several years later but found nothing. will Kepler peek around there or maybe SETI will listen again? or is the wow signal considered a scam?
And if they had something better than Radio or Light, then why would they use inefficient slow tech?
Scientists are discovering physics and material hacks all the time, so the possibility of "instantaneous" communication is growing stronger. University labs are producing some interesting results that seem to skirt along the edges of information theory and quantum theory. It's unlikely, but possible. Check back in a hundred years or so...
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature_of_intelligent_life_to_destroy_itself
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Hello...?
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone at home?
Dr. Hugh Ross theorizes that we humans are at the earliest possible time intelligent life can exist in the Universe. So regardless on what you think on how we got here, it may not be possible for other intelligent physical life to have existed before us humans. Since reality is only 14.7 billion years old this is a plausible explanation.
Those SETI guys have already had two signals that couldn't be explained, the WoW! Signal and another one from the Seti@Home program. Even if they did detect something it would end up the same way as those other two signals did. It would be explained by a shrug of the shoulders and a whisper to a colleague that it must be a signal from earth bouncing off Space junk. SETI is the joke of the Century.
Fact:
The largest single aperture radio telescope in the world is the Arecibo Observatory.
It's maximum power output at 2380 MHz is 20 TW
If a matching radio telescope were placed on a planet orbiting our nearest star Alpha Centauri (4.2 light years away) and broadcast at full power, directly at earth... the signal would be too weak by the time it arrived for Arecibo to detect it.
We can't even detect our own radio signals with the best equipment we have at interstellar distances. I think it likely that we'll be well out of the radio age by the time we can... The fact that the sky isn't flooded with alien Television stations isn't because there are no aliens, it's because there's a better way to transmit that we haven't figured out yet.
how long would it take for our answer to reach them? Just curious. If there signal would have taken thousands of years to reach us, I'm not waiting around to hear their reply to our reply. This makes it nothing more than a curiosity and not something that will cure all disease or solve poverty on our planet.
They're scared to be sued by apple for whatever reason.
------------
(sorry for that bs, it's pretty late here)
Sure will be nice when we figure out what everybody else in the galaxy is using for communicating long distances.
Alien civilizations with the knowledge to travel the stars, may have developed ways of picking up far distant signals in a way that wouldn't force them to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years to detect.
They've thus seen Kirk, and have blacklisted our species - they don't want no poo-flinging monkey offshoots bumping human horns with their genteel spacewomen.
I wonder whether an "advanced" civilization would even be interested in expending the resources to send out signals in every direction, as mentioned in the article.
If not, that would explain the "mystery" of lack of contact so far.
Interstellar alien communication will be subject to the inverse square law. No matter what carrier (photons, neutrinos, ???) they will use a highly directional beam. Even (or especially) advanced civilisations won't waste gigawatts of power just to illuminate the vast voids of the universe.
So unless we get by luck into a alien signal beam, we won't hear from them anything.
To start a conversation we should probably direct a high power laser at a nearby star with a planet in the habitable zone. And then wait for an answer in the same spectrum. This also greatly reduces the not so unreal risk of attracting hostile aliens. Because if there were highly advanced hostile aliens in the neigbourhood we would probably know already.
Unless they are deliberately aiming a signal at us, we wouldn't be seeing anything. Even regular analog transmissions are impossible to see at this distance. And modern radio signals (cellular, encrypted, compressed) just look like low level random noise anyway.
"2012: No sighting".
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Have gnu, will travel.
Not english speaker so was unsure if the headline was about "No transmiting aliens" found or No "transmitting aliens" found. If was the 1st alternative then was wondering how they found them if they didnt transmit anything, maybe a Ringworld, a Klemperer rosette or another non natural formation was detected.
Maybe should be considered how much power is needed to transmit something to a particular point of the sky, strong enough to hit the entire habitable zone of a solar system with enough power to be detected for whoever is there, if there is something there hearing at the time it reaches.
Maybe there are out there civilizations so advanced that manage to do that, that went for thousands or millons of years trying to hit us in particular with a strong enough message, so if/when we decide to hear what is coming from there should finally hear them. But the odds of that seem to be pretty low.
Your read that right:
"The greatest problem is the sheer size of the radio search needed to look for signals (effectively spanning the entire visible universe), the limited amount of resources committed to SETI, and the sensitivity of modern instruments. SETI estimates, for instance, that with a radio telescope as sensitive as the Arecibo Observatory, Earth's television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light years.[71] "
Our best radiotelescope has an effective range of 0.3 LY, unless we're betting on ET to be pointing an entire nuke-plant-powered transmitter directly at Earth. The assumptions underlying SETI are absolutely preposterous and solely an excuse to secure funding for the endeavour. The chance of success with this method is nearly nil.
The safe solution until sufficient weaponry is developed to annihilate any and all opposition to conquest.
I think this is unlikely. Non-aggression tends to make people unable to solve problems. Aggression makes them year for conquest and discipline themselves according. A non-aggressive society will be fat, lazy and most likely to kill us through incompetence.
"THEY" are already here.
Watch:
K-PAX (possession of person/travel via light)
Starman (love story to cover up cloning of dead man)
The Last Starfighter (more cloning)
They Live (more evidence of travel via light)
V (The original series, a few episodes are enough)
and others.. There are several related trends running through many movies about alien travel and consumption of human flesh and eating the flesh/bodies of other animals. The recent hard on for Twilight and other movies which depict evil beings as good is more proof of the culture turning towards the dark/evil side.
Remember to Seek Ye First The Kingdom of God, not alien and conspiracy crap in movies and on websites. once you know, you know. place your trust in Yahweh, through Christ Jesus, by the Power of The Holy Spirit.
Examine:
The cover of Dark Side of The Moon
(it is another example of travel via light and evil spiritual transformation through the occult symbol of the triangle)
There is much more out there, obviously.
If I had to guess, the SETI number cruncher program (which is proprietary still? I don't remember.) could have an entirely different purpose and function.
In other news:
Non-Transmitting Aliens Detected In Kepler SETI Search were detected, but hey, that was not the goal of the project.
Draw a circle the size of a plate, then take your pen and put a dot near the rim but not too close. Say an inch. That is the extent our radio signals have traveled if our galaxy was to be shrunk to the size of a soup pate. Give it time, it takes about 100,000 years for our signal to get to the other side of our milky way alone. By then we would have discovered warp drive and we would have sent giant vacuum cleaners to suck up our radio signals :-)
G
It doesn't matter if it's directed if you're only looking for the frequency of hydrogen. it's like driving around a car with the frequency knob set to one frequency and then complaining that there's no radio stations.
first space is not 3d but 4d, chance that two civilizations with electro-magnetic communication systems collide in space-time is somehow very thin.
+
frame of air full communication with electro-magnetic signal, according to our own history, is itself very short. what we see for us is : 1950's, start of massive air broadcast, 2010's communications go underground with fiber optics and wired networks. air broadcasting is already diminishing, ask tower companies about their business models today...
so finding this alien needle in a haystack might be just waste of time & ressources no ?
"the SETI team can now place important limits on the likelihood of finding a sufficiently advanced alien race in the Milky Way. Generating a powerful radio signal requires a lot of energy, so the team point out that they will most likely detect a civilization capable of generating an isotropic signal (i.e. a radio transmission that is emitted in all directions). This would require the civilization to harness the total power output of their host star, making them a Kardashev type II civilization."
Okaayyyy.... but the religionists are full of blind faith and wishful thinking. Ah. Got it. Yup."
So true keep believing in your sky pirates.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Distance between stars, round trip, and power of the signal you have to send to a particular planet, point of time in civilisation development.... So many obstacle as to make communication improbable and a waste of time and resource (remember we are only *hearing* , *sending* is much much more costly especially when you do not know where you have to send to and how far, we have only 2* a few minutes signal we sent which went further away than a few light years 8back in the 70) all other radio/radar/tv they are all gone into noise latest by 1 light year many much nearer than that).
In other word the "aliens" might have already figurated that it is useless to try to spend energy on the off chance somebody might hear.
And frankly even if all alien are bad bad evil carnivorous paranoid invader whatever , what do you think they will do if they detect a civilisation 10000 light years away ? Come and invade ? pffft. Unless you come up with fantasy FTl drive it will be at best 10000 years trip and more probably a few millions years. *shrug*.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Inverse square law is a bitch. Even us we only sent 2 signals which had a chance to go beyond our solar system. Nothing else we sent would be heard beyond 1 light year.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The typical alien civilization has had hundreds of thousands of years to work out compression algorithms.
On top of this, spread spectrum might be used.
So what makes anyone think that SETI or anyone else would be capable of recognizing an alien signal if they saw one?
The fact that people are trying to draw conclusions from this failure, is a sign only of colossal human arrogance.
Now can we get back to solving our problems?