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Hunt Intensifies For Aliens On Kepler's Planets
astroengine (1577233) writes "Could ET be chatting with colleagues or robots on sister planets in its solar system? Maybe so, say scientists who last year launched a new type of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, project to eavesdrop on aliens. Using data collected by NASA's Kepler space telescope, a team of scientists spent 36 hours listening in when planets in targeted solar systems lined up, relative to Earth's perspective, in hopes of detecting alien interplanetary radio signals. "We think the right strategy in SETI is a variety of strategies. It's really hard to predict what other civilizations might be doing," Dan Werthimer, director of SETI research at the University of California Berkeley, told Discovery News. So far the search hasn't turned up any artificial signals yet, but this marks a change in strategy for radio searches for ETI with Kepler data taking a focused lead."
It says they listen when they are lined up relative to earth's perspective, but it doesn't seem very likely that the proper time to send a signal from point A to point B once the speed of light and distance are taken into account is going to be when ABC are all in a line by point C's perspective...or am I just misunderstanding the article?
I'm still looking for terrestrial intelligence!
Some might question why we're working so hard to advertise our existence when we still have exploitable mineral wealth and liquid water.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If we could get some meaningful immigration reform, we wouldn't have to spend so much time hunting for them.
If the Extraterrestrials have some, intelligence that is, they'd go through great pains to leave us rot.
the idea is that if there's a solar system out there where a civilization exists which is sending signals between planets (kind of like we're doing on a limited scale with the Mars orbiters and rovers), it's likely that the signals between the planets are highly focused in a single direction, and so the ideal time to listen would be when the planets are lined up with respect to Earth.
Since we have no idea what kind of signals they are using (radio is the most popular method for our civilization but lasers are also good communications devices) the search would sweep over as much EM spectrum as it could. It's a really clever idea that would definitely pick up interplanetary communications, IF we can recognize the signals as such. As it stands, noise - and the fact that sufficiently advanced communications could be indistinguishable from white noise - limit our ability to do that.
But anyway, I like the idea because it doesn't presume that they are sending interstellar communications (which requires a high level of advancement), sending incredibly powerful bursts of omnidirectional signals (which requires some unknown reason since it's a pointless thing to do) or specifically aiming their signals at us (which requires a high level of self-importance on our part). If there are civilizations with the same level of advancement as us, we'll find them.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Surely this is the job of NSA not NASA
If the late and great Hawking says to shut the fuck up then shut the fuck up!
Optical SETI is the way to go. A 10-meter diameter visible telescope has a gain 80 dB greater than that of the 300-meter Arecibo dish.
Current NIF lasers can deliver petawatts for nanoseconds, and could easily outshine the sun during their pulse if provided with a reasonably large telescope.
It has been shown frequently in the past that if alien life did actually develop on those, or any other, planets, the probability of actually detecting it would be near enough to zero as to be ignored - for numerous reasons.
But even so, given the imagined size and age of the universe, the probability of life forming even once is so remote as to be ridiculous. And in fact the only reason we have for believing it happend at all is because we are here, and we don't like the alternative explanation.
Negative Comment directed toward Obama.
Generic troll comment directed toward money spent on this project.
Anti-Obama comment blaming Obama for something that Bush did.
Negative rants that I just made up on the spot but have no support and are entirely off of subject.
If they use laser for communications, we will have a hard time seeing them.
Looks like someone's been watching Ancient Aliens on the History Channel!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The problem is the time window. We use radio waves a bit longer than 100 years and I'd be surprised if we didn't switch to something else within another hundred years. In fact, we have already switch a lot to optical fiber, and who knows what advances in science will bring? Who still uses smoke signals? Combine the probability that some planetary system is inhabited by intelligent aliens right now, which is probably very low, with the time window for radio waves and the probability of stumbling upon aliens will be extremely low.
The good news is that if FTL travel is possible and if we ever invent it, extraterrestrial archaeology will boom like no other science - there may be hundreds of thousands extinct species out there!
That we will no longer be using MacOS 7 to defeat them, it will be Mavericks on a macbook air and that whoever is sent to defend please make sure you "allow applications from anywhere" prior to taking off else you will be sat at the upload port for ages trying to figure out why the defence program won't run. (its in the security section of the system prefs Will)
The big filter (I don't like the term "great filter" but I'll include it to make search easier) is the point at which software programs itself (I don't like the term "singularity") - and so on. This point will soon arrive for our civilization, and it has already passed for the civilizations we are looking for. SETI is futile.
We must admit something is wrong after the current statistical failure to find detectable electromagnetic radiation (DEMR) from others. The best suggested answer is that civilizations hit the big filter at a point before having centuries of producing DEMR. So what comes early in DEMR production? Software intelligence. Right now, it's not a species killer, but tomorrow, when it can evolve itself, it will write our epitaph.
Regarding the article, it won't work. Civilizations will reach the big filter before they reach other planets.
(||) Nehmo (||)
"D...R...I...N...K..."
This could be a great way to prep the public for a reveal; it's boiling the frog slowly.
Isn't it going to be difficult trying to find the non-indigenous inhabitants of those planets amongst all of the domestic inhabitants? Why not just look for any inhabitants at all?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.