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Stephen Hawking and Russian Billionaire Start $100 Million Search For Aliens
An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Hawking is joining forces with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to start a $100 million effort to search the skies for signs of alien life. The initiative is called Breakthrough Listen, which will pay for large amounts of access to the Green Bank Telescope and the Parkes Telescope to scan the skies for signals over the next 10 years. They say the search will be 50 times more sensitive than previous attempts, cover 10 times more of the sky, and scan a greater portion of the radio spectrum 100x faster. They add, "All data will be open to the public. This will likely constitute the largest amount of scientific data ever made available to the public. The Breakthrough Listen team will use and develop the most powerful software for sifting and searching this flood of data. All software will be open source." The project is also supported by Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, and Lord Martin Rees.
Finally some Russian billionaire who puts his money to good use. (No, I'm not joking.)
Ha.
Spoilers: They aren't going to find shit. But whatever, if a billionaire wants to spend his money to confirm the obvious, so be it.
My understanding has been that we should expect a civilization to use radio broadcasts that radiate out and which we can distinguish from noise for only maybe 100 or so years. Prior to that, they've not invented radio. After some point, all transmissions are compressed and/or encrypted so that they're harder to distingush from noise. And at some point, transmissions may be done via other media, such as point-to-point lasers and even things we haven't discovered yet. The likelihood is that all over civilizations have started at different points and progressed differently, so we've likely missed that window on all other civilizations.
What happened to my past CPU cycles?
We currently have a list of 11 FRBs (Fast Radio Bursts), two of them are almost certainly from the same source, FRB 110220 and FRB 140514, as can be seen from their detected locations.
I posted in my journal we should be on the look out for a repeat on August 6, 2017 (if from an intelligent source), however it could be any integer fraction of 1179 days and 15 hours added to May 14, 2014 if we missed some pulses.
I also find it odd we haven’t nabbed any new pulses since 2014, when we are searching more closely for them.
Letter To Iran
In soviet Russia, aliens find you!
At first I was going to ask the doubters why Hawking would be involved if the project was so dubious, but after RTFA it is very unclear what Hawking has to do with it. He is quoted making several comments about SETI in general but nothing specific about this project. He isn't listed as a project leader. The closes I found was this quote "I strongly support the Breakthrough Initiatives and the search for extraterrestrial life.". It seems like they stuck his name in the headline for the prestige effect.
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I leave the Physics and related math to Hawking's team because that is his area.
From a computer science point of view (my area), and find the numbers to be rather low (100 Million). Lots of software cost that much just to develop something, although I can't imagine it costing that much for this project. But he is also wanting to run things for 10 years with this money. That is something I don't think is likely. He will need additional funding.
SETI had almost no chance of finding anything because they were looking for a world with life, with the assumption the people on that world uses radio waves, and used them in the exact point of history where we would detect them.
I don't know what method this team will be using, but I am guessing they will be pointing telescopes at the earth like worlds, although I think this should be tested against planets and moons in our own solar system first.
The search for radio signals from other planetary systems may be an effort that will be in vain. The reason I say this stems from our own progress in communications technology. The era of high power radio broadcasts is on its way out in our civilization, something close to a hundred twenty years after the invention of wireless transmission. We are moving toward wide bandwidth, low power transmissions for our broadcasting. All of this milliwatt level stuff will not be bearable even a fraction of the way to next star since it will be burred in the cosmic background. (cell phones, WiFi etc). One of the problems that NASA has encountered is the tradeoff between bandwidth and signal to noise ration. Low speed data transmissions are used for deep space probes because it makes the best tradeoff between bandwidth and signal to noise ratio. Assuming other civilizations evolved much like we have; more and more information will be interchanged as their wireless technology evolves. Signal bandwidth will increase which lowers the effective distance a radio signal of the same effective radiated power can travel before that signal becomes burried in the noise. This project like others who have come before it will yield no communications from another civilization, the laws of physics, and technologies on other worlds that may have followed the same evolutionarily path as we are working against it.
Listening to a radio telescope in no way helps aliens find us.
he's a physicist and has never worked in finance
Being a billionaire nowadays is certainly hard; in fact, this is the main reason why I am poor. There is a tremendous peer pressure because all the other billionaires are donating lots of money to good causes.
I imagine what a billionaire might be thinking while choosing his defining good cause: “This one is not cool enough”; “Bill is already taking care of this other one”; “Is that one a scam? Will keep it on hold for the time being”; “This one is too expensive and spoiling my kids is not precisely cheap”.
Billionaires certainly miss simpler times, when they were keeping all their money to themselves. Poor men/women!
WARNING: this comment contains sarcasm.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
As described in the novel, LGM (at Amazon), a radio message might just be the side-effect of another purpose.
as to think that:
1) anonymous space aliens are radiating coherent energy in all directions (we sure aren't) and,
2) that we'll pick them up, when receiving photons from stars is so difficult.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Please, please, don't do that. Please, let aliens not find us. Please. Aliens that find us are so much more developed than we are, they will not consider us to be intelligent life. They'll put us in their zoo. Or worse, in their butchery. How can Hawking be so dumb?
Indeed, Hawking is sooooo dumb. But to be clear, are you saying that the outcome of detecting something means that we would then figure out how to send them a message which would be way more noticeable than out current radio transmissions, and then they come and then it's all game over? Yes? I like the way you think!
Because otherwise you're saying that analyzing radio spectrum (which the whole universe receives anyways) tells aliens that we exist, which is far less plausible.
No chessplayer, you.
If found, the next step is to watch as govennments dump billions into sensitive listening, followed by some idiot broadcasting at them.
It is inevitable.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
A better method is likely to build better telescopes, perhaps large space arrays, and do transit analysis of many many worlds. You could, in theory with better tech and observation time, pick up on all kinds of signs of life both non sentient and sentient. These signals would be carried by electromagnetic waves, just not all in the radio spectrum. It's not as sexy as ET phoning home but far more practical in many people's eyes and is actually a main focus of research for many reasons extending beyond detecting life as you can still do analysis from earth.
if you believe some of the UFO stories out there, the aliens who have been in contact with us are vegetarians and don't like the fact that we kill other living things for food
BTW, they will couch the spending in terms of investigating the galactic neighborhood, but will in fact be in an arms race with other major powers to discern new tech -- plans or science ideally -- but just knowing some things can be built is a huge advantage to direct research.
I still favor retreat into virtual worlds as the end game, even after manipulation of reality approaches manipulation of virtual reality in capability.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
They need to "listen" to gravity. Radio/EM will never be used by a spacefaring civilisation for interstellar communication.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.0342
"we attribute the proximity to sampling bias and conclude that they are distinct objects"
You can't really be this stupid, right?
The sky is VAST. Really.
How about improving intelligent life here at home instead? Or to quote the late, great Robin Williams, "We can to this planet looking for intelligent life. Whoops, we made a mistake."
BTW, they will couch the spending in terms of investigating the galactic neighborhood, but will in fact be in an arms race with other major powers to discern new tech -- plans or science ideally -- but just knowing some things can be built is a huge advantage to direct research.
I still favor retreat into virtual worlds as the end game, even after manipulation of reality approaches manipulation of virtual reality in capability.
I suggest you retreat soon. Really soon.
Grass is a living thing... you insensitive clod!
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
previous article... ... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.' Personally, I've always thought that the indigenous people of the world really had no chance to avoid contact here on such a small planet, but is hiding under our collective bed an option for humanity in the wider galaxy?" - Stephen Hawking
'I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.
retreat into virtual worlds as the end game
YES! I'm surprised at how few people talk about this. Why stick around in a boring hostile universe when you can live in a perfect utopia of your own creation?
is going to miss a lot. A planet full of tool using dolphins would be invisible to us. Jovian civilizations without metals to direct radio would have the same issues. A radio using civilization that had taken all of their radio digital, complete with compression and encryption would be invisible as well since all the entropy would be distributed in such a way as to make all radio traffic appear as noise. Even a zipf analysis would probably fail.
A more interesting approach would be to attempt to train current AI to distinguish natural objects from man-made objects and then point it at the universe. Mega-engineering might be quite visible, but look to us like another bright, bright, fuzzy, oddly shaped stellar thing. Ditto for the electrical "noise" of planets like Jupiter. some of Jupiter's "whistler" and other interesting radio noises might be something other than lightning. We simply can't know at this point.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Fast radio bursts: the observational case for a Galactic
origin
Letter To Iran
Steven Hawking and Russian billionaire to throw away $100 million
integer fraction of 1179 days
How could a transmitter know how long a day is? That's silly and naieve.
It's just a measurement; the units don't matter. The point is that the two were separated by that amount of time, so if they are a periodic signal then the period must be an integer fraction thereof.
two of them are almost certainly from the same source, FRB 110220 and FRB 140514, as can be seen from their detected locations.
Probably not. They're in the same place, yes, but they were deliberately looking at the location of FRB 110220 in case it flared again, so they were biased towards detecting a pulse from the same location. It's not quite as big a coincidence as the close locations imply. More importantly, the dispersion measure (DM) - a measure of the column density of electrons between us and the origin of the pulse - is completely different between these two FRBs, which indicates that they lie at very different distances. (Unless, that is, you follow the minority opinion that the free electron population causing the dispersion is local to the source, and compact enough that it can change significantly over a few years.)
I also find it odd we havenâ(TM)t nabbed any new pulses since 2014, when we are searching more closely for them.
That's not too surprising: there's a significant lag time between astronomers detecting an event, and being certain enough that it's real to publish it. And even then they sometimes get it wrong: look at the "perytons", which were published (albeit with a big "we think this is probably just interference" warning) a few years before they were discovered to be produced by microwave ovens.
Making astronomical observations plblic access and the algorithms used open source can fuel all kinds of research at the corporation, university, and amateur levels. That alone is a laudable effort. Too much science today is pay walled and locked up behind restricted access.
"When I told him we'd be 'hunting for alien life', I should have been more specific.", said Hawking.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Already an American billionaire had figured out who the aliens are , and what they do, Got into hot water for saying it openly instead of using euphemisms.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Outside the singularity nuts, you don't often find people advocating for a video game afterlife.
Besides, your mom will probably just unplug your universe to run the vacuum cleaner in your basement "apartment", fulfilling the prophecy: The great Filter Queen will being an end to all existence.
Required reading for internet skeptics
most initial propagation will be hemispherical in 1/r , so even our initial broadcast would be lost after a few AU, well beyond a light year. Our radio broadcast and tv with their power *never* reached alpha centauri before disappearing in the intergalactic noise at those frequencies. The only broadcast which may have reached some other star are the one semi directional sent intentionally (toward M24 IIRC?). And they were only of a few minutes total. Maybe 1 hour top.
The only things pretty much they would be detecting are intentional signal sent by ET "we are here!". But here is the food for thought : beside that 2 or 4 broadcast totaling about 1 hour or so, we would not be able to detect ourselves.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Hawking has been getting loop lately.
I have a hard time believing that they'll succeed. From my limited understanding unless an exceptionally strong signal was specifically directed at us picking up RF signals would be next to impossible except for sources within a few thousand light years. Also I have a hard time believing that most alien civilizations are still using RF for long range communications and have probably moved on to something more advanced. Here's hoping I'm wrong.
The prime flaw in the Fermi Paradox is, we don't posses technology to communicate between stars (all but the nearest) or travel between them. Therefore, we have no reason to suspect we know what to look for. For all we know, alien communication is everywhere, all we know for sure is flying saucer haven't landed, followed by demands to see our leaders, which is dumb because they would really ask to see Elvis!
A sucker is born every minute.
There's a pretty big difference in listening for aliens, and actively sending out messages. He was advocating not to do the latter; he never said the former was bad.
In the final analysis, the Drake equation tells us about (a) statistics and (b) our state of knowledge.
It does not tell us if there is other life out there, intelligent or otherwise.
We know full well that life is possible, because, us.
We don't know if life is widespread.
We don't know if our life is the only kind of life (which, by the way, is a problem with several terms of the Drake equation.)
We don't know if intelligent life typically communicates over distance using radiative methodologies.
We don't know if intelligent life typically uses technologies that radiate unintentionally.
There's lots we don't know.
Seems to me, at least, that we should put considerable effort into finding out with whatever we can, with whatever tools we can bring to bear. <shrug>
--fyngyrz
*Anon due to utterly pointless slashdot limitation preventing moderators from posting under their own IDs without undoing moderation(s)
Could this data be used for something other than searching for ET?
You need to know where they are to avoid them.
Within a few hundred years, we'll be expanding from our current spot in the galaxy in a shockwave of life and technology that'll eventually approach the speed of light in all directions. Any life anywhere within this sphere will be stamped out while still in the 'algae floating around in rockpools' stage. As would any alien intelligence who had got there first, and expanded to our solar system. Since we're here and they're not, that must mean we're the only intelligent life within our chunk of the observable universe.
One of the reasons it was bad for the native Americans is that they were both competing for the same resources. What resource is there on Earth, that an alien race can't get from a million other planets instead? Life? Easier to grow it locally.
Who ordered that?
In order to achieve interplanetary travel, *any* species will need to cooperate. The tech is so complex that it is impossible to discover it alone, let alone actually build a spaceship alone. So, a species capable of cooperation on a very large scale is a necessary prerequisite of spaceflight.
Any species that is capable of operating in groups like that will have, by logical necessity, an effective set of moral values. And the "pure evil" set is clearly NOT effective to this end as evidenced by the elimination of slavery in every developed culture on our own planet. Just as we can be assured that the species will have organs for absorbing nutrition, excreting waste, and breeding...we can be assured that any space-faring species will have a moral system similar to our own.
Obviously, then, when they discover us, and discover that we function as a society, have moral values, cooperate, etc., just like they do....their own moral system will compel them to recognize us as an intelligent species, and accord us rights over our own planet.
You know....exactly like what *we* would do if our space ship encountered a planet full of articulate beings that drive cars and watch TV.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's like saying that Pi has no way of knowing the circumference of a circle. While it is true going by just the face value it shows a lack of critical thinking.
"Aliens found!" ... "Never Mind." ... "Aliens Found!" ... "Never Mind."
A few days later
A few days later
A few days later
Repeat ad nauseam.
This isn't a proof, but the Drake equations are actually wrong. You can never add huge amounts of time to a probability statement. Otherwise you end up with monkeys typing Shakespeare. Multiplying odds by enough time guarantees shit happens, such as life.
For a better approach, still full of swag, start with today's number and count and assume.
If there are 10 to the 11th power stars in the Milky Way, then all I need are 11 events in a row with a 1 in 10 chance of occurring. Life doesn't seem so inevitable now. Rocky planet (1/10) in the right zone (1/10) in a stable orbit around a stable star (3.5 billion years of evolution requires stability 1/10). A big moon so water life can spread to land. 1/100 (having a moon is a biggie). Assume cyanobacteria happen. You still need eukaryotes and prekaryotes to evolve and combine, multicellular life to occur, life to move out of the ocean, a magnetic core to save land life from cosmic rays.
I think life is a lot more unlikely than folks assume. Regardless of what assumptions you do make, remember that multiplying probable odds by enough time is as invalid as dividing by zero. You can claim whatever results you want.
Any aliens smart enough to contact us would be too smart to contact us. We're probably considered the white trash of the universe the way we carry on down here on Earth, totally and selfishly trashing her. Why would any alien race want to come visit that?
And finding aliens with a passive search would id them and give possible early warning to such a threat. So yeah. Makes sense from his point of view.
No one would believe anything they find anyways.
Yes, clearly Earth is the best place to get resources. They certianly would want to venture down it to our gravity well to get out water ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and our precious metals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). They may want to eat us ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ). But maybe these are all the stupid ideas of stupid primates. They are just as likely to visit for our political and religious ideas.
The most likely explanation for lack of contact is that there is nothing but pain to be experienced by dealing with us. We still degrade form old age and die from cancer. We murder each other over stupid plants and petty territorial squabbles. If aliens know us they wouldn't want contact.
Finally some Russian billionaire who puts his money to good use. (No, I'm not joking.)
Welcome to the market system. Sounds like somebody needs to get rid of some of his Russian mob money fast. It's been a workable solution and great tradition in the US.
You can't really be this stupid, right?
You must be new here.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Nah they just told folks at Parkes to stop opening the microwave door before the timer went off.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.0216...
If we do receive a message that looks like a computer program, we will, of course, execute it. What could possibly go wrong?
We might not be able to find aliens, but they could find us. We have been broadcasting for 100 years, so the number of stars in that light sphere is growing.
How could they cover the vast distances of space? In star wars type space ships? Of course not. We live in an information age, so they they would transmit themselves as computer programs.
("They", of course, would not be little green men but instead be software running on tiny supercomputers.)
I expect that the search for civilisations could be futile as a civilisation may only remain detectable for a couple of centuries during it's development therefore when you add that small window to all of the other factors that reduce the chance of detection the probability of success is very small. However while they are doing all that scanning they could record data that offers other insights into the cosmos that are of scientific value. Remember that detectable equates to wasteful and that is not sustainable therefore civilisations should not do so for any longer than necessary.
Listening to a radio telescope in no way helps aliens find us.
That's what they want you to think, sure.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Outside the singularity nuts, you don't often find people advocating for a video game afterlife.
Apart from teenagers who enjoy video games but have no skill at reality.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it