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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.)
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.
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
No one with a brain would use microwaves, optical SETI is far more efficient and the logical choice. For a picosecond, a source can out shine the local star and transmit an obvious artificial pattern. The whole spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet can be monitored at once too
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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Listening to a radio telescope in no way helps aliens find us.
It's a serious point. Our own radio signals are probably indistinguishable from background noise from Alpha Centauri, and they're actually reducing with time, not increasing.
Rather than than looking for "stray radio communication" (you really think an advanced society is going to lose lots of energy to stray communications?), we should either be striving for extreme optical / UV resolution (satellite-based interferometer telescope) so that we can spatially resolve surface spectra on extrasolar planets in our area to look for signs of life; and in general look for signs of energy release that might be associated with interstellar travel, such as antimatter annihilation, directed thrust, solar sail reflection, etc.
IMHO.
"You see, Government is a system that is based on weapons." -- Timster
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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!
You can't really be this stupid, right?
You must be new here.
Similar to the upcoming US election results