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Why We're Looking For ET All Wrong
StartsWithABang writes: When you consider that there are definitely millions of planets in the habitable zones of their stars within our Milky Way galaxy alone, the possibility that there's intelligent life on at least one of them, right now, is tantalizing. But we're in our technological infancy, relatively speaking, having only been broadcasting electromagnetic signatures visible by an alien civilization for around 80 years. Unsurprisingly, we're looking for exactly the types of signals we're capable of sending, but what if that's totally wrongheaded? Based on how technology is evolving and what the Universe is capable of, perhaps we should be looking not at electromagnetic radiation, but neutrino or gravitational wave signals from the distant Universe to search for alien civilizations.
It's the one life we know exists, if we find aliens with a totally different physiology or totally different technology that's nice but we have no idea of what to look for. It's unlikely that aliens expect us to tap into their communications, if they are trying to ping us they probably do it using all possible channels. And we know at least one of them, it's unlikely a civilization that can do what he proposes hasn't invented the radio.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica is an example. LIGO has been scanning for gravitational waves for over two decades, without success. These observatories don't exist for the purpose of scanning for communications from extraterrestrial life, but they would be able to detect such a signal. I'm not sure what the author wants, since we're already looking for these things for the purpose of testing cosmological hypotheses.
When you consider that there are definitely millions of planets in the habitable zones of their stars within our Milky Way galaxy alone, the possibility that there's intelligent life on at least one of them, right now, is tantalizing
I'm thinking there might be one under our own feet
... when we have neutrino or gravitational wave telescopes capable of detecting such signals. Which we don't. Current neutrino observatories are very crude, and we have yet to detect gravitational waves of any kind.
While we have been sending radio transmissions for 80 years, the modularion has changed dramatically, which has negative imolications for finding ET, even if they are using our same frequency bands.
Early on we used FM and AM. Both end up with a strong easy to identify carrier tone. As time has gone one and DSP has become a cheap commodity we moved to more efficient modulations (relative to Shannons's limit). Digital modulations look more noise like and have no carrier as such. GPS is below the noise floor as received due to the energy being so smeared out, and that is from medium earth orbit. Your voice calls are recieved below noise as well in a CDMA system.
So if ET is similarly good at math, they will have moved on to signals that are similarly noise like and may simply be undetectable. There may only be a 100 year or so window to detect Earth, and similar may be true for ET.
they say: Stop Slashdot Beta or die!
Maybe the 'aliens' went through a period of using RF during their evolution to better methods. Just watch for their version of "I Love Lucy" or "The Honeymooners"
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The methods we have been using so far have always been based on our own technology level and therefore an assumption that other civilisations will be using the same methods.
One such assumption was sensing infra-red emissions, though the problem there is that a civilisation sufficiently advance may be using technology that has low emissions, due to optimisations. Though, at the same time we need to take note of different technology levels that different civilisations may be using for themselves and those they may be employing for their mutual search of 'extra terrestial' life. What I mean by this, is that they may be employing optimised radio technology, such as lasers and high encryption methods (which may be hard to distinguish from background noise, for us) for communication, but still using wide beam/wide spectrum, unencrypted radio in their search?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well we have been trying to detect gravitational waves and that has been a complete no go.
So trying to detect alien life via gravity waves will be a little difficult.
Neutrino modulation well at least we can in principle detect that, though there is no evidence they can be practically modulated for a communication system or that you could in principle make a reasonable detector.
On the other hand Earth's RF output continues to rise.
We are infants screaming in a forest of wolves.
That's the truth of the Fermi paradox, the only surviving intelligence is one that's extremely quiet.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
P.S. I have to ask just who did ethan blow to get slashdot as his personal PR machine ?
This guy spouts endless bad navel gazing science.
If the aliens really are intelligent then they're probably walking around among us, perhaps for a long time.
For most advanced civilizations, this may turn out to be pretty short. Between the discovery of radio and the development of efficient (below the noise floor) methods of modulation, this era may last a few hundred years. So if we are looking for inadvertent radiation, the probability of seeing it must be reduced by this factor.
The latency problem: Any sufficiently advance civilization will certainly understand the latency problems involved with communications at the speed of light. They might set up a beacon to advertise "Here we are" with no expectation of receiving an answer. But then again, probably not. They might run into the same problems we do with such 'science'. Funds will be better spent elsewhere, so why bother with the gigawatt beacon?
One possibility: A sufficiently advanced civilization might develop the technology to generate wormholes. Not big enough to physically traverse (due to the energy requirements). But large enough through which to inject photons. And if they can pop them open in the vicinity of candidate solar systems, they could find us in a reasonable (compared to light speed communications) time. So, they've found us. The next step would be to pop open some wormholes where we could actually 'grab' one, observe it for an intelligent optical signal and return one of our own. That would be a useful, two way, low latency link.
We don't have to understand the physics of how one goes about generating such tiny wormholes. Or aiming them at remote points in our universe. All we have to do is figure out how to detect one, confine it and couple it to optical instrumentation.
Have gnu, will travel.
I like the idea of some religions that there are gods, but they don't generally interact with mankind because we are smelly, coarse savages, filled with anger, lust and stupidity. I think if there is intelligent and technologically advanced life out there, they have more sense than to contact us.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious aliens have been here all along.
Citation#1: US presidents have known about UFOs here on Earth, even seen them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Citation#2: If 200+ NASA, Ex-Military, Ex-US government high ranking employees coming forth and willing to testify before congress isn't enough for you, then your mind is too closed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Citation#3: How many pilot witnesses with radar evidence to back it up does it take before you belive that UFOs are real and here on Earth?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Citation#4: Is 3 Million alien abductions in the USA alone enough evidence for you, or are you waiting around for a nice round number like 10 million?
http://www.ufoevidence.org/top...
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Any extraterrestrial civilization that has survived into interstellar travel is probably willing to invest a great deal of its time and energy into NOT being discovered by us. What could be more dangerous than a species that has learned some technology yet turns every technological advance into a weapon against others of its own kind? And we've been advertising that aspect of ourselves to the universe ever since we discovered radio waves.
Neutrinos and gravitational waves? That's so 20th century. We should be looking for quantum signaling and psi emissions! After all, our devices for detecting quantum signals and psi emissions are just as advanced as our devices for detecting neutrinos and gravitational waves!
"Unsurprisingly, we're looking for exactly the types of signals we're capable of sending, but what if that's totally wrongheaded? "
What? No alien 'I love Lucy'? Perhaps they are blind and deaf and just use 'feelies' or 'smellies'.
How would an existing species gain nourishment from another situated at interstellar distances?
Bad metaphor, I think.
Increase the sasquatch budget!
One aspect of the Fermi Paradox is the assumption that "civilization as we know it" necessarily broadcasts a huge amount of information-bearing electromagnetic radiation, and that more advanced civilizations will broadcast more. From a modern perspective, this seems silly.
A signal recognizable across interstellar distances represents waste. It's energy that's spent without reaching its intended target. One aspect of "advancement" is reducing this waste -- improving modulation schemes, encoding efficiencies, and transmission techniques to minimize wasted power.
A signal recognizable across interstellar distances also represents lack of diversity, or wasted capacity. If you're using a certain chunk of spectrum to broadcast a signal recognizable across light-years, you're not getting as much capacity out of that chunk as you could by using it for a bunch of geographically localized broadcasts -- for example, by broadcasting separate programs to each of 100 individual square miles within a 10-mile square, rather than one program for the entire 100-square-mile area. Take this idea a bit further, and you see our current cellular networks. From space, their signals would sound like noise.
It seems to me that the natural signal of a civilization like ours is a pulse of EM broadcast, lasting perhaps a few decades, then going silent or becoming indistinguishable from noise as we move to more localized and more efficiently encoded transmissions. If nobody happens to be listening in our direction during the right interval, brief compared to technological civilization's lifespan, they could easily miss us completely.
https://www.youtube.com/result... Thanks.... that episode is exactly what I was saying. Great episode.
https://xkcd.com/638/
Is that you, the Alien Guy from the history channel? http://paulabrown.net/history-...
Our species has not existed for very long, maybe a few hundred thousand years. Only in the last hundred years have we even begun playing with electromagnetic waves. Our experts consider this feasible. We need to look closer at science fiction and start speculation on technology. We have to assume that faster than light communication is indeed possible if not outright travel.
There are millions of planets out there that do have life on them. Jungle worlds. How do two species communicate over such large distances. You figure out what other intelligent species ares going to find interesting and you build a monument where they will already be looking. Take in the fact that humans already without ever meeting an alien already have "invasion" fears... It's only practical that you don't build a light house directly in your back yard but rather put it close enough that if you still exist you relay though it. If you've gone extinct then it's still a monument to your existence in a place that other intelligent being were going to look anyway.
All we are talking about is smoke signals. When we find it it will give us clues to FTL communication though something like that might still take us a hundred years even with outright clues. There is likely a network of living intelligent species out there. But by finding one that has gone extinct may provide clues for contacting other living species.
If I was an alien sending signals I would send the easiest to detect, like radio, or light.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I image that about 1/2 of those civilizations are technologically *less* advanced than us. Perhaps we should try flag semaphore or smoke signals.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Let's admit it, we don't even know what we're looking for. I mean that in the broadest, most philosophical sense. We say we're looking for E.T. but there's no way we can look for something too dissimilar to ourselves so we end up looking for ourselves as an end result.
As many here have pointed out, the RF era may only last a short while. It would be a pretty heady coincidence if we did receive signals from that era from an exo race just at the time we're spending (wasting?) our time looking for such signals.
Consider the law of inverse squares. It doesn't take very many light-years for a radio signal to become a whisper. People are talking about compressed and distributed radio that is indistinguishable from background noise. I haven't seen many people offering a similar argument for AM and FM - not very far away (about 120 light years from some things I'm reading) and the same thing happens to even very strong broadcasts from Earth.
So unless we're really, really blowing on the dice, here, we don't have much hope of finding something this way. We're talking about the coincidence of not only E.T.'s radio era and our listenership, but also the coincidence that E.T. lives extremely, extremely close to our neighborhood. Two coincidences at once, playing out to our whims? I doubt it.
But think about what we broadcast that doesn't get attenuated so easily. Think about our space probes.
Surely even the most technologically advanced races have to give up trying to receive propagating radio signals beyond a certain distance. But space probes always stay the same size (don't quote me on that, cosmogony and quantum mechanics experts) so even if they aren't going at the speed of light, they stay detectable across time and space.
I'm sure it's far easier to pick up a tiny, tiny little pinprick of metal and electrical energy (valuable things in space) for an advanced race than it is to find random signals amidst the background noise of the universe.
Maybe we should learn to apply a similar technology. Maybe we need to develop "sensor arrays" that can quickly and easily detect artificial satellites drifting through space. For all we know, several have gone through our solar system since the advent of, say, radar, and we don't know it because we're not really looking or don't know how to look properly.
If we're so certain that there are exo races out there that have lived in an advanced state for long enough that by now their intelligent creation of radio signals is reaching us, then it's just as safe to assume that by now their space probes are reaching us as well. Voyager is escaping the sun at 38,500mph. Light travels at roughly 300,000mph. So this dramatic leap in assumption is simply a magnitude of ten.
Considering the milky way is 100,000 years across, I think it's okay to play with a magnitude of ten in terms of light years when asking ourselves how big of a "neighborhood" we live in. It's like saying maybe our neighborhood is the size of our subdivision and not just our cul de sac.
When you take all of this into consideration, it looks actually very silly to spend time looking for radio signals. It makes looking for radio signals seem like a sideshow game that some people just happen to be distracted by.
Meanwhile, our solar system could be bristling with tiny little space probes that we ignore because we haven't learned how to effectively differentiate them from rocks.
Maybe that's because we really actually fear the universe. Our biggest concern about exo objects is space rocks because we're so afraid that a big one is going to slam into our planet.
It reminds me that a lot of people have argued that we should be learning how to mask our signals and to stop sending out calling card broadcasts in the hope of gaining an audience.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
If they are only a little bit more advanced then our civilization they've probably encrypted all their communication, maybe even encoded it in such a way that it will be hard to distinguish from cosmic noise. If they don't want to be found, they'll be hard to find.
New things are always on the horizon
Signal strength drops by the square of the distance, so if the closest possible earth-like planet with a civilization is say, 5000 light years away (about 5% of the distance across the Milky Way), is a reasonable amount of power, say 1 megawatt, 1 mile from that earth-like planet going to be detectable here on Earth after intersteller dust and gas absorption?
Would Infra-red transmission get through longer distances even better between planets?
"having only been broadcasting electromagnetic signatures visible by an alien civilization for around 80 years"
Not really, none of our signal went beyond a few au for most signals, and a few hundred au for most others. The reason is simple most signal were not very directional, and propagated at some point in 1/r^2, even if it is a cone rather than hemispherical. So for big r the r^2 gets bigger and you get a signal amplitude which is below the intergalatic noise for that frequency.
There are about only 4 or so signals which had enough energy to go beyond the solar system. They were intentionally very directional and high powered directed toward M13. They totaled all together 2 hours IIRC.
But beside those 2 hours or so ? Nothing. An ET could be landed on alpha proxy and NOT hear us in any way shape or form.
Basically : we would not be able to detect ourselves. Nobody would when the signal amplitude is dwarfed by noise. So unless some ET is continuously sending ginormous amount of energy in a directed radio signal toward us, there is no chance we would catch them.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
All the better reason we should learn how to detect miniscule space probes within our solar system.
If we're assuming we have listenable neighbors inside of 100 light years, why not assume we have space-probing neighbors inside of 1,000 light years and start looking for the probes that would have reached us by now as well?
And space probes are a medium we use to communicate and are gaining importance all the time. NASA has several semi-celebrities, now, who broadcast all the latest news about space probes. You might check our the twitters of Kimberly Ennico-Smith, Emily Lackdawalla, or any of the current or former crew of the International Space Station. All very fascinating daily reads.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
You mean the giant sign on my roof pointing up that says "I'm ready to be probed" isn't likely to attract any aliens?
You're off your meds again, aren't you?
Why is Snark Required?
Actually the Fermi Paradox doesn't consider that all civilizations are equally stupid: every Earth like planet have their own SETI institution listening for signals. But none of them had the occurrence of sending signals out.
I was of the understanding that current radiotelescopes could not pick up a regular broadcast signal of the type that is sent by commercial transmitters but that the signal would have to be much more powerful and concentrated, intentionally sent for the purpose of detection from another planet. I suppose that I was wrong?
Secondly, what benefits would a gravity or nuetrino have over EMF for communications? If it was so great why wouldnt be we be using it? How would you create a gravity or neutrino communications device? An expensive, complex communication technique just because it would be hard to use doesnt make it more practical and ETs are likely to be practical.
That's like saying an exploration team is "nutter" for keeping a point scout ahead of the exploration party.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Oh right, when they held positions in the scientific community, were Surgeons in hospitals, ex-NASA employees etc, in charge of F'ing nuclear weapons facilities they were all sane. All of a sudden they see a UFO and they are all crazy. Nice logic fail there.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
It seems to me you are. Your statement contradicts your signature. We call that hypocrisy around here.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Why wouldn't an ET leave a big message that was hard to miss, like, say, a moon? Or even better, a big pyramid in the middle of nowhere? That would be kind of hard to miss, wouldn't it?
Earth's RF output has been declining. What are you smoking?
http://www.cybercollege.com/pi...
Thanks I always say AC posting should be banned because it's usually idiots and or trolls.
Advanced communicators just flip bits using entangled particle pairs in pre-shared sets. Imagine two identical SSD modules, you give one to your friend who travels around with it and whenever you write data to your copy your friend is able to read the same bit changes off their's. Nothing is transmitted, the link is instantaneous and totally secure. Why wouldn't an advanced civilisation not switch to such a system as soon as they can? So assuming humans are average in their technological development rate you have about a 100 year window where any new civilisation is exposing itself to detection via electromagnetic wave transmission. If you accept that what are the odds of finding anything now? Bugger all?
As other commented observed, EM radiation diminishes with a square of distance, rendering it undetectable over interstellar distances, unless star-power emitters are used, Ditto for gravity. Likewise with neutrino-base comms, except it's the probability of catching this one stream of neutrinos that would diminish with square of distance.
Why would one use any of the C-speed-limited comms through interstellar space (to justify existence of star-power EM for example)r? Other then a species that have very slow time perception (say feel a "day" is 1000 earth years to make such comms usefull to them)...how would they even evolve?
They (ET) would have to really target us as direction of comms...but how would they know we are even here, per above, and why would they even want to?
On top of that we have temporal alignment chance...
IMHO, There is a good chance life did develop on other planets, sadly there is a very slim chance we will ever know about it. But, SETI is like playing Lotto, slim chances of success when you play vs no chance if you do not play and but put your energy elsewhere.
4wdloop
So I doubt we'll ever detect life "up there". Which is only in one direction, up; see my signature. I have tested moonlight and it makes things colder (i.e., it was warmer in the shade of the moonlight), so it's definitely not reflected sunlight. If it's not reflected sunlight? Well, then, we need to recognize our preconceptions and test and verify them.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
So far human communications are based upon a signal traveling along a path. In an advanced culture that may no longer exist. Quantum mechanics is weird enough and just maybe information can be made to appear at a target place without traveling in the physical universe. Obviously we could not detect something like that.
It's only hypocrisy if you think he's being snarky. He could be asking a serious question... which, honestly, is a legitimate one.
Suggesting that we use a communication that we have yet to invent is fantasy.
We don't have to invent it. We leave that to the much more advanced civilization. We only have to detect it.
Have gnu, will travel.
If it was 2 or 3 different authorities ok, but when it's thousands of pilots and hundreds of air traffic controllers who know the difference between an airplane and somehting that can do a 90 degree turn while going 20,000 miles per hour... and when it's hundreds of insiders in high ranks telling you not just what they saw, but what they know from decades on the job... at some point you have to pull the ear plugs off your ears and have a listen.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Maybe we're not just looking the wrong *way*, but in the wrong *place*. Maybe *extra-terrestrial* isn't broad enough! Maybe we'll find life other than what's here on Earth in a much broader domain, i.e., maybe we should be looking for *extra-cosmic* life, in other words, life outside our cosmos! How? In the fabric of mathematics itself. Max Tegmark has suggested (and indeed made a career of) speculations that *our* universe is mathematical (he posits the existence of mathematical structures that might be perfectly isomorphic to our own physics and cosmos, thus making them truly the *same* and just as real as our perceived universe). If this is indeed the case, then maybe we should look inside mathematics and see if we can find E.T. there (it does bring up an interesting question of how his phone would work!) This idea first really came home for me when looking at 3D animations (youtube) of the Mandelbulb. Check it out yourself; some of these videos, when you watch them, seem to implore you to just take a closer look to see small organisms or fishes or something even more alien! It sounds crazy, but, if Tegmark is right about any of this, then maybe we should look in the complex (understatement) mathematical multiverse!
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious aliens have been here all along.
Okay, one can play this game about any widespread "belief." Let's try, shall we?
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious God and Jesus have been here all along.
Citation#1: US presidents have known about UFOs here on Earth, even seen them:
Since the beginning of the US, US Presidents have been -- and continue to -- invoke a superior supernatural deity acting on Earth, usually to our country's benefit.
Citation#2: If 200+ NASA, Ex-Military, Ex-US government high ranking employees coming forth and willing to testify before congress isn't enough for you, then your mind is too closed:
I can find thousands and thousands of NASA, Ex-military, Ex-US government high ranking employees to talk about how belief in the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ is not only present in the world, but often is responsible for their entire success in life.
Citation#3: How many pilot witnesses with radar evidence to back it up does it take before you belive that UFOs are real and here on Earth?
How many miracles certified by the Vatican does it take for you to believe in an almighty deity? (The Vatican employs lots of actual scientists and doctors to certify these too.)
Citation#4: Is 3 Million alien abductions in the USA alone enough evidence for you, or are you waiting around for a nice round number like 10 million?
Yes, and hundreds of millions of people around the world believe that bread or a wafer is magically transformed into the body of someone who lived 2000 years ago, and by practicing ritual cannibalism and consuming his body and blood, they will be saved an afterlife of eternal torment. And hundreds of milions of others think the first group is crazy, but they believe in their own tradition pointing to a supernatural god or gods. Etc.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm NOT saying God isn't real, nor am I saying definitively that aliens have not visited earth.
But you have to admit that there are good reasons why many scientists have become increasingly skeptical of religious claims in the past few centuries -- largely due to the nature of the "evidence," which always seems a little fleeting or hard to capture in controlled experiments or whatever.
It is indeed rational to present a similar skepticism to claims like millions of people in the US are supposedly "abducted." How? When? Don't other people in their families notice? Why would aliens be doing this? How many government officials would have to be in on this conspiracy theory to keep it quiet? Why hasn't anyone been able to produce clear evidence of these things?
Here's the problem -- there are other explanations. You go back more than a century, and rather than alien abductions, people believed in other kinds of noctural weirdness, from incubi to succubi to various other demons or ghosts or fairies or whatever. There are well-known phenomena of sleep paralysis, which occur when your body's motor control turns off, but sometimes the conscious brain is still a little aware. This has happened to me a number of times in my life -- and I've even had dreams and nightmares that correspond to those times, sometimes where I've "felt a presence" or whatever nonsense... but I recognize these things as nightmares combined with well-known physiological phenomena... I don't blame them on aliens.
Isn't it interesting that all of these "abductions" started soaring just about the time that UFOs and sci-fi stories became all the rage? And the old stories about demonic visitation, etc. just happen to disappear at the same time?
Humans have an incredible propensity to look for patterns in randomness, and to try to ascribe meaning to phenomena even if t
If we can't depend on a large enough overlap in radio communications, perhaps we can search for other evidence of intelligence. Would nuclear reactors, for instance, give off any detectable signs -- an increase in neutrino emissions perhaps?
My calculations show that from the time life started on earth, planetary ejecta from Earth has had the time to travel across our entire Milky Way.
I have no idea why I had to work that out myself. It is quite the problem I suspect.
I won't read his stuff anymore. I read one article that was just bogus and damn if my Son didn't pass it along to me as well. It's the fact my son believes in what Ethan post, and dumber for doing so.
We shouldn't even be looking for ET. At all. Because of math. To put the age of the universe or even our galaxy in perspective, finding ET would be like winning the lottery every week for a year straight. Looking for ET is a total waste of time, no pun intended.
I wonder if our telescopes will ever be able to find more fundamental ways of detecting the physical modifications made to planets and star systems? One example, looking for orbital perturbations caused by using space elevators.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
One day, scientists and their followers will feel like complete idiots, when it becomes obvious God and Jesus have been here all along.
Except that while I haven't seen God or Jesus (that I know of), I've seen quite clearly an "artifact" (for lack of a better word) flying in the sky that bore absolutely no resemblance to any sort of flying machine that the public has knows about. No, I'm certainly not suggesting that it had to be ET... but to rule it out offhand... or equate belief in said possibility with a belief in religion... isn't particularly impressive, intellectually.
The problem is our limit on the speed of light containing electromagnetically coherent information traveling through the ridiculous vastness of space: we're still stuck looking further and further into the deep dark past, the further away we look. Until we use our consciousness to bend the Vastness until there *is no* vastness, we won't be finding anything currently alive in the moment with us....
Pretend that you could fully record two full weeks of received signal and whatever fidelity. Record two weeks of the 2.4 ghz spectrum at, say, a large apartment building. Assume that it's all 802.11 b/g/n with wpa2 encryption.
What's the earliest decade you could hand that recording to a bunch of scientists from, and have them retrieve meaningful communication from it? 2000s? 1990s? 80s? 70s? As you go further back in time, you're not only requiring them to figure out the encryption, but to decode the physical layer, the transport layer, file formats...
Hell, could you hand a group of scientists from 1980 take an unencrypted .mp4 and get it to play? How long would it take them? The 80s meant Commodore 64s. Say it's a four gigabyte file. They'd need to invent something that they could store the data on, just to start working on it!
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I'm completely willing to believe that there have been lots of UFOs, in the sense of objects that appear to be flying that we didn't identify at the time, and still may not have identified. What I really, really doubt is that they were alien spacecraft.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Actually, there was a time when many Western scientists believed that the Bible was true, and that Christianity was useful in determining scientific facts. It wasn't that many centuries ago. This included a period when lots of people claimed to have "proofs" of God (with an assumption that the existence of God implied the truth of their particular brand of Christianity). Some people still peddle fallacious proofs based on physical evidence.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The invasion scenario is ridiculous.
Sure, they need nothing from us; but being much more highly evolved than humans, perhaps they find us revolting and/or hideous. Some humans, who are much more technologically advanced than spiders, will cheerfully spray a can of Raid to exterminate a nest of harmless spiders.
Until that scenario can be ruled out, beware.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
we should be looking for cell phone signals.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Gravatational waves shoot through the Universe like touching a spider's web. Almost instant.
You can be sure if we do get an alien signal, it'll be an advertisement.
I prayed to God. I asked about all the war and strife. Then I read the Bible. Genesis.
Where the favored tribes ran around smiting everyone (per God's will). About a God that sure was cranky. Genocide. Crazy men ready to kill their children because of the voices in their heads.
And I said "Oh".
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
This is more about what is the most suitable medium of communication for a sufficiently advanced civilization. Is it radio? Probably not, if galactic communication does exist, it certainly won't be radio it is way too slow. Even light, is way too slow. Until we figure out some sort of communication medium that transcends these limitations there isn't much point to looking, Heck other worlds could be sending us stuff all the time, we could simply just not know enough to receive any of it.
A somewhat modern analogy:
Back in the mid 1990's I worked as a co-op student in a university IT department. What I did most days was access the "internet" or "World Wide Web" and interact and communicate with others via usenet newsgroups and typically argue with other people with similar access around the world. At the time, insofar as the internet was concerned unless you were a government or a university you didn't have access to it. Most people didn't know it existed. I could tell a few people around me about conversations I had but for the most part that was as far as the communication ever got.
So I guess what I am saying is that the Earth today doesn't know what the "Internet" is, has no access to it, and given distances, is a person standing in a vast plain just listening really hard and hoping for the best. It doesn't mean that others do not have access to that technology, nor that those communications are not taking place. Fast forward to today, just about everyone has the internet, and usenet is archaic, everyone is aware of this type of communication, and in fact now have advanced usage.
Anyway until we discover whatever exotic physics allows for said reasonable communication, there isn't much point straining our ears in the conventional sense.
I for one can't wait until our first alien communication amounts to: ;p
Beatlejuice1234: Hey Earth you suck! Your space is the worst! Ha Ha !111!111!