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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How would an existing species gain nourishment from another situated at interstellar distances?
Bad metaphor, I think.
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.
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
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