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SETI Fails To Detect Signals Coming From KIC 8462852 (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Rare excitement spread through the scientific community and the media when data from the Kepler Space Telescope indicated something strange going on around a star 1,500 light years away called KIC 8462852. An analysis of the pattern of light coming from the star suggested that a swarm of smaller objects was orbiting the planet. Scientists narrowed down the possible explanations for the data to either a swarm of comets or a group of alien megastructures. According to a story in Space Daily, an examination of KIC 8462852 by SETI, using the Allen Telescope Array, has failed to find any evidence that ET exists around that particular star.
If ET were there, couldn't there be other E-M methods that would attenuate before reaching earth? Not saying there are beings there, but just because radio waves aren't there doesn't mean they aren't.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Just how is SETI not finding a signal in anyway shape or form news ?
Even we are moving from lossy radio signals into lossless signals. And we have only been broadcasting shit for 100 years or so.
If ET were there, couldn't there be other E-M methods that would attenuate before reaching earth? Not saying there are beings there, but just because radio waves aren't there doesn't mean they aren't.
If ET were there, transmitting on RF with the same power we use for radio/TV signals - our detectors aren't even good enough to hear it over noise.
In other news, I recently discovered my car wouldn't start. I've narrowed it down to two possible explanations: either the battery is dead or my cat has telepathic powers and doesn't want me to leave. I have been unable to find evidence of my cat's telepathic powers. Just thought you'd like to know.
Entanglement does not facilitate the transfer of information.
Entanglement does not enable FTL communication.
Entanglement does not violate causality.
If ET were there, transmitting on RF with the same power we use for radio/TV signals - our detectors aren't even good enough to hear it over noise.
From what I understand it's primarily going to pick up military radar or intentional "pings", signal broadcast is very weak compared to radars trying to detect stealth aircraft that is diverting 99%+ of the signal away from the source. There's not really any reason to send radio/TV signals with that power and for information efficiency we're going to encode them so they're almost indistinguishable from noise anyway. The latter is obviously the best since they're the only ones likely to have any information content we could positively identify. So at least for our current level of technology they have to want to be found.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Because there's a difference between not finding it after checking and not finding it after not-checking...?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
First off SETI is incapable of discerning signals from noise at >200 LY's away. Secondly, aliens with Dyson Swarms are in now way communicating with crappy, inefficient radiowaves. They are likely using laser based communication or something even more exotic.
I really do hope the next look at 2017 reveals even greater light fluctuation, proving definitively an alien megastructure. Hopefully they lend over some scientist cause our current crop aren't meeting specification.
tl;dr: They saw something funny there at high frequencies. So it's news that they don't see anything funny at lower frequencies.
I think it does. It's how we solve the black hole information paradox. Hawking radiation tunnels the information back out into meatspace by entangled virtual particles. The anti particle half collides with a real particle inside the event horizon, causing the real half to transform into the portion of the real particle that merged with the antiparticle.
Exactly. I would imagine any species sufficiently advanced to do planetary and solar system engineering, probably has moved beyond EM communications. In fact, I really feel that the theory that advanced civilizations will only use radio for a fairly narrow period before moving to other means of communications really means SETI is doomed. That window is probably only a few hundred years, and considering that anything but a very directed high powered signal is likely to dissipate within a few light years of the planet of origin, it's the wrong approach. We could be surrounded by civilizations at our level of development within a few thousand light year window and never hear a single signal from them, and visa versa.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I spent years donating my computing time to SETI, when I started to investigate how they did what they did and alien life on my own.
First and foremost - SETI leverages Radio telescopes for discovery of life on other planets.
Most human life - is visually and auditory in nature - so when I started asking questions such as 'why are they looking for radio communications and radio evidence of life, when there's a high probability that life on other planets which is like us may have gone down different developmental paths?
How do I put this in English. Radio is an imagined construct created through a collective agreement our population has with our reality.
Now what's to say - even remotely suggest - that life on other planets may have the same thought on reality, let alone have invented or messed with radio waves?
I know, I know the argument. There's certain imprints of civilization that should be searchable via radio astronomy, it draws a picture of the cosmos.
That's not entirely true.
It draws a picture based on our understanding of the universe. But if our collective understanding of the universe is myopic. Then SETI is the equivalent of looking for a needle in a haystack with a remote controlled robot while blindfolded.
Sorry. I don't trust anything SETI has to say anymore.
Logic suggests we need to look for evidence of visual and auditory beings leveraging more than just radio waves.
Exactly. Spitzer is capable of detecting it as a very faint signal, knowing that the actual source is a star. If they are using EM communication, the prower is probably orders of magnitude smaller than the star emission itself. Good luck, catching that with sufficient SNR in the radio domain...
Correct, obviously the shark people of KIC 8462852 would use frickin lasers!
We have never had ANY reason to assume aliens of any kind use radio as we know it. Even among the life forms on Earth, many of which are very closely related to us, absolutely NONE of them have developed or discovered radio except humans. So therefore, we already know radio happens 1 in some billions of species even when they are our close relatives.
Among aliens unlikely to be anything like us, we have to assume that they may never have found radio, or use it differently. SETI essentially looks out into space looking to find ourselves. This is just ludicrous. What little we know about space and other planets tells us the universe is incredibly diverse. We aren't going to find another US out there. So no wonder they have always failed.
Sig for hire.
...but it does make it more likely.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
From what we know the universe should be teeming with life, so where is everybody?
This is the question Drake was actually asking with the "Drake equation". It's not a huge stretch to imagine species that develop fossil fuel technology self destruct in a very short time (geologically speaking). A fate not that different from fermenting yeast in a sealed container.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If it's a Dyson Sphere, would radio waves pass through it? If not, then this tells us nothing.
Just how is SETI not finding a signal in anyway shape or form news ?
Following the scientific method a negative result is an equally valid result ;)
Lossless? there is no such thing. Even in fiber you need signal boosters. Anything propagating in space is attenuated with the inverse square law, it is conservation of energy.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
You are wrong. We understand entanglement very well. It was Einstein that just didn't' really like it. But we have done real experiments many times. No information transfer, no FTL, hell we even suspect that it won't even make NP complete problems easier to solve either. Well at least a lot of us do.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Two different types of radio signals were sought:
(1) Narrow-band signals, of order 1 Hz in width, such as would be generated as a "hailing signal" for societies wishing to announce their presence.
This is the type of signal most frequently looked for by radio SETI experiments.
(2) Broad-band signals that might be due to beamed propulsion within this star system.
If astroengineering projects are really underway in the vicinity of KIC 8462852, one might reasonably expect the presence of spacecraft to service this activity.
If these craft are propelled by intense microwave beams, some of that energy might manifest itself as broad-band radio leakage.
They are looking for possible "engine noise" too.
So far... well... nothing.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Come in..., come in please..., Mother Star KIC 8462852. Those of us in the Earth-planet system recently had a close one. Apparently, the thought implants we used on their presidential candidates to make them crazy wasn't enough to keep the humans distracted, and the primitive humans almost deduced where we came from. Nonetheless, we assure you they *are* primitive. When we studied something referred to as TFA, it implied "a level approaching 1027 watts" of radiated power was substantial.
(||) Nehmo (||)
I think he meant "non-leaking to space RF" signals (i.e. fiber optic cables). In other words, communication power is not 'lost' to space, therefore detectable by aliens.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Why are we even assuming that they'd be reliant on E-M technology? If they are building a Dyson sphere isn't it possible they've moved to something more exotic. I mean by their standards we're still using two tin cans and a piece of string
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Wait, are you saying that we are the universe's beer?
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Well SETI didn't say they weren't there, they just said they haven't found any evidence of somebody being there. Since SETI only checks radio spectrum signals - that lack of proof is limited to that domain.
Unfortunately we really don't have much technology for doing any other kind of looking right now, nor the funding to develop any, nor the political will to supply the funding.
Who knows what we may have missed (not just with this case but in the 20-odd years since SETI lost it's original budget), because we weren't willing to listen a little harder ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
They are probably using sub-space communications......once we invent devices that work in that domain, we will probably pick up all kinds of ET chatter! ;)
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Also, laser communications is being investigated. That type of communication wouldn't even be noticeable at 1500 LY.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That last point- do you mean that:
> Factoring is NP complete, and entanglement won't work the way it is supposed to in Shor's algorithm*?
> Factoring is P, and shor's algorithm only works for that reason?
> Factoring is a special case, but entanglement doesn't solve a broad or general set of NP problems?
> Something else?
*You probably don't mean this one because Shor's algorithm has been used small numbers already, right?
To my mind, the search for life would be better spent on ever better optical telescopes. We can already "sniff" the atmospheres of exoplanets to some extent, and we're probably within a few decades of being able to directly image significant features of Earth-sized planets, not to mention finding evidence of at least photosynthesizing life (which would almost certainly infer a complex biosphere on such a planet).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Factoring is an NP problem, but there's no particular reason to believe that it's in P or that it's NP-complete. (Of course, if P==NP, it's both in P and NP-complete.) I don't quite get what you mean by "special case", since problems are in P or NP or are NP-hard based on the algorithms that will solve them. Since classical and quantum computers do somewhat different things, it's possible that a problem is in P on a quantum computer and not in P on a classical computer.
Of course, if a quantum computer can solve one NP-complete problem in normal time, it (possibly in conjunction with a classical computer) can solve any problem in NP in normal time. That's at least some evidence that factoring isn't NP-complete.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
We think we do. History has shown a lot of the things we "know" were, in fact, incorrect. (at best, incomplete) Given our current understanding and technology, entanglement is little more than a novelty. We simply don't know how to use it to transmit information -- at all, at any speed. (then there's the issue of getting the entanglement to last long enough to span a useful distance. A few mm in a lab is just more novelty.)
I'm trying to figure out what the poster is saying by "we even suspect that it won't even make NP complete problems easier to solve". If factoring is NP complete (the first case), then does he mean that somehow Shor's algorithm is not ACTUALLY helping solve an NP complete problem? Like, the little bit of quantum processing we have is actually working by another mechanism that would break down if extended to large numbers of qubits, meaning that he's claiming a problem with quantum mechanics?
Or does he mean, that factoring is in P (a real possibility), and that the demonstrated trivial uses of Shor's algorithms are only reflecting something that could be solved in polynomial time without quantum stuff, if only we had the algorithm? Like, that it's only interesting because we are solving a classical polynomial problem that we just lack the classical polynomial time algorithm for?
Or does he mean, factoring is a "special case" - meaning an NP problem that is not in P that is solved in polynomial time by Shor's algorithm, but that he suspects that nothing else will come of quantum computing, like it can't solve any OTHER NP problems, nor any NP Complete problems, just this one (or a very narrow subset), for some special reason no one knows?
I'm obviously referring to classical computing when I mention P or NP, just as the poster I am responding to is. It's meaningless to say "make NP complete problems easier to solve" if it's referring to anything but the common usage of problems that are NP complete in classical, but could be solved in polynomial time on a quantum computer.
Factoring is probably not NP-complete. It's a well-studied problem, and nobody's come up with an NP-completeness proof. It's likely not in P, for much the same reason: people have studied it a lot and haven't found a polynomial algorithm. If P != NP, there are going to be levels between P and NP, and therefore problems that are in neither. The best bet, from what I've seen, is that factoring is one of those in-between problems. (If P == NP, all of this is moot, as all NP problems are then both NP-complete and in P.)
Shor's algorithm solves factoring problems efficiently (or so I've been told; I know less than I like about quantum computing). We know this. I think I read somewhere that quantum computing can't solve NP-complete problems in P time, but don't rely on what I say for that. (The definition of a NP-complete problem is that a problem is in NP, and if it can be solved in polynomial time so can all other problems in NP.)
So, I'd say the poster meant that quantum computing solves some NP problems that are not in P and aren't NP-complete efficiently, but not all of them. He clearly meant that NP-complete problems would not be quantum computable in reasonable or polynomial time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I meant that factoring is has not been shown to be in NP and that solving factoring faster is not evidence that quantum computers can solve NP problems faster than NP. I am being sloppy with terms here of course.
It has been speculated that no quantum computer can solve NP-complete/hard problems "faster" (ie in P). But then we also have a *very* small set of quantum algorithms to do anything at all. It just so happens that on of them is factoring. With large constants and a heavy burden on total number of operations needed and a fairly heavy classical computing burden as well. But it is still doable in P time.
Yea a little late to the party.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Just because you don't understand doesn't mean other don't. And no there has never been a " oh shit we must have just got all this data wrong for 200 years" moment in science. The data and results remain. New theory are not new. They tweak. And we have a lot of data that supports 2 things. FTL of things or information is time travel. Entanglement does not transmit information.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!