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Alien Contact Unlikely For Another 1,500 Years, Says Study (msn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Astronomers at Cornell University predict based off estimates that alien contact is unlikely for another 1,500 years. MSN reports: "According to the astronomers, signals from Earth would need to reach half of all the solar systems in the Milky Way in order to be picked up by an intelligent life form. Given that signals from TV and radio were first sent into space as a byproduct of broadcasting 80 years ago, it will take around 1,500 more years for aliens to receive, decode and respond to the signals." A co-author of the paper who will present it at the American Astronomical Society's meeting on June 16, Evan Solomonides, said, "We haven't heard from aliens yet, as space is a big place -- but that doesn't mean no one is out there. It's possible to hear any time at all, but it becomes likely we will have heard around 1,500 years from now. Until then, it is possible that we appear to be alone -- even if we are not. But if we stop listening or looking, we may miss the signals. So we should keep looking." Stephen Hawking and Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner announced a $100 million research program in April to send robotic probes the size of postage stamps to nearby stars within a generation.
I've already made contact
we want to get paid
The Solar System is 25,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. So, it takes 25,000 years for signals from Earth to reach half of the solar systems in the galaxy... and another 25,000 years for them to respond.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I'm pretty sure the aliens are coming back next week... on June 24th at a theater near you. "Independence Day: Resurgence"
send robotic probes the size of postage stamps to nearby stars within a generation.
The first message we will hear and decode into English: "You have violated the pan-galactic anti-litter ordinance. Prepare to be mopped!"
*Study funded by Aliens Anonymous
I'm sure the BBC will be sending them nastygrams accusing them of having equipment capable of recieving a broadcast without paying the license fee.
If you have listening devices at some grid spacing, then you can, with some wiggle room, fire up some kind of kill vehicle for the star that is emitting them. Spend a couple centuries accelerating as close to light speed as you can, make a nice gamma ray burst. Keep the skies quiet.
Weak aliens wouldn't detect anyone, or make any sign.
Powerful friendly aliens would have made a big sign trying to sell you alien Jesus, and tell you how to build something helpful.
Powerful hostile aliens would either try to tell you how to build something suicidal, or would wait for you to make noise and squish you.
No aliens would not say anything, because they don't exist.
So either there's no aliens, weak aliens (essentially the same thing), or powerful hostile aliens.
Why are we trying to communicate again?
Why do they assume that there are no byproduct signals from aliens that we could detect?
Yes, yes, this all makes sense if all you have is the conventional no-faster-than-light travel.
Thing is, that's just not suitable for zooming around the galaxy; it doesn't do for zooming around the solar system. In fact, it barely got us to the moon, but it was painful. You might note that getting into orbit is something we're only now getting licked as the shuttle was anything but.
So if we want to get serious about this "contact" thing, better invest in finding alternate ways to get around. Faster-than-light travel would indeed be a sine qua non, and then we can have those first contacts in a couple decades, maybe even faster. But without? Never going to happen.
Unless they come here first, and that'd be ba... oh hey they're already here. Just not known to the general public--for Reasons. Which is why these overpaid "scientists" can speculate as wildly as they do, since nobody is going to tell them differently. So they're basically farting in space. Somebody open a window, please.
How long until those signals are indistinguishable from background? It's not just that the signal is there, but that the SNR is low enough to stand out.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
So using only early 20th century technology and understanding of physics for.. forever and assuming alien life is also operating under this handicap, it is likely to take 1500 years to contact alien life. Good to know.
Holy fuck. I think you've made one bad assumption after another.
First of all, I think you have totally ignored the density of the galaxy. Solar systems are not uniformly distributed, like you seem to think they are. I thought that would be obvious from its shape as a spiral galaxy, but clearly it wasn't obvious to you. Our solar system is actually within the most dense region of the galaxy, so signals from us reach a majority of the other solar systems well before they'd reach the center of the galaxy. So this significantly cuts down on your 25,000 light year estimate.
Second of all, I think you have assumed that alien life would be uniformly distributed, which is likely not the case. Some alien life would likely be extremely close to us. If they detect our signals then contact would happen well within 25,000 light years that you're estimating.
Your comment reminds me a lot of the snide comments we see from people who support systemd. You make assumptions that just aren't realistic, and then you insist that others are wrong when it turns out that they're actually right because they've considered the situation in far more depth than you have. Just like how systemd is often a huge problem for most Linux users, your assumptions about the galaxy and alien life also appear to be wrong.
There is not much possibility of our signals being heard due to the inverse-square law.
Most of our signals will be indistinguishable from the CMB, and if we generate a massive focused beam, we are going to have to be so precise, that it is most likely not feasible. 2 completely unrelated points traveling in 3 dimensional space, and we would somehow have to send and receive a beam (because sending one way is useless) when there is no way to guarantee where the other point will be due to all the exotic forces in the universe. Sounds like magic.
This stuff doesn't work like geostationary satellites, you can just point it in one direction and expect in a million years when you get the reply that they will be in the same spot. Honestly the radio search for ET life is pointless, you would think a bunch of scientists and mathematicians would avoid spending their careers playing the lottery.
Is astronomical
A research paper I read in the last few years showed it's very unlikely for TV and radio signals to propagate far beyond Alpha Centauri without deteriorating to the point of being completely unintelligible. Fox News, doubly so.
USB, USB, USB!
1500 years to get there, 1500 years for the reply?
With great pussy comes great responsibility.
The assumption is that we have to initiate contact for them to respond. Why wouldn't they be trying to initiate contact also? In theory, we could hear from them tomorrow if they are more advanced and initiated contact long ago.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/17pild/if_every_transmission_radio_signal_etc_leaves/
""Could it have traveled far enough to be intercepted by intelligent life?"
Probably not, unless they are flying near-by. The strength of the signals from earth vary depending on the frequency of the signal, thus the possibility that our signals will be strong enough to be distinguished from the Cosmic Microwave Background and other stellar noise depends on the frequency.
The answer to this question depends on the Power Spectrum Intensity of human transmitted radio waves from the earth being greater than the "noise" represented by the Power Spectrum Intensity of electromagnetic radiation of the universe. As I mentioned earlier, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, the afterglow from the big bang) is the quietest it can get anywhere in the universe, so at a minimum your signal must be stronger than that.
This is the power spectrum for the CMB, http://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/arcade/cmb_intensity.html .
It peaks at about 160 GHz. The units of intensity are in (ergs/sec)/cm2 which is equivalent to 1012 W/m2, so shift the order of magnitude by 12 for those units (thus the Y-axis goes from 10-2 to 10-9). Around the peak you get a signal intensity of about 5 x 10-2 W/m2. Using the scenario numbers that @wazoheat got for the Roumoules radio transmitter, and shifting its frequency to 160 GHz, at 1 light year the radio signal intensity would be 3 x 10-27 W/m2 which would be swallowed up by the noise from CMB, crapped out, and then buried in a grave.
The Roumoules radio transmitter actually operates at 218 KHz or 0.218 GHz. The CMB intensity is about 10-7 W/m2, which STILL swallows up the radio transmission at a mere 1 light year away.
"
"predict from estimates" Really?
Seriously, does anyone even 'journalist' anymore?
This is a simple wild-ass guess based on NOTHING. Aside from that simple fact...
They "guess" that signals would have to reach "half the systems in the Milky Way" to have a reasonable chance of being intercepted...but then say that this will happen in only another 1500 years.
Quick hint: just looking at it as a 2d issue, the Milky Way is 100,000 ly across, more or less. It doesn't take a mathematician to realize that a 1500-ly radius circle doesn't come CLOSE to hitting 'half the systems in the Milky Way'.
For those mathematically bent, a 50k ly radius circle has an area of about 8x10^9 sq ly.
A 1500 ly radius circle is 7x10^6...so about 1/1000 of the galaxy, not half.
"Experts", eh?
-Styopa
At the rate things are going, the human race may not exist in any significant way 1500 years from now. We'll either pull ourselves out of the various tailspin-inducing shenanigans, or it'll get us.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
chances are intelligent life does exist, and that there are civilizations that are the same, astonishingly ahead, or behind. and everything in between. The real trick is to catch the right people at the right stage of developement at the right time, in the right place. the odds are against us making random contact. plus who knows maybe we are being contacted, but it's the equivalent of us sending a radio broadcast to a civilization in the middle ages. Yeah there's intelligent life there, but they have no idea what we're sending or how to receive it. It's entirely possible we just aren't listening right.
TV and radio broadcasts are unlikely to survive getting out of the solar system due to that bit of interference called The Sun.
"Earth would need to reach half of all the solar systems in the Milky Way" I think all the people is science should know there is ONLY one Solar System in the Milky Way. There is a lot of other star systems in the Milky Way. Tim S.
More or less since the first signal we blasted out for tv and radio where omni-directional , count about 1/r^2 decay in intensity. A few hundred AU at most a few light year (e.g. we are almost not detectable if we had a SETI outpost placed on our nearest neighbors). Basically what our SETI is trying to detect , is intentional unidirectional powerful "we are here" signal sent by an ET civ, like we did in direction of Gliese or M13. There is a nice table with all signals including TV and maximum range : http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astro... scroll to "Table 1 Detection ranges" for assumption and detection range. Basically the only signals ET could detect beyond 10 LY, is our own intentional signals sent from various folk in the last 4 decades, and those maximum are around a few hours duration top.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If we received broadcast signals from an alien civiliazation how would we respond? We don't have the technology to go there. At best we could send a broadcast toward them. Why would we assume that they are any different? Or is that what they are assuming? That is, our broadcasts will reach them in 750 years and then they will respond quickly so 750 years later we will receive the response?
Shazbot!
How to secure funding for another 1,500 years.
Not a bad deal really.
So humanity has 1500 more years to live before the aliens come and destroy us.
There is no way to scientifically estimate anything about aliens. It is all far-fetched speculation, there is no solid science behind it. For all we know, aliens whose technology is far more advanced than ours could have already found us, and could be observing us, and have cloaking/invisibility technology to prevent us from detecting them.
Doesn't this count as an alien?
In other news blah bullshit bahaha woo blahalhallalalalalal
You just have to reverse the polarity of the deflector array. Duh, anyone knows that!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If intelligent aliens are watching us from afar, they might have checked the spectroscopic signature of our atmosphere, and realized millions of years ago that we live on a temperate planet with a lot of water, and that the high oxygen content in the atmosphere is an indication of life.
Dogshit smells good.
Lord Hawking should send his probe droids to Hoth. Rumor is that there's a detectable signal from a shield generator.
According to a very serious study I just made up, this article is made 99.93493% full of hot air and that this article is completely made up.
seriously, wtf? first, why would aliens be exactly 1500 light years away, in this middle of the milky way? assuming they exist (no proof), that they are found in the milky way (I believe as much as any other I am the center of the universe but why the heck would it be exactly there), that they have the technology to listen and are actually listening (why would they be listening at the precise moment we send the waves), and they actually want to listen (If they are very smart, they won't as they say)
Has it ever occurred to these supposedly bright people that aliens may not use radio waves for communication except maybe for a few centuries during their development..if at all. It's really unlikely given the vastness of time that anyone else who can even see our galaxy is at that same stage. They would be millions or even billions of years beyond us. Advanced civilizations would be using quantum links (entangled particles) to communicate instantly over any distance, even from inside black holes. Such links would be set up initially by traveling or sending a probe to a desired location using wormholes or warp drives or something even more exotic, and then placing a transceiver containing the other half of the entangled particles. Once placed signals can be sent by flipping the spin of the particles at 'home' back and forth..and the same from the other end. With a large collection of particles vast amounts of data could be transferred. Radio waves are too slow and weak to be any use over interstellar distances and anyone looking for them is wasting their time.
They might not find any so we'll be left alone... Joking aside, they might have something akin to a Prime Directive, and we're not advanced enough in technology to be worth contacting, or not civilized enough (we're still trying to extinct ourselves)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
for independence day....
An extra 1500 years before catching the attention of aliens is probably not a bad thing. That's more time to prepare defenses. It's hard to guess the nature of the extremophiles which live in space, or the space-faring races which navigate it.
We shockingly might not be perceived as peers or equals by space-faring races, but as an inferior species. And the history of superior species meeting inferior ones is not all rainbows and unicorns.
The notion that aliens would need to sit around waiting for radio signal epitomizes the enduring dumbness of our so-call scientists. How advanced would aliens need to be to exceed our collective stupidity? Not much I reckon.
What if the aliens have mastered quantum entanglement, built a network of listening points throughout the galaxy and are able to listen to us in more-or-less real time?
It feels strange to hear a pessimistic assessment of SETI from Cornell astronomers. Carl Sagan, we miss you...
The "scientists" at Cornell who are getting headlines with this breaking news haven't the foggiest clue how far away the nearest alien intelligent species is from Earth. Possibilities range from living here already among us or lurking in the solar system to "there are no alien intelligent species in the Cosmos", we could be unique. If you assume -- not unreasonably -- that evolution of advanced life requires an extremely unlikely accident -- like a collision with a proto-planet that is just the right size to strip away some atmosphere components and deposit others and rearrange the distribution of massive elements in the developing crust and then produce a moon that initially is very close and produces huge tides, plus a magnetic core, plus the right distance from the right sun, plus the good fortune not to be hit AGAIN just as intelligence is teed up, plus the enormous good fortune of the developing species making it over the self-extinction hump -- we might be alone in the entire galaxy or in very rare company extragalactically, even with a trillion trillion star systems to choose from. Or, the odds could be a D&D 20 sided dice roll per star. We just don't know. There is no evidence, and our theories of planetary evolution and abiogenesis are just that -- theories with very little substantive evidence to support them.
Then there are the other silly aspects of their claim. It is rapidly looking like a developing civilization is likely to have only a narrow window where they radiate a substantial amount of organized radio wave energy, so one has an even narrower window for retarded detection. Also that emitted (wasted!) energy at its peak is on the order of maybe a megawatt or two in any given channel on its brightest day, and the 1/r^2 law is pitiless. Just one light year away your 10^6 watts are spread out across 4\pi (10^15)^2 ~ 10^31 square meters. Let's see: 10^6/10^31 = 10^{-25} watts per square meter. If you turned an entire planetary surface into a directed antenna, it would have a cross sectional area on the order of 10^14 square meters, leaving you with 10 whole trillionths of a watt receiver power. Sure, why not, a piece of cake we can amplify that and resolve signal from noise -- using a planet-sized antenna and black magic.
So a better answer is that we will never be visited by space aliens who "pick up our TV signals" any more than we will pick up their signals. If some NEARBY civilization is crazy enough to point a directional, tight beam radio station right at the solar system and pump it with a terawatt or so, sure, maybe we could receive it here. But resolving the waste signal of a civilization order of tens of light years or more away? The amazing thing is that anybody manages to get this sort of thing funded. Simple arithmetic makes a fairly powerful argument that any SETI effort is a complete waste of time and money. No matter how cool -- and dangerous -- it might be.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
that's if we were listening for a RESPONSE. but aliens were out there, WE should be able to see THEIR signals... unless their civilization began exactly at the same time as ours. ffs. wtf?!
If we ever invent FTL I wonder if we could travel way out, build a big dish, and retrieve the lost TV episodes of early Dr. Who? Some lost movies?
If if its not omni directional you still get 1/r^2 decay in intensity. Even with lasers. The beam is still spreading out even with diffraction limited "optics".
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I'm just going to leave this here...
http://majesticdocuments.com/d...
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
there is really only 2 things of inestimable value that we should be transmitting: the genomes of our species, including us, and all our creative output. they arent going to visit us, they are going to have ALL the tech we have, and more. what they wont have is our species, our ecosystem. they could recreate it on a planet, even if we never can. humans could be born on alien worlds, in laboratories. then they could be given all our creative output, their heritage from us. viola, our civilization is reborn, perhaps long after we have been destroyed by our sun or a comet.
If we ever invent FTL I wonder if we could travel way out, build a big dish, and retrieve the lost TV episodes of early Dr. Who? Some lost movies?
Or you can wait 3000+ years until the signal has taken a loop around the nearest black hole and try to capture it when it passes by.
Of course it will be horribly smeared out and extremely diluted and depending on the circumference of the event horizon the part of the signal that gets looped back might be cancelled out completely.
This is called science these days. Prediction of 1500 years based on absolutely zero proof that life exists anywhere beyond Earth in any form.
I remember several groups of people in the past ho calculated precise date for the "end of the world". It was called cult, not science.
Already made that estimate. It's fucking obvious, the math is fucking straightforward unless you're a goddamned moron. Where's my grant money?
Does this therefore set a timeframe of the order of 1,500 years for us either to colonise other planets, to defend ourselves against unknown aliens of unknown capabilities and intent, or to build the technology for at least some of us to flee?
Watch this be one of those errors that, for whatever fucking reason, turns out to be the way it happens.
Plenty of time to clean the bathroom and run a vacuum through the place.
1. The authors are completely clueless that some humans have already met at _least_ 4 alien species, let alone the public evidence:
a) NASA's own footage: (Evidence: The Case For NASA UFOs), and
b) High ranking Government official's testimony Disclosure Project
2. They are also completely ignorant that First Contact is tentatively scheduled to happen as early as 2024 and as late as 2040. Some bullshit "theory" will always lose to reality.
It is no longer a matter of "if", but "when" our mass consciousness is ready to accept the facts that humans are:
a) considered animals by (some) more evolved and intelligent species,
b) that we don't own this planet, and
c) that humans were genetically engineered.
As someone said on YouTube:
"It can be difficult for people from underdeveloped worlds to hear that their planet is not the only inhabited planet ...ï"
The good news is that we get to meet our progenitors!
--
"Truth is stranger then Fiction"
If we ever invent FTL I wonder if we could travel way out, build a big dish, and retrieve the lost TV episodes of early Dr. Who? Some lost movies?
Now you see how time goes backwards when traveling FTL. You would see the last episode of Lucy *first*, with the movie playing backwards.
In fact. This is the very thought ["how would it be like catching up with a ray of light?"] triggered Einstein's curiosity about light, ultimately leading to E=mc^2.
Why would someone select M13? If anything it seems that M13 would be one of the most hostile environments to life. I know there is a ton of distance between the stars but it still seems like it would be an absolute crapstorm of radiation given the proximity of so many stars. It's not like us having a single star that is at the same average distance... I just wonder why this was chosen.
The camel fucking muslims will have taken over and destroyed everything, so nobody will be able to receive it. I hope the aliens come and nuke the place.
Well this certainly explains the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ! 1500-2000 years , give or take....
Found my own answer at Wikipedia:
The Arecibo message was broadcast into space a single time via frequency modulated radio waves at a ceremony to mark the remodeling of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico on 16 November 1974. The message was aimed at the current location of globular star cluster M13 some 25,000 light years away because M13 was a large and close collection of stars that was available in the sky at the time and place of the ceremony.
Mainstream science has largely failed to examine the the topic of UFOs and alien life because the US intelligence community has run a disinformation campaign over the past half century due to national security reasons. Aliens have already visited Earth and tampered with both Soviet and US nuclear silos and missiles since the end of World War 2. Here is a link to government documents released under the freedom of information act written by nuclear silo operators and other military personnel on the missile site that both witnessed and recorded craft on radar that were clearly indicate unidentified with vastly superior technology that tampered with nuclear missiles:
http://www.ufohastings.com/documents
In fact, as recently as 2012 one of these events occurred where over half of the US nuclear missile system was non-operable. The media reported it as a failed circuit when actually just before the missile systems went down a metallic disc shaped object flew to at least two nuclear bases within US territory and scanned the warheads.
The Milkyway's diameter is 100,000 light years, so even if we were in the center, we'd need at least about 35,000 years for our signal to reach 50% of the volume of the galaxy. If the reply took 17,000 years to get back (probably doesn't originate at the most distant part), then you're talking about 52,000 years. Minus the 50 or so during which "I Love Lucy" has already been traveling.
Every civilization goes through a brief period in their history where radio communication is the thing. And then for the next millions of years (if they live that long) they rely on whatever it is that supersedes radio (gamma rays, neutrinos, gravity waves, etc). Everybody knows this. Listening for radio signals is like us watching the plains of Texas for smoke signals from a new native american tribe. Who is doing this today?
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
and we just had to pay for it..Congress wouldn't..
The only reason I read something with a headline like this is to see what kind of boneheaded assumptions these "scientists" (are astronomers automatically scientists?) make. The idea beings millenia or epochs ahead of us can't travel faster than light is stultifying. Let alone, that they haven't figured out how to communicate in faster modes.
Except because of how radio waves travel, it's like writing on a balloon and expanding it...the message becomes distorted to the point that it becomes unrecognizeable once it passes a certain, relatively short range. We could have had alien broadcasts hitting us since we started listening , and we wouldn't know it.
Scientists report receiving a long series of pings from space, embedded with a picture of Adolf Hitler and blueprints for a trans-dimensional space travel machine.
This is assuming that we have to contact them first. What if they put us here to begin with? As we want to spread out in case of a catastrophic event, maybe they did the same thing and that's why we're here.
We could also be some kids science experiment.