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SETI's 'Strong Signal' Came From Earth (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the false-alarm dept.

Yesterday, it was reported that Russia has detected a strong signal around 11 GHz coming from HD164595, a star nearly identical in mass to the Sun and located about 95 light years away from Earth. Well, long story short the signal came Earth. Ars Technica reports: "First, astronomers with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence downplayed the possibility of an alien civilization. 'There are many other plausible explanations for this claimed transmission, including terrestrial interference,' Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with SETI, wrote. Now the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences has concurred, releasing a statement on the detection of a radio signal at the RATAN-600 radio astronomy observatory in southern Russia. 'Subsequent processing and analysis of the signal revealed its most probable terrestrial origin,' the Russian scientists said."

80 of 146 comments (clear)

  1. Woohoo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We found intelligence on Earth!

    1. Re:Woohoo! by warrax_666 · · Score: 1

      Yeah. It's quite a surprise, actually. Though... perhaps not worthy of a publication.

      --
      HAND.
    2. Re: Woohoo! by telchine · · Score: 5, Funny

      We found intelligence on Earth!

      The people at the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence Project will have to confirm this, of course. However it'll be an amazing breakthrough if we finally discover intelligent life on Earth!

    3. Re:Woohoo! by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Unsurprisingly it was in Russia.

      Europe and America is doomed by it's own suigenocide.

    4. Re:Woohoo! by ourlovecanlastforeve · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's coming from the microwaves in the break room.

      We've been over this.

    5. Re: Woohoo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Do Egyptians count as "niggers"? I'm assuming your reference is to African decent? I'm pretty sure they created mathematics, computers, and many architectural along with agricultural methods. Maybe you meant African Americans? Google George Washington Carver. I'd be willing to bet that the list of inventions you are personally responsible for is about as large as your understanding of history.

    6. Re:Woohoo! by rossdee · · Score: 1

      "Aborigines never invented anything"

      Boomerangs

    7. Re:Woohoo! by Jhon · · Score: 1

      The didgeridoo. Much much cooler than a stick you get throw away.

    8. Re: Woohoo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Pharmaceuticals, gum, needles..

      Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/06/29/10-native-inventions-and-innovations-changed-world-155541?page=0%2C1

    9. Re: Woohoo! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Yeah, look it up in the Big Old Racist's White Man's Dictionary and the Revised Bigot's Encyclopaedia for Social Inadequates, why don't you?

    10. Re: Woohoo! by Ulfilas2000 · · Score: 1

      There is also: http://sti2.blogspot.com/

    11. Re:Woohoo! by michelcolman · · Score: 1

      To be fair, microwave ovens have caused interference for other observations before:

      https://www.theguardian.com/sc...

    12. Re:Woohoo! by Big+Hairy+Ian · · Score: 1

      Doubt it the signal purportedly came from a Karashev Type II civilisation. We're not even Type I

      --

      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.

    13. Re: Woohoo! by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      Probably Apocryphal, but still funny and relevant to the above post:

      Journalist: What do you think of Western civilization?

      Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

    14. Re: Woohoo! by ourlovecanlastforeve · · Score: 1

      The pejorative for anyone who is brown and lives in the desert is "sand niggers."

      This is purely for the sake of answering your question.

  2. That means...... by tekrat · · Score: 5, Funny

    *WE* are the aliens!!!!! (dramatic sting)........

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
    1. Re:That means...... by aliquis · · Score: 4, Insightful

      .. the search for intelligent life in the universe continues.

    2. Re: That means...... by Chewbacon · · Score: 1

      We traced the call. It's coming from inside your house!!!

      --
      Chewbacon
      The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
    3. Re:That means...... by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Given the current Presidential campaigns we can now definitively rule out Earth...

      Yup, any people willing to vote for Hillary, the EU, our Swedish prime minister and the seven parties which think immigration is good, voting for Islam or Christianity = all idiots.

    4. Re:That means...... by i.r.id10t · · Score: 1

      Well, to be fair, to the other 7 billion people on this planet *you* are "the other guy". Why shouldn't the presence of possibly billions of billions of alien life change that?

      Besides - this just means there might be some sort of giant super mirror out there. Cool either because, well, aliens right? But I would imagine also that the astrophysics folks would get some serious geek out moments from it...

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
    5. Re: That means...... by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Sweden is a rich welfare society where immigrants have a hard time getting a job.
      = They cost a lot of money.

      The same amount of money spent on vaccination for instance would save many more lives. The same money spend on food packages, farming equipment, schooling would transform regions and save many more lives and make their lives better.

      Also it would push down fertility so they would both have better lives and not a quickly growing population. If one don't change their society they will just be even more and still remain poor in the future which mean even more of them will have to move here if that's the only solution which will keep on being inefficiency and not save as many lives or improving life for as many as it could had been had the money been spent where it was the most efficient = cheap to reach the goal you wanted to reach.

    6. Re:That means...... by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 1

      We are legend

    7. Re: That means...... by aliquis · · Score: 1

      I'm not a troll. I just hate immigrants. Hardly on topic and the first post was supposed to be posted AC. On the other hand I'm no chicken and I want to be able to get a reply and follow up / let others follow up.

      Week 32-34 to Sweden with total at the end.:
      "SYRIEN 71 111 82 264
      AFGHANISTAN 47 51 51 149
      IRAK 48 57 37 142
      SOMALIA 36 26 21 83
      ERITREA 32 25 23 80
      IRAN 26 21 26 73
      STATSLÃ-S 18 26 17 61
      TURKIET 17 23 14 54
      ALBANIEN 9 19 14 42
      GEORGIEN 13 11 18 42"

      So mostly Syrians, or claimed to be Syrians. I don't know Syrian politics and society enough to really discuss it but I assume both dictatorship and Islamism is cause for the lack of freedom and peace there currently, possibly between secular and Islamist values too - a conflict we have imported to Sweden and will suffer under here too.

      Poor is relative. As is many homes in Syria is completely destroyed and people have left them and have nothing to go back with and no functional village / cities and no work and so on. Which make them very poor - regardless of what has been. People likely flee Syria both for safety and a functional society but also because it's fucked up right now (and it will cost lots of money and effort to rebuild it.)
      War cost a lot of money and it's no economical injection and awesome for the economy. It's just a cost. Sure they need more work to be done but they need it just to acquire what they already had. It brings no development. If they had used that money and performed that work onto what they had before they would have a better Syria than what they had.

      As for Afghanistan it's very poor and in likely in general and in some places even more the perspective of improving your life situation is likely slim.

      Iraq somewhat poor with broken government and good reasons to flee for some.

      Somalia is also very poor with little functional government.

      Eritea is also very poor and is a dictatorship and young men have to do military service for years which some doesn't want to do. Though we've had that system here too.

      Iran somewhat poor non-free and a religitard country. Some people get a decent education but it's still a non-free country with slim possibilities. Sweden is way better.

      Stateless.. well, I don't know who these are, Palestinians among other? Poor, non-free non-functional shit-hole.

      Turkey, guess some of those are coup refugees, some others people who had gotten permission to be in Turkey and move on maybe? Maybe minorities? Also getting towards non-free dictatorship but better than the others.

      Albania former communist shit-hole, majority Islamic nation like all the others above too. Very poor for being in Europe and unlikely great possibilities of making it into anything. Complete trash just like the other communist nations including Bulgaria and Romania and yet a bunch of idiots want that shit.

      Georgia yet another socialist / communist / soviet success nation. Poor as fuck. This one have a majority of Christians though so it stands out there.

      All communist nations are poor and crap but yay we must go there again!! It's awesome! Socialists know best!

  3. High-latency by TigerPlish · · Score: 1

    That's the NSA pinging their way-off-shore backup facility..

    --
    The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
  4. They're Here! by amiga3D · · Score: 1

    I knew it. Both Hilliary and Trump are both aliens. No matter who wins we lose!

    1. Re:They're Here! by wafflemonger · · Score: 1

      Don't blame me! I voted for Kodos.

    2. Re:They're Here! by gachunt · · Score: 1

      Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

    3. Re:They're Here! by crimson+tsunami · · Score: 1

      Well that's 2 votes, how many more did he need?

    4. Re:They're Here! by dcw3 · · Score: 1

      While R v. W is certainly one of the primary issues, but so is the Second Amendment and decisions like Citizen's United (campaign finance...money that influences politics)

      So, yes. Even if you hate the individual candidates (as do I), who they'll pick for the Supreme Court position(s) will impact us for much longer than four years...likely a generation.

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
    5. Re:They're Here! by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      For all the complaining I see, the Democrats don't seem harder on the Second Amendment than Republicans in practice. The D gun crackpots spout different nonsense from the R gun crackpots, but I haven't seen much of a difference at the national level.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    6. Re:They're Here! by dcw3 · · Score: 1

      At a national level, all that matters is what the law is, and the decisions made by SCOTUS that interpret them and the Constitution. A Clinton presidency will change the current direction with a new all those issues. This will likely be the single most important election our lifetime, no matter which way you lean.

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
  5. we still need to build a wall by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    'cause the Russian's will hack more emails. lol.

  6. Huh? by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 1

    Well, long story short the signal came Earth.

    That may be shortening the story a little too much. Or did the Earth get here via a signal from another star 95 light years away? I'd say that's some pretty big news.

    1. Re:Huh? by RockDoctor · · Score: 1
      Since the star is 95 LY away, that would imply that if the "mirror" is at the star, then the round-trip time would be 190 years. So, a very powerful terrestrial signal at 11 GHz in 1826.

      I'm not even sure that sparks generate anything like that high a frequency. They were just getting as far as solenoids and galvanometers, as I recall. Maybe just getting a handle on induction.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  7. Damn it! by Derekloffin · · Score: 1

    And I had just broken out my "All hail our Alien Overlords!" signs. Now I have to put them back... argh!

    1. Re:Damn it! by dcw3 · · Score: 1

      And I had just broken out my "All hail our Alien Overlords!" signs. Now I have to put them back... argh!

      You can still put it up down by the Rio Grande. Trump was down there negotiating with them.

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
  8. Hollow Earth by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

    Of course the signal comes from Earth. Where do you think the aliens come from? Don't you guys watch the History Channel?

    https://youtu.be/QA_Dw71Satc

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  9. 65 Billion years from earth by MindPrison · · Score: 1

    What would the difference be anyway? Yay, we found POSSIBLE sign of life 65 billion years from where we live, or its just business as usual?

    --
    What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
    1. Re:65 Billion years from earth by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      What would the difference be anyway? Yay, we found POSSIBLE sign of life 65 billion years from where we live, or its just business as usual?

      Did you just discover nihilism? Don't answer that. It doesn't make any difference.

    2. Re:65 Billion years from earth by Immerman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'll admit a 180 year round trip makes for slow conversations, but if we were to establish communication with an intelligent race elsewhere in the universe, there's no telling what we might learn from them. Physical travel between stars might never be practical, but an exchange of science, art, culture, and philosophy could be a practical reality. And any civilization we can detect across interstellar distances is almost certainly far more technologically advanced than we are, so there's no telling what we might learn.

      Of course any sort of two-way communication begun at this point would be irrelevant to anyone currently alive, aside from whatever sociological fallout there might be to discovering with certainty that we're not alone (I'm sure a few religions would squirm for a while, and plenty of new cults would pop up), but there's also the possibility that a signal is the first of many to be detected, with further, more information-rich signals already in transit. Possibly at a much lower power that would be harder to detect. Like a loud, fiendishly expensive "Hey, Listen" chirp periodically introduced into an otherwise more economical data transmission.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    3. Re:65 Billion years from earth by dcw3 · · Score: 1

      Physical travel between stars might never be practical, but an exchange of science, art, culture, ...

      As soon as they see the Kanye & the Kardasians, they'll likely aim their photon torpedoes at us.

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
    4. Re:65 Billion years from earth by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      I'm most interested in their art, culture, philosophy, and religion. We have millennia of practice and study of human thought in these fields, and it would be fascinating to have something to compare it to.

      To give one example: some people have spiritual experiences. These are either real or based on some oddities of brain evolution, and a completely different evolution situation would be unlikely to come up with the same oddities.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    5. Re:65 Billion years from earth by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      an exchange of science, art, culture, and philosophy could be a practical reality. And any civilization we can detect across interstellar distances is almost certainly far more technologically advanced than we are, so there's no telling what we might learn.

      You spend a lot of your time and effort on teaching chimpanzees the ethics of flinging poo around the cage?

      (Apologies to any chimps intelligent enough to be offended by the poo-flinging stereotype. Hey guys, we've got a presidential candidate like Trump - you can fling poo all you wnt and still have us beat by a mile.)

      If these putative aliens are only a million years ahead of us, well, them talking to us would be like us talking to chimpanzees on a technology designed and built by the chimpanzees. Poo-flinging in Morse code? So once they've learned our language (come on - it's going to go the other way? Get real.), they're going to teach us their science. Well, since science at least should be a universal, so their science should be something that applies to our part of the universe. "art" - most modern human art is incomprehensible to most humans already, so what is going to happen with alien art? Nothing except an excuse for bearded wankers (of any gender) to pontificate over something meaningless. "culture" - that's something you keep in a Petri dish, isn't it, because otherwise it's going to have as few referents as the subtleties of Chimpanzee poo-flinging have to us. Same comments for the philosophy. It's already a meaningless merry-go-round, so that's going to be a lot of use too.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
    6. Re:65 Billion years from earth by Immerman · · Score: 1

      Not personally, no. But there are plenty of scientists who have dedicated their lives to working with apes. Not necessarily for the good of the apes, but to satisfy their scientific curiosity. And the apes learn all sorts of interesting things along the way - sophisticated sign-language skills, mathematics, etc. They largely lack the cultural knowledge transmission methods to productively spread such sophisticated knowledge throughout the population, but if we found ourselves in a similar position we could probably make better long-term use of whatever knowledge we gained.

      As for art and philosophy being useless... I pity your tiny world view. Art is one of the high points of civilization, if you think otherwise then I invite you to permanently abstain from TV, movies, music, paintings, essays, etc. After all, partaking in such activity is a waste of time. As for philosophy, one of the major reasons it sometimes seems useless is that when they come up with useful results they spawn new fields which then tell the philosophers to but out. Science is one such offshoot. Mathematics. Reiigion. All incredibly useful, and all with their roots firmly in philosophy. (hey, if nothing else religion is incredibly useful for socio-political manipulation)

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    7. Re:65 Billion years from earth by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      if you think otherwise then I invite you to permanently abstain from TV, movies, music, paintings, essays, etc.

      Music and paintings certainly are a waste of space. Most movies too - there are some decent documentaries. TV has some useful documentaries and news - which is what I use it for. Radio more so.

      Show me something useful that philosophy has done and I'll maybe think about giving it a few more hours of attention. Art can be profitable. Useless, but profitable.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  10. Re:facepalm by martiniturbide · · Score: 2

    It is a conspiracy. Russians wants to contact the aliens first, so they are saying it was a signal from earth :)

  11. Earth Origin by PPH · · Score: 1

    Just a TV broadcast of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympic Games.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  12. Re:It was still the Kardashians by desdinova+216 · · Score: 1

    I think you misspelled Cardassians?

  13. Re:facepalm by Chuq · · Score: 1

    they should've sent a poet!

    --
    - Chuq
  14. In other, completely unrelated news, by Scutter · · Score: 1

    Open house at HAARP planned for end of August, 2016

    --

    "Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
  15. The call is from inside the house! by mmdurrant · · Score: 1

    In Soviet Russia, intelligent life searches for you.

    --
    I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
  16. Real ET signals most likely to be faint by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 1

    A very strong signal reduces the probability it is ET, it increases the huge amounts of energy needed to create it. A real signal probably would be very faint.

    1. Re:Real ET signals most likely to be faint by stealth_finger · · Score: 1

      A very strong signal reduces the probability it is ET, it increases the huge amounts of energy needed to create it. A real signal probably would be very faint.

      Why would they even bother when they can just come and make some patterns in a field somewhere?

      --
      Wanna buy a shirt?
      https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
  17. What we might learn ... by Ihlosi · · Score: 1
    there's no telling what we might learn from them.

    And what could that possibly be?

    There are intelligent aliens. Okay, that would be a pretty groundbreaking discovery all by itself.

    We'll probably not learn much in the ways of science or technology from them, or at least no much that we couldn't discover ourselves within a reasonable (few hundred years) timespan.

    That basically leaves philosophy and possibly religion as topics. And poetry.

    1. Re:What we might learn ... by Immerman · · Score: 2

      A few hundred years? You give humanity incredible credit, or perhaps assume that "all possible things that can be done" is and incredibly small set.

      Considering the chaotic fits and starts with which life and civilization emerged on this planet, and the potential timing differences that could accumulate over a few billion years make it more likely that their civilization would be thousands or even millions of years ahead of ours than only centuries. And even if by some miracle they were of a comparable technological level, they would almost certainly have developed in some very different ways, allowing for the exchange of different accumulated knowledge and even different models of physics (Even two similar theories can have very different exploitable corner cases)

      Sill, what could we learn of use? No idea. Think of everything we don't know about the universe, life, art, philosophy, economics... everything. It makes what we do know shrink to insignificance. And the one thing we know as a near certainty about an alien race, is they'll be standing somewhere different in that expanse of knowledge. Because for all the similarities there might be between us, the sheer amount of chaos in the universe is going to ensure that they walked a different path, and thus learned different lessons along the way.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    2. Re:What we might learn ... by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      oh, what if our thinking has gone irretrievably down the wrong path in certain areas...like maybe we can't unify GR and quantum mechanics because there is a better model than both that we'll never find because our minds are "stuck in a rut"

      and don't give me shit about "string theory", those wankers have been going at it for decades with NOTHING provable to show for their nonsense, unlike GR and QM which at least are useful in their realms and predict experiments we can do

    3. Re:What we might learn ... by david_thornley · · Score: 1

      The problem is that we can't break GR and QM adequately with current experiments and observations. Until we can break a scientific theory, we can't replace it.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
    4. Re:What we might learn ... by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      not true, we had GR (which replaces 17th century physics) and the observations confirming it came much later.

    5. Re:What we might learn ... by Ihlosi · · Score: 1
      not true

      Einstein himself showed that GR explained at least one phenomenon (perihelion precession) that Newtonian mechanics didn't.

      All the other observations just served to confirm GR over and over.

    6. Re:What we might learn ... by Ihlosi · · Score: 1
      A few hundred years? You give humanity incredible credit, or perhaps assume that "all possible things that can be done" is and incredibly small set.

      I'm just working under the assumption that any aliens we actually get to talk to will have roughly our level of science and technology. Any civilization significantly more advanced will probably not bother talking to a bunch of unwashed barbarians.

      Think of everything we don't know about the universe,

      Well ... ok. Maybe they could tell us more about the star systems in their vicinity than we can find out ourselves.

      art, philosophy

      Mmh, ok. Point taken.

      economics

      Or politics. Yes, the questions "How does your society work?" might be an extremely interesting one, even if the answer doesn't have any application (if "they" are photosynthesizing plants, then food production won't be high on their priority list. If they have genetically evolved to live in hive structures, that might work for them, but we can't copy it due to being somewhat civilized apes).

    7. Re:What we might learn ... by Immerman · · Score: 1

      How about physics? We thought in the 1800s that we knew almost all there was to know about physics, with only a few odd anomalies unexplained - anomalies which eventually led to QM and Relativity and fundamentally changed how we saw the universe, and greatly expanded how we could manipulate it. Today we know with certainty that our current theories are at least incomplete, possibly fundamentally flawed, and there's no telling how many more world-changing revisions are yet to come. To say nothing of applications - there are probably millenia worth of useful technologies based just on our current physics that nobody has dreamed up yet, and probably many that will never occur to us because of the biological and cultural limits on how we perceive and conceive of the world.

      And that's not even mentioning the Big Questions, things like Dark Matter and Energy - according to our own theories we know absolutely nothing about ~95% of the stuff in the universe. I seem to recall hearing of at least another dozen or so known gaping holes in our knowledge.

      Or chemistry - an insanely broad and complicated topic that is *extremely* resistant to numerical analysis and prediction - we can barely simulate the properties of simplest H-H bond, and even moderately complex molecules may remain out of reach for centuries - the physics involved is HARD, in a computational complexity sense, and gets harder fast. We can't even begin to simulate a water molecule. We can use various heuristics to guess at where a lot of interesting and useful reactions might be discovered, but there are almost certainly going to be useful catalysts,etc. that will only be discovered through many millenia of exhaustive searching and luck - the potential problem space is mind-bogglingly huge.

      Or biology - if they're completely alien at a bio-molecular level we could learn an immense amount about what life can look like. If there are similarities, we may learn of processes that genetic engineers could incorporate into organisms here. Imagine what it could mean to learn how to make plants photosynthesize with 20% efficiency instead of 1%. Evolution is extremely vulnerable to being trapped in local maximums, and aliens would almost certainly be trapped in a completely different set than us.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    8. Re:What we might learn ... by Ihlosi · · Score: 1
      How about physics?

      Any alien civilization with significantly more advanced knowledge of physics will probably not bother talking to us, unless they're really bored or see it as the duty to enlighten less advanced civilizations.

      And if their knowledge of civilization is only slightly more advanced than ours, we can probably catch up to their level in the time (>100 years) it takes for our message to get there and their response to get back here.

      Or biology

      True - that might be another interesting topic. We may know all the moleculues that make up alien biology, but not how they interact. I would add it to the list of "how" questions. "How does your society work?", "How does your biology work?", "How does your communication work?" (of course, we'll need to figure out the basics ourselves, at least up to the point where we can ask the question and understand the answer).

      Some answers might also be more intriguing than others. Is the alien biology similar to ours (DNA-based), or is it wildly different?

  18. Re:That didn't take long. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

    Not long at all.

    It's odd. From May 2015 (detection) to yesterday the standard SETI algorithms didn't quickly rule out terrestrial origin. Today they did, after it hit the news.

    That's not what one would expect of any actual scientists.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  19. Obvious by Dashiva+Dan · · Score: 1

    Clearly, about 180 years ago, some smartarse troll built a steam engine capable of broadcasting a signal at HD164595 and we're just now getting the echo.

    Well played.

    --
    "lt;dr" is the correct response to most of my posts.
  20. Type -7??? by TimothyJSimson · · Score: 1

    Where on the Kardashev scale does this place us?

  21. Re:SETI is a waste of time and money by Zak3056 · · Score: 2

    SETI's cost is minimal. Not minimal in the governmental "a billion here, a billion there" sense, but in the "operating budget of a moderately successful mcdonalds" sense. We spend tens of billions on all the other things on your list, so saying "that SETI money could be better used over here" is simply not a credible statement.

    --
    What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
  22. 11Ghz - not rare by iggymanz · · Score: 1

    X band is used for a lot of things: radar, satellite, microwave relay stations, motion detector, ham radio...the FCC just opened some spectrum at 10.85GHz for 5G (along with 27.5-28.35 GHz, 37-38.6 GHz and 38.6-40 GHz

    1. Re:11Ghz - not rare by bentit · · Score: 1

      10.7 to 12.7 GHz is the Ku band satellite downlink band in Europe. If it was 11 GHz I would think it would be hard not to receive interference in a side lobe. I can't find the exact frequency online--only that the front end has a 1 GHz bandwidth which also seems odd. Once someone other than the media looked into this it became a non-event anyway.

    2. Re:11Ghz - not rare by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      Even the Russian SETI astronomers that reported it said signal was interesting but probably terrestrial. A lot of media didn't bother to quote the source entirely.

  23. Re: I am so fucking surprised by R3d+M3rcury · · Score: 1

    First the emdrlive turned out to be bs.

    Maybe I read this wrong...

  24. Re:equivalence by lgw · · Score: 1

    No, no, don't you see? Aliens on Earth are signaling SETI. The truth is out there!

    --
    Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  25. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  26. Related by dcw3 · · Score: 1

    This recent article has related info, and what the protocol is in the event of a signal discovery.

    http://fivethirtyeight.com/fea...

    --
    Just another day in Paradise
  27. Quote from Announcement by rlp · · Score: 1

    "I'm not saying it was aliens, but .... wait ... I guess it's not aliens. Anyone want some microwave popcorn?"

    --
    [Insert pithy quote here]
  28. Re:equivalence by stealth_finger · · Score: 1

    So what does probable mean?

    --
    Wanna buy a shirt?
    https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
  29. Aaaawwww! by Stubbyfingers · · Score: 1

    Sad face.

  30. Could be Big Bang episode. by SirKron · · Score: 1

    When reading this headline the first thing I thought was having Koothrappali explain the importance of the signal in the opening of a Big Bang Theory episode. And then at the end of the episode have Sheldon says "yep, I was right, no freaking E.T."

  31. Re: I am so fucking surprised by Coren22 · · Score: 1

    It hasn't, but that doesn't stop the "space nutters" nutter from screaming about all the imaginary space nutters populating Slashdot.

    --
    APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
  32. When extraterrestrials call by gzuckier · · Score: 1

    We've traced the call... it's coming from inside the house!!!

    --
    Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
  33. space tinder by gzuckier · · Score: 1

    looking for somebody they can anally probe

    --
    Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.