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SETI's 'Strong Signal' Came From Earth (arstechnica.com)
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."
We found intelligence on Earth!
*WE* are the aliens!!!!! (dramatic sting)........
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It is a conspiracy. Russians wants to contact the aliens first, so they are saying it was a signal from earth :)
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.
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.
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?