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Mysterious Star Pulses May Be Alien Signals, Study Claims (iop.org)
"Strange pulses of cosmic light might be signals from hundreds of different alien civilizations -- or just the latest false alarm in the tortuous search for E.T.," reports Space.com. Slashdot reader Okian Warrior shares this excerpt from the paper which argues that the signals "cannot be caused by instrumental or data analysis effects."
Finally, we consider the possibility, predicted in a previous published paper, that the signals are caused by light pulses generated by extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to makes us aware of their existence. We find that the detected signals have exactly the shape of an ETI signal predicted in the previous publication and are therefore in agreement with this hypothesis. The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the Sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis.
The researchers add that "at this stage, this hypothesis needs to be confirmed with further work," and Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at SETI, tells Space.com that "If I were a betting guy, I'd bet this is an artifact of the way they processed their data."
The researchers add that "at this stage, this hypothesis needs to be confirmed with further work," and Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at SETI, tells Space.com that "If I were a betting guy, I'd bet this is an artifact of the way they processed their data."
It's wonderful when science steps out into the fringe. Sometimes they end up being right or discover something useful unrelated to their initial inquiry.
I've no idea whether they are right this time. But this phenomenon will be studied heavily. And we'll learn more. Pure research, even that which seems obtuse, often provides more knowledge when it's conclusions are wrong. Even when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann failed to produce fusion using a palladium lattice- there was knowledge gained.
Though I hope these researchers are right. The SETI question has large potential for positive change in society in general.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
I ain't gonna care about any alien pulses unless those pulses turn out to be video signals of humanoid extraterrestrial porn.
Anything less than that is useless and worthless. Just like the Internet, the Universe was created for porn, and so can true diplomacy between different species start.
Anonymous Coward getting a first post, study claims.
Hopefully it is instructions for medicine to live forever and a billion years of shows to watch.
If just one, the latter please.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The fate of the universe may be in the balance!
besuretodrinkyourovaltine
For once we should learn from our planet. If you are in a vast ocean of space and see a faint light it is ... Anglerfish - run!
No wonder we are all so confused about these thing every now and then. And it all started from a 19th century man who though the observations of an Italian astronomer of Mars were in fact canals.
As much as I'd like it if we discovered incontrovertible evidence that there are other sentient beings in the Universe with their own civilizations and technology (I hold out the belief that it would help cure humankind of all our infighting), I have to ask myself, "Why would any civilization even want to do that in the first place?". The vast majority of humans on this planet are not looking outward with their thoughts, they're looking inward, concerned with their day-to-day survival, and will look at you funny if you start talking about other beings on other planets; why would an alien race have a different opinion? Our own government here in the U.S. has to more or less have a gun put to it's head to fund any space program, even. Also consider that another sentient race might consider the idea of drawing attention to themselves and their planet as insane, inviting disaster in the form of an invading force, and therefore would go out of their way to shield their electromagnetic emissions so that they don't draw any unwanted attention. And, of course, there's the rather cynical theory that technological species eventually extinguish themselves with their own weapons of mass destruction, or destroy their own ecosphere to the point where it won't sustain them anymore. Really, I'd be thrilled to hear we've discovered and decoded transmissions of an alien version of The Andy Griffith Show from millions of years ago, but it seems that for every reason we should be seeing such signals, there is at least one reason we wouldn't.
Pretty sad to see what has become of /.
"The fact that they are only found in a very small fraction of stars within a narrow spectral range centered near the spectral type of the Sun is also in agreement with the ETI hypothesis."
Aliens are going to be NOTHING like us. If we think we've found a signal from aliens *like us*, then we've got it wrong.
Every 5 or 10 years someone discovers some signal which they think maybe could be possibly be ET. Then it either turns out to be a some new stellar physics or interference from earth. IIRC one ET "discovery" turned out to be the microwave oven in the kitchen of the science centre.
The earth is neither flat nor hollow, but you can ride the Monorail around Disneyland for as low as $60 per day without an annual pass.
> the paper which argues that the signals "cannot be caused by instrumental or data analysis effects."
It can. Their methodology is completely full of holes and willfully insufficiently paranoid considering what they're claiming.
Go read the PDF - it's hard to say 100% without having the original data, but it sure looks like they're torturing the data till it confesses what they want - what they predicted in their previous paper.
Hell, there might even be a signal, by all means keep looking harder. But when you jump right to History Channel 'I Don't Know - Therefore Aliens.' And then add 'HUNDREDS of Aliens Civilizations' on such tenuous evidence you start the race with a self-inflicted foot wound.
Might SETI 'change society'? For thousands of years we believed there was an ideal extraterrestrial community caled 'Heaven' - did that help us stop wars? Do those who still believe abstain from genocide? Would any other cosmic certainty improve things?
The idea of heaven helped and hurt, as it and its associated ideas still do.
Fundamentally it let one group of people control another group of people, and the people in power caused a lot of harm and backwards-thinking. But they also found a way to discourage people from acting cruel to one another and to encourage those people to conform to certain norms and even to be kind, on promise of heaven and threat of hell.
The norms they chose were not all the right ones, and because of the hierarchical structure and the authoritarian grip on power throughout the institution they also prevented a lot of advances that could have been made over the centuries.
But service done today because of modern Christian teachings, and the benefit of helping hundreds of millions of people internalize the idea that they should be generous, makes it a much better world.
It's just that the shame, control, and rigidity of thought that can accompany the dogma and the hierarchy also causes a lot of harm. A school shouldn't have a principal who knows nothing about education just because he is a priest; priests shouldn't make millions of people lie to them in order to fill out a checklist that they fit a set of rules that says they are of enough value to get married in a church; confirmation shouldn't be done when kids are still too young to be making that decision; sexual rules designed to control obligations to children and spouses before birth control existed should be re-examined now that it does. Many of the rules the church makes are about things that are or were wrong for a reason, but the church teaches that they are wrong in themselves (calling them sin), and that makes it so much harder to change rules that become wrong in a new age.
So anyone who says it is all good or all bad is naive or ignorant. Or most probably scarred by a bad experience. I know many millions of kids have terrible experiences in catholic schools every year, so that alone may make it a net negative. But it also does a lot of good.
same with the USA presidential political polls
That depends on the poll. Professional pollsters tend to be accurate. Polls run by journalists tend to be inaccurate, partly because they are more interested in drama than accuracy, but also because they fail to properly account for bias. So when Hillary does well in a debate, and her numbers shoot up by 5%, journalists report that her support has surged. Professional pollsters understand that what is really happening is that her supporters feel upbeat, and are more likely to participate in surveys, while Donald's supporters feel demoralized, and hang up the phone. So underlying support for the candidates barely budged, it is just that the sampling bias shifted.
We are just going to delete your stupid fucking facts and replace them with what appears more dramatic on TV. We can't sell beer and tampons with facts.
The basic assumption is that there is an evolutionary bias toward intelligence and that intelligence can exist in physical forms other than ours, which developed over four billion years. Of the infinite number of possible evolutionary paths ours is just one and I don't think it has any special place in evolution. I certainly don't think there are intelligent squirrels, fish etc. It is all just a tremendous waste of time and energy. First prove that there is an evolutionary bias toward intelligence, then go looking for "aliens." That would make more sense to me. But even then, because of the spans of time and space, the likelihood that we will exist at the same time and proximate is small. Is there an evolutionary bias toward intelligence?
E Proelio Veritas.
Probably not n1993rs, anyway.
Does anyone get why Figure 3 in TFA lacks N=900?
and they're telling us, whatever we do, don't elect Hillary
The signal decodes as one repeating byte, 101010. Now to find out exactly what the question was...
a message written in Sanskrit that says "Mars needs Women" I'm going to be very disappointed.
The IOP abstract mentions Fourier transforms revealed the signal pattern. Yup, it's amazing what they can reveal.
Too impatient? Go to 5:30 in the video to see what I mean.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Beer and tampons don't go together well. Try to sell them separately.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Fuck you!
Suck it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So when Hillary does well in a debate, and her numbers shoot up by 5%, journalists report that her support has surged. Professional pollsters understand that what is really happening is that her supporters feel upbeat, and are more likely to participate in surveys, while Donald's supporters feel demoralized, and hang up the phone. So underlying support for the candidates barely budged, it is just that the sampling bias shifted.
If there only were a way to control for that... like asking upfront "Are you an X supporter, and if so, how long have you been one?", before asking about the debate results - and then excluding those "upbeat supporters" from the comparison.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that you are not a "professional pollster" either.
Among other things... Like the way you're also probably not a professional fox.
Though you did an AMAZING job there, arguing that there is actually no correlation between "doing well" in an event designed to convince people to vote for you and actually convincing voters.
WHILE AT THE SAME TIME arguing that doing poorly in that same event would ONLY affect people who were supporting the "poorly" candidate AAAAAAND that it would demoralize them to the point that they'd be slamming down phones on "professional pollsters" - but not enough to drop their support.
Apparently, debate results are both such a strong influencing factor on supporters that some get too depressed to talk about it (but still not give up their support) - WHILE AT THE SAME TIME having absolutely no effect on undecided voters.
Debates are apparently SO immensely convincing and influential - except they're not.
Also, no one ever thought of actually controlling for old and new supporters after a debate and the existence of undecided voters.
That's not cognitive dissonance. That's way past the point of delusion.
And I guess the less said about media hiring "professional pollsters" the better.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
From How the Universe works - season 1 - Galaxies: 25 min, 20 seconds into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
and would need to take rockets to visit us. . . what a bunch of malarkey.
For once we should learn from our planet. If you are in a vast ocean of space and see a faint light it is ... Anglerfish - run!
For once we should learn from our planet. If you are in a vast ocean of space and see a faint light it is ... Firefly - mate!
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I keep praying for the aliens to come here and destroy mother earth! :D
I would laugh all the way to hell!
probably just a spaceship-destroying wormhole or something nearby. Watch out guys!
Maybe for you! I'd did my tampons in a keg if beer and then slowly suck them dry. Don't even have to get out of bed to drink.
Money isn't magically transformable into anything we want. We can't just stop doing everything we do and suddenly have 4000 times more food for everyone.
Aliens.
We must start work on a space wall, to keep out the aliens.
"Beer and tampons don't go together well. "
You have to soak the tampons in vodka first, everybody knows.that.
We just don't know!
You have no idea what a society without religion would look like.
I doubt if ETL would have much negative effect on religion. I know plenty of religious people, and they are MORE likely to believe in aliens than the non-religious people that I know. Mormonism includes an affirmative belief in life on other planets. Back in the late 1800s, it was widely believed that there were canals on Mars, and far more people believed in ETL than believe today. I was not used as an effective argument against religion.
I am Mormon; my family joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1830s. There is no official declaration of life on other planets within our solar system, although it was (eg. back in the 1800s) widely believed that the moon had a Quaker-like society. I never heard speculations of civilization on Mars. Officially, we are taught that the star Kolob is the closest to the abode of God, but Kolob has not been identified as any of the stars identified by science. We are also taught that Jesus is the Messiah of all of God's creations, and that all of God's children are created in His image and likeness.
Only if it is an 8 bit binary number.
http://www.politics1.com/p2016...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?