You bring up a very valid point, however recognize that civilizations could be sending communications actively or passively.
Passively in the mechanisms you described, by what I hear commonly referred to as "information leak" in SETI discussion circles.
Active communication however is the classification of those civilizations that will actively broadcast in the hopes of reaching people.
You may ask why would a civilization expend so much money and energy in such a persuit, and this is a valid point ss well. The common response is that there must be some advanced civilizations that are so far along that they can spare the change to send a few million photons our way. This gesture could be construed as a peace offering to us. A membership in a huge galactic family.
I'd like to offer a response however that I have not heard of before, in that a civilization could do so for its own benefit. By seeking communication, they are seeking further intelligence from other intelligent beings. Really, its a wonderful way to gain significant scientific understandings by asking others who have already done the dirty work for you.
Thus, from a knowlege standpoint, it is adventageous for a civilization to actively persue intelligent communications for the express purpose of learning, much like an inquisitive child asks too many questions.
SETI is no longer funded by NASA due to a congressional ruling, and hasn't been for some time.
At its current state, the institute is funded entirely from private donations by those who have hope that the discovery of ETI would bring wonderous advances to our society.
If you think its a worthwhile persuit, which I think it is, donate. http://www.seti.org/
If not, then don't donate. Unlike NASA programs, this one carries your democratic approval of support.
Ah, but some ARE looking for intelligence in photons. That is my future research interest, assuming that I graduate.
Essentially the same arguments as regular seti, but using optical frequencies as the target "waterhole". This new recent effort is labelled optical-seti, or oseti for short.
Instead of looking for narrowband radio broadcasts, we look for pulses of light that have an extremely short duration. With this kind of communication, you can use a typical earth technology laser in the megawatt output range, and blast data at fairly high bandwidths.
Re:By the sound of it, they will be using optics
on
Looking for Life in Light
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· Score: 3, Informative
I am actually working on this exact problem as an undergraduate astrophysics researcher. My mentor came up with the quite excellent idea of looking at the difference in luminosity of specific frequencies over the course of time.
Technically, we use polarization-encoding to split a light beam into two right-angle polarized beams, run them through different color filters, and then recombine them back into a single beam. We then use a fast polarization analyzer to look at each beam independently at speeds close to 100 frames per second.
The idea here is that as the orbiting planet goes through various phases, and shows us different surface area profiles as a function of time (think about the various surface areas of the moon that you can see as it goes through its phases), so we'd expect that the difference in signal for certain frequencies to vary with a period equal to the orbital period.
The difference in signal comes about by the fact that the planetary atmosphere and surface have a specific curve of frequency vs reflected percentage of light. This differs from the emissions of the host star, which follows a theoretical blackbody curve.
You're not interpreting my post the way I had intended. Typical as this is, I've always had difficulty expressiing myself verbally. I question how my post could be construed as "Overrated"
My point is, there lacks an authority on such natural rights that we can turn to. Consequently there is no firm way to distinguish what rights we have and which we dont. If we could make the distinction, we wouldn't need a supreme court to set precedant on such fundamental free speech cases now would we?
Now, if you believe in god and the ten commandments, you have a source of some central authority that grants natural rights, but I don't see free speech there. Furthermore, different people have different god's and different cultural moral codes. Which is the correct one?
So where do you draw the line? Certainly your enumeration of natural rights is going to disagree with someone elses in the world. That alone should be a sign that you are fabricating them from what either you or your culture has traditionaly defined to be morally just. Other cultures will have different balances of what rights they consider to be innately defined for every human being.
Now if you set aside all moral codes bestowed upon us from divine intervention, that only leaves human intelligence itself as the arbiter of natural born rights. That means that we fabricated it, and considering the fact that we don't hold as much control over the universal gavel as we might think we do, we are in no position to claim that we have any concept of any natural rights.
Under this interpretation, the natural rights are those that we have agreed upon to be just. No one who has ever been hurt can argue that any of them are unjust, but are we sure that the list is complete?
Rights that we inherently possess? Who gave these rights to us? Are they written down somewhere? If they're not, then where did the founding fathers get them?
Ergo, they were fabricated from the society that wrote the constitution.
I think we need to make a clear definition between "right" and "physical capacity" to perform some action.
Thats easy. Everyone holds onto their old machines, and the resell value of pentium II's skyrockets in 10 years.
At this point the big media companies will simply wait for the old hardware to finally die off in disrepair. Ripping groups will need to become electrical engineers to keep the equipment going, assuming of course the feds dont come bursting into your window and confiscate it all.
I find it insulting that Miscrosoft will wait months before releasing the fix to a known vulnerability, yet worm coders will have an attack ready to exploit the hole in a matter of days.
Now, what if these white-hat freedom fighters used worms as a propogation mechanism for bugfixes? Patch the hole BEFORE the machine becomes a zombie?
Or, instead of patching said hole, why not instruct the machine to only allow your IP address to enter the hole? Some kind of backdoor authentication mechanism? This way you would be able to use the same worm to propogate many patches over several months until microsoft finally closes your hole.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, the T means "Terrestrial", it's the I that means intelligent ;-p
You bring up a very valid point, however recognize that civilizations could be sending communications actively or passively.
Passively in the mechanisms you described, by what I hear commonly referred to as "information leak" in SETI discussion circles.
Active communication however is the classification of those civilizations that will actively broadcast in the hopes of reaching people.
You may ask why would a civilization expend so much money and energy in such a persuit, and this is a valid point ss well. The common response is that there must be some advanced civilizations that are so far along that they can spare the change to send a few million photons our way. This gesture could be construed as a peace offering to us. A membership in a huge galactic family.
I'd like to offer a response however that I have not heard of before, in that a civilization could do so for its own benefit. By seeking communication, they are seeking further intelligence from other intelligent beings. Really, its a wonderful way to gain significant scientific understandings by asking others who have already done the dirty work for you.
Thus, from a knowlege standpoint, it is adventageous for a civilization to actively persue intelligent communications for the express purpose of learning, much like an inquisitive child asks too many questions.
SETI is no longer funded by NASA due to a congressional ruling, and hasn't been for some time.
At its current state, the institute is funded entirely from private donations by those who have hope that the discovery of ETI would bring wonderous advances to our society.
If you think its a worthwhile persuit, which I think it is, donate. http://www.seti.org/
If not, then don't donate. Unlike NASA programs, this one carries your democratic approval of support.
SETI has a fine line difference with astrobiology.
SETI intends to find intelligent life, whereas astrobiologists, although happy to find ANY life, are mostly looking for unintelligent life.
Ah, but some ARE looking for intelligence in photons. That is my future research interest, assuming that I graduate.
Essentially the same arguments as regular seti, but using optical frequencies as the target "waterhole". This new recent effort is labelled optical-seti, or oseti for short.
Instead of looking for narrowband radio broadcasts, we look for pulses of light that have an extremely short duration. With this kind of communication, you can use a typical earth technology laser in the megawatt output range, and blast data at fairly high bandwidths.
I am actually working on this exact problem as an undergraduate astrophysics researcher. My mentor came up with the quite excellent idea of looking at the difference in luminosity of specific frequencies over the course of time.
Technically, we use polarization-encoding to split a light beam into two right-angle polarized beams, run them through different color filters, and then recombine them back into a single beam. We then use a fast polarization analyzer to look at each beam independently at speeds close to 100 frames per second.
The idea here is that as the orbiting planet goes through various phases, and shows us different surface area profiles as a function of time (think about the various surface areas of the moon that you can see as it goes through its phases), so we'd expect that the difference in signal for certain frequencies to vary with a period equal to the orbital period.
The difference in signal comes about by the fact that the planetary atmosphere and surface have a specific curve of frequency vs reflected percentage of light. This differs from the emissions of the host star, which follows a theoretical blackbody curve.
You're not interpreting my post the way I had intended. Typical as this is, I've always had difficulty expressiing myself verbally. I question how my post could be construed as "Overrated"
My point is, there lacks an authority on such natural rights that we can turn to. Consequently there is no firm way to distinguish what rights we have and which we dont. If we could make the distinction, we wouldn't need a supreme court to set precedant on such fundamental free speech cases now would we?
Now, if you believe in god and the ten commandments, you have a source of some central authority that grants natural rights, but I don't see free speech there. Furthermore, different people have different god's and different cultural moral codes. Which is the correct one?
So where do you draw the line? Certainly your enumeration of natural rights is going to disagree with someone elses in the world. That alone should be a sign that you are fabricating them from what either you or your culture has traditionaly defined to be morally just. Other cultures will have different balances of what rights they consider to be innately defined for every human being.
Now if you set aside all moral codes bestowed upon us from divine intervention, that only leaves human intelligence itself as the arbiter of natural born rights. That means that we fabricated it, and considering the fact that we don't hold as much control over the universal gavel as we might think we do, we are in no position to claim that we have any concept of any natural rights.
Under this interpretation, the natural rights are those that we have agreed upon to be just. No one who has ever been hurt can argue that any of them are unjust, but are we sure that the list is complete?
Rights that we inherently possess? Who gave these rights to us? Are they written down somewhere? If they're not, then where did the founding fathers get them?
Ergo, they were fabricated from the society that wrote the constitution.
I think we need to make a clear definition between "right" and "physical capacity" to perform some action.
Thats easy. Everyone holds onto their old machines, and the resell value of pentium II's skyrockets in 10 years. At this point the big media companies will simply wait for the old hardware to finally die off in disrepair. Ripping groups will need to become electrical engineers to keep the equipment going, assuming of course the feds dont come bursting into your window and confiscate it all.
I find it insulting that Miscrosoft will wait months before releasing the fix to a known vulnerability, yet worm coders will have an attack ready to exploit the hole in a matter of days. Now, what if these white-hat freedom fighters used worms as a propogation mechanism for bugfixes? Patch the hole BEFORE the machine becomes a zombie? Or, instead of patching said hole, why not instruct the machine to only allow your IP address to enter the hole? Some kind of backdoor authentication mechanism? This way you would be able to use the same worm to propogate many patches over several months until microsoft finally closes your hole.