September 02, 2004

• Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease be extra-terrestrials! (the Close Encounters kind, not the ... other kinds.)
• Quick! Look busy!
• They could be the evilest mofos in the Universe, but if they're over in Pisces it'll be a couple centuries or so before they get here. Can't get around the old Speed o' Light.
• Advanced alien civilizations are unlikely to be using anything so primitive as radio for data transmission. Humans are so fucking stupid.
• Uh, excuse me Fes , but haven't you heard of a little thing called warp speed? Besides, even if they did take centuries to get here, they could just fly around the sun backward and go back in time.
• but nostril, what if they've been using advanced techniques (which we can't yet detect) and haven't gotten an answer, so they've been going backwards in technology until they find something we can hear?
• "Can't get around the old Speed o' Light." Ha ha ha! That's only a linear limit. Relativity doesn't account for non-linear transit.
• ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh! /runs around screaming "It's a cook book! It's a cook book!"
• Who says they're advanced? This could be the alien Marconi. Poor bloke sets up his apparatus for a few experiments, and the first thing he knows, instead of hearing his assistant up the road, a bunch of snotty alien astronomers interrupt and ask him to sort out his appalling frequency drift, because half the time they can't make out what he's saying...
• Relativity doesn't account for non-linear transit. Grateful translation beamed to my co-ordinates!
• Awesome! Thay'll bring a new religion to fight over!!!!
• I bet these aliens are communists
• "..what if they've been using advanced techniques (which we can't yet detect) and haven't gotten an answer, so they've been going backwards in technology until they find something we can hear?" I put it to you that they don't know we're listening. If they did, & they are sufficiently advanced, they come here directly. There. Bet you didn't expect me to give a serious answer.
• Scotty, see my last. And beam down my clothes - that wasn't funny.
• well, 1000 light-years away. how long does it take that signal to get here? we could be listening in on their past, after all. by present-day they would certainly have fixed the frequency wobble; wait a few decades and see how long it takes them to sort it out. assuming it's really Them of course and not just a weird blip of some kind.
• If we're hearing them, doesn't that mean they're hearing us? When exactly were the first radio broadcasts made? Anyone?
• well, 1000 light-years away. how long does it take that signal to get here? almost exactly 1000 years, strangely...
• *giggles*
• Advanced alien civilizations are unlikely to be using anything so primitive as radio for data transmission. What else would they use?
• "If we're hearing them, doesn't that mean they're hearing us?" No. "When exactly were the first radio broadcasts made? Anyone?" Probably around the turn of the century. About a hundred years, give or take a decade. The first large-scale radio signals from the 1920's, becoming progressively weaker and weaker, will travel at the speed of light and spread out into the stars, gradually becoming lost in the background radiation. At this point the 1930s signals have gone out about 70+ light years. There are many systems within that distance, but the likelihood of them having habitable planets, let alone intelligent life, is somewhat slim. Alpha Centauri A&B, along with Proxima Centauri, are I believe our closest neighbours. Alpha is a binary star system - something like 4 or 5 light years away. So it would only take about 5 years for signals to reach hypothetical inhabitants of planets orbiting those stars. I can't remember if Proxima Centauri is in some kind of gravitic relationship with Alpha A&B, but it's the closest. Sadly it is a red dwarf or some-such, thus unlikely to have a habitable zone like Sol. Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. It will take a very, very long time (thousands of years) for a signal to propagate far enough to be a likely 'flag' to the civilizations that undoubtedly exist somewhere out there. Even then it will take an almost unbelievable amount of luck for someone to pick them up & recognise them. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence should be re-named the search for Anthropoid Intelligence, since the criteria it uses are so anthropomorphic as to negate any chance of discovering other intelligent species at all. "What else would they use?" Anything more efficient. Optical data transfer would be more efficient - such as using lasers! Some SETI theorists have proposed lasers would be a likely medium to investigate. More likely to me seems the use of Quantum Coupling effects. Shit, man, radio is primitive. There are probly many more efficient data transport methods, most only existing in the theoretical state for us because we lack a) computing power & b) energy sources advanced enough to support them. I would say that Quantum Coupling would be the advanced technology of choice for superior aliens, since no time-delay exists for signals using such a method, and it would be unable to be 'tapped' into by third parties, making it a very secure system. Unfortunately, it also makes it impossible for us to detect.
• Optical data transfer (lasers) *are* radio. It's all electromagnetic waves, just at different wavelengths. Electromagnetism is a fundamental force of nature. If we ever discover evidence of *anything* out there (which I doubt) it will be using an electromagnetic transmission of some sort. I'm curious what makes you assume that we are "primitive", and blind to some magical technology that we haven't discovered yet (but others have)?
• "Optical data transfer (lasers) *are* radio. It's all electromagnetic waves, just at different wavelengths." Eh? Obvious & also incredibly simplistic. By this statement you imply that there is no difference between optical (lightwave) communication & radio wave coms. The basic principles are the same, but the transmission/detection methods are vastly different, & so are the inherent difficulties posed by each. Radio transmission has a major problem viz long distance communication in space: it gets blotted out by naturally occurring radio waves. Optical communication also gets blotted out, but pulsed lasers are far, far more efficient than radio signals - at least for sending a directed signal. A pulsed laser can outshine a single star, in terms of emitted photons, but of course only for a fraction of a second or something. Of course, they are subject to dispersion. If you had a choice between systems for very long distance coms, & you had a powerful enough directed-pulse laser system, you'd choose lasers, if something else wasn't available. "I'm curious what makes you assume that we are "primitive", and blind to some magical technology that we haven't discovered yet (but others have)?" Because our scientific systems are in their infancy & to assume we have discovered all technology possible is assinine. General Relativity & Quantum Mechanics are both acknowledged as incomplete systems. If one proposes the existance of a more advanced technological civilization somwhere 'out there', one has to assume that they are in possession of technologies that we have not yet perfected. This seems logical to me. Do you think we have reached the zenith of our technological advance? I would say that this is somewhat of an optimistic view. We're not 'blind' to the possibilities of future technologies, in fact theorists have already predicted the potential for technologies currently beyond the grasp of our civilization. We simply can't utilise them at this time. Like I say, Quantum Coupling, or the Inseparability Principle as it used to be called, offers tantalising possibilities for galactic communication, or even travel, potentially.
• pleg, i thought you said, "this could be alien macaroni." noodlebrains! well then.
• and how come "alien civilizations" are always assumed to be so much more advanced than ours? maybe WE are the smart kids in the universe, and maybe a few thousand earths out there are still in the dinosaur phase.
• I'd love to meet some interstellar trash. "Meepzorp, you gitcher tentacles outta yer sis's pants 'fer I tan yer hide!"
• Unlikely. Human beings are probably unique in the entire universe in their predilection for pants.
• fuyugare, are you saying something like kilts is the universal standard?
• fuyugare is saying that legs are out of fashion in this galaxy.
• But of course! Humans and aliens alike look more rugged and manly in kilts.
• Wouldn't a pulsed laser have to be aimed pretty much directly at us for us to detect it? Seems unlikely anyone would do that. Do you think we have reached the zenith of our technological advance? Not even close...but we know even less about the wildly theoretical stuff than we do about the established stuff. To think that our uninformed sci-fi fuelled assumtions about quantum time travel will pan out is even more optimistic & assinine. The fact is, we *are* detecting radio waves from far-off places. Whether they're from naturally occuring sources or aliens is debatable (my money's on the former), but we are detecting them. My personal take on it all is "Why are we doing this (SETI)?"...it's like someone from 6000 BC (when boats were first developed) standing on the seashore, scanning the horizon for signs of life. It's not coming. There's no reason to assume there's anything out there anyway, and if there is, we probably don't want them to know about us.
• ..."sci-fi fuelled assumtions about quantum time travel will pan out.." /boggle Who the hell mentioned sci fi 'quantum time travel'? Quantum Coupling is a real, proven, phenomenon. I did a google search to find a nice technical .pdf or some shit but I realised there was so much stuff on it that I didn't know where to start. Have a bit of a read, it's fairly interesting stuff. Manipulate a molecule here, and have something react a hundred light years away instantaneously. That's a tremendous oversimplification, but basically it. "..it's like someone from 6000 BC (when boats were first developed) standing on the seashore, scanning the horizon for signs of life. It's not coming." See, here is where I have a problem with your logic. It's all the assumptions. Firstly, we don't know for sure when boats were first developed. Nobody fucking knows. Every cherished assumption about when a prehistoric technological advance took place has had to be revised every couple of decades, from woven fabric to language. Right now we understand that the earliest boat making was around the same time as early man's colonisation of islands and continents like Australia - but this is only the evidence we have so far discovered. Read textbooks from 15 years ago & they assure us it wasn't anywhere near that early. Next you draw an analogy between us and primitive man.. where before you seemed to object to me doing the same thing, albeit in blunter fashion. We're primitive man on a sea shore (shades of Newton collecting pebbles) looking for ships.. exactly! Maybe primitive man should be looking to the sky, a place he hasn't considered as a conduit for travel. If you don't look, you don't find. You're also implying that nothing is 'coming our way'. How the fuck do we know? Why would ET land on the Whitehouse lawn and announce itself? We know nothing of the motives, thoughts or modus operandi of hypothetical extraterrestrial beings; we have no way to prove that ET is not visiting or has not visited Earth. All we have are opinions. ET may come here and remain completely in 'stealth' mode. He may have been here in the past. We may be the only intelligent life anywhere. We just don't know. We shouldn't dismiss anything until there is hard data one way or the other.
• Nostrildamus said: Advanced alien civilizations are unlikely to be using anything so primitive as radio for data transmission. Humans are so fucking stupid. SETI isn't attempting to eavesdrop on alien conversations. It's looking for intentional beacons from civilizations trying to share information with us. I put it to you that they don't know we're listening. If they did, & they are sufficiently advanced, they come here directly. They don't have to know we're listening in order to broadcast a beacon. The whole point of the beacon might be to reach us in the brief window between our discovery of radio signals and our likely self-extinction. Discovering radio waves is the technological equivalent of a toddler discovering she can open the door under the sink. According to Robert McNamara, we came within a hair's breadth of full-fledged nuclear war in 1962, a mere 70 years after the first public demonstration of radio communication. Today, a single well-designed terrorist plague could end human civilization. It isn't hard for me to imagine an alien society that would want to reach out to toddler civilizations, to connect with them before they drink the cosmic Liquid Plumr, so to speak. A powerful radio signal broadcast at a logical frequency is a reasonable way to do that. That's why SETI focuses its search on the so-called "Water Hole", the quietest part of the radio spectrum which happens to fall between the radio spikes of hydrogen and hydroxyl, around 1.4 gigahertz. Hydrogen (H) + hydroxyl (HO) = H2O. If there's another water-based civilization out there, it's easy to see that this is a logical place to broadcast or listen. Projects like Danny Hillis' Clock of the Long Now enable me to imagine a future in which we broadcast a signal of our own someday.
• Ok, I am so not wearing a red uniform.
• stimulantcaplets: We sent one...in 1974.
• beauty post stimulantcaplets. Also props to rocket88 for remembering that. (You're old aren't you ;)
• rocket88: Yeah, I love that blocky old thing. My best friend in grade school used to have a poster of it on his wall. It still reminds me of Intellivision football. But the Aricebo message wasn't a beacon. It wasn't even a spark. It barely lasted 3 minutes. It's also hella vulnerable to errors. Someday, though, we'll have a real active SETI operation going. Someday...
• update from SETI@home: the signal story was apparently misleading
• Senior SETI Astronomer, Seth Shostak: We'll find ET within two dozen years Beams #4400 into #4400
• Or as he's known to his mates, SSASS.