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SETI has observed a strong signal that is Russian's that need funding

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pswii60

Member
This radio detection project seems like a waste of time to me.

I mean, on this planet, we've generated radio signals for ~120 years. That's a microscopic fragment of our history.

So we're assuming that there is a star out there, with a habitable planet at the relevative current light time distance (ie 95 years ago in this example), that is in detection range of SETI, that has an advanced civilisation living at the light time distance, that has discovered and is using and transmitting radio at the light time distance, etc etc.

I believe there is an abundance of life out there that, like on Earth, ranges from the microorganism to the intelligent life-form and beyond anything we could ever imagine. But given even our own history, I think the chances that we would detect extraterrestrial life form made radio signals are slim to none. They're too busy using dark matter to communicate with each other :)
 

xkramz

Member
this reminds me of the golden record which is inside the voyager..

"if" anything other than humans gets a hold of it, how do they know that its some sort of vynly?
 

DavidDesu

Member
I saw this earlier and while there are numerous caveats, it does feel like we might just be living in the age with the technological maturity that we will confirm the existence of others out there in the cosmos.

It started with the confirmation of exo planets and seeing us rack up a huge list of confirmed ones of varying sizes, to the recent discovery that our very closest neighbouring star features a planet in its stars habitable zone. 4.5 light years away. Yes it's not somewhere we could ever get to in our lifetimes and beyond, but knowing we have a massively powerful space telescope that could shed far more detail on these things, just a few years away from deployment, is tantalising.

And now this.

Honestly I feel like we could be alive during the time of the greatest shift in our mindsets we've ever seen as a species, as we confirm the existent of others similar to us out there. I imagine if we do discover a signal that it will contain information, probably even pictures and video of what these other people look like, what their world is like. Imagine that. As much as we're getting progressively backwards it seems like this could be the one thing that finally opens up everyone's eyes to the wonder and awe of the universe, and begin to leave petty fears aside. At worst humanity will come together in abject fear of this new, greater 'other' and we live in peace and harmony and lock and load ready for invasion, haha!
 

Jedi2016

Member
this reminds me of the golden record which is inside the voyager..

"if" anything other than humans gets a hold of it, how do they know that its some sort of vynly?
Vinyl?

To answer your question, it includes visual instructions on how to use it.

It's all moot, really, I imagine the record is completely unplayable by now, seeing as it's mounted to the outside of the probe. That, and the probe will take so long to get anywhere, we'll probably recover it and bring it back to Earth for a museum long before it gets anywhere. Even at their speeds, it would take thousands of years to reach even the closest star, and they're far too small, and space is far too large, for anyone to really notice them.
 
Vinyl?

To answer your question, it includes visual instructions on how to use it.

It's all moot, really, I imagine the record is completely unplayable by now, seeing as it's mounted to the outside of the probe. That, and the probe will take so long to get anywhere, we'll probably recover it and bring it back to Earth for a museum long before it gets anywhere. Even at their speeds, it would take thousands of years to reach even the closest star, and they're far too small, and space is far too large, for anyone to really notice them.

It's made of gold-plated copper and designed to be playable for up to 1 billion years.

The real reason no one will ever find it is that it's final trajectory doesn't take it near any particular stars, with the one exception being a 1.6 light year distance pass from a red dwarf in 40,000 years, and then nothing for pretty much the rest of ever. Plus it won't be able to power any of its instruments and won't generate any outgoing detectable signals.

So, if anything it might be pushed out of the way by an alien spacecraft's particle deflection system or something. Nobody will ever actually notice it.

Still, it's fun to imagine.

latest
 

Teknoman

Member
The government doesn't really have much in the way of jurisdiction when it comes to this stuff.

Also, on a personal note, I've always felt that the vast majority of people on Earth would actually be personally unaffected by the discovery of intelligent alien life. Sure, it would cause a bit of a stir, but for the most part ... people would return to their daily lives without thinking much about it again.

Pretty much. Unless they popped up on our doorstep all of a sudden...i'd say about a couple weeks worth of news reports and then back to business as usual.
 

Dryk

Member
This reminds me of the weird signal that only happened at certain times. It turned out to be because the observatory personnel made microwave popcorn at those times, and the microwave was leaky, if I recall correctly.
It was at Parkes. It wasn't because of the microwave being leaky, it was because it was old and had started producing radio spectrum signals. It wouldn't have been a problem because microwave ovens have Faraday cages but someone kept getting impatient and opening the door while it was still running. The emergency shutoff doesn't magically make the magnetron cycle down instantly so there was causing them to detect 250ms bursts of radio waves.

The paper on it is pretty interesting
 
What if the solar system of HD164595 has a species that is similar to humans but a little more advanced, and KIC 8462852 has a species that is really super advanced and evil? and if we had a choice to contact one or the other, which would we choose?
 

smurfx

get some go again
What if the solar system of HD164595 has a species that is similar to humans but a little more advanced, and KIC 8462852 has a species that is really super advanced and evil? and if we had a choice to contact one or the other, which would we choose?
why would we want to contact an evil highly advanced civilization?
 

Staccat0

Fail out bailed
What if the solar system of HD164595 has a species that is similar to humans but a little more advanced, and KIC 8462852 has a species that is really super advanced and evil? and if we had a choice to contact one or the other, which would we choose?

I mean... by all measurements we're probably a "super evil" civ.
 
TBH, I'd expect aliens to actually land on the White House lawn and offer Hillary some Reticulan Liver and Onions before SETI ever found anything.

EM signals are way too much of a needle in a haybale, and we relatively are taking apart the bale one straw at a time. And we started about ten minutes ago. And we are wearing drunk goggles. And someone may not have even added the needle yet, or maybe have ditched needles for a sewing machine.

If there's a sewing machine in the haystack we should be able to find it pretty soon.
 
If there's a sewing machine in the haystack we should be able to find it pretty soon.

My point is that we likely have no idea what technology 500 ahead of us might look like. We are looking for EM signals when a slightly older civilization, say 10,000 years ahead, may not be using EM. Just look at that other topic about a dark matter galaxy being discovered - maybe advanced civilizations use some force associated with dark matter which is as "dark" to us as electroweak is to dark matter? We don't have dark matter on Earth, so obviously we don't know it's properties beyond what we can observe of it (gravitation) and theoretize (strong force).

Most of the light from within our galaxy we see is at best many thousands of years old, and much, much older as we go to other galaxies. And we have been looking for...31 years, and sampling relative mLs to a vast ocean of EMF. I'm not expecting any reasonably acceptable conclusion from SETI either way for couple millenia. Sample size and all that.
 
It's made of gold-plated copper and designed to be playable for up to 1 billion years.

The real reason no one will ever find it is that it's final trajectory doesn't take it near any particular stars, with the one exception being a 1.6 light year distance pass from a red dwarf in 40,000 years, and then nothing for pretty much the rest of ever. Plus it won't be able to power any of its instruments and won't generate any outgoing detectable signals.

So, if anything it might be pushed out of the way by an alien spacecraft's particle deflection system or something. Nobody will ever actually notice it.

Still, it's fun to imagine.

We ought to have put a beacon on it.

If the EM Drive works out, we could to set it up on a probe with a nuclear power source and an antenna and send it out. It would overtake Voyager relatively fast AND would actually attract attention if someone found it.

Also, won't Voyager be likely to get destroyed in the Oort Cloud anyway? NLS travel needs to hurry up if that future space museum wants its main display for its "20th Century" exhibit.

I guess that applies to the EM Drive probe too lol. Not going to get far - it's hard to signal in space.
 

PantherLotus

Professional Schmuck
I will never, ever believe any SETI result until it is observed, re-observed, and observed again by multiple sources. This is no exception.
 

MogCakes

Member
SETI's best bet is finding aliens directly within atmospheric space, and the odds of that are, well. I wonder how big their staff is.
 

DarthWoo

I'm glad Grandpa porked a Chinese Muslim
We ought to have put a beacon on it.

If the EM Drive works out, we could to set it up on a probe with a nuclear power source and an antenna and send it out. It would overtake Voyager relatively fast AND would actually attract attention if someone found it.

Also, won't Voyager be likely to get destroyed in the Oort Cloud anyway? NLS travel needs to hurry up if that future space museum wants its main display for its "20th Century" exhibit.

I guess that applies to the EM Drive probe too lol. Not going to get far - it's hard to signal in space.

The Oort cloud isn't like the Hoth asteroid belt. Even with the speculated amount of objects, it is so far out that, as NDT's Cosmos put it, each object is, on average, as far from its nearest neighbor as Earth is from Saturn. Sure, Voyager could get extraordinarily unlucky and smack into something, but it's far more likely that it never even gets close to anything.
 

Wellscha

Member
More from Eric Korpela :

We believe a signal when

  • It is persistent. It appears at the same spot in the sky in multiple observations.
  • It only comes from one spot in the sky.
  • If we reobserve the target, the signal is still there.

Things that add to believability

  • Its frequency/period/delay does not correspond to known interference.
  • Its Doppler Drift rate indicates that it is exactly frequency stable in the frame of the center of mass of the solar system
  • Its properties (bandwidth, chirp rate, encoding) indicate intelligent origin.


Unfortunately the observing method used by the Russian team does not permit many of these things to be determine. 1. The signal was not persistent. 2. The signal was gone when the target was reobserved. 3. The signal frequency/period/delay cannot be determined. 4. The signal Doppler drift rate is unknown. 5. Many sources of interference, including satellites, are present in the observing band.
 

MogCakes

Member
The Oort cloud isn't like the Hoth asteroid belt. Even with the speculated amount of objects, it is so far out that, as NDT's Cosmos put it, each object is, on average, as far from its nearest neighbor as Earth is from Saturn. Sure, Voyager could get extraordinarily unlucky and smack into something, but it's far more likely that it never even gets close to anything.

And thus, the depressing reality that space really is empty and lifeless, for 99.99% of its expanse.
 

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
And thus, the depressing reality that space really is empty and lifeless, for 99.99% of its expanse.

Even the rings of Saturn that look so solid are pretty much just ice crystals and dust, not giant chunks of rock constantly smashing into one another.
 
there's also the problem that any sufficiently advanced society is going to be using encryption. which is indistinguishable from white noise.

If it's intended to not be interpreted sure.

I just hope before I die we discover some kind of intelligent life. I know it's ridiculous to hope for. But I have a morbid fascination with finding out how we as humans react to that when it happens. Probably just denial etc. But also because I just want to see it myself.

Also that title change lol.
 

xenist

Member
So just how fucked are we if it's a Type II civilization? Maybe fucked or surely fucked?

If a Type II civilization wanted to fuck us we wouldn't even know it was coming. However the fuckery would be more of the "Ooops, I stepped on a worm" type. Type II means Dyson spheres, access to anti-matter and terraforming. There's is literally nothing a civilization like that may target us for.
 

Cimarron

Member
My point is that we likely have no idea what technology 500 ahead of us might look like. We are looking for EM signals when a slightly older civilization, say 10,000 years ahead, may not be using EM. Just look at that other topic about a dark matter galaxy being discovered - maybe advanced civilizations use some force associated with dark matter which is as "dark" to us as electroweak is to dark matter? We don't have dark matter on Earth, so obviously we don't know it's properties beyond what we can observe of it (gravitation) and theoretize (strong force)

Most of the light from within our galaxy we see is at best many thousands of years old, and much, much older as we go to other galaxies. And we have been looking for...31 years, and sampling relative mLs to a vast ocean of EMF. I'm not expecting any reasonably acceptable conclusion from SETI either way for couple millenia. Sample size and all that.


Element zero. BELIEVE!!!
 
I will never, ever believe any SETI result until it is observed, re-observed, and observed again by multiple sources. This is no exception.

Which they state themselves is how they begin to determine if something warrants special investigation, never mind bringing it to anyone's attention ...... this was not from SETI.
 

Vagabundo

Member
If a Type II civilization wanted to fuck us we wouldn't even know it was coming. However the fuckery would be more of the "Ooops, I stepped on a worm" type. Type II means Dyson spheres, access to anti-matter and terraforming. There's is literally nothing a civilization like that may target us for.

Hyperspace motorway.
 

MCN

Banned
Yeah, but it would take 95 years for their reply to reach us. So if this signal is a response to our earliest radio broadcasts, it is 95 years too early.

"We send our condolences to the family of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the people of the Austro-Hungarian empire. We only hope that peace can be maintained in these difficult times."
 

MCN

Banned
I mean... by all measurements we're probably a "super evil" civ.

What datum is this measured against? For all we know, we could be fucking saints compared to everyone else out there, which is why we're so far behind technologically.
 

n0razi

Member
I swear it's only a matter of time before I turn turn on my T.V. and see an alarming "BREAKING NEWS" headline.

I know the likelihood of us ever contacting /being contacted is slim, but I don't think it's impossible. The universe surprises us all the time.

I think if we make contact, it wont be like that... u know with UFOs landing,etc... Similar to the amoebas analogy, an alien from a Type 3 civilization might fart and wipe out the milky way, etc.
 

TipsyArchmage

Neo Member
What the fuck is the thread title trying to say? I know what the thread is about but I've been staring at it for the last 2 minutes and can't work out the title at all
 
What datum is this measured against? For all we know, we could be fucking saints compared to everyone else out there, which is why we're so far behind technologically.

We could be the most "human" and most other intelligent species lack certain emotions. I could see more problem solving, colonizing species out there who have never had a war or argument, they simply have no capacity for it. We could ruin them with our concepts.
 

MattKeil

BIGTIME TV MOGUL #2
What the fuck is the thread title trying to say? I know what the thread is about but I've been staring at it for the last 2 minutes and can't work out the title at all

The apostrophe shouldn't be there. The title change is meant to imply that the Russians who reported the signal just want publicity and funding, so they whipped up a media frenzy around what SETI would consider a very routine bit of data.
 
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