Posted on 01/26/2010 7:48:50 AM PST by JoeProBono
EARTH is becoming "invisible" to aliens, the world's leading ET hunter claimed yesterday. Dr Frank Drake said transmission of signals into space was being cut by the digital revolution.
As a result, any little green men on other planets would not be able to detect them.
Dr Drake said Earth was surrounded by a 50 light year-wide "shell" of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions. The signals had spread far enough to reach nearby star systems but are vanishing.
He explained that while old-style TV transmissions could generate one million watts, digital transmissions are much weaker.
And satellites aim their transmissions to Earth - with almost none being allowed to escape into space.
Dr Drake said: "Now the actual amount of radiation escaping is about two watts, not much more than you get from a cell phone.
"If this continues into the future, very soon our world will become undetectable."
Dr Drake said he believed that intelligent life DOES exist beyond Earth.
He reckoned alien civilisations were likely to be far more advanced than ours and that their analogue TV age probably went long ago. That in turn means that the world's search for their signals is that much harder.
Dr Drake - who founded US-based organisation SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) 50 years ago - told a meeting at The Royal Society in London: "We're going to have to search many more stars and many more frequencies."
Absolute, total BS.
Great. I’m guessing we’ll start hearing cries from Obama about how we need to “Cap and Trade” digital transmission credits to eliminate all of that noise.
Oversampling is your friend. It’s how you can see RADAR and SONAR returns that are 40+ dB below the noise floor...
I wonder if this guy has any idea how much of a signal an air search radar puts out? Every time a carrier battle group goes to active scanning this planet lights up in the radio spectrum quite nicely.
Is this connected to that pseudoscientific "electric universe" silliness?
I'm not worried. I have my towel.
All we can use is the tools at our disposal.
a) Any alien civilization advanced enough to not only locate us, but more importantly to travel to us within a meaningful timespan, would be immensely beyond us in terms of technological (or whatever is analogous to technology ...maybe instead of 1s and 0s it is biological in nature) advancement.
b) That means that if that alien lifeform was to be hostile there is precious little we could do to stop them. Looking at human history, every single time an advanced civilization met a less advanced one, the less advanced one paid in some way or form. Why should it be different on a galactical scale?
c) This does not even necessarily have to mean that the alien lifeform is malevolent. Maybe they only mean to 'help us better ourselves' and deem that, since we are not as 'enlightened as they are,' it may be most prudent to 'expedite' things. Or maybe they come along with some pathogen with which we have no resistance. Or maybe some accident occurs (e.g. their craft, or what we conceive as their craft, is fired upon by some overzealous air national guard chap, triggering a response from them for which we have no answer). Or maybe their presence so disrupts society (imagine what the PROVEN existence of aliens would do to some socio-religious nodes. Many would quickly include aliens in the greater works of God, but some would see them as demons and go loco ...maybe even attacking them). Think about market reaction ....
Anyways, right now we may just have captured the attention of some malevolent entity that is alien to us, that is heading our way. We expect humanoid lifeforms, but I doubt any aliens would be humanoid (this is not star trek). Furthermore, for them to travel immense distances means they either have extremely advanced technology (i.e. maybe using wormholes), or else they have 'technology' unlike anything we have even conceptualized (maybe they are not corporeal, but can instead project their wills and intent).
Or maybe there is nothing out there but empty space and infinite darkness (which I doubt from a mathematical point of view).
But even if that were the case, broadcasting would be like a person sitting on a log in the middle of some nameless vast ocean, and tapping hard into the water with a stick trying to see if he can attract something to the surface.
There is a chance nothing will come.
Or maybe some glittering fish with omni-colored scales.
Or maybe the last thing he will see is some dark cavernous maw rising up from the depths, ringed with halos of serrated teeth and retching like the very belly of hell!
Hey, as a Kenyan there is a story I was told when I was a child about a famous medicine man from our culture who allegedly prophesied about a race of men who wear clothes of many colors that made them look like butterflies, and who would come riding on an iron snake. That people would welcome them, and that for a time they would suffer greatly for giving that welcome.
Maybe right now some iron snake steams across the cosmos, and rather than seeming like flittering butterflies the riders of that train are veritable devils and monsters of yore!
Not directly. The interesting thing about Sansbury’s thesis is that it does not arise from any sort of a search for grand unification theories or any sort of a back-of-the-book type solution to gravity. It arises from a very mundane study of reversible electrostatic fields being generated by currents, and the only possible explanation of the actual data is sub-electron particles. For the last hundred years or thereabouts of course, electrons have been thought of as indivisible, even as atoms were thought of prior to that time.
Which is why I like to hide here.
I’d wager a watt or two that the quote from Dr. Drake was actually stated in a context other than what was reported in the article and that it was simply mishandled by the reporterette who wrote the story...
“No, they arn’t. Most flavors of those things all use digital modulation.”
Don’t know much about RF, do you? There is no such thing as a digital RF transmission.
Looks like slough (shed snake skin by a snake that got bigger and thus needed to peel off its old skin). One of the worst things you can see in places with snakes, since it means there is a likelihood that a snake’s in the vicinity. Happened to one of our workers when I was young ...one of the garden keeps found such a slough in his servant’s quarters ...a few days later he saw a huge snake above his bed. It was at night, and his screams had us all running to see what was up. The snake managed to slither away and escape - for quite some time the man slept with another garden keep until his nerves calmed down. I did not have a good look at the snake, but there were a couple of spitting cobra incidents back then. Might have been harmless, but glossy coils over your bed at night .....hmmmm ....
Yes, that’s certainly possible. The ability to write coherently is no longer a requirement in the field of journalism.
Ping because I thought they were talking about y'all .........
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