Posted on 09/08/2020 5:05:20 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The study, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia on Monday, details a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a collection of 4096 antennas planted in the red soil of Western Australia that detects radio signals from space. "They are little spider-like antennas that sit on the ground," explains Chenoa Tremblay, co-author on the study and astrophysicist with CSIRO, an Australian government scientific research organization.
Tremblay and co-author Stephen Tingay, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, used the MWA to listen out for "technosignatures," or evidence of alien technology, in a portion of the sky around the Vela constellation. Tremblay explains this region is scientifically interesting because a large number of stars have exploded and died, creating ideal conditions for new stars to form. The search for extraterrestrial life "piggy-backs" on other work studying this region to understand the life cycle of stars.
But how can you tell a radio signal from space is coming from an alien civilization? "Think of a car alarm when you leave your lights on, where there are a series of equally spaced 'ping' sounds," Tremblay says. The survey looks for a repeating ping that may be escaping noise from a planet or "a purpose built signal."
After listening to the Vela region for 17 hours, no unknown signals were detected. While the survey was able to capture over 10.3 million stellar sources and contained six known exoplanets (likely many more exist in the region), the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool."
And there's another big caveat.
"Looking for technosignatures is assuming that the civilisation have technology similar to our own," says Tremblay.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
“Alien”...as in...not from this Country. Sheesh! /s
Listening to these far away stars for electronic signatures would be like going back in our history to 1M years ago a making the conjecture that there is no life here.
We are looking at data points that are millions of years old by the earlies count. So not really relevant to what may be out there today. Maybe life started there at the same time that it did here. They will discover us millions of years from now.
And the Reptizoans on the planet Rjiuus absolutely DEMAND pineapple on their pizzas.
We are alone...
Lol, yep.
Maybe the only stars we see in the sky that are still there are about 10000 years old. The rest flamed out long ago..( we see their light) but they are gone.
We are, collectively, idiots.
I’d argue that, as a planet, we haven’t gone ‘dark’ at all.
“we” as in the US and Europe, don’t shine our city lights because we’ve been green-guilted and white-privileged into going dark. To our detriment, as dark cities encourage crime.
But have you seen the fingerprint of China and greater Asia? Their urban areas are lit up like neon Christmas trees all night long! Which makes one wonder? Why are we ‘saving the night sky’ when 8.5billion other people aren’t? To signal how virtuous we are?
As to radio waves - back to the 9 billion people, every little town around the world now has a radio or tv station, licensed or not, most broadcasting 24 hours. Not to mention ham radio broadcasts, podcasts and internet. Even remote areas of the world have satellite links. That’s a whole lot more white noise than existed in 1950, when tv stations went off the air at midnight, there was no internet and ham operators were few and far between. There’s a peak right behind me that we jokingly call an alien base it has so many microwave receivers/repeaters. And then there’s skylink, which will theoretically enable internet from any point on earth and will quadruple bandwidth use. And militaries around the world with their own dedicated bands. We are a lot noisier, and brighter now than ever before.
We are a society that has spent trillions trying to disprove intelligent design. It’s time to put that hypothesis to bed.
ROTFL
That explains Chelsea.
I think all they are saying is that they didn’t see any Dyson Spheres.
*ping*
“Astronomers find no signs of alien tech after scanning over 10 million stars”
given the pisspoor resolution of our star “scanners”, i would imagine that the only detectable “alien tech” would need to be the size of an actual star ...
This well duh moment brought to you by CNET.
Thanks BenLurkin.
After listening to the Vela region for 17 hours, no unknown signals were detected. While the survey was able to capture over 10.3 million stellar sources and contained six known exoplanets (likely many more exist in the region), the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool."
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10 SETI Messages That We May Not Want to Receive An exploration of alternative SETI messages that may not say hello. | Published on Nov 6, 2017 | John Michael Godier | from his Patreon page -- "I am passionate about all science fiction, however with my own writing I want to create hard science fiction stories that blow people's minds but stay within the confines of the scientifically possible. Plus, I just want to spin a good old fashioned entertaining yarn in the process. In addition, I am an aspiring documentary filmmaker and maintain a science and technology based YouTube channel showcasing interesting and unusual subjects from the realm of hard science and futurism." John Michael Godier
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