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 ...
According to Kilgore Trout, Space Aliens communicate by tap dancing and farting.
"But I am not really willing to accept your premise, because it may well be that the means of communications they have are of a kind that we do not know how to receive, and that they would not have the means of communicating with sufficiently powerful radio or optical signals. That is something which, technologically, is too difficult for them but they would have some other means we would not recognize." -- Thomas J. Gold, 'Communication with Extraterrestial Intelligence' (Sagan, ed)
"To consider the Earth as the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that in an entire field of millet, only one grain will grow." -- Metrodorus, 4th c BC Greek philosopher
"Heaven and earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other earths." -- Teng Mu, 13th c AD Chinese philosopher
even at a single light year away, what the hell would they expect to find?
unless they’re making MASSIVE ships, you won’t see them
a dyson sphere? ring world?
just seems over the top for what would be needed.
of course, maybe the evidence of their existence ... is us
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