 UC SETI physicists plan to monitor stars with two transiting planets in hopes of eavesdropping on interplanet communications. Because these signals would be narrowly beamed, they would be stronger and, thus, more easily detected from Earth.
Posted on 03/22/2013 6:37:25 AM PDT by null and void
 UC SETI physicists plan to monitor stars with two transiting planets in hopes of eavesdropping on interplanet communications. Because these signals would be narrowly beamed, they would be stronger and, thus, more easily detected from Earth.
NASA’s Kepler mission has identified 2,740 planets orbiting other stars, but do any of them harbor intelligent life?
Scientists at UC Berkeley now have used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look for intelligent radio signals from planets around 86 of these stars. While discovering no telltale signs of life, the researchers calculate that fewer than one in a million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy have planetary civilizations advanced enough to transmit beacons we could detect.
“We didn’t find ET, but we were able to use this statistical sample to, for the first time, put rather explicit limits on the presence of intelligent civilizations transmitting in the radio band where we searched,” said Andrew Siemion, who recently received his Ph.D. in astronomy from UC Berkeley.
Even with such odds, there could be millions of advanced civilizations in the galaxy.
“The Kepler mission taught us there are a trillion planets in our Milky Way Galaxy, more planets than there are stars,” said UC Berkeley physicist Dan Werthimer, who heads the world’s longest running SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project at the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. “Some day, Earthlings might contact civilizations billions of years ahead of us.”
Siemion, Werthimer and their colleagues published their findings online in a paper that has been accepted to The Astrophysical Journal.
The 86 stars were chosen last year based on a list of 1,235 planet candidates known at that time. The scientists chose stars with five or six planet candidates in orbit and those that hosted planets that are thought to have Earth-like conditions, including temperatures that allow liquid water. The telescope, funded by the National Science Foundation, spent 12 hours collecting five minutes of radio emissions from each star in a frequency range (1.1 – 1.9 GHz) that on Earth falls between the cellphone and TV bands. They then combed through the data looking for high-intensity signals with a narrow bandwidth (5 Hz) that are only produced artificially – presumably by intelligent life.
Most of the stars were more than 1,000 light years away, so only signals intentionally aimed in our direction would have been detected. The scientists say that, in the future, more sensitive radio telescopes, such as the Square Kilometer Array, should be able to detect much weaker radiation, perhaps even unintentional leakage radiation, from civilizations like our own.
The team plans more observations with the Green Bank Telescope, focusing on multi-planet systems in which two of the planets occasionally align relative to Earth, potentially allowing them to eavesdrop on communications between the planets.
“This work illustrates the power of leveraging our latest understanding of exoplanets in SETI searches,” Werthimer said. “We no longer have to guess about whether we are targeting Earth-like environments, we know it with certainty.”
Coauthors of the study are Eric Korpela, Matt Lebofsky, Jeff Cobb and Geoff W. Marcy of UC Berkeley; Andrew W. Howard of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa; Paul Demorest, Ron J. Maddalena and Glen Langston of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO); and Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA.
The research was funded by a NASA Exobiology grant and donations from the Friends of Berkeley SETI and the Friends of SETI@home. The Green Bank Telescope is operated by NRAO under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities.
If the God of the Bible truly exists, it would make no sense if there is life on other planets.....I believe the entire universe, in ways mortal man could never understand, is all in place to support life on this one planet.
Precisely.
What do they consider “Intelligent Civilizations”? Surely they know the one here on Earth flunks that test.
Intelligent life on other planets is not just a problem of distance, but of time.
Starting with distance, about the only way to get from our rather sparsely populated spur of a spiral arm to somewhere with some likely candidates for occupied planets, you need a spaceship that can travel at least 500 times the speed of light. Which means you can visit planets within 500 light years in just a year of transit time.
But here’s the other problem. The universe is about 13.5 billion years ago. Our solar system is only about one third of that, and any kind of life on Earth about one quarter of the life of the universe. Only about 200,000 years for the human species, something approaching intelligent life, and only 200 years of technological society.
So humanity has been able to communicate with someone not on our planet for about 1/67,500,000th of the life of the universe.
Now we need to make a wild guess of how long an intelligent technological species would last, before either a disaster happened that wiped it out, or it either de-evolved or evolved and died out. For an utterly wild guess, how about assuming a liberal lifespan of an intelligent species of 500,000 years?
This would mean maybe 24,000 cycles of intelligent species appearing and becoming extinct in the universe, of which we exist in just *one* of these cycles.
So the odds of any intelligent life being anywhere near enough to us to matter is pretty tiny. But there might be a way to change that.
If life doesn’t come to you, send life to lifeless planets and make it, not by scratch, but by giving it a jump start.
If natural selection is any hint, in a relatively few number of generations the bacteria, plants and animals on these worlds will become novel, adapting to their alien environment. And this can be augmented and accelerated considerably with, dare I say it, “intelligent design”.
What’s this “we’re alone” stuff. Does that mean you think the civilizations here on Earth are “Intelligent”?
You would limit God to one Bible and one planet?
Interesting.
Is there some other Bible I should be aware of?
I hear ya but ... I see no way to escape eventual world-wide communism and central control which would be fully in place before any such colonization. In mneantime ... we fight.
It is ours, custom made for our salvation, and only our salvation.
Any mention of other creations and other covenants in our Bible would serve no useful purpose, would only serve to confuse rather that illuminate.
The Bible makes no mention of an entire "New World" half a planet away from the Holy Land, why would it need to discuss life in other solar systems?
On a human scale such was totally irrelevant at the time of the Patriarchs, remained so for the Apostles, and still isn't of much relevance even today.
I'm pretty sure that when it becomes an issue, we'll get a second update.
I suppose it’s possible, we’ll never know, but to me it seems why would God need more than one planet with life on it....I guess he would only know, but at least to me, it wouldn’t really make too much sense.
I hear ya but ... I see no way to escape eventual world-wide communism and central control which would be fully in place before any such colonization. In mneantime ... we fight.
A wild guess. But I can understand how they got the number. 1 million has 6 zeros.
Fair enough. It doesn’t make sense to me that the universe would be so vast and so lonely.
But we are not even small “g” gods, what makes sense to Him on such a scale is beyond our ken.
Just consider all of the things that have to be exactly in the right place in order to sustain life on this planet...the distance from the Sun, the distance of the Moon. And who knows if things that are billions of light years away in some manner help to support life on this planet.
If those “odds” intrigue you,
you should first watch the video, then read the book,
“Privileged Planet”.
For example, a distant gamma ray burst can reset the ecosystem and literally slay the dragons that were in the way of the next step forward.
I believe this is why the “scientists” are so desperate to find ET life. To “disprove” God.
The Solar system and the space around it is vast and lonely. Life on Earth is extremely rare if one uses an objective measure like a mass ratio.
I agree. I makes for great science fiction, but that’s all it is.
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