Posted on 03/17/2018 4:21:03 PM PDT by Kaslin
In the scientific community, there is still a great deal of energy devoted to “listening” for evidence or hints of intelligent, extraterrestrial civilizations out among the stars. Most of you are probably familiar with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and their decades of work in this field. They’re still at it and, in fact, are upping their game with a new generation of laser sensors. These projects drew fresh attention after the discovery of Tabby’s Star and the frantic speculation over whether or not some ancient civilization had built a Dyson Sphere around their own sun. This has led one team to train all of their listening sensors directly on the star in hopes of picking up some indication of advanced technology there.
So what is it they’re listening for? Radio waves, for the most part. We’ve been producing them for more than a century ourselves so the traditional thinking is that advanced, potentially space-faring civilizations would as well. But radio wave transmission has a host of problems and challenges which come with it, both for using it ourselves and listening for it from others. First of all, while these waves travel at an impressive clip (the speed of light, actually) that’s still sort of slow in terms of space travel. When we were sending radio commands to New Horizons as it approached the planet Pluto it took 4 hours and 25 minutes for the signal to reach the craft and an equal amount of time for the response to get back to us so we knew if it had worked. That doesn’t exactly allow you to turn on a dime.
Also, since waves propagate outward as well as forward, they weaken over distance. The signal strength coming back from New Horizons was barely above the background static levels. Listening to Tabby’s star means that we’re hoping to “hear” a signal which has been traveling through space for roughly 1,300 years and has faded to nearly nothing.
That’s what got me to thinking about all of these “listening” projects. I’ve been mulling this over for a while now while reading various opinions from experts and, while I find such research projects perpetually exciting, I’ve slowly been coming to the conclusion that there’s one significant downside to all this listening. It’s probably not going to work.
We’ve had technology in the form of being able to at least work metals for barely 3,000 years. That’s a long time in terms of human lifespan, but less than the blink of an eye in galactic or even geological timeframes. We only developed the ability to directly communicate further than line of sight would allow less than two centuries ago. In the relatively short timespan since then, we’ve arrived on the verge of being able to employ faster than light communication using direct counterfactual quantum communication. Using a system such as that, no interception or random discovery of the communications would be possible since you have to be on one end or the other of the conversation. There are no particles or waves being transmitted to intercept and the communications happen instantly no matter how after the participants are.
Despite having come this far in a couple of hundred years, how much further do you think we’d have to advance before we could build a
Dyson Sphere or a ship capable of interstellar travel? If other hypothetical, alien civilizations have mastered such feats, don’t you suppose they’d have figured out quantum communications (or something even more mind-bogglingly advanced) long before now?
The point is, once you are able to conceive of the idea of instantaneous communications over the vastness of space, the idea of sending antiquated old radio waves, laser beams or particle streams of any sort which are clunking along at only the speed of light seems preposterous. If we’re listening for the aliens we suspect might be building Star Wars type empires out there closer to the bustling center of the Milky Way or buzzing our Navy ships when they get bored, we’re probably not going to pick them up because they’re almost certainly using some form of communication beyond our comprehension.
If we are somehow lucky enough to intercept some radio waves from another star which wind up being an interstellar greeting, their version of reality television programming or the latest crossover pop music hit, who do you suppose sent it? Odds are that we’re listening in on some other schmucks who are barely past the point of figuring out how to start a fire without waiting for a lightning storm, and they won’t be sending any ships to deliver the secrets of unlimited, free, clean energy or the secret of anti-gravity to us any time soon.
Does that mean we should give up on SETI and related programs entirely? Not at all. They’re almost entirely privately funded these days
anyway and you never know what sort of fascinating signal they might pick up which could deliver some new scientific breakthrough. Or, if nothing else, we can watch the Alpha Centauri version of the Kardashians.
He’s an unidentified flying object
You will see Him in the air
He’s an unidentified flying object
You will drop your hands and stare
You will be afraid to tell your neighbors
They might think that it’s not true
But when they open up the morning papers
They will know they’ve seen Him too
He will come back like He promised
With the price already paid
He will gather up His followers
And take them all away
He’s an unidentified flying object
He will sweep down from the sky
He’s an unidentified flying object
Some will sleep but will not die
He’s an unidentified flying object
Coming back to take you home
He’s an unidentified flying object
He will roll away your stone
And if there’s life on other planets
Then I’m sure that He must know
And He’s been there once already
And has died to save their souls
He’s an unidentified flying object
You will see Him in the air
He’s an unidentified flying object
You will drop your hands and stare
He’s an unidentified flying object
Coming back to take you Home
He’s an unidentified flying object
He will roll away your stone
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rzz8Yfr0nWI
Exactly, there is no one out there.
LOL, yeah right.
No doubt there have been, are, and will be billions and billions of planets with intelligent life separated by billions and billions of miles and billions and billions of light years.
...
You can’t know that unless you know the probability of intelligent life.
If you read the books “Rare Earth & Privileged Planet”, one of them does a plausibility argument on how common extraterrestrial intelligent life might be given known physical constraints. (I forget which book and I m too lazy to dig it out. Anyway they are both worth reading!) Constraints like age of the universe, position in the galaxy, star type, star volatility, etc. Life possible systems (forget intelligent for a minute!) have to be out on the galactic rim, way too much radiation as you move inward, this means such systems have to be roughly the same age given some +/- X amount of millions of years. You say should that be enough time for a Mr Spock visit. Maybe and maybe (more likely given what we currently know!) interstellar space travel is really really hard to do! So maybe they haven’t come because they haven’t figured interstellar space travel out yet and maybe its impossible to do like in Star Trek. Maybe the best you can do is the occasional long lag time chat in RF. And maybe they’re not there! So far that fits the known facts, fact change then possibilities change!
... A big unknown in the original Drake Equation is the average lifetime of a civilization during which they might be available to communicate with us. This window might be very short, especially if technological species are typically replaced by machines. Or it could be very long.
Reframing the question makes longevity a moot point. Frank and Sullivan ask: What is the chance that we are the only technological species and always have been? If we put the question this way, the Drake Equation boils down to A = Nast * fbt, where A is the number of technological species that have ever formed over the history of the observable universe, Nast are all the astronomical unknowns (which we now have a much better handle on than we did in 1961), and fbt are the biological unknowns, which are still many—including the fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears, the fraction of those planets on which intelligent life emerges, and the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
Based on recent exoplanet discoveries, Frank and Sullivan assume that one-fifth of all stars have habitable planets in orbit around them. This leads them to conclude that there should be other advanced technological civilization out there, unless the chance for developing such a civilization on a habitable planet in the observable universe is less than 1 in 1024 (a 1 with 24 zeros!). For our own Milky Way galaxy, the odds of being the only technologically advanced civilization are 1 in 60 billion. Thus, it’s very likely that other intelligent, technologically advanced species evolved before us. Even if only one in every million stars hosts a technologically advanced species today, that would still yield a total of about 300,000 such civilizations in the whole galaxy.
The Archilles’ heel of these statistical estimates is of course the biological uncertainties; Earth is still the only planet where we know life exists. The appearance of life may be extremely unlikely, and so might the evolution of technology. After all, there are many intelligent species on our planet, including dolphins, octopi, apes, parrots, and elephants, but only once in 4.6 billion years has a technologically advanced species evolved. And life cannot have appeared in the very early Universe until heavier elements produced by the explosions of many supernovas became abundant.
Still, Frank and Sullivan think their 1 in 1024 estimate constitutes a “pessimism line”—a lower bound on the probability that one or more technological species has evolved over time. And that’s good news for SETI, even if it doesn’t help us know where to look.
That is why he is the Almighty.
They speak all our Earth languages, read and write most of them, and even disco.
So there aren’t billions and billions of galaxies?
How many are there, then?
I don't know...
We seem to find 'spirits' in white noise all of the time, and it's usually backed up by green screen evidence!
Them paranormal people do it; and now so can YOU!!!
https://www.amazon.com/The-Ghost-Meter-EMF-Sensor/dp/B000ZH7G1E
We may as well return to Remulak.
SETI@home was a pioneer in the distributed computing that led to “install this app and mine Bitcoin”. Or even worse, the magazines saying “let us mine cryptocurrency with your browser while you read”.
You'll forgive us if we don't take your word for it and keep searching, yes?
Probably??
BAsed on what data?
I'm not terribly worried. :-)
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