I saw this chap on an ABC program called 'Big Ideas' here in Australia, he was on a panel with Carol Oliver from SETI and some other chap who's name escapes me.
I found it hard to believe this panel was made up of real world-class experts, there seemed to be a lot of nonsense with a few interesting tid-bits thrown in. I thought their ideas regarding intelligent extraterrestrial life were extremely naive. They scoffed at the possibility that any visiting extraterrestrials would be hostile, asking what could they possibly want from us? On the grounds that anything they could get from the Earth they could get from somewhere closer to home. Er....hello, anyone home? The planet for a start. I think good planets like this one are very few and far between, all of the extra solar planets found so far are just useless rocks.
I thought Lineweaver's ideas were curios rather than particularly interesting. It may well be an unimaginably great discovery to find any kind of life that originated on another world but lets be honest, we're only really interested in physical thinking beings with a technology level at least on par with ourselves. A "living" rock isn't going to 'cut the mustard'. You can expand the definition of life as much as you like, but what's the point? No-one outside of the professional scientific community is going to be interested, let alone impressed.
On this program Carol Oliver stated that SETI had picked up some interesting signals that had been repeated "2 or 3 times". I sent her an email asking if these signals were narrow band and if they had any modulation on them. (Modulation being information encoded on the signal) It's extremely unlikely that a modulated narrow band signal would occur in nature, and would be the SETI 'Holy Grail'. I didn't get a response. I emailed another SETI scientist, Seth Shostak, who responded the next day. He told me that Carol Oliver was talking historically and the equipment used to detect these signals was not capable of detecting modulation. Just as with the equipment that 'heard' the WOW signal, they had no idea if it contained any information. For all we know It may be possible for a narrow band signal to occur in nature, but a narrow band signal with modulation, that would have to be synthetic, a manufactured, structured transmission.
It seems to me that in the near term at least the only way we're going to detect a reasonably advanced extraterrestrial species, unless they call in for lunch, is by listening for them as SETI is doing. I think it would be far more useful if they expanded the capabilities of their receiving equipment to include various types of demodulation capability, if they haven't already.
If we could have detected modulation on any of these signals we would know for sure we aren't alone right now.
Edited by Occams Razor, 22 September 2012 - 07:43 AM.
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Am I looking at this the wrong way mate?
