What happens if a signal is found?

[XenoFish]

I'm pretty sure religions that put humanity on a divine pedestal might be a bit peeved. 

[Hazzard]

3 hours ago, ThereWeAreThen said:

I honestly wouldn't blame the government(s) for covering it up IF a signal was received.

 

Two things mystify me about these recurrent paranoid claims that NASA is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. First, we would love nothing more than to find such evidence and there is absolutely no reason at all for anyone to cover it up. NASAs budget would skyrocket with such a discovery. 

Second, anyone who thinks the government is capable of covering up something as monumental as this must not pay much attention to national political news. The government couldnt even keep a stained blue dress a secret. 

[ThereWeAreThen]

Just now, Hazzard said:

Two things mystify me about these recurrent paranoid claims that NASA is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. First, we would love nothing more than to find such evidence and there is absolutely no reason at all for anyone to cover it up. NASAs budget would skyrocket with such a discovery. 

Second, anyone who thinks the government is capable of covering up something as monumental as this must not pay much attention to national political news. The government couldnt even keep a stained blue dress a secret. 

I would just like to clarify. I didn't claim the governments are covering it up.

[stereologist]

2 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

I'm pretty sure religions that put humanity on a divine pedestal might be a bit peeved. 

The Vatican astronmer made the following comment about aliens:

https://www.archbalt.org/vatican-astronomer-says-if-aliens-exist-they-may-not-need-redemption/

Quote

If aliens exist, they may be a different life form that does not need Christ’s redemption, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said.

Jesuit Father Jose Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory, said Christians should consider alien life as an “extraterrestrial brother” and a part of God’s creation.

 

[toast]

1 hour ago, freetoroam said:

Can you define "intelligent signals"? 

As explained,  problems are distance and time. Another is language.

A signal may be recieved, but we have to decipher it and even if we get any information from it like "hello, is anybody out there"  we may be too late to reply.

This is assuming 'they' are similar to us and speak a language which could be understood by us humans. We can not understand the vocal  language of animals  which we share this planet with, plus a signal may be just that - one single signal with no language behind it.

We will have no chance of reaching it and if an intelligent lifeform are sending a signal, chances are they have no chance of reaching us - hence a signal being sent because of distance.

 

Here is what kind of signals SETI is looking for:

Quote

How would we know that the signal is from ET?

Virtually all radio SETI experiments have looked for what are called “narrow-band signals.” These are radio emissions that extend over only a small part of the radio spectrum. Imagine tuning your car radio late at night … There’s static everywhere on the dial, but suddenly you hear a squeal – a signal at a particular frequency – and you know you’ve found a station.

Narrow-band signals – perhaps only a few Hertz wide or less – are the mark of a purposely built transmitter. Natural cosmic noisemakers, such as pulsars, quasars, and the turbulent, thin interstellar gas of our own Milky Way, do not make radio signals that are this narrow. The static from these objects is spread all across the dial.

In terrestrial radio practice, narrow-band signals are often called “carriers.” They pack a lot of energy into a small amount of spectral space, and consequently are the easiest type of signal to find for any given power level. If E.T. intentionally sends us a signal, those signals may well have at least one narrow-band component to get our attention.

Of course language would be a big issue but I think ET would use the same mathematical logic we humans used already by at the Arecibo Message in 1974.

Edited August 9, 2019 by toast

[stereologist]

I recently was told that our radio telescopes are sensitive enough that they could pick up our military radars at a distance of 60 light years. The matches up our most powerful transmissions with our most sensitive gear.

[XenoFish]

2 minutes ago, stereologist said:

The Vatican astronmer made the following comment about aliens:

https://www.archbalt.org/vatican-astronomer-says-if-aliens-exist-they-may-not-need-redemption/

 

Religious goal post moving, nice.

[Hazzard]

50 minutes ago, and then said:

 I think some very intelligent people who have a deeper understanding than I'll ever have tend to urge caution against assuming any advanced intelligence would necessarily be some cuddly ET.  It's possible that they might be but it is also possible we'd be welcoming them like the natives welcomed Columbus into the New World.

We still cant say what real aliens are like, but science can provide some useful insights. After all, any biology out there will exist in a landscape of finite resources. Darwinian competition will be their lot, as well as ours. So you can expect that there will be some less cuddly ETs out there.
 

Predation is an economic device... carnivores leave it to plants or plant eaters to slowly build up energyrich molecules from sunlight or some other source. They then harvest this crop of useful compounds quickly, a good tactic that can power an active life style.

But of course, for an intelligent species with technology capable of interstellar travel, predation is sooo Stone Age?!  Even today, humans (who are a long way from being able to make sporting trips to other star systems) dont rely on predation much. We farm our food, and maybe soon we will manufacture it. Killing just for the fun of it, as the Hollywood Predators do, is no longer considered socially acceptable in most circles. 

Real Predators, who must be many thousands of years ahead of us tech wise, have presumably moved beyond this.... Presumably. 

[Hazzard]

1 hour ago, stereologist said:

I recently was told that our radio telescopes are sensitive enough that they could pick up our military radars at a distance of 60 light years. The matches up our most powerful transmissions with our most sensitive gear.

This is kinda recent.

Using radio and optical telescope observations from the Green Bank Radio Telescope (GBT) in West Virginia and CSIRO's Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, the data set represents the most comprehensive and sensitive search for extraterrestrial life (SETI) in human history.

  https://www.sciencealert.com/the-most-comprehensive-and-sensitive-radio-search-ever-has-found-no-sign-of-alien-life

[Earl.Of.Trumps]

4 hours ago, Hazzard said:

Sure, but the real question is, how would they know about us at all? 

I would think they don't know us any more than we know of them. They are just shooting an arrow into the air and hope it sticks. We've done it.

4 hours ago, Hazzard said:

There is only one way that they can tell from interstellar distance that intelligent creatures inhabit this planet....RADIO.

That's what we think at this early part of our evolution and technological savvy. But I think more mature Aliens would work with some method of communications that is superior to what we have now, and we ar already looking at exotic methods of communication based on quantum enanglement. 

4 hours ago, Hazzard said:

  There would have to be 10 billion technically sophisticated societies in the Galaxy to have a reasonable chance of finding one camped out among the nearest three dozen stars (our radio bubble) Thats optimism of a high level indeed. Its here that the UFO dudes always throw in some exotic propulsion like warp drive? Lightspeed? Maybe the aliens can create wormholes and get here in essentially no time? 

I think that wormhole looks good for now, as it was proposed by Einstein so it is not just romantically dreaming. They have to have *something* to supersede speed of light travel or forget it. We'll be stuck here forever 

4 hours ago, Hazzard said:

It doesnt matter. Ill worry about how they got here once Im convinced that theyve really made the scene.

To get here they need to know were we are.

Exactly, and we do not have this huge neon sign in space hanging over earth saying "Cool humans right here", so they are just as stumped trying to find us as we are trying to find them. One caveat to that however, the really ancient, advanced civilizations may know better already. Just a thought.

[Earl.Of.Trumps]

4 hours ago, XenoFish said:

I'm pretty sure religions that put humanity on a divine pedestal might be a bit peeved. 

You'd think, yes. but the Pope already gave his speech to his people, pretty much saying that if Aliens in UFOs showed up on our planet, it does nothing to change the catholic theology. I still say he did this to prepare them, as if he knows that full disclosure is coming in America and England, but that is only speculation. Of course, the Vatican has its own intel organization that is allied to CIA and MI6, so....

[Earl.Of.Trumps]

4 hours ago, Hazzard said:

Second, anyone who thinks the government is capable of covering up something as monumental as this must not pay much attention to national political news.

They could and have covered up Alien UFO incidents. They just deny these UFO reports and let the people argue. Inevitably, people back the government even if the government coverup is obvious 

[Earl.Of.Trumps]

4 hours ago, Hazzard said:

Real Predators, who must be many thousands of years ahead of us tech wise, have presumably moved beyond this.... Presumably. 

Of course. If they have the technology to get here, they aren't starving LOL

[Golden Duck]

7 hours ago, spud the mackem said:

If we detect a signal it wouldn't be in any Earth language ,but probably a series of numbers ,then depending on how far away , and how long it took to get here we could reply but it could take years to answer ,but if N.A.S.A. received it ,they would with hold it (on Government instructions ) from the public as it maybe would cause mass panic or hysteria , but if an ordinary person received it ,would any one believe them. I believe that there has to be life out there , but the universe is so vast that we maybe will never know , for as Carl Sagan said " we are a small dot in a vast universe ". Unless of course a Government has already received signals which are being withheld.  

It probably would NOT cause mass hysteria  We didn't see it with Copernicus or Darwin.  We didn't see it from Indigenous Australians when DNA showed they migrated to Australia.

[Golden Duck]

7 hours ago, XenoFish said:

If true. I wonder how many would write it off as fake news?

My guess it would written off as a nothing burger. 

You'd still have to show up to work.

[stereologist]

5 hours ago, Earl.Of.Trumps said:

I would think they don't know us any more than we know of them. They are just shooting an arrow into the air and hope it sticks. We've done it.

That's what we think at this early part of our evolution and technological savvy. But I think more mature Aliens would work with some method of communications that is superior to what we have now, and we ar already looking at exotic methods of communication based on quantum enanglement. 

I think that wormhole looks good for now, as it was proposed by Einstein so it is not just romantically dreaming. They have to have *something* to supersede speed of light travel or forget it. We'll be stuck here forever 

Exactly, and we do not have this huge neon sign in space hanging over earth saying "Cool humans right here", so they are just as stumped trying to find us as we are trying to find them. One caveat to that however, the really ancient, advanced civilizations may know better already. Just a thought.

Some basic mistakes.

1. Quantum entanglement requires that two particles become entangled and that does not happen at a distance.

2. Wormholes require two ends to be made and connected. Hardly a way of traveling great distances.

3. People are already looking into the possibility of examining the chemical make up of distant planets.

But you've been informed of your mistakes countless times.

[stereologist]

5 hours ago, Earl.Of.Trumps said:

You'd think, yes. but the Pope already gave his speech to his people, pretty much saying that if Aliens in UFOs showed up on our planet, it does nothing to change the catholic theology. I still say he did this to prepare them, as if he knows that full disclosure is coming in America and England, but that is only speculation. Of course, the Vatican has its own intel organization that is allied to CIA and MI6, so....

Love the nonsense. It makes everyone smile.

CT is laughable. It has the Vatican mixed up with all of the other governments even though it is not a government.

Disclosure being imminent is such a joke. It's been a joke for half a century at least.

[stereologist]

5 hours ago, Earl.Of.Trumps said:

They could and have covered up Alien UFO incidents. They just deny these UFO reports and let the people argue. Inevitably, people back the government even if the government coverup is obvious 

That's a pretty lame claim. It's the sort of shallow thinking that has become the UFO norm.

[Grim Reaper 6]

10 hours ago, Hazzard said:

We still cant say what real aliens are like, but science can provide some useful insights. After all, any biology out there will exist in a landscape of finite resources. Darwinian competition will be their lot, as well as ours. So you can expect that there will be some less cuddly ETs out there.
 

Predation is an economic device... carnivores leave it to plants or plant eaters to slowly build up energyrich molecules from sunlight or some other source. They then harvest this crop of useful compounds quickly, a good tactic that can power an active life style.

But of course, for an intelligent species with technology capable of interstellar travel, predation is sooo Stone Age?!  Even today, humans (who are a long way from being able to make sporting trips to other star systems) dont rely on predation much. We farm our food, and maybe soon we will manufacture it. Killing just for the fun of it, as the Hollywood Predators do, is no longer considered socially acceptable in most circles. 

Real Predators, who must be many thousands of years ahead of us tech wise, have presumably moved beyond this.... Presumably. 

I don't think that we can presume that they will think the same way that we do. I also don't think that applying our methods of thought to their possible actions is also not possible. While this is all conjecture, I suspect that we will never know for certain unless it ever happens.

[Hazzard]

10 hours ago, Manwon Lender said:

I don't think that we can presume that they will think the same way that we do. I also don't think that applying our methods of thought to their possible actions is also not possible. While this is all conjecture, I suspect that we will never know for certain unless it ever happens.

I dont think its that far off to assume that extraterrestrial evolution started pretty much as our own, with single cell developing over time. Water and landbased animals fighting over resources. Sure, we only have an example of one so far but it states clearly that intelligent or not, high tech or not, resources are extremely important to all life,... on Earth. 

[Hazzard]

16 hours ago, Earl.Of.Trumps said:

They could and have covered up Alien UFO incidents. They just deny these UFO reports and let the people argue. Inevitably, people back the government even if the government coverup is obvious 

Well, if they have covered it up then how come you know about it? ...and for the love of God please dont say Roswell or some other dead horse!!  

[Not Invented Here]

Unless any message that was received was deliberately designed to be easy to decode (and how would an alien species know enough about our psychology or technology to make it easy?) we would probably never be able to understand it. See the various undecipherable languages (Linear A; Cretan hieroglyphs) that we cannot interpret to this day, despite the fact that those laguages were made very recently (on a galactic scale), by humans who traded with humans whose languages we can read.

But certain types of messages using radio or light would be almost unavoidably recognised as artificial if we ever detected them. The "wow!" signal was a powerful, narrowband radio signal that was briefly detected for 72 seconds in 1977. Never to be heard again, and although there was no obvious infomation contained in it, it remains unexplained by any natural process. 

But SETI doesnt just look for radio. They also have a project looking for laser light pulses from space. 

In the meantime, we need to pose the question at the heart of the fermi paradox. "where is everybody?"

I have spent an awful lot of my life reading everything I can and I think that the below article is the most profound, fascinating thing I've ever read on the web in my 40 years. If you have time to sit and read something read this (by a scientist who can also communicate beautifully) about the leading theories about why we're not knee deep in aliens, and hope that the "great filter" is behind us! https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html  For those familiar with the fermi paradox it is even more worth a read as it ranges widely.

The other, more neglected way that some of the original people who set up SETI thought we might detect alien life was via artifacts in space that we would be able to detect. Of course to be detected at interstellar distances such artifacts would need to be beyond any sort of human scale. So we may as well start with the biggest.

Carl Sagan predicted that maybe one day we might find stars that had been altered by artificial means. Stars are surprisingly (to me at least) well understood. An awful lot can be understood from a star's spectra - the exact colours of the star's light tells us which elements the star contains, and because we know a lot about how elements behave on earth a lot can be said about a given star's make up, age etc from it's spectra.

So how would we detect stars that have been altered either deliberately as a 'beacon' or via dumping or other activity? By spotting elements in a star that shouldn't be there according to known physics. Welcome to HD 101065 or Przybylski’s Star - where iron and nickel appear in "unusually low abundances, but there are short-lived ultra-heavy elements, actinides like actinium, plutonium, americium and einsteinium. Hence the mystery: How can such short-lived elements persist in the atmosphere of a star?" https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2017/03/28/the-challenges-of-przybylskis-star/  what , or who is putting them there?

There are other interesting stars out there too. Shout out to https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/ "Tabby's star". This has seen such huge temporary 'dips' in the amount of light (20%+ reduction) being seen, plus century long overall dimming, that astronomers genuinely started to wonder whether a huge structure was being built around the whole star. Further analysis suggests that the dips were in fact caused by dust around that star, but the mechanism for the creation and sustaining of the dust (it should 'blow out' of the system) remain unknown. The dips are the wrong shape to be caused by comets and to date that star's peculiarities remain unique.

(Also - should have been an astronomer - you get stars named after you!)

Finally there is 'Oumuamua. The first object ever detected as arriving from outside our solar system. Weird things about it: It may as much as ten times as long as it is wide - at 230m long, that is an unnatural shape. It arrived on the sort of trajectory that earth scientists use when sending probes around the solar system, it will have got a good 'look' at three of the four rocky inner-system planet circling our sun (that includes earth). Unsurprisingly, lots of telescopes were trained on it, including SETI ones. Result? Looks like a boring rocky surface. No signals emanating from it. Probably a rock. It's also going too fast to realistically catch up with it. But then... on the way out of our system it starts to accelerate in a way not due to gravity.... 

 

Edited August 10, 2019 by Not Invented Here
paragraphs

[XenoFish]

Maybe the point of our existence as a species is the colonize other worlds? We could be the first.

[Orphalesion]

On 8/9/2019 at 5:48 PM, XenoFish said:

Oh man. It would be hilarious if the first alien contact with have is one of their soap operas.

The Real Houseflargs of Trappist 1-e

On 8/9/2019 at 6:27 PM, OverSword said:

Get ready for war.  The Holy Emperor of Humanity shall lead us to gloriously eliminating the xeno filth from our galaxy so that humanity may live in peace.  Praise Him

Pffffft I never voted for that guy! #NotMyEmperor

[XenoFish]

4 minutes ago, Orphalesion said:

Pffffft I never voted for that guy! #NotMyEmperor