SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded.
The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable.
If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
suns are sentient beings, and by just watching the stars, we may see them communicate
With radio signals?
They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.
This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!
At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.
Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.
Outside of this safety Bubble there's a strong tendency for conflict and war. Only after two cruel world wars and a prolonged cold war, the western world got their shit together and decided 'enough of that'. And even that doesn't seem to hold much longer, so it seems we will only have managed to live peaceful among each other without an immediate conflict with somebody (cold war) for roughly 30 years.
If aliens are remotely like us, they shouldn't know about us.
Nobody wants our Lego.
I'm only half-joking.
Let's say they have had thousands of years of Nuclear Fusion, for example, it wouldn't surprise me if they could produce any elements they need by fusing hydrogen.
But let's say they didn't, and they do in fact see Earth as a rare jewel full of precious materials... the logistics of taking our natural resources just seems like a joke. Surely the juice isn't worth the hundreds of years of planning and logistics squeeze.
I used to buy this dark forest idea, because it's scary and exciting, but I think the biggest mistake is projecting our behaviours onto extra-terrestrials.
If they wanted to destroy Earth they'd just slightly nudge a big asteroid in our direction and be done with it.
/ sorry for the ADHD rant
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.
Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.
Sounds like a great sci-fi premise. "Hey, there aren't enough knock-down, drag-out religious wars on Earth. Let's start beef with the nuclear-armed, FTL-capable sky wizard cult on Epsilon Eridani 4."
Here's a later article from 2010: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door
This is what I thought also.
Maybe they didn’t find any signals, but just said, “To heck with it. We’ll just say we found 100 signals, and let them come to us!”
According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
(Well, none pointing at stars at least. There are some spy sats pointed down.)
https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...
One exception is the far side of the moon to get away from radio noise. But other than that, there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space.
there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space
sadly isn't as true as it once was ..
* https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa51856-...
Once that constellation is fully expanded as intended, the planned chinese constellation joins it, and other nations (India?, the EU?) pile on, things will get even noisier.
The dark side of the moon offers hope, but it's still a lot of addiional awkwardness and expense that could be avoided with better attention to "the commons".
The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.
When it came time for questions I asked. So, if we were at Alpha Centari could we detect signals from earth with the tech we currently have? They said "No". That was 2019. Maybe tech is better today?
“There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” he said. “We have to do a better job of measuring what we’re excluding. Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches, and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere.”
Is this not the perfect job for AI today? Just sit there and digest signals for 30 years and report back the top 1000? I'm quite sure it could even work on the algorithms as a side-quest.
You could hypothetically use AI to write algorithms to find the patterns, but people have already spent a long time super-tuning them.
AIs can't even (at least I keep checking) solve Sudokus as well as my mother -- they aren't good with piles of numbers and complex patterns.
This sort of effort really ought to be conducted with antennas on the far side of the Moon, IMO. But good luck finding the budget for that these days.
seti@home was definetly a cool screensaver, though.[0]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Korpela/publicatio...
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=3346...
I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot.
I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.
Literally thousands of witnesses. It's very odd to say "aliens may exist, but those nuclear weapons officers are crazy, aliens would definitely be sending signals from elsewhere, they would not be and are not here."
[1] 50 USC § 3373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373