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SETI spots dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy
- siavosh 8y ago3 billion miles away, typo?
- admax88q 8y agolol yeah. Other articles say 3 billion light-years, slightly further than 3 billion miles haha.
- iscrewyou 8y agoEver so slightly.
- chimeracoder 8y ago> 3 billion miles away, typo? "from a mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 somewhere between Neptune and Pluto"
- ndarilek 8y ago"Seventy-two new “fast radio bursts” from a mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away" Wait, what? I thought space is big. Really big. This mysterious distant galaxy is practically in our backyard.
- admax88q 8y agoShould be 3 billion light years according to other articles.
- fhood 8y agoNot just practically, I would say 3 billion miles away puts it firmly on top of us.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoAbout as close as Pluto. No wonder it can't be a planet.
- microtherion 8y agoMessage probably says: "Get us in touch with your Plutocrats".
- wu-ikkyu 8y agoOur plutocrats don't take kindly to illegal alien aliens.
- Sharlin 8y agoThree billion miles is roughly the distance to Neptune. So, yeah.
- owenversteeg 8y agoFor reference, that's closer than Pluto is (normally) to the Earth. Other sources all say "3 billion light years", which seems more accurate and believable.
- VikingCoder 8y agoWow, this seems really exciting. This could be huge! Narrator: It wasn't.
- dustfinger 8y agoIt is exciting because we can't explain it yet. That makes it interesting and worthy of study. >> This could be huge! Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the humor and understand how the media tends to over hype any news that could potentially excite people interested in the discovery of little green men, but I never felt that this particular article was doing that.
- moneil971 8y agoOk, but the point isn't little green men -- it's that SETI is now using AI and a convolutional neural network. Not that AI and ML isn't also a victim of media hype...
- fishtoaster 8y agoI felt like this particular article was almost bizarrely moderate in its tone. It managed to talk about ML and a new seti discovery in a balanced manner, discussing both the optimistic and realistic takes. I guess I'm just so used to modern headline writing that I'm pleasantly surprised when someone doesn't publish "Artificial Intelligence finds aliens." :)
- dustfinger 8y agoI am glad the information was not presented in a sensational way. I find Fast Radio Bursts really interesting. They have been discussed on HN many times. For those interested see: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=fast%20radio%20burst&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=fast%20radio%20burst&sort=byPo...
- jeletonskelly 8y agoSo, aren't we sending out radio signals in a spiral as the planet rotates that would be massively spread out over a distance of 3 billion light years? If I were broadcasting something into space constantly some alien civilization would only be exposed to perhaps a very short portion of the signal until Earth had fully rotated again and my signal lined up perfectly to their planet again.
- dustfinger 8y agoYes we are sending radio light out, but it certainly has not traveled 3 billion light years. Also, our weak transmission would be nearly invisible. FRBs are interesting because they are super high-energy bursts over short time durations.
- mitchty 8y agoIndeed, hell, our earliest broadcasts have barely made it past the closest star systems. https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/news/a27934/galaxy-map-human-radio-broadcasts/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/news/a27934/galaxy-ma... If we can control the amount of energy as these broadcasts, we'd basically be gods for all intents and purposes.
- yannyu 8y agoEM waves are spherical in nature (analogous to ripples in a pond) rather than directional. So the rotation of the earth wouldn't significantly affect the strength/reception of the signal by a distant planet. The bigger factors would be signal degradation because distance and other kinds of interference.
- prerok 8y agoWell, that's true, but that is why we use dishes to direct the signal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_antenna https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_antenna I think we generally believe that the dishes are used just for receivers but they are also used in directing transmitters. In fact, there are also heavy regulations for high-speed long distance directed microwave antennas to not spread the signal too broadly: https://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Orders/1997/fcc97001.pdf https://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Orders/19...
- Exuma 8y agoI remember running SETI @ Home on my 300 MHz Gateway and watching the pretty graphs as if I was a real life alien spaceship pilot. It's funny to hear that it's actually a real thing (I knew it was real, but when I saw the size of the radio dish in the image, it's REALLY real)
- savanu 8y agoIts the Greenbank telescope in West Virginia. I don't think its particularly associated with SETI. The telescope is available on a rental basis. People just schedule it to point it wherever.
- cgriswald 8y ago> I don't think its particularly associated with SETI. That depends on what you mean by "associated". It's not associated directly with SETI the institute, but it was the site of the first systematic/scientific search (and false positive) for extra-terrestrial intelligence lead by Frank Drake. It is also the place where The Order of the Dolphin (Drake, Carl Sagan, Otto Struve, et al.) met and developed the Drake Equation.
- savanu 8y agoThe one in the picture is the 100m dish. Frank Drake used the 25m dish. Just being nitpicky, I get your point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#History
- rootbear 8y agoThe telescope there is amazing. It's worth a visit, they have a visitor's center and tours. I was there for the 50th anniversary celebration, in 2006, and want to go back some day.
- Senderman 8y agoSame on my 100 MHz Apricot. I like to think it helped. One thing that used to bug me is I wondered how much CPU time was being spent on rendering those graphs locally.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago72 new bursts, on top of 21 already identified, in five hours of data. Total of 93 bursts in five hours, for an average of one every 3 minutes 14 seconds. That's... rather surprising.
- dustfinger 8y agoIt was a 5 hour session, but all of the bursts were discovered in the same 1 hour period. >Initial “standard” algorithms identified 21 FRBs, all happening in one hour’s worth of the observations...Sure enough, the machine learning model picked out 72 more FRBs in the same period.
- ChillyWater 8y agoIf it is actually an average of one every 3 minutes 14.159265359 seconds ... now you've got something.
- jemfinch 8y agoThe length of the minute and second are arbitrary.
- ChillyWater 8y agoDream-killer. :P
- wongarsu 8y agoYou mean not every civilization chooses to make their unit of time multiples of 9,192,631,770 cesium-133 oscillations? /s
- OccamsLaser 8y agoPlus, if they don't use Tau by convention, they aren't even worth discovering in the first place.
- GeorgeTirebiter 8y ago
- based2 8y agohttps://www.obspm.fr/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=2998 https://www.obspm.fr/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=2998
- nautilus12 8y agoHow long would it take radio waves to travel 3 billion light years? If it is a communication it would be from very far in the past. Assume it takes life about the same time to evolve on other planets wouldn't that mean that we wouldn't expect to start hearing radio communications until billions of years from now?
- iamatworknow 8y agoRadio waves travel at the speed of light...so 3 billion years.
- gnulinux 8y agoYes, assuming this is an actual intelligent life sending us radio waves, we're seeing their signals sent 3 billion years ago. So it's entirely possible their species already went extinct or they left their home planet for galactic expedition. Practically, nothing is the same about this civilization since they sent this signal. To put this into perspective: when this civilization sent this signal, there was merely unicellular life on the earth!
- rubyn00bie 8y agoI have a question... and this is probably a stupid question, but... does anyone know if there is any theory to support the idea that sufficiently advanced civilizations rely on something other than radio waves or light to perform communications? My dumbass-self wonders about quantum entanglement or teleportation as means of communication we have yet to master; may be, the medium of communications for the super civilizations of the universe. Note: Just wanted to say, I'm less trying to talk about "FTL" and more so that we may just not be able to intercept, decode, or "see" the communications via our current technologies. P.S. Thanks for the thoughtful replies.
- cmsimike 8y agoI think this goes back to searching for other life on earth-like planets. We know what life looks like on our planet, so that's really the only thing we have to go off of, otherwise we are stabbing in the dark. Likely we are searching for radio waves and light since that's the only thing we know how to communicate with.
- bluGill 8y agoIt is more than that. We know what life looks like: composed of carbon because that is the only atom than easily forms long chains of double bonds. It is also very likely to be composed of the atoms that are common in the universe: the low Atomic number ones.
- gbrown 8y agoAlso, liquid water is very convenient for complex chemistry.
- monochromatic 8y agoIt’s by definition stuff that we don’t know about, so we can’t exactly go looking for it.
- eip 8y ago"I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known." Terence McKenna Psilocybin - Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide
- kmetan 8y agoLets hope that they allready checked the microwave oven
- ISL 8y agoKmetan is serious. Half of the first detections of FRBs were traced to a microwave oven at Parkes Observatory.
- aresant 8y agoIf you haven’t read “Three Body Problem” - warning spoiler alert - the premise was mind blowing to me - that the reason aliens aren’t broadcasting signals is that more mature spacefaring societies use those signals as targeting vectors! Eg aliens aren’t interested in making contact, and our efforts to broadcast our location could be inviting our ruin.
- mig39 8y agoThat's exactly where my mind went when I read the link... whatever we do, don't answer the signal :-)
- gnulinux 8y agoWe'd be safe for 3 billion years, probably. Also I don't think we have the technology to answer that call (can radio waves sent by humans be visible after traveling 3 billion lightyears?)
- nickthemagicman 8y agoHaha sounds like a movie preview.
- bluGill 8y agoPossible, but not something I'm worried about. Those "mature" societies are still limited to the speed of light, they would have to be willing to wait out an average trip of thousands of years just to wipe out new civilizations in our galaxy - assuming the new civilization survives that long.
- interfixus 8y ago> a mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away Some close galaxy, that!
- breck 8y ago~ 100TB an hour of data. I’m guessing it doesn’t compress well. Do they write that to disk or filter it in memory and only pass on a subset?
- ggggtez 8y agoIf it was compressible, that would mean there was a repeating pattern. The whole point is that the data is extremely noisy, so finding a pattern is difficult.
- daodedickinson 8y agoI imagine a lot of sensors are detecting the same silence or non-zero EM signal most of the time (when adjusted to be as-if they were pointed in the same direction, anyway) and differences are the rarity.
- iamgopal 8y agoSo finding SETI is all about finding compressible data ?
- andbberger 8y agoActually, yes. There's a deep connection between the compressibility and predictability of things. But we're not good at learning the complex distributions needed for these sorts of things - there's a long standing competition for natural language compression, the idea being if you can do that perfectly you basically have human level semantic understanding.
- dboreham 8y agoUnderlying source : http://seti.berkeley.edu/frb-machine/ http://seti.berkeley.edu/frb-machine/ and paper : http://blpd0.ssl.berkeley.edu/frb-machine/CNNFRB_eprint.pdf http://blpd0.ssl.berkeley.edu/frb-machine/CNNFRB_eprint.pdf
- coleifer 8y agoPlease let it be aliens
- gnulinux 8y agoI'm interested in aliens especially because of biological curiosity. I wonder how did their evolution happen, what unique futures their species developed, from what sort of creatures they evolved (if they're primate-like too, that would be very weird), do they have emotions like humans, why did their brain evolve so large?
- projektir 8y agoPlease let it not be aliens.
- harshulpandav 8y agoI wonder why many people visualize aliens to be entities with flesh or something else like how species (that move or grow) on earth. I think aliens can also be in the form of new elements, rocks, gases, waves, or some entity which is beyond the ability of 5 senses of humans to perceive. Currently we use other methods to transform perception of entities so that humans can see/feel/hear/understand. But the devices we build for this purpose are built using earth elements. It could also be probable that earth might not be having those elements which are required to give humans the ability to perceive other entities.
- komali2 8y agoDepending on who you read, life could be quantum wave functions flying around the universe, or even dark-matter "birds" slowly tearing suns apart. I may read too much sci fi.
- Balgair 8y agoYes, the fight between Baryonic matter and Dark matter does promise to be quite the show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeelee_Sequence
- conception 8y agoWell, chemistry has some pretty good evidence on which elements do and can exist. I don't think we'll be seeing unknown elements (sorry Mass Effect) any time soon. And if they exist beyond what physics can currently detect, then the point is sorta moot.
- raverbashing 8y agoNot unknown periodic table elements, but new minerals, possibly formed in conditions not found in Earth, yeah
- godelski 8y agoChemistry would suggest we've found all stable naturally occurring elements too. BUT I will say that there is extremely good evidence that there are plenty of unknown elements (I'd argue that every chemist agrees). Well, more accurately, elements we haven't created. Feynman says the limit is 137, but others think it is higher (relativistic limits). The thing is most of these are unlikely to be stable, though there are some predictions for stability in the 120's. But to be life, they would need to be stable. And it would be EXTREMELY odd for life to be made from non common and non naturally occurring elements. Even more odd to be from unstable ones.
- syndacks 8y agoAliens == God As humans, we wish something greater exists. It minimizes the noise in our otherwise meaningless lives. It gives reason. And so we make up stories and find stories in signals and get excited at the prospect that _this_ just might be it. But it never happens. And we go on searching and believing, and then we die.
- antidesitter 8y agoHow do aliens “minimize the noise in our lives” and “give us reason”?
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoThe difference is that there are falsifiable hypotheses about aliens, and there are valid scientific reasons to believe they might (and statistically probably should) exist.
- daodedickinson 8y agoI have trouble finding it, but I think Thoreau at some point says you can find out what an atheist thinks of god by what they think superhuman aliens would be like. Definitely worked for Stephen Hawking.
- pluto9 8y agoWhy do they have to be "something greater"? Most people would be thrilled if we found the alien equivalent to a jellyfish. People like aliens because we're curious creatures and aliens are unknown and interesting. I've never understood why some people feel the need to inject their mopey nihilism into everything.
- syndacks 8y agoQuite the opposite, my friend. I'm a humanist. IMO each bit of energy expended in the search of aliens is an opportunity cost to do something real here on Earth. So while you get excited about theoretical space jellyfish (or colonizing Mars, or the Second Coming of Christ (not you, specifically, just in theory I group these together)), I will excite myself with the alleviation of human suffering and preservation of planet Earth.
- spullara 8y agoThe background radiation is actually the universal communication band broadcasting the entire knowledge of every civilization that has ever existed but sadly it is encrypted so appears to be random.
- vram22 8y agoThe novel Contact by Carl Sagan was pretty good in this area of SETI.
- SilentM68 8y agoA lot of unexplained happenings occurring all of a sudden. First mysterious signals from space and now the sudden closure and lock-down of the New Mexico Solar Observatory: https://www.abqjournal.com/1219922/nm-solar-observatory-closed-authorities-mum.html https://www.abqjournal.com/1219922/nm-solar-observatory-clos...
- dmix 8y agoWas that observatory even operational?
- SilentM68 8y agoThat's a good question? Only someone local from that area, e.g. not me, would be able to answer that. Here's another question, even if it was not operational, then why all the secrecy surrounding the closure last Thursday. Even if it was some sort of break-in, or similar, occurrence, there is usually some sort of PR of some kind, but not providing information usually leads people to speculate, e.g. UFOs, aliens, which is now the case on social media sites: https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article218385560.html https://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article21838556...
- IAmGraydon 8y ago2 things is “a lot”?
- cletus 8y agoFor anyone interested in this or related topics I highly, highly recommend the series of 100+ videos in Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur ("SFIA") [1]. Relevant to this topic: - Fermi Paradox series (15 videos) [2] - Advanced Civilizations (19 videos) [3] - Alien Civilizations (10 videos) [4] Of particular relevance is the Kardashev scale [5]. The basic idea is this: unless something catastrophic happens, humanity is destined to become a Kardashev-2 ("K2") civilization without a blink of a cosmic eye (measured in thousands of years). Since the timeline from sentience to K2 is so short (cosmologically speaking) it seems pretty unlikely there are other spacefaring civilizations in our galaxy. It's worth noting that the scale of such a civilization is so immense and what it is capable of with access to that much energy and resources tends to debunk a lot of ideas that come out of a search for explanations to the Fermi paradox. For example, there is the idea that civilizations might "hide" and would not be detectable. Such an effort would be futile vs a K2 civilization however. I mention this because there is the idea that aliens might not use radio technology. Doing so wouldn't keep you hidden from a K2 civilization so there's no point in trying. And I find this a compelling line of reasoning. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g [2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh... [3]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Ls3WMYP_2FpP9Y0mjgtf98M https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Ls3WMYP_2Fp... [4]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lu97HzMt_BJu36UMaItB1cm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIIOUpOge0Lu97HzMt_BJ... [5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dArpj_VxxuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dArpj_VxxuQ
- Ataraxy 8y agoMy favorite channel on youtube. Couldn't reccommend it enough.
- androidgirl 8y agoIsaac Arthur is my absolute favorite. Every Saturday morning after I make my coffee, I sit down and am enthralled by this week's video.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jordache 8y agomore like deficient machine learning code rather than actual intelligence findings.
- dvh 8y agoCan we please stop calling FRBs mysterious signals when we already have name for them. It's not something new it's FRB. They set out to find FRBs and they found FRBs.
- ForrestN 8y agoI hope they are breaking the prime directive in order to save humankind from the Republicans!
- gpsx 8y agoI have trouble connecting to the cell tower down the street. I don't know how they are going to receive a real communication signal from that many light years away.
- NKosmatos 8y ago400TB in 5hr??? So in 18000 sec (5hr×60min×60sec) they saved 409600 GB... which roughly is a transfer speed of 22.7GB/sec. I'm wondering what type of SSD raid they've got :-)
- saagarjha 8y agoI'm sure the data is coming in from multiple sources and being stored on high capacity tape archives or something, if it's not just being thrown away at some point after analysis is complete.
- pheon 8y agoNot possible, write bandwidth of tape is not very high. My guess is they have a cabinet / 42U worth of HDD arrays, by the numbers they need ~ 176Gbps write bandwidth which is totally possible even in half a cabinet. 400TB worth of SSDs @ 176Gbps write bandwidth is also very possible, would be ~ 4U expect but extremely expensive.
- Eli_P 8y agoI've converted series of those images to audio, it's obviously swipes and trills only. I wish I could get my hands on higher resolution images to get a drop of a real alien dubstep, not some cheap microwave oven blues.
- NegativeLatency 8y agoCould you post a soundcloud link or something? I’d be interested to hear what you’ve got.
- Eli_P 8y agoUploaded. SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/xca8biolusw4/sets/seti-space-noise-mapped-to-audio https://soundcloud.com/xca8biolusw4/sets/seti-space-noise-ma... Conversion script used: https://gist.github.com/ptytb/6eade153de6f54dbc0fc1fc0d469939e https://gist.github.com/ptytb/6eade153de6f54dbc0fc1fc0d46993...
- make3 8y agono way would an Alien specie able of sending signals of such strength would send uncompressed / unpreprocessed audio. it is more likely that they would send perfectly compressed data that would appear indistinguishable from noise to us, as this is what optimally compressed information looks like
- minikites 8y agoInspired by NASA? https://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/blogs/symphonies-of-the-planets.htm https://www.stufftoblowyourmind.com/blogs/symphonies-of-the-... >For instance, the probes picked up the interaction of solar wind on the planets magnetospheres, which releases ionic particles with an audible vibration frequency. Essentially, we can then translate these waves into sound waves and put them on an album. https://archive.org/details/SymphoniesOfThePlanets2 https://archive.org/details/SymphoniesOfThePlanets2 https://archive.org/details/SymphoniesOfThePlanets3 https://archive.org/details/SymphoniesOfThePlanets3
- mbrumlow 8y agoThis is cool, but TC's site is shit. THis seems to be just a article to push you to a iPhone advertisement that loads once you scroll down.
- stephengillie 8y ago> The high degree of rotation of the nearly 100 percent polarized radio bursts is unusual, and has only been seen in radio emissions from the extreme magnetic environments around massive black holes, such as those at the centers of galaxies. The Dutch and Breakthrough Listen teams suggest that the fast radio bursts may come from a highly magnetized rotating neutron star – a magnetar – in the vicinity of a massive black hole that is still growing as gas and dust fall into it. The short bursts, which range from 30 microseconds to 9 milliseconds in duration, indicate that the source could be as small as 10 kilometers across – the typical size of a neutron star. Other possible sources are a magnetar interacting with the nebula of material shed when the original star exploded to produce the magnetar; or interactions with the highly magnetized wind from a rotating neutron star, or pulsar. [0] Do any terrestrial sources create polarized radio waves? Would polarization help beamforming or other range-extending techniques? [0]http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/01/10/seti-project-homes-in-on-strange-fast-radio-bursts/ http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/01/10/seti-project-homes-in-on...
- delecti 8y agoI'm certainly no expert, but the Wikipedia article on the subject says this: > All radio (and microwave) antennas used for transmitting or receiving are intrinsically polarized. They transmit in (or receive signals from) a particular polarization, being totally insensitive to the opposite polarization; in certain cases that polarization is a function of direction. Most antennas are nominally linearly polarized, but elliptical and circular polarization is a possibility. As is the convention in optics, the "polarization" of a radio wave is understood to refer to the polarization of its electric field, with the magnetic field being at a 90 degree rotation with respect to it for a linearly polarized wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves)#Radio_transmission_and_reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves)#Radio_tra... So it's less that it helps, and more that it's inevitable.
- cortic 8y ago>noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away that's only 0.00051 of a light year, or a few light hours away.. either me or them has a big math problem.
- caf 8y agoYes, 3 billion miles is closer than Pluto.
- harrygallagher4 8y agoThe press release says 3 billion light years. Probably just a mistake at TC PR: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/news/22 https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/news/22
- okonomiyaki3000 8y agoDon't respond right away, it looks desperate. Wait a day or two. Does anybody know if SETI automatically sends read receipts? Turn that off if at all possible.
- person_of_color 8y agoIs there an explanation of FRBs that uses terminology that someone with a University education of DSP would be accustom to?
- kumarvvr 8y ago> 3 Billion miles That is ridiculously close. For reference, the distance between sun and earth is about 150 Million miles.
- cscurmudgeon 8y agoThe reporter probably assumed light years are a measure of time and "fixed" it.
- brandmeyer 8y agoFrom context, I 'm pretty sure its light-years, not miles, and this was a typo. The curvature of the pulses in the frequency domain implies that there's lots of ionized gas between the us and the source. Lower frequencies are delayed relative to higher frequencies. Also, "mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away" (emphasis mine).
- Schmazo 8y agoThe first paragraph of the article says the galaxy is 3 billion miles away. That might be a editing error.
- WheelsAtLarge 8y agoPeople are so quick to classify anything that can't be explained immediately as extraterrestrials. I would bet a lot of money that this has nothing to do with extraterrestrials only because after so many years there is no proof that such exist. Come on everyone get back into reality and look for the true answer. A true scientist tries to disprove his/her theory until there can be no other answer as opposed to picking the first theory and going with it.
- topmonk 8y agoThere is some evidence for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Airport_UFO_sighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Ai...
- WheelsAtLarge 8y agoUFO does not equal extraterrestrial. It's an acronym for an unidentified flying object. Also, for many years the air force promoted the UFO idea as a way to cover their aircraft research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_conspiracy_theory
- WheelsAtLarge 8y agooops wrong link Here's the right one: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/09/16/the-truth-behind-ufo-sightings-and-the-us-air-force https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2010/09/16/the-truth...
- cpeterso 8y agoUsing machine learning to anaylze mystery signals reminds me of Stanisław Lem's novel His Master's Voice (1968). It's a fictional memoir of a mathematician working on a Manhattan Project-like project to analyze a signal from space. The book is like a cross between Contact and Catch-22. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master's_Voice_(novel)
- sebazzz 8y agoI know we have optical telescopes in space. Don't we have radio telescopes in space too, like SETI? Why not?
- maym86 8y agoOptical telescopes are in space to avoid the effect of the atmosphere. Radio telescopes aren't effected in the same way so I don't think there would be an advantage for them to be in orbit and it would cost a lot more.
- vkou 8y agoThe atmosphere is really good at distorting optical signals. It's not as good at distorting radio waves. Additionally, radio telescopes tend to be enormous - much bigger then optical telescopes. It's one thing to launch a bus-sized instrument into orbit. It's another to launch a stadium-sized instrument into orbit.
- szemet 8y ago" from a mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away" That is good news, that galaxy is close enough to visit;) : https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=3+billion+miles+to+lightminute https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&q=3+billion+miles+to... https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
- otto_ortega 8y agoWhat amuses me is the fact that we are so obsessed with finding civilizations that have an equal or superior level of technology than we do... If such civilization does exists, and if they are anything like us... Our history show us things will NOT end well for us! The more advanced civilization will eventually (always...) conquer the less advanced civilization when in need (or desire...) for resources. It is like if a deer were obsessed to find the hunter that will put its life to an end... If the question we are trying to solve is "Are we alone?" we have better try to look for "less advanced" forms of life, like marine animals or something like that... Otherwise we will get the kind of reply we are not looking for... IMHO
- yesenadam 8y agoI sometimes imagine a species which is to us like we are to cockroaches...
- kruczek 8y ago> The more advanced civilization will eventually (always...) conquer the less advanced civilization when in need (or desire...) for resources. I think this doesn't translate so directly into space. If they are thousands of light years away, then they will have plenty of other planets nearby to harvest for resources.
- de_watcher 8y agoEspecially while the planets aren't the first place you go to harvest resources.
- celticninja 8y agoIt all depends on what sort of resources they are looking for, no one is crossing light years to come steal water from us, when there are other planets that have water (perhaps as ice) and would be undefended. However if they needed territory and the earth had an environment that was hospitable to them then yes they might very well travel light years to invade.
- em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
- tankerdude 8y agoim Kind of stumped at the whole advanced life form contacting us thing. 1. We didnt even emit any real radio waves until just a century or so ago. How did they detect it to know to emit something to us? 2. How much power would that entity have to emit from that distance to be detectable by us? 3. And for civilizations more than 50 light years away, how did they know to even push a signal in our direction if they didn’t sense a single thing except maybe a certain type of atmosphere?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mordae 8y agoWe are not looking for data. We are looking for slow, noisy beacons to know where to look for the data. Much like WiFi AP beacons are on a lower frequency than data transfers or how lighthouses are hard to miss.
- superkuh 8y agoIt's cool that a single dish telescope discovered so many FRB within a short time but the fact that it was done with SETI time on GBT doesn't make FRB as a concept a SETI thing. It's an unexplained thing but broadband radio bursts aren't exactly uncommon in nature. FRB are just really far away. The swept curve as shown in the spectrograms is probably because of distance to the signal and frequency dispersion due to charges along the line of sight. FRB are originally broadband pulses that distort in the medium getting here. It looks like these ones are pretty simple quick burst. The latest discovered by the UTMOST all-sky interferometer recently had a complex bursty structure over time, http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/research/utmost/?p=1475 http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/research/utmost/?p=1475 Instruments like UTMOST and other all-sky digital processed arrays (like SKA and children) should get some every hour once everything is running and optimized.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y agoSo, the "mysterious signals" are Fast Radio Bursts? I mean, it's not that we know what those are exactly, but I was under the impression that nobody really takes them as alien broadcasts. And they have been observed before- just not by SETI's CNNs apparently?
- amgin3 8y ago447 comments here and not one questioning how this "mysteriously noisy galaxy" ended up being closer to us than Pluto.. (article says this galaxy is "3 billion miles away", Pluto is 4.67 billion miles from Earth).
- Razengan 8y agoI'd just like to address a pet peeve by saying that the Fermi Paradox is dumb. It's often thrown around as a low-effort dismissal as if it were a fundamental law that must be fulfilled for extraterrestrial intelligence to be considered. It's a relic of a less-informed era when space was filled with aether and green-skinned humanoids were fancied to inhabit the Moon and Mars, and flying vehicles were expected to be our primary mode of transportation by 20 years ago. An extreme simplification that basically says "If X then Y MUST follow. If no Y then no X." —— We have long had the technology to establish a permanent presence on the Moon, why haven’t we done so by now? We have the tech to put men on Mars, why are we not even planning to do that already? We can build photovoltaic cells, why isn't the Earth covered in them yet? There are still uncontacted tribes on this very planet untouched by modern civilization, why haven't we uplifted our own species yet? I guess we don’t exist either.
- c048 8y agoThe fermi paradox works on a different timescale than the points you bring up, which is exactly why it keeps being brought up. Our civilization has existed for only several thousand years. That is nothing on the cosmological scale. The fermi paradox asks why, when looking at the age of the universe, there is no visible (to our level of technology) trace of other civilizations. Even when expanding at a crawl, a civilization having had a million of years to do so should have reached every corner of our galaxy. The fermi paradox is simply a question: why? Suggestions, like a civilization uploading itself to some sort super computer to experience eternal life, are answers to the fermi paradox. But they do not invalidate it.
- Razengan 8y ago> a civilization having had a million of years to do so should have reached every corner of our galaxy. Why? Why indeed. Why should they? Why is it desirable to do so? Why haven’t we done many of the things that we technically could have done in our timescale by now? “They should have reached every corner of our galaxy” relies on at least the follow assumptions: • That it is desirable to them. • That their ability to reproduce/replicate can keep up with their technology to expand. • That their presence on every planet they colonize lasts indefinitely. • That there is no force—natural, adversarial or internal—that counters unrestricted expansion. • That they even can expand in all directions. (Again, consider our own solar system and how useless, hostile, uneconomic or unstrategic some of the planets in it would be to humans.) • Following on the previous point, that they’re dumb enough to spread themselves thin by colonizing every sub-optimal planet, instead of cherry-picking the planets which are best suited for them or, indeed, constructing their own artificial habitats in space. • That we have the ability to detect all signs of alien presence on all stars and all planets, including any possible artificial worlds and rogue planets. • That we have the ability to detect all PAST alien presence: An species may have already colonized this galaxy once, but thanks to the aforementioned timescales we may have missed running into them by a few million years, like we missed the dinosaurs on our own planet. —— The Fermi Paradox is a flawed premise that itself needs to answer many other “why”s before its “why” can be answered. “Intelligent Life -> [Long enough timespan] -> Intelligent Life on every planet around every star.” A -> [B] -> C, where [B] makes a ridiculous amount of assumptions, then takes the absence of C to invalidate the possibility of A.
- edgarvm 8y agoSeeking for alien messages sent to nobody is silly, we have more chances to find extraterrestrial civilizations if we look for two points that seem talking to each other, I know, easier said than done.
- SeanTankGarvey 8y agoI've always thought of EM (Radio/Communication Technologies) as potential tools to confirm specific sources/locations of other intelligent life as well as possibly their purported agenda/intention/lifestyle/threat-level? (or level of intelligence and even to develop [flawed but useful, a.i. based] predictive algorithms of their future likelihood of physical contact/threat and/or their rate of scientific advancement, based on analysis of numerous factors including their encoding used, past broadcasts compared to current, means of broadcast, etc. Etc. Etcetera.) [STRICTLY LIMITED TO/AT the time of the broadcasts, not at the time we receive them... BIG DIFFERENCE IN ASSUMING THAT THE TWO ARE THE STILL THE SAME!]. Never in my wildest dreams, would I consider us as humans advanced enough to ACTUALLY RESPOND (IN WAY THAT WAS COMPLETELY SAFE, FORETHOUGHT, LOGICAL, CALCULATED, MORAL, AND MUTUALLY-BENEFICIAL!). We shouldn't knowingly, directly communicate or reply to forces beyond our wildest comprehension, for what we wish to be a dream for the future of mankind could quickly turn to its worst nightmare, if we are not careful, moral, loving, prudent, and conscientious. We should not have the audacity to treat our supposed Galactic neighbor(s) based on behavioral assumations, if we ever resort to treating them any way whatsoever, which until we reach a far greater point of advancement (both materially, defensively, socially, scientifically, technologically, and, in all honestly, Spirtually) I advise against, 100% completely. Just my take. Learn what we can without exposing ourselves.
- happy-go-lucky 8y agoI want to believe in SETI's findings, but is this true?