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I 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 civil

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    Also, liquid water is very convenient for complex chemistry.
monochromatic 8y ago
It’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
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Reads like it was written by machine elves...
jerf 8y ago
It depends on whether you want to stay grounded in real-world physics, or if you want to spin off on flights of fancy. If you want to stay in real-world physics, at the moment there is no reason to expect any civilization to use anything other than electromagnetic radiation for communication. Other than the low speed of light, which is a characteristic of the universe that it does not seem to allow any faster-than-light communication so it's not specially a disadvantage for EM, electromagnetic radiation basically has every characteristic you're looking for in a communications medium, and there's little reason to believe even an advanced civilization would use something orders of magnitude worse on numerous dimensions simply because maybe they can. This is for much the same reason that we could transport everything in our civilization by people carrying things around on Segways, but we don't, because why would we deliberately choose something suboptimal? If you want to go off on flights of fancy, then anything is possible, but there's no way to say anything useful about it. The "grounded in reality" answer is subject to change as our understanding of physics improves, but at the moment I wouldn't say there's any particular reason to expect this answer to change much. Even on the crazy fringe frontiers of real science, I am not aware of any candidates for communication any better than EM. Most of the whacky ideas proposed as alternate methods fail by orders of magnitude vs EM. Might you be able to build a better neutrino detector than we can? Maybe, but it's still easier to build EM detectors, and EM emitters, by a lot. Gravity waves? Why on not-Earth would anyone spend the massive, massive amounts of energy required to do that, very klunkily and with very low bandwidth, when for literally a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth the energy expenditure you could use EM, and get higher bandwidth to boot and better reusability to boot? Quantum entanglement and teleportion are non-starters, because they both require a conventional channel to work at all, and the best tool for that communication is EM.
- SilasX 8y ago
  I think the parent meant -- or a least a steelman of the point would be -- whether there could be some kind of particle/field/force/form-of-energy we're missing out on that could be used to communicate (even if slower than light), and whether there's some way to rule that out. I don't think that's dismissable as being a flight of fancy any more than the existence of radio waves would have been in 1500.
cde-v 8y ago
Even if a sufficiently advanced civ out there is using something like quantum entanglement, they mostly likely didn't just jump from smoke signals to quantum entanglement. So we might be catching signals from the say 500 years while they used radio waves.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  But isn't there a certain probability we missed those radio waves back when we didn't know radio and now the earth is receiving more sophisticated signals humans can't yet analyze?
  - saudioger 8y ago
    Sure, it's also possible the universe immediately surrounding us was teeming with life a billion years ago and we just missed it all anyway. We can only try our best with the current means we have available.
  - cde-v 8y ago
    We could have missed those signals millions of years ago, but we could also start receive a civ's first ever radio broadcast tomorrow (that would be incredibly lucky).
    - jcelerier 8y ago
      > we could also start receive a civ's first ever radio broadcast tomorrow (that would be incredibly lucky). not a chance. Our own radio transmissions barely go past the solar system before going under the noise floor.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        Maybe not their first radio broadcast, but possible one of their early, directed ones…
- themagician 8y ago
  Look at us as an example though. We've had radio for a little over 200 years and already realize its limitations. Smoke signals will have been around for a lot longer than radio. Smoke signals will have been around for 99.9% of the timeline and then 0.1% radio before quantum. To an outside observer it would look like radio was just skipped. If you scale human civilization into a 1 year time frame we invent radio at 3PM on December 31st.
sharkweek 8y ago
I always liked the theory that if you go stand above an ant hill and scream all day at the little creatures, they'll still have no concept of your attempts at communication. So then similarly, it seems possible that advanced intelligence could be screaming at us but we're too "simple" to be able to understand them or even be aware of their presence.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  The bit that saddens me is the realisation that those ants will probably find "aliens" one day, the termite mound half a mile away, and likely fight terrible wars, but even if not, neither side will ever see sunrise over central park
- circlefavshape 8y ago
  Similarly every ant in the anthill could be screaming at you all day, and you'd have no concept of their attempts at communication
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singularity2001 8y ago
Common tangential theory: Any advanced civilization compresses their data so its signals will become indistinguishable from noise
- nacs 8y ago
  But surely an advanced civilization would realize theres less advanced lifeforms and would thus send the simplest type of message possible. After contact is established, they could then send their ultra-compressed data.
  - clear_dg 8y ago
    Or being advanced, this civilization would be extremely cautious of any other civilization, and would most likely not facilitate communications with others. For a civilization to survive and be qualified as being advanced, not only implies being smart enough to develop some technology but smart enough to know when NOT to use it. e.g.: let's not use nuclear warheads, let's not use grey goo, let's not communicate with possibly agressive alien civilizations.
  - hcnews 8y ago
    That just depends on the delta between civilizations. They might've advanced way beyond us and they don't have the means to fallback to human method of communicating.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Why? We don’t simplify high bandwidth satellite radio signals for the benefit of the Sentinelese people, and unlike extra terrestrial life we can be certain that the Sentinelese are sentient, and also that they can (given enough time, but less than even a RTT to Andromeda) learn both how to tune in and what the signals we’re broadcasting ultimately mean.
saudioger 8y ago
I mean, of course we might be missing out on things we can't technologically grasp yet... but even if we knew it existed we wouldn't know what to do with it yet.
daenz 8y ago
If they're super smart, and actually care about communicating with less-advanced civilizations, then they would probably broadcast through mediums that are considered "old tech" for them, but possibly current tech for those civilizations.
- ken 8y ago
  Humans aren't broadcasting into space with any pre-EM technologies. It's not so much that we don't care about less-advanced civilizations, but that broadcasting in a way that life forms could see/hear without electronic sensors would be many orders of magnitude less efficient for us. It's simply impractical. Maybe there's another form of communication we haven't discovered yet that's so much faster and more efficient (like Star Trek's "subspace") that everybody else in the galaxy uses that instead. For them to send radio waves to Earth might be like us pointing Morse lamps at Alpha Centauri. Trying to detect alien life by scanning the EM spectrum sure is inefficient. Maybe it's the best we can do, but if there were something better, I could totally see why we'd abandon plain old radio waves.
reaperducer 8y ago
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? This implies a common assumption among people: That any civilization out there is automatically going to be more advanced than we are. If you believe that the universe started with the Big Bang, then (IMO), it's reasonable to believe that we all had pretty much the same amount of time to evolve and develop civilizations. Asteroid events notwithstanding. To me, believing that all beings average about the same place in the development cycle, it makes sense to look for the signals we know, rather than the signals we don't know. But I'm no scientician.
- piyh 8y ago
  In 500 years we've gone from signalling towers to lasers, fiber and RF. If someone got a 10,000 year jump on us and has a technological improvement rate close to us, we don't know the scale, frequency, or means of communication. There's a lot of physics we know, but there's also more we don't know. Also, I can't use language bi directionally with a plant no matter how hard I try. Maybe we're the plants. Maybe they don't have language.
- pp19dd 8y ago
  There's a great short story by Harry Turtledove called "The Road Not Taken" that tries to jostle that view. If you can find a copy of it, worth a read.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - yesenadam 8y ago
    https://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK https://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK
- ketralnis 8y ago
  The universe is about 14bn years old. Earth is about 4.5bn years old. Humans are about 100k years old. Writing is about 5k years old. Radio communication is about 150 years old. The laser is about 50 years old. So that window holding our current level of communication abilities is 0.15% to 0.05% of our species' age, and our species is in a similarly tiny window.
elorant 8y ago
Gravitational waves could be a prime candidate. Assuming that you have enough power to create one it could travel to the other side of the universe without any kind of interference. Whether you can embed a message in them is a whole different story though, we couldn't possibly know with our current understanding. The concept is used in the "The Three Body" trilogy.
j_coder 8y ago
Very advanced civilizations could learn how to create targeted worm hole like structures to send information through it using real world physic rules that we don't know yet
nabla9 8y ago
It's possible that they are using the orbital angular momentum of photons to communicate and we would not have discovered it, because we are not yet listening for it. If every civilization that invents a radio gets past this phase we are now very fast (as we are soon going to do) advanced civilizations don't bother to encode their messages in a way that we listen now (we look mostly for phase and amplitude encoding) Photons carry both Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) and Spin Angular Momentum (SAM) OAM is relatively recent discovery (1990's). They exist just not in the light beams level but also at the single-photon level (very surprising). Detecting photons with orbital angular momentum in extended astronomical objects: application to solar observations https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2011/02/aa14844-10.pdf https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2011/02/aa14844-10.pdf Optical orbital angular momentum (2017) http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2087/20150444 http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2087/2015... Entanglement of the orbital angular momentum states of photons https://www.nature.com/articles/35085529 https://www.nature.com/articles/35085529
- deleted 8y ago
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gwbas1c 8y ago
I think the people who downplay this question forget that many technologies we take for granted today would be considered impossible by older understandings of physics.
TomMckenny 8y ago
Or they use EM but are allot more efficient with communication such that they don't leak. These SETI signals, if they were of intelligent origin, would be showing just how dumb these aliens are. To send a presumably fairly local signal in such a way that it wastes such vast amounts of energy that it can be picked up 3bil ly away would seem like a serious transmitter design flaw.
- dogma1138 8y ago
  Why? Literally the cheapest thing to use acrossm interstellar distance is your local star in the cosmic equivalent of flashing in Morse code. Say you want to communicate between 2 star systems all you need to do is to position say a polarizer between at the edge of each solar system such as that polarizer can obstruct a suffiently large portion of the star from the point of view of the system you want to communicate at say the edge of a solar system it won’t even have to be that big. You use the polarizer to modulate the passing light and encode your message onto it.
  - benibela 8y ago
    Something like KIC 8462852
    - dogma1138 8y ago
      Yes but it can be done on a much smaller scale. The smallest exoplanet discovered is Kepler 37b it’s smaller than mercury. And planetary transitions are hard to detect because they are very time sensitive if you put something in a solar synchronous orbit between two planetary system a thin polarizing sheet which can be as thin as a solar sail can easily serve as communication device. Any civilization needing one would easily be able to drag an asteroid which should have enough raw material to build a polarizer a few 1000’s of KM in size.
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airstrike 8y ago
On your specific comment regarding quantum entanglement see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem
Groxx 8y ago
We don't have much of an option but to look with the tools we have, so though it's an interesting thought exercise (and continually worth pushing for new sciences) I don't think it's actionable to assume otherwise. E.g. I don't know of any generally-accepted theory that says that sufficiently advanced civs will definitely not use what we use, so it's still worth looking while we try to discover new things :)
themagician 8y ago
Definitely not a stupid question, just the wrong question IMO. The real question would be do we have any reason to believe that they do still use radio? We've had radio for just a little over 200 years and we've already realized its limitations. The fact that we can even speculate about quantum communication leads me to believe that radio is definitely NOT the end-all-be-all. If you scale human civilization into a 1 year time frame we invent radio at 3PM on December 31st. It's successor likely emerges January 2nd at the latest. Radio communication is likely a blip. Radio is efficient over short terrestrial distance but horrible for long (galaxy scale) distance communication. If interstellar travel is feasible at all it will have to be at FTL speeds and an FTL communication system would be necessary. If FTL is truly impossible then it doesn't seem like there is much point in listening since everything is so incredibly far it's irrelevant even on a species-level or planetary-level time scale. I believe that everyone at SETI must believe FTL is possible because otherwise it truly is a waste of resources.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  > The fact that we can even speculate about quantum communication leads me to believe that radio is definitely NOT the end-all-be-all Who is it that's speculating about quantum communication? Certainly not physicists. It's mostly just IFLScience!-class journalists seeing a term like "quantum teleportation" and assuming that it means start trek is real and write their articles based on that. > I believe that everyone at SETI must believe FTL is possible because otherwise it truly is a waste of resources. If everyone at SETI believes that mysterious FTL communication exists, then why do they spend all their time looking for EM signals?
  - themagician 8y ago
    Because that's what we have today, so that's what they have to work with. It's a shot in the dark in the hope that we might be able to find a remnant sign. If we detect radio signals in another galaxy but FTL is impossible who cares? The human species will be extinct before any interaction can occur. It's probable that whatever species sent them is already extinct because it's at least 3 billion years old. If c is the ultimate speed limit there's really no point in looking anywhere else because everything else is so far away it's irrelevant.
amthewiz 8y ago
An advanced civilization, when looking to signal other potential civilizations, would hopefully - - use the lowest common denominator long range communication medium (like EM waves), not the most advanced technology available to them, and - would broadcast it widely in spatial, temporal and spectral dimensions and not worry about efficiency
caconym_ 8y ago
EM waves are, given everything we know about the universe, the obvious communication medium for advanced civilizations no matter where or who they are. Maybe somebody sufficiently indistinguishable from a god could use gravitational waves, but off the top of my head I'm not sure why you'd want to bother. Quantum entanglement does not, as far as we know, enable superluminal transmission of information. "Teleportation" is implementation-dependent and at this point entirely science fiction. If you're going to rip something apart or non-destructively scan it, and rebuild it at the other end, which is the only "realistic" theory of how it might work, you either need to transmit the bits or the bits (heh) and then you're back to the same problem of information transmission. Of course we don't know everything, but the discussion really ends there: we don't know what we don't know.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  Sure but imagine what someone would have said before we discovered radio waves. We don’t know that there is anything better, but given how much we don’t know it’s not unreasonable to consider that we might not have the technology to receive communications from more advanced civilizations. I agree with you that RF is a good communication medium given what we know, I just don’t put much weight on our existing knowledge being all there is.
  - canhascodez 8y ago
    Do you know why people say that superluminal communication is impossible?
  - caconym_ 8y ago
    I said this: > Of course we don't know everything, but the discussion really ends there: we don't know what we don't know. I think the guy I replied to asked about "theories" of alternatives, and there isn't really anything specific as far as I'm aware; there's just this vague philosophical notion that we don't know what we don't know. I don't think anyone's denying it (I certainly am not) but there is not much else to be said on the subject. Knowing that we don't know what we don't know doesn't help us make predictions about what we don't know.
3rdAccount 8y ago
You'll want to read "The Eerie Silence" by SETI lead Paul Davies who's job is to think of this stuff. The book covers many many possibilities for how a civilization might try to communicate or get the word out from Von Neumann probes to leaving something in our DNA, which could easily last multiple millennia to monuments...etc etc. It also covers the search for life elsewhere like looking for reverse chirality DNA on Mars (basically there is no reason all DNA found on earth should curl one way and finding DNA that goes the other way strongly suggests it didn't come from us).
netcraft 8y ago
I think others have it right, with what we know EM is the way to go. But I keep thinking about dark matter and dark energy and how we don’t understand them. It wasn’t really that long ago that we didn’t understand EM either. Finding radio waves was exactly like finding invisible ways to communicate. Who knows what we can’t “see” yet.
analog31 8y ago
I don't know if we count as advanced, but our communications are moving towards light that's confined to fiber optic cables, and radio waves that are practically disguised as noise. We are making an ongoing effort to reduce the power level used by those communications. That doesn't seem promising for having someone detect us from a distance. For inter-stellar communications of sufficient distance, some sort of massive object (i.e., a space ship) seems like the preferred method because it can go at almost the speed of light, but it doesn't spread out over distance, can make minor corrections to its course, visit multiple destinations, and do something such as return a message, learn about its surroundings, and so forth. I'd guess that a civilization might go through a period where it is emitting lots of easy-to-detect radio signals, lasting maybe a century, so we have to catch them at just the right moment.
bhouston 8y ago
Probably sufficiently advanced could harness neutrinos? (At least in Star Trek that is proposed.)
- kovrik 8y ago
  But what's the point? First, they have mass, hence travel slower than the speed of light, which means they are less effective. Second, it is very hard to detect neutrinos, which means they are very bad communication medium.
anonnel 8y ago
I absolutely expect they use EM radiation. Another interesting question is if they are EM radiation. It should be the most efficient way to travel. Going from Turing machine to Turing machine, a virus with a really advanced universal exploit, impregnating civilizations like ours around the time they develop both radio tech and computers. Civilizations with the capability to travel in that fasion would be dominant.
oh_sigh 8y ago
Neutrinos seem like a good option, if you have a good way to collect them.
zhte415 8y ago
Your comment reminds me of the Startrek TBG episode The Loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loss The two dimensional lifeforms were unable to perceive three dimensions. Yet at the same time, the crew of the TNG struggled to understand them.
roberttod 8y ago
What if alien civilisations figured it was a good move to hide themselves from hostile civilisations... Or if those that broadcast like we do were destroyed by hostile civilizations. Let's hope not I guess.
Iv 8y ago
SETI more expects side-effect radio emissions than purposeful communications. It was started at a time when powerful radars [1] designed to detect ballistic missiles were deployed and this radar's emissions are definitely detectable several light-years away. It relies on the same mentality as the Fermi Paradox: it expects that an advanced civilization will master so much energy that its waste should be visible from afar. Only recently have we started considering that efficiency, rather than wastefulness, may be the hallmarks of civilization. But yes, everybody at SETI knows that what they are doing are stabs in the dark. It is like trying to find inhabited lands by looking for tam-tam songs along the coast or to check if there are lighthouses installed where people may have switched to GPS. Still, if there are thousands of civilizations out there, you can bet on off-chances of detecting one. The odds are low but the rewards would be huge. Fewer discoveries would be as consequential as this one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar
yCloser 8y ago
I don't think we can answer that I mean, before we knew that radio waves exists we could not forsee the use of radio for communicating so, I'd say that better ways of communicating relay on something that physics hasn't found yet (like, you know "that weird supersimmetry decay thing that only su-top quarks do when reacting with Stuff")
scotty79 8y ago
I always believed that all that SETI thing will be pretty silly if in few hundred years we'll discover how to emit and receive neutrino beams for communication. SETI would become search for extraterrestrial intelligence that that believes it's worth a shot to emit RF to contact less advanced civilisations that at the moment of recieving the signal will be in that small time window when they used RF for communication because they had nothing better.
mfukar 8y ago
> My dumbass-self wonders about quantum entanglement or teleportation as means of communication we have yet to master; We use lasers for quantum teleportation. There's no reason to believe it can be realised more efficiently without.
tzs 8y ago
> I 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? This probably really should be five questions. 1. For an advanced civilization trying to communicate to other, unknown, civilizations like ours. In other words, intentionally trying to have our SETI folks notice them. 2. Similar, but trying to communicate with a civilization that their SETI folks have detected. E.g., they have picked up on our existence from our EM emissions and want to to strike up a conversation. 3. For an advanced civilization that spans multiple star systems, not intentionally trying to communicate with anyone else. 4. Similar, but only spanning multiple planets within one system. 5. Finally, for an advanced civilization that is only one planet, not trying to communicate with anyone else. For #1-4, EM is the most likely answer for reasons numerous others have mentioned. For #3 and #4, the big issue would be power. If they are only intending internal communication they might not be putting enough power for us to pick it up unless they are close to us. For #5, even if they have not discovered something beyond the physics we know, they might not radiate their EM in a way we can detect. For example, if they have a planet wide urban civilization they might have every building connected to a high speed wired communication system. The only wireless they use might be something like Bluetooth or low power WiFi that only needs to communicate within a single room of a building between their portable devices and that room's node on the wired system.
russdill 8y ago
EM is quite disappointingly weak for anything except point to point communications. If you really wanted to broadcast a message, it'd be far better to use something like von-neumann probes.
ololobus 8y ago
Despite the fact that quantum entanglement is frequently referred to the new ways of communication, at the current state of Standard model/Quantum physics quantum entanglement does not mean interaction or information transfer. Furthermore, instantaneous information transfer is restricted and its speed is limited to the speed of light. Quantum entanglement is rather about correlation and statistics, which is, hopefully, will be quite useful for some applications, but not for communication channel. Otherwise, it will ruin the current foundation of quantum mechanics. I strongly recommend reading the book of Nicolas Gisin 'Quantum Chance' [1], which is quite good for the general audience to understand, what quantum entanglement actually means in the real life, i.e. in the physical experiment. [1] https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/press-releases/corporate/quantum-chance/32820 https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/press-relea...
technotony 8y ago
Personally I think the assumption that science has figured it out is going to turn out to be nonsense. Science thought that in the nineteenth century right before discovery of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Personally until we've figured out things like consiousness and dark matter/inflation etc I think the null hypothesis should be that there is unexplained stuff happening and thus it's likely advanced civilizations use something other than electromagnetic waves, just like we don't use smoke signals or fire beacons much for communication anymore.
ryanmercer 8y ago
>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? At a scienctific level no, but in science fiction you have devices like the 'subspace ansible' and similar things that allow FTL communications by using some sort of currently-undiscovered 'subspace'. I actually remember in the mid 90's seeing, in the Weekly World News (a sensational tabloid for those unfamiliar) or its primary competitor at the time, mention of a intelligence agency that had laptop like devices that allowed for real-time encrypted communication anywhere on the world which was likely a spin on this idea (IIRC it was suggesting some sort of quantum entanglement where doing something to one would instantly cause the same to happen on the 'paired' device so you'd just type on one and it would instantly appear on the display of the other). There's no valid reason to think something like this isn't possible, or even plausible. We didn't discover infrared until 1800, x-rays and radio until 1895. There could very well NOT be anything that would allow for FTL/real-time communication over any distance but then again there could be. There could very well be some sort of radiation or similar particle that we've yet to discover too which might be the preferred means of communication for an advanced enough civilization. Look how far computers have come since I was born in 1985. Look at other technologies like genome sequencing, the human genome project took 13 years and cost many millions but now you can do whole genome sequencing commercially with an 18 hour turnaround and hire your own whole genome sequencing out for 500$ with a 10-12 week turnaround. I know these examples don't compare but what I'm getting at is we are barely a technological species and who knows what possibilities exist for us.

cmsimike 8y ago

I 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 ago
It 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 ago
  Also, liquid water is very convenient for complex chemistry.

monochromatic 8y ago

It’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

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
Reads like it was written by machine elves...

jerf 8y ago

It depends on whether you want to stay grounded in real-world physics, or if you want to spin off on flights of fancy. If you want to stay in real-world physics, at the moment there is no reason to expect any civilization to use anything other than electromagnetic radiation for communication. Other than the low speed of light, which is a characteristic of the universe that it does not seem to allow any faster-than-light communication so it's not specially a disadvantage for EM, electromagnetic radiation basically has every characteristic you're looking for in a communications medium, and there's little reason to believe even an advanced civilization would use something orders of magnitude worse on numerous dimensions simply because maybe they can. This is for much the same reason that we could transport everything in our civilization by people carrying things around on Segways, but we don't, because why would we deliberately choose something suboptimal? If you want to go off on flights of fancy, then anything is possible, but there's no way to say anything useful about it. The "grounded in reality" answer is subject to change as our understanding of physics improves, but at the moment I wouldn't say there's any particular reason to expect this answer to change much. Even on the crazy fringe frontiers of real science, I am not aware of any candidates for communication any better than EM. Most of the whacky ideas proposed as alternate methods fail by orders of magnitude vs EM. Might you be able to build a better neutrino detector than we can? Maybe, but it's still easier to build EM detectors, and EM emitters, by a lot. Gravity waves? Why on not-Earth would anyone spend the massive, massive amounts of energy required to do that, very klunkily and with very low bandwidth, when for literally a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth the energy expenditure you could use EM, and get higher bandwidth to boot and better reusability to boot? Quantum entanglement and teleportion are non-starters, because they both require a conventional channel to work at all, and the best tool for that communication is EM.

SilasX 8y ago
I think the parent meant -- or a least a steelman of the point would be -- whether there could be some kind of particle/field/force/form-of-energy we're missing out on that could be used to communicate (even if slower than light), and whether there's some way to rule that out. I don't think that's dismissable as being a flight of fancy any more than the existence of radio waves would have been in 1500.

cde-v 8y ago

Even if a sufficiently advanced civ out there is using something like quantum entanglement, they mostly likely didn't just jump from smoke signals to quantum entanglement. So we might be catching signals from the say 500 years while they used radio waves.

gnulinux 8y ago
But isn't there a certain probability we missed those radio waves back when we didn't know radio and now the earth is receiving more sophisticated signals humans can't yet analyze?
- saudioger 8y ago
  Sure, it's also possible the universe immediately surrounding us was teeming with life a billion years ago and we just missed it all anyway. We can only try our best with the current means we have available.
- cde-v 8y ago
  We could have missed those signals millions of years ago, but we could also start receive a civ's first ever radio broadcast tomorrow (that would be incredibly lucky).
  - jcelerier 8y ago
    > we could also start receive a civ's first ever radio broadcast tomorrow (that would be incredibly lucky). not a chance. Our own radio transmissions barely go past the solar system before going under the noise floor.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      Maybe not their first radio broadcast, but possible one of their early, directed ones…
themagician 8y ago
Look at us as an example though. We've had radio for a little over 200 years and already realize its limitations. Smoke signals will have been around for a lot longer than radio. Smoke signals will have been around for 99.9% of the timeline and then 0.1% radio before quantum. To an outside observer it would look like radio was just skipped. If you scale human civilization into a 1 year time frame we invent radio at 3PM on December 31st.

sharkweek 8y ago

I always liked the theory that if you go stand above an ant hill and scream all day at the little creatures, they'll still have no concept of your attempts at communication. So then similarly, it seems possible that advanced intelligence could be screaming at us but we're too "simple" to be able to understand them or even be aware of their presence.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago
The bit that saddens me is the realisation that those ants will probably find "aliens" one day, the termite mound half a mile away, and likely fight terrible wars, but even if not, neither side will ever see sunrise over central park
circlefavshape 8y ago
Similarly every ant in the anthill could be screaming at you all day, and you'd have no concept of their attempts at communication

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singularity2001 8y ago

Common tangential theory: Any advanced civilization compresses their data so its signals will become indistinguishable from noise

nacs 8y ago
But surely an advanced civilization would realize theres less advanced lifeforms and would thus send the simplest type of message possible. After contact is established, they could then send their ultra-compressed data.
- clear_dg 8y ago
  Or being advanced, this civilization would be extremely cautious of any other civilization, and would most likely not facilitate communications with others. For a civilization to survive and be qualified as being advanced, not only implies being smart enough to develop some technology but smart enough to know when NOT to use it. e.g.: let's not use nuclear warheads, let's not use grey goo, let's not communicate with possibly agressive alien civilizations.
- hcnews 8y ago
  That just depends on the delta between civilizations. They might've advanced way beyond us and they don't have the means to fallback to human method of communicating.
- ben_w 8y ago
  Why? We don’t simplify high bandwidth satellite radio signals for the benefit of the Sentinelese people, and unlike extra terrestrial life we can be certain that the Sentinelese are sentient, and also that they can (given enough time, but less than even a RTT to Andromeda) learn both how to tune in and what the signals we’re broadcasting ultimately mean.

saudioger 8y ago

I mean, of course we might be missing out on things we can't technologically grasp yet... but even if we knew it existed we wouldn't know what to do with it yet.

daenz 8y ago

If they're super smart, and actually care about communicating with less-advanced civilizations, then they would probably broadcast through mediums that are considered "old tech" for them, but possibly current tech for those civilizations.

ken 8y ago
Humans aren't broadcasting into space with any pre-EM technologies. It's not so much that we don't care about less-advanced civilizations, but that broadcasting in a way that life forms could see/hear without electronic sensors would be many orders of magnitude less efficient for us. It's simply impractical. Maybe there's another form of communication we haven't discovered yet that's so much faster and more efficient (like Star Trek's "subspace") that everybody else in the galaxy uses that instead. For them to send radio waves to Earth might be like us pointing Morse lamps at Alpha Centauri. Trying to detect alien life by scanning the EM spectrum sure is inefficient. Maybe it's the best we can do, but if there were something better, I could totally see why we'd abandon plain old radio waves.

reaperducer 8y ago

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? This implies a common assumption among people: That any civilization out there is automatically going to be more advanced than we are. If you believe that the universe started with the Big Bang, then (IMO), it's reasonable to believe that we all had pretty much the same amount of time to evolve and develop civilizations. Asteroid events notwithstanding. To me, believing that all beings average about the same place in the development cycle, it makes sense to look for the signals we know, rather than the signals we don't know. But I'm no scientician.

piyh 8y ago
In 500 years we've gone from signalling towers to lasers, fiber and RF. If someone got a 10,000 year jump on us and has a technological improvement rate close to us, we don't know the scale, frequency, or means of communication. There's a lot of physics we know, but there's also more we don't know. Also, I can't use language bi directionally with a plant no matter how hard I try. Maybe we're the plants. Maybe they don't have language.
pp19dd 8y ago
There's a great short story by Harry Turtledove called "The Road Not Taken" that tries to jostle that view. If you can find a copy of it, worth a read.
- deleted 8y ago
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- yesenadam 8y ago
  https://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK https://pastebin.com/aJQfubrK
ketralnis 8y ago
The universe is about 14bn years old. Earth is about 4.5bn years old. Humans are about 100k years old. Writing is about 5k years old. Radio communication is about 150 years old. The laser is about 50 years old. So that window holding our current level of communication abilities is 0.15% to 0.05% of our species' age, and our species is in a similarly tiny window.

elorant 8y ago

Gravitational waves could be a prime candidate. Assuming that you have enough power to create one it could travel to the other side of the universe without any kind of interference. Whether you can embed a message in them is a whole different story though, we couldn't possibly know with our current understanding. The concept is used in the "The Three Body" trilogy.

j_coder 8y ago

Very advanced civilizations could learn how to create targeted worm hole like structures to send information through it using real world physic rules that we don't know yet

nabla9 8y ago

It's possible that they are using the orbital angular momentum of photons to communicate and we would not have discovered it, because we are not yet listening for it. If every civilization that invents a radio gets past this phase we are now very fast (as we are soon going to do) advanced civilizations don't bother to encode their messages in a way that we listen now (we look mostly for phase and amplitude encoding) Photons carry both Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) and Spin Angular Momentum (SAM) OAM is relatively recent discovery (1990's). They exist just not in the light beams level but also at the single-photon level (very surprising). Detecting photons with orbital angular momentum in extended astronomical objects: application to solar observations https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2011/02/aa14844-10.pdf https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2011/02/aa14844-10.pdf Optical orbital angular momentum (2017) http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2087/20150444 http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2087/2015... Entanglement of the orbital angular momentum states of photons https://www.nature.com/articles/35085529 https://www.nature.com/articles/35085529

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gwbas1c 8y ago

I think the people who downplay this question forget that many technologies we take for granted today would be considered impossible by older understandings of physics.

TomMckenny 8y ago

Or they use EM but are allot more efficient with communication such that they don't leak. These SETI signals, if they were of intelligent origin, would be showing just how dumb these aliens are. To send a presumably fairly local signal in such a way that it wastes such vast amounts of energy that it can be picked up 3bil ly away would seem like a serious transmitter design flaw.

dogma1138 8y ago
Why? Literally the cheapest thing to use acrossm interstellar distance is your local star in the cosmic equivalent of flashing in Morse code. Say you want to communicate between 2 star systems all you need to do is to position say a polarizer between at the edge of each solar system such as that polarizer can obstruct a suffiently large portion of the star from the point of view of the system you want to communicate at say the edge of a solar system it won’t even have to be that big. You use the polarizer to modulate the passing light and encode your message onto it.
- benibela 8y ago
  Something like KIC 8462852
  - dogma1138 8y ago
    Yes but it can be done on a much smaller scale. The smallest exoplanet discovered is Kepler 37b it’s smaller than mercury. And planetary transitions are hard to detect because they are very time sensitive if you put something in a solar synchronous orbit between two planetary system a thin polarizing sheet which can be as thin as a solar sail can easily serve as communication device. Any civilization needing one would easily be able to drag an asteroid which should have enough raw material to build a polarizer a few 1000’s of KM in size.

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airstrike 8y ago

On your specific comment regarding quantum entanglement see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem

Groxx 8y ago

We don't have much of an option but to look with the tools we have, so though it's an interesting thought exercise (and continually worth pushing for new sciences) I don't think it's actionable to assume otherwise. E.g. I don't know of any generally-accepted theory that says that sufficiently advanced civs will definitely not use what we use, so it's still worth looking while we try to discover new things :)

themagician 8y ago

Definitely not a stupid question, just the wrong question IMO. The real question would be do we have any reason to believe that they do still use radio? We've had radio for just a little over 200 years and we've already realized its limitations. The fact that we can even speculate about quantum communication leads me to believe that radio is definitely NOT the end-all-be-all. If you scale human civilization into a 1 year time frame we invent radio at 3PM on December 31st. It's successor likely emerges January 2nd at the latest. Radio communication is likely a blip. Radio is efficient over short terrestrial distance but horrible for long (galaxy scale) distance communication. If interstellar travel is feasible at all it will have to be at FTL speeds and an FTL communication system would be necessary. If FTL is truly impossible then it doesn't seem like there is much point in listening since everything is so incredibly far it's irrelevant even on a species-level or planetary-level time scale. I believe that everyone at SETI must believe FTL is possible because otherwise it truly is a waste of resources.

hannasanarion 8y ago
> The fact that we can even speculate about quantum communication leads me to believe that radio is definitely NOT the end-all-be-all Who is it that's speculating about quantum communication? Certainly not physicists. It's mostly just IFLScience!-class journalists seeing a term like "quantum teleportation" and assuming that it means start trek is real and write their articles based on that. > I believe that everyone at SETI must believe FTL is possible because otherwise it truly is a waste of resources. If everyone at SETI believes that mysterious FTL communication exists, then why do they spend all their time looking for EM signals?
- themagician 8y ago
  Because that's what we have today, so that's what they have to work with. It's a shot in the dark in the hope that we might be able to find a remnant sign. If we detect radio signals in another galaxy but FTL is impossible who cares? The human species will be extinct before any interaction can occur. It's probable that whatever species sent them is already extinct because it's at least 3 billion years old. If c is the ultimate speed limit there's really no point in looking anywhere else because everything else is so far away it's irrelevant.

amthewiz 8y ago

An advanced civilization, when looking to signal other potential civilizations, would hopefully - - use the lowest common denominator long range communication medium (like EM waves), not the most advanced technology available to them, and - would broadcast it widely in spatial, temporal and spectral dimensions and not worry about efficiency

caconym_ 8y ago

EM waves are, given everything we know about the universe, the obvious communication medium for advanced civilizations no matter where or who they are. Maybe somebody sufficiently indistinguishable from a god could use gravitational waves, but off the top of my head I'm not sure why you'd want to bother. Quantum entanglement does not, as far as we know, enable superluminal transmission of information. "Teleportation" is implementation-dependent and at this point entirely science fiction. If you're going to rip something apart or non-destructively scan it, and rebuild it at the other end, which is the only "realistic" theory of how it might work, you either need to transmit the bits or the bits (heh) and then you're back to the same problem of information transmission. Of course we don't know everything, but the discussion really ends there: we don't know what we don't know.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
Sure but imagine what someone would have said before we discovered radio waves. We don’t know that there is anything better, but given how much we don’t know it’s not unreasonable to consider that we might not have the technology to receive communications from more advanced civilizations. I agree with you that RF is a good communication medium given what we know, I just don’t put much weight on our existing knowledge being all there is.
- canhascodez 8y ago
  Do you know why people say that superluminal communication is impossible?
- caconym_ 8y ago
  I said this: > Of course we don't know everything, but the discussion really ends there: we don't know what we don't know. I think the guy I replied to asked about "theories" of alternatives, and there isn't really anything specific as far as I'm aware; there's just this vague philosophical notion that we don't know what we don't know. I don't think anyone's denying it (I certainly am not) but there is not much else to be said on the subject. Knowing that we don't know what we don't know doesn't help us make predictions about what we don't know.

3rdAccount 8y ago

You'll want to read "The Eerie Silence" by SETI lead Paul Davies who's job is to think of this stuff. The book covers many many possibilities for how a civilization might try to communicate or get the word out from Von Neumann probes to leaving something in our DNA, which could easily last multiple millennia to monuments...etc etc. It also covers the search for life elsewhere like looking for reverse chirality DNA on Mars (basically there is no reason all DNA found on earth should curl one way and finding DNA that goes the other way strongly suggests it didn't come from us).

netcraft 8y ago

I think others have it right, with what we know EM is the way to go. But I keep thinking about dark matter and dark energy and how we don’t understand them. It wasn’t really that long ago that we didn’t understand EM either. Finding radio waves was exactly like finding invisible ways to communicate. Who knows what we can’t “see” yet.

analog31 8y ago

I don't know if we count as advanced, but our communications are moving towards light that's confined to fiber optic cables, and radio waves that are practically disguised as noise. We are making an ongoing effort to reduce the power level used by those communications. That doesn't seem promising for having someone detect us from a distance. For inter-stellar communications of sufficient distance, some sort of massive object (i.e., a space ship) seems like the preferred method because it can go at almost the speed of light, but it doesn't spread out over distance, can make minor corrections to its course, visit multiple destinations, and do something such as return a message, learn about its surroundings, and so forth. I'd guess that a civilization might go through a period where it is emitting lots of easy-to-detect radio signals, lasting maybe a century, so we have to catch them at just the right moment.

bhouston 8y ago

Probably sufficiently advanced could harness neutrinos? (At least in Star Trek that is proposed.)

kovrik 8y ago
But what's the point? First, they have mass, hence travel slower than the speed of light, which means they are less effective. Second, it is very hard to detect neutrinos, which means they are very bad communication medium.

anonnel 8y ago

I absolutely expect they use EM radiation. Another interesting question is if they are EM radiation. It should be the most efficient way to travel. Going from Turing machine to Turing machine, a virus with a really advanced universal exploit, impregnating civilizations like ours around the time they develop both radio tech and computers. Civilizations with the capability to travel in that fasion would be dominant.

oh_sigh 8y ago

Neutrinos seem like a good option, if you have a good way to collect them.

zhte415 8y ago

Your comment reminds me of the Startrek TBG episode The Loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loss The two dimensional lifeforms were unable to perceive three dimensions. Yet at the same time, the crew of the TNG struggled to understand them.

roberttod 8y ago

What if alien civilisations figured it was a good move to hide themselves from hostile civilisations... Or if those that broadcast like we do were destroyed by hostile civilizations. Let's hope not I guess.

Iv 8y ago

SETI more expects side-effect radio emissions than purposeful communications. It was started at a time when powerful radars [1] designed to detect ballistic missiles were deployed and this radar's emissions are definitely detectable several light-years away. It relies on the same mentality as the Fermi Paradox: it expects that an advanced civilization will master so much energy that its waste should be visible from afar. Only recently have we started considering that efficiency, rather than wastefulness, may be the hallmarks of civilization. But yes, everybody at SETI knows that what they are doing are stabs in the dark. It is like trying to find inhabited lands by looking for tam-tam songs along the coast or to check if there are lighthouses installed where people may have switched to GPS. Still, if there are thousands of civilizations out there, you can bet on off-chances of detecting one. The odds are low but the rewards would be huge. Fewer discoveries would be as consequential as this one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar

yCloser 8y ago

I don't think we can answer that I mean, before we knew that radio waves exists we could not forsee the use of radio for communicating so, I'd say that better ways of communicating relay on something that physics hasn't found yet (like, you know "that weird supersimmetry decay thing that only su-top quarks do when reacting with Stuff")

scotty79 8y ago

I always believed that all that SETI thing will be pretty silly if in few hundred years we'll discover how to emit and receive neutrino beams for communication. SETI would become search for extraterrestrial intelligence that that believes it's worth a shot to emit RF to contact less advanced civilisations that at the moment of recieving the signal will be in that small time window when they used RF for communication because they had nothing better.

mfukar 8y ago

> My dumbass-self wonders about quantum entanglement or teleportation as means of communication we have yet to master; We use lasers for quantum teleportation. There's no reason to believe it can be realised more efficiently without.

tzs 8y ago

> I 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? This probably really should be five questions. 1. For an advanced civilization trying to communicate to other, unknown, civilizations like ours. In other words, intentionally trying to have our SETI folks notice them. 2. Similar, but trying to communicate with a civilization that their SETI folks have detected. E.g., they have picked up on our existence from our EM emissions and want to to strike up a conversation. 3. For an advanced civilization that spans multiple star systems, not intentionally trying to communicate with anyone else. 4. Similar, but only spanning multiple planets within one system. 5. Finally, for an advanced civilization that is only one planet, not trying to communicate with anyone else. For #1-4, EM is the most likely answer for reasons numerous others have mentioned. For #3 and #4, the big issue would be power. If they are only intending internal communication they might not be putting enough power for us to pick it up unless they are close to us. For #5, even if they have not discovered something beyond the physics we know, they might not radiate their EM in a way we can detect. For example, if they have a planet wide urban civilization they might have every building connected to a high speed wired communication system. The only wireless they use might be something like Bluetooth or low power WiFi that only needs to communicate within a single room of a building between their portable devices and that room's node on the wired system.

russdill 8y ago

EM is quite disappointingly weak for anything except point to point communications. If you really wanted to broadcast a message, it'd be far better to use something like von-neumann probes.

ololobus 8y ago

Despite the fact that quantum entanglement is frequently referred to the new ways of communication, at the current state of Standard model/Quantum physics quantum entanglement does not mean interaction or information transfer. Furthermore, instantaneous information transfer is restricted and its speed is limited to the speed of light. Quantum entanglement is rather about correlation and statistics, which is, hopefully, will be quite useful for some applications, but not for communication channel. Otherwise, it will ruin the current foundation of quantum mechanics. I strongly recommend reading the book of Nicolas Gisin 'Quantum Chance' [1], which is quite good for the general audience to understand, what quantum entanglement actually means in the real life, i.e. in the physical experiment. [1] https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/press-releases/corporate/quantum-chance/32820 https://www.springer.com/gp/about-springer/media/press-relea...

technotony 8y ago

Personally I think the assumption that science has figured it out is going to turn out to be nonsense. Science thought that in the nineteenth century right before discovery of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Personally until we've figured out things like consiousness and dark matter/inflation etc I think the null hypothesis should be that there is unexplained stuff happening and thus it's likely advanced civilizations use something other than electromagnetic waves, just like we don't use smoke signals or fire beacons much for communication anymore.

ryanmercer 8y ago

>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? At a scienctific level no, but in science fiction you have devices like the 'subspace ansible' and similar things that allow FTL communications by using some sort of currently-undiscovered 'subspace'. I actually remember in the mid 90's seeing, in the Weekly World News (a sensational tabloid for those unfamiliar) or its primary competitor at the time, mention of a intelligence agency that had laptop like devices that allowed for real-time encrypted communication anywhere on the world which was likely a spin on this idea (IIRC it was suggesting some sort of quantum entanglement where doing something to one would instantly cause the same to happen on the 'paired' device so you'd just type on one and it would instantly appear on the display of the other). There's no valid reason to think something like this isn't possible, or even plausible. We didn't discover infrared until 1800, x-rays and radio until 1895. There could very well NOT be anything that would allow for FTL/real-time communication over any distance but then again there could be. There could very well be some sort of radiation or similar particle that we've yet to discover too which might be the preferred means of communication for an advanced enough civilization. Look how far computers have come since I was born in 1985. Look at other technologies like genome sequencing, the human genome project took 13 years and cost many millions but now you can do whole genome sequencing commercially with an 18 hour turnaround and hire your own whole genome sequencing out for 500$ with a 10-12 week turnaround. I know these examples don't compare but what I'm getting at is we are barely a technological species and who knows what possibilities exist for us.