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Searching for aliens seems like the ultimate high risk/high reward investment opportunity. If someone secretly made contact with an advanced extraterrestrial ci

Searching for aliens seems like the ultimate high risk/high reward investment opportunity. If someone secretly made contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization the potential for profit would be huge. On the other hand, good luck executing on that.

jackowayed 16y ago
I'm not sure there's that much chance for profit even if you do find aliens, at least not directly from the information you'd get from the aliens. These aliens would be many light years away. (absolute minimum ~5, right?) So for a long time you'd just be receiving signals (because it would take at the very least 10 years for your first message to get to them and them to respond). First of all, the signals you'd receive would probably be worthless. Even if you manage to understand them despite the fact that they likely use some totally different language and encode information in radio waves in a different way, it's not like we frequently broadcast "this is everything you need to know to build a computer" or anything super-useful. There might be some useful mentions of science they've developed (the equivalent of our NPR science programs), but it probably wouldn't be in enough detail (especially since their lay people would presumably have a much more advanced scientific base if they're so far beyond us) for us to really get anything out of it. In the meantime, people have probably heard that you got alien signals, and they'd eventually figure out how to receive and decode the signals too. Maybe you could patent it or something, but again, if they're far enough away, your patent might run out before you do much with it. You'd get somewhat of a head start, I guess. And since this whole thing would take so long to cash in, and your investors took an absurd risk, they'd expect at least 1000x on their money.
- danenania 16y ago
  There is also the possibility that extraterrestrials exist and communicate in ways we can't conceive of.
  - sliverstorm 16y ago
    Yes, this is possible. I'd argue though that if 2 instances of life exist (them and us), n instances must exist, (and thus some must use radio waves) because it clearly demonstrates humanity wasn't a freak septillion-to-one occurrence that shouldn't have happened.
    - danenania 16y ago
      Interesting point, but given the amount of randomness involved in evolution, the physical complexity of cognition, and the timescales involved, is it possible that even given massive numbers of cognitively advanced species in the universe, each could have such a fundamentally distinct ontological relationship to reality and model of the physical universe that even a concept as seemingly scientifically basic as a 'radio wave' would be unique to us?
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
    - narag 16y ago
      This would be relevant for civilizations like ours, using waves to purposedly contact with others, but not for signals used to communicate with spaceships or colonies of the same alien civilization.
  - CamperBob 16y ago
    I suspect that they communicate in ways that we can conceive of, and have recently started to communicate, ourselves. Specifically, if you're broadcasting radio or TV signals that look like anything other than random noise from the perspective of an uncorrelated receiver, then you're wasting energy. Human history suggests that there's a window of about 100 years between the time when a civilization learns RF theory and starts to generate coherent signals, and the time when they learn information theory and stop.
  - m_myers 16y ago
    http://xkcd.com/638/ http://xkcd.com/638/ "We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheremone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now."
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  your investors took an absurd risk If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually. Considering life is a binary condition (there or not there) and we haven't found anything to strongly indicate the odds of life existing elsewhere are very small, I certainly wouldn't call the odds of finding life absurdly bad.
  - JoachimSchipper 16y ago
    > If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually. That's quite possible, but you'd want a highly-advanced technological organization - some bacteria-type things in Martian ice would be a scientific breakthrough, but unlikely to be massively profitable.
  - JeremyBanks 16y ago
    If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually. I don't know. I would like to think that this is so, but it seems hard to reconcile with the Fermi paradox (referring to intelligent life, at least). We do not know the probability of intelligent life developing, but I consider it plausible that the probability is such that although other life exits, it is beyond the limits of known methods of communication (e.g. extragalactic).
- palish 16y ago
  I've been thinking about faster-than-light communication recently. Consider gravity. Is its effect instantaneous? That is, gravity varies as the inverse of the square distance between two bodies. If, say, the Earth were to suddenly get much closer to the Moon, would that gravitational effect be "instant"? Or does it propagate at the speed of light? If gravitation is somehow "instant", then one could imagine an apparatus which allows you to transmit information instantaneously. (You would need a way to measure the effect of gravity from the sending body; perhaps by measuring the height of waves formed in a planetary-sized sphere of water.)
  - transphenomenal 16y ago
    Gravity propogates at the speed of light. However, using gravity to send information will allow you to send information through most objects like Earth or the Sin without any satilites to redirect it around the object.
  - ramchip 16y ago
    Instantaneous gravity exists in Newtonian mechanics but not in modern theories. Gravitation is thought to be transmitted by gravitational waves, which have a finite speed of c. It is not possible to transmit information at a faster speed than light in special relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Relativity#Gravitational_waves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Relativity#Gravitationa... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_and_prohibition_of_motion_faster_than_light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_an...
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Just knowing something is possible is invaluable. "Our space-scouts returned from 6 light-years away yesterday, validating govt funding of this 2-year-old program"
TheCondor 16y ago
This sounds pretty crappy but the more I think about it, what's the best case scenario here? Mind you, we're coming out of the worst recession of most of our lives, we've still not fundamentally fixed any of those problems and then with the general status of human life on most of the planet, global warming, etc.. I'm just trying to think this through, so we identify some sort of signal. I'll bet that there will be detractors, with legitimate arguments, why wouldn't there be? It's not going to be an English message encoded in a format we can't dispute. Maybe it's a bad assumption but assuming the aliens use radio technology, it seems at least somewhat reasonable to assume that they'd use it to communicate with themselves before attempting to communicate with others, for those aliens, we'd most likely intercept their communications signals rather than directed communication with us or others. Communications which happened years and years ago. The best case scenario would be one of the near by stars having alien life that happened to be listening too and in that case should we get a signal and send one back it would still be on the order of a decade long cycle. What's the average case? A century long communication cycle? Assuming both parties are listening and engaged? Likewise, if they're sufficently advanced, wouldn't they compress and encrypt their communications and it should appear to be entropy to us? I think there are a lot of things you should do just to do. The best upside here seems like hope or an easing of the beliefs about the universe, it just seems like we'd have to get really really lucky to actually communicate with something else and it could take centuries to establish that. Which in a round about sort of way makes it seem like shutting down a telescope for a few years isn't so harmful after all. Then let's just toss in nuclear proliferation, Islam fundamentalism (as well as other religious zealotry over the centuries,) AIDS in Africa (imagine should it some how become more communicable...) hunger, and global warming as issues that might affect our ability to concentrate on a problem for a century or more, is stoppage that bad?

jackowayed 16y ago

I'm not sure there's that much chance for profit even if you do find aliens, at least not directly from the information you'd get from the aliens. These aliens would be many light years away. (absolute minimum ~5, right?) So for a long time you'd just be receiving signals (because it would take at the very least 10 years for your first message to get to them and them to respond). First of all, the signals you'd receive would probably be worthless. Even if you manage to understand them despite the fact that they likely use some totally different language and encode information in radio waves in a different way, it's not like we frequently broadcast "this is everything you need to know to build a computer" or anything super-useful. There might be some useful mentions of science they've developed (the equivalent of our NPR science programs), but it probably wouldn't be in enough detail (especially since their lay people would presumably have a much more advanced scientific base if they're so far beyond us) for us to really get anything out of it. In the meantime, people have probably heard that you got alien signals, and they'd eventually figure out how to receive and decode the signals too. Maybe you could patent it or something, but again, if they're far enough away, your patent might run out before you do much with it. You'd get somewhat of a head start, I guess. And since this whole thing would take so long to cash in, and your investors took an absurd risk, they'd expect at least 1000x on their money.

danenania 16y ago
There is also the possibility that extraterrestrials exist and communicate in ways we can't conceive of.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  Yes, this is possible. I'd argue though that if 2 instances of life exist (them and us), n instances must exist, (and thus some must use radio waves) because it clearly demonstrates humanity wasn't a freak septillion-to-one occurrence that shouldn't have happened.
  - danenania 16y ago
    Interesting point, but given the amount of randomness involved in evolution, the physical complexity of cognition, and the timescales involved, is it possible that even given massive numbers of cognitively advanced species in the universe, each could have such a fundamentally distinct ontological relationship to reality and model of the physical universe that even a concept as seemingly scientifically basic as a 'radio wave' would be unique to us?
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - narag 16y ago
    This would be relevant for civilizations like ours, using waves to purposedly contact with others, but not for signals used to communicate with spaceships or colonies of the same alien civilization.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  I suspect that they communicate in ways that we can conceive of, and have recently started to communicate, ourselves. Specifically, if you're broadcasting radio or TV signals that look like anything other than random noise from the perspective of an uncorrelated receiver, then you're wasting energy. Human history suggests that there's a window of about 100 years between the time when a civilization learns RF theory and starts to generate coherent signals, and the time when they learn information theory and stop.
- m_myers 16y ago
  http://xkcd.com/638/ http://xkcd.com/638/ "We've searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheremone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now."
sliverstorm 16y ago
your investors took an absurd risk If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually. Considering life is a binary condition (there or not there) and we haven't found anything to strongly indicate the odds of life existing elsewhere are very small, I certainly wouldn't call the odds of finding life absurdly bad.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  > If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually. That's quite possible, but you'd want a highly-advanced technological organization - some bacteria-type things in Martian ice would be a scientific breakthrough, but unlikely to be massively profitable.
- JeremyBanks 16y ago
  If there's life out there, we'll probably find it eventually. I don't know. I would like to think that this is so, but it seems hard to reconcile with the Fermi paradox (referring to intelligent life, at least). We do not know the probability of intelligent life developing, but I consider it plausible that the probability is such that although other life exits, it is beyond the limits of known methods of communication (e.g. extragalactic).
palish 16y ago
I've been thinking about faster-than-light communication recently. Consider gravity. Is its effect instantaneous? That is, gravity varies as the inverse of the square distance between two bodies. If, say, the Earth were to suddenly get much closer to the Moon, would that gravitational effect be "instant"? Or does it propagate at the speed of light? If gravitation is somehow "instant", then one could imagine an apparatus which allows you to transmit information instantaneously. (You would need a way to measure the effect of gravity from the sending body; perhaps by measuring the height of waves formed in a planetary-sized sphere of water.)
- transphenomenal 16y ago
  Gravity propogates at the speed of light. However, using gravity to send information will allow you to send information through most objects like Earth or the Sin without any satilites to redirect it around the object.
- ramchip 16y ago
  Instantaneous gravity exists in Newtonian mechanics but not in modern theories. Gravitation is thought to be transmitted by gravitational waves, which have a finite speed of c. It is not possible to transmit information at a faster speed than light in special relativity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Relativity#Gravitational_waves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Relativity#Gravitationa... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_and_prohibition_of_motion_faster_than_light http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_an...
JoeAltmaier 16y ago
Just knowing something is possible is invaluable. "Our space-scouts returned from 6 light-years away yesterday, validating govt funding of this 2-year-old program"

TheCondor 16y ago

This sounds pretty crappy but the more I think about it, what's the best case scenario here? Mind you, we're coming out of the worst recession of most of our lives, we've still not fundamentally fixed any of those problems and then with the general status of human life on most of the planet, global warming, etc.. I'm just trying to think this through, so we identify some sort of signal. I'll bet that there will be detractors, with legitimate arguments, why wouldn't there be? It's not going to be an English message encoded in a format we can't dispute. Maybe it's a bad assumption but assuming the aliens use radio technology, it seems at least somewhat reasonable to assume that they'd use it to communicate with themselves before attempting to communicate with others, for those aliens, we'd most likely intercept their communications signals rather than directed communication with us or others. Communications which happened years and years ago. The best case scenario would be one of the near by stars having alien life that happened to be listening too and in that case should we get a signal and send one back it would still be on the order of a decade long cycle. What's the average case? A century long communication cycle? Assuming both parties are listening and engaged? Likewise, if they're sufficently advanced, wouldn't they compress and encrypt their communications and it should appear to be entropy to us? I think there are a lot of things you should do just to do. The best upside here seems like hope or an easing of the beliefs about the universe, it just seems like we'd have to get really really lucky to actually communicate with something else and it could take centuries to establish that. Which in a round about sort of way makes it seem like shutting down a telescope for a few years isn't so harmful after all. Then let's just toss in nuclear proliferation, Islam fundamentalism (as well as other religious zealotry over the centuries,) AIDS in Africa (imagine should it some how become more communicable...) hunger, and global warming as issues that might affect our ability to concentrate on a problem for a century or more, is stoppage that bad?