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Astrobiologists have released the preliminary results of a SETI survey
- podiki 5y agoLink to actual paper (preprint, that is): https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14148 https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14148
- koheripbal 5y agofyi, Preliminary result is that they didn't find anything. It's funny how movies always show a telescope operator falling asleep listening to deep space as if that's what he does every day and every night.... ... and then the reality of these papers showing that SETI does very brief checks for a handful of hours (11hrs in this case) maybe once per year, and only looking in one direction, and only at a narrow frequency band.
- aksss 5y agoI think that trope is often of “the earnest researcher” who has so much hope and faith that he/she does it in their spare time. So rather than a job to listen, it’s their hobby to listen. I love it, because the silly fantastic odds of the system finding anything, much less of that thing showing up while a person happens to have the headphones on and not be distracted, are just Indiana Jones level entertaining to me. I’ll buy in every time. :D
- podiki 5y agoThese days I imagine it would be getting an email alert from the analysis system. Or maybe more realistically the unveil of the true result after doing blind analysis on both junk and real data, not sure what is what (as is becoming common in some areas of physics, to help prevent biases seeping in). Still some drama to be had :-)
- pixelpoet 5y agoI've never understood the position that the greatest scientific question is whether or not we're alone in the universe. Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone, and if we're not then it's anyway going to be basically impossible to communicate with them due to speed of light limitations. P ?= NP is IMO way more significant for a start, to say nothing of questions about consciousness, fusion energy, ways to explore and colonise space, ...
- matkoniecz 5y ago"the greatest scientific question" is a bit pointless distinction, but it is certainly an interesting question. And putting some resources into that research is a good idea, even just for what we learned about our own planet thanks to having a different context. Or having an interesting question for people to become interested in adjacent research at least.
- bnegreve 5y ago> Given the number of stars out there, it seems wildly improbable that we are alone This tells you nothing unless you also know the probability of (intelligent) life emerging on a planet. As far as we can tell it could be very low, and earth could very well be a unique combination of factors that allows it. Remember, there are many more possible deck of 52 cards than there are planets in the universe.
- DavidSJ 5y agoThere's also the possibility that the existence of one civilization in a cosmic neighborhood tends to preclude the emergence of other civilizations in that same neighborhood, due to the tendency of civilizations to rapidly expand and take resources that might have been used by others, before those others even get a chance to emerge. In that case we can't treat our existence as independent of the existence of other nearby civilizations.
- hokumguru 5y agoWhat makes you think other civilizations would be focused on rapid expansion like humanity?
- d_silin 5y agoNot to start a massive flame war, but just a personal opinion: I rather prefer humans to be the only intelligent species in the observable Universe - that means it will be all ours to play with.
- bpodgursky 5y agoBeing the only intelligent life means that it's far more likely that we have a long and promising future. If there is other intelligent life out there... we have to ask why they aren't _everywhere_. Because unless we're missing something big, it would be clear that intelligence is either perpetually stuck in their own tiny tiny corner of the universe, or kill themselves off before they can reach the rest of the visible universe.
- nazgulnarsil 5y agodark matter is like 96% of the universe by mass...
- garmaine 5y agoThis is incorrect.
- wing-_-nuts 5y agoExpand please? I read a book that also proposed this. If science has moved on I'd like rto know.
- garmaine 5y agoIt is conflating dark matter with dark energy, and counting them both together.
- lgl 5y agoIt's pretty close. Only 5% of all matter is "regular" matter, and ~27% is dark matter which makes it be 85% of all mass but not of mass-energy since there is ~68% of dark energy. It's the combination of dark matter + dark energy that makes for ~95% of the universe's total mass-energy. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#:~:text=In%20the%20standard%20Lambda%2DCDM,of%20total%20mass%E2%80%93energy%20content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter#:~:text=In%20the%2....
- forgotpwd16 5y agoTalking about SETI, have there been any publications related to SETI@home which ended last year?
- mxcrossb 5y ago> The galactic center, according to the scientists, “provides an ideal” central location for “advanced civilizations to place a powerful transmitter to efficiently send beacons across the entire Milky Way,” in what is yet another advantage to this strategy. Can anyone comment on this? What is the idea of such a beacon?
- trutannus 5y agoWhenever I hear about putting beacons in space I'm always reminded of the plot of the book The Dark Forest. I remember too about a decade ago that it was decided the idea of broadcasting our location in deep space might be a bad idea.
- squarefoot 5y agoA book that could reinforce this idea is "Those Gentle Voices" by Gorge Alec Effinger.
- Balgair 5y agoThe Three Body Problem trilogy also leans heavily into that theme. It's a good series at first, but gets very woo-woo by the end. Spoilers: All aliens are actively hostile to others. Any civilizations they find, they destroy.
- elefanten 5y agoThe Dark Forest is book 2 of Three Body Trilogy
- Balgair 5y agoCrumbs! Not enough coffee this morning, sorry!
- lgl 5y agoAgain, spoiler alert: The books don't really specify that *all* civilizations are actively hostile to each other but hints that the best chance for survival is basically being quiet since there are unknown civilizations that yield tremendous power and are in fact actively hostile to any signs of other intelligent life which they can destroy with relative and terrifying ease. It's that sort of status-quo that makes the dark forest theory so scary and why everybody that eventually reaches that conclusion would want to remain hidden and/or silent. Throughout the story we only ever get to see from the point of view of two civilizations so who knows if there wasn't something like a star-trekian federation at some place or time since we do eventually get to know that there were many many civilizations in the end. It does get really crazy, but I personally found the whole trilogy really awesome. It would be hard to build such a story relying only on our current understanding of physics and technology and even some of the crazier parts are still kind of based out of real theories and hypothetical developments or discoveries. I still highly recommend this trilogy to any sci-fi/first contact fan.
- m3kw9 5y agoResult: nothing found yet
- paulpauper 5y agonothing will ever be found. the experiment was flawed/doomed to begin with due to the huge galactic distances involved. satellite data has ruled out any habitable planets in a close enough radius to ever be detectable by seti even if they did have intelligent life
- Dumblydorr 5y agoHow did satellite data rule that out? We've seen a variety of earth-like exoplanets, and we're sending up satellites to study their atmospheres. Seems to me like they haven't ruled it out, why else send up the James webb?
- irrational 5y agoIsn’t the mission of the James Webb to study the earliest galaxies in the universe? I’ve never heard of it being used for SETI work.
- deeviant 5y ago> satellite data has ruled out any habitable planets in a close enough radius to ever be detectable by seti even if they did have intelligent life Satellite data? What Satellite data? What do you define as "close enough radius"? Why?
- ripper1138 5y agoNot OP, but “close enough radius” alludes to the fact that earths current radio output would only be detectable in a radius some hundreds of light years away (signal would become too weak past that). And I’m pretty sure our radio signal output is now decreasing in energy. So it becomes increasingly less likely with distance that a radio source would exist that we could currently detect. But I guess this study states that it could detect a theoretical “beacon” that is intentionally incredibly powerful.
- lebuffon 5y agoI don't know if this is an original thought but it occurred to me that we might be in a cosmic proportioned "terrarium". What better way to keep an intelligent species from escaping than limiting the velocity of information transfer and putting everything interesting at distances that are large multiples of the maximum velocity. In other words, maybe the simulation architect doesn't want us to escape and find (contaminate) the other experiments? :)
- simonh 5y agoWhat better way to study an intelligent species behaviour that to put it in a dense rich easily traversed environment it could spread through and populate, generating lots of data.
- colordrops 5y agoWe are the control group
- pkdpic_y9k 5y agoTotally original and excellent thought but just have to throw it out there... Three Body Problem... Liu Cixin is trying to tell us something...
- Dumblydorr 5y agoThe fact that we exist as carbon based life forms makes it somewhat likely other life forms exist. We're made of the most common elements, whose signatures we observe in other stars. But in order to exist, we needed time for first and second generation stars to create heavier elements. So, space is only part of the limitation, time may be the more key reason we don't hear alien contact.
- nly 5y agoSeems a little inconvenient for the architect to have to account for all the laws of physics and allocate millions of cubic light years of space just for our tiny rock when they could just squish those of us that escape, or at least discover the true nature of our environment, like we would ants on a kitchen work top.
- squarefoot 5y agoIn the old days of USENET there was this signature saying something like "The proof that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe is that they didn't attempt to contact us".
- rbanffy 5y agoNot only that, but they seem to be taking extra precautions to prevent detection.
- imglorp 5y agoOr maybe they don't fill their atmosphere with pollution for us to detect and have no need to spray E&M into space.
- bluGill 5y agoThey are probably moving to harder to detect high frequency, low power, encrypted transmissions just like earth, for the same reasons. There is likely only a short window when they are detectable.
- ddalex 5y agoSee the Three Body Problem
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoOccam's Razor says that we are alone in the universe. (Feel free to downvote me, flag, etc., for speaking heresy.)
- elsonrodriguez 5y agoCurrently alone in time and distance, most likely. Uniquely sentient across time and distance, impossible.
- aksss 5y agoAdding infinite resources enables absolutism.
- sktrdie 5y agoTo me a plausibile answer is that we can at least observe specific dynamics within our own life based world where we keep ants (based on dna like us) in a cage and they’re totally unaware they even are in a cage. For them that’s their universe. They go along and discover new things thinking in their own way why no other life form has contacted them. Even though we literally lift them using our hands. They simply think that’s a natural phenomenon. To me it seems plausibile that other life forms that are probably not even based on dna are very likely to be imperceptible to us, the same way we are to ants. Thus I’d like to think the universe is probably our cage and we’ll never possess the mental capacity to distinguish alien beings from actual natural phenomena.
- scomelirag 5y agoIf anyone finds this perspective intriguing, you may be interested in the novel "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. In the story, a character proposes that humans are effectively like frightened forest critters with no ability to understand the nature of the seemingly magical rubbish that extraterrestrial picnickers could have left behind after a brief stop on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic#Plot_introduction_and_setting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic#Plot_introduct...
- BatteryMountain 5y agoEven worse than that, the ants know nothing about the ocean and fish nor space and the moon. Those things are not even near their scope, even if they are aware of us. What about math? And time (time keeping and calendars, tenses)? What about music and art? The ants are simply not able to comprehend any of it. So if we are like ants in the universe, then the reality we are in is probably insanely complex - we are just interacting with the little slice of it we can interpret, just like the ants.
- fogihujy 5y agoHow far away would one have to be before human radio signals would simply blend in with the background noise?
- topspin 5y agoThis[1] page claims that cold war military radar systems would be prominent for "hundreds" of light years, as opposed to earlier, lower power signals. Since these have only been running for approximately 60 years the diameter of the sphere in which these signals exist is only about 0.1% of our galaxy. So the real limit for the foreseeable future is the speed of light. [1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-far-from-earth-could-aliens-detect-our-radio-signals/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-far-from-earth-could-...
- clankyclanker 5y agoThose Cold War systems have since been replaced with much more efficient systems that don’t just spew signals into space, so there’s only a ten or twenty year window during which another civilization could have looked to see those signals. Since then, we’ve become much quieter because signals that can be detected hundreds of light years away are expensive and not necessary for a specie that lives within an 8 minute light radius.
- fogihujy 5y agoRight, so if another species does what we do, then we'd be lucky if we were inside the 200 ly radius of them at a time where they sent enough signals for us to notice?
- 8bitsrule 5y agoGiven that It's easier to search in quieter wavelengths like 0.7 and 93 GHz. But is there anything on Earth 1) transmitting unique signals 2) in that range with 3) the kind of power that would survive the rigors of the journey through hundreds of light years? What is our interstellar beaming frequency? At what power? Why else would there be any signals between 0.7 and 93 that aren't -300dB down? Radio waves spread. And scatter. You're going to travel in the mountains in a remote region of a planet with no ionosphere. You want to eat your meals while listening to music. Do you take a shortwave radio or an FM radio? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We're looking for the lost keys under the streetlight.
- fallingfrog 5y agoWell, it seems pretty much certain that faster than light travel is impossible. Otherwise one of those 60 million would have been making noise of some kind.
- fallingfrog 5y agoOne possibility is that if we are talking about biological life, it might not be possible for life from planet A to digest matter from planet B. After all terrestrial life has special enzymes and processes to deal with other terrestrial life. In that case if you wanted to colonize another planet you’d have to look for an empty one, or you’d have to erase the whole native ecosystem and start over. Looking for an empty planet might be a lot easier, therefore expansionist civilizations might be specifically avoiding inhabited planets. Maybe?