12 ms·
I've pretty much given up on traditional radio SETI ever finding anything, as its sole focus is on trying to find terrawatt/mega scale, repeating, intentional a
by thegrim000 9mo ago
I've pretty much given up on traditional radio SETI ever finding anything, as its sole focus is on trying to find terrawatt/mega scale, repeating, intentional alien communication beacons, and nothing else. As I don't believe aliens would make such things, I don't believe traditional SETI will ever find anything.
Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded.
The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable.
If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
- singularity2001 9mo agoOn the other hand, I hold the slightly fringe theory that suns are sentient beings, and by just watching the stars, we may see them communicate.
- robertk 9mo ago“Slightly fringe”
- GJim 9mo agoHeh Arthur C Clarke once suggested that some supernova could be industrial accidents. A curiously romantic idea, and one I rather like!
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoI think that's the premise of a novel that I've been meaning to read.
- stoneforger 9mo agoHerbert's ConSentiency universe , the Calebans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Star?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Star?wprov=sfla1
- thechao 9mo agoSun Diver by David Brin, or The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle are both adjacent to this.
- pluralmonad 9mo agoIn your theory, what is the structure that supports sentience?
- singularity2001 9mo agosome incomprehensible magnetic field interactions
- singularity2001 9mo agoStellar plasma supports long-lived, self-organizing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) structures whose coupled electromagnetic and fluid dynamics implement distributed information processing. Sentience would supervene on these MHD attractors rather than on matter in a solid or neural form.
- sharts 9mo agoThis sounds so complicated while I’m just here making my GUI interface with Visual Basic to trace an IP address.
- pluralmonad 9mo agoThanks for the reply. I wonder what sort of stimulus such a system would be capable of perceiving. I suppose the context is so different that very little of my intuition about "life" could be applied productively.
- singularity2001 9mo agoStimulus is the most interesting question. Is there anything that can reach from other stars to our sun without completely being overwhelmed by its own signals? Would it rely on planets as antennae? Calling that speculation would be an understatement;)
- esbranson 9mo ago> suns are sentient beings, and by just watching the stars, we may see them communicate With radio signals?
- estimator7292 9mo agoI'm there with you. Also mycelia networks. Zero chance that forest-spanning neural networks have never woken up and started thinking