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from the but-we-want-our-little-green-men dept.
We thought aliens were making first contact, but it looks like Earth has been caught out by a case of phantom phone vibration on a cosmic scale.
The latest radio signal picked up by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) had excited some folks, but it turns out the signal came from Earth.
Earlier this week, our SETI senses were tingling over news that Russian scientists had discovered a "strong signal" coming out of a star system 95 light-years away. The signal was reportedly picked up by the Russian RATAN-600 radio telescope more than a year ago, coming from the direction of the star HD 164595.
While news sites around the world started calling Jodi Foster for comment on this real-life "Contact" situation, the rest of us (CNET included) were pretty skeptical. For starters, the Russians reportedly only picked up the signal once in 39 tries, and they'd sat on the seemingly exciting news for a year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 02 2016, @03:57PM
So what, _exactly_ was the reason to declare it terrestrial?
It seems to me that just some official was annoyed with it entering main stream news.
The signal was picked up over a year ago and during that time, there seems to have been no evidence either way during that time. Then suddenly we get a press release:
(https://www.sao.ru/Doc-en/SciNews/2016/Sotnikova/), that claims without evidence: "Subsequent processing and analysis of the signal revealed its most probable terrestrial origin. ".
But this is highly unlikely if taken literally. It would mean that the signal itself was obviously from earth, but it was just a single energy peak. It did not encode "I am from earth" in Morse or something. It was a frequency that is not uncommon on earth, but as far as I know, no real explanation of origin of the signal was made. And thus it merely means they have no clue what caused that signal or whether or not it is terrestrial in origin.
I don't know, but I imagine it was something like what you said. It was a blip, they looked into it, figured out it was non-news, and then forgot about it. Then mainstream media got into a frenzy, and they wanted to do a reality check.
Imagine you have a family email account, you get a weird email. You do some quick checking, find out it's safe, and then forget about it. A few months later, your brother comes in and starts shouting, "I saw this email! It's a virus! What should we do?!" What is your reaction?
I imagine it's something like, "It's not a virus. I checked it already. It's nothing. Go back to sleep."
That's what they are doing here. If you actually know the science and technology you can probably investigate why they think it is terrestrial in more technical sources, but I expect the mainstream media won't cover that if it can't be explained in a 10 second soundbite. After all, how do you explain to your non-technical brother how javascript popups are not evidence of a virus?