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Phys.org is reporting on a paper which details some interesting phenomena which could be evidence of advanced civilizations.
From the Phys.org article:
We all want there to be aliens. Green ones, pink ones, brown ones, Greys. Or maybe Vulcans, Klingons, even a being of pure energy. Any type will do.
That's why whenever a mysterious signal or energetic fluctuation arrives from somewhere in the cosmos and hits one of our many telescopes, headlines erupt across the media: "Have We Finally Detected An Alien Signal?" or "Have Astronomers Discovered An Alien Megastructure?" But science-minded people know that we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.
[...] What we're talking about here is a new study from E.F. Borra and E. Trottier, two astronomers at Laval University in Canada. Their study, titled "Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars" was just published at arXiv.org. ArXiv.org is a pre-print website, so the paper itself hasn't been peer reviewed yet. But it is generating interest.
The two astronomers used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and analyzed the spectra of 2.5 million stars. Of all those stars, they found 234 stars that are producing a puzzling signal. That's only a tiny percentage. And, they say, these signals "have exactly the shape of an ETI signal" that was predicted in a previous study by Borra.
Prediction is a key part of the scientific method. If you develop a theory, your theory looks better and better the more you can use it to correctly predict some future events based on it. Look how many times Einstein's predictions based on Relativity have been proven correct.
The 234 stars in Borra and Trottier's study aren't random. They're "overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral range" according to the abstract. That's significant because this is a small range centred around the spectrum of our own Sun. And our own Sun is the only one we know of that has an intelligent species living near it. If ours does, maybe others do too?
The authors acknowledge five potential causes of their findings: instrumental and data reduction effects, rotational transitions in molecules, the Fourier transform of spectral lines, rapid pulsations, and finally the ETI signal predicted by Borra (2012). They dismiss molecules or pulsations as causes, and they deem it highly unlikely that the signals are caused by the Fourier analysis itself. This leaves two possible sources for the detected signals. Either they're a result of the Sloan instrument itself and the data reduction, or they are in fact a signal from extra-terrestrial intelligences.
Are these signals just evidence of some, as yet undiscovered, property of stars, or are these "transmissions" the alien equivalent of an episode of "The Bachelor"?
2012 paper predicting the signals reported on by Borra, et. al.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Tuesday October 25 2016, @08:44AM
As the aliens have no obvious reason to choose exactly this spectral range for a beacon, it is equally - if not more - likely that the observed frequencies are produced by a natural process that is typical to stars in exactly this spectral range. If I were an alien in charge of that transmission, I'd use all kinds of stars to make it obvious to the observer that a natural process is not likely to span so many different star configurations, periods of life and other unique physics.
I had a similar thought (hence the question at the end of TFS) and agree that this is more likely from some natural process.
However, I think the implication that the paper's authors are going for is that since these are "sun-like" stars, they could have a similar propensity for life/intelligent life and, assuming Kardashev [wikipedia.org] Type I (or even Type II) or lower level civilizations, it seems unlikely that such a civilization would have the capability to set up shop around a variety of stars just to show others they can communicate.
In the end, we will be sure that we see a SETI message only when it is undeniably artificial. Say, a sequence of prime numbers followed by a checksum of the last 1024 entries; or a grid of X and Y (and maybe Z) that are primes, and the content of the array makes sense. That was the format of some SETI messages that were sent from this planet.
This is a much more convincing argument, assuming that such signals from another civilization are intended to be received and understood by other civilizations. Which could be a pretty big assumption.
Given the type of signals, it seems unlikely that these are artificial. But even if they are, they likely weren't meant to be an advertisement for such a civilization.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday October 25 2016, @12:37PM
Look at our "intentional contact" signals vs our random emissions, we've got more "I Love Lucy" going out than SETI, by orders of magnitude. Some of the SETI signals were intentionally strong, but mostly, they're just buried in a background of internal chatter that leaked out.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday October 25 2016, @03:32PM
There's really no way around it: we make a lot of assumptions. We assume that any civilization will send using the electromagnetic spectrum. We assume that they will send us something intelligible, like prime numbers. We assume that they will format this information in a way that we can decode.
We cannot even manage to understand animal speech, on a planet where we are closely related to the animals involved. What is it that the chimpanzees are communicating to each other? Whales? Dolphins? We have only the vaguest of ideas, even though their communication ought to be very simple and limited.
Or consider dogs: we're not only both mammalian, we've lived with them for thousands of years. Yet the communication that they have with each other through scent is, literally, beyond our comprehension.
And we think we'll be able to communicate with aliens?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 25 2016, @04:21PM
No. But if they are not sending in the electromagnetic spectrum, we won't currently be able to receive their signals. So we look at the electromagnetic spectrum because that's the only place where we can at least hope to find something.
Imagine you are in a desert, and in one direction there might be an oasis within your reach, and in another direction it is far more likely that there is an oasis, but any oasis there may be is definitely out of reach. Which direction will you go to?
If there are actually any aliens actively trying to contact us, it is very likely that they will use something they can hope us to understand. Which almost certainly means using something involving the fundamental properties of natural numbers, as those are independent of any culture. Of course we cannot know for sure, but then, if we can't understand it, it might as well not be there, so again the original point applies: We look for what we can recognize, because that's the only thing we can hope to find.
Well, in those cases where the animals try to tell us something, they usually succeed quite well. Maybe you've never had a pet, or else you'd know.