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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 26 2017, @02:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the eureka? dept.

The team of researchers working on the Breakthrough Listen project (affiliated with SETI) has released preliminary findings after sifting through several petabytes of data obtained from three telescopes involved in the research project. The findings have been made available on the project's website as the team awaits publication of a paper in the Astrophysical Journal.

The Breakthrough Listen project was publicly announced in 2015, and has been backed by Stephen Hawking and perhaps more importantly by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire who, along with other backers, has put $100 million toward the 10-year project. Over the past two years, the Parkes Telescope in Australia, the Green Bank Telescope in the U.S. and the Automated Planet Finder optical telescope at Lick Observatory also in the U.S. have been dedicated to listening to radio signals emanating from space in the hope that one or more of them might be generated by alien life forms.

The team reports that to date, project members have identified 11 signals as worthy of a closer look, but at this time, do not believe any of the signals represent alien communications. They also note that the process of sifting the data is rather simple and straightforward—first, distinguish artificial signals from natural signals by looking at irregular behaviour such as modulation or pulsing patterns. The next step involves making sure any such irregularities are not generated here on Earth. The software is open source so that anyone who wishes to participate in the search can do so.

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-preliminary-results-breakthrough.html

[More Information]:
https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/News/10
https://seti.berkeley.edu/lband2017/index.html


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:06AM (11 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:06AM (#499812)

    If ET is out there it probably has enough tech to make a pretty obvious signal. We have not seen it. So we can probably conclude that if ET is out there it ain't using radio or the optical frequencies we have been looking at.

    So there is physics we don't understand and we aren't looking for the right thing, ET ain't out there or ET ain't talking for some reason. And if ET ain't talking we probably shouldn't transmit anything bright enough or obviously intelligent enough to be visible at long distances until we figure out some answers.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:13AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:13AM (#499815)

    This answer always amuses me.

    We just have to discover subspace and warp drive and it'll be STAR TREK!!!!!omgomgomg!!! except for that communism part, since that wouldn't happen in jmorris' fantasies.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:38AM (4 children)

      by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:38AM (#499823)

      Besides ignoring the other two possibilities I mentioned, nothing in my wondering if we lack the physics to see any signal being sent out implies FTL communication or travel. Normal optical and radio frequencies are subject to many distortions and noise. Perhaps ET is sending something else in an otherwise less noisy way? Perhaps if we could clearly identify some as yet unknown property of some particle we would instantly identify an intelligent pattern from select directions? Or notice only a very few places in the sky emit some particle at all? Our physics now knows of a great many things that we can barely detect.

      A hundred years ago we were blind to most of the EM spectrum and only had pitiful telescopes. What will we have in a thousand years? ET has almost certainly had far longer and assuming it isn't one civilization pitifully beaconing away still hoping to hear somebody for the first time we can assume multiple ancient civilizations sharing tech for untold ages. Because there is no reason not to share knowledge, barring FTL they have no need to worry of invasion.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:05AM (2 children)

        by tftp (806) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:05AM (#499837) Homepage

        Because there is no reason not to share knowledge, barring FTL they have no need to worry of invasion.

        Pray tell, why? Will long flight time bother biological creatures in hibernation? Will passage of time bother mechanical creatures or pure computers? Sublight transportation may need tens of thousands of years, but this Universe exists for tens of billions years. You cannot know who is on the other end of the communication. We do not know how rare certain resources are (but suspect that an Earth-like planet, were we in need of a spare, would not be an obvious find.) We do not have a clue how a seemingly innocent piece of information may be received by the extraterrestrials - even something that is obvious to us. Hell, just the fact that humans eat animals may be a sufficient reason for some other form of life to exterminate us. But it's more likely that out of infinite number of societies an infinite number of them does not need much justification for violence. One such example is Earth.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:56AM (1 child)

          by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:56AM (#499857)

          Way I see it is there are two possibilities. If we stick to the limit that FTL is not possible.

          Lets work the problem. Assume ET is 10,000 light years away and has improbable tech that would permit 0.5C travel.

          1. Tech expands almost unlimited at something like our current breakneck speed, perhaps even faster as meat is replaced with digital logic. So they send out a signal, we hear it and reply. So on the day they hear it at least 20,000 years have passed. They won't hear it because they have ascended to Godhood by then. No problem. But if they somehow haven't quite made it yet the crew of the starship they send will almost certainly make it in the additional 20,000 years it will take to get here. Again, no problem.

          2. Tech advance slows to more of a log scale vs time. So again, no problem. By the time the aliens get here 30,000 years after we answer their hail we will be pretty near their tech level with a whole solar system vs a starship. Again, no problem, even if the 'starship' is a moon with a drive implanted.

          Now consider they already know the answer to the question, especially if we ain't their first first contact situation. Add in the fact there really isn't anything we have that is going to be worth it. Sure Earth is habitable; for us. Odds of finding ET that wants the exact same conditions is probably small, odds of ET advanced enough to send to us a message still overly concerned with living planetside lower still. And if you have super tech terraforming is probably easier than going tens of thousands of years away to steal something that isn't quite what you need and would require a messy war with the sort of weapons ultra tech will make possible.

          Now if we got really unlucky and a hostile ET is only a few hundred light years away we could have a problem. But if life is that commonplace we should be seeing signs, right? (or God is pissed enough at us to have fudged the dice a bit...) Or we get the bad scifi scenario where their homeworld is doomed for some reason. Nothing is truly certain in this universe, but we can play the odds.

          • (Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday April 26 2017, @09:44PM

            by tftp (806) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @09:44PM (#500378) Homepage

            Now if we got really unlucky and a hostile ET is only a few hundred light years away we could have a problem. But if life is that commonplace we should be seeing signs, right?

            Seeing signs? How? We cannot directly observe planets in other star systems. Even around Proxima Centauri. We have no idea if there are smaller planets there, let alone what civilization may or may not exist on them. We do not even know if there are civilizations on satellites of our own gas giants - there is no law that would force them to reveal themselves to us.

            Earth is similarly invisible to our neighbors. We used to radiate a lot of RF, but only for a brief period of time - and over interstellar distances the omnidirectional, chaotic radio transmissions stand no chance. Today very little is radiated, as we switched to close range, low power cellular networks.

      • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:03PM

        by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:03PM (#500071) Journal

        There already is alternatives to EM spectrum transmissions namely a neutrino transmission that is something that is already known to be able to penetrate a wall made of 9 light years of solid lead. Now that is seriously better than most electromagnetic waves. There has already been a experiment to test this in 2012 at Fermilab [nature.com] with speed of 0.1 bits/second.

        So scintillator and photomultipliers (PMT) is the shit for the next ET search..

        Next study ought to be what kind of other particles or interactions there are. In essence only a very narrow scope of force carriers has been used, most is left to explore.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:00AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:00AM (#499835)

    If ET is out there it probably has enough tech to make a pretty obvious signal.

    We didn't for millions of years.

    We have not seen it.

    Or we wouldn't have because it's so damn rare. Earth is a very unique world, maybe one in trillion planets has the conditions necessary to create ecology like our own. Forget needles in a haystack, what we are doing here is the equivalent of looking for individual molecules in the ocean. From space.

    So we can probably conclude that if ET is out there it ain't using radio or the optical frequencies we have been looking at.

    Or that it:
    a) hasn't reached us yet
    b) reached us before we were looking for it
    c) the signal was too diluted for our instruments

    And if ET ain't talking we probably shouldn't transmit anything bright enough or obviously intelligent enough to be visible at long distances until we figure out some answers.

    Any civilization large enough to fully colonize their Solar system is large enough to survey every single planet in their galaxy and powerful enough to preemptively vaporize every other planet in existence. That is only with physics we know and understand today, there is no need for hypothetical technology such as FTL in order to accomplish such monumental tasks, all you need is to harness one single star. The best part is you don't even need to be transmitting radio for them to notice, life is very clearly visible long before sapience emerges. If there are any Kardashian-2 civilizations in our galaxy, they KNOW we are here, although they would be limited to knowing our state thousands of years ago because of light lag.

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:27PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:27PM (#499998)

      I think you're looking for the Kardashev scale [wikipedia.org].

      But I did giggle a bit.

      A Type I Kardashian civilization—has asses the size of a planet.
      A Type II Kardashian civilization—has asses the size of a star.
      A Type III Kardashian civilization—has asses the size of a galaxy.

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:03PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:03PM (#500070)

        I think you're looking for the Kardashev scale.

        I stand by my original statement.

  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:50AM (1 child)

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:50AM (#499854)

    It cold also be something as simple as "nobody nearby is actively trying to be heard by savages". I've heard that an alien race with identical technology to our own would find it almost impossible to detect us even from only a few light years away, and even then it might only be our high-power military radar pulses. Stars are massively noisy radio emitters that will tend to drown out any artificial signals.

    We can also see in our own technology that as communication technology improves, absolute signal strength tends to fall - better antennas and signal processing let you reliably receive much weaker signals. And for intentional interstellar communication you'd almost certainly want an incredibly tight-beam transmission to minimize the astronomical power consumption - the odds of us happening to be caught within the tight cone of such a transmission line is extremely low, unless we were intentionally targetted.

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:06PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @03:06PM (#500075) Journal

      Perhaps also known as.. No sane alien would contact Earthlings ;-)