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
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 26 2017, @05:00AM (2 children)
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)
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
I think you're looking for the Kardashev scale.
I stand by my original statement.