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