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[An] upcoming study in The Astronomical Journal, which we learned about from MIT Technology Review, suggests humanity has barely sampled the skies, and thus has no grounds to be cynical. According to the paper, all searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have examined barely a swimming pool's worth of water from a figurative ocean of signal space. "We haven't really looked much," Shubham Kanodia, a graduate student in astronomy who co-wrote the study, said during a NASA "technosignatures" workshop in Houston, Texas on September 26.
[...] In their study, Kanodia and his colleagues built a mathematical model of what they consider a reasonably sized cosmic haystack.
Their haystack is a sphere of space nearly 33,000 light-years in diameter, centered around Earth. This region captures the Milky Way's bustling core, as well as many giant globular clusters of stars above and below our home galaxy.They also picked eight dimensions of a search for aliens — factors like signal transmission frequency, bandwidth, power, location, repetition, polarization, and modulation (i.e. complexity) — and defined reasonable limits for each one. "This leads to a total 8D haystack volume of 6.4 × 10116m5Hz2s/W," the authors wrote. That is 6.4 followed by 115 zeros — as MIT Technology review described it, "a space of truly gargantuan proportions."
Kanodia and his colleagues then examined the past 60 years' worth of SETI projects and reconciled them against their haystack. The researchers determined that humanity's collective search for extraterrestrials adds up to about 0.00000000000000058% of the haystack's volume. "This is about a bathtub of water in all of Earth's oceans," Kanodia said. "Or about a five-centimeter-by-five-centimeter patch of land on all of Earth's surface area."
Those numbers make humanity's search efforts seem feeble. But Kanodia views it as an opportunity — especially because modern telescopes are getting better at scanning more objects with greater sensitivity and speed. For example, he said, a 150-minute search this year by the Murchison Widefield Array covered a larger percentage of the haystack than any other SETI project in history.
Related: Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner Announce $100 Million "Breakthrough Listen" SETI Project
Narrow SETI Targets by Looking at Places Where Earth Transits can be Seen
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New Theory Suggests Radio Bursts Beyond Our Galaxy Are Powering Alien Starships
A New Theory on Why We Haven't Found Aliens Yet
Russian Physicist Proposes New Solution to the Fermi Paradox
Are We Alone? The Question is Worthy of Serious Scientific Study
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @02:59AM (1 child)
I was thinking along the same lines. If I'm running a SETI program in the Alpha Centauri system, and I'm listening to the Sol system, I might only have 200 or so years before the humans stop being so noisy. But the universe doesn't revolve around the humans, so I might be starting my SETI program around the time Aristarchus was just figuring out that the Earth goes around the sun or thousands of years in the future... assuming there are even humans left to detect. A thousand years goes by very quickly on the cosmic calendar. Blink and you'll miss it. How long will my fellow Alpha Centaurians carry on my work and keep listening to the Sol system?
In all likelihood, my Alpha Centaurian SETI program will probably be be hundreds of millions of years either too late or too early to detect the humans.
Also as other comments have pointed out, that Distant Early Warning Line might not even be bright enough to be detectable to my SETI program. It could be more likely that I'll spot an object or two making their way from the Sol system, and only then probably when their signal is no longer being drowned by Sol itself. So it could be more likely that when the humans make first contact by sending a probe over, it'll be news to me that there's a technological civilization hanging out around Sol.
Even then, how many hundreds of years will it take for even a very fast probe to make it to the neighbor's? Can the humans or even any technological species plan a mission that will take many, many multiples of their lifetimes to complete?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @03:01AM
Whoops! And GP comment! Must be getting close to bedtime....