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It's quiet out there: scientists fail to hear signals of alien life
Astronomers have come up empty-handed after scanning the heavens for signs of intelligent life in the most extensive search ever performed.
Researchers used ground-based telescopes to eavesdrop on 1,327 stars within 160 light years of Earth. During three years of observations they found no evidence of signals that could plausibly come from an alien civilisation.
[...] During the three-year effort, the astronomers scanned billions of radio channels and filtered out any signals that appeared to come from nature or equipment on Earth. Having dismissed millions of signals this way, the team was left with only a handful of "events". On closer inspection, these too turned out to have prosaic explanations.
The Breakthrough Listen team described their latest attempt to track down ET in two papers released on Tuesday, which made all the data available to the public. "There could be a signal in the data that we didn't detect this time around, but others can now look through it to see if we missed anything," Price said.
Also at Astrobiology and The Register.
The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Public Data, Formats, Reduction and Archiving
UC Berkeley SETI Program GitHub
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:20PM (13 children)
There is always that option that we are all alone and/or the most advanced form of line in the universe and/or the other aliens are so far beyond our form of comprehension of what life is that we don't even register to each others as life and/or they just don't give a fuck about us -- the backwards ape people of that blue water world.
That said the Ancient Astronaut theorists are not going to like that, I'm sure they do believe it's some kind of conspiracy afoot.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hartree on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:45PM (2 children)
Well, it could be like a civilization of dogs declaring there can't be intelligent life out there because by now there surely would have been time for their scent to get here.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday June 20 2019, @06:59AM (1 child)
Or as the agnostics tell the atheists: God stinks.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @11:58AM
No, I think you're mistaken. That was Diogenes of Sinopel!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:45PM (4 children)
I still think we're looking at a very tiny amount of the search space, and possibly the most interesting stuff (radio/TV equivalent broadcasts) is unrecognizable after it travels light years.
If you read TFA, Breakthrough Listen was looking for technosignatures/megastructures/beacons. Very obvious "WE ARE HERE" stuff. The innumerable and very weak TV and radio broadcasts that have been emitted on Earth may be virtually undetectable.
Direct observation of exoplanets to look for signs of biology or other unnatural features might turn out to be a much more fruitful approach. But if we don't find anything within 100 light years, expanding the search area to 1,000 or 10,000 light years could require additional decades to put together bigger and better space telescopes.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:58PM (2 children)
We're trying to do a stock take by peering through the Warehouse door keyhole.
I don't know what the answer is though. Space is big.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:03AM (1 child)
For one billionth of the time that the warehouse has been operating, across 1,300/100,000,000,000 of the shelves.
Call me when we reach 1% coverage with still no signs. Until then, this is like asking: are there platypuses on Earth? by standing in one random spot, opening your eyes for one second, then counting all the platypuses you don't see there.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:33PM
What? Venomous underwater cats with a duck's beak? Of course there bloody aren't, that would be mental.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:59AM
It's not just a search space, it's also a search time, and we've barely flipped the shutter open for the briefest of moments.
H. sapiens has been transmitting RF less than 100 years, less than 1/50th of our "civilization" has been transmitting, and civilization rise or fall, there's pretty good odds that we're going to be ramping down our transmission power and intelligibility to others pretty severely in the next 100 years. I Love Lucy was somewhere near the high point of our broadcast power days.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:48PM (3 children)
There still could be life around neighboring star systems. Microbial, which we'll probably be able to detect in the near future. But it's also possible that intelligent lifeforms exist, that don't need radio anymore. Or aquatic creatures on a water world, could be highly intelligent, but we're not going to find out about them until we've managed interstellar travel. I can't imagine a water world being highly technological, even if its inhabitants are much smarter than us.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:08AM (2 children)
Your failing, not theirs. Picture a water world with 0.1 Earth gravity and a big moon in a low swinging elliptical orbit. Now, picture two more water worlds like that in the same solar system. Those water creatures would have both a much easier time getting into space than we do, and a much greater incentive to do so.
~250 billion stars per galaxy, ~100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, anything physically possible that you can imagine most likely exists somewhere.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday June 20 2019, @08:05AM (1 child)
Yes, but on a water world I can't imagine melting furnaces to extract metal out of ore. Electronics would be difficult to create too I guess.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:06PM
As you say, lack of imagination. If we're ever lucky enough to meet spacefaring water-worlders, maybe they'll be friendly and explain how they build their ships (in ways we haven't yet imagined)... if they even need ships.
As far as we can interpret the fossil record, we're the first species to do serious environmental modification (beyond beaver scale), out of hundreds of millions of years of species that were perhaps as intelligent as us, or even moreso. It could be dumb luck 50/50, or even more in favor of water dwelling species to evolve to spacefaring capability. Sure, they probably won't be starting with cellulose combustion in air to heat ore to refine metals - that was our dumb luck path - theirs will be different, and likely as difficult for us to manage as fire is for them.
As for electronics - I don't have much of a problem at all conceiving of water dwellers evolving photonic computing before electrical... talk about another flash in the pan, fire has been around for millennia but electricity is barely 200 years in practical use - surely there are technologies as capable as electricity for information processing and communication, we just haven't stumbled into widespread practical application of them yet.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 20 2019, @02:55AM
Yep, until the Vogons decide it's time for a hyperspace bypass right through the Sol system...
All I think this study means is that ET thinks high power radio broadcasting is dumb and only broadcast for about 100 years before going 100% to a cable delivery subscription model. Stick that in your Drake equation and then tell me how many stars with transmitting life you're going to have to scan to catch ET in that brief century of freely transmitted easily understood RF signals. Hint: much much greater than 1300.
🌻🌻 [google.com]