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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: 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]