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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 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.
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