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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 ledow on Thursday June 20 2019, @01:53PM
Yes, in that tiny sliver of time, for the tiny proportion of incredibly weak signals that we can receive, in those tiny areas of the galaxy just the right distance away, from those civilisations that just so happen to be broadcasting, etc. etc. etc.
The numbers quickly make it infeasible. And we're looking for patterns... we're not looking for noise, because noise is everywhere. A constant random noise is not a pattern, it occurs naturally. An on-off random noise is incredibly rare, even in modern radio - the idle channels are still transmitting random noise so that you don't know they are idle (which gives away something about the content of the message). And then we're hoping to spot that from *across the galaxy*, not long after our first image of a black hole, and where we're still discovering that some stars have planets we've never observed before.
There is also an argument that - though discovering a foreign signal might be the most amazing discovery in all of mankind... we can't actually *do* anything with it. Likely it won't be intelligible. And even if it was, or even if we try to blindly talk back, we have to hope they see something. By the time that signal gets back, it's going to be *decades* until the first response. We're all just kind of hoping that there's an alien civilisation hiding totally out of sight that will magically receive our signal, pop up, reveal itself, break all our known laws of physics and visit us where up until now we haven't seen hide nor hair of them, or their technology, and which it'll do just to meet us and be friendly. There's no sensible reason why they would, certainly no positive one!
It would be like us scooting across to the Moon just because we discovered a colony of ants, and that's just never going to end well (unless you want to buy a Moonant as a pet in a few years time!). They will likely learn *nothing* from us, and we likely have nothing of value to them if they're capable of such things.
And if they aren't... then it's postcards-at-decade-long-intervals and likely won't meet up for centuries even if both sides dedicated the entirety of their civilisation to that task.
Knowing that the universe is as quiet as it is is quite useful. If there were things to be picked up easily, we probably would have, and we'd probably have an accurate count of civilisations across the galaxy by now, and we might be able to communicate even. But knowing how empty it is, it's now just clear that we don't have much use for the rest of the galaxy.
We can't even take care of ourselves, traipsing halfway across the universe to talk to others really doesn't seem a good use of our time and resources.