Alien Hunters Discover Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri
It's never aliens, until it is. Today, news leaked in the British newspaper The Guardian of a mysterious signal coming from the closest star to our own, Proxima Centauri, a star too dim to see from Earth with the naked eye that is nevertheless a cosmic stone's throw away at just 4.2 light-years. Found this autumn in archival data gathered last year, the signal appears to emanate from the direction of our neighboring star and cannot yet be dismissed as Earth-based interference, raising the very faint prospect that it is a transmission from some form of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI)—a so-called "technosignature." Now, speaking to Scientific American, the scientists behind the discovery caution there is still much work to be done, but admit the interest is justified. "It has some particular properties that caused it to pass many of our checks, and we cannot yet explain it," says Andrew Siemion from the University of California, Berkeley.
Most curiously, it occupies a very narrow band of the radio spectrum: 982 megahertz, specifically, which is a region typically bereft of transmissions from human-made satellites and spacecraft. "We don't know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency" such as this one, Siemion says. Perhaps, he says, some as-yet-unknown exotic quirk of plasma physics could be a natural explanation for the tantalizingly concentrated radio waves. But "for the moment, the only source that we know of is technological."
The detection was made by a $100 million project called Breakthrough Listen, led by Siemion and funded by tech billionaire Yuri Milner under the umbrella of Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives.
Haim Eshed was right.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday December 20 2020, @05:32PM
Even space aliens is their find.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @05:34PM (17 children)
Santa clause was vaxxed by Fauci:
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/530983-fauci-i-vaccinated-santa-claus-myself [thehill.com]
He is now dead:
https://www.searchquarry.com/namesearch/register?fname=Santa&lname=Claus&courthouse=De%20Kalb%20County%20Death%20Records%20Database&city=Higdon&state=AL&age=30&zip=&co=&trackstat=homepage-&aliasid=&recordtype=Death&type=&trid=&ntyp= [searchquarry.com]
This signal is them beaming over another Santa to replace the one that got vaxxed.
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday December 20 2020, @05:52PM (15 children)
> This signal is them beaming over another Santa to replace the one that got vaxxed.
You know what 4.3 light years away means, right?
It means beaming back Santa _will_ be, in another 8.4 years (given the date of the vax). Four years+ for the distress signal to get to them, four years+ to beam another Santa back.
Meantime, coal all round for everyone (if you can even find it).
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Sunday December 20 2020, @05:54PM
s/4.3/4.2/
Sheesh, can't even get it right when pulling up someone else...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @06:01PM (2 children)
So christmas is cancelled until 2030.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:33PM (1 child)
Or 2024, if Trump is re-elected (if you're a person who thinks that would look good under your Christmas tree)....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 21 2020, @06:43PM
Can't we just beam Trump to Proxima Centauri? He'll miss 2024 and 2028.
(Score: 5, Funny) by fustakrakich on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:00PM (2 children)
It's closer than 16.9, but not as wide
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @11:00PM (1 child)
I think Santa Claus might need a wider portal ...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday December 20 2020, @11:11PM
Now you're thinking with portals!
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:10PM (6 children)
Did anyone bother to find out if Coca-Cola-man is maybe an anti-vaxxer?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @08:33PM (5 children)
There is no Santa Claus this year because he is quarantining since he got the corona virus. Plus he's old and overweight which makes him high risk. Let's pray for him, hopefully he doesn't wind up in the ICU. Also, he should have been wearing his mask ;)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @08:51PM (2 children)
No. He has the Mantle of Immortality. See The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1985 film).
He could become the world's greatest superspreader, however.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @10:57PM (1 child)
Everyone needs to sterilize their chimneys.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @04:10AM
So it has come to this.
Send in the Hebrew Hammer [imdb.com].
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday December 21 2020, @12:28AM
Too little too late he might have already infected some kids [thestate.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 21 2020, @09:06AM
I think if Santa is getting closer than 6 feet to anybody while he's making his rounds, everybody can agree something is already wrong.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 21 2020, @09:04AM
Hey, come on now--there was an episode of TNG where they were working on interplanetary beaming :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Monday December 21 2020, @10:57PM
Well santa isn't real and neither is the media/political response to covid-19. Sociopaths like Fauci do this stuff its a message to people who can see through his deception.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:05PM (29 children)
Just read the Guardian article and skimmed the other one, TLDR. In all the cases cited, our labcoat squad go nuts over a short burst of one frequency.
Think about the following, because as scientists, they should.
If you were to "listen" for our Earth from someplace N light years away, you would see a vast array of frequencies, warped by traveling through space, coming from radio, TV, and all sorts of things. A jumbling mass, increasing as our "civilization" creates more junk that spews out signals. Earth would have been silent 150 years ago, then slowly cranking up.
So if we are looking for a "signal" out there, it should be a constant barrage of a very mixed bag of frequencies. Maybe we should send a satellite out a bit and "listen" back, pointing it a Earth to see what kind of thing we are looking for? Maybe something we have already sent has the right "ears" and can turn around to scan back at Earth to get a baseline? That's what I would do as a scientist.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:19PM (2 children)
You're assuming a civilization with a similar level of technology to us.
It's likely that other technological civilizations are *more* advanced than we are, given the short time we've been around and generating EM signals as compared with the age of the universe.
What's more, after decades of broadcast signals, more and more of our communications aren't broadcasts and don't have the signal strength to reach interstellar space, let alone other star systems.
It's much more likely that the signal detected is from some sort of natural process.
If it's not, the fact that it's in a quieter part of the spectrum and detectable by us implies that it's *meant* to be detected by us rather than just unintentional broadcasts from another civilization.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @08:39PM
1420MHz and 982MHz sound like AM stations :)
Once decoded and translated: "..and here's the weather, brought to you by 982AM, the best intergalactic station..."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 23 2020, @09:22PM
If they are so advanced, why are they wasting so much energy, shouldn't they have advanced enough to be efficient? Firstly, their communication should be as close as possible to noise - anything that isn't by definition contains redundancy that could be removed. Not just that, but given the proportion of the energy that we receive they're literally using a significant proportion of a sun for their transmitter - again really wasteful.
Take a guess how wasteful...
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by turgid on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:24PM (5 children)
How are radio signals "warped" by space, other than say, undergoing gravitational lensing? Proxima is pretty close and we don't know of anything in between that could "warp" a signal. There might be the odd nebula here and there in other places that absorbs at specific frequencies.
It's actually pretty simple to make mathematical models of the artificial electromagnetic emissions from Earth over time and to be able to predict which stars should be seeing what and when. By definition, it's possible to know the sort of gear that would be needed to detect/decode such signals. The scientists are way ahead of you. Sending out a spacecraft wouldn't tell us very much, and it wouldn't be able to travel far enough to be useful on a human timescale.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:44PM (1 child)
Red shift.
Of course, that wouldn't spread the frequency much.
Well, absorption and re-emission from virtual particles tends to spread things....but that's not happening, and besides, that, requires a lot further travel. (Red [or blue] shift could just be Doppler, and happen immediately.)
Perhaps it depends on what is meant by "warped" as the only other things that comes to mind is having the path bent by passing too close to a star. (There's something about magnetic fields and polarization that's hanging just outside my memory, but nobody said anything about the polarization.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:59PM
There is also gravitational red shifts ... not sure how that really applies here though.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @09:09PM (1 child)
Off the top of my head, I would think radio waves will spread out in frequency due to dispersion in travelling through the interstellar medium. I am not a radio astronomer, so I don't know how much of an effect this would be without looking it up.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 21 2020, @08:42PM
Group Velocity Dispersion
You can get a funny "chicken vs egg" thing going on with fiber optics old timers because natural silica has a minima about zero GVD around the famous and popular 1310 nm wavelength, so over time mfgrs have worked hard to optimize equipment to work at 1310 and fiber makers have fine tuned their fiber to work best at 1310 so do we use 1310 today because of the equipment optimizing to the fiber or the fiber optimizing to the equipment (aka why the heck not 1305 nm as the standard?)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @05:41AM
If the aliens aren't using high-quality Monster Cable, there would be so much distortion & noise, they're lucky the signal even made it this far!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:29PM
"In all the cases cited, our labcoat squad go nuts over a short burst of one frequency."
The problem is that as soon as their frequency becomes visible the Russians hack their power grids and shut down their equipment so the frequency stops before we even have a chance to identify what it is.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:52PM (4 children)
Let's say Adolf Hitler won WW2: his television broadcasts would have strengthened in power as he broadcast to wider and wider places and MAY have made it out to distant space. Powerful enough, his broadcasts (of himself, of course, for propoganda purposes) MAY have reached distant points with images (in various quality) intact.
I could see that for the length of his 'Reich' (thousand years, anyone? Buehler?), television broadcasts would have been very much propaganda based and not much of 'I LOVE LUCY' and 'GILLIGAN'S ISLAND', so would have been of lesser output but more powerful output.
Frequencies would not have needed to be varied much and the output would have been continuous, but not as continuous as all the broadcasts we have now: there would have been (at least originally) 1, maybe 2 channels (pure propaganda station and news/propaganda station (say, NAZI 1 AND NAZI 2).
Aliens looking for vast output from Earth would probably been seeing less than they would now, but (possibly) scarier broadcasts.
Who knows what's happening out there in space: maybe someone sent a brief signal before (like in that Isaac Asimov story...Nightfall???) they got shut down by scared peoples.....
Truth is often stranger than fiction...
But i will say, "I WANT TO BELIEVE!"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @12:42AM (2 children)
Lets not.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @04:35AM
The future hitlers one and only poweful message: "WEAR A MASK".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:31PM
History is written by the winners. Hitler was the good guy. You're brainwashed about everything. Use the internet to find out the truth before it's too late.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Socrastotle on Monday December 21 2020, @03:30PM
You have to think about these things on a geologic time scale. There was a really great episode in Cosmos about this. That entire series is just absolutely phenomenal. Since I'm sure you already have a copy and would simply like a digital backup, they're available here [1377x.to]. Sagan went with a "Cosmic Calendar" - compressing the universe into a single year, to see relative time frames.
January 1: Birth of the Universe
May 1: Birth of the Milky Way
June-August: Birth of various planetary systems
September 15th: Birth of our planetary system
December 31st 23 hours, 53 minutes: Birth of humanity
December 31st 23 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds: We cross the Atlantic
Absolutely everything we've achieved since has been wrapped up in the milliseconds and microseconds since.
The point of this is that things such as the discovery of radio (~140 years ago) seems like an eternity to us, because we think of things on a human time scale. But relative to any other species, it's an unimaginably small period of time. In fact even thousands of years from now will still be an unimaginably small period of time. So the odds of our nearest neighbor (whoever that may end up being) being anywhere remotely near to us in technology are just unimaginably remote. They are vastly more likely go be either some nonsentient form of basic to moderately evolved life, or something so advanced that to try to describe them would be akin to a blind man trying to describe color.
This is part of the reason that though I'm extremely interested in SETI type stuff, I think it's unlikely to yield much beyond disappointing false positives. To even assume that advanced species would still rely on the electromagnetic spectrum for communication is, in my opinion, unimaginably arrogant. It would be akin to a primitive species of times past assuming people in the future would still use something like smoke signals to communicate. Because, after all, in order to communicate the other party must certainly at least see your signal, right? That said, I'd love nothing more than to play a part in any project of the sort. Even if most likely to be fruitless, I think it's still important work and may, perhaps as now, still ultimately end up discovering new and interesting phenomena.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by legont on Sunday December 20 2020, @08:07PM (10 children)
Well, perhaps, only total idiots like us don't maintain radio silence. After all we - Europeans - destroyed every civilization we encountered. How come we expect a different treatment?
In this case they might have picked up communications with incoming colonization fleet.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @11:39AM (1 child)
Wow, that must be so unique, no civilizations on any other continent wiped anyone out. Surely, only we deserve this fate.
Or perhaps the aliens are a bunch of self-haters and are broadcasting their locations so we come and wipe them out.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday December 21 2020, @10:22PM
They did not reveal their military radar signatures; just saying.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday December 21 2020, @05:29PM (5 children)
After all we - Europeans - destroyed every civilization we encountered
What in the hell are you talking about? Europeans encountered Asian civilizations centuries ago, and those certainly weren't "destroyed". European contact has been pretty awful for indigenous populations in the Americas, to be sure, but Europeans contacted many more civilizations than those.
(Score: 2) by legont on Monday December 21 2020, @06:21PM (4 children)
With respect to Asians, it's a small miracle they - Asians - did not destroy European civilization mostly attributed to Russia who stopped some and China who decided not to do it.
On top of Native Americans, Europeans destroyed Muslim and Indian civilizations as well as devastated African tribes.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:35PM
and the Germans who saved Europe from the invading Huns. Also, the Asians in the Americas are not more indigenous than Europeans in the Americas are. The Europeans may have even been here before the Asians walked over, as Europeans probably had boats or possibly even Vimanas.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Monday December 21 2020, @10:23PM (2 children)
On top of Native Americans, Europeans destroyed Muslim and Indian civilizations as well as devastated African tribes.
Huh? What are you talking about? Muslim civilizations are still there in the middle east and central Asia, and were never "destroyed" at all. In fact, Islam is one of the world's largest religions by number of adherents. Where do you get the idea that their civilization was "destroyed"? Am I living in an alternate timeline suddenly?
And have you forgotten when the Moors conquered part of Europe (mainly Spain)?
As for India, same thing: India has over a billion people and seems to be doing OK. Their civilization certainly wasn't "destroyed", though it was changed by colonization for a while.
Same with Africa: they're still there. The Europeans did try colonizing parts of Africa for a while, but without a lot of success. Some places have certainly been changed a lot by European invaders (like South Africa), but others not so much. There probably aren't too many white people in Congo.
Seriously, I don't know where you're getting this crazy idea that Europeans have "destroyed civilizations". This charge can certainly be leveled at certain incidents: the Inca and Maya civilizations, for instance, were certainly wiped out by the Spanish. And the various tribes living in North America (Navajo, Apache, etc.) have certainly been devastated by European colonization: the Navajo of course are still around, but mainly stuck on a "reservation" in the desert which is quite different than if colonization had never happened, and other tribes don't even have reservations it seems and their descendants are all mixed-blood and part of the general population. But outside the Americas, I'm just not seeing any evidence for your claim.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Tuesday December 22 2020, @09:43AM (1 child)
American Indians was a total genocide. It's a step up from destroying civilizations that was done to everybody else.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Grishnakh on Tuesday December 22 2020, @05:26PM
Who's "everybody else"? You still haven't answered the question about how in your reality, Muslims have been totally wiped off the face of the planet, when in my reality they number in the billions and control many nations.
(Score: 1) by Leelapolis on Monday December 21 2020, @06:38PM
Vogon construction fleet on its way...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:41PM
That's why i have largely hostile mongoloids right down the road from me, cuz Whitey's so evil... fuck off. If anything Whites have been way too nice and are in the process self destructing right now due to the Jewish psyop of Christianity.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @10:31PM (1 child)
For several decades the strongest signal that was leaving Earth was all the cold war radar.* It would appear to aliens as a group of pulsed sources each one a specific frequency and pulse rate. Try decoding that to get a meaningful message.
*It was also a far stronger signal than any leaving now. The more communications improve the lower the power and the more the signal looks like random noise.
(Score: 2) by legont on Sunday December 20 2020, @11:00PM
Yeah, the nature of our civilization would be an easy puzzle for Proxima's folks.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @04:53PM
I'm going to go ahead and assume that they did, and furthermore that they saw something so obvious (to them) that they dismissed your concern out of hand.
Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. Offering a smug opinion in the we're-smarter-than-they-are vein, after skimming a press-filtered sciency-story devoid of actual facts, when you're neither an expert in the field nor have any experience working in it, is most assuredly the father.
That's what I would do as a scientist. If I were a scientist. In linguistics. Or something.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:09PM
I really hope Mary Doria Russell hears about this article; I bet she'd at least crack a smirk. Her novel "The Sparrow" is a really good read, and if memory serves, it starts with the reception of a signal similar to this.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:13PM
They are declaring war on Alpha Centauri and the Terran Trade Authority, as it was written [amazon.com].
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @07:28PM (4 children)
add a "popular" link and sort by # of comments. that ways people can filter by "latest" or "popular" and "latest" that become popular don't disappear until people really get tired of arguing about stuff. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @08:57AM
found the redditor
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:17PM (2 children)
I don't even understand why you'd suggest something like this.
Have you seen the sort of cesspit that Reddit has turned into? And there's no doubt that at least part of it is their voting system, which works as a great motivator for losers to try to game the system. Even here the voting system is dubious, but the worst it does is occasionally "censor" a post which is immediately uncensored when somebody expands a message group - how I saw this post, for instance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:44PM (1 child)
no, because i don't really use reddit. i didn't say anything about voting stuff up. i said based on the "number of comments", meaning *general engagement*. with the current soylent setup interesting stories get covered up by new lame stories.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 23 2020, @03:55AM
I have a suggestion, but you need a user account and we probably need to fix a bug related to it first.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 20 2020, @08:00PM (12 children)
How hard would it have been for somebody in 2011 to pulse a focused beam around 982 MHz at Proxima Centauri just to sit back and wait for the yucks as people go nuts over the echo?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 4, Funny) by takyon on Sunday December 20 2020, @08:04PM (5 children)
Was Arecibo destroyed to cover this up?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday December 20 2020, @09:49PM (4 children)
That's what I was thinking. When Arecibo was around, it was receiving their communications all the time. But I suspect the aliens found out about the failure and are saying, "Are you still listening to me? I'm talking to you. Ugh, earthlings."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @12:06AM (3 children)
Absolutely. Especially since there are zero other radio telescopes [wikipedia.org] anywhere on Earth or in orbit.
Sigh.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday December 21 2020, @05:27PM (2 children)
But how many of them have been in James Bond?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @07:16PM
I don't know, but thank you so very much for that really unpleasant imagery!
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday December 21 2020, @10:04PM
Bondage...James Bondage... her name was Gag... Ball Gag...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Monday December 21 2020, @07:18PM (3 children)
Something tells me that the power needed to send to and bounce a beam from Proxima Centauri and still be detectable would be astronomical.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 21 2020, @07:54PM (2 children)
By definition, no?
The trick would be a focused beam that could get a 180 swing around the star somehow...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday December 22 2020, @04:12PM (1 child)
Simply not practical. Proxima Centauri isn't massive enough to bend light (or radio waves) that much, even if we could somehow get a beam focused and powerful enough to reach that far.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 22 2020, @08:35PM
Ancient alien civilization setup massive retroreflectors as a gag?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 21 2020, @08:53PM (1 child)
Its in the middle of the military TACAN air navigation band and that's right about the time frame of hyper-rapid deployment of the JTIDS system WRT the wars in the middle east for Israel.
So its like glass half full, glass half empty; lots of gear laying around for people to F with and see what happens, yet at the same time lots of locals REALLY pissed off that you've disabled their VOR/DME and can't land on their aircraft carrier and can't get the military aircraft datalink working right.
There were massive studies to see what would happen if you deploy JTIDS on top of existing civilian TACAN/DME operation. Conclusion in the end was its "OK". Anyway kinda surprising nobody would notice some major interstellar radar F-ing around.
Maybe people noticed incoming L-band signals and didn't want to get in trouble with the defense department WRT known experimental JTIDS deployments. One would think there would be slow long term interstellar doppler shifts on interstellar signals vs locals, but whatever maybe the signal isn't long enough.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 22 2020, @01:58AM
There would have to be some unusual echo at work, not just moon bounce kind of stuff but something quite a bit more efficient. The interstellar Doppler shift would be there but I don't think it would be a very strong effect at Proxima Centauri.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 5, Funny) by srobert on Sunday December 20 2020, @08:49PM (1 child)
The signal has already been decoded thanks to the efforts of a broad open source coalition of cryptographers.
Ready?:
"Drink your Ovaltine"
EOM
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @12:12AM
This was a clever part of the movie, a bit of an educational tip for future spies.
Here is my take:
When decoding your message (in secret, of course), let no one disturb you from completing your task. There is nothing more important than this moment, this message. As the tension mounts and the outside pestering reaches a fever pitch, remain fixated on your task until the decoding has completed.
(Score: 3, Funny) by BsAtHome on Sunday December 20 2020, @10:01PM (1 child)
Isn't this the signal that is advising us to visit the local galactic planning office to look at the plans for the intergalactic expressway? I wonder how long it will take for the workforce to arrive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 20 2020, @11:36PM
11:46:00 on Thursday
http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Entertainment/Books/HitchHikers_Guide_To_The_Galaxy/1.Screenplay.html [davesource.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @12:59AM
Fuck her good & plenty. She's a tasty one, ain't she. My precious.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Monday December 21 2020, @03:57AM (1 child)
Can we listen to/download/see the signal? It probably looks/sounds like static, but I'm curious.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:57PM
It was a totally unmodulated carrier a 982.002MHz. Which is why I suspect it is human, what are the odds ET would send a signal dead centered like that? Especially with the shifting one would expect from Doppler shifting as they send from a point orbiting their star, possibly on the surface of a rotating world, being received on an antenna on the surface of a spinning world in orbit around our Star. Something on Earth, no idea how it came and went as they pointed toward and away from the target though.
The Band Plan has that frequency in the Aeronautical Mobile / Aeronautical Navigation space so somebody was probably doing a test of some sort.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @06:35AM (1 child)
queue - detective show theme music
8:24PM - Detective Sargeant Dawson receives the dossier on Alpha Centauri....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2020, @08:55AM
*sergeant
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 21 2020, @09:03PM
Inmarsat-3 F4 is a geosynchronous comsat with L-band downlink licensed to 1525-1559 MHz.
That's the sat you listen to, in the western hemisphere anyway, if you want safety of life at sea messages and they also do other mobile sat downlinks. Like jet engine automatic performance reporting and stuff like that.
There's a small subculture of amateur montoring dudes listening to that stuff. I have the gear and have played around and it works pretty well.
Anyway I would not be surprised if in the entire giant constellation of US and Russian and "other" military comsats there's not somebody up there with a L-band sat with lower limit that could line up with one observatory for awhile during a transmitter test, accident, or maybe even normal operations.
Would be amusing to know the exact geographic coordinates and time of the supposed intercept and then see whats in the Clarke belt that would be sitting in the path, or close enough anyway WRT antenna sidelobes.
Remember with respect to antenna sidelobes, "loud as hell" like consumer satellite radio, but many dB down in an antenna sidelobe, is now detectable but weak. So its not necessarily that the Russians pointed a sea radar at the observatory, its just the Russian's antenna is not infinitely large so there are antenna sidelobes that will be detectable.
(Score: 1) by TommyJ on Wednesday December 23 2020, @12:42PM
This is really interesting news. But, unfortunately, we always find explanations for such things in nature over time.
What if it really was extraterrestrial life? And we were wrong. That would be great. Or maybe not. Especially if this life is as warlike as people. Do you know that people have lived only 100 years without wars in their entire history of existence? And not in a row.
It is not entirely clear to me for what purpose we are looking for extraterrestrial signals.