SETI picks up mysterious signal

Cool

nice. too bad we will never know.

Why will we never know?
I am not a techie, so please excuse if dumb question...
Maybe they'll find a way to travel superfast like Jodie Foster's new friends in the movie?

That's an ignorant statement, Crotaline. You probably would have said the same thing when Jocelyn Bell discovered the first pulsar. You'd be surprised at what astronomers can tell about an object just from the radiation we receive from it.

Disappointing name: SHGb02+14a.

How the hell are we to give orders to train our phasers onto that unpronouncable alien?

Very interested to hear it shifts frequency. Is it possible that, say it is something alien, that they are not necessarily so advanced as we think?

Perhaps they are even behind us in some way? I have the impression that many alien fans assume the intelligence if it exists, will have the answers to everything on earth, as if it was some religious quest not scientific.

@jeremy - it's likely to assume an alien civilisation is more advanced than ours since we haven't been around than long in relation to the cosmic time scale. However that's also the weak point of SETI project, if some civilisation is way more advanced than ours, how likely is it that we are capable of detection their 'messages'.

I dont get the frequency shift thing. Do we shift our frequencies to match the earths rotation when we send comms signals to spacecraft on moon missions etc? Maybe we do, but I dont know. I certainly doubt that we shift the frequencies on terrestial and sattelite transmissions.
They are suggesting that the aliens would be advanced enought that they would do this shifting, but surely not if we are picking up spurious signals that were only intended for their local orbit.
If they were pointing the transmission directly at us specifically though, then sure, they should be shifting it, but they arent.

Whatever it is, it will be intersting to see the outcome of their research into this signal.

I actually think that it makes more sense that it drifts with regularity. Why are they assuming that it should be one single signal that will continually shift as opposed to sending the same signal out again and again?
I mean everytime it gets to the telescope it is the same and then drifts the same with perhaps some cosmic interference variation that could not always be the same.
If the signals were continually different, but originating from the same source, then it would make more sense to be a natur phenom. I believe that we too are sending a repeated signal out.

As for the more or less advanced, that is actually kind of easy if you think about it.
We are looking for someone sending. Therefore, for us to meet up with this single purpose, they would have to be as advanced or more advanced than we are. That is the assumption with the odds being that they can send better than we can receive at this point in earth human development.

@Tom17 - no, as far as i know communication signals from the earth are never corrected in frequency for the earth's rotation. Remeber that the frequency shift is very small, and for communication purposes you can just use a phase locked loop in the receiver to correct for a random, or for that matter periodic, shift in frequency.

@eurovol - the argument is flawed, from the earth we have been sending out signals aimed at other space civilisations for decades now. So we're not only listening but also sending.

True, but we haven't gotten an answer that we know of. And that is not really an argument, only the prevailing assumption.
Myself, if there is one, then there are others. Some will be less advanced and some will be more advanced (kinda like people on earth).
If I was betting in Las Vegas, I would put my money on the first contact being with the more advanced. Better odds I think.

Yes we have been sending a signal for 30 years, but they could have been doing it for 1000? You never know. It is still pure speculation.

I wonder if they are sitting in their offices, looking out the window at the glorious pink sunny day and the blue crop fields having the same discussion right now.

hmmm. sorry

Longer than 30 years, perhaps? When was the first radio signal sent?

Or am I being ignorant of physics here?

No, it is the periodicity of the pulsar signal that allowed Bell and Hewish to determine that it was a natural source. The only signals we on Earth are currently sending out are NOT periodic (television, radio, mobile phones, etc.) . There was A signal sent out about 30 years ago, but that is not continually being sent.

true, but how advanced is the signal we/they are sending.

for example assume you would like to receive a signal generated by a more advanced alien civilisation. A very advanced way for radio-datacommunications is to use ultra-wide band modulation. Our own radio technology is also heading in that direction, with CDMA and UMTS, being the first steps. The trick with such a signal is that if you don't know it's there you will never be able to detect it, let alone decode it. So if there's only a slight offset in how advanced two civilisations are they will not be able to detect eachother's communication. Ofcourse this argument is flawed when the alien civilisation tries to get into contact with other civilisations and sends on purpose an easy to detect signal, but how likely is that?

@Tom17 - it does make you wonder.

Not only would you have to decode the signal, but then there's the language after that. The signal that was sent out 30 years ago was in mathematics, which would be more likely to be understood since it's the closest thing to universal that we've got.

The first "high-power" signal is usually attributed to the 1936 Olympic broadcast from Berlin (yes, used in Sagan's "Contact").

Suffice it to say, we're not going to have much of a dialogue with some civilization 1000 light years away from us. Alas, that isn't the intent of SETI. Just imagine the religious, political, and sociological impacts of knowing for sure there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

"Either we are alone or we are not; either way boggles the mind." - Lee DuBridge

@interplanetjanet - the main problem is detection, since such a signal is lower than the noise threshold for any given particular frequency. Only through proper detection you can retreive the signal and start thinking about trying to decode it

As for mathematics, how do we know that our mathematics are universal? And besides you still need some kind of language to write it down.

@DW - sure it's very interresting and boggles the mind but 'religious, political, and sociological impacts' that's a little far fetched i would say.

It is worth noting that any signals received could be genuine attempts at making contact, e.g. "hey, we're here" or simply standard communications not intended for extraterrestrial listening.

Our low earth orbit signals are meant for us and not far flung civilizations and what we sent out to the nether-regions may be degraded after such a long trip.

Whatever signal that is sent out, how would it change after travelling 30+ light years through the cosmos. If we could capture our own signal then, would we even be able to recognise that it was our own and could we still decode it?

Also gotta hope that civilisations continue sending out radio waves after they progress on to other technologies too (if they will exist). Consider that we discovered the principle of radio transmission in 1887 (spark gap jobby). At the beginning of the last century we had proper signal transmissions. 30 years ago we started sending signals into space apparently.
Now over the last few months, scientists seem to be making more noise about discoveries in quantum entaglement which looks like it could potentially turn out to be another method of transmission in the future that doesnt use radiowaves. Even if they take another 100-200 years to get that working, commercialised and in wide use that would still be a lifespan of only around 300 years that we will have been sending out radio waves. In the scale of things, that is a tiiiny window for our signals to get found by someone else.
Assuming that other civilisations have similar rates of technological discovery/development, they will too only have a small window where they are sending out radio waves that could be discovered by us.
With any luck, civilisations will continue to send out "discovery" radio waves into space long after radio is no longer used in the civilisation as a whole.
Or this quantum stuff will come to nothing and it will all be irrelevant, but still something else to consider...

@eurovol - but you forget about signals we use to communicate with our space probes exploring distant part of our solar system. That are high powered signals and they are directed towards space. However these signals also use very advanced modulation methods these days.

Singals don't change by travelling through the cosmos. It's vacuum out there so there's no interaction, it only gets weaker the further it travels.

@Tom17 - that's exactly the argument use by skeptics about contact with other civilizations. Do civilizations (or their technology for that matter) exist long enough to have a proper change of interacting with an independently evolved civilization in the 'neighborhood'. Will human civilization still be around in 300 years? No way to tell that right now.

It may be base 10, or base 12 (or my preferred base 16 which has failed despite my attempts to poularize it), or plain binary. I think we can all agree that an appropriately sequenced I/O pattern would indicative of some significance.

For example, NASA sent this out in 1974:

[img]http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/700000/images/_704124_seti150.jpg[/img]

It is basically an array of I/O that when put into an appropriately proportioned matrix yields an image of some significance.

Maybe this "quatum stuff" is what other civilizations use and they never used radio waves?

Quantum entaglement is some weird shit. Fact.

100% FACT.

But I imagine so was the spark gap transmissions when they discovered it in 8887.

After a few years of loosely keeping an eye on Quantum physics (and mostly not understanding a bloody thing of it) I think I am staaaarting to get the gist of what the quantum entanglement is about..

Bloody nifty if they can get it working

This may be true for short cosmic distances, but what about 100 light years, a 1000, ...
It is a "vacuum" out there, but it is not empty. There are things pulling it, pushing it, bumping into it, like a gauntlet with things that we have not even begun to imagine.

@DW - I don't understand that image to start with, let alone other civilisations

a base 12 mathematical system would be the more logical choice (because you can divide 12 by 1,2,3,4, and 6). So we made the wrong choice, but hey that happens we you copy things from those Arabs.

Quantum entanglement is really interesting matter and it goes pretty quick with the development. Recently they actually realized real transmission with it (over an optical fiber, no air waves) and used it in a test for ultra secure bank transactions.

Translation

[img]http://www.cropcircleresearch.com/articles/imgs/uk01dm/decrypt.gif[/img]

The array is 1679 pulses. 1679 because that is the product of 23 and 73, two prime numbers.

What if they sent the message "dogmaI", do we read it forwards or backwards?

well i would have send out a simple 'hey, how're you doing'. The chance they understand that is equally big than that they understand the real message, about zero i would say.

I don't think we should have told them our human size and population. May give them the impetus to attack if they know that have the better numbers!

its ok, they will be expecting our heads to be the same diameter as our necks... Our huge heads will confuse them and we will crush them!

DW - how did they decide on that 1974 message? I understand the math stuff, but is it really fair to think that the same bases and sugars in nucleotides would have evolved elsewhere?

All it says is that for some reason that assortment elements is somehow, someway important to us. It's about as good as you can do not knowing who is on the receiving end.

Well, we can detect signals on the order of a milliJansky (if I remember correctly, that's 10^-26 Watts/sqm/sec). One would assume that a civilization much more advanced than ours could reach even lower thresholds.


Go back and read my statement. I said "as close to universal as we've got". Prime numbers are certainly universal, no matter what basis you're using for your numbering system. If humans can decode languages and encryption systems, then certainly a more advanced civilization can decode as simple a message as the one we sent out!

BTW, eurovol is right in that the signal would be affected by the interstellar medium, but it's a linear effect. The signal is spread out in frequency, and can be quantified by a "dispersion measure" which is just the slope on a frequency vs. time plot.

@interplanetjanet - I guess i wasn't clear. It's not about being able to straightforwardly detect it, but detect it and discriminate the signal from the noise you receive and the noise generated by your own detection equipment.

and of course mathematics is "as close to universal as we've got" but my question was do they use the same kind of mathematics.


we're still unable to read some of the ancient scriptures (correct me if i'm wrong but i think Maya is a prime example). And if it wasn't for the stone of Rosetta we wouldn’t be able to read Egyptian scripture at the moment.

@interplanetjanet - as far as i know there's no dispersion in a vacuum medium. Which medium would cause the dispersion?

If I recall correctly, the message sent out 30 years ago was preceeded by a periodic signal, which is easy enough to pick up and sort out using FFTs. Equipment noise is normally easy enough to get around. I did some observing awhile back at Arecibo (the big dish at the beginning of Contact), and the only noise they have to contend with there was the 60Mhz cable noise. Fine, just ignore a small band around 60 Mhz. As I said, if we can detect signals on the order of mJ within the local noise, there's no reason to believe a more advanced civilization couldn't do better.


But we're not talking about a rosetta stone here. We're talking about ones and zeros, ons and offs, that can be assembled according to dimensions given by two prime numbers in an arbitrary numbering system. Don't you think that an advanced civilization would think to try different numbering systems and then, when they hit on the correct one, recognize prime numbers? This is much simpler than even common languages.

The interstellar medium is not a perfect vacuum.

re
I think it would invalidate the book of genesis, so some schools in alabama would have to change their curriculum. that would have to be approved politically and make some teachers redundant.

there, all three...

If I understand DW's post properly, NASA beamed a copy of Defender from the Atari 2600 into space. Sweet, but I would have sent the E.T.s Pitfall. Better long-term gameplay.

Or perhaps "Space Invaders" would be more realistic

Let's not be pessimistic, I am sure our new Overlords will be benevolent and kind masters. I for one fully support their efforts and will gladly work in their intergalactic salt-mines. I would never suggest that I would be better suited to managing one of their intergalactic slavegirl summer camps. *cough*

1. Work for our new overlors in their salt mines
2. Gain their trust as we find their weaknesses
3. *******

(BBC) oh well. crapped out again.

Quantum entanglement is indeed some seriously, seriously weird shit. There was an articlle in New Scientist back (27 March issue) that anyone can read called "The Weirdest Link" that gives a little glimpse of some of the weirdness involved if anyone is interested.

Seems they have found some evidence that quantum entanglement has effects on a macro-scopic scale !! Holy shit. I'll say that again. Holy shit.

I received a signal from outer space just recently, well Drogheda actually but it's almost the same