SETI

[Stinger]

A buddy of mine claims that SETI has found a signal that it hasn't "falisfyied" yet. They first found it May 23. I suspect a hoax.

What is the process for finding a "suspicious"signal? Have any been found outside of the famous "wow" signal?

[SteveP]

I know how this is done. You have an astronomer wearing a pair of headphones, dozing in front of a bank of computers with his or her sneaker-clad feet on the desk.

If a signal is detected, the astronomer leaps to his or her feet and frantically switches on a tape recorder. Confirmation is made by ringing up the head astronomer and holding the phone next to the speaker.

[LampreyMoose]

Or some prankster aboard the ISS.

[SwoleMan]

Probably a hoax. I don't think it's likely that SETI will ever find anything.

[GenesisNemesis]

Your buddy misspelled "falsified". :Cheeky:

[skepticalbip]

SETI finds "suspicious" signals all the time. Generally, however, they are eventually identified as satellites, terrestrial signals, etc. But they do occasionally detect a signal that they can not identify and is non-repeating so it can not be confirmed.

Then again, if I remember right, in the 1960s they chased pulsars for quite a while before they figured out that they were natural signals from a collapsed star. The pulsars were originally labeled as LGM1, LGM2, etc. (for Little Green Men 1, etc.) as I recall.

[The Colourful Jester]

Was anything ever made of the WOW signal?

[skepticalbip]

Was anything ever made of the WOW signal?Nope... It didn't repeat so it could never be confirmed or identified. It could have been almost anything from equipment glitch to a terrestrial signal to a natural event to the signal they are hoping for. It was just the indications of a signal on the strip chart data generated by automated equipment that they noticed the next day.

[kaugust]

SETI's chances of success are even lower than previously thought:

http://www.vectorsite.net/taseti.html#m2


For us to detect an alien civilization 100 light-years away that is broadcasting "omnidirectionally" -- in all directions -- the aliens would have to be using a transmitter power equivalent to several thousand times the entire current power-generating capacity of the entire Earth. It is much more effective in terms of communication to generate a narrow-beam signal whose "effective radiated power" is very high along the path of the beam, but negligible everywhere else. This makes the transmitter power perfectly reasonable, but the problem then becomes one of having the good luck to be in the path of the beam.


On the History Channel program "Life After People," at the very end it was revealed that SETI itself found that leaked radio and TV signals would fade into background noise between 1-2 light years from Earth. The nearest star, Alpha Centuri, is slightly more than 4 light years away. That means we are virtually undetectable to any civilizations that might be out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People#Human_successors


Television and radio signals which were once thought to be capable of transmitting information over interstellar distances actually decompose into static within one or two light years according to research done by the SETI project.


The second citation on that point in the Wikipedia article is an article by Neil deGrasse Tyson on our radio and TV bubble: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_9_110/ai_80061812/print

We have sent one directed signal at a random segment of the sky in 1974 from the Arecibo Dish containing a pictoral "message" if decoded--but I've always found it remarkable that SETI people thought that we might receive a signal from an alien race when were are barely willing to send out direct signals ourselves!

In sum, the constant FM radio and non-cable TV that can actually escape into space would not be distinguishable from background noise even if it arrived at the nearest star, and we've sent a single directed signal into one part of space that won't likely ever reach any planet. And we think we'll pick up the radio signals of any other civilizations that might be out there (or not)?

[skepticalbip]

SETI's chances of success are even lower than previously thought:

http://www.vectorsite.net/taseti.html#m2

<snip>

In sum, the constant FM radio and non-cable TV that can actually escape into space would not be distinguishable from background noise even if it arrived at the nearest star, and we've sent a single directed signal into one part of space that won't likely ever reach any planet. And we think we'll pick up the radio signals of any other civilizations that might be out there (or not)?
Indeed...

Photo of page 96 from "Common Knowledge or Blissful Ignorance" by W. Patterson:
http://i108.photobucket.com/albums/n7/skepticalbip/misc/DSCF2866-1.jpg

[JamesBrown]

A buddy of mine claims that SETI has found a signal that it hasn't "falisfyied" yet. They first found it May 23. I suspect a hoax.It could have been one of my Hits (http://seti.net/cgi-bin/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=73). If so it was falsified. Follow the link in the post.
Regards..... jim

[wufwugy]

i like how the fermi paradox is not a paradox

[JamesBrown]

A buddy of mine claims that SETI has found a signal that it hasn't "falisfyied" yet. They first found it May 23. I suspect a hoax.It could have been one of my Hits (http://seti.net/cgi-bin/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=73). If so it was falsified. Follow the link in the post.
Regards..... jimDid anyone look at this post? Hello, Hello, Testing 123. I just said I have a machine that can detect extraterrestrials and you all just said "that's nice - what else is new".:wave:

[ZikZak]

Alas, for anything but a civilization utilizing the majority of the solar flux incident on their planet to beam a transmission directly at us, any positive result the SETI experiment finds is completely unrepeatable.

For "listening-in" type activities, where SETI attempts to find a stray radio/TV signal from a nearby civilization, we would only ever detect it in something like a 25-sigma scintillation event. In other words, just like stars flicker on and off because of the Earth's atmosphere, radio signals flicker as they travel through space. This is called scintillation. What would be necessary to detect stray alien radio signals would be a scintillation event equivalent to that necessary in the Earth's atmosphere to make Vega scintillate to about the brightness of the moon. Not absolutely impossible, but even if it occurred, it would never be repeated.

This is why SETI never gets funds from the NSF.

[premjan]

SETI always struck me as somewhat improbable as a search though I suppose the budget isn't so huge that we ought to consider it a misallocation of funds.

[Lavis Knight]

Wow i didn't realize how unlikely our chances were O_o;;