The Scream Aliens Hear From the Earth 223
onehitwonder writes "Astronomers have discovered that the Earth emits awful, ear-piercing chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, according to an article up at Space.com. The sounds are created by charged particles from the solar wind colliding with Earth's magnetic field. This article explains more about the sounds and links to an audio recording of it."
Awful, ear-piercing reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
It as interesting as the lengths they went to create a sensationalist headline
News pattern:
1. Find interesting scientific discovery that features emissions in any spectrum.
2. Map emission to audible sound.
3. Write "The screams X emits to anybody listening"
4. Profit.
Wait, no ??? line. I must have told it wrong.
What about the scream we hear from other planet ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't another planet emit those noises ?
I suppose the answer is "Yes", if it has a magnetic field and if it orbits a usual star.
So, can't we use those noises to detect extrasolar planets ?
Re:To us... (Score:4, Insightful)
funny i was thinking the opposite. Mother earth is warning the aliens to stay away.
Call it an interstellar quarantine marker from the planet itself.
Ear piercing in space?? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you take any kind of electro-magnetic wave and arbitrarily convert it to sound waves using a formula you've just made up, then amazingly it's going to sound awful. But the idea that the Earth is emitting "sound" that aliens may find "ear piercing" is misleading garbage.
Re:I thought (Score:5, Insightful)
Sound is the propagation of a wave within a medium, and in space, there is no medium with the density required to propagate a wave of any kind. Sound can travel within a medium such as a gas, however when the gas density decreases such as an atmosphere does as you get further from the surface, the sound wave attenuates, eventually petering out to nothing.
When the article says that the Earth "screams" and "whistles", it's not talking about acoustic sound waves, rather, the acoustic translation of the radio waves that are given off as a result of the helio-terrestrial effects. Whatever sensory capacity aliens have may not actually consider it to be noise, to them, it may sound pleasant, the way the waves on a beach sound to us. They may be translating it into their native sensory package, which may be "eyes" that are only sensitive to microwaves, or "ears" that only "hear" sound in a band outside of our 5hz-15khz range. Once translated, we have no idea how they'd perceive the resulting sensory experience to be. It could be a piercing shriek to them, or a gentle soothing experience.
Re:Right but that's (Score:4, Insightful)
How exactly is hearing antiquated? Lets see:
The list goes on. As far as how difficult it would be use hearing on a different world, I find that hard to believe as well. Given that sound is just vibrations traveling through a medium any planet with an atmosphere could conceivably have life that utilizes hearing for just such reasons as those listed above. In fact I would say that the ability to hear could very well be universal (or nearly so) in "advanced" lifeforms (advanced in the sense that they are more evolved than an amoeba for example).
Yes, because our brains are wired to listen for certain patterns, so what you're saying is correct. Of course, this could be true of a variety of lifeforms, so it could very well sound like that to them too. It would be interesting to encounter a lifeform that listens to those "screeches" and interprets them as, say, War and Peace (or the ET version of it), but I think it would be highly unlikely.
Re:I thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Whatever sensory capacity aliens have may not actually consider it to be noise, to them, it may sound pleasant, the way the waves on a beach sound to us.
Everyone seems to want to ask, "what if it sounds good to aliens?" I guess that's kind of interesting and all, but I think the better question is, why would the aliens be listening? I'm just thinking that there are an awful lot of sources of EM radiation in the universe. If, among all those sources, they manage to detect these radio waves from Earth's atmosphere, why would they go pumping *that* into their stereo systems to listen to the sound?
I guess we're supposed to believe that they'd go through all that trouble just to listen to it, and hope that it might be musical. And when they're through, they'll hate us for not having a musical planet? It all sounds pretty absurd to me.
Re:Right but that's (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite so. I don't understand why people think xenos would have exotic senses that are nothing like our own. If there is a source of information about your environment, it is a survival advantage to be able to detect and process that information. A few great sources of information are vibrations, chemical makeup, and radiation -- all three of which ought to be bountiful on just about any planet. We take advantage of the first through hearing and touch, the second through taste and smell, and the third through sight (and a bit through touch as well). The particular way xenos detect this information is likely to be different, and how they process the sense data is probably wildly different, but it's a fairly safe bet that they have the same fundamental senses we do.
Re:I thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Radio is not sound.
The sound you hear out of your radio is the result of sound being modulated at the radio station, transmitted as radio waves, and then demodulated at your end.
Radio waves are a form of EM, which is only partly a "wave". The property that makes it propagate through a vacuum is the part of it that deviates from the definition of a wave. This is why EM radiation is given its own classification separate from waves and particles, as it exhibits features of both, and yet cannot be said to be either.
Re:I thought (Score:3, Insightful)
Whales, however, are extremely annoyed...