After 35 Years, Another Message Sent From Arecibo 249
0xdeadbeef writes "Two weeks ago, MIT artist-in-residence Joe Davis used the Arecibo radio telescope to send a message to three stars in honor of the 35th anniversary of the famous Drake-Sagan transmission to M13 in 1974. It was apparently allowed but not endorsed by the director of the facility, and used a jury-rigged signal source on what will now be known as the 'coolest iPhone in the world.' The message encoded a DNA sequence, but no word yet on whether it disabled any alien shields. You can get the low-down on Centauri Dreams: Part 1, Part 2."
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I believe calculations have been done which show that two Arecibo type telescopes could communicate across the galaxy.
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
One bit per second is good enough for the Navy...
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:5, Interesting)
You have no idea about what you are talking about. It is true that omni directional radio sources are subject to inverse square law, but directional signals degrade less slowly. Scientists have calculated that using the Arecibo dish at one megawatt the signal could be received by a similarly sized dish 10000 lightyears away. I think I trust calculations done by people with PhDs in astronomy more than calculations done by you and your friend
The message assumes prior knowledge of our world (Score:3, Interesting)
Think about it, even if they understood the message was about DNA, they would have to know our amino acid code in order to interpret it as the template for a protein. A protein that either did not evolve on their world, or evolved in a completely different way.
In effect, all we saying with this message is that we have advanced enough to recognize that DNA is the basis for life on this planet. Only a sentience that already understood that basis could interpret this message.
It's akin to someone shouting, "a-squared + b-squared = c-squared!" - out-of-context - in the antarctic. It shows you have learned something, but there either isn't anyone to hear you or they won't understand you unless they knew all about you (and Euclidian geometry) already.
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:3, Interesting)
In the science fiction story "Dragons Egg" by Robert L Forward [wikipedia.org] (who was incidentally a physics professor and described the book as "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel"), a spaceship beams the entire contents of their encyclopedia to creatures living on the surface of a neutron star at high speed. By the time they are halfway through, several hundred generations have passed and the creatures have solved all the problems that remain to be sent, have built spaceships of their own and are knocking on the hull. One of my favourite books ever, describing the postive viewpoint of giving knowledge away for free.
There are negative viewpoints though, such as presented by Gregory Benford [wikipedia.org] (also a physics prof, and another of my favourite authors) where broadcasting anything attracts the attention of machines whose only purpose is to destroy organic life.
I'm not sure which theory is more likely to be proved. I would prefer the first (and I release my own code under the BSD licence) but I'm afraid that it only takes one civilisation to construct self-replicating terminators that could take over the galaxy at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Furthermore, since we only have one civilisation to study and our usual response seems to have been "We come in peace, shoot to kill" I'm not desperately confident for the long term future of the human race. After all, it doesn't seem likely that we are the first..
Re:Ok really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, although on the other hand there's only so many ways we could be able to detect any eventual technological civilisation, so we might as well try them. I mean think about it, optical systems aren't yet able to resolve a body the size of Earth even if it was around a nearby star, and our probes might find basic life on Mars, in Europe or on Titan, but even if they do that'll be some microbiology crap. If there's some dudes (or super smart land-squids) out there in the sky who mastered electricity the only way we can find out right now is by pointing our radiotelescopic ears and listening carefully. The odds are thin, and I for one think they will be fruitless.
To add my little bit of worthless speculation : I think that within the 21st century we might be able to detect significant biological activity on other celestial bodies, but either we'll find microbiological stuff in the solar system or we'll only get spectral signs of biological activity on planets, nothing else. I find the odds are awfully small that we'd find anything the SETI way (the fact that we've found nothing for decades means we'd have to be awfully lucky to find something this century), I find it more likely (which is not saying much) that we'd find an alien civilisation's equivalent of a Mars rover on or near Earth. For all we know we might have seen one of them and called it a UFO (among the countless other things we've called UFO).
Re:Dangerous (Score:5, Interesting)
Based on human behavior, we can roughly guess that at least 10% of any/all intelligent receivers will be agressive.
Really want to mess with your head? Try this on for size. Based on human behavior, we can roughly guess that at least 90% of any/all intelligent receivers will believe in some form of supernatural friend in the sky whom runs the whole show. Now how are they going to freak out when a dude in the sky starts talking to them?
See, now slashdotters whom watch too much BSG are worried about fighting the cylons, but the average (and below average) moron on the street is going to be worried about the supernatural implications.
Re:Wishful thinking (Score:4, Interesting)
Our star is in the second generation, so anyone around a first generation star had a head start of a few billion years. They'd have much more difficulty reaching space because they'd have a shortage of heavier elements (most of the ones we have access to come from the collapse of first-generation stars). With self-replicating colonies and a decent ion drive (i.e. stuff we could build with known science and just a bit of engineering effort if we had the political will), it would take around a million years to colonise the entire galaxy. Between the formation of the first planets in this galaxy and the formation of life on Earth there was enough time for a few thousand species to be born, create galaxy-spanning empires, and die out (or become non-corporeal, or go to a different universe, or whatever species do once they've conquered the entire galaxy).
It's also worth noting that the majority of stars in this galaxy are binaries. Life around single stars might be more rare. The tidal forces from the two stars on the crust of a planet in a binary system are likely to increase surface radioactivity and mutation rate, and intelligence would be much more of an advantage in the rapidly changing environment of a planet in an eccentric orbit. It's entirely possible that there are interstellar civilisations around most of the binary stars in the galaxy, completely ignoring us because life around single stars is so unlikely it's not worth investing effort searching for.
Re:Practical joke (Score:4, Interesting)
Aliens with a good grasp of game theory might just very well decide to drop a meteor onto any planet they find broadcasting into outer space
If by 'good' you mean 'incredibly poor,' then yes. The response that game theory would dictate to that kind of attack would be a similar (or greater) response. The only way in which a near-C mass[1] attack would be a good plan would be if you could guarantee species annihilation in the first strike. Given that this signal is for starts 100ly away, you'd have to be able to guarantee that, within the next 100 years[2], we would not have any off-planet colonies that would be able to launch a counter attack.
You'd also have to make sure that there was no evidence of it that was observable from other star systems. The collision would be detectable a long way away, and you'd have to hope that no one else saw it and decided that the galaxy would be better off without a belligerent species like yours in it.
[2] It would have to be near-C or we'd see it coming and be able to intercept it, and also know who to shoot back at before it got here even if we couldn't destroy it in time.
[1] Assuming a straight-line projectile. In practice, you'd want to slingshot it around a different star to make it less obvious that you were the originator.