Making It Hard For Extraterrestrials To Hear Us 374
quaith writes "US astronomer Frank Drake has told scientists at a special SETI meeting in London that earthlings are making it less likely that we will be heard in space. In the past, we used huge ground stations to broadcast radio and television signals which could be picked up relatively easily — according to astronomers' calculations anyway. Now we use satellites that transmit at 75 watts and point toward Earth instead of into space. In addition, we've switched to digital which makes the transmissions even fainter. Drake has concluded that very soon, in space no one will hear us at all. I guess we'd better keep listening."
Not news (Score:5, Insightful)
Sufficiently Advanced (Score:4, Insightful)
This has its perks (Score:5, Insightful)
It reduces the probability that earth could be quickly located.
We gotta consider the possibility, that any extraterrestrials close enough to hear our signals in any reasonable amount of time, and with the sophistication to pinpoint us....
Might have the technology and desire to invade earth.
E.g. Consider earth itself... fast forward a few dozen generations...... massive overpopulation, lack of resources, land, severe overcrowding.
Extreme desire for another habitable place to live.
And then you detect an alien signal.. a foreign world. You step foot there, and you're greeted by basically an aboriginal species (compared to your civilization).
Habitable world, massive resources, very primitive 21st-century level technology, nothing compared to your 23rd century tech.
Oh.... so some colonists start travelling from earth to 'the new world' for a better life.
Settlers VS the Natives all over again.
It's happened before, it could happen again. Except us earth inhabitants could be the primitive natives / "Indians" / etc.
Scary, huh? :)
This is good... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is good news. And overdue.
We've been a stupidly noisy duck for far too long.
so what (Score:4, Insightful)
the closest aliens are at least thousands of light years away, they haven't "missed" our radio signals, they still haven't heard them yet. And they'll have like 100 years of signals to figure us out.
perhaps (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering how the meeting between two civilizations, one more avanced than the other has generally gone badly for the majority of human history, it may not be such a bad idea to keep ourselves quiet until their intentions are shown to be peaceful/cooperative.
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
More to the point (Score:4, Insightful)
Do we WANT to be detected? Oh it would be wonderful if we could communicate with intelligent life somewhere other than earth (I am assuming there is intelligence here). But what if the species we contact are not peaceful? What if they're out looking for worlds to enslave? There certainly would be an advantage in staying quiet and being the first to "discover" a new civilization without giving up our own presence. That way we could study these new beings before deciding whether to risk contact or not.
Likewise, the same logic can be applied to an alien species. Why would they trust us? Why would they carelessly beam their presence out into space, not knowing who was going to listen in? It is certain, given our past history (you know, that part about strong humans usually ending up wiping out weaker ones through conquest), that we ourselves aren't exactly trust-worthy. Maybe they have heard us, and we failed the test, and we will never meet our neighbors. That is one possibility the "Drake Equation" fails to account for. Maybe we will be permanently assigned to the universe's "time out" box, because of our bad behavior - and we'll never know.
Find US? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not news (Score:2, Insightful)
This is why the Drake equation never did seem to make much sense to me.
Given the rapid advancement of telecommunications technology we've observed, to me it seems entirely possible that a civilization a few hundred or thousand years beyond ours might not even be using a technology analogous to RF transmission. Entanglement, gravitation manipulation, something entirely different?
We can only imagine, because who can say what discoveries the future will hold, but you can be damn sure that a thousand years from now we'll be using something different than we are now. The Drake equation always seem to me to require the presupposition that a far advanced extraterrestrial civilization would be using the equivalent of.. cosmic flag semaphore, or smoke signals.
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:2, Insightful)
And there's no reason to think that any other civilization would have such extra resources either.
I think it's a pretty ignorant statement to presuppose that any other civilization in the universe will necessarily irreparably rape and exploit their planet for resources as badly as we humans have.
Re:This has its perks (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine that by the time a civilization has the power to go to another solar system for colonization issues of overcrowding would be overcome by technology.
I'm sure the Native Americans that occupied North America would have thought that about the Europeans, too.
It is really hard to make any assumptions about why aliens might show up on our doorstep. There are logical explanations for why a peaceful, curious society would make the journey, but there are equally logical explanations for a hostile society. Certainly, the ability to develop long distance space travel means that a society has a high level of organization and cooperation. But we have seen that here on earth with both the United States and Nazi Germany. We also know that military conflict can be a great motivator to developing some kinds of technology, so visitors to earth might arrive in warships.
The bottom line is we just don't know and no explanation seems any more plausible than any others.
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
The flip side, of course, is that monitoring for radio signals is extremely cheap. It uses equipment that we already use for other purposes and a small number of researchers. The potential upside is huge, though. Discovering that an advanced civilization exists somewhere is such a big deal that there is no reason not to do something cheap and easy to find it.
I agree that the odds are stacked against us and that it is unlikely that we find anything. Even if we are lucky enough to pick up a signal, establishing communications would be difficult. The odds are stacked against us, no question. But we are a curious species and we just can't pass up an opportunity to learn something, especially when it costs us so little.
Ignores other sources (Score:2, Insightful)
I can't believe this came from educated scientists.
Our communications signals are getting weaker, sure, but we still have other sources of clearly artificial radiation that are just as powerful as before. For example, military and weather radar. We regularly send out radar pusles powerful enough to compute the range to other planets in the solar system. Similarly, the Deep Space Network sends out powerful signals on various frequencies using highly directional beams when communicating with space probes.
Re:could be sexual reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Find US? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has anyone considered the historical evidence of what happens when superior civilizations encounter lesser ones? The Native Americans, the Mayans, the Incas, the Australian Aborigines, the tribes of South America, the natives of Pacific Islands, to name a few, all cry out to humanity to avoid at all costs encounters of the first, second, and third kinds. We have no reason to expect anything but annihilation from advanced alien races- either they are truculent and violent like we are, or they will destroy us as a service to the rest of the galaxy. We do not wants aliens to find us!
Not a problem, unless they're very long lived or really have found a faster than light travel mechanism. Civilizations that were conquered on earth were all reachable well inside a human lifetime. What's more the civilizations all had things of value to the invaders - land, resources, natives to indoctrinate in their religion. Any civilization sufficiently advanced to invade would likely be able to obtain their resources more locally, and colonise more local uninhabited worlds. I would hope they're past superstition, but who knows.
Re:This has its perks (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they need "Lebensraum", because there are not many planets that sustain life?
Re:This has its perks (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fermi Paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you think finding an Earth-like world within 100 light years is "unlikely"? We have already discovered worlds with liquid water. Unfortunately, so far they have been far too large for us... but that's just because the big ones are easier to find. In just the last year we have found several planets closer to earth's size.
Given our actual experience of the last couple of years, I don't think it's "unlikely" at all. I think it's quite likely indeed.
Maybe you just haven't been keeping up with the recent news?
WRONG (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Encryption in space (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if it were not the data itself but the character of the signal that were detectable, that's another story altogether. For example, the equivalent of TCP/IP packets would be easily detectable as intelligent signals, regardless of the eventual content of those packets.
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
i would say we humans have actually increased our use of EM transmissions the last couple of decades. But said transmissions are shorter range then the EM thats been broadcasting since the start of the 1900's.
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
No. Civilizations that have moved far beyond radio for their own use will still understand that radio is an easily discovered, created, and maintained technology with great range and excellent economy. If such a civilization were to wish to keep track of emerging civilizations (a good idea, as the earlier it is done, the less dangerous they will be), they would keep radio reception going. Given our knowledge of physics, it seems that radio is as fast as anything can be - light speed - and so it would provide as quick a "heads-up" as anything else.
Radio transmission presumes they want to contact us. The only observation I can make here is that aside from a few, seriously underfunded and rather pitiful attempts, we're not trying to contact anyone else, though we certainly could be, technically speaking. Assuming that some other civilization wants us to find them... that may be the problem.
Of course, if a civilization is up to creating an optical telescope of multiple light years across using aperture synthesis... they can just watch us (time delayed), if they're close enough. Sounds impossible - and it is, for us at the moment - but any civilization that can start an automated process and has a few systems worth of raw material to draw upon should be able to do it, given time.
Re:Not news (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why the Drake equation is correct, but useless. Every factor in it is a guess that slides along a scale from "observational estimates" to "wild assed". And by careful selection of just the right guesses, you can come up with a number that suggests dumping truckloads of money into SETI is worth it. But any one of those numbers can skew N to less than one in a heartbeat.
And now, with just one the values that they based the decision to build SETI on reduced by three orders of magnitude, based on just 50 years of observation, that means that the wilder guesses could be even worse than they imagined.
SETI is a waste of money and resources. Participating in it is like participating in the lottery, only with a higher cost of entry and a lower chance of payoff.