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."
Great (Score:5, Funny)
If anyone ever makes first contact with us, it will to complain about the noise. Not a good start.
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
[X] We're ALIENS! We dont HAVE ears, you ignorant clod!
It could be worse ... "You mean that wasn't the call to dinner? Well, we're hungry, and we've got this great book - How to serve Man."
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)
Let's not be too hasty, the book "How to Serve Man" could be their title for the "Idiot's Guide to Being an Ood"
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[X] We're ALIENS! We dont HAVE ears, you ignorant clod!
That's true, I've seen it in some movies and on Stargate SG-1.
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
Breakdancing aliens might make the movie worth not poking your eyes out
You didn't see Men in Black then?
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But the first thing they'd do is abduct our leaders :D result!!!
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Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)
And due to an incidental wormhole, Ignoxtrix Umglalaut was released after George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" and Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby", and contains rifts and lyrics oddly similar to Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida". So, the IGRIRAA can shove it down their six gullets into their four compartmented bowels until it rests where the Alpha Proxima doesn't shine.
I am so suing you for taking my novella and turning it into an AC /. post.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Don't you mean 'Under Pressure', by Queen?
I thought (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I thought (Score:4, Informative)
Animals (which includes us, and likely the aliens) can't... machines can, sound travels basically the same "out there" as it does in here, its just there isnt enough particles to produce a wave large enough for our ears to detect...but anyways, assuming that aliens are listening, would generally imply they had the technology to do so, rather than just sticking an ear out.
Re:I thought (Score:5, Informative)
I'm afraid that's not true. Assuming that a sound wave could travel (particle to particle) in a gas density like that of outer space (1x10^-11 Pa), quantum effects would completely destroy any signal contained years before one particle could collide into the next.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
well, I was using particle ambiguously as in pretty much anything, not specifically as a piece of dust, or something somewhat "large", but anything that isn't a vacuum (atoms, molecules, etc)
Black Hole Strikes Deepest Note [space.com]
Astronomers have detected the deepest note ever generated in the cosmos, a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond. No human will actually hear the note, because it is 57 octaves below the keys in the middle of a piano.
Sound travels, there just isn't enough pressure for our ears to hear it at any distance, I would imagine that even screaming right next to eachother would probably only make it a few feet before becoming inaudible and dropping down like the "57 octaves below..." I doubt that the sound act
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Red shift. Most astronomical stuff is moving away from us, owing to universal expansion.
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If your a few feet away and relatively stationary, no red shift should be occurring. The dB would drop, not the Hz. Question really is how fast the dB would drop to 0 on any given sound.
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Because God made it drop in pitch, just as He evolved^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcreated you unable to hear it.
Re:I thought (Score:5, Informative)
I would imagine that even screaming right next to eachother would probably only make it a few feet before becoming inaudible and dropping down like the "57 octaves below..." I doubt that the sound actually started that low, but who knows...
an octave is a measurement of a signal's frequency, not amplitude. space would not change the pitch of your words, it would render them completely silent.
Re:I thought (Score:5, Informative)
So let's see. Middle C is about 260 Hz (with Bb slightly lower). 57 octaves lower is 2^-57 * 260 Hz, which is 5.5 x 10^14 seconds per cycle, or about 17.4 million years per cycle. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that humans aren't going to hear this signal.
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Or maybe it's just that with thin enough gas, the chances that any of the particles in the passing wave happens to hit you is pretty low.
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Whales, however, are extremely annoyed...
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I think you mean "obscure the signal", to "destroy" it would imply you can destroy information.
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you were being pedant but you actually have a point he quantum effects would be symetric so they reduce the signal noise ratio but the signal would still be there.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
True. However, I specifically said signal, not information for a reason.
The hypothetical situation I was thinking of was an interstellar medium density so low that the "sound" would be transmitted by a single particle travelling through space. Assuming that this particle is going to travel onwards until it hits another particle and transfers its information across, the "signal" (actually meaningful information) would be destroyed. As you cannot predict the exact state of the particle due to quantum effec
Re:I thought (Score:4, Informative)
to "destroy" it would imply you can destroy information. /pedant
And that's problematic how? There's no law of conservation of information. Information is destroyed all around us all the time. Look up "second law of thermodynamics" one of these days.
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.
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Sound is the propagation of a wave within a medium,
Well it's a little more complicated than that. Sound is MICROSCOPIC VIBRATIONAL modes propagated within a medium without any bulk motion. Matter waves of other kinds propagate through vacuum just fine.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512047 [arxiv.org]
Also, the rotating double-spiral structure of our own galaxy is believed by astrophysicists to be a soliton (a special kind of wave).
and in space, there is no medium with the density required to propagate a wave of any kind
not quite, since not all waves require media to propagate. Radiation doesn't, and it propagates through space just fine.
Re: (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
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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.
The sentence above is the initial, much geekier version of the tagline, which was later reduced to "In space, no one can hear you scream"
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No, that's gravity. I don't know about you, but I can't hear gravity. The only way I can hear vibrations is if there is an atmosphere for the vibrations to act upon.
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Ahh, but, if you take two seperate masses in a vacuum, and cause one to vibrate, then the other will also, because the gravitational interaction between the two will couple the vibration from one to the other.
Damn straight--all you need is a neutron star and something to shake it back and forth a few meters a couple thousand times per second, and you've got yourself something that might be as effective at transmitting signals as a 1 watt radio transmitter is with EM. ;)
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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 ei
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.
It all depends on the encoding, doesn't it? (Score:5, Funny)
The emission could just as well be playing a Britney Spears song -- its just that the programmers at Kl'agnorf Multidimensional Muzzak borked their encoding routine.
(Unborking their encoding routine would probably cause an interstellar war, though, as the Intergalactic Association Of Recording Artists claims that Spears was clearly pirating Pu'oluk's Fuzzion album. And doing a poor job of it, which they privately concede they wouldn't have thought possible.)
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A question for the lawyers out there. Suppose it were B.S.'s song being sent and it were received by an alien on a planet 200 light years away.
Has the copyright expired?
Re:Awful, ear-piercing reporting (Score:4, Funny)
I did that once, but I had to turn it off once it started playing the newest Brittany Spears hit.
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young whipper-snappers don't know when they have it good, in my day we had to pick up pulses on the relay control line with an AM radio! Then we had to write our own music in assember!
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Assembler? With those easy mnemonic codes? Luxury!
An idea... (Score:2)
The Earth should install Adobe Flash Player, then it would be completely silent unless aliens install the plug-in and the server isn't /.'d.
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I'd prefer not to see the Earth crash...
Humming sound (Score:5, Funny)
Our planet is also known to hum, a mysterious low-frequency sound thought to be caused by the churning ocean or the roiling atmosphere.
No, that's from our warp engines. How else do you move a planet around?
Re: (Score:2)
1. Find a long lever.
2. Find a place to stand.
3. ?????
4. Move! [wikiquote.org]
In other words... (Score:5, Funny)
Earth sounds like a 16 kbps MP3 encoding of /dev/random
In space, you can hear the Earth scream? (Score:2)
Sounds like Ridley Scott and/or Jim Cameron has to make a new version of "Alien(s)" in which we *can* hear the scream. And frankly, if I remember the original correctly, all Lambert did was scream. Sheesh Lambert, shut the f**k up! And of course, this time, Ash has to be a hobbit robot.
Found it on Youtube (Score:4, Funny)
Here's a copy on Youtube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
I knew what was coming and still clicked on it. Love it.
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Someone, prepare a defense, find us Yoko Ono!
Right but that's (Score:5, Interesting)
that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening
Assuming that "aliens" can hear at all.
Of course "hearing" is based on the detection of vibrations in the surrounding medium - a sense that is very antiquated indeed - and available to even some of the most primitive organisms. On Earth. However it's difficult to use the mere existence of such a sense to apply it to possible creatures on entirely different worlds. Perhaps given very different environments with stranger density/pressure conditions other senses would be more vital for survival. Of course one could argue that as far as we know the conditions that are suitable for life would not be that different from our own, therefore hearing would probably have to exist.
And then we can argue that the "screeches", etc, are merely the way we choose to make our computers interpret this data.
Re:Right but that's (Score:4, Funny)
What kind of racist thinks Mexicans can't hear at all? I would think their incidence of deafness would be roughly the same as any other population.
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.
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I think he meant that it was antiquated in the sense that it had been around since the earliest life, not that it wasn't still useful.
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Hmmmmm, I see what you mean. Poor word choice if so... Or maybe antiquated doesn't mean what I think it means :-P
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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
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>>Given that sound is just vibrations traveling through a medium any planet with an atmosphere could conceivably have life that utilizes hearing
You came so close to touching on probably the most important evolutionary reason to have hearing- It's almost free. Hearing is feeling. Feeling is essential for all but the simplest microbes.
If a creature can feel at all, it can already detect very loud/low frequency sounds. It makes sense to evolve exquisitely sensitive feeling/hearing nerves using already av
Incomplete summary (Score:3, Interesting)
The summary could have mentioned that although
somebody learned something new about the radiation produced by charged particles trapped in the Earth's magnetic field,
which seems fairly interesting. I wonder if anybody's got a model worked out yet to explain how a narrow planar beam gets generated.
To us... (Score:3, Funny)
...it's a scream. To the aliens, it's the siren's call of potential conquest.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's insightful, but I think what it says to an advanced civilization is "This Planet Has An Atmosphere, And Therefore Edible People. Now Turn Down The Damn Radio."
Not an SOS, but a warning beacon (Score:2)
The first thing that came to my mind was this exchange from Alien:
Ripley: Ash, that transmission - Mother's deciphered part of it. It doesn't look like an S.O.S.
Ash: What is it, then?
Ripley: Well, I, it looks like a warning. I'm gonna go out after them.
Ash: What's the point? I mean by the, the time it takes to get there, you'll, they'll know if it's a warning or not, yes?
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:What about the scream we hear from other planet (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with this is, the "scream" a planet produces is insignificant to the SCREAM the star it orbits would produce.
Its like trying to hear what someone is saying when they are stood next to the speakers at a rock concert and you are on the other side of the stadium.
You would be better getting a video camera with a telephoto lens and trying to lipread :)
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Or solar flares. (What do you call solar flares made by stars other than sol?)
Patent infringement.
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More importantly: can we determine if the extra-solar planets we know of (or find) have magnetospheres?
The magnetosphere protects us from stellar and interstellar radiation. Without shielding, life as we know it on Earth could not exist (at least not exposed to the sky).
It would, I think, be very interesting to know the presence or lack of magnetospheres on planets outside the solarsystem.
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It's as if... (Score:5, Funny)
...a million voices cried out at once...
Complaint. (Score:5, Funny)
it has come to our attention that the planet, namely the EARTH, which we purchased from you some millennia ago, may now be faulty. It appears to emit a high pitched screeching noise as it turns around its star. We are not sure at this point if it's perhaps an intermittent fault, however Benji can hear it every time he's out in his spaceship.
We understand that the planet is still covered by warranty, thus we would be grateful if you could send some engineers around to have a look at it. Mornings suit us best.
Kind regards
The Mice.
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"I feel a great disturbance in the Force. As if millions of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."
(*)Galactic unit.
Dear Customer (Score:2)
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. In our drive to reach the highest possible customer satisfaction, your free replacement planet will be delivered today.
Your current planet will of course be recycled at no additional charge.
Thank you for choosing Magrathea Planetary Systems and we look forward to your future business.
Lucy in the sky... (Score:2)
Apply apropiate transform function to the sensors data stream, and you could hear 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' if you would...
So what?
Re: (Score:2)
Apply apropiate transform function to the sensors data stream, and you could hear 'Lucy in the sky with diamonds' if you would...
Apply appropiate transform function to the data stream on the Slashdot servers, and your comment could be pertinent...
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earth recordings (Score:2, Informative)
needlessly anthropomophised (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to think that space,com had some credibility, but it looks like they're willing to give up any principles of sound (ooops, pun unintended) reporting in the pursuit of a good headline
All that's happened is some scientists have concluded the solar wind interacts with our magnetic field to emit radio waves. Hardly a big deal, but I suppose it's a cheap, undemanding article that attracts the uniniatated (and slashdot readers) to their advertising.
So much for a decent science article
Short wave Radio (Score:2)
As kids we used to tune in between the stations on our short wave radios to listen to charged particles emitting radio waves as they spiraled through the Earth's magnetic fields.
How is this process different?
Shoddy reporting (Score:2)
This is just plain shoddy reporting.
There is nothing new here: Earth's natural VLF emissions have been known and studied for decades. The only thing new here is a new standard of bad reporting.
Sigh.
...laura
Sound without Medium?? (Score:2)
In addition... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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I don't disagree, converting to sound is a useful process for representing what would otherwise be invisible to our senses. A lot of our understanding of science revolves around models like this. But we need to appreciate that they are only models.
Dumping your model straight back into reality and speculating what the results may be is just nonsense that suggests you've no understand of what the underlying phenomenon actually is, just the misguided idea that the model is the reality.
If I converted the peak
Misleading FA (Score:5, Interesting)
It's very likely the original auroral noise is much closer to your basic interstation FM hiss than "piercing chirps and whistles". Somebody put the noise through a FFT-like process which pretty much made up all the coherent beeps out of random noise.
But studying random noise seems a whole lot less interesting than trying to make out words from the chirps.
Radio Waves, not audio (Score:2)
These are radio waves.
And, since they don't penetrate our ionosphere, in order to do this
The knowledge could also be used by Earth's astronomers to detect planets around other stars, if they can build a new radio telescope big enough for the search.
Those radio telescopes would have to be built in space, not here on Earth.
Humor intersects SETI and Drake (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously a topic ripe with potential for humor, and once again Slashdot has attempted to meet the challenge. Some would say grandly, others would say falling short. It all depends on your sense of humor, of course.
On a more serious note...
There are those who believe that our emissions of radio and TV signals are advertising our presence to book ("To Serve Man") authors everywhere, and that letting our presence be known is a Really Bad Idea. (TM) They should be happy to hear that we're being drowned out quite effectively by the Earth, itself. From what I remember, a really good detector can fish signal out of this much noise, but you also have to have more of an idea what you're looking for.
Which also has implications for SETI and such. Maybe there's more noise out there than we anticipated. We knew that suns make some serious noise, as do Jupiter-type planets. I'm not sure we knew how much noise Earth-style planets make.
Plus there's the nature of "intelligent" signals themselves. You can listen to Morse code and pretty quickly come to the conclusion that it's modulated - not random noise. Even if the concept of a BFO is foreign, you can look at it on an oscilloscope and figure that out. Next would be an AM or FM modulated signal. Even if it's Brittany Spears, as others mention, you can probably figure out that it's a modulated signal. By the time you get to Adolph Hitler opening the Olympic Games it's starting to get rougher. But I guess if you hang a spectrum analyzer on the thing, you can figure out that it's a modulates signal, find the video fields, figure out that there's a second signal (audio) on a subcarrier, etc.
Now from first principles try to intercept and decode an HTDV signal, even without DRM. Or how about spread-spectrum communications, or the various cellphone signaling mechanisms. In fact, good signal compression turns *any* signal into noise. That's because if there were anything in the compressed output that looked regular, then the compression would have been evaluated as lacking. This is even before we try to add any encryption, but in fact some compression/archive programs include password protection, because it does so good a job of de-regularizing data that it practically is encrypted.
Which brings us to "Dpilot's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law" :
"Any sufficiently advanced communications technology is indistinguishable from noise."
(Need I state Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")
Which brings us back to SETI and Drake... Maybe the signals of interstellar communication are all around us - and we're just not smart enough to recognize and decode it - yet.
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Might be interesting - depends on how rare rocky planets with magnetospheres are. Right now at least part of our problem is that our methods of planetary detection don't lend themselves well to small rocky planets. As an aside to your thought, perhaps if we could identify characteristic "signature" differences between radio emissions of Earth vs Jupiter, that might yield a completely different way of searching for Earth-like worlds.
And for the paranoid Beserker fans, the same goes for them.
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Dpilot,
That's along the lines of what I was thinking, but you said it far more succinclty. :)
Oh, and glad to see another Saberhagen fan too.
Codecs?! (Score:2, Funny)
Andif you listen VERY closely..... (Score:2)
You might be able to make out the Fab Four singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand".
ear piercing chirps? (Score:2)
Nearest star is only 4 years behind (Score:2)
The aliens at Proxima Centurai are just settling down now for their TV coverage of the Athens Olympics 2004.
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/extra/nearest.html [wisc.edu]
small planets with magnetic fields harbor life? (Score:2)
I have identified the source (Score:2)
So really, it's just the Earth saying hello
It's the Force (Score:2)
Maybe there's a simpler explanation.
Maybe there's just a great disturbance in the Force. As if a million souls are crying out in torment and just haven't been silenced at once.
Look for horses not zebras, folks.
So, if aliens can really hear this radio noise (Score:2)
Shouldn't we be able to pick up the radio noise generated by earth-like planets in other solar systems?
I seem to remember... (Score:2)
...that my mother was hooked on a particular soap opera, called "As The World Turns."
Perhaps that could now be brought back in the form of "As The World Screams."
BTW, don't tell the televangelists about this. They'll probably want to try and find some way to organize a choir of all the system's planets. Gad, talk about "Music of the Spheres..."
Now, where did I put my industrial-grade earmuffs...?
So aliens listening to our planet... (Score:2)
...would hear the voice of Heath Ledger? I don't get it.
Upside down sound (Score:2)
Why is it that I can "see" when things are upside down, but there is no such audible distinction?
Is it because sight is reception of photons (EM), and hearing is pressure/vibration of air molecules?
Why is it that I can immediately know my book or TV is upside down, but not when my speakers have been turned upside down?
Is it that I can easily "see" in 2 dimensions, but that I only hear in 1 linear dimension?
I'm sure there'