Astronomers Find No Signs of Alien Tech After Scanning Over 10 Million Stars 153
A new large-scale survey of the sky looked into the dark forest of the cosmos, examining over 10 million stars, but failed to turn up any evidence of alien technologies. CNET reports: The study, published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia on Monday, details a search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a collection of 4096 antennas planted in the red soil of Western Australia that detects radio signals from space. "They are little spider-like antennas that sit on the ground," explains Chenoa Tremblay, co-author on the study and astrophysicist with CSIRO, an Australian government scientific research organization.
Tremblay and co-author Stephen Tingay, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, used the MWA to listen out for "technosignatures," or evidence of alien technology, in a portion of the sky around the Vela constellation. Tremblay explains this region is scientifically interesting because a large number of stars have exploded and died, creating ideal conditions for new stars to form. The search for extraterrestrial life "piggy-backs" on other work studying this region to understand the life cycle of stars. [...] After listening to the Vela region for 17 hours, no unknown signals were detected. While the survey was able to capture over 10.3 million stellar sources and contained six known exoplanets (likely many more exist in the region), the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool." And there's another big caveat. "Looking for technosignatures is assuming that the civilization have technology similar to our own," says Tremblay.
Tremblay and co-author Stephen Tingay, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, used the MWA to listen out for "technosignatures," or evidence of alien technology, in a portion of the sky around the Vela constellation. Tremblay explains this region is scientifically interesting because a large number of stars have exploded and died, creating ideal conditions for new stars to form. The search for extraterrestrial life "piggy-backs" on other work studying this region to understand the life cycle of stars. [...] After listening to the Vela region for 17 hours, no unknown signals were detected. While the survey was able to capture over 10.3 million stellar sources and contained six known exoplanets (likely many more exist in the region), the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool." And there's another big caveat. "Looking for technosignatures is assuming that the civilization have technology similar to our own," says Tremblay.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or consider that the chance for technological civilizations in the galaxy is astronomically low. I did play with the Drake equation once and it gave me the value of 0.8.
But if you don't search then you will find nothing. If you search you may find things you weren't searching for.
There are no failures, just more data.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Interesting)
The Drake equasion is useful for understanding the rough playing field of how life "as we know it" could exist in the galaxy, but for almost every value in that equasion we have no goddamn clue what to put in there. So getting a value for it is a pointless endeavor.
The odds seem good that the galaxy as a whole is teeming with life. A small unknown (we really dont know) proportion of those might even be sentient. and a fraction of those might even be advanced like humans or plausibly vastly more so.
But we dont yet know how to look for it. We've tried some things, didnt really work. I'd say the odds are good that if its there, it aint exactly advertising the fact. That doesn't seem a wise survival strategy in a dark forest.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe a good survival strategy is to not advertise your presence.
That's pretty common in the wildlife.
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Or you get to a point where your actions are indistinguishable from natural phenomena for those who aren't on your level.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Informative)
Or maybe a good survival strategy is to not advertise your presence.
Everything we know about physics says there is no way to hide a class 2 civilization on the Kardashev scale [wikipedia.org]. There is no possible way to avoid a stellar-scale IR signature.
So stay small, or be seen.
Re: Of course! (Score:2)
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Alternately, it seems doubtful that civilizations who've moved past that threshold would have much to gain by seeking out - and fucking with - vastly less advanced civilizations,
I think quite the opposite. If we were to for example find life on mars that was as complex as say a rodent or something, we would study the shit out of it. If however we were to discover humanoid martians, we'd simply argue with them and eventually go to war. Studying them and trying to understand them would probably just be an afterthought.
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If they can travel faster than light, then they would most likely communicate at that speed as well. If that knowledge is within 100 years for humans, then we may likely move exclusively to that which would mean our current tech would not likely be able to detect. That would also mean there is a narrow 200 years window to detect a civilization like ours with the current tech. If aliens were using radio frequencies before the 1800s, people would have been clueless for their entire existence to that point.
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Such civs most likely do not exist.
Why anyone would put a Dyson sphere around his solar system is beyond me.
What would you do with that energy, and how?
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The refusal to see the number of extinction events on this planet that preceded us, the failure to iterate extinction events into the future of our own planet and apply them to ourselves, combined with the complete absence of thought they happen on every other planet: this is the most human way of thinking ever misconceived by humans.
It is this kind of thinking that guarantees our extinction, too.
Re:Of course! (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind they looked at 0.004% of the stars in the Milky Way, and there are another 100,000,000,000+ galaxies out there, probably several times that number.
Our technology is limited and we haven't looked at most stars. You could say that there don't appear to be any advanced civilizations nearby but that's about it.
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Keep in mind they looked at 0.004% of the stars in the Milky Way, and there are another 100,000,000,000+ galaxies out there, probably several times that number.
Our technology is limited and we haven't looked at most stars. You could say that there don't appear to be any advanced civilizations nearby but that's about it.
Also, if we assume that those solar systems are of a similar age as ours and evolved in a similar way, it's quite likely that they've only been emitting for the last century or two of their civilizations. Assuming these solar systems aren't just Proxima Centauri and other close stars, it's entirely plausible that a civilization only evolved to the point of creating these "technosignatures" in the time it's taken the light to travel from their system to ours.
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The Milky Way is about 13 billion years old, our solar system is about 4 billion years old.
Now, perhaps we can assume that only metal rich ( to astronomers, "metal" means anything heavier than helium) solar systems around population I stars could host life. The oldest population I stars in our galaxy are 10 billion years old. Our sun only has a lifespan of about 9 billion years, but K class stars last tens of billions of years and M class stars last hundreds of billions of years.
Stars like ours were present
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However, using just the technology we posses today, we could colonize the entire Milky Way in a few hundred million to two billion years, depending on how much energy we want to expend.
I disagree.
One of the reasons that humans were able to colonize the earth in short order was that just about everywhere we went there was air to breathe, water to drink, and plants and animals to eat. It didn't matter if it was ocean, jungle, mountain, desert, swamp, etc., we can find food and drink in any of those places, and breathe the air as well.
The diversity of life on earth is astounding, and the only thing about as astounding is how much of it we can eat. We can eat everything from worms to whales a
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You are entirely right about the difficulties of living outside of a robust ecosystem. I'm merely talking about the issues of interstellar travel and how long, given no other issue, that it would take an intelligent species to colonize a galaxy our size. And I am talking about this in terms of a hypothetical earlier technological civilization, not in terms of humans doing it. This is in relation to the question of why we don't see a highly populated galaxy, given that planets capable of supporting intellige
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...and yet, we've inadvertently advertised ourselves for decades - and in fact specifically and purposefully advertised ourselves on a couple of occasions.
We're gradually reducing our "footprint", but more by accident than design. There's been no global "lights out" or "radios off" initiative - we're just using lower power, lower-range/spread-spectrum radio a lot more than we used to, and we're actually using wires for far more than we thought we would too.
I suspect the truth is that we've grown up in a ver
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...and yet, we've inadvertently advertised ourselves for decades -
The radio broadcasts of Hitler's Nuremberg Rally speeches should be reaching aliens by now, followed soon by Dukes of Hazzard and On The Buses. Don't expect replies.
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The problem is that there has to be someone out there actually looking in our direction during those deliberate broadcasts (at least they have to be looking in the right area when the signal gets to their location). There is also the problem that the signal needs to be above the background noise level of the galaxy when it gets to a location where someone is looking in the right direction. I would be curious if any of our "tech signatures" are detectable from 100+ light years away.
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I'd say the odds are good that if its there, it aint exactly advertising the fact. That doesn't seem a wise survival strategy in a dark forest.
Maybe they were smart enough to figure out diversity isn't their strength. Some species have had to figure that out the hard way.
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With lack of data, scientifically we usually use what data we do have, and place it on a mean, and assume a normal distribution.
Because that is the best model we can apply at the time. We on earth could be 20 sigma out of the mean, while we are using it a 1 sigma. It isn't that we are stupid, but we lack appropriate data to use better values.
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The odds seem good that the galaxy as a whole is teeming with life. A small unknown (we really dont know) proportion of those might even be sentient. and a fraction of those might even be advanced like humans or plausibly vastly more so.
You already established the Drake equation was made up values - this is just restating the Drake equation with made up values.
For thousands of years we just assumed the earth was at the center of the universe because it fell naturally out of a philosophical belief that humans were the of central importance in the universe. Now we philosophically assert our unimportance instead, and here we are again, just assuming that the occurrence that brought us here *must* be common and prevalent not because we have *s
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For anyone who cares about evidence, the only presently supported hypothesis is that life (and more certainly, intelligent life) exists exclusively on earth - this investigation and every other that has been attempted goes in as supporting evidence.
That's not remotely true. There are many supported hypotheses. You just picked a very limited one such that it works for your argument.
For example, I have a well supported hypothesis that incoming solar energy and volcanic activity can provide the necessary energy to drive endothermic reactions, a necessary condition for life.
I have another one which is that reversible endothermic reactions can store energy, another necessary condition for life.
This leads to a third, which is that there are many places in t
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See, people have found God, but nobody has found even a slight hint of a trace of a whispered rumour of aliens.
You say that but did you notice how shit got really fucked up after they raided area 51?
Re: Of course! (Score:2)
Well, "people" have found God (or gods), aliens, and Bigfoot, but scientists have found none of those, as of yet. I'm willing to bet we'll find alien life (sentient or otherwise) long before scientific confirmation of the other two. That's just a guess, though.
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We have found alien life. It's in the fossil record. Just like we will be shortly. Its the way the universe works. Too bad humans aren't sentient enough to see the truth and become a species dedicated to its own survival.
Instead of survival we want status. I guarantee any species of our complexity that is oriented to survival rather than status will be invisible to us. At least until it is too late.
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There is substantial evidence of alien encounters....
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Consider that extinction events are not unique to this planet. The "Goldilocks zone" is also right next to the cup of an intergalactic gravitational putting green. Rocks of sufficient size to remake the planet have been teeing off towards it for billions of years.
If life is not a magical or divine thing unique to this planet then the writing is on the wall. That writing is the is the history of the observable universe and our own planet's observable history, and it tells the tale unequivocally.
It is pret
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I think there's another possibility in here that you're missing.
Consider that extinction events are not unique to this planet.
They are not. Yet life has so far survived them all, in large part due to being ridiculously diverse.
As a species moves out to other planets and then other solar systems, they're most likely not bringing that diversity with them. This makes many non-extinction events into extinction events, and pretty much guarantees extinction should anything happen early on, before they get a serious foothold.
I'm wondering if it's just very hard for intellig
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An advanced race would likely have more energy efficient and precise technology.
It might not be making an effort to be stealthy but they might not be heard easily either unless they make an effort.
It is a simply premise that if you have a system of communication for your planet you do not need it to be so powerful as to reach other stars.
While people model alien advancement as bigger and increasingly more powerful I would
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Dissipation of an EM signal means we wouldn't catch any alien civilization's mundane signals beyond a few dozen light years. A civilization would have to intentionally want to communicate with us using a very tight beam like a laser, and have to put a helluva lot of power into it.
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Dissipation of an EM signal means we wouldn't catch any alien civilization's mundane signals beyond a few dozen light years. A civilization would have to intentionally want to communicate with us using a very tight beam like a laser, and have to put a helluva lot of power into it.
I was thinking also that we are in an outside arm of one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Ten million stars were sampled out of....trillions and trillions?
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The behavior of a light cone, even where you don't have interstellar radiation and dust, means EM signals of the kind we use for most communications just aren't going to make it far (look at the efforts we have to put in to just receiving the signals from the Voyager probes). The same rule would almost certainly apply to any civilization at or near or level of technological development. Unless the civilization is very close by, they aren't going to be receiving any episodes of I Love Lucy. So far as I'm con
Of course! (Score:2)
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Why should we expect other cultures to come up with Radio transmissions.
1. Out of the Billions of years of life on Earth. We have been broadcasting radio and EM for a little over 100 years. Granted it is a wide spread technology now, how much longer will we use it for? Perhaps in 400 years we will no longer need to use radio. That seems like a long time for us, but in terms of Stars and evolution that is is just a blip. 10 million stars, with lets say 1 billion years of advanced life, to detect technol
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You lose.
Almost done... (Score:2)
About how many stars are in space? [ucsb.edu]
Hardly surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
No one knows whether life can form easily or not, but even if it can then even on earth it still took a billion years for multicellular life to form then another few hundred million for life to make it onto land then it took another few hundred million for an asteroid to hit that wiped out the dinosaurs and paved the way for mammals , then humans , then another million for the discovery of metal smelting and the industrial revolution. And I'm sure there are plenty of important stages I've missed.
To sum up - intelligent life with advanced technology is so improbable that I wouldn't be surprised if we're the only civilisation with it in the whole galaxy.
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There are rare events in the earth's past. One was the Theia impact. The impact vaporized the earth's early ocean which was lost to space. The earth reacquired water from comets. So the earth has both oceans and continents. This may be very rare. Most planets are likely either bone-dry like Mars or world-oceans like Europa. A deep world-ocean would have no upwelling, so no nutrients in the sunlight. Some life may evolve around volcanic vents, but that chance of intelligent life evolving is nil.
Anoth
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There are around 250 billion stars in the Milky Way, and estimates range from 100 to 200 billion galaxies in the visible universe. So even if the odds of one being suitable for intelligent life are astronomically low, there are also an astronomical number of solar systems to play those odds.
I think more likely we just don't have the technology to see it yet. They say they checked 10 million stars, so 0.004% of the Milky Way, with currently available instruments that may not be able to detect the signs, espe
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So if the former is X and the latter is Y, then the statistical odds of such life developing at all is (1-X)^Y. While this number does asymptotically approach 1 for any value of X, the smaller X is, the greater Y must be for this asymptotic behavior to be observable. Why do so many people assume that this number is close to one or greater? The m
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The fault in your type of thinking is that any advanced species, once establishes, would continue to exist. Put a cap on the existence of advanced technological species at somewhere between 2-20k years.
With this limitation in place there is literally room for billions of advanced species to come into existence, flourish, and then die without ever letting their cosmic neighbors know of their existence.
In the event that the circumstances that led to life on this planet are intrinsic to the universe and life
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Go back to bashing your bible with its invisible sky fairy (where did it come from? Oh , been around forever has it? How convenient) , bad conjuring tricks it calls "miracles" , contradictory morality and plain old psychopathic violence.
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Your argument: We don't understand X, therefore G-d.
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A better theory is that this universe manufactures life, as a result of the intrinsic qualities of the universe.
Spontaneous self organization from true randomness is how this universe works at every observable scale. It is how these bodies we wear got here.
How this is distinguishable from a benevolent creator, or the initial conditions of the universe being love, is immaterial and irrelevant.
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Self organisation is a long way from life - a crystal is self organised but it does nothing. Life is more than organisation, its a set of ongoing processes that maintains negative entropy internally, stores information about itself and allows reproduction.
Re: Hardly surprising (Score:2)
What's the difference between the god concept (omnipotent, omniscient and creator of everything) and the Universe being a simulation?
None.
So god is probably a PhD student and we are the project, to be discarded at the end. Or a gamer having a blast in his basement. Or an infinite number of other possibilities.
Once you postulate an agency outside of our Universe to which the laws of Nature are subordinate (just like I can insert a code in my game and create a miracle by, for example, making my character im
I find no sign of humanity.... (Score:5, Interesting)
... after staring through a frosted window over ten seconds. ;)
(I want to say: Beware of assuming if something is not true, that the opposite must be true. Reality also has a third option: We don't know... yet. :)
Re:I find no sign of humanity.... (Score:5, Informative)
the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool." And there's another big caveat. "Looking for technosignatures is assuming that the civilization have technology similar to our own," says Tremblay.
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"the team notes it was like trying to find something in an ocean, but only studying "a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool.""
Except... that's VASTLY overstating what they looked at.
According to their abstract: "...In total, across this work plus our two previous surveys, we have now examined 75 known exoplanets at low frequencies...."
That 75 planets would be more comparable to - using the ocean metric - maybe a drop of water.
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I think SETI is important, and we don't know how to do it any better. And it is important to report negative results - that represents real research work, and should be publishable.
That said, the chances of detecting anything were miniscule: A tiny part of the universe. Most stars are too far away: we wouldn't even pick up our own radio noise. A limited range of frequencies. Plus, radio looks to be a relatively short window, at least for us: after a bare few decades, we are already moving to more efficient
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It's much worse than that. Consider the question "What signs would you expect to be able to detect at that distance?" We'd be hard put to detect a 1960's level society in the Alpha Centauri system. Maybe we could detect the radar signals that were scanning for missile attacks. The TV wouldn't be detectable...it would be drowned out by the sun.
Scale (Score:5, Insightful)
A man, standing on a beach, picks up a handful of sand, glances at it briefly and then declares "there's no life here".
Re:Scale (Score:4, Interesting)
How is this marked as insightful? They are not saying there is no life near the stars they observed, just they did not find any sign of it.
They are more than aware of the limitations of the observations.
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Ironically, the handful of sand is full of life, just at the microscopic level - examine it closely and you'll find millions of bacteria and other organisms.
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How is this marked as insightful?
How is this story on the front page of Slashdot? "Astronomers search tiny volume, do not find earth-like life" ... no shit. Let us know when they do, or when they at least search a large volume.
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A man, observing the circumstances that led to his ability to stand on a beach and pick up sand, realizes that life, no matter where it is in this universe, is fleeting.
Averaging out the volume of our solar system over the time since its inception to the end of its days yields the same conclusion: "There's no life here."
And yet, here we are to say it.
Perhaps Alien Tech Would Not Look Human (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be really doubtful we could catch it (Score:4, Informative)
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There's very good reason to assume FTL communication is not possible. However, that indeed says little about the technology used, they could use electromagnetic waves or neutrinos or dark matter for that matter to communicate, we don't know.
Also, time scales may be different. An alien life form with a lifespan of 50,000 year would have an entirely different perspective on interstellar communication or travel than we do.
Personally i tend towards the big filter hypothesis. Earth was lucky enough not to have t
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The obvious way to communicate between star systems would be a narrowly focused beam, such as a laser, with repeaters along the way.
We could build something like this with only a slight advance on current tech, and it would be nearly undetectable to someone not in the path.
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The computations just to align that signal for the 4+ year journey between stars would be astronomical. After all you can't point the laser directly at where the star is when the signal is sent. You would need to figure out where the star (actually the planet around said star but you get the idea) will be when the signal finally reaches said location. You would then need to do this for each repeater along the way and make sure the those repeaters are in the right place at the right time to intercept then re
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The computations just to align that signal for the 4+ year journey between stars would be astronomical.
No. Astronomical calculations are not very difficult at all and were accurately done by hand for centuries before digital computers.
Also, you don't need to do it all in a single hop. Instead, set up an RTG-powered repeater every few billion kilometers. An RTG can be built to last for millennia.
Put three spatial separated antennas on each repeater. One of the three will be closer to the center of the beam and will receive a stronger signal. It can send this information as feedback to the originator to co
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Also, you don't need to do it all in a single hop. Instead, set up an RTG-powered repeater every few billion kilometers.
So exactly how are you going to get those repeaters out every few billion kilometres? It would still take several centuries (millennia?) with our current technology to get repeaters to the halfway point (assuming the other end knew to meet us halfway).
I would argue that it is easier (computationally and logistically) to send the signal direct. You would need to be sure the sending signal is strong enough and that the receiver is sensitive enough but that is probably easier and faster to do than to get sever
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Everything is constantly moving. Lasers are a terrible idea.
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Everything is constantly moving.
We have known how to accurately predict astronomical movements since the 1600s.
Today we have electronic devices called "computers" which automate the process.
Not the only caveat (Score:2)
"assuming that the civilization have technology similar to our own,"
AND assuming that they are existing at the same time as us. They could be long dead. Or they might not have evolved intelligence yet. Finding alien life is hard enough, but what if we're the first? Or what if we're the last?
Re:Not the only caveat (Score:5, Insightful)
To be honest, it's almost impossible to detect a civilisation over its lifetime.
How long, in the age of the universe, were we transmitting, clear, patterned signals direct into space? Virtually zero time.
We went from radio-silence, to simple broadcasts to complete encrypted and compressed communications in no time at all. And that's just the stuff that LEAKED out without us really knowing.
One of the goals of encryption, for instance, is to render the signal statistically indistinguishable from random noise. So how are we going to detect that signal? We're not.
Yet in the entirety of deliberate-radio-broadcast, we passed that point extraordinarily quickly (even down to FM vs DAB, etc.).
The chance of seeing another civilisation's similar jolt of technology in that short window from across the galaxy, let alone the universe, is - for all intents and purposes - zero.
And Hawking himself said that's it really not a bright idea to be advertising our presence. Other civilisations likely agreed very quickly, even without incidents occurring.
Statistically, we're not going to encounter another civilisation. Not in any of our lifetimes, or generations from now.
We would need something faster-than light and yet we've never personally gone farther than the Moon, and nothing has ever gone further than Voyager (1970's technology) - and that has 10's of thousands of years of travel ahead of it before it's anywhere "different" or "interesting" and that's literally a tiny fraction of the space between here and the next star, even.
Worry about looking for them when we're able to do anything useful with that information, and when that information is likely to show us anything approaching even the largest of galactic welcoming committees (which are incredibly unlikely to exist).
Let's concentrate on something smaller first... like getting to the Moon ever again, for instance. Even Mars is, what is it? Eight times further away than the Moon?
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And we send other involuntary signals. Earth sends some strange peaks at 50 Hz/60 Hz, and light in the visible spectrum for instance, especially from the site that is not facing the Sun at the moment. And in the VHF range, Earth is the strongest radiator of the whole Solar s
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Hawking himself said that's it really not a bright idea to be advertising our presence.
Either aliens can get here, in which case they can likely find us whether we're advertising or not, or they can't, in which case it doesn't matter if we advertise.
Aliens who can get here probably have the tech to solve problems without stealing our water or whatever. There's good reason to believe that if they came to visit, they'd just want to copy our art. Interstellar war is expensive to anyone who wants to make war. Anyone for whom it's cheap has no reason to do so.
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This is an usually up-beat take on the possibility of interactions with alien civilizations. What do you think happens if we happen to be the ones to stumble on another species of intelligent life many generations down the line? I'd say unless we've somehow curbed our natural tendencies, there's a better than average chance it will be full-fledged military invasion without so much as a, "Howdy neighbor! Nice planet you got there!" Even if there's no "good" reason, we're experts at cooking up stupid bull
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Progress bar (Score:2)
THe question is (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe... (Score:2)
They don't live on stars?
So How Much Did That Cost? (Score:2)
Well at least we know now that we are stuck here alone with the demons..err...aliens.
Can we have our flying cars now?
Small wonder (Score:2)
The aliens use glass fiber to watch their Netflix.
First Contact (Score:2)
Can we come out of our basements? (Score:2)
Old News (Score:2)
If it's a dark forest, then they are hiding. (Score:2)
If the cosmos is indeed a dark forest as the summary states, then the alien civilizations are hiding.
That's the premise of the Dark Forest book by Liu Cixin, quite a good read.
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Liu Cixin was hardly the first to come up with that premise.
According to the Pellegrino, Powell and Asimov's Three Laws of Alien Behavior:
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finding life (Score:2)
In a cup of seawater is not hard under a microscope.
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But first you need a microscope.
On the scale we need to look at, we probably haven't invented the equivalent yet.
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Given that we can detect and plot the orbits of large planets from 27,000 light-years [wikipedia.org] away, I'd argue that the metaphor still holds. Not that debating a metaphor will get us very far in terms of understanding the real world.
Native Americans said the same (Score:2)
They found no sign of any obsidian knives among Europeans.
Despite the fact that obsidian weapons are clearly sharper than even 21st century metal weapons. Clearly, those backward Europeans had no technology at all.
A matter also of Time, not just Space! (Score:2)
Universe is a very large and old place.
The possibility that you stumble upon another civilization is much thinner that you could imagine.
Maybe our dinosaurs could have been able to detect one of them, but they had not enough opposable thumbs to do it.
Or maybe we have enough, but the first photons will reach our revolving rocky ball only after we will blow all of us out.
Not surprising (Score:2)
These results aren't really surprising. We have no basis whatsoever to know the frequency at which life spawns in the universe. It could be unique to just Earth (unlikely, but still a possibility until we have proof otherwise).
It could be rare enough that only 1 in 100 Galaxies have life (which would still mean millions or even billions of planets with life, but they'd never be able to detect each other). We also have to factor in time. We often think of habitable zones around stars but there is also a
Inverting for a Second... (Score:2)
I'm trying to guage the degree of confidence we can attribute to a null response.
The article says that the Australian sensor network scanned fro 17 hours... But that's such an impossibly narrow slice of time that if you think about wha
Let's unpack this, OK? (Score:2)
We have recieving antennas listening for signals. What if no one is transmitting?
What if they are listening, too?
Why aren't WE transmitting?
If we had powerful broadcasting stations, we'd be flooding our own local areas.
Wouldn't the same logic apply everywhere?
A lot of beings are listening, perhaps, but no one's talking.
Re: (Score:2)
If we had powerful broadcasting stations, we'd be flooding our own local areas.
That local area is pretty small. It has a radius of less than 100 light years. And as technology progresses, we are likely going to communicate much more efficiently. Television broadcasts over 5G rather than megawatt border blasters [wikipedia.org]. From a technological point of view, the radio emissions of an advancing civilization might appear as a short duration pulse to a remote sensor. And if you don't catch t at the right time, you'll never see it.
If UK couldn't stop pirate radio ... (Score:2)
Another thing I can't find: any signs worth dropping all this money on this study.
Did they check the multiverse? (Score:3)
Wasn’t going to wade into this, but if any “aliens” exist and / or have visited Earth, there’s a better than zero chance they’re simply not from our universe. The reproduction of the Wigner’s Friend test of different threads of reality is hard to dismiss. The disproval of the involvement of gravity in quantum collapse. Yeah, it sounds Rick and Morty, pass the Szechuan sauce, but odds are that there is > 1 reality.
That said, aliens / UFOs bother me. They bother me because life is really hard, intelligent life is insanely hard, advanced technology is infinitesimally hard. For several civilizations to have developed to that point a la Star Trek, I just don’t buy it. Not impossible, but by any kind of non-zero measure, impossible. I’d put the odds of technologically advanced independent civilizations evolving on habitable planets at around 1 / 19,000,000,000,000,000,00,000. Which means, we’re basically it. I do believe there is other life out there, but life isn’t enough, you need a whole lot of things to go just right to get to our weight class. We ourselves came within a hundred individuals of extinction long before we even knew how to work metal. If there are UFOs, the overwhelming odds are it’s ourselves from different realities. No time travel. No octopus people. Just “us” with evolution having taken different forks in the road in other realities.