New System Would Let Us Know If Aliens Are Using Lasers to Communicate (gizmodo.com) 83
It's conceivable that extraterrestrial intelligences are using powerful lasers to grab our attention, but we lack the proper tools to notice. A newly deployed system might be exactly what's needed for us to finally make contact. From a report: Two laser-detecting devices were recently installed on the summit of Haleakala, also known as East Maui Volcano, according to a University of Hawai'i press release. The devices, mounted on the rooftops of an existing building, will now work in concert with similar devices installed in California, at the Robert Ferguson Observatory in Sonoma. Together, these scanners will scour the Pacific skies in hopes of detecting powerful laser pulses sent by an extraterrestrial civilization. Unlike traditional SETI, which seeks to detect alien radio transmissions, optical SETI looks for signs of artificially created light. It makes sense that advanced aliens would want to use lasers for the purpose of communication, as messages transmitted over light have "a fundamental advantage over radio in that it can, in principle, convey far more bits per second -- typically a half-million times as many," according to the SETI Institute, which runs the LaserSETI program. Aliens could use lasers to communicate across interstellar distances, whether to off-world colonies or fledgling civilizations seeking to make first contact. The newly installed system, a collaboration between the SETI Institute and the University of HawaiÊi Institute for Astronomy (IfA), can now monitor more sky than before.
Why would aliens use light to communicate? (Score:3)
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while collimated light is fairly common in the Universe, monochromaticity is not. And other properties that can be produced with a laser easily should make it stand out as artificial.
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What do you suggest?
I would go with a subspace channel.
(But don't forget to reverse the polarity.)
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I just finished realigning the coil array of the phase buffers.
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what mode did you align them in?
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Light possibly, lasers doubtful (Score:2)
Barring some incredibly unexpected breakthroughs in technology we are likely centuries away from travelling to the nearest stars so any alien civilization will be at the very least centuries more advanced than us and most probably millennia or more. However, our f
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if the search in EM is going to be done, i would go at least as short as X-ray or beyond. if expecting a simple "Hello", then longer wavelengths (radio) make more sense. if you are looking for what they are sending to others like themselves, go beyond EM (particle beams and such). maybe they can see wavelengths we can't.
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Particle beams - except neutrinos - also interact with mat
Re: Light possibly, lasers doubtful (Score:2)
The argument is that they use light because it has higher bandwidth, presumably because of the super high frequency compared with radio. If high bandwidth is the goal, wouldn't it make more sense to use higher frequency spectrum? The theoretical maximum frequency of photons is about a hundred orders of magnitude higher than visible light.
It's possible that we already do receive EM signaling from ET, but to us they just look like cosmic rays, assuming that we can even detect them at all as we only have the c
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If they are trying to contact earth like life, they might use one of the atmosphere transmission bands, assu
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That's basically the idea for using visible light. Go out into the country at night and look up. Pretty dark hey? It's not in radio.
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Wouldn't it make more sense to use some kind of energy that's less common in the universe if you're looking for intelligent alien civilizations?
They tried using 5-Hour Energy, but it didn't even last that long.
[They're waiting for a more advanced 6-Hour Energy, but for now, that's just crazy talk.]
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consider.
would it not be more useful to know what aliens are saying to each other.
stop playing checkers.
when aliens are playing power chess
Please don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
If aliens are communicating then we should let them be. Humanity needs to get it's shit together. Not even, let's stop murdering each other with wars, I'm talking about, how about we stop destroying the very ecosystem we live in. Aliens could give us the solution to all our problems and the vast majority of people would complain about costs and how it's not as good as polluting.
Re: Please don't. (Score:3)
Idiocracy was not supposed to be a documentary.
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instead, it sees to be a form of government.
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Pretty much every country outside the USA has cheap insulin. If you're paying out of pocket it's literally cheaper to fly round trip to Germany for your insulin.
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Re: Please don't. (Score:2)
And America becomes more and 3rd world by the day.
Wait until American cities become complete shanty towns with a city core and rural compounds both walled off and guarded with electric fences, self firing shotguns, and guards toting machine guns and RPGs. The poor are left to fight each other over the scraps that fall from the master's table like starving dogs. Kids will be sniffing glue to get high, and 'death squads', mercenaries hired by private businessed will be killing them en masse. Like in c
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It costs less than $1 to manufacture a dose of insulin.
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how much worse could aliens make things?
it's... it's a cookbook! [wikipedia.org]
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Aliens could give us the solution to all our problems
I assure you we would create new problems to fill in the vacuum. Most of our problems today have a completely rational solution that is within reach of current technology. We can literally grow enough food for every person on the planet, we just have a self-made problem with distribution.
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Aliens could give us the solution to all our problems
I just recalled the 'Guy Test" (courtesy of Dave Barry).
A flying saucer lands in your yard. An alien steps out and presents you with a gift. A machine that can produce unlimited, clean energy, cure all diseases and contains all the collected knowledge in the Universe. Do you:
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Holy shit. I don't know what kind of screw driver I'll need but I'm already thinking about what ones I could make just in case.
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4. Use it to start your own nation where anti-intellectualism and sociopathy will get your deported, use your nation's power to break system designed to promote inequality, and really just earn the unyielding ire of good-for-nothings everywhere.
I would point out that you don't have to take it apart because it contains all the collected knowledge in the Universe which means it has schematics to the machine itself.
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.... Do you:
1) With the moron in the WH right now? Hell no.
2) Larger version of 1)
3) No. No one here is qualified to do that.
What you need to do is find a businessman that has the means to figure it out. I have one in mind. Then it can be properly set up as a trade secret for protection and used.
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Aliens could give us the solution to all our problems
A limitless supply of clean energy and a small string of DNA that we can insert into Natasha Henstridge's genome.
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"Could" - maybe.
But why would they?
From their humanity? But they're not human. They're not necessarily even humane.
For the love of [insert name of your favourite god here]? They say, "Who?"
To improve our flavour ? ... Ah, now there is a reasonable basis for intervention.
Pacific skies (Score:1)
What if aliens recognize civilizations surrounding the Pacific as the cultural cesspools that they are? And they don't bother transmitting until Europe is in view.
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Funny, when I go to Europe I see lots of people dressed in clothing brands from California. Apparently Europeans want the cesspool look.
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dressed in clothing brands from California
Levi Strauss was an immigrant from Bavaria.
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Yes, the US is still the melting pot. People come here for better opportunities, to do their best work. The grit of immigrants is what built the US (and continues to), no doubt. Honestly, we've lost a lot of that grit and/or use it in ways we should not. Its the very nature of the melting pot and the opportunities that drives the culture. Don't forget that the riveted denim jeans themselves were invented by a Russian born tailor Jacob Davis.
Re: Pacific skies (Score:2)
Plot twist: USA-ians pay higher taxes. They just pay them differently.
As for the world wars: it wasn't all of Europe, just the Germans. You know, those guys with autobahns and the cool cars. Everybody else has been playing catching up for 70 years now, and still incapable of producing a proper world war. Or decent cars. Or proper autobahns.
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What if aliens recognize civilizations surrounding the Pacific as the cultural cesspools that they are? And they don't bother transmitting until Europe is in view.
BUT...Little do the aliens know that they are about to be fried by the Europeans' powerful regulations.
Cats. (Score:5, Funny)
Why not just use cats for laser detection?
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They are all tied up making Youtube videos.
Re:Cats. (Score:5, Funny)
Cats are all busy knocking everything off the edge of the flat earth
This seems unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
If aliens are advanced enough to send communications via lasers, I'd bet they're also smart enough not to do it this way.
Lasers only broadcast to a narrow area of the sky, making it great for communicating with someone you expect to be in a certain region of space, but pretty awful for generally reaching out into unknown space to find potential pen pals.
If you want to find aliens, it makes more sense to start looking for what humans already generate: terrestrial radio waves that have bled off into space.
Think of it this way. If humans just happened to pick up alien terrestrial radio broadcasts, do you think we'd start trying to aim a big laser pointer at them to signal them? What would make us think that they would even notice that? All we would know about them so far is that they know how to use radio waves for communications. And what would make us think that intentionally showing our hand that we exist at all is a "good idea"?
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One idea is that some light "leaks" to the side for longer-distant targets. The beam size becomes wider over distance and is thus larger than the collector at long enough distances.
This seems like a funding chase (Score:2)
1) Come up with an idea that sounds sensible on the surface but doesn't bear much in depth scrutiny but is in the zeitgiest of the moment. Aliens!
2) Funding!
3) Update resume.
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The inverse square law largely prevents detection of unintentional signals. While it's certainly not impossible, it's extremely difficult. Even our most powerful omnidirectional broadcasts won't be discernible outside our solar system even if we parked our most powerful receivers out there. The only thing that might be detectable would be military or weather radar and those are very narrow beams. So not only would the signal be difficult to detect, being narrow beams with the Earth is constant motion, any r
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Take a 14 billion mile diameter sphere. Figure out whatever surface area is covered assuming some reasonable beam divergence. It's a *lot* less than the surface area of the whole sphere.
There's nothing about distance that makes a signal less directional, despite your soundbite analysis.
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anything worthwhile when we are talking space, is going to involve one or both sides, finding out a loophole to the universal speed limit. Because trying to establish communication with decades/centuries/mill
Re:This seems unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)
You're assuming the aliens have lifespans similar to ours. A life form which had a lifespan 1000x ours wouldn't see the timescales involved interstellar *travel* any different from us, but would have a very different perception of the delays involved in interstellar *communication*. A twenty year round trip for a message for them would be like a week for us.
Even the social organization of alien society makes a difference. Imagine an alien society that was more eusocial -- like bees -- than individual like humans. The lifespan of its constituent members wouldn't matter very much, any more than we worry about the lifespan of our body's cells. Some cells last our entire lifetimes, but on average most cells in our body are replaced about every ten years.
We're hampered in our understanding of what might seem reasonable to an alien soceity by our experience being limited to ourselves. I think you can make a strong evolutionary argument that any advanced individual life form would have to have a limited lifespan, but beyond that we have very little to go on to rule out what an alien society might do. We're not very good at understanding other *human* societies, and they're right there for us to study.
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Beam divergence [wikipedia.org] is tunable. Laser is the perfect method of doing this precisely because the divergence factor can be tuned.
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Right. And within aperture/wavelength constraints, the alien lasers need to expend far less energy by illuminating likely targets* instead of omnidirectional broadcasts.
*This may be a list the aliens have of solar systems with probable life sustaining planets (water, oxygen) that they have compiled from their advanced version of the Kepler telescope.
Re: This seems unlikely (Score:2)
life sustaining planets (water, oxygen)
Nah, oxygen is poisonous to them. They've been pointing that laser to Jupiter for decades now, but apparently nobody's home.
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If you want to find aliens, it makes more sense to start looking for what humans already generate: terrestrial radio waves that have bled off into space.
Except that over long distances radio waves red shift into nothingness. If species want to send a long distance signal they need to start with higher energy EM, like visible light. Maybe highly focused. Like a laser.
Re: This seems unlikely (Score:2)
Seriously. If there is an advanced civilization of aliens out there, they are, no doubt, using a faster medium than light to communicate with off world groups.
Re: This seems unlikely (Score:2)
What faster medium? A seance?
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Re:Straight outta X-Files (Score:2)
(Yeah it's really too late to comment on this, but maybe someone will read it--only surprised I'm the one that has to say it!)
Maybe I've been watching too many re-runs but this has already been done in The X-Files (and probably elsewhere too):
SAY you're looking for ET
In REALITY you're doing surveillance of laser-based satellite comms maybe even laser moon-bounce (EME).
We already know StarLink will turn up inter-satellite lasers shortly for testing and within a year or 3 for production comms. We also know NA
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start looking for what humans already generate:
terrestrial radio waves that have bled off into space.
Trouble is, those radio waves are far too weak to be
detectable very far into the galaxy. On the other hand,
for 70 years we have had a source of radiant energy
billions of times more powerful than any radio transmitter:
the detonation of a hydrogen bomb.
I'm thinking we could put a few hundred H bombs (out of
tens of thousands on earth, doing basically nothing) in
orbit around the moon. Then set them off during full moon
as they pass over the dark (far) side and set them off in an easily recogizable
pattern, like 1
East Maui Volcano (Score:2)
So, these are looking for lasers being used on the Darth Maul volcano?
Note to self.. (Score:2)
Do not look for aliens with remaining good eye
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It's a time space problem, intelligent life elsewhere is probable, intelligent life elsewhere in our backyard in our time frame, less likely.
Now space lasers to communicate. Like an author I just wrote said, it would be faster to bring the message by a ship if some intelligence actually figured out how to make a black/white hole ftl drive.
Even if aliens did communicate by lasers, they could maybe do it between stars that weren't very far apart. and that light wouldn't be likely to originate in our galactic
More bang for your buck (Score:2)
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Because NASA staff are desperate to find intelligent life somewhere in the universe. Anywhere will do. Just one planet.
My pet rock (Score:2)
My pet rock will be correct at determining at least as often as the proposed system.
Come back later kiddies (Score:2)
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Yes, EM waves take too long to make 2 way communication useful. And forget about going there in a rocket ship.
Incoming light? Send RF broadcasts instead, plz. (Score:2)
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Why can't they listen to all the shit we've already transmitted? Megawatt pulsed radar, hundreds of kilowatts of TV. All coherent and easily recognizable as intelligent.
Unless ... there's nobody there. Or they died ten million years ago.
Why not pan-spectral SETI? (Score:2)
As a civilization, we have used radio for a century, and that has biased our assumptions about how telecommunication should work. In turn, we look for radio in the skies as the signature of a civilization.
After about 60 years of having lasers, visual wavelength communication using them is not a new idea, but it is only in very recent years that there seems to be a concerted effort to get earnest about using them for space based and other long distance networks. So, not surprisingly, as the idea amps up in
Fly on the wall (Score:2)
It makes sense that advanced aliens would want to use lasers for the purpose of communication ...
Scientists' hypothesis: advanced aliens are sharks.
Hmm.... (Score:1)
There's a joke in there of nerdy aliens going "Pew! Pew!" when firing lasers, I just know it.
Alien Sharks (Score:2)
Alien communication should be backward compatible (Score:2)
Waste of time. (Score:1)
Light is directional. So it could wizz right by the earth and we'd never know it. Besides, it'll be subject to gravity and other problems. Radio is far more practical or even better gravity waves.