China Says It May Have Detected Signals From Alien Civilizations (bloomberg.com) 186
China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery. From a report: The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye -- the world's largest radio telescope -- differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley. It isn't clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China's science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.
UPDATE (6/18/2022):A co-author on the research project which first spotted the signals has now said the signals came from human radio interference, "and not from extraterrestrial."
UPDATE (6/18/2022):A co-author on the research project which first spotted the signals has now said the signals came from human radio interference, "and not from extraterrestrial."
No read receipt please (Score:5, Funny)
Sure hope the higher ups in China have read The Three Body Problem before they go sending response signals!
Re:No read receipt please (Score:5, Interesting)
Talking to alien civilizations less than, say, five light years away from us could be dangerous. While TFA is not clear on the point, it is likely the electromagnetic signals they have detected (in the unlikely event that they are really from an alien civilization) come from an exoplanet hundreds of light years away. Assuming the civilization still exists when they receive our response, I do not think they will have the technology to immediately blast us out of existence. If they have the desire to destroy us, it might be a concern for cockroaches, but I doubt the human race will still exist millennia from now.
Re:No read receipt please (Score:5, Insightful)
So for now, it's a peculiar electromagnetic signal, nothing else. I am betting a pound of noodles, that it is not an alien civilization talking.
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The general rule of Cosmology is: It's never aliens, until it is.
So for now, it's a peculiar electromagnetic signal, nothing else. I am betting a pound of noodles, that it is not an alien civilization talking.
In other words:
I'm not saying it's cosmology.
But it's cosmology.
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That aliens guy is a victim of bad cosmetology...
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So for now, it's a peculiar electromagnetic signal, nothing else. I am betting a pound of noodles, that it is not an alien civilization talking.
Wonder if they have ruled out the microwave in the break room.
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And yes, that's part of sciece we know for sure. Just like the laws of thermodynamics, there is no way around it. We do not understand every subtle detail of particle physics, but we do know as much as this.
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Actually there are ways around that. The only problem is they all require unobtainium of one sort or another. (E.g. large amounts of stuff with negative mass.)
But unless they have something REALLY special, any solid object sent at even nearly c would dissolve from collisions with dust on the way here. I suppose the Alcubierre drive (a warp drive) might evade that, but I'm not sure.
The way to bet is that FTL doesn't work in this universe. But it's unwise to be certain of that.
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Even the Alcubierre drive is predicted to have a maximum speed of 10x light speed, so a year round trip to visit the nearest star, perhaps possible but in all likelihood, it is going to much further to the closest habitable planet
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For now, we don't even understand why c is the speed limit in the universe.
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No, do you have a link? I seem to have lost my manual.
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"Talking to alien civilizations less than, say, five light years away from us could be dangerous."
I doubt that, the amount of energy it would take to reach light speed on any interstellar craft is huge. Then, you reach the problem that your craft disintegrates into pure energy. There is also the ramp up time and the ramp down time, assuming you've solved the energy problem. Having your aliens squished flat at either end might hamper their ability to conduct operations on Earth. They could send machines, but
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If they're close enough, you don't need FTL. If you could get something up to 1% the speed of light, something 5 light years away could get here in about 500 years. And when it gets here it wouldn't need to slow down, just do orbital corrections to impact on the target.
So it seems possible. Not very plausible, but possible. A 10,000 Kg impactor at 1% the speed of light = 9*10^21 newtons of energy. That's a lot more than the dinosaur killer.
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Umm...the newton is NOT a unit of energy. It's a unit of force. You were probably looking for joules.
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Actually, I just picked mv^2 and then looked for the unit that fit. I probably should have divided by 2, but at that size it hardly matters.
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I agree with you that sending spacecraft at anywhere close to the speed of light is probably not going to be feasible. However, I could well imagine a highly advanced civilization situated five light years away being able to inject something very into our solar system nasty within a century or so. Those are the kind of timescales that we theoretically would need to worry about. In practice, unless they already had assets in our immediate neighbourhood, it is hard to believe they would regard us as a high pr
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Talking to alien civilizations less than, say, five light years away from us could be dangerous.
Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem series makes a good argument for what he calls the theory of "Cosmic Sociology", and what Cosmic Sociology says is (paraphrasing) "Don't talk to alien civilizations. Ever. Hide, and hide well, if you want to survive." He describes the universe as a dark forest, full of things that will eat you. Distance doesn't matter, because the other civilization might not be limited by distance, and even if it is, it may be willing to come kill you anyway.
The logic of this view is actual
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If they have a weapon that can instantly vaporize planets hundreds of light years away, I doubt they will need us to tell them we exist. They would have unimaginable capabilities. I do not think we can yet even theorize about how such technology would work. Even something that worked at double the speed of light would seem to violate our imperfect understanding of how the universe operates.
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Realistically no physical beings, no matter how advanced, can get even the tiny sliver energy directed at us.
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When I was a kid people were trying to create a decent world back in the early 1930's. T
The obtuse part of the program? The 30s had nothing but depression from Rich Robber Barons who lost their shit in the markets. The only thing that "saved" shit around here was World War 2 kicking the production of the U.S. of A into high gear.
You think the grass was greener in the 30s with rampant STDs, zero modern vaccines and Jim Crow in FULL FUCKING EFFECT?
Rest your obviously old and addled head.
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In case the GP isn't saying that in jest...
Ahh, the good old 1930s... where less than 50% of the population in _democratic_ countries basically ruled over the population and sent them into war etc etc. Where goverments across the world were ruling far off colonies and sending people into war without just representation in said governance. Those 1930s?
Or are we talking about the time where the world literally went into a second World War with the first still fresh in their minds? Mostly because people did
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Urgh. That thing was so boring I had to stop reading completely.
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Then they should have released a bullet point list of ideas for some other author to write a good book about.
Explanation (Score:2)
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6EQUJ5 is a mistranslation of "GENIUS."
Hm (Score:5, Funny)
"We had no idea what the heck they were saying it sounded like English to us..", said the Chinese.
Re:Hm (Score:5, Funny)
Yep, for some reason aliens are almost always humanoid and speak English. And even though they have no genes or ancestry in common with us, and may have copper blood, they cross-breed with us easier than monkeys can, too! Next up, new star trek movie; "Vulcan needs women!"
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In Star Trek canon all the humanoid species have a common ancestor race that seeded the galaxy with their own DNA. It's also been shown that for different species to breed requires some medical intervention using largely unexplained technology to make them compatible.
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They probably use CAS-10.
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The technical explanation is that all the actors were humanoid.
It's a human problem, especially a city based human problem, the need to anthropomorphize everything. Ie, cartoons make it clear that a cow is female by adding feminine glasses (despite there being no male cows). Video games are confused; lizard women with boobs, dwarven women without beards, nonsense like that. If you want to imagine an alien species that isn't humanoid, just look on earth - lizards, scorpions, armadillos, etc.
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Re:Hm (Score:4, Funny)
Also, China immediately declared the alien signals came from a planet that has historically and always been an integral part of China and Chinese culture, and they quickly drew 7 dashed lines on their star charts.
Dilemma (Score:5, Funny)
Trying to decide how to announce the discovery, the Chinese Academy of Science found itself caught in a big dilemma when they discovered the aliens, wanting to be friendly, were rebroadcasting scenes from Winnie-the-Pooh...
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Or, were rebroadcasting footage from the Tian An Men repression...
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massacre. [youtube.com] #FTFY
When your government rolls in with tanks and the army it doesn't end well for unarmed civilians.
Requisite South Park clip. (Score:2)
Good memories. [youtube.com]
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Okay, but not the joke I was looking for. However a quick text search of the the discussion reveals no mention of the removal from the "Science and Technology Daily" website. I was looking for some kind of censorship joke there... This dig at Xi is the closest of the Funny-rated comments.
I call rubbish (Score:2)
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Re: I call rubbish (Score:2)
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Well, if it's a manufactured story, it's probably directed at an internal target audience, and we're just accidental bystanders.
OTOH, I think it much more likely that someone was overeager in interpreting data to fit their own hobby-horse. "China" isn't a monolithic entity any more than any other country is.
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China has manufactured stories before, and I think they are at it again.
Probably just some "scientists" trying to be "patriotic" (i.e. virtue-signalling) to increase their funding and power. Happens all the time in the west as well. Just look, for example, at all the more recent "AI" and "Quantum Computing" stuff that makes grandiose claims.
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Scientists around the globe have fallen victim to confirmation bias, no need to blame China.
However, if alien signals were to be received, the only two places on the planet that could get them would be this one in China and the SKA telescope.
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Yeah Pangolins, wet markets etc.
Check for burritos (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully this isn't like the time some years ago when Australian astronomers thought they detected an alien civilization and it turned out to be some guy microwaving his burrito. Reference: https://www.theguardian.com/au... [theguardian.com]
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You are hoping it is completely fake, not only some misinterpretation?
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I'm pretty sure they'll do a check with immigration services to see whether the burrito-microwaving guy has recently relocated to China...
Re:Check for burritos (Score:4, Funny)
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It was probably a meat pie, which was then covered in tomato sauce.
... and then floated in pea soup, I wouldn't wonder.
Pics or it didn't happen (Score:2)
China says lots of things. (Score:2)
99.999% of it is pure, unadulterated BULLSHIT.
Oh shit (Score:2)
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Hey, can't be worse than first contact with the US, which is the usual narrative.
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They'd look at the average American and *definitely* consider us a food source.
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Which expoplanets, exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that the story does not mention where in the sky these signals were being received from gives absolutely nobody else the ability to corroborate their findings.
Like others here, I call this article BS.
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They wouldn't be able to, anyway. Nobody else has a radio telescope that large, or anything remotely close to being that large. And that won't change until the whole of SKA is online.
Re: Which expoplanets, exactly? (Score:2)
Me too! (Score:2)
Translation (Score:2)
The news report was removed because they were finally able to translate the message and it says "Greetings to the Republic of China".
Google's sentient AI (Score:2)
Normal (Score:2)
Nothing to see here at the "Beijing Normal University", we're just a totally normal university. Definitely not a cover operation.
Congratulations to China! (Score:2)
They've finally discovered the GNAA.
My Favorite Martian (Score:2)
They picked up an alien cooking show starring Chef Uncle Martin Yang:
"An den you add the Fis;fCdle spice....WOW"
Pay no attention to Taiwan! (Score:2)
Look at the sky! Look at the sky!
The post was deleted (Score:2)
The Aliens asked to speak to the Dalai Lama.
Alernative read. (Score:2)
Chinese intelligence see's American personnel in positions of power wasting time on UFO nonsense and figures why not encourage the distraction a bit.
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America simply doesn't have a telescope large enough. Remember, this is a dish with a collecting area of 0.79 square miles. Nobody else has anything similar, and won't until SKA is fully switched on.
Actually... (Score:2)
What they caught was stray signals from Washington, DC!
Low Frequency? (Score:2)
"Chinaâ(TM)s Sky Eye is extremely sensitive in the low-frequency radio band"
LF? Don't LF waves broadcast here on Earth mainly propogate through groundwaves that bend with the planet's curvature? Wouldn't they likely do the same on an alien planet? So how would the signal reach Earth?
If they were actually broadcast from space, with no ground to follow they might. But think of the required antenna size! And the bandwidth! Why pick frequencies that require huge antennas but only provide low bandwidth in s
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Elon Musk is already here (Score:2)
He is clearly from another planet and landed undetected. Only NYSE got it right.
Slashdot ads are CPU intensive today! (Score:2)
No, they haven't. If they had, they'd never admit it, preferring to mine the data for advanced technology and world domination, so the entire planet, not just their own citizens, can enjoy a boot stepping on a human face, forever.
Their spam-filter deleted it (Score:2)
The aliens were broadcasting about penis enlargements, viagra, and intergalactic porn sites.
This may also be the very reason why some civilizations may have invented death stars.
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I think "Enzyte Bob" [youtube.com] is now working for the CCP!
Talking to the first AI (Score:2)
It's a census (Score:2)
It's just a census to determine more precisely the count of USA morons.
fermi paradox says nope, life not self forming (Score:2)
If life was self forming it would happen on its own.
When asked what was in the message, Zhang replied (Score:2)
'Cosmologist Zhang Tongjie, chief scientist of China ET Civilization Research Group, told the newspaper FAST located "several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past."'
When asked what was in the message, Zhang replied 'we think it says to sell cryptos'. Zhang said the message was redundant because China had already outlawed cryptos and only produced cryptos for foreign consumption and that ordinary Chinese are protected from predatory peddling of speculative financial instruments.
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"While odds of another civilization evolving are nearly 1"
Based on what? Our civilisation looked at over the preceeding eons was a total fluke. For a start it relied on multicellular life forming which didn't happen for 2 billions years after life started then a number of asteroid impacts to get other species out the way and even when humans evolved we spent a million years chucking spears at antelope. Its only in the last 10 thousand years we've had civilisation and only in the last few hundred we've had s
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and only in the last few hundred we've had sophisticated technology.
It's been about 100 years that we have been broadcasting any signals at significant power levels and containing patterns containing intelligence (a bit longer if aliens were looking for a 50 or 60 Hz hum). And with the advent of 5G, we will switch to low power networks for communications instead of high power omnidirectional broadcasts. Then, if you aren't within a few hundred yards of a tower, no signals will be detectable.
The period in which a civilization blasts signals inefficiently all over the place
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Based on what? Our civilisation looked at over the preceeding eons was a total fluke.
Actually, no. Current evidence is indicating that life isn't a fluke. The current trending theory is where the conditions are right life will always evolve. As for when it comes to conditions being right we are a still discovering life on our own planet in very extreme environments. Some of this extreme life on earth would be just fine on some of the exo-planets that we know of, as we currently understand them.
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"Call it a fluke if you want, but the odds of us evolving are 1.0"
Sorry pal, probability doesn't work like that , you can't retrospectively decide on chance when the event has happened or I could say a coin has a 100% chance of heads after its landed heads up.
" multiply that by how many probable planets exist in the universe and small numbers times really big numbers become big again--really big."
Google the Drake equation. There are so many unknowns its essentially useless. The probability may be big or it
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"The fossil record goes how deep, exactly? About 100 million years is as far back as we know"
You should really do some research before posting. There's evidence of fossilised cyanobacteria from 3.5 billion years ago.
"multiply that again by how many galaxies are out there"
Again, probability doesn't work like that. The chance of a dice throwing 6 is 1/6. The chance of 2 dice both throwing a 6 is not 1/6 * 2, its actually less - 1/36.
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"The fossil record goes how deep, exactly? About 100 million years is as far back as we know"
You should really do some research before posting. There's evidence of fossilised cyanobacteria from 3.5 billion years ago.
"multiply that again by how many galaxies are out there"
Again, probability doesn't work like that. The chance of a dice throwing 6 is 1/6. The chance of 2 dice both throwing a 6 is not 1/6 * 2, its actually less - 1/36.
While that's correct, we're not calculating the same odds:
The odds of rolling a 6 with one die is 1/6.
The odd of rolling a 6 with two dice rolls is 2 x 1/6 or 1/3.
The odds of sentient life evolving once, somewhere, given one galaxy is the Drake equation result.
The odds of sentient life evolving once, somewhere, given our current estimate of 2 trillion galaxies in the know universe is the Drake equation result x 2 trillion...
so the odds there is another sentient species somewhere in the universe is 12 orders
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"The fossil record goes how deep, exactly? About 100 million years is as far back as we know"
You should really do some research before posting. There's evidence of fossilised cyanobacteria from 3.5 billion years ago.
"multiply that again by how many galaxies are out there"
Again, probability doesn't work like that. The chance of a dice throwing 6 is 1/6. The chance of 2 dice both throwing a 6 is not 1/6 * 2, its actually less - 1/36.
While that's correct, we're not calculating the same odds:
The odds of rolling a 6 with one die is 1/6.
The odd of rolling a 6 with two dice rolls is 2 x 1/6 or 1/3.
This isn't quite right, it's actually 1 - (1 - 1/6) ^ 2 or 30.5%, not quite 1/3rd.
The odds of sentient life evolving once, somewhere, given one galaxy is the Drake equation result.
The odds of sentient life evolving once, somewhere, given our current estimate of 2 trillion galaxies in the know universe is the Drake equation result x 2 trillion...
so the odds there is another sentient species somewhere in the universe is 12 orders of magnitude higher than the odds we exist at all in just our own galaxy, which is pretty damn near close to 1.
For the astronomical calculation it would be 1 - (1 - [drake equation odds]) ^ 2 trillion ... which is essentially 1.
Re: it's only a matter of time... (Score:2)
30%? Right. Because rolling two 6s is more likely than rolling just one. Whatever. Your equation is the gibberish and you need to go get an education.
Re: it's only a matter of time... (Score:2)
Bollocks is it 1/3rd. Did you do maths at school at all? The chance of 2 dice at the same time or following each other both rolling a 6 is (1/6)^2. Go get yourself an education you moron.
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However, the number of 6's thrown will go up with the number of dice thrown.
Re: new book on amazon come up (Score:2)
Considering humans are basically pork. Lots of options exist including bacon.
So the next time you see an obese american you should thank them for being bacon for the aliens.
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Foreign to Britain, America, and Libertarians everywhere, too. Free markets and civil liberty are very rare these days.
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Why would it be bullshit? I think it's highly likely they stumbled upon some signals from an alien civilization. BUT I can imagine governments not wanting it out in the open, yet..
I think within a couple of years there will be a big announcement of the existence of ET's. bit by bit small information about possibility of aliens existence is put into the open, so people can adjust in small stept to the thought of us not being alone in the universe (which is VERY unlikely).
Announcing it without small steps wo