Seti

[Theory5]

I always think that nobody has contacted us is a sign that there is intellegent life out there.
I mean, if you came to earth, and watched our tv broadcasts from your ship, what would you think of us?
I doubt the though "I would really like to meet them" would cross your mind.

[lemit]

Originally Posted by Theory5

I always think that nobody has contacted us is a sign that there is intellegent life out there.
I mean, if you came to earth, and watched our tv broadcasts from your ship, what would you think of us?
I doubt the thought "I would really like to meet them" would cross your mind.

I love that! I should have thought of it.

Congratulations!

It's great to have you around here.

--lemit

[maddog]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

SETI puts a considerable effort into finding extraterestrails under the assumption that they want to be found and are intentionally putting out a enough radiation in some way for us to detect them. Recent upgrades allow them to detect relatively nearby extraterestrails by eavesdropping on their normal communications.

But what if the extraterestrails do not want to be detected? It has been hypothesized that extraterestrails might want to smack down any up and coming civilizations to prevent competition. This might cause them to want hide or to simply not wanting to be bothered by primitives.

If we assume that extraterestrails are really hiding then how could we detect them? What would we look for to detect ET's if they are not actively broadcasting or if they are actually hiding?

It may not be just that they do not wish to be detected.

Consider this analogy first. Say you would like to communicate with an ant. How would you go about it ? Forms of communication are very different. How would you get
your point across to a creature that is developmentally on a lower scale that ours. Now
reverse this; say we are the ants. How would we communicate with anyone out there ?
It may not be so much that they don't want to talk with. They not have the interest like
we what interest would we have conversing with ants.

Second, is the technology of communication. Who is to say that future civilizations wish
to modulate radio signals the way we do right now. Imagine a culture with 10,000 years
of technology advancements. Could we guess what types of communication is being sent
to us right now, only we don't know it ???

maddog

[maddog]

Originally Posted by lemit

I have a question about SETI.

From what I've heard, it seems the search might be fairly restrictive in its verifying patterns. I have got an impression they have been listening for a very basic pattern of a single frequency that is repeated for hours at a time.

If my impression is correct, wouldn't that basic, simple, repeated pattern be more indicative of a natural phenomenon? Wouldn't sophisticated communication be more varied? Are we really interested in finding the most boring life in the universe?

I hope my impression is wrong.

--lemit

I sometimes wonder about for a single signal. However the SETI of today does their search
on a target simultaneously search on about 6 Million (6,000,000) or more wavelengths.
They have built new machines to do this. I am not aware if the processing were to find
on some of those channels might sound like noise as a single frequency yet when put
together could make a bonafide signal by properly piecing it together.

I know that an FFT signal analysis is run on any capture signal on-axis, then off-axis. I
am not clear with simultaneous capture that whether multiple frequencies are correlated
or not.

maddog

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by maddog

It may not be just that they do not wish to be detected.

Consider this analogy first. Say you would like to communicate with an ant. How would you go about it ? Forms of communication are very different. How would you get
your point across to a creature that is developmentally on a lower scale that ours. Now
reverse this; say we are the ants. How would we communicate with anyone out there ?
It may not be so much that they don't want to talk with. They not have the interest like
we what interest would we have conversing with ants.

Second, is the technology of communication. Who is to say that future civilizations wish
to modulate radio signals the way we do right now. Imagine a culture with 10,000 years
of technology advancements. Could we guess what types of communication is being sent
to us right now, only we don't know it ???

maddog

I think your ant analogy is a strawman. We are not ants. What we know about ants is the manifestation of our interest in ants.

Logically since we know that radio signal modulation works, any other suitably intelligent beings may also know it. Certainly we can and do guess about what we don't know, but it is always prefaced on what we do know.

[sman]

Originally Posted by maddog

Consider this analogy first. Say you would like to communicate with an ant. How would you go about it ? Forms of communication are very different. How would you get
your point across to a creature that is developmentally on a lower scale that ours. Now
reverse this; say we are the ants. How would we communicate with anyone out there ?
It may not be so much that they don't want to talk with. They not have the interest like
we what interest would we have conversing with ants.

Second, is the technology of communication. Who is to say that future civilizations wish
to modulate radio signals the way we do right now. Imagine a culture with 10,000 years
of technology advancements. Could we guess what types of communication is being sent
to us right now, only we don't know it ???

maddog

My favorite form of this argument is from Carl Sagan's book The Cosmic Connection from 1973. Although it's kindof obscure, and although I broadly disagree with SETI, I'll post it here just because I think it's beautiful:

We are like the inhabitants of an isolated valley in New Guinea who communicate with societies in neighboring valleys (quite different societies, I might add) by runner and by drum. When asked how a very advanced society will communicate, they might guess by an extermely rapid runner or by an improbably large drum. They might not guess a technology beyond thier ken. And yet, all the while, a vast international cable and radio traffic passes over them, around them and through them.