The 'WOW' rf signal now explained:

That signal from 1977 has been identified:

https://phys.org/news/2017-06-wow-mystery-space.html#nRlv

Originally posted by sonhouse
That signal from 1977 has been identified:

https://phys.org/news/2017-06-wow-mystery-space.html#nRlv

And I thought it was... it was... it was... but it wasn't! Phew!

SETI has been a dumb idea from the beginning. Look at all the money wasted..Even if a signal is detected,,so what ? It'd take a million years to answer and get a response. By then our knowledge will be far beyond waiting for a reply..

Originally posted by ogb
SETI has been a dumb idea from the beginning. Look at all the money wasted..Even if a signal is detected,,so what ? It'd take a million years to answer and get a response. By then our knowledge will be far beyond waiting for a reply..

SETI is not about establish an interstellar communication.
SETI gives us the answer if someone else is out there.

SETI is well spent money. War on earth is not.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
SETI is not about establish an interstellar communication.
SETI gives us the answer if someone else is out there.

SETI is well spent money. War on earth is not.

I agree about war on earth, but why do we assume that alien life, if we contact it, will be friendly? That seems a good reason to stop SETI.

Originally posted by C J Horse
I agree about war on earth, but why do we assume that alien life, if we contact it, will be friendly? That seems a good reason to stop SETI.

Signals from stars and such from all the close in stars, say within 200 light years from Earth, have been looked at closely and nothing yet from them. Assuming a possibly hostile intelligence found Earth, they would have to be more than 200 light years away and assuming nobody can go faster than light, would mean even if they heard us and sent ships they would get here hundreds of years in the future and in the meantime, we would be developing our sciences to such an extent we would have a good chance of being able to defend ourselves. But our signals have only reached out about 100 light years radius so a 200 light year wide bubble of our radiation of radio waves is going on.

That means if a hostile civilization is say 1000 light years away, they wouldn't even SEE our signals for another 800 years and then another thousand years to get here so in that case we would not see them till around the year 4000. Get the picture? The things in space to REALLY be worried about are things like rogue asteroids like the ones that helped off the dinosaures or nearby supernova's. THAT is a much larger threat than any hostile alien civilization.

So suppose hostiles are 10,000 light years away. About 20,000 years goes by on Earth before any of THOSE aliens get here, probably not a huge deal, and it might be US who would win out with 20,000 years of continuous development of science and technology.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Signals from stars and such from all the close in stars, say within 200 light years from Earth, have been looked at closely and nothing yet from them. Assuming a possibly hostile intelligence found Earth, they would have to be more than 200 light years away and assuming nobody can go faster than light, would mean even if they heard us and sent ships they wo ...[text shortened]... t be US who would win out with 20,000 years of continuous development of science and technology.

That all hinges on the premise that they have not developed quantum tunneling.

Originally posted by joe shmo
That all hinges on the premise that they have not developed quantum tunneling.

If that is so why are they not here NOW?

Originally posted by sonhouse
If that is so why are they not here NOW?

Maybe they are here, perhaps they do not care, they do not exist, or do not have that technology...I don't know. However, survival of the fittest makes no guarantees on decreasing hostility with increased technology. If it's us or them and they can get here, it's them...

Originally posted by C J Horse
I agree about war on earth, but why do we assume that alien life, if we contact it, will be friendly? That seems a good reason to stop SETI.

Who says that we are about to connect with an alien race? There are no such projects going, and I don't think we will start such a project either.

SETI is cheap comparing to war preparations.

Originally posted by C J Horse
I agree about war on earth, but why do we assume that alien life, if we contact it, will be friendly? That seems a good reason to stop SETI.

Are you under the impression SETI is going to contact aliens? If so you should look up what SETI actually is. SETI is a bunch of RADIOS. Get it? Receivers ONLY. They don't transmit ANYTHING.

The only signals transmitted are those of commercial broadcasts, weather and comm sats and military radar.

And like I said, those signals are now maximum 100 light years into the galaxy. So if some alien is at 1000 light years away they won't even begin to hear us for 900 years, hostile or friendly.

We already examined signals from stars out to about 200 light years with no apparent signals so there probably are not aliens that close to Earth and even at that, if there was some alien high tech civilization 200 light years away, it will be at least another 100 years before they even hear ANYTHING from us. And what they first would hear would be spark gap transmitters, very inefficient RF wise, very broadband signals switching off and on with morse code. 20 years or so later they may start hearing short wave broadcasters and 50 years after that they may hear the blips of military radar. That is only if said aliens are that close. Chances are any aliens will be way far away in our galaxy, could be 50,000 light years away or more. So they won't hear us till maybe we are extinct as a species.

Originally posted by sonhouse

We already examined signals from stars out to about 200 light years with no apparent signals so there probably are not aliens that close to Earth ....

but, assuming they haven't been deliberately sending signals specifically to Earth for millions of years hoping to get a response thus assuming any signals we can receive from them are stay accidental signals; for there own domestic purposes they might be using fibre optic broadband with no need for ever using radio. Or if they do use some radio, the stray radio signals may be too weak for us to detect. It doesn't make any sense after all to make the radio signal any stronger than what is required to send the intended message over the relatively 'short' distance; why waste energy making the signal way to much unnecessarily strong for the requirement of detecting at the intended destination of the signal?

But I think it is unlikely that there are any highly technological aliens within 200 light years from us for a very different reason; most such aliens, if they exist, would have most likely been highly technologically advanced for millions of years (it would be a huge coincidence if their technologically advancement is anything as young as ours despite habitable planets existing for billions of years! ) and that means, if they were that close to us, they would have likely not only sent probes here but robots or even themselves here ...so that begs the question why do we see no good evidence of this? Or why didn't they inadvertently interfere with our possible evolution(by terraforming or industrializing or colonising out planet) thus didn't inadvertently prevent us from evolving into existence?

Originally posted by humy
but, assuming they haven't been deliberately sending signals specifically to Earth for millions of years hoping to get a response thus assuming any signals we can receive from them are stay accidental signals; for there own domestic purposes they might be using fibre optic broadband with no need for ever using radio. Or if they do use some radio, the stray radi ...[text shortened]... ing or colonising out planet) thus didn't inadvertently prevent us from evolving into existence?

Of course we wouldn't know at this point in time considering our level of tech, it may have actually happened cosiderimg the neandertal V homo sap thing. The lessening of the use of RF is already happening to humans, like 40 years ago there was a thriving short wave broadcast industry since around 1925 or so and all that RF has established a wavefront about 100 light years radius, so a 200 light year bubble of our radiation is already on its way into the galaxy but in human terms, a very slow growth of the wavefront, a hundred years from now it will still only be three or four hundred year wide bubble and if some alien was listening for a long term the would notice our reduced dependence on radio. My guess is the same thing would happen to any high tech civilization, they would arrive at our state at some point in time, maybe inventing the first transmitters, spark gap things, then proceeding to modulated narrow bandwidth signals and then transit to say IR transmissions and listeners would just find an end to radio waves.

But the idea of aliens being around in some kind of high tech existence to me seems impossible.

It already seems our brains are about as big as they can get as far as percentage of total body energy needed to run it, right now about 20% of all of our energy just to run the brain.

Maybe we could evolve to have 25% brains but the body would begin to suffer energy wise, like not being able to run for long distances and such, less stamina maybe less total body strength to compensate for brains using up such a massive amount of the total energy available for the human body.

My guess is brains would develop along similar lines anywhere in the galaxy and that would mean alien brains would probably not be much more native intelligence than we have right now.

And that would mean there would be the usual political strife leading to the downfall of civilizations after some time, say 2000 years max, then a fall and a new one starting up but looking at the end of the Roman empire and the long term effects of Europe, it is easy to see the loss of a major civilization could leave outliers like Ireland, Scotland and such to slide back centuries in quality of life and like it happened in Britain, a thousand years goes by before they have anything like the old Roman state tech wise.

The rules of physics are the same here and anywhere else in the galaxy and most likely anywhere else in the universe so life based on carbon would likely have the same limitations as us Terrans.

That said, it would indicate the civilizations extant in our galaxy stands a good chance of already being extinct, even if we give them a 10,000 year lifespan that would be at best a 10,000 light year radius and the radius of the galaxy is like 5 times that so room for 20 such civilizations to have spread in our galaxy.

But radio being rather slow on a galactic scale, signals may come and go and we wouldn't even know since our antennas would not see them in time or only be present 10,000 years later, way too late for us.

With all that in mind I think it is going to be a long long time before we find anything artificial.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Are you under the impression SETI is going to contact aliens? If so you should look up what SETI actually is. SETI is a bunch of RADIOS. Get it? Receivers ONLY. They don't transmit ANYTHING.

OK - keep your hair on and stop speaking to me as if I were Freaky. I never said any such thing or intended it. Simply a harmless comment about the pointlessness, in my view, of the whole thing.

Originally posted by C J Horse
I agree about war on earth, but why do we assume that alien life, if we contact it, will be friendly? That seems a good reason to stop SETI.

There's a difference between attempting to detect life and trying to have a chat. For one thing I doubt a transmitter powerful enough could be built.

Aside from which wars happen for economic reasons and over rights, both of which are supremely irrelevant when it comes to aliens.