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- shaunj66, on 03/24/2009, -21/+81..……………………….„~"¯¯¯”~„
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………………………..¯””^~~~~^” - pe5t1lence, on 03/24/2009, -14/+64No.
- tpmidd, on 03/24/2009, -1/+41Hubble today took a picture of the Alien laser array:
http://tinyurl.com/ddq8qw - Asrrin29, on 03/24/2009, -3/+27We are thinking in terms of physics that we know. Every attempt to look for signals have been looking for non FTL signals. If there is an advanced civilization in the here and now, say 10,000 light years away from us, they would have had to send these kinds of signals 10,000 years ago. Think to where the human species was in 10,000 years and imagine where we will be in 10,000 years. It simply isn't practical to do something like this.
No, if advanced alien civilizations are out there, the only way to make a civilization past a star or two would be some sort of FTL transport, whether that be classically through wormholes (so as not to disrupt physics as we know it) or exploiting some undiscovered physical phenomenon. And until we can eavesdrop on truly advanced types of communication, all we will hear is silence.
It's like an ant trying to discover human communication without having any knowledge of wireless radio, electric signals, and everything else we use today. - borez, on 03/24/2009, -4/+28Obligatory "IMMA FIRIN MAH LAZER" comment.
- JackSchittt, on 03/24/2009, -1/+17For all we know, we could very well be getting bombarded with signals from alien worlds trying to communicate with us. We just may not have the technology to pick up those signals. If an alien civilization were trying to communicate with Earth, would we even be able to pick it up? I think the chances of them using technology that we could detect is iffy at best.
Even if we did pick up some kind of signal, how would we know what it says? It's not like the aliens are going to speak English. Any alien communication would likely sound like static, random noise, or some undecipherable garbled mess. It's not like anyone on Earth would be able to translate.
There's also the distance thing. Any communication that we could even pick up on would have been sent thousands of centuries ago. That civilization may not even exist any more. Even if we did try to reply, a reply would not hit their home planet for several thousand years.
If they did send some form of message in some way that's faster than the speed of light and could reach us in a reasonable time frame, they'd obviously be using a technology not yet discovered by humans, which means there's no way we'd be able to receive the message anyway.
And the same holds true for us sending signals to them. How do we know that aliens would be able to even pick up something as "primitive" as radio waves or whatever? How would they know what we're saying? And by the time they receive our radio waves, human civilization will either (a) be far more advanced than it is now, or (b) be dead. - chanop, on 03/24/2009, -0/+15I want to believe
- andyb747, on 03/24/2009, -2/+14pew... pew... pew... pew...pew... . . fphoooooshshsh
- dazparkour, on 03/24/2009, -1/+13Three. No more. No less. Three was the number they counted, and the number they counted was three. Four they did not count, nor two, except to proceed to three. Five was right out. Once the number three had been reached, being the third number, they declared that the number was Three.
- dattaway, on 03/24/2009, -0/+11Its all fun and games until you point that laser in someone's eye lightyears away. And they had a much bigger laser to return the fire...
- FearisFailure, on 03/24/2009, -0/+9They can't get to me I have my aluminum foil hat on.
- Treshnell, on 03/24/2009, -2/+11That's what I thought might be happening when I read about yesterday's exploding star. Maybe the star theory is correct, and the star just had its life prematurely ended, by an alien race using it as a signal beacon.
http://digg.com/space/Star_Explodes_and_So_Might_T ...
Unfortunately, that star exploded about 215 million years ago...so who knows what happened to that race of aliens. - getoffmybridge, on 05/05/2009, -1/+10That's no moon...
- CrimsonBlur, on 03/24/2009, -1/+10Why would an advanced alien species use ONLY FTL signals to attempt contact with other species knowing that said species may not be as technologically advanced? On top of that, said species would have, at some point in their existence, used technology inferior to what they have now, which could have been 10,000 years ago.
What you're saying is only "logical" if the aliens are idiots, which wouldn't really make any sense.
The point is, given the vastness of the Universe, there may be a civilization out there that at some point has tried any one of the communication methods we can think of that could be detected at the distances being discussed.
How advanced the civilization is today isn't relevant in considering what to search for, since you're talking about distances of tens of thousands or millions of light years, which automatically implies they are more technologically advanced than we are, but may not have been when they sent the signals we are receiving. - wolfing, on 03/24/2009, -4/+12not possible even if it was doable. The laser 'burst' would have to be directed with pinpoint accuracy to the destination, so they would need to know exactly where we are. A 0.00000001 degree away and we wouldn't notice it. Since laser travels at (or near?) the speed of light, and stars are thousands (or more) light years away from us, that means that whatever they know about this planet is thousands of years old, back to a time when we didn't generate anything that would mark our planet from far away (this only really started happening about 100 years ago, with radio and TV transmissions). Basically, nobody in the universe will be alerted of our presence for at least a few more thousand years, unless of course Einstein was wrong and traveling faster than light is indeed possible.
- inactive, on 03/24/2009, -1/+9In other news, scientists ponder whether aliens sit outside and listen to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin while firing off said lasers into the night.
- Bamboolemur, on 03/24/2009, -1/+8YES. They want to know whether the cylon/human war really is over.
- CheeseburgerBro, on 03/24/2009, -2/+8rm...rm...rrrmmmm....RRRmmmm....RMMMMMM: kaaaaaaPLOWIE (fash! foosh! mzzzzzft!)
- fjsferreira, on 03/24/2009, -1/+6As long as they don't hit me, we're good.
- jknevitt, on 03/24/2009, -1/+6Why not just sweep the burst over a certain arc in the sky to cover your intended target? Even if your target is a 0.01º x 0.01º patch of sky, you could still easily do it and be pretty sure you hit your mark.
- neocreo, on 03/24/2009, -1/+6Actually, given enough trials all things will happen. Like oxygen spontaneusly transforming to gold, just because it gets bored one day.
- inactive, on 03/24/2009, -1/+6They've been sending me signals for years now.
- inactive, on 03/24/2009, -2/+7*fizzle*
- Phazoni, on 03/24/2009, -0/+5Don't you mean SyFy?
- Asrrin29, on 03/24/2009, -0/+4It's not so much the distances I worry about, more the timelines involved. Depending on how we fare as a race, It's very possible that intelligent civilizations either self-destruct or die off before enough time has passed to have more then a few of them present in the universe at any given time period. While I hope that this is false, I look at the state of our own world and die a little inside.
- aaabbbsss, on 03/24/2009, -0/+4Question: If an alien civilization managed to create a spaceship that could make it to Earth in an amount of time before the pilot's natural death by age, and they had a telescope that managed to watch Earth the entire flight (just imaginary, come on), would they see the Earth evolve rapidly from the early stage of life they were seeing from their planet due to the speed in which light travels all the way to modern times, all condensed into the length of the space trip? Would our evolution from billions of years ago (depending on the distance this 'alien' planet is from earth) be played in super fast motion in their perspective as they traveled towards us at their insane speed of travel? Would this act be considered time travel? Or just an illusion because of the mysteries of light itself?
- gkiltz, on 03/24/2009, -2/+6Of all of the things that COULD happen, how many actually DO?
- rhepark, on 03/24/2009, -1/+5Next stop, EARTH!
- plainOldFool, on 03/24/2009, -0/+4Aliens with frickin' lasers attached to their heads.
- TMorel, on 03/24/2009, -3/+7If they really wanted to make contact, wouldn't they just use twitter like everyone else?
- mstachiw, on 03/24/2009, -1/+5So that's whose been shining those in my eyes in public
- linksus, on 03/24/2009, -0/+4Considering we are planning on doing just that, I dont think its completely silly.
- HippyInASuit, on 03/24/2009, -0/+4If they wanted us dead we would already be toast.
- Qeveren, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Of course, there is the slight problem that FTL likely doesn't exist, so it'd be kind of difficult for advanced alien civilizations to communicate using it...
- mtzadogg, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3looks like its time to bust out the tin foil hats!
- BotchaMcCoola, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Don't reply or they will be able to get a fix on your location.
- jfitz369, on 03/24/2009, -1/+4Also, on this hypothetical spaceship's return home they would watch their own civilization fast forward into the future where apes would become the dominant species on the planet.
- bshock, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3In the unlikely event that aliens are signalling us via laser, it would be because (a) they know we're here because of our radio broadcasts, and (b) they're telling us to shut up if we don't want to be noticed by less friendly species.
- Qeveren, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3It wouldn't have to be that pinpoint accurate, really. The beam would diverge over distance, and this would allow it to cover a huge portion of the target solar system. For example, a petawatt laser beam that had diverged to be as wide as Earth's orbit around the Sun would still appear as bright as the star Vega in our sky. A petawatt beam as wide as the entire solar system (~40 AU radius) would be easily visible in binoculars, let alone astronomical telescopes. It would stick out like a sore thumb, especially because it'd be coherent, monochromatic light.
So lasers are an -awesome- way to communicate between stars. - thcobbs, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Correct; We send inter-galactic candygrams with directions to our planet from MegaGoogle Universe.
Do mind that minor black hole near AZHE-34236(Rigel)... it can be a bit hard on your thrusters. - Chromatics, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3I think if the alien civilization were more advanced than we are, and they wanted to communicate with beginner civilizations, they would know what the simplest form of communication would be, e.g., radio waves with specific (non-random!) patterns, broadcast at the hydrogen line frequency, for example. (http://www.setileague.org/askdr/hydrogen.htm)
It would make sense for them to use a lowest common denominator beacon such as this. And this is indeed a frequency that the SETI receivers are tuned to. The non-random message pattern might be a morse code-like representation of a math constant such as pi. e.g., 000 0 0000 0 00000 000000000 00 000000 etc.
If they used a FTL technology to deliver the message, they would likely still wrap it in a package that would make it indistinguishable from non-FTL delivery. - pumanegra2012, on 03/24/2009, -1/+4Would aliens like to communicate with us, lesser humans?
- directedition, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Doesn't this assume that the aliens would be able to predict the precise location of our planet when it intersects with our beam? And to do so, they would have to specifically want to speak with us. If they detect our radio signals, chances are that they would want to respond in kind.
- danesis, on 03/24/2009, -2/+5Traveling faster is not the issue, traveling through space by bending the distance between it is the tricky part. Based on Einstein's theories it is theoretically possible, so I'm sure civilizations that are more astronomically advanced than we are might have already figure it out.
Also considering the scale and ratio of objects in the universe, humans are relatively the size we are because of our planet and surrounding environment. There's nothing that excludes the possibility of there being planets thousands of times bigger than our own with stars thousands of times larger that are capable of sustaining life at much larger scales. The universe is a strange place and physics has both a classical and subatomic nature that we have yet to fully understand. - mparker21311, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Agreed.
But I would go as far as to say that we're not as primitive as we'd like to believe we are. I dare say that we're probably among the few intelligent lifeforms floating on a rock in the black matter ocean of space.
Even still, our ocean has an end. Does space have walls? - pinchduck, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Dugg for godzillion-watt.
- Treshnell, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3But if they blew up a star to make it into a signal beacon, it would flare out in just about every direction. Maybe they'd just be shouting out, "Hello?"
- speedyrev, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Depends on the quality. I buy name brand. If you use that cheap no name stuff, you're screwed.
- PeppermintPig, on 03/24/2009, -1/+4I wouldn't want to be around when one of these aliens is giving a speech.
/Boyz from the Dwarf!! - densetsu23, on 03/24/2009, -0/+3Like the Vulcans ignoring Earth until Zefram Cochran demonstrated his warp drive!
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