Searching for extera tersesial inteligence
 

I was watching the discovery channel many months ago and they were talking about SETI searching for extra terrestrial intelligence or something. They had really big satellite dishes and I guess they listen for a signal from space. As cool as it would be to get get some alien pr0n, I thought radio waves only went so far.... Am I wrong?

No they pretty much go on indefinitely in a vacuum.

There is no extra terrestrial intelligence - there's not enough to go around as it is. The sum total of all intelligence is finite, but it's getting spread between more and more people, which helps explain why younger people seem so stupid.

The real limiting factor with radio waves is their slow speed.

Wow, that explanation really would explain a lot.

Idiocracy

radio waves can travel forever. but they move very slowly. any radio transmission we pick up might be hundreds of thousands of years old.


what frightens me are the dullard scientists broadcasting signals out into space. one in a million that there is space faring intelligent life out there. one in a quadrillion that they're nice and want to be friends.

I have a friend who's been out of work for a while.

These days, he's so deeply steeped in extraterrestrial intelligence, the idea of off-world beings landing on Earth, cover ups, conspiracies, Roswell, and the like, I can barely have a conversation with him, as this is all he chooses to ramble about.

He didn't use to be this way when he had a job. SmileWavy

worse yet, our commercial TV and radio broadcasts.

Tell me about it. Spanish radio or milquetoast hits from the 80s and 90s is our menu here. That'll be our representation to the universe.

Right about now, they're getting the Ed Sullivan Show and I Love Lucy. But, when they start receiving The Jeffersons or All in the Family, the invasion of Earth is on. :eek:

Judging by your thread title, I'd say we better search for terrestrial intelligence first.






:D

Slow? Um...how fast would you like them to travel?



SETI is a small group that is essentially independently funded now. They use equipment that was mothballed, and run low power, low man-power jobs with it. I wouldn't call them "dullard" by any means. Yes, they are looking for coherent signals from other planets, no they don't particularly expect to find them, but looking is pretty easy.

over interstellar distances, i'd like a means of communication that doesn't take twenty generations of waiting for someone to say hello back when you say hello.


they are searching in a spectrum that any advanced civilization would find useless. might as well be looking for smoke signals from other worlds.

Apparently, c=too slow...
All electromagnetic radiation -- from radio waves to x-rays -- travel at the speed of light.

Imagine there is a predator out there that feeds off biologically developed planets, and it's main tool of detection is receiving radio waves.

dinner time!

Why? Don't Extera's(sic) have an ECU?

I used to run SETI@home as my screensaver (great idea) but Berkley U. has completely screwed it up. Now it's some convoluted gobbleygook "BOINC" interface that nobody short of a CS major can understand. I fought with it for an hour and said "screw it".

I'm going to be (sic)

No one is trying to communicate. They are tying to find signs of life outside of our Earth. Nothing more. Sending a signal out is basically free, why not do it? They're also hoping (as humans tend to do) that they might find that sign of life nearby (within 20 or 30 light years). 10 would be even better, you almost could communicate at that distance.


Actually, they're searching in a spectrum that is well established all over the Universe. They're searching in a bandwidth that is (1) easy to make, (2) would be recognized by any civilization in the universe, since it's the frequency of the most common element in the universe, and (3) has shown to be effective in transmitting cleanly through all of the various debris that exists in the universe (other wavelengths get scattered away and are useless).

Finally, the massive parallel computing designs that they've worked on are being used in other fields of science, so even if you dismiss them as "kooks", they're contributing.

Yep that vacume between the ears is infinite for some..

Anybody who intercepts our signals would realize almost instantaneously that there is no cognitive intelligence on this planet..

WHEW...Since I never had a job, so DD can't be talking about me....

hence, radiotabs

EXACTLY....what I was talking about....

indeed

There... fixed it for you. :eek:



Saw a comedian talking about this once...

"Okay, so we all love E.T. and those cute little grey aliens in Close Encounters, but hasn't anybody thought about the possibility that there could big, mean, nasty biker aliens out there, too?"

In the vast emptiness of the universe, the speed of light is way to slow for us to communicate effectively or travel beyond a small part our own little galaxy. The next closest star in our galaxy is Alpha Centauri at about 4 light years.

Ironically, as the universe continues to expand, the spaces between galaxies are only getting larger. Our own Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. Parallel universes and worm holes are looked at as possible shortcuts in time/space travel. The speed of light seems a snails pace when put into perspective.

The speed of light increases as well. The actual fabric of space is expanding, so the yardstick that we use to measure things is expanding with it.

So how do we know that it's expanding if our tools for measuring it are expanding as well?

And what is "tersesial"?

"extera" and "teresial"...as well as "inteligence" are words that are used to test the efficacy of Spell Chekk.

Yes----but would "extera tersesial inteligence"have spellcheck?

Much faster than they do. About 1000x faster would be nice.

Yes, C is way too slow.

Ditto.

Not as bad as Java!

I doubt they'd need it... from what I've heard and read, they use telepathic communication.

What I wanna know is do they have terlits... and if so, do they dump them every so often out there, or have they figured out a way to dump their dookie into the superfusion hyperdrive and burn it up.

LOL when I posted this I had just come off night shift and was on my 4th beer. I cant believe I butchered the title like that but when I wrote it, it looked fine. Hopefully aliens wont see this post and decide to eat us all.

Um, that's sorta like a local restaurant stating that they are "World Famous". :D

We can't agree on anything on this planet.

I don't remember the physics, but doesn't the strength of a omnidirectional radio signal diminish with the square of the distance from its origin? Has to do with the formula for surface of a sphere? So if a radio signal is "X" strong 1 mile from the transmitter, it will be 6 trillion squared or 4 x 10^25 times weaker when it reaches Alpha Centuari? I don't really see how such a weak signal can be distinguished from background noise, including that produced by Alpha Centuari itself? I can see if the signal is a supernova, but some local FM station broadcasting "Dancing Queen"? Anyone who knows the math, please explain. Thanks.