Topic: The Science of Aliens - SETI First Alien Signals

[mrodgers]

Acctually, I just wikied it, and I was pretty close, but it turns out I got the numbers the wrong way around, since they are written right to left, not left to right.

I should have got that from the solar system pic...  *ashamed of self*


((sorry for double post))

While it assumes a number system, its not hard to decode one from any other.  If you really look at it, the signal is a pretty simple one and contains quite a bit of info.

[sltlamina]

I seriously hope they get the Simpsons or Futurama or something that'd be a laugh (well at least If they translated It) although to us alien porn might look more like mass murder suicide or summat, with all the fluids and screaming and moving...I dunno.

I really hope we get a greeting message, summat along the lines of...

"By the time you get this our race will probably be In a massive solar scale civil war and society as we know It will have collapsed...hey"

[Holiace]

1. What do you thin will be the first message we receive from an alien world?
"Hello, we come in peace."

2. What do you think will be our first message found by an alien world?
"Hello, we come with war and killing AND total destruction."

[Behumat]

I think they've already recieved a message from us, and it didn't take them long to figure out the shouldn't talk to us.

[Snake]

You must take into consider the other forms of communication. Possibly a highly advanced civilization has bypassed the slow radio and waves of communication, perhaps opting for a much faster system with less energy loss. At that point our simple radios don't do us much good to a race that like advance 20,000 years per transmission reaching us... In that amount of time its almost certain a better alternative would be discovered. At first we had letters. Then about 1900 years later or so, radio was discovered/invented. The rate of technological increase is accelerating exponentially. Its entirely possible that in a few years some quantum scientist or whatnot finds out there are better and faster alternatives. So its entirely likely they're not even noticing the radio waves. Even if they did, they may have completely forgotten any reason to make transistors, and upon discovering the waves, they would send out a signal of their newer and non-primitive transmissions. We, being so primitive, would never find these waves until we have invented a way to receive them, finding out how far behind we are.

[Behumat]

You must take into consider the other forms of communication. Possibly a highly advanced civilization has bypassed the slow radio and waves of communication, perhaps opting for a much faster system with less energy loss. At that point our simple radios don't do us much good to a race that like advance 20,000 years per transmission reaching us... In that amount of time its almost certain a better alternative would be discovered. At first we had letters. Then about 1900 years later or so, radio was discovered/invented. The rate of technological increase is accelerating exponentially. Its entirely possible that in a few years some quantum scientist or whatnot finds out there are better and faster alternatives. So its entirely likely they're not even noticing the radio waves. Even if they did, they may have completely forgotten any reason to make transistors, and upon discovering the waves, they would send out a signal of their newer and non-primitive transmissions. We, being so primitive, would never find these waves until we have invented a way to receive them, finding out how far behind we are.

The number of radio transmissions radiating off of our planet has dropped significantly. Most communications are reflected back at our world via satellite.

[Holiace]

I think they've already recieved a message from us, and it didn't take them long to figure out the shouldn't talk to us.

True! I mean.. What have we doen to them? no good anyways 

[stuck]

You must take into consider the other forms of communication. Possibly a highly advanced civilization has bypassed the slow radio and waves of communication, perhaps opting for a much faster system with less energy loss. At that point our simple radios don't do us much good to a race that like advance 20,000 years per transmission reaching us... In that amount of time its almost certain a better alternative would be discovered. At first we had letters. Then about 1900 years later or so, radio was discovered/invented. The rate of technological increase is accelerating exponentially. Its entirely possible that in a few years some quantum scientist or whatnot finds out there are better and faster alternatives. So its entirely likely they're not even noticing the radio waves. Even if they did, they may have completely forgotten any reason to make transistors, and upon discovering the waves, they would send out a signal of their newer and non-primitive transmissions. We, being so primitive, would never find these waves until we have invented a way to receive them, finding out how far behind we are.

Technically speaking, radio waves are the fastest things available for us to use. Radio is just another form of light, with travels at roughly 3.0 x 10⁸ meters per second. Nothing can go faster than it due to relativity and causality, with causality being the main principle behind this. So unless all our physics gets revamped (which is likely, I suppose), there is no foreseeable future for faster than light communication. Maybe quantum entanglement.

Also, chances are that an alien species would broadcast radio waves through a whole spectrum of frequencies to prevent distortion loss. If we singled in on a single bandwidth, then it would look like static (which is what SETI is picking up).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Possible reason we can't find anything.

[Snake]

Exactly, but for a race many years ahead of us, their physics are most likely already heavily revamped. We used to think the Sun circled Earth not long ago  .

[HolsteinCow]

It would take billions of years to communicate with an alien species because FTL travel is physically impossible.

[Zer Zeron]

I find it pretty likely that we might be in contact with an alien race before the end of the Millennium. 50 years computers weighed 30 short tons, so its not completely impossible for us to have FTL travel by the end of the Millennium.

Oh and, years ago it was physically impossible for humans to fly in any conceivable manner. Yet here we are...

Impossibility is relative. Nothing that we consider impossible is actually impossible. It just seems so from our current technological and mental standpoint.

[ollj]

1. What do you think will be the first message we receive from an alien world?
"The universal comunication network welcomes another homeworld. haha. And all the time you used electromagnetism for comunication."

2. What do you think will be our first message found by an alien world?
If anything waits to rechieve any signal it propably wont miss our radio signals send during the second world war, and they are easy to filter and decode and do not leave a good impression to anyone.

The movie "contact" has a nice intro you hear historic radio broadcasts in reverse historical order while aproaching earth.
Many dont like the movie because its quite boring but it fits the topic.

The problem is that the maximum speed of information, light speed, is still pretty damn slow on large scales.
If your screen resolution is 1024 pixel wide or high and displays an image of the milky way galaxy about this scale, diameter 100.000 light-years, one pixel is ~100 light years wide and our 50 year old radio signal has just traveled past 1 pixel, 50 light years in all directions, filling just that 1 pixel from its center.
And the whole galaxy is tiny on an even larger universal scale.

A signal from "the other end of our galaxy" is like a signal from something as old as dinosaurs and when our 50 year old radio signals have spread all over our galaxy they will be as old as dinosaurs for anyone who rechieves them.
Comunication only makes sense to something close, but the closer the more unlikely it is to exist without noticing.
So if you dont notice something nearby it does not make sense to try to comuniate with something further away.
On large scales you just listen for VERY old information that has traveled WAY past its destination, but a reply just takes way too long to be usefull.
Therefore Before anyone sends a "hello aliens, you there? asl..." for usefull comunication he has to have rechieved a signal from "not too far", that wasnt really aimed directly at him, or the "hi whazaap" reply will be useless/outdated by the time a reply has come back.

There has to be a maximum speed for information or causality and many physical laws would fail, and that speed limit is simply light speed for all that matters.
That speed limit also limits the size of "fast thinking/processing".
A computer processor the size of a classroom could not be faster than ~100mHz because of the light speed limit through the classroom.
A light-echo to the moon and back takes 2,6 seconds.
Intelligence 40 light years away enables anyone to ask a question as a teenager and to get a reply hopefully before diing of old age. (ignoring that you "age" slower the faster you move).
The larger something is the slower it processes information by the comunication speed limit, therefore intelligence is relatively small and automatically isolated from another intellicence.

Self replicating space nodes that build up a comunication network feeding on asteroids and moons, a universal internet, called "van neuman nodes", are a workaround for "comunication without replies".
They just spread and store information through space to enable a comunication network , traveling as fast as possible (like 10% to 50% light speed), begging the question why we just did not met any of them yet.
Bet we hit the spam/abuse filter of all alien nodes out there.

[Snake]

Even if we do not travel faster than light which in all likely hood would rip apart atoms... The more possible is the stable, expanded worm hole which will probably take about 1000 years at the least even at the increasing rate of technological increase. If we don't slow and reverse global warming you might as well add another couple of thousand years, if we survive... We would probably be listed as "Future uncertain - environmental problems." in an evolution book that aliens might have  lol. But if wormholes are the way to go we might see a return of a form of "letter" system. Unless radio waves could travel through a wormhole which is probably likely seeing as how matter can pass through.

[ChristianSkunk]

I don't like how sure scientists supposedly are these days about certain things like that.  As others have mentioned, there's been plenty of times when people were sure and today we laugh at them.  But we're not like that, no!  We everything we know, we know. </sarcasm>  They didn't think the sound barrier could be broken (hence the name) because the planes kept breaking up and they didn't know why.  So they tried to write it off as impossible.  Anyway...  I doubt I'll live to see FTL, I might even be willing to say that it's unlikely any human ever will, but I will not say it's impossible.

There's just too much guess work in a lot of that stuff.  Have you read A Brief History of Time?  This theory is founded on that theory, which is true if that theory is true, if that other theory is true, which it is under these limited circumstances...  Just look at all the weird stuff that happens with black holes and additional dimensions tightly curled up in ours and stuff.  It seems like a 'yeah, that's true for our every-day lives, but what about other places, other times?'  A lot of it sounds like a cop out to me.  'It doesn't matter what happened before the big bang because time and therefore causality didn't exist' (paraphrasing).  Pfft, I say.

(BTW, did they lose the spell checker?  I don't see it.)

Edit:  Oh, and on topic...  I don't know what was broadcasted first, although I remember in Contact, supposedly the first with the strength was the Olympics.  *shrug*

It's hard to say though, when our transmissions will reach other ears, or jagons, or whatever.  Everyone (apparently) tends to assume other races are/will be more advanced than we, which suggests to me they're assuming these aliens evolved before or at the same time (given the delay between life and first transmission).  Anyway, I think it's perfectly possible that other races wouldn't be using radio waves, or not at least at the time that our transmissions would begin to wash over them.  However, if there is a more advanced race out there, it's doubtful they were always at that level of technology, so could have been using radio waves that might be close to reaching us.  And they won't be anything directed at us, of course, maybe just their own sports?

So here's a thought...  What if we are the most advanced race in the universe?  Not necessarily the only race, nor the first to evolve, but the only one with better than stone tipped spears?