> They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.
This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!
And that's why they won't find anything, IMHO. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.
At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.
Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately leaving your house will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is stay the fuck inside.
Beyond ability to follow government direction, the amount of genuinely damaging social isolation experienced by many people during COVID indicates we shouldn't be doing it without good reason. People need people, in proximity, at length. We're a social species.
Having it safe to go outside is the very point of a society.
Outside of this safety Bubble there's a strong tendency for conflict and war. Only after two cruel world wars and a prolonged cold war, the western world got their shit together and decided 'enough of that'. And even that doesn't seem to hold much longer, so it seems we will only have managed to live peaceful among each other without an immediate conflict with somebody (cold war) for roughly 30 years.
If aliens are remotely like us, they shouldn't know about us.
But this is my point — it would take hundreds, or even thousands of years for aliens to get here. To do that they'd need some sort of abundant fuel source.
Let's say they have had thousands of years of Nuclear Fusion, for example, it wouldn't surprise me if they could produce any elements they need by fusing hydrogen.
But let's say they didn't, and they do in fact see Earth as a rare jewel full of precious materials... the logistics of taking our natural resources just seems like a joke. Surely the juice isn't worth the hundreds of years of planning and logistics squeeze.
I used to buy this dark forest idea, because it's scary and exciting, but I think the biggest mistake is projecting our behaviours onto extra-terrestrials.
If they wanted to destroy Earth they'd just slightly nudge a big asteroid in our direction and be done with it.
> Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.
Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.
Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.
Sounds like a great sci-fi premise. "Hey, there aren't enough knock-down, drag-out religious wars on Earth. Let's start beef with the nuclear-armed, FTL-capable sky wizard cult on Epsilon Eridani 4."
I've pretty much given up on traditional radio SETI ever finding anything, as its sole focus is on trying to find terrawatt/mega scale, repeating, intentional alien communication beacons, and nothing else. As I don't believe aliens would make such things, I don't believe traditional SETI will ever find anything.
Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded.
The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable.
If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
Stellar plasma supports long-lived, self-organizing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) structures whose coupled electromagnetic and fluid dynamics implement distributed information processing. Sentience would supervene on these MHD attractors rather than on matter in a solid or neural form.
Thanks for the reply. I wonder what sort of stimulus such a system would be capable of perceiving. I suppose the context is so different that very little of my intuition about "life" could be applied productively.
Stimulus is the most interesting question. Is there anything that can reach from other stars to our sun without completely being overwhelmed by its own signals? Would it rely on planets as antennae? Calling that speculation would be an understatement;)
>“There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” he said. “We have to do a better job of measuring what we’re excluding. Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches, and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere.”
Is this not the perfect job for AI today? Just sit there and digest signals for 30 years and report back the top 1000? I'm quite sure it could even work on the algorithms as a side-quest.
AI has been used in astrophysics for a long time, now. AI is more than genAI of the past 3-4 years... Classification tasks are handled by AI now because it's the only thing that gives you some accuracy at scale.
If nothing else, AI will probably be needed to filter out RF artifacts and spurious emissions from all the Internet satellite constellations that are either already online or ramping up in the future.
This sort of effort really ought to be conducted with antennas on the far side of the Moon, IMO. But good luck finding the budget for that these days.
We have a statutory office within the US Department of Defense meant to track UFOs (AARO).[1] Why would such things be sending electromagnetic signals from outer space?
Literally thousands of witnesses. It's very odd to say "aliens may exist, but those nuclear weapons officers are crazy, aliens would definitely be sending signals from elsewhere, they would not be and are not here."
Not solved at all. Certainly AF is very useful but what it outputs is a fundamentally a prediction with important limitations. There’s plenty of utility in physical modeling.
That was really interesting. Really wish we got a real deal of aliens in the next say ten years. The tictac thing as well as all those congress hearing got me excited.
> “Until about 2016, we didn’t really know what we were going to do with these detections that we’d accumulated,” Anderson said. “We hadn’t figured out how to do the whole second part of the analysis.”
This assumes that ETs are deliberately transmitting high power signals towards us (or into space in general), although I'm not sure that is a reasonable assumption. I think it would generally be unwise to loudly announce a civilization's presence.
According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
I heard this as well by scientists from JAXA. They gave a presentation on SETI.
When it came time for questions I asked. So, if we were at Alpha Centari could we detect signals from earth with the tech we currently have? They said "No". That was 2019. Maybe tech is better today?
It's mostly not reasonable to try and ascribe human motivations to alien entities, particularly when we know some humans would definitely fire up the transmitter if they could.
The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.
Yes, there are arguments for and against sending out a strong deliberate "we're here" signal. But I guess you could also argue that the possible danger in announcing our presence is fairly well mitigated by the speed of light, as there are unlikely to be any other advanced civilizations within a few light years.
could you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??
There's a proposal for a large constellation of small, cheap-to-build radio sats. Heard about it on a Fraser Cain podcast. They plan to send them to one of the Lagrange points and spread them out in x KM cube pattern. They also want some of the sats to do some RF processing on-site, and beam just the "results" back.
What's the point? The frequencies being listened to on these radio telescopes aren't affected by the atmosphere. Arecibo in space doesn't get you anything that Arecibo on the ground didn't (except hurricane resistance, I guess).
One exception is the far side of the moon to get away from radio noise. But other than that, there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space.
Once that constellation is fully expanded as intended, the planned chinese constellation joins it, and other nations (India?, the EU?) pile on, things will get even noisier.
The dark side of the moon offers hope, but it's still a lot of addiional awkwardness and expense that could be avoided with better attention to "the commons".
I was at a shop that had beefy workstations for 3D/video/graphics work that I thought I was cool for running @home on the 10 boxes we had. I remember popping up in the top 100 list for a minute.
> They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.
This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!
Only if you hit the transmit button.
And that's why they won't find anything, IMHO. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.
At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.
Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.
Why not just credit the dark forest for this idea?
Perhaps because the concept's been knocking around for decades before it was published?
The idea wasn't Cixin's. E.g., https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alan-Penny/publication/... refers to speculation as early as 1967 that it might not be a good idea to answer that particular phone.
Here's a later article from 2010: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately leaving your house will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is stay the fuck inside.
This reads like a Douglas Adams quote
We tried that in 2020. It didn't really work out that well as most people were physically unable to stay the fuck inside.
Beyond ability to follow government direction, the amount of genuinely damaging social isolation experienced by many people during COVID indicates we shouldn't be doing it without good reason. People need people, in proximity, at length. We're a social species.
Having it safe to go outside is the very point of a society.
Outside of this safety Bubble there's a strong tendency for conflict and war. Only after two cruel world wars and a prolonged cold war, the western world got their shit together and decided 'enough of that'. And even that doesn't seem to hold much longer, so it seems we will only have managed to live peaceful among each other without an immediate conflict with somebody (cold war) for roughly 30 years.
If aliens are remotely like us, they shouldn't know about us.
We're like a paranoid child terrified that anyone that enters our room is going to steal our Lego, so we must be left alone!
Nobody wants our Lego.
You know, if aliens are like Americans and we have oil....
I'm only half-joking.
But this is my point — it would take hundreds, or even thousands of years for aliens to get here. To do that they'd need some sort of abundant fuel source.
Let's say they have had thousands of years of Nuclear Fusion, for example, it wouldn't surprise me if they could produce any elements they need by fusing hydrogen.
But let's say they didn't, and they do in fact see Earth as a rare jewel full of precious materials... the logistics of taking our natural resources just seems like a joke. Surely the juice isn't worth the hundreds of years of planning and logistics squeeze.
I used to buy this dark forest idea, because it's scary and exciting, but I think the biggest mistake is projecting our behaviours onto extra-terrestrials.
If they wanted to destroy Earth they'd just slightly nudge a big asteroid in our direction and be done with it.
/ sorry for the ADHD rant
Heck, no. We need to go invade the systems that broadcast their presence. Where there's biology, there's probably oil!
> Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.
Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.
Even if we credit the idea that it's unsafe to transmit, there are reasons to do it anyway, e.g. you have a holy text and a mission to share it with the universe.
Sounds like a great sci-fi premise. "Hey, there aren't enough knock-down, drag-out religious wars on Earth. Let's start beef with the nuclear-armed, FTL-capable sky wizard cult on Epsilon Eridani 4."
> This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door
This is what I thought also.
Maybe they didn’t find any signals, but just said, “To heck with it. We’ll just say we found 100 signals, and let them come to us!”
I guess we'll find out in a few decades.
I for one welcome our new...
I've pretty much given up on traditional radio SETI ever finding anything, as its sole focus is on trying to find terrawatt/mega scale, repeating, intentional alien communication beacons, and nothing else. As I don't believe aliens would make such things, I don't believe traditional SETI will ever find anything.
Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded.
The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable.
If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
On the other hand, I hold the slightly fringe theory that suns are sentient beings, and by just watching the stars, we may see them communicate.
Sun Diver by David Brin, or The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle are both adjacent to this.
I think that's the premise of a novel that I've been meaning to read.
Herbert's ConSentiency universe , the Calebans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_Star?wprov=sfla1
> suns are sentient beings, and by just watching the stars, we may see them communicate
With radio signals?
In your theory, what is the structure that supports sentience?
Stellar plasma supports long-lived, self-organizing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) structures whose coupled electromagnetic and fluid dynamics implement distributed information processing. Sentience would supervene on these MHD attractors rather than on matter in a solid or neural form.
Thanks for the reply. I wonder what sort of stimulus such a system would be capable of perceiving. I suppose the context is so different that very little of my intuition about "life" could be applied productively.
Stimulus is the most interesting question. Is there anything that can reach from other stars to our sun without completely being overwhelmed by its own signals? Would it rely on planets as antennae? Calling that speculation would be an understatement;)
This sounds so complicated while I’m just here making my GUI interface with Visual Basic to trace an IP address.
some incomprehensible magnetic field interactions
I'm there with you. Also mycelia networks. Zero chance that forest-spanning neural networks have never woken up and started thinking
“Slightly fringe”
Heh
Arthur C Clarke once suggested that some supernova could be industrial accidents. A curiously romantic idea, and one I rather like!
>“There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” he said. “We have to do a better job of measuring what we’re excluding. Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches, and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere.”
Is this not the perfect job for AI today? Just sit there and digest signals for 30 years and report back the top 1000? I'm quite sure it could even work on the algorithms as a side-quest.
Digest signals for 30 years and report back? That's one hell of a super computer and significantly faster than Deep Thought
No, AI are terrible at finding these types of patterns.
You could hypothetically use AI to write algorithms to find the patterns, but people have already spent a long time super-tuning them.
AIs can't even (at least I keep checking) solve Sudokus as well as my mother -- they aren't good with piles of numbers and complex patterns.
AI has been used in astrophysics for a long time, now. AI is more than genAI of the past 3-4 years... Classification tasks are handled by AI now because it's the only thing that gives you some accuracy at scale.
It depends on what you mean by AI. I bet if the two of you used clearer terms, you’d both be right.
Claude Code: i'm entering plan mode to analyze the 10B signals in the database
If nothing else, AI will probably be needed to filter out RF artifacts and spurious emissions from all the Internet satellite constellations that are either already online or ramping up in the future.
This sort of effort really ought to be conducted with antennas on the far side of the Moon, IMO. But good luck finding the budget for that these days.
We have a statutory office within the US Department of Defense meant to track UFOs (AARO).[1] Why would such things be sending electromagnetic signals from outer space?
Literally thousands of witnesses. It's very odd to say "aliens may exist, but those nuclear weapons officers are crazy, aliens would definitely be sending signals from elsewhere, they would not be and are not here."
[1] 50 USC § 3373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373
I used to run this on my computer in the early 2000s. I wish we had a similar project nowadays.
folding@home is still going I think?
seti@home was definetly a cool screensaver, though.[0]
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Korpela/publicatio...
Folding is still going strong, as is:
https://worldcommunitygrid.org/
Wasn't protein folding solved by our AI overlords once? Demis Hassabis? Alpha Fold?
Not solved at all. Certainly AF is very useful but what it outputs is a fundamentally a prediction with important limitations. There’s plenty of utility in physical modeling.
This made me go back and find the S@H team I started in 1999:
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=3346...
That was really interesting. Really wish we got a real deal of aliens in the next say ten years. The tictac thing as well as all those congress hearing got me excited.
The article links to BOINC. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)
Way, waaay better than Interstellar. That's a low bar actually. Interstellar was visually stunning, but absolute crap otherwise.
I liked contact and I liked interstellar.
Three Body Problem as well for detecting signal.
Pluribus as well
Also “Three Body” is the Chinese version of this, which is more in-depth.
The book is far better. They completely removed the "artist signature" from the movie.
I think both are fine, actually. The movie definitely departed from the book, especially near the end.
For your kids, “Elio” is basically “Contact” for kids. It didn’t get fantastic reviews, but I suspect it appeals to the HN crowd more.
I associate SETI news with the Youtube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011.
> “Until about 2016, we didn’t really know what we were going to do with these detections that we’d accumulated,” Anderson said. “We hadn’t figured out how to do the whole second part of the analysis.”
No comment.
This assumes that ETs are deliberately transmitting high power signals towards us (or into space in general), although I'm not sure that is a reasonable assumption. I think it would generally be unwise to loudly announce a civilization's presence.
According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
I heard this as well by scientists from JAXA. They gave a presentation on SETI.
When it came time for questions I asked. So, if we were at Alpha Centari could we detect signals from earth with the tech we currently have? They said "No". That was 2019. Maybe tech is better today?
But what did you think?
What did I think about what?
It's mostly not reasonable to try and ascribe human motivations to alien entities, particularly when we know some humans would definitely fire up the transmitter if they could.
The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.
Yes, there are arguments for and against sending out a strong deliberate "we're here" signal. But I guess you could also argue that the possible danger in announcing our presence is fairly well mitigated by the speed of light, as there are unlikely to be any other advanced civilizations within a few light years.
ask chaptgpt about space telescopes
There are no space-based radio telescopes.
(Well, none pointing at stars at least. There are some spy sats pointed down.)
could you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??
There's a proposal for a large constellation of small, cheap-to-build radio sats. Heard about it on a Fraser Cain podcast. They plan to send them to one of the Lagrange points and spread them out in x KM cube pattern. They also want some of the sats to do some RF processing on-site, and beam just the "results" back.
These aren't telescopes, but it is quite similar to what you're describing otherwise:
https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...
What's the point? The frequencies being listened to on these radio telescopes aren't affected by the atmosphere. Arecibo in space doesn't get you anything that Arecibo on the ground didn't (except hurricane resistance, I guess).
One exception is the far side of the moon to get away from radio noise. But other than that, there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space.
I'm a fan of ground based radio astronomy, however:
> there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space
sadly isn't as true as it once was ..
* https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa51856-...
Once that constellation is fully expanded as intended, the planned chinese constellation joins it, and other nations (India?, the EU?) pile on, things will get even noisier.
The dark side of the moon offers hope, but it's still a lot of addiional awkwardness and expense that could be avoided with better attention to "the commons".
I remember donating a bit of my Alienware gaming laptop GPU on uni ethernet LAN in like 2010 ROFLMAO
I was at a shop that had beefy workstations for 3D/video/graphics work that I thought I was cool for running @home on the 10 boxes we had. I remember popping up in the top 100 list for a minute.