Are Aliens Hiding Their Messages?
from the alien-encryption dept
Roland Piquepaille writes "In an article to appear on May 10, the New Scientist carries a fascinating answer to the problem of why we never -- yet -- caught any signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. In a preview to the article, they say: "Two physicists have come up with an intriguing solution. They suggest a way in which aliens could send messages to each other across space that not only disguises their locations but also makes it impossible for a casual observer to even distinguish the messages from background noise. Messages sent by this method could be criss-crossing our Galaxy without us ever knowing." Check my blog for more comments, including how it is possible and what would be a potential usage for such a technique." I wouldn't exactly call that an "answer" to the question, but rather a theory. Also, it does seem like an odd bit of research, trying to prove why something that's never happened hasn't happened - on the assumption that something we have absolutely no proof exists, does so.
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This is a dumb
This tech forum is posting pseudoscience articles about Aliens?
"We have never met aliens and now cannot see or hear aliens because they are hiding thier messages and presence from us." says the piece.
Am I the only one who finds this arguement ridiculous? My idea "We have never met aliens and now cannot see or hear aliens because they have taken a vow of silence." seems just as logical.
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Not dumb in the least
Erico told them there weren't any aliens and that he could prove it.
When asked for an explanation he said something like this: If you do the math, if aliens never got any smarter than us, never lived any longer than us, never developed "magic" technologies like faster than light travel, then if you make a few reasonable assumptions about distances between stars, time between expeditions, etc. - you could have the entire galaxy colonized in about 8 million years or so - if each new colony begat two new ones.
If that were true, Fermi argued, you shouldn't be able to miss the aliens. Alien transmissions should clog our airwaves, alien artifacts should be strewn all over every inhabitable planet. After all, the galaxy has been around for 10 billion or more years. Every star could have been colonized over and over.
So what the guys at UHM are trying to do is resolve this seeming contradiction. How can the building blocks of life be so common and the presence of life be so rare? There are a number of explantions that have been tried: we're unique; we're the first technical civilization; we're the last civilization; civilizations are common, but very short lived (we've only been noisy for 80 or so years); or radio is a short-lived technology, and civilizations only use it for a few hundred years and move on to modulated neutrino beams or some other gizmo we haven't stumbled on yet.
My favorite is Carl Sagan's reply to the Fermi Paradox when he said, "Well, I imagine there were ants crawling all over the Colossus of Rhodes." Kind of puts it in perspective.
So, I don't think this is dumb at all, it's a novel approach to an intellectual puzzle. Plus, they may be on to some cool real-world applications, which only goes to show, you never know what you'll need to research.
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and the waward for the most prevalent life form go
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What about interstellar spam?
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to quote Calvin:
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Messages
But realistically, the universe is amazingly vast, and ridiculously long. The idea of two civilizations being at the right level of technology and within a reasonable distance of each other at the right time in history is hard to swallow at best. And that's not counting in all the various planet-killing meteors and other natural disasters that have been a part of this world, and presumably many if not most others.
Then there's evolution itself to consider - perhaps the question should be why no other species in the millions that have inhabited this world before us have been this intelligent. Looking at it from that perspective, we're a freak blip on *this* world - puts the odds against it in many others, doesn't it?
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Re: to quote Calvin:
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