ETs could use stars to signal us
University of Hawaii physicists suggest that extraterrestrials might send messages by tweaking the brightness of certain stars. Cepheid stars brighten and dim on a regular cycle. John Learned and his colleagues posit that an ET civilization might change the timing of that cycle by firing a high-energy neutrino beam, for example, into the star. From Nature:
The normal and shortened pulses could be used to encode data, to form what the researchers call a 'galactic Internet' in a paper..."'Galactic Internet' proposed" (Nature)
Learned admits that the galactic internet would be slow — a Cepheid with a roughly one-day period could transmit about 180 bits per year. Such a transmission would require roughly a millionth of the star's energy, the researchers estimate...
Learned says that finding a signal from the galactic internet is a long shot — but, he says, we've got 100 years of data on Cepheids in which to look.
"Analyzing that data would take a graduate student a couple of months, and just think if it turned out to be correct," says Learned. "The implications would be astounding."
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As is so often the case, if it weren't for graduate students... nothing would get done.
-S
It reminds me of the Starflyer's flare in Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star/Judas Unchained...
I'm still with the "There's a way to communicate at superlightspeeds but we're not there yet" supposition. It may not be "by design", like in the movie Contact (coming to think of it the movie isn't about that really), but simply because they send messages using that technology while we just don't have the means to receive it yet (or may have but don't know how to piece it together).
However, if the Cepheid theory would turn out to be true it would be great!
I, for one, welcome our galactic star-modulating alien over^Wneighbors.
egggsactly. Please think of the poor fuckers that actually have to do the work. :(
Hey wait a minute
What if aliens have been manipulating the amount of bananas in the average bunch
maybe it's a secret message
get a grad student
we'll pay $10 an hour
good ol' radio signals would still be a lot cheaper and have as good a chance of being correctly interpreted as this method, but, granted, "radio" doesn't sound as hip, catchy and media friendly as "galactic internet"
It better be one darn important (yet simple) message if ETs were wasting that type of energy...
I always felt using light as an intergalactic signal to other civilizations would have a good chance of being a way ET's comunicate, or at least reach out to undiscovered civilizations.
Radio signals is a very good possibility aswell, because it apears naturally, so it's posible alien societys would use a signal like that, but still I somehow doubt they would use it, we hardly do it anymore, unless they where looking for others 'out there' aswell, like we do.
Damn Aliens, why can't you just e-mail us, that would make things way easier :)
At 180 bits per year it's going to take me literally forever to download hot alien on alien porn.
This is a good project for a graduate student, but the odds of there being any communication using this mechanism are basically zero.
Any ET civilization that is smart enough to build a high energy neutrino beam would realize that the system could transmit at most 180 bits a year. They would also realize that the energy expenditure to transmit those 180 bits would not be worth the power required for the beam. The laws of physics are universal.
Also, stars getting brighter and dimmer, even in a patterned way, is probably just how those stars work. There's no way to know whether that is a natural phenomena or one that is caused by the activities of intelligent life. If there was intelligent life that wanted to announce its existence it would be sure to do it in a way that could not be easily confused for a natural phenomena. The Voyager golden records are a good example.
Lastly, why is there this assumption that the other intelligent life forms in the universe, if any, are in any way similar to ours. The stars themselves could be intelligent for all we know.
I want to discover extraterrestrial life as much as every other person. However, I'm not about to abandon reason and grasp as straws to maintain hope. I keep my hope at the very reasonable level of "almost no reasonable chance in my lifetime".
There is an excellent chapter on extra-terrestrial signalling near the end of David Khan's "The Codebreakers."
@#11: Seconded. Required alien-nerd reading (well, the whole book is, but that chapter in particular). Another great treatment of the same topic is in Carl Sagan's Contact (in the movie, the details are glossed over, but the book goes into some depth)
@7
A civilization that could build such a system might just send a beacon that lets anyone seeing it know that they aren't alone.
That would be a pretty profound message, at least for us.
Maybe they'd just encode a simple mathematical fact, like repeating enough of the Fibonacci sequence to remove any doubt that it was not a natural occurrence.
They might also encode something that was almost, but not quite a clear indicator of life. They could intentionally screw up the sequence after about a year of transmitting to deliberately get our hopes up and then dash them. Great for intergalactic lulz.
and what if it is not ETs but humans from the past, only light arrived here just now..and it was maybe sent from here, reflected back from a giant mirror somewhere and we think it is someone else ending the message, whereas it is us way back..and this would explain why we could decipher the code (when we will do that)...otherwise i am not sure if we and ETs share the same kind of codesystems and logic as we do... :)
@#13: I don't think Fibonacci sequences would be a very smart choice for the aliens. Fibonacci numbers are everywhere in nature, so it while in our current understanding it wouldn't make sense for a star to be blinking them, it doesn't make it obvious that an intelligent being is making the transmissions.
A much more clever sequence would be prime numbers (like in Contact :). While they do sometimes occur in nature, it is much rarer than Fibonacci numbers. And besides, it is a sequence more likely to be familiar to other intelligent species, since it is so fundamental to mathematics.
I think this is a really clever way of contacting other species, much more "realistic" than other methods (the universe is filled with radiowaves that easily might fade to the background, but a huge-ass blinking star is hard to miss). I suggest that we do this in 10000 years or so, when we have the technology.
Yeah, well, light from a star is still only traveling at ho-hum light speed, just like radio waves. The only benefit I can see from this is that it would send the message out in all directions at once, for any civilization to find, including one that may not have radio technology yet. . . but that might interfere with the Prime Directive.
@7 It better be one darn important (yet simple) message if ETs were wasting that type of energy...
Greetings!
#10 wrote...
They would also realize that the energy expenditure to transmit those 180 bits would not be worth the power required for the beam.
It might make sense for them to use the Cepheid to signal that we should turn our radiotelescopes onto that star system. We then would get the content-carrying message by listening into their terrestial broadcasts.
Or maybe it was just a project so that Alien gradstudents could get paid $10 an hour.
Seems to me, however, that some multi-million-year-old alien civilizations might have left a lot of interesting things laying around for us younger species to use, if only we knew where under our noses to look.
#10:
Any ET civilization that is smart enough to build a high energy neutrino beam would realize that the system could transmit at most 180 bits a year. They would also realize that the energy expenditure to transmit those 180 bits would not be worth the power required for the beam. The laws of physics are universal.
The laws of physics may be universal, value judgements are not.
@#10, #19:
I wouldn't assume that all alien civilizations (assuming they exist, o/c) function on a similar timescale to humans. 180 bits a year could be incredibly fast for this society, although it seems interminably slow for us. 1000mbps could seem equally slow for some super-fast society of beings whose lifespans seldom reach out of the realm of milliseconds.
This would cause a serious problem for attempted intercivilizational communication. We might not even be able to detect alien communication simply because it occurs too fast, too slow, or in some other way outside the realm of our vision.
The point regarding the immense expense of energy still stands.
There's a temple for science and now they've created their own "bible code". I guess one way of "unifying" science and religion is to make them just as hypothetical as the other.
Sound like a good idea, until you wipe out a sector of perfectly good terraformed planets with a buffer overflow.
It seems unlikely a civilization capable of modulating a star would settle for simple binary data. Much more data could be transmitted by using a continuous range of levels, modifying the spectrum by introducing additives, phase encoding, etc.
I think the regular, same-amplitude pulses would be a stronger indication of some natural occurrence.
Is it too late to modulate the universe-ending black hole we're creating tomorrow to send a message? "Sorry" perhaps?
All of this is pre-supposing an alien intelligence that is as gregarious and egocentric as we are.
What if a civilization has evolved near a Cepheid star, but the variation serves some other function entirely? Like reflectors at the end of a driveway?
What if they have no interest in talking to anyone, or what if they are in the habit of laying out lures, like stellar humpback anglerfish?
Fermi's paradox has many solutions, some of them a little grim for us newbie meatbags.
"Contact?" Really? Are you stoned?
@krakenskulls
I was thinking along the same lines. If people can find hidden messages in the Bible what can we expect from the winking of suns. How long before someone says they found a prediction of 9/11 in the light of a sun a million years ago?
Lots of folks have said this in different ways, but there are very likely far easier methods of contacting "us."
Slow science day, but worth it for all these additional speculations.
Dear ... Earthlings ...
You ... are ... probably ... surprised ... to ... hear ... from ... me ... I ... am ... President ... Zlarg ... Wingoo ... of ... Vleebuxpl ... and ... I ... have ... the ... sum ... of ... three ... million ... flongbucks ... that ... I would ... like ... to ... export ...
I predict this will never get done.
The Prof will suggest it to his student in a meeting one monring, student will nod noncommittally and say something like "I'll have a think how we should do that boss", then ignore it and get back to doing some propper work - like reading BoingBoing meanwhile hoping the boss has another idiotic idea before he asks him again.
Now, where was I in my thesis.......
This like totally ties in with my experience the other night. I was looking at the stars and they were speaking to me. They were saying, 'You are magnificent. You are the chosen one.'
Like wow!
anyway, I own the copyright to this
Who cares about extraterrestrials - the designers of our universe left a message encoded in the distant digits of pi, just as in Contact. But not a bitmap of a circle. A jpeg of Goatse.
Nice suggestion ... NOT !
Wouldn't that be a waste of time and energy? There could be more efficient ways of sending messages.
What if something is in the way of seeing the star? You would think it was a message when it was false.
#28 wins by a country mile.
My own suspicions about "slower than light" (or lightspeed) intersteller communication methods are along the lines of: why would anyone bother? Even if Proxima Centurai were used, that's a 4 year delay on the message, and a further 4 (at the very least) before any response could be issued back. If the message is 'Hurry on over, alien tech going cheap for 7 year sale period only' we're boned.
For other more distant star systems, this time period becomes even more ridiculous.
Even taking on board the point about other civilisations' sense of time which may be radically different from our own, the question remains - why send a message that will arrive ten million years too late?
ANGUSM:
!!!!!!!
F'in Hilarious.
Aliens do exist. But this is retarded everyone. Come on.
Aliens do exist. But this is retarded everyone. Come on.
I love that we expect all extraterrestrial beings to see math in the say way we do as the counting of objects in a simple number system. Who's to say their entire interpretation of math is different than ours. And before I'm jeered off, there's a living example of this in Daniel Tammet. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbASOcqc1Ss) He claims to see math in the form of moving images, flashes, and landscapes and adapts those to our representations. We could be missing all kinds of messages just because we have no clue how exactly to look.
It's almost certain that there are other intelligent species in the universe. But why would they bother to contact US? We're way out here on the edge of the galaxy, a very expensive trip from just about anywhere. They'd have to consider us extremely interesting in some way—and for that to happen they'd have to know about us first.
Now maybe current physics is wrong, and there are jump points or stargates like in science fiction. That would be so cool! But based on what we know now, I can't think of any method that would result in useful communication between us and any alien species.
Also, I can't think of any reason they'd want to, but since aliens are, you know, alien, that may just be a failure of imagination on my part.