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Tomo wrote:Detecting other civilisations also poses a unique problem.

Particularly if they are more advanced than us and want nothing to do with those dreadful Earthlings.

*Activate Cloacking Device *

On the subject of other life - a signal was beamed into space in the 70s, describing (in binary!) life on earth, in the hope that it would be picked up by some ET civilization. The thing is, what if it zooms past a planet where the life is dinosaurs...

As for first contact, there's another wonderful quote about communication; with how many species do you communicate intelligently on earth? Since understanding is species specific, how on earth are we supposed to communicate with life from some other planet?

And then there's visitation - if the nearest star is 4.3 light years away, and we are hoping for a life sustaning planet with could be hundreds or thousands of light years away, what makes you think something is going to travel for years just so they can goose some redneck p1ssing on the side of his truck in Arkansas?

It's a lovely thought, but it's never going to happen!

Take care, Ian

Ted wrote:

Tomo wrote:Detecting other civilisations also poses a unique problem.

Particularly if they are more advanced than us and want nothing to do with those dreadful Earthlings.

*Activate Cloacking Device *

When Marconi sent his transatlantic signals in 1901-1902 most of the signal simply escaped the atmosphere and went shooting out across the galaxy. Supposing a race of aliens pick it up and decided to make contact. When they get here, they'll want to know all about the man who sent the signal. The trouble is, we'll have to explain what a fascist is. Marconi's was a member of the Fascist Grand Council and his best man was Mussolini. I suspect the aliens would pretend they've left something in their spaceship, take off and never return!

I knew I had it somewhere:

Interesting stuff.

One question though; if I lived in Vega, how long would I have to wait for the A-Team to come out on DVD?

Plus from what has been pumped out into space like Hitlers speaches and other Cr*p to do with war and horrible things happening on earth, would you serious want to come to earth if your got those signals.

We the human race in media terms look horrific.

I wouldnt come within miles of the planet for fear of being killed, stabbed put in a zoo or experimented on...(or put in area 51 for all the rest of my days).

Oh dear.
Look, what ever they are, It's more likely to be something comming from our own future, rather than a long way away.

Think about it.

All those nazcar lines, pyramids, crop circles, and stuff.. So obscure.

perhaps in the future, mankind finds out how to time travel.. but doesnt want to make a fuss, because they are well aware of the mess we can make with a time machine in our hands....

So, what do they do? they go through time, setting up all these strange things, so that a mythology about Aliens from another world, comes into being. This then, explains the wiered craft that pop up... probably ferrying time tourists back and forth who pay big bucks to see how the old folks lived thousands of years ago, in the 21st c.

Even in the future, Its all about money

And if your thinking about how far fetched this sounds.. Its a little less far fetched than the alternative.

A J Irving wrote:One question though; if I lived in Vega, how long would I have to wait for the A-Team to come out on DVD?

1000 or so years, assuming it's region 1. Region 2 will take another 500 or so years, assuming the distributor gets the rights

Tomo wrote:Detecting other civilisations also poses a unique problem. What's the logical progression for electromagnetic information transmission? Spark gap generators, then AM, then FM, then digital FM, then low power satellite comms, then cable. We're pumping out less energy into space year on year, so there's a very small detection window of about 70 years for any civilisation anywhere.

I thought it'd be the opposite. We seem to be using radiowaves more than ever what with mobile phones and wifi, so thought we were blanketing space with the stuff

And particularly with more modern transmissions, I question whether aliens will be able to decrypt the signals, before they even get to figuring out our languages

daleshrimpton wrote:And if your thinking about how far fetched this sounds.. Its a little less far fetched than the alternative.

Believe it or not, to a physicist, this is actually more far fetched because it implies travelling to a time before the machine you used to get there was invented. However the maths doesn't preclude travel backwards and forwards any time forward from the point where the machine first became operational.

kolm wrote:I thought it'd be the opposite. We seem to be using radiowaves more than ever what with mobile phones and wifi, so thought we were blanketing space with the stuff

Good point, but the signals used today are vanishingly small and precise. WiFi and mobile signals are designed to be short range, and atmospheric water absorbs radio very easily. By contrast, Marconi was pumping out a huge amount of energy at all frequencies in the hope that enough would get to the ionosphere, bounce back and make it to Newfoundland.

Just think in thirty or 40 years time a race of intelligent pan dimensional superbeings will pick up the signal and will also know that "Lost" is a pile of contrived rubbish

I just find it depressing that there is a possibility that somewhere in the universe, sometime in the future, intelligent life is going to jump to the conclusion that Lady Gaga is the best that we can produce as a species.

I think there should be an project, similar to CERN in it's funding and it's international collaboration, that only concerns itself with broadcasting out the best that we've got to offer just so the rest of the universe doesn't think we're the galactic equivalent of the early rounds of 'Britain's Got Talent'.

Tomo wrote:Good point, but the signals used today are vanishingly small and precise. WiFi and mobile signals are designed to be short range, and atmospheric water absorbs radio very easily. By contrast, Marconi was pumping out a huge amount of energy at all frequencies in the hope that enough would get to the ionosphere, bounce back and make it to Newfoundland.

Didn't know that, you learn something new everyday

With regard to the probability of the existence of extra-terrestrial life, a tiny percentage of an immense number can still be a very large number!

I assume that a lot of the criteria discussed in the lecture were based on the Drake equation in which many of the terms are actually just guessed (I'd say estimates, but some of the terms have proposed values spanning several orders of magnitude). That said, comparing optimistic to pessimistic versions, they give estimates (guesses) of the number of concurrent civilizations in our galaxy capable and willing to communicate anywhere between 0.05 (ie we're alone) and 5000. Taking the most pessimistic (I like to think that there is intelligent life out there somewhere), then that implies that there might be one intelligent civilization for every 20 galaxies. Given that an estimate of the upper limit of the number of galaxies in the observable universe based on the Hubble ultra deep field is about 170 billion then we could hope that there might be millions, if not billions, of intelligent civilisations out there.

That doesn't mean that it is possible for them to get anywhere near us, or for any signal sent at random to be either strong enough to be detected or recognisable as a form of communication.

Personally, I find it near impossible to imagine that we are alone but then others find it equally impossible to imagine that we aren't.

Its probably some time of UAV. British police are going to be adopting a new surveilence UAV soon enough. These things are never anything that remarkable.

Either that or its aliens come to do some probing, like an extraterestrial version of an 18 to 30s holiday.