An Interesting SETI Candidate in Hercules
centauri-dreams.org
centauri-dreams.org
here's a good description of the wow signal and why it's important. if this one has similar characteristics we just increased chances of observing a really interesting phenomena by 100%:
http://www.universetoday.com/93754/35-years-later-the-wow-si...
What is it about this signal that is supposed to make it seem (possibly) unnatural?
"First, ["Wow!" signal] did appear to be an artificial radio signal, rather than a natural radio emission such as a pulsar or quasar. The Big Ear telescope used a receiver with 50 radio channels; the signal was only heard on one frequency, with no other noise on any of the other channels. A natural emission would cause static to appear on all of the frequencies, and this was not the case. The signal was narrow and focused, as would be expected from an artificial source."
"The signal also “rose and fell” during the 72 seconds, as would be expected from something originating in space. When the radio telescope is pointed at the sky, any such signal will appear to increase in intensity as it first moves across the observational beam of the telescope, then peak when the telescope is pointed straight at it and then decrease as it moves away from the telescope. This also makes a mere computer glitch a less likely explanation, although not impossible."
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/93754/35-years-later-the-wow-si...
If hypothetically it were the best case scenario, something broadcasted by a sentient being, then the position that the universe simply isn't old enough to be densely populated becomes a lessor issue.
Considering that our sun is a third or fourth generation star, based on its metallicity/age and if heavier elements are necessary for advanced civilizations to evolve - it's possible that the intergalactic space race is only just beginning.
That and being 0.99 solar masses. If we were going to send messages out to the universe picking sun like stars would be a sensible choice.
I thought the scientists theorized about the existence of civilizations evolved entirely from a single Kardashian genome.
The only thing I wondered about is what the difference would be between type I and type II Kardashian civilizations.
A type I Kardashian civilization would find it impossible to keep up with a type II Kardashian civilization.
[I've often wondered what a computer and OS designed by an extraterrestrial civilization would look like. But it's impossible to for just us to project our own systems out any reasonable amount of time. It's unclear that we'll even have keyboards and displays 100 years from now, or that we'll have replaced C with something better <-- troll :-) ]
The one I can't forgive is the aliens having telepathy in the first place. So much sci fi has this and it ruins the story for me as much as it would if a wizard showed up.
Only that this is not what happened in the movie. Jeff Goldblum tried to get out of "his" satellite links that pirate signal (= alien communications hijacking) that distorted the TV transmissions. He found and partly reverse engineered its line coding between his arrival at the TV station and his lunch break, identifying a recurring pattern that he (correctly) identified as a countdown.
Later at Area 51 (that scene is only found in the extended edition) he's shown a piece of alien tech in the crashed ship the A51 scientists can make no sense of, but turns out to transceive (and display) the same pattern as the pirate signal used by the aliens.
Eventually he arrives at the idea of engineering a signal pattern that, when injected into the aliens' communications network will (temporarily) shut down the ships' shields, simply by glitching the responsible controllers. It's never stated how that signal pattern is generated, but if it makes you feel better, assume it was some kind of fuzzing method.
When they go up to the mothership they don't "plug in" a USB storage device. Watch that sequence again. Goldblum is first running a program on his computer that synchronizes with the aliens' communication network's signal pattern and then uses that link to inject the glitching signal.
----
Yes, the timeframe is more than optimistic short. But it's not something that's logically impossible. In fact it's one of the better parts of the movie IMHO. And all the people who complain about "how did he do this without knowing their computer architecture?" definitely never looked into, or did reverse engineer a completely black box piece of computation equipment. It's definitely possible; yes it takes a lot of patience, but it can be done.
/s
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-blogs/cosmic-relief...
Re: interstellar invasion, perhaps not, but hard to rule out the possibility that the response we get to our broadcasts is something like a relativistic projectile.