“Baffling” “signal” “from HD 164595” is probably none of the above | Hacker News Reader

“Baffling” “signal” “from HD 164595” is probably none of the above

setiathome.berkeley.edu

234 pointsdak141 comments

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The comment I found most useful:

We believe a signal when

It is persistent. It appears at the same spot in the sky in multiple observations.

It only comes from one spot in the sky.

If we reobserve the target, the signal is still there.

Things that add to believability

Its frequency/period/delay does not correspond to known interference.

Its Doppler Drift rate indicates that it is exactly frequency stable in the frame of the center of mass of the solar system

Its properties (bandwidth, chirp rate, encoding) indicate intelligent origin.

Unfortunately the observing method used by the Russian team does not permit many of these things to be determine. 1. The signal was not persistent. 2. The signal was gone when the target was reobserved. 3. The signal frequency/period/delay cannot be determined. 4. The signal Doppler drift rate is unknown. 5. Many sources of interference, including satellites, are present in the observing band.

[decoded alien signal from HD 164595] "...must be willing to relocate to San Francisco."

something something... professional network... something... linkedin

"Unsubscribe"

I am making 85 bucks hourly for working from home

"Sentient species from Gamma Quadrant working on next big thing to change the galaxy - Facebook for Gilgameks. Seeking unpaid technical co-founder, offering 1% equity and all the blach you can marklar"

> ...all the blach you can marklar

See, it's language like this that turns aspiring blachen in the Galaxy away from the tech sector...

Uber for galaxy hoppers.

I find myself frustrated at researchers who get frustrated at non-researchers being interested at all in their work. It's the same as the hypothetical megastructure; all the news is quite clear: no satisfying explanation is available. That's the news! That's interesting, even to people who decided not to devote their lives to astronomy!

People jump to the alien angle because it's interesting. The few left with that impression that aliens really are involved are likely not going to be dissuaded by more technical reporting

The trouble is that people jump to the alien angle because it's interesting, then get angry with the scientists when it turns out to be mundane. I don't see this so much as being frustrated with people who are interested, but rather being frustrated with reporters who take something relatively mundane and blow it into a big story, setting people up for disappointment.

And actually, the linked post gives several satisfying explanations. They don't know which one is the right one, but that's not the same as "unexplained." If you see a flash of light in the night, it could be car headlights or lightning or a transformer explosion. It could be aliens, but the mundane explanations are enough, even if you don't have enough information to choose one in particular.

I agree with your point in general, but I'm not sure "unexplained" means the same as "having no explanation". After all, you can "explain" any phenomenon by mass hallucination of everyone who's observed it, or simply chocking it up to an extremely unlikely macroscopic quantum fluctuation. To decide whether something's a satisfactory explanation, you have to look at the a priori probability, not just how well it fits the facts. We don't actually know the a priori probability of detecting life, so it's hard to compare it against the also unknown probabilities of various other previously undiscovered astronomical phenomena, like the proposed "swarm of comets" around Tabby's star.

All that being said, in this case the fact that "SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics" does imply there's nothing in particular here to get excited about. But you know, all those other signals could have been aliens too...

I mean it is SETI. Aliens are literally in the name. So yeah, I don't quite understand it either. Let people's imagination's run wild, it generates interest and hopefully ignites some young minds to become active in the effort and learn.

The problem is that you don't want to be the kid who cried wolf, you don't want to be endorsing crying wolf, and you in fact maybe even want to punish the newspapers who cried wolf and said you were responsible for the cry.

SETI wants to have the ability to say later, "guys, we have a signal, and this time we think it's real." The best way to have that credibility is if your members are the most likely to say "hey, I know the media is really interested in this but we're really hard-nosed skeptical bastards who aren't going to fool you, this is probably nothing." Then when those people actually say "this is probably something!" you're like, "woah, even the hard-nosed skeptical bastards are throwing in with it."

Depending on your perspective this is either undermined or enforced by the way climate change has been approached. Climate change has been an indisputable fact compelling so many hard-nosed skeptical climate scientists for so long, that now the deniers no longer believe that the scientists are hard-nosed or skeptical. So maybe this is misguided and "haters gonna hate" anyway. But I can understand why it's the default attitude in a tenuous field like fusion research or SETI.

Maybe the Fusion and SETI people can learn something from the AI/Machine Learning people. Lots of funding is currently thrown at people who go around telling people they can almost taste the Singularity...

I want to believe!

"We don't do science for the general public. We do it for each other. Good day." -- Renato Dalbecco

Given that generic public finances science being done, a reasonable explanation is expected when it is being requested. Perhaps if scientific community put forward 10% of their time explaining importance and fun aspects of the research that they do - they could expect a raise in the level of funding.

The reasonable explanation will be offered when the research is published - no researcher has time to sit down and explain every anomalous data point to the public.

It would take much more than 10% of a researcher's time to explain research concepts in a way that would let the public truly understand it. Otherwise they are just giving out meaningless soundbites that will be misinterpreted.

> Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there's really nothing about this "signal" that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view.

A satellite passing through the telescope field of view is interesting to you?

OP is implying you've been had by bad science.

Here's more coherent article.

http://www.seti.org/seti-institute/a-seti-signal

While informative your article left me thinking the conclusion was "we don't know what it is", whereas with the OP the conclusion was "nothing to see here, move along".

What is the user "bluestar" writing about in this thread?

I don't even understand the intent of the message.

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=80193&po...

I wouldn't take it seriously - see the other bluestar posts https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_user_posts.php?userid=... - just thoughts strung together, a train of thought, lost and found again... sometimes. I like the style though. I think the comment is about the nature of ETI communication and if it always fits our expectations (like bluestar's comment clearly does not).

Makes me wonder if someone isn't pulling an elaborate prank in homage to Brin's Existence... The aliens are communicating by posting on our forums already.

I think they are trying to say that it's too difficult to distinguish noise from a real signal when we have no idea of what the underlying language or code is. I'm not really sure how that's relevant to this thread though.

> There's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view

There is no tool that automatically rules this in or out as a possibility? I would have thought it would be nearly trivial to build such a thing. Am I missing something?

What is the table with numbers they have in their signatures?

Their individual contributions to various distributed computing efforts, most likely.

it's extremely distracting. I find it hard to read the content with those. Luckily the page renders in text browsers ok.

history_channel_aliens_guy.jpg?caption=Dyson%20Sphere

  ... decoding, please wait   ...
  ... analysing               ...
  ... complete                ...
  ... message content follows ...

  +++  U N S U B S C R I B E  +++

https://xkcd.com/1675/

One of those Paddy Cosgrave's emails?

or LinkedIN transactional emails?

> or LinkedIN transactional emails?

Certainly not the only one to think of LinkedIn; http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/science-technology/signal...

wow, great minds...I guess.

In fact the LinkedIn invite seems to work as the "universal caption" for every New Yorker comic ever:

http://time.com/4046328/new-yorker-linkedin-caption/

So it's clearly the pinnacle of human civilization. It makes perfect sense that it's the message an alien intelligence would want to send us too.

That's a great modern twist on the original idea that every New Yorker cartoon works then the text is changed to, "Christ, what an asshole."

LOL'd at the Paddy Cosgrave reference

Assuming there is really a signal.... The sum of the numbers 164595 is 30. The traditional 30th wedding anniversary gift is a pearl. I hereby name this planet Pearl.

TL;DR:

Nothing to see here, move along.

Probably not, but I would wait until the original authors have a look at this rebuttal, and comment on whether it is on the mark. Scientific method.

I somehow hate that he used the word "probably"

Takes the sting out of the piece.

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