Repeating Radio Signals Coming from Distant Galaxy Detected | Hacker News Reader

Repeating Radio Signals Coming from Distant Galaxy Detected

newsweek.com

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This is the really interesting bit IMO

In addition, their observations revealed that the brightest of these 15 emissions occurred at around 7 GHz. This was higher than any repeating FRBs seen to date, which indicated for the first time that they can occur at frequencies higher than previously thought. Last, but not least, the high-resolution data the Listen team collected is expected to yield valuable insights into FRBs for years to come.

This was made possible thanks to the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT, which is able to record several GHz of bandwidth simultaneously and split the information into billions of individuals channels. This enables scientists to study the proprieties and the frequency spectrum of FRBs with greater precision, and should lead to new theories about the causes of these radio emissions.

So even if these particular signals should prove to not be extra-terrestrial in origin, Listen is still pushing the boundaries of what is possible with radio astronomy. And given that Breakthrough Listen is less than two years into its proposed ten-year survey, we can expect many more sources to be observed and studied in the coming years. If there’s evidence of ETI to be found, we’re sure to find out about it sooner or later!

Cant we see a way to backhaul radio telescope data from very remote locations, in the same way that Cloudflare is using asymmetric website traffic patterns? Is there any potential for collecting radio data inexpensively, I mean can we substitute network scale and geography to such a extent that commodity radio observatory is possible, in the 20 years to my retirement, or in my life, or beyond?

I hear you loud and clear about the potential, but I am desperate to get a clue about how much the ramp will become steep and quick?

Funny thing, if it weren't for the cheap and distributed way of inexpensive intelligence that had bombarded my senses with new information, I should be very possibly unaware of the potential for this immense explosion of discovery!

Do you mean like the square kilometer array? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array

I'm not sure what you're asking for specifically. For signals like the ones in the linked article, there's no way to observe them without a giant dish. Lots of antennas don't do anything for the problem when the noise is many orders of magnitude higher than the signal.

Strangely, or perhaps not, the most interesting part of this article to me was this:

"Using the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT, Dr. Gajjar and the Listen team observed FRB 121102 for five hours. From this, they accumulating 400 terabytes of data"

That has to be one hell of an all flash array to take in that much data at a steady state of 22.75 GiB/s

Fun fact: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA telescope) will gather roughly 3 TB/s when it's up an running.

Would it be a reverse DoS attack when the North Koreans try to steal the data and 3 TB/s crashes their Pentium II "mainframe"?

“There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” ― Lao Tzu

Paper describing the instrument:

"The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A Wideband Data Recorder System for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope"

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06024

Relevant part:

"Each storage server contains 36 hard drives, each with 6 TB capacity. These are configured as three 11-disk RAID 6 arrays plus 3 global hot swap spares."

Impressive if you think in raid 6 you have double a single drive's write speed (not counting cache). They'd need 60+ of those arrays to ingest without back pressure.

A single spinning disk is already capable of >200MB/s sequential write:

shttp://www.storagereview.com/wd_black_6tb_hdd_review

100 of those in parallel will suffice to achieve >20GB/s, with roughly the same capacity of a few hundred TB.

Is use of 100 parallel disks at all standard? There has to be some overhead in processing, can you really just stripe across more disks and directly multiply the throughput? How much is that costing to run?

7200 disks in 1 "array" for 30PB of storage. This cluster is described as their "playground"

https://cds.cern.ch/record/2015206/files/CephScaleTestMarch2... https://indico.cern.ch/event/594977/contributions/2407197/at...

They probably filter and compress it, put it through a fiber glas system to storage systems of universities and so on.

Those store systems are huge and yeah are build to do exactly this.

I've seen petabyte-scale SANs for bioinformatics HPCs. Other sciences (esp. the high energy physics community) have similarly scaled storage and compute requirements.

what do they mean by accumulated data? Are they mapping the raw signal to some other format that necessitates this huge file size? Is it recording the signal at multiple wavelengths?

The article keeps mentioning "intelligent alien life" over and over, then closes with

| Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

Way to be a buzz kill.

The scale of the universe is depressing.

Edit: because I feel that were stuck here for now. If Voyager took 40 years to exit our solar system. And solar system in galaxies and galaxies in the universe...

It's a good thing I'm too busy being poor to be concerned about interstellar travel.

It is mind blowing though... Way to quote pale blue dot... Everything we have ever known...

At least you're not a paramecium, or an ant, or a dog, or a mollusk, or an electron. You have self-awareness which is something many things on many scales do not have.

Not to mention, you can speak English (world's most used langauge), and have an internet connection. Hopefully, you make end's meet, and aren't starving in the street. Even on the scale of other sentient beings, things are all relative.

Hahaha hey man it's my right to complain. I just went to whole foods, live in a first world country. I do wonder is it better not to know. Yeah I could be a paramecium under a slide in some high school biology class.

New analysis of a known FRB source. They find new signals.

> The source known as FRB 121101 was discovered back on November 2nd, 2012, by astronomers using the Arecibo radio telescope. At the time, it was the first FRB to be discovered; and by 2015, it became the first FRB to be seen repeating. This effectively ruled out the possibility that repeating FRBs were caused by catastrophic events, which had previously been theorized.

And in 2016, FRB 121102 was the first FRB to have its location pinpointed to such a degree that its host galaxy could be identified. ... And in the early hours of Saturday, August 26th ... What they found was evidence of 15 new pulses coming from FRB 121102, which confirmed that it was in a newly active state.

The article has a completely unrelated image, captioned A colorful deep space image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, as seen in a NASA handout from June 3, 2014.

There is no claim that the RFBs came from that area of space.

That "colorful" image is a Hubble image that is incredible in its own right. It is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014. http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news/91-astronomical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

The HUDF shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax. Now, using ultraviolet light, astronomers have combined the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The resulting image – made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time – contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang.

Cue the 'aliens' click bait stories in about 24 hours.

Less sarcastically...has anyone created some sort of internet archaeology tools that allows quick traceback of information linked from page to page to show how science becomes news then bad news then click bait?

Actually the Ancient Babylonians had clay tablets that could trace the origin of information linked from tablet to tablet far more accurately than modern computing devices can.

> far more accurately than modern computing devices can

I feel like have no idea how complex computers actually are...

I think you missed the Trig Tablets article earlier this month..

I really hope you're being sarcastic.

1. That technology was probably given to them by aliens /s

2. Do you have a link about this? I assume that tablets had identifying marks on them, and subsequent tablets had some sort of "source:" citation on them?

That would be a great tool. The only examples I've seen are when youtubers like portholer54 do it, presumably manually.

> Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

Anyone know how?

Among other things, contemplate the energy requirements for producing a signal that we're picking up 3 billion light years away. Even if it's somewhat directional it's a huge energy output, as in "death of a small star" huge.

Physics has many unanswered questions, and we can't rule out the possibility to generate energy equivalent to the death of a small star. My point is not just a formal nitpick. Everything, all the stars, all the matter, all the energy is there. Many orders of magnitude more than what we are talking about of stuff was created at least once, and we don't know how. Why would one rule out that it can be repeated? Maybe it can be repeated in smaller scale.

You shouldn't completely rule it out, but you should apply occam's razor to try and guess the most likely cause for such an event. Looks like the scientists did that and largely ruled out this hypothesis. Of course as long as we don't figure out exactly what created this signal we can't be absolutely sure.

Rather than taking a position, being agnostic seems more appropriate to me.

We don't know. We don't know what physics may enable, we don't know if there's other life out there or what capabilities it might have.

I don't see any need for coming down on a particular side, nor any solid evidence for doing so.

You basically give up on science then. Maybe gravity doesn't work the way it does and it's just highly advanced aliens messing up with us. Maybe there's a teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars. Maybe I'm actually an alien trying to confuse you so that you don't find the truth.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.

Nonsense. You make judgements based on the amount of evidence available. To simplify a bit, the more favourable evidence the more likely you think something is, and you make decisions accordingly.

My point was basically arguing that you should always factor in the known limitations of your current knowledge, whereby if you know there's limitations to the knowledge you can't just assume that the knowledge is representative of how things are.

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that.

What part of being agnostic about something do you think involves believing extraordinary claims??

I see what you mean but unless you can argue otherwise it seems that the people who work on that stuff have "largely ruled out" this theory. I don't have enough knowledge or experience in astronomy to contradict them.

You're free to disagree of course but so far your argument sounds more like a nihilistic "you can never really know anything" which leads to a logical dead end.

So apparently one of the reasons it has been "largely ruled out" is the amount of power that would be required to generate the signal. Because we know that our knowledge of physics is not definitive, it is entirely possible that there are ways of exploiting physics that we aren't aware of that could produce such amounts of power. We also know that our knowledge of whether there's alien life, and, if there is, what their capabilities might be like, is very limited. We know that we know very little about what they might be able to do and why they might do it. Thus, it would be making a massive assumption to think that, just because we don't know how or why such a signal could be artificially generated, that therefore we can largely rule it out.

Thus, I believe the appropriate position is being agnostic. We don't know. If we learnt more then that could change, in either direction.

This argument is based on positive knowledge about the limits of what we currently know, not the nihilistic argument you reference.

A relatively-recent example that comes to mind. These days we know of many many planets outside of our solar system, but it wasn't long ago that we had not found any. I remember hearing a lot of people say that the fact that there was no evidence of such planets meant that there odds were very low. They were making the same mistake: of not factoring in the known limitations of the knowledge we had (i.e. we knew that the tools we had weren't good enough for spotting planets below a certain size/distance away from us), and assuming that the knowledge we had was representative of how things actually were.

That's fair I suppose. It's true that when you consider the universe at large the scale of everything is so mind numbing that it's hard to draw the line between the likely and the extravagant.

We don't really know anything!

We do understand a lot of things, and we have degrees of confidence in said understanding, and we have a scope where confidence is high.

That's all science can give us.

Ruled out = extremely low confidence, according to our current understanding.

It seems like if your civilisation spent millennia trying to contact anyone without response you might progress to harnessing a star as a communications beacon?

I'm sorry that nobody else in this thread seems to understand the meaning of the words "largely ruled out".

I also would like to know why that is. Not saying it's aliens just saying I'd like to know the reasoning.

Why would an alien civilization do this?

And I don't just mean, come up with something that maybe some really powerful but really stupid alien civilization might conceivably do in a silly science fiction book. Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power.

Even the old standby "well maybe they're just incomprehensible and we can't understand them" doesn't really work here because when we're talking about "incomprehensible" aliens we don't usually mean that they're incomprehensible on account of being cosmically stupid and wasteful.

(I am speaking about what we actually have evidence for. If there's multiple exabytes of incredible data packed into this signal somehow we have no evidence for it. I like to distinguish very clearly between "things based on the evidence that we have" and "airy flights of fancy based on what might be hiding in the gaps", on the grounds that the latter is unbounded, so while they are fun in stories, in a way the very unlimited nature of the possible sets of speculations makes them uninteresting as an analysis of the real universe, all equally lost in the noise of all the other fantastic possibilities.)

>Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power. Even the old standby "well maybe they're just incomprehensible and we can't understand them" doesn't really work here because when we're talking about "incomprehensible" aliens we don't usually mean that they're incomprehensible on account of being cosmically stupid and wasteful.

Sorry, where did the idea of "still-limited power" came from? Or the idea that they're power constrained enough for this to be "wasteful"?

> Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power

Weapon. I suppose you could ask the same question looking at our nuclear tests - why someone would waste so much energy in a single event? Maybe it's just remnants from their firing range?

Or an actual use of weapons.

Perhaps they're celebrating the failed attempt by anarchist revolutionaries to cause the emperors home star to go nova.

And that's probably genocide on a multi star system level. Good cause to celebrate.

There you go.

Nice!

It appears to be few bytes. And probably not information.

Still, I think being confident about what a civilization capable of sending an intergalactic signal is doing is a bit much. Maybe some kid was bored (and was throwing neutron stars into a black hole).

There's also the possibility that FRB-s are artificial in its origin, but it's the byproduct of some technology we don't really grasp yet.

I just thought "ruled out" makes it sound like they have some criteria for a "alien" signal vs natural.

Well, randomness (entropy of the singal etc) is a good criterion which doesn't require deciphering.

These "signals" have less entropy than normal, which is what is interesting about them, so we have to come up with additional criteria here.

Well, simple periodic/repeating signals occur all the time in nature -- so it has to be more advanced than that to consider it an actual message or "intelligence made".

Even if it was the Macarena beat it would hardly qualify as such.

A variation on Clarke's 3rd law is:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

So the origin could be such an advanced intelligence that it looks natural.

"Things we have evidence for" also includes our lack of a definitive understanding of physics and our lack of understanding of what life does or doesn't exist out there. That needs to be taken into account. You can't just assume the positive knowledge you currently have is representative of how things actually are.

Maybe because we already understand most of the physics required for space flight and the boring conclusion is that huge arrays of lasers are the most feasible way to accelerate an object to a fraction of light speed.

Sure we can dream about FTL, but the physics support for that is minimal at best.

I'm reasonably sure that hydrogen bombs are the most feasible way to accelerate an object to ~0.03c. We know how to build bombs, and concepts for big-shock-absorber-with-bomb-shute spaceships looked feasible with the tech from 1960.

Sure, but how about 0.2c? Carrying your fuel with you has some pretty serious limitations for anything short of a fair chunk of your mass being anti-matter.

However with the lasers you leave the fuel at home.

Probably because of the transmitting power involved, scaling it in favor of natural galaxy noise

I would guess mostly Occam's razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Darn, I don't want to discover the aliens now! We're much closer to meeting AGI which is kind-of like an alien intelligence for us.

"intelligence" cough cough

Laugh now, while you still can. There will be a time when our age will be seen like we see the stone age.

I laugh about IA that have intelligence. The time you are born is not funny, why laugh about this?

we are aliens

Turns out it was just episodes of The Alien Bachelor?

But is the frequency of the signals prime numbers?

I always thought an interesting experiment would be to fire off a handful of nuclear bombs in space. (Rather deep space, like well out of where they could do any harm to Earth.)

Then pace the time between detonations to different prime numbers...

This is a core point in the Three Body Problem series of books by Liu Cixin (plus a little hand waving sciency signal amplification). As mentioned below it turns out to be a generally bad idea

I just discovered this trilogy and have just finished the first book. Truly what a great story

The second and third book are even better :) You're in for an amazing ride! Enjoy!

I disagree; I would stop at the second book. Death's End reads like Stephen Baxter/Greg Egan fan-fiction.

> Then pace the time between detonations to different prime numbers...

There is a problem though. Whose time ? Your time, observers time ? Are the bombs moving with the same velocity ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

> Are the bombs moving with the same velocity?

Relative to the speed of light, where these effects actually become appreciable?

Yes. Hell yes. Basically identical velocities. Signal to noise ratio issues will do in this idea long before relativity has any sort of impact; it's not even close.

Won't the ratios should remain the same? A change of inertial reference frame in SR is just a linear transformation.

That may not be a good way to announce peaceful intentions to the galaxy. But anyway, they would probably be too faint to detect by anyone.

Too faint? Is there something about the Drake equation you would like to share with the rest of us?

The Tsar Bomba test produced 5.3 yottawatts (about 1% of the power output of the sun) but only lasted 39 nanoseconds.

I wonder if that would be noticeable over interstellar distances?

1% of the Sun's output power seems really huge. Is this accurate? Any references?

According to this:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2006/12/08/yottawatts/

Tsar Bomba - 5.3 YW

Sun - 386 YW

39 nanoseconds isn't very long (~39 light-feet).

~12 light-meters for our non-metrically challenge friends.

I was using feet to emphasise I was being silly ;-)

Not really that deep at all, it turns out you can fire off nuclear bombs above about 80km up and they are essentially harmless to life, causing only electrical (i.e. EMP) effects.

Way to miss my point

Why exactly would you want to draw attention to us?

To show that we're bad-ass

IMO they already know. That's why they're waiting for us to evolve one more thousand years before contacting us.

Wouldnt 'they' have evolved 1000 yrs as well? By that time their own current state of evolution would look even less developed given the exponentiality of evolution.

Perhaps we just need to stop being dangerous to other species and ourselves. Embracing the pursuit of collective goals would be a huge advance in our civilization level. Beyond that point athough less developed we could be accepted for not being harmful anymore.

no.. you're assuming that other species develop technology at a similar rate, and that our current progress will continue at the same rate. Both are things we don't know.

There may be hard limits that stop development of technology past a certain point. Like Moore's law coming to an end, but one day we may not have any viable alternatives.

…not if they're moving faster.

Or waiting for us to evolve enough to provide good sport.

Nah, they're fattening us up to be the intergalactic version of Wagyu.

Or waiting for us to compute 42

I said it would be interesting, not that it would be wise. :-)

Curiosity killed cat.

"And tell Willie to break out the big boy!"

Does anyone have a copy of the signal, be interesting to play with and how many bits of information were there etc.

They have some data here and a nice plot :)

http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=10675%20and%20will%....

Interesting, looks like the plot of part of an orbit :-/

I guess this is cool, but not really that novel a result (and yeah, it's an ATel, not a paper yet, although that's just a matter of time). We've seen similar burst storms from this FRB source before, which is what allowed us to localize it in the first place. And I'm disappointed that they used the Hubble Deep Field - we have very nice deep images [1] of this field already.

But yes, the Breakthrough digital hardware is really pretty neat!

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio-burst-...

In the video, she says "even if 0.1% of habitable planets have life, you would expect over a million planets with some form of life."

Where do we get this 0.1%? why it is not 10^-20% and probability of life in the galaxy is impossibly small?

I think that number was thrown out there as a "small" percentage, to highlight the (literally) astronomical numbers of possibilities. One model of getting to some percentage though is called the Drake equation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

The problem is, as you said, that it seems Drake and others like the sound of billions of stars in billion of galaxies, but when it comes to an unknown number for existence of life in a planet they pick a very optimistic number, to justify their thesis of abundance of life in universe.

Maybe they take the earth as an example, the life existing under very harsh conditions and deduce that it should be a good probability given enough time. But I am skeptical of this.

If you plug values in drakes equations ou can make anything comes out. But historically with any like real numbers you get many civilizations right up until you state how long each civilization lasts. This is why Great Filters are such an important topic of discussion.

Try a calculator [1] and puch in your pessimistic and see what chances you actually get. It is really hard to get 10^20 without just getting 0, and we know the chances are higher than 0.

1 - http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120821-how-many-alien-worl...

The calculator link you gave is doing exactly the same thing, smallest percentage is 1%. It doesn't make sense.

Well sorry, for that. Get a piece of paper and try it. The drake equation isn't too hard. It is just a bunch of probabilities multiplied by an amount of stars. You can even add your own terms if you don't like the one you have, but generally doing this takes yo further from the science...

Anyway, Here is a simple description I snagged from google search [1]:

> The Drake Equation is: > N = R * fp * ne * fl * fi * fc * L > > where: > N = The number of broadcasting civilizations. > R = Average rate of formation of suitable stars (stars/year) in the Milky Way galaxy > fp = Fraction of stars that form planets > ne = Average number of habitable planets per star > fl = Fraction of habitable planets (ne) where life emerges > fi = Fraction of habitable planets with life where intelligent evolves > fc = Fraction of planets with intelligent life capable of interstellar communication > L = Years a civilization remains detectable

Now grab a pen and cocktail and make the math do whatever you want. I think that is you stick to realistic numbers you will get reasonably high values. But we might just disagree there.

[1] http://www.astrodigital.org/astronomy/drake_equation.html

well, lets say fi < 1e-9 fl < 1e-12 and its a mostly a desert outside.

My post had the formatting screwed up, but you didn't even try to show your work. You are just presuming what you think or want to be true without putting even the theoretical work into it.

Something interesting I found in the wikipedia page:

> One reply to such criticisms is that even though the Drake equation currently involves speculation about unmeasured parameters, it was intended as a way to stimulate dialogue on these topics. Then the focus becomes how to proceed experimentally. Indeed, Drake originally formulated the equation merely as an agenda for discussion at the Green Bank conference.

The existence here on earth of fungi growing within the melted down Chernobyl reactor and possibly using Gamma radiation for it metabolism, makes me a bit more optimistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus

The difference is that existing life adapted to those conditions. It doesn't mean that it could start in them.

Essentially, we have no clue. I'm optimistic that a bacteria like level is quite usual (like > 1e-6), but it baseless optimism. IANAA IANAB, IANAAB, ...

This is the same problem that has the Drake equation: we don't have a good estimation of most of the factors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Criticism

Carl Sagan talks about this point in Cosmos. Life arose here on Earth pretty quickly after it cooled. So the thought is that it's not difficult for life to appear on favorable, habitable planets. A probability of 0.1% may be far too low.

Remember too, an earth-like planet can have lots of organic chemicals floating around, and you only have to hit the right combination once over millions of years to end up with life.

A sample size of 1 means: not a clue.

True that. The argument (at that level) is speculative. But sometimes it can be interesting to speculate.

Even the most basic life seems super complicated to me, I am not sure the first spark of life has that high probability of happening even under right conditions. But maybe I am over estimating its complexity.

People have studied this, and basic building blocks (amino acids) arise spontaneously when electric current is applied to chemical soups for example. Also when we look around today, we see the end prodcut of billions of years of evolution, we don't know what truly primitive life may have looked like in the first few millions years, life forms even more primitive than viruses, say.

Still, a few amino acids are far far away from proteins, let alone all proteins that work together and makes a simple living cell. Or mechanisms like: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/mitochondria-14053...

it might still be possible "given enough time".

Some of the chemo-synthesizing lifeforms around volcanic vents might be close.

These days we have an industry that makes DNA "oligo"'s that should be somewhat close to how life would have looked at some point in the distant past. The chemical reactions involved in the entire lifecycle are entirely understandable with university chemistry knowledge. Starting the reactions takes a remarkably small number of chemicals present, and none of these are too far fetched.

You have to keep in mind that, on earth, today, life cannot just exist. It must compete successfully with other very complex lifeforms. This effectively imposes a minimum complexity level that any lifeform must attain to survive in the current environment. But, conceptually, there are many things that would count as life even though they have zero hope to exist on earth (outside of labs). Such simple lifeforms today can only exist in places like the clouds of Venus.

One explanation is that life was seeded from space by spores of some sort, and they may be quite common throughout the universe.

We're talking about radio in the article. Which means we're talking about a very small subset of possible life.

I suppose that's why "even if" precedes a number most people will accept as a common enough phrase: one in one thousand.

Exactly. It's rather hard to estimate the probability of an event for which there is only one known example.

Life started on Earth relatively early in it's history, so a high percentage isn't unreasonable to assume.

It took 4 billion years after that and several mass extinction events for a species to evolve that can send radio signals (and so far only briefly ), so even on an astronomical scale we might be rare.

Agreed, also consider the importance of a large moon in our system, which cause massive tidal flooding, and churning geology for all these years. How important was periodic deposit of water based life on dry land for the eventual evolution of a technological civilization? One might suppose very important.

Thus one could posit that technological civilizations, requiring both a planet in the habitable zone of a star and also an appropriately large satellite companion, could be even less probable. It would be interesting to know how probable similar earth/moon systems are in the universe.

I don't know why this is getting a press release (beyond presumably the Milner support). FRBs are mysterious and cool, but this one was already localized and was already known to repeat. The higher-frequency detection is not too exciting. This isn't even a paper, just an "ATel"--roughly the scientific equivalent of a blog post.

Just curious: If you wanted to plant a fake signal that looked like it were coming from a distant galaxy (say 3 billion ly), how far away from Earth would you have to place your transmitter?

You can be on Earth and just sabotage the deep space network antennas or radio telescopes or whatever they use to receive the signals to directly inject the signal in the processing pipeline.

Depends on how long the signal lasts. If it's continuous, there's no way to take it with a single transmitter. Astronomers can detect the apparent motion of stars caused by the earth's orbit, and use those measurements to triangulate the distance to stars, even though the stars are many light years away. A single transmitter on a probe near our solar system would be very obvious.

> Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

In other words, none of the scientists want to sound like quacks. How could this possibly be "ruled out"? Oh right you put "largely" in front of it.

How much effort did you put into answering "How could this possibly be "ruled out"?" before you assumed it was just a weaselly political decision?

One of my favorite Stanislaw Lem novels is "His Master's Voice", about a message from space (only accidentally discovered because it was recorded on mag tape that was recycled as a one-time random pad, which turned out to inexplicably repeat itself), which had multiple ambiguous conflicting interpretations.

It's actually scathing social commentary and philosophical satire about how fucked up government and military sponsored science can be, and the divide between the social scientists (elves) and physical sciences (dwarves).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)

Throughout the book Hogarth—or rather, Lem himself—exposes the reader to many debates merging cosmology and philosophy: from discussions of epistemology, systems theory, information theory and probability, through the idea of evolutionary biology and the possible form and motives of extraterrestrial intelligence, with digressions about ethics in military-sponsored research, to the limitations of human science constrained by the human nature subconsciously projecting itself into the analysis of any unknown subject. At some point one of the involved scientists (Rappaport), desperate for new ideas, even begins to read and discuss popular science-fiction stories, and Lem uses this opportunity to criticize the science fiction genre, as Rappaport soon becomes bored and disillusioned by monotonous plots and the unimaginative stories of pulp magazines.

https://scifistandpoint.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/the-voice-o...

The hypotheses popular before the existence of the Project seemed to me incredibly shallow; they ricocheted back and forth between the pole of pessimism, which called the silentium universi a natural state, and the pole of mindless optimism that expected announcements clearly and slowly spelled out, as if civilizations scattered among the stars would communicate with one another like children in kindergarten. Yet another myth has bitten the dust, I thought, and yet another truth has ascended overhead — and, as is usually the case with truths, it is too much for us.

I just finished it during holiday, I loved the book.

A film based on it is on the way: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4795062/

Good sci-fi is good philosophy. A good companion to sci-fi is history. When people nay-say because we have no proof and 'given what we know today' I am reminded that most people didn't have electricity 150 years ago. The combustion engine is being superseded only 100 years after it became commonplace. Hell, 50-80 years ago half of England didn't have an indoors toilet and plumbing. What was the population of the US's tech-central, California, in 1850? The region was hardly populated. The last 500 years, and especially in the 20th century we have moved at an astounding rate, both technologically and socially. I have sci-fi books on my shelf from 40 years ago in which the population of Earth reaches 'critical' proportions at 5 billion. Nay-sayers at the time would never have accepted that we would reach over 7bn in 2016. Some HNers in the comments here clearly don't realize that a great many sci-fi writers have been scientists and cosmologists, professional and amateur, but dedicated to the science of the genre, and from there they take their starting point.

Lem didn't have a very positive opinion about most sci-fi writers, except for one in particular:

Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

But that one particular sci-fi writer had some harsh things to say about Lem to the FBI, and Lem's criticism got him kicked out of SFWA:

http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick

"[...] What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. [...]" -PKD to FBI

Why was Stanislaw Lem expelled from the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) in 1976?

The following quote from J. Madison Davis' book on Stanislaw Lem gives an answer to your question:

Lem has always been critical of most science fiction, which he considers ill thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or new literary forms. (...) Those opinions provoked an unpleasant debate in the SFWA [the "Lem affair"]. Philip José Farmer and others were incensed by Lem's comments (...) and eventually brought about the removal of the honorary membership(...). Other members, such as Ursula K. Le Guin, then protested the removal (...) and the SFWA then offered Lem a regular membership, which he, of course, refused in 1976. Asked later about the "affair," he remarked, that his opinions of the state of science fiction were already known when he was offered an honorary membership (...). He also added he harboured no ill feelings towards the SFWA or U.S. writers in particular, "...but it would be a lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers".

A long time ago, in a ......

E.T. phone home?

If there were aliens, we would have known with clear proof. If they are there, they are light years ahead and behind in technology and no need for crappy radio signal.

no need for crappy radio signal

radio travels at the speed of light.... if the speed of light is a hard limit, that may be the best we will ever do

The correct title here should be "Repeating radio noises coming from distant galaxy detected". The elephant in the room that SETI fans don't really want to admit is what if intelligence is actually not that smart, but is actually a viral form of stupidity that leads to self limiting catastrophe?

Don't want to admit? Self-destruction is a pretty common posited solution to the Fermi paradox.

Are other astronomers confirming the origin of these FRBs? There's this example, where an unexplained signal turned out to be caused by a microwave oven: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-ov...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)

With our luck it will turn out to just be an alien microwave.

How about signal from a terrestrial microwave oven being looped back through a wormhole.

(Probably ruled out easily by parallax.)

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