Comment by optimalsolver | Hacker News Reader

Comment by optimalsolver | Hacker News Reader

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"""Unfortunately, this news leaked out before the team had finished their analysis, so we’re left to read tea leaves and parse vague newspaper statements instead of reading their paper on the topic (which does not exist because they’re not done with their analysis!)

Someone in the “astronomical community” (we don’t know if they are even a member of the team) leaked the story to the Guardian. Their hand having been forced, the team then gave interviews to Scientific American and NatGeo with some more details, emphasizing that the signal is probably RFI. Now, I’m pretty grumpy about this. SETI has extensive post-detection protocols that were not followed by the leaker, exactly to avoid this sort of situation. Especially since the team was definitely going to announce this, there’s no need for the leak."""

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It's a bit amusing that after decades of SETI touting their post-detection protocol, they couldn't even keep a sorta-maybe interesting find under wraps for five minutes before someone went running to the media.

Where's Jodie Foster when you need her?

Well, at least we can be certain that there hasn't been any contact made before that's been kept secret for decades.

> we can be certain that there hasn't been any contact

Conspiracy theories always find a way. Someone can believe that 5G causes COVID (and equally inexplicably, 4G doesn't) can believe this is still part of a cover-up.

Someone(s) competent to cover up aliens would also be smart enough to muddy the waters and lull us into complacency. I don't think the conspiracy theorists are wrong not to treat minor, easily-stageable signs of transparency/incompetence as extra evidence against their beliefs.

Those theories are bogus however under the big umbrella of technologies in '5G' are new frequency bands. Those bands may have different absorption characteristics in tissue than previous ones. Buuuuuut they're not viruses, and they're not used for 'spying' any more or less than 4G.

Most 5G is at LTE-ish frequencies. The mm-wave stuff is relatively rare and will probably remain so for a while (if not forever; it’s arguably a solution in search of a problem).

I know that. And you know that. But it's a kernel or truth that conspiracy theories are able to weave their way about.

Yeah. Sadly you can always find something somewhere at some point in time that proves the general point of "the government and corporations being assholes".

Like when lead poisoning was covered up by corporations and researchers discredited by corrupt "scientists". Yes this happened, and society learned from such incidents and became more resilient. But if you keep getting back at those incidents as "proofs" that everything is corrupt forever, how you're going to solve the problem?

> mmWave

I thought the problem was that houses and most buildings outside of North America have solid internal walls which blocks or attenuates mmWave signal strength to such a degree it's practically worthless for anything besides Wi-Gig between consumer appliances within a few feet of each other?

I mean, that's one problem, but even with the most radio-transparent walls available, you're looking at something with a very limited range, really only suitable for deployment in dense urban areas. And dense urban areas normally have decent fixed-line broadband. And pretty good LTE.

One edge-case application _might_ be stadiums, large train stations etc. But in practice these days these can often be covered quite adequately with small LTE nodes. And that will improve with 5G, even without mmWave.

No words. Should've sent a poet.

I wonder how many RFIs have been noted to be in the 982Mhz band, especially given we don't know how to transmit at that frequency?

> “We don’t know of any natural way to compress electromagnetic energy into a single bin in frequency” such as this one, Siemion says. [1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-hunters-dis...

You might have misread that: we don't know any natural process that would generate a single spectral line at that frequency, but it is very easy to generate artificially by a civilization. Hence, the interest.

You can build an oscillator at that frequency with 10$ in parts.

How many unclassified RFI sources around 982 MHZ is the only question we can answer.

Its in the L-band for satellites up and down by numerous countries and on the ground there's interesting TACAN and military digital links.

Its entirely possible nobody can admit for fifty years that some classified digital data link device had a firmware crash and transmitted an unmodulated carrier for awhile.

FCC does. Had to do deconfliction between JTIDS data links (could use more more than X of the available timeslots between all military datalink users) and S-band radar. They’d monitor us and actually occasionally issue fines to units that messed up their terminal’s time slot allocation.

Not every country enforces radio spectrum guidelines.

I made some 868Mhz lora sensors for a pacific island client in 2016. The customer had a lot of interference from the local TV station and after talking to the island mayor we just changed them to 877Mhz which was quiet

I think that says that we don't know of any naturally occurring sources that would do that, not that we don't know how to generate this signal if we wanted to (which should indeed be trivial).

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