SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station
supercluster.com
supercluster.com
Along with combing the surface of the moon looking for existing impacts of potentially artificial objects.
Within 1000 years, barring some apocalypse, an incredibly conservative prediction is that we will be able to build permanent space orbitals. We already have sufficiently strong and readily available materials (ie stainless steel) to build O'Neil Cylinders at 2-4 miles in diameter and 10-20 miles in length that could house as many as a million people. These can be powered with solar collectors.
Build enough of these (ie millions) and you have a Dyson Swarm. With our Sun that can give our civilization upwards of 10^26 Watts of power to use (compared to our current estimated 10^11 Watts). This is also known as a Kardashev-2 (or K2) civilization.
There are a ton of advantages to this. While it may not be the route that every civilization goes, given it is relatively low tech and has massive advantages in living area and energy availability, it seems like this would happen at least some of the time.
These things would stand out from a huge distance because the only way to dissipate heat for a space orbital is to radiate it away into space. That has a wavelength determined entirely by temperature, which for any reasonable termperature range is infrared.
So you'd detect a Dyson Swarm from a huge distance away by its IR signature.
A galaxy of these (a so-called K3 civilization) would be visible from millions of light years away. A single star would be detectable now from a smaller distance but still a far bigger distance than any form of radio communication as you'd find via SETI.
The fact that we haven't seen any evidence of this thus far in our galaxy leads many (including me) to think the most likely scenario is we are the only potential spacefaring civilizatin in our galaxy.
The JWST is actually a way better tool for finding spacefaring life than anything SETI has done or proposes.
1. It may well be the only feasible method of interstellar travel. Accelerating a spacecraft is a whole bunch of fuel you don't have to carry; and
2. Computing power.
So what would motivate people? Living room. One estimate I've seen is the current population of Earth on a full Dyson Swarm would give each person the equivalent living space of the continent of Africa. Of course you'd probably have a ton more people. It's likely you'd have a quadrillion people (>10^15) with each person having significantly more room than they do on Earth.
As someone who hopes there’s other life out there we can communicate with this is exciting.
The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be far worse than a literal alien invasion.
Whatever resources are available for speculative anticipation of encounters with non-human intelligences should surely be directed towards hypothetical AGIs, rather than towards hypothetical beings from Epsilon Eridani.
Maybe AI can do much better at interpreting signals than humans do, and we should build this lunar station so that the post-human AGI can listen to calls from other distant AGIs. It would certainly have more patience for interstellar communication than us.
Now, I'm not asking that carpenters be reassigned to work on AI extinction scenarios. That wouldn't make sense, because it's not their area of expertise. But if you are already going to spend resources on hypothetical non-human intelligences, surely the kind of intelligence we are by far most likely to actually encounter deserves the most attention. And in the absence of unlimited resources (i.e., in reality), that goes at the expense of lower priority intelligence scenarios.
Note that these people are asking for a telescope to be built on the moon. That's an absolutely enormous expense, that, needless to say, wouldn't be funded by those scientists but by society as a whole. Resources are limited, so every decision to fund something means not funding something else. Priorities are a thing, and "it's science" doesn't change that.
It most certainly is, at least in the real world. The ISS has cost more than $150 billion so far. That's not "a joke", it's the GDP of a mid-size country. I very much do hope that everyone involved is asking themselves hard questions about whether this expense is justified by whatever has been gained in return. Science is not a magical la-la-land where people have the right to piss away truckloads of public money on projects they feel are important, simply by virtue of invoking vague platitudes about the "need for humanity to know".
There are an endless number of scientific projects all looking for resources to fund them. If (potential) gain isn't the right criterion for prioritization, then I don't know what is.
Wow, a whole three "midlife crisis ceo twitter buyouts".
The UK's "High Speed 2" project is currently budgeted to cost about $125 billion for its ~300mi extent. I very much do hope that everyone involved is asking themselves hard questions about whether this expense is justified by whatever has been gained in return. The UK is not a magical la-la-land where people have the right to piss away truckloads of public money on projects they feel are important, simply by virtue of invoking vague platitudes about the "need to reduce journey time from 71 to 52 minutes".
The ISS seems like a bargain.
Less than it cost to send a roadster to Mars. The cost of two superbowl’s worth of adds. The revenue from a moderately successful movie.
Looks like you forgot to read the article before commenting.
What enormous expense? They're talking about a cost of $200 million. That is chump change for the _individual billionaire philanthropist_ funding it out of his own pocket, not "society as a whole". This is his play money. Some billionaires own super yachts and other toys that cost multiple times that amount. The Eclipse superyacht cost $1.5 billion, owned by a Russian oligarch. That's 7.5 times the cost of this moon telescope, for one stupid yacht, that itself is a drop in the ocean of expensive toys in the world.
I would actually disagree. Extraterrestrial life is essentially guaranteed (statistically) but conlusive evidence is exceptionally difficult and who knows how far away any life would be. But there is absolutely nothing to suggest AGI is possible, let alone ASI. At best they are both equally unlikely in that people are biased by how much science fiction they read, and thats how they attribute likelihood. HN just likes to go on and on about AGI and whatever but its just overhyping as usual
I'm not saying we'll get there - I don't think 'we' as a culture even really understands what is meant by intelligence - but we know its possible because we exist.
Most of the people talking about AGI now are assuming it is possible to achieve that with today's computer architectures, maybe just more powerful than what we have now. But to be fair, the fact that our body is intelligent says very little about the possibility that also a PC could be intelligent, as their inner workings are extremely different. To be sure that a computer can be intelligent, you have either to build a computer AGI and show that it is intelligent or you have to prove that intelligence is computable.
Also, most of the people talking about AI and intelligence don't know jack from shit. Other people have wondered if the differences between computer hardware traits and brain traits (one has relatively few but highly reliable and completely integrated units, the other is the inverse) is crucial and have been working on neuromorphic hardware. Other groups have focused on modeling and simulating at various levels with the goal of creating medically relevant models (one day), with stunning results in modeling specific neuron's firing behavior, and interesting if not at all medically plausible simulations of the behavior of groups of neurons interacting and performing tasks.
Talking about how smart a computer chip can be is irrelevant when the hardware is instead designed to function like neurons do. A simulation of intelligence that performs by doing what a brain does in the way that a brain does it has a strong argument for being akin to intelligence - especially if you construct the simulation such that it must deal with human experiences, such as persistent embodiment in a stimulating environment with multiple competing needs.
They're looking at a cost of $200 Million, funded out of pocket by one billionaire philanthropist. That's his pocket money. The cost is negligible on a global scale. 0.00019% of GDP.
"No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years." — G. H. Hardy (1941)
But beyond that I don't really see how these concerns are supposed to be competing for resources. Yes, resources are finite, but I don't see why you suppose they aren't sufficient to saturate both these concerns and then some.
There also seems to be value in the project in that it is a stepping stone towards being extra terrestrial ourselves. Establishing a powered listening post on the far side of the moon is likely to be very educational.
1. Skynet type scenario where machines rule and somehow we can’t pull the plug on them.
2. Humans hoping to make money and gain power and weird positive feedback loops cause AI to goad humans into war with each other, causing massive world conflict, destroying the earth.
I cannot for the life of me fathom number 1 ever happening. How many data centers or aircraft carriers or really anything electronic or mechanized continue working without massive human intervention to keep those power outlets or engines going? I can’t think of anything. Why do we keep fearing this? I don’t care how much the AI evolves and iterates in silicon, it cannot escape this law of our physical universe and need for a physical connection to the real world we live in. It needs an army of humans, the great generalists, supporting it, to even survive.
Now if you fear #2, well that is more plausible and it seems we are living in it now.
Even if it does not get built anytime soon (say because today‘s society thinks this is a waste of money), having the idea discussed in public helps and might inform future decisions.
For example, we still reread proposals like the Dyson sphere, space elevators, a next-gen LHC, etc. . None of this is either technologically feasible today nor realistically fundable, but it shows the ambition and might spark discussions.
> UFOS: CHALLENGE TO SETI SPECIALISTS (Friedman, 2002)
> Major news media and many members of the scientific community have taken strongly to the radio-telescope-based SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) program as espoused by its charismatic leaders, but not supported by any evidence whatsoever. In turn, perhaps understandably, they feel it necessary to attack the ideas of alien visitors (UFOs) as though they were based on tabloid nonsense instead of on far more evidence than has been provided for SETI. One might hope, vainly I am afraid, that they would be concerned with The Search for Extraterrestrial Visitors (SETV). I would hereby like to challenge the SETI specialists, members of the scientific community, and the media to recognize the overwhelming evidence and significant consequences of alien visits and to expose the serious deficiencies of the SETI-related claims. I have publicly and privately offered to debate any of them. No takers so far.
https://web.archive.org/web/20191222220058/http://stantonfri...
Then, we people are very soon capable of communicating using quantum entanglement, which means it’s beyond wireless and you simply couldn’t tap into it with some antenna.
For these reasons I suspect that SETI is waste of money.
> If an extraterrestrial civilization has a SETI project similar to our own, could they detect signals from Earth?
> In general, no. Most earthly transmissions are too weak to be found by equipment similar to ours at the distance of even the nearest star. But there are some important exceptions. High-powered radars and the Arecibo broadcast of 1974 (which lasted for only three minutes) could be detected at distances of tens to hundreds of light-years with a setup similar to our best SETI experiments.
It's not really a surprise why we aren't finding things. It's a surprise that we're still acting like this is a good way to look.
I think the real problem is the timing. It seems unlikely that anyone will be looking at the same time anyone else is sending a message.
TO be clear, the signals it is referring to are those that would be similar the unintended leakage of normal broadcast and military radar systems used on earth. So detecting ETIs from their passive emissions is certainly unfeasible that the moment.
Signals broadcast by a hypothetical extraterrestrial civilisation as part of an intentional seti signalling effort would (presumably) use much higher power, narrower bandwidth, and frequencies chosen to reduce attenuation by the interstellar medium. These would be detectable using our current technology, and is largely what seti is looking for.
Just because it's "noise" (ie. random/unpredictable looking) doesn't mean it's indistinguishable from other "noise".
Not all "noise" is created equal. "noise" can have properties that make it distinguishable from other "noise". You may have heard of "white noise", "brown noise", "pink noise", "gaussian noise", etc...
A sequence that appears random or unpredictable may nevertheless fall in to certain distributions.
I am not an astronomer, statistician or cryptographer, but would not be in the least surprised if encrypted communication could be clearly distinguishable from the cosmic microwave background radiation -- not only based on its distribution, but other properties such as intensity of the signal, how frequently the signal appears, and other much more advanced signal analysis techniques which are way beyond my expertise to analyze but not beyond the experts at SETI.
This is true. The signals we communicate with amongst ourselves would be too weak to detect using present equipment at any distance.
> when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal..
This part is not true. A simple spectrum analyzer will show what radio bands are being communicated on and it's clear as day.
> we people are very soon capable of communicating using quantum entanglement,
This is very much not true. This is theoretically impossible. Unless we are very--very--wrong about quantum mechanics, we cannot use effects related to quantum entanglement to communicate.
ELI5 to a non-physicist why not? I thought this was possible, if Alice and Bob share an entangled pair of a set of particles (i.e. each has a clique of particles entangled with the other), and they pre-arrange an algorithm for determining the meaning of different states of their particles.
IIRC wasn't this the gist of the "wormhole" paper that went viral last year (which was criticized for being improperly named, but nonetheless demonstrated a method of "communication" between two locations given a prearranged algorithm for assigning meanings to different states of entanglement)?
It does not mean that if you push on one particle, the other one lights up.
Imagine that two people are each given a coin with the property that whenever they flip those two coins simultaneously, they will either both come up heads, or both come up tails. How can you use that to communicate, that is, send information from one to the other? You can't. You can pre-arrange actions that you both will take when you see either heads or tails, but that's not communication.
Heads = 1, Tails = 0?
I don't fully understand the subtleties, but the root problem seems to be that by measuring the state, you're perturbing the system and putting it into a new state, such that your measurement becomes irrelevant, as if you're always one step behind the message and can never catch up.
> The only way that this problem could be circumvented is if there existed some way of making a quantum measurement that actually forced a particular outcome. (Note: this is not something permitted within the presently-known laws of physics.)
[0] https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-entanglement...
It does not allow Alice or Bob the place a die on the table on a specific number and have the other die roll over to that number. If Alice or Bob try to influence the number that the die rolls, it will break the connection between the two dice.
The link I posted downthread seemed to suggest that the No Cloning Theorem is the constraint that makes this impossible. Any chance you can try to explain that within the context of the dice analogy?
Alice and Bob have a dozen dice. They agree that if they roll a 4, that's the signal for "attack at dawn" and Alice has decided that she wants Bob to attack at dawn. Alice rolls the 12 dice, and at the agreed upon time, Bob also rolls his 12 dice. The sequence they get is 1,5,3,2,2,4,6,5,1,2,1,6. The 6th die is a 4, which is the signal that Alice wants to send. How does Alice signal to Bob that she wants him to look at the 6th die? If Alice can send a signal to say, "look at the 6th die", why wouldn't she just send a signal that says, "attack at dawn"?
My microwave produces noise but I'd like to think scientists could pick it up with their sensors and say "huh, sounds like a microwave".
You might be sending encrypted noise over the wire, but the things like error correction codes are not encrypted. It might be white noise, but you've got to make sure it's the correct white noise when it arrives at its intended destination.
> Then, we people are very soon capable of communicating using quantum entanglement
How many years from now do you think it'll be before we simply stop using radio waves entirely?
This is nothing other than sci-fi. I don't understand how you can be so sure of something like this.
How much do you wanna bet? Do you have a specific bitrate and year in mind?
I guess you haven’t heard of the military monitoring the activity even of encrypted enemy channels. You don’t even need to know how to decrypt it, you can detect peaks in communication.
If nobody had ever thought to look before at the sky for any signs of aliens, then it would be worth a quick glance to see. But since people have been looking at the sky now for many hundreds of years, with increasingly advanced tech, and still found nothing, it might be worth scaling back the effort.
https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-re...
Whisteblowers just last week testified under oath to Congress and the Inspector General of recovered ET craft.
So either they're lying and going straight to jail, or there's truth to these accounts.
We can only wait and see.
It's a developing situation; we need wait and see before jumping to conclusions.
That said having discerningly followed this topic for years, I believe what we're seeing is a momentous shift in the status quo and that the revelations from these proceedings will be paradigm shifting.
Who? Do you have an article for this? Because all I see are claims that people say the retrieval accounting could be possibly credible, but absolutely no first hand accounts.
> That said having discerningly followed this topic for years, I believe what we're seeing is a momentous shift in the status quo and that the revelations from these proceedings will be paradigm shifting.
It's also possible that leadership is becoming less discerning and more than happy to follow whatever makes the biggest headlines.
https://thedebrief.org/intelligence-officials-say-u-s-has-re...
> Several current members of the recovery program spoke to the Inspector General’s office and corroborated the information Grusch had provided for the classified complaint.
If we believe the claims, it's looking more the case that leadership is completely in the blind regarding these activities. These UAP programs have operated without congressional oversight, and so are illegal. Leadership is now forced to address these claims seriously, for the first time since the 70s.
I value SETI and ideas behind it and even the line you just wrote. But would it?
The whole thing will just descend into a twisted conspiracy pit of nonsense within 48 hours.
_______
How long did governments know about it?
Have aliens been interbreeding with humans all this time?
Is Joe Biden a lizard crossbreed alien?
When do we get to nuke them?
________
This is the level of humanity that we currently display, or which shouts the loudest, or which we click on and ... eventually, slowly, but surely, listen to... or, at least, take account of in our political decisions.
I'm certain that any alien lifeforms out there are far more sensible and will just ... 'walk on by' ... as a human might in the presence of a tiny microbe resting on a discarded apple in the corner of a derelict building.
Basically, I'm saying that the search for alien life is just science, and if you believe in curiosity-motivated science, there's no reason to single that out. Unless you're worried about alien malware, which isn't a crazy thing to be worried about https://youtu.be/st9EJg_t6yc
The video amused me. I got to thinking - what if the first communication was just spam!
Possibly this is the first time that this sentence has appeared in a comment in the history of the internet.
I can't say I have high hopes given the odds of making first contact, but it'd still be a huge milestone for our civilization if we can survive it.
Would the effects be good? The truth can have bad effects, but so does not confronting reality.
Finding signals from aliens on some distant planet would be interesting for one news cycle. Then everything would continue on as before.
Plus, more fundamentally, I think most people intuitively find knowledge itself valuable. Even if bringing much joy to many people doesn’t erase mortgages, this dismissive attitude seems unjustified. Imo
The truly salient difference is that aliens unlike gods aren't focused around our loves but their own.
And I would argue that God is not ultimately focused just on us, but one of his interests is in helping us to get to know him since that is beneficial to us and he loves us. A big difference with an alien is that they would be a created being just like us (in Christian understanding). If they exist, we can't really presume to know whether they'd be just into their selfish interests, or perhaps know God and be committed to loving others the way God calls us to, etc.
That implication you mention is not present in the text at all, and if you think about what it says and what that means it paints a very different picture. I mean, the very process of creation is the shaping of a chaotic potential over a period of time that ends in a rest - that doesn't depict an all powerful god.
Specifically I'd suggest that you are uncritically repeating this perspective that lacks a basis in the text, and its justifications replaces persuasion with insistence and repetition . But it does not make sense and its sole reason for existing is to try and harmonize 'god is perfect' with the actual text.
Edit: To your second paragraph I'm uninterested in how a specific culture views the relationship between men and spirits, I'm referring to how they are human creations that are inherently anthropocentric - they are stories told by humans for humans to explain human things and so their stories are centered around human things.
So the difference between 'people that know other life exists because they believe in spiritual life', and 'people that know other life exists because they recorded a signal that was demonstrably extra terrestrial' is that the former group believes other life is centered on them/us and the latter group does not - I presume we'd ascribe to them similar internal life as to our own, but at the very least we wouldn't assume that their core purpose or sense of place would intersect with us in any way.
Genesis 2:4 et seq: The earth is already there in rough form. God finishes it and populates it with life.
A very powerful being, yes, but nothing requires omnipotence.
Job 38 seems to reflect more of an omnipotent God. But it's also much later than the Genesis creation accounts, by which time Hebrew culture had likely been exposed to Greek philosophical ideas about what properties God should have to be worthy of the title.
Even if I believe there is life out there, and even if we have visual proof of it, SETI specializes in detection with certain instruments, not proving they exist.
I like the plans of SETI, and the equipment they come up with, but to me that is like Alchemy.