Wow signal
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Oh, man, what will they think of us now? Couldn't we have sent Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and similar content?
Something mathematically-based?
Not only do have to worry about whether there is intelligent life to receive our message, or whether they understand it, but we also have to worry about the certainty that they will now either be hostile, or else not very intelligent...
Scientists say that if the signal came from
extraterrestrials, they are likely to be an extremely
advanced civilization, as the signal would have required a
2.2-gigawatt transmitter, vastly more powerful than any on
Earth.
That would certainly explain the intensity, brevity and lack of repitition for this particular signal?
One might expect residual evidence of destructive forces at work, such as a debris field or hot gas clouds, but that assumes that the weapons are of a conventional nature we might readily understand.
Where do we see intelligence and anomalies converge?
- War, and other forms of political conflict
- Accidents, even if non-destructive, like when the cat sits on the keyboard
- Experimentation, and research into novel discoveries, unfamiliar to a civilization
- Distress, final acts of desperation, where no hope is provided by circumstance, but behavior is engaged in anyway, because there is no consequence
- Randomness?
You cited several scenarios wherein intelligence and anomalies converge, and I am suggesting that randomness is another possible (and perhaps likely) one.
I suppose this possibility is not unlike your accident suggestion but, perhaps, less bounded.
Let's assume that somebody else is broadcasting with a transmitter designed exactly like big ear, only in reverse (transmitting instead of receiving). Let's assume that they're very far away. Maybe their own planet wobbles.
What is the likelihood that we're even supposed to have heard the signal again? I mean, the way I'm imagining it is we have two drunk, blindfolded sailors, being randomly spun around as if before a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game, and each is holding a laser pointer, with no knowledge of each other. In the expanse of large open field, in the course of 1 year, how likely is it that the two laser beams will intersect? Ignoring the curvature of the earth, how much less likely is it the further apart they are? If they're, say, a light year apart (and have impractically powerful lasers), what is the likelihood then?
When you think of it as an event similar to an electromagnetic pulse from a hydrogen bomb, and not as a beam from a laser pointer, it changes the rationale for why it might not be a repeatable event. If it was a pulse and not a beam, it might still be prone to occlusion, in terms of whether pulse were generated on the surface of a planet, and on the side that only happened to be facing toward us at the time (not away), while our antenna was pointed at the night sky, but that still increases the probability of reception.
The alternative concept for a pulse, is that it was generated from a small space craft or space probe, and not on a planet capable of eclipsing the signal.
Considering that it lasted 72 seconds, that might fit the profile of a weapon, if you consider the duration of typical video of a mushroom cloud. 72 seconds might also fit the profile of a jamming signal generated while a weapon was en route, to prevent detection while being delivered to a target.
Should one start brain-interacting directly with a substrate, the substrate could be powered independently and persist after separation. If separation occurred after natural death of the host, you could say that it 'uploaded' it's consciousness to the substrate.
The term "uploaded" is being subjected to special semantics in this case. Consciousness is not transferred over to the receiver by the act of transmitting a signal.
If I make a telephone call, and leave a voicemail message, the answering machine does not get up and walk around. Even a sufficiently advanced voicemail recorder would only be an interpretation of artifact left behind by a creature, and not the original being.
If you separated them before the host dies, then you'd have copied the consciousness into the substrate, and they would exist separately until you reattached it.
Wait until the host dies, then the consciousness would experience that death yet still persist. It would carry on experiencing through whatever senses the substrate offers.
Notice that it's not just a signal being transferred, it's the actual mechanics of consciousness, neurons firing and communicating. When the substrate, connected to the brain, communicates, it's just as if you added brain cells. So it's not just a signal, it's actual thought.
They've been trying to work out the bugs in the design for the subsequent 25 years.
Thus, if civilization is not capable to monitor all of the sky at the same time with low powered telescopes and quickly point high powered telescopes when something interesting is detected, there is extremely small chance that it would be able to communicate effectively. That is retransmitting the signal to the same star is worth inherently less when compared to trying to transmit to a new star.
If interstellar travel is not viable, what we would want to do is transmit wikipedia[0] to all stars that could contain life. Traveling time for information would be long enough that we can't expect confirmation or two way communication. So what you would want to do is make a really powerful telescope beaming wikipedia to one star at a time (or many telescopes transmitting to different stars). Idea is - you do not want to repeat yourself. If you sent information once, and it have not been received, you would not want to try again for a long while. That is due to the fact that chance that civilization would develop that can listen to your signals in relatively short amount of time is unlikely. So I would say that if this is logic transmitting civilization would use then a signal would not be repeated for thousands of years.
While writing this I though of algorithm that might work better to maximize amount of civilizations you reach. This would require a relatively stable space transmitter, or series of coordinated ground transmitters:
1. Pick a set of stars S that potentially can support advanced civilization and are located closely in a region of space (so you do not have to reposition telescope a lot).
2. Start sending signals primer signals to stars. For signal S[x], temporal difference between S[x] and S[x+1] would a set amount shorter than temporal distance between S[x-1] and S[x]. Primer signals are short and cheap, transmitting entire Wikipedia should take way longer (Weeks, months, maybe years?).
3. Once time between primer signals reaches some threshold start transmitting data set.
Idea is that this will give advanced civilization potentially listening a chance to prepare to receive full transmission, while avoiding costly repeats of big data set.
[0] Wikipedia is chosen as sufficiently large volume of knowledge about human civilization that we would potentially want to transmit.
But radio emissions swiftly degrade after not too long of a distance, so unless we build some kind of extremely high-powered transmitter then any scheme like this is doomed to failure. Luckily.
"Conquering" stellar civilizations only happens in space operas.
- Aliens land in Beijing, Beijing people would ask the aliens if they believe in capitalism or socialism.
- Aliens land in Shanghai, Shanghai people would drag the aliens to the zoo to put on display.
- Aliens land in Guangdong, they would be eaten…
- Aliens land in Wenzhou, Wenzhou people will ask the aliens: is business easy to do on your planet?
I'm not claiming that any of this is certainty. It really is very difficult to predict. But I caution against anthropomorphic reasoning. I also think it would be wise to be cautious about taking these kinds of risks, if we can.
[1] http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/aliens.php#id--... [2] http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunexotic....
I think it's essentially impossible to predict what to expect from a point of view of specific technologies, and a more fundamental approach is more interesting: given the possible gains we might have, and the possible threats (termination should have a fair likelihood), the expected utility from contact should be hugely skewed negatively -- assuming -inf utility for termination and +finite for whatever gains.
We don't know what other destructive technologies are possible.
>the expected utility from contact should be hugely skewed negatively -- assuming -inf utility for termination and +finite for whatever gains.
If you are assuming death is -inf, almost any action has infinite negative utility. Also see pascal's mugging (http://lesswrong.com/lw/kd/pascals_mugging_tiny_probabilitie...).
The insane energy scales of relativistic travel (especially between .9 and .9999-repeating) combined with the ridiculously advanced technologies throws any speculation out of the window. Interstellar nukes surviving relativistic deep space travel while guiding themselves to a solar systems light years away (and with your ability to turn measure in tiny radians of the same)? Super-virus that operates across massive evolutionary scales while, again, surviving said travel (and for kicks only 240 of the known 500 amino acids are naturally occurring [1] and it depends entirely on random mutations and environment)? Self-replicating nanobots, one half of the holy grail (billions of years being the other) that would place in the hands of mortals that which allowed natural selection to give birth to the aforementioned aliens?
At the technological level of relativistic weapon systems + nanobots you're basically talking the ability to do whatever you wanted. If they can have near omnipotent self-replicating nanobots flying to destroy civilizations, why not to slightly shift their stellar orbit by consuming the rest of the solar system (relativistic guidance and navigation is an entirely different ordeal) to add some interstellar non-determenacy or send out nanobots to replicate their civilization on hospitable solar systems?
Sending out a bunch of relativistic nukes is probably going to be one hell of an expense (don't imagine you'd be able to do a gravitational sling shot without a black hole or perfect premonition). If the civilization was that scared of being wiped out, it'd probably be cheaper to build a single defense for their civilization rather than a bunch of attack platforms intended to wipe out other civilizations.
It's possible they can have dyson spheres, and artificial brains the size of planets, running far faster and more efficient computers and algorithms. This is of course just wild speculation, I'm only trying to give a sense of how absurdly far ahead of us they could be.
Interstellar travel is difficult yes, but possible. We've had the basic technology requirements for interstellar spaceship since the 50's (project Orion.) If you accept the premise that it's possible to send a reasonable size package (possibly as small as a pin if nanotechnology is possible) then wiping out a primitive planet doesn't seem so difficult.
>If the civilization was that scared of being wiped out, it'd probably be cheaper to build a single defense for their civilization rather than a bunch of attack platforms intended to wipe out other civilizations.
Possibly. It depends entirely on the costs of defense against advance civilizations vs the cost of wiping out primitive planets before they become a threat. We don't know what futuristic interstellar warfare would be like, but my guess is crushing intelligences before they advance to far, is far easier.
The technology necessary to reach out and destroy another civilization light years away cannot be developed in a vacuum. No matter how you accelerate the nuke, navigate it or protect the payload from the harsh realities of relativistic flight, you will develop an entire canon of technologies and an understanding of the universe that before you would ever be capable of identifying, let alone destroying, another intelligent civilization.
Atomic bombs would suggest a negative response.
Well, then you are also spread out, and given enough time, you spread throughout a galaxy. With that level of spread, the safety in numbers and distribution over a large space is a form of strong defense against relativistic weapons from other civilizations.
Furthermore, the technology for these weapons may also open up avenues for defense, even if such is not the case for nuclear weapons. Consider a relativistic missile detection system that continually scans for incoming missiles and is able to quickly accelerate its own for head-on collisions. Granted, there's not much notice. But let's say you have missiles at 0.99c - quite fast - and a light year away (would any closer be plausible for a launch? Maybe with relativistic ICBMs... or ISBMs rather). By my non-relativistic calculations, that gives you almost 90 hours to prepare countermeasures.
A "simpler" countermeasure is just to go overboard with the spreading idea. Simply live on millions of asteroids with your advanced propulsion tech slapped on. When a relativistic threat is detected, each asteroid is nimble enough to get out of the way, and if some are still hit, it's a small loss.
Though, the attacker could just shoot many smaller, faster missiles dispersed over a wide area. Not civilization-annihilating now, unless it was overwhelming in number, but still painful.
Couldn't they defeat it with their own nanotech? Well possibly. Perhaps the winning civilization is just slightly more advanced and has an advantage. Perhaps they slip in somewhere undetected and have time to mess things up before they can be stopped. Perhaps stopping nanobots from self-replicating is just harder to do than replicating.
Who really knows what technology is possible. An 18th century person never would have predicted machine guns and planes. A 19th century person couldn't have anticipated nuclear weapons. Few 20th century people probably even heard of nanotechnology. We can't guess a century of technological progress, let alone millions.
This one seems a little strange. They're like weaker bombs, only not as weak. What's not to anticipate?
If an alien species has the means to reach Earth, either sublight or FTL, chances are they sorted out their own problems as a civilisation and as such, could probably teach humanity a few things.
There are, however, still factors imaginable that might lead to a hostile (=genocidal) reaction from an advanced race - for example a reaction motivated by religion or paranoia. If we are within the reach of such a civilization they're already looking for us anyway though, it's unlikely additional harm will come from sending them a signal if they're already in the process of scouring the galaxy for places that are in need of a thorough ethnic cleansing.
The probability of such a scenario can currently not be estimated since we don't even have a single data point on other civilizations in our neighborhood. We don't even know if FTL is possible in practice, a technology without which an assault on Earth may very well be impractical for the foreseeable future.
One thing that might concern us, related to a potential explanation for the Fermi Paradox, is the possibility of attracting the attention of an embodied "great filter", for example in the shape of automated replicating drones that sweep the galaxy to eradicate all instances of technology they can find. But if such a filter exists, our eventual discovery will be inevitable anyway so sending an additional signal out into space would probably not make a difference.
It's difficult to construct a credible scenario where sending a signal will be instrumental in our destruction, mainly based on the assumption that interstellar civilizations or entities with the motivation to destroy us would likely not be content with sitting around on the off chance that another planet might contact them.
So who's our most likely recipient then? It's a civilization on a tech level comparable to our own. So for the sake of argument let's assume the roles are reversed:
One day we get an interstellar call. There's another inhabited star system out there, maybe not too far, let's say 200 light years away. Let's assume the worst and, upon receiving a friendly "hello" type message, the world goes completely crazy and decides the remote greeters need to DIE! At this point, there is really not much we can do to actualize that desire. We could build a huge generation ship and send it on its way but it's going to be traveling for thousands of years. When (if!) it arrives, the other civilization will either be gone or so far advanced that it's beyond the point where our puny aging low-tech generation ship can do any damage.
These are the assumptions we're operating under. Yes, they're assumptions, but for the most part they're based on the best we can do for reasoning and scientific knowledge today.
It's also possible they might simply want to quarantine Earth as wars, religion and poverty are still present, and they wouldn't want them to spread to the rest of the galaxy.
It seems like the purpose of sending a signal is ultimately to get aliens to visit us. But the diseases they bring with them do have a high probability of wiping us out (or us wiping them out).
I suppose if both sides are very careful, or if we restrict ourselves to communication only, then it could be all right. But why go looking for more problems when we haven't even solved our own? And we probably never will.
One reason to be searching for a new civilization is to steal their technology. The first nation that's willing to do this stands to dominate every other nation, so there's a big incentive for us to steal their tech as long as the concept of nations still exist.
And of course, if the aliens somehow didn't already have nuclear technology, then transmitting our Wikipedia to them might prove disastrous for them.
That's almost certainly beyond the capabilities of either civilization, but sure in the long term there's the benefit of already having some like-minded friends when we do get that capability.
> But the diseases they bring with them do have a high probability of wiping us out (or us wiping them out)
Again, considering the type of civilization we're trying to contact that's so far in the future it's not of immediate concern. What dangers both world pose to each other biologically would have to be studied carefully as data becomes available. There are certain things we can almost certainly exclude as disease carriers, such as viruses or other vectors that are tightly coupled to the host's biochemistry. Parasites and vermin might become a problem on both ends if living conditions are compatible enough (which is another big question mark).
> But why go looking for more problems when we haven't even solved our own?
We're not looking for problems, we're trying to contact people to at least gain some scientific knowledge but if possible also to get some serious motivation going towards technological advancement. Cooperation between two comparable but entirely separate civilizations has the potential to be very fruitful for both.
> One reason to be searching for a new civilization is to steal their technology.
Well, it's not like we'll pop in and steal their iPhones ;) If they choose to transmit scientific and engineering data, that's not stealing either (copying is not stealing). I would imagine such an exchange to be very cautious in the beginning. It might not even be feasible to transmit time-critical knowledge, however. Still, it's always of interest to compare notes, and I imagine scientists on both sides would welcome an extended conversation if posssible.
> so there's a big incentive for us to steal their tech as long as the concept of nations still exist
If they transmit the blueprint for some really advanced stuff, sure, there'd be the usual power shenanigans here on Earth. But at the moment, that's not a concern as the first messages back and forth would most likely be very limited in scope. Even establishing a common communications format might take several hundred years.
> if the aliens somehow didn't already have nuclear technology, then transmitting our Wikipedia to them might prove disastrous for them
It's unlikely they'd be able to communicate but at the same time not have mastered basic physics. There will be things that each side is more advanced at - for example it's conceivable that Earth has better information technology but lags behind its potential in energy production.
The biggest boost an open phone line can provide would probably be psychological, long before a meaningful science collaboration could be orchestrated. Just knowing there are other people out there is of tremendous value.
I don't think that this would work with only one transmitter node; we need to build machines that travel to other solar systems, build receivers/transmitters there (one per system! we don't want to become a source of Aggressive Hegemonizing Swarm Objects, but rather a source of Evangelical Hegemonizing Swarm Objects), and re-broadcast from there.
(This also minimizes our chances of inviting unfriendly folks from coming down to check out who's being so noisy in the solar system.)
Even if they do hear, it would be a great deal of time before whatever they do can affect us.
Couple of things to keep in mind though:
- With the exception of the spiders and two other aliens, most of the civilizations the Qeng Ho (another romanization of Zheng He, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He) are human. As a result (and based on their historical and software archives), they are able to understand what drives the civilization they deal with. Even then, however, contact with some of them turns out for the worse (The Emergents in this case) at least in the short term (and by short I here I mean decades -- human life is extended due to medical advances and suspended animation, and that's not taking into the account relativistic effects, e.g., by the time one comes back to their planet, the civilization on that planet may have already fallen).
- Qeng Ho is better termed as a culture: they're certainly not a government much less an empire. The book goes very deep into this angle and I won't go further to avoid plot spoilers.
- Relativistic time dilation ("grandfather paradox") plays a huge role here in travel. The civilizations rely on Bussards Ramjets (which seem to be impractical, magnetic sails would be more likely) and constant acceleration and then (from half-way point) deceleration: they're effectively marooned if they're unable to repair or refuel their "ram scoops", so they're taking bets that whenever they reach their target, the civilization on the other end is able to repair the ships. Again, that works well if the civilizations are human: even if the civilization has fallen into barbarism (like Pham Nuwen's home, Canberra -- where they've lost even radio and aircraft) it's possible to rebuild based on archaeology, knowledge of human nature (arranging deals and trades), and (as the parent mentioned) radio communications.
So I think this is where the analogy fails: it's possible to have an inter-stellar culture without faster than light travel or communications, but probably only as long as civilizations already familiar with each other are within light decades.
Fire Upon the Deep is quite fascinating in the sense of what is possible with FTL, although even there it seems that there are mostly cultures as opposed to empires (with Skroderiders -- the sci-fi aliens I want to meet most in real life! -- being the equivalent of Qeng Ho)
It doesn't even necessarily have to build a culture - it just has to build up a framework that works well enough to exchange some data and technology.
Also: why haven't we built a dedicated radio telescope to just watch that spot all the time? Surely this is the biggest lead generated by the SETI program so far?
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4342
The podcast starts with: "It was August 15, 1977, when astronomer Jerry Ehman was examining data coming from Ohio State University's radio telescope, which was engaged in listening for signals from deep space, hoping to find something of intelligent origin. In a moment that's since become one of the most famous events in astronomy, he saw a sequence of six characters on the printout — 6EQUJ5 — which caught his attention. So much so, in fact, that he circled the text, and wrote "Wow!" in the margin.
It was, apparently, a signal from outer space. It came from the direction of Sagittarius. The strength of the signal was represented by the digits 0-9 and the letters A-Z, a scale of 36 levels of intensity, rising with 6EQ and falling with UJ5, a near-perfect bell curve of signal strength spread over 72 seconds. All speculation and hype aside, Wow! remains the strongest candidate ever detected for an alien radio transmission."
A great line from the article: "drawing vast conclusions from half-vast data". Would all HN stories avoid this as well.
1. The distance between stars is too huge, so there has to be a trick to beating it easily, like FTL travel or wormholes, because otherwise it's just crap.
2. If any supervillains want to destroy the universe, they're too late: it's already been done, and this is all that's left.
I totally agree to this statement. Even though I guess there is no need to actively sent too many information out in space as we do already have a kind of "frequency pollution" broadcasting TV channels, TCP packets etc. There are many signals travelling from earth to space all the time - communication with satellites doesn't end on them, remember: it's radio we use for communication!
You can easily imagine what it must be outta there when aiming at the earth with some kind of antenna: just imagine a world on which air isn't throttling voice-signals (aka shouting/talking). Those signals would keep floating around until they are reflected by some kind of object. Well, in space there aren't that many objects so our little earth is already looking like a big frequency mess and a kind of big light bulb for other guys out there. We just have to wait until all our civilization-generated signals are arriving at other parts of the galaxy.'
You can argue whether this is a wise thing to do this so naively but it's already too late to stop this from happening and to be honest: we can only do assumptions based on things we do know, so we simply have to speculate when it comes to aliens. The only thing which makes me a kind of sad is, that we humans seem to had a quite clear pattern when it comes to "exploration" of new geographical areas by external people (Northern/Southern American Natives, Africans, Australian Natives the list goes on and on). In this sense it's quite good that space-travels are that hard to do over a fast distance.
Just my 2 cents :)
Yet something we will probably never know the truth about.
Then thinking was it an error? Did something go wrong? Is E.T. on its way?
Awesome!
With so many emitting bodies in the universe, wouldn't we expect to receive the complete works of shakespeare from ~1 remote body/month?
I mean, you could find the "WOW" signal in PI somewhere too, right?
Random doesn't mean without any limitations. You can have random variations in frequency that nonetheless remain red.
You won't get a WOW signal out of any know phenomenon. It does not matter how many of them you measure.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...) says we have around 10^80 hydrogen atoms in the observable universe. That's a huge number, but there are 10^80 different decimal numbers with 80 digits alone. Shakespeare's works are considerably longer.
Secondly what the above comment means is that with so many bodies emitting some thing random for such a long period of time. You are inevitable bound to notice something that you could make some meaning of.
And yes the 'WOW' signal is present some where in Pi.
And no, that's not necessarily true with regards to Pi.
We don't know anything about the unobservable universe. And who cares in this context? johnvschmitt was explicitely talking about 'receiving'.