Arecibo Observatory Detects Mysterious, Energetic Radio Burst
phenomena.nationalgeographic.com
phenomena.nationalgeographic.com
Btw. she put many awesome photos of the observatory on her flickr stream: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/
some are categorized in albums:
* Flying over Arecibo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157642216845184/
* Sunday Platform Tour: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157633399446014/
* Arecibo Observatory: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157631700960474/
* The Platform After Dark: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157631824663769/
* Sunset from the Lidar Lab: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/sets/72157632834643572/
an old Sun Sparc workstation: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/8111297074/in/set-721576... and https://www.flickr.com/photos/sondy/13952717471/in/set-72157...
3D: http://s15.postimg.org/5czp6yi6j/are_04.jpg
point cloud: http://s21.postimg.org/3nvdz80vb/are_03.jpg
3D: http://s15.postimg.org/4lk04gwwb/are_06.jpg
point cloud: http://s23.postimg.org/4mrgn0daz/are_05.jpg
3D top: http://s30.postimg.org/6jfoha3fl/are_08.jpg
3D side: http://s30.postimg.org/3n6fm81r5/are_10.jpg
(based on Flying over Arecibo photos, see above)
a close-up 3D model: http://s2.postimg.org/4rblqbnwp/are_12.jpg
related point cloud: http://s2.postimg.org/pqdgt84i1/are_11.jpg
..based on 500 public photos, taken between 2000-2014 by tourists - sadly that means the receiver moved around. So if you can capture hundreds of photos please go and upload the photos on flickr.com
Overall Paul Allen has contributed more than $30 million to the project.
Triva: he is also looking for a wife http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IM0SvIiMI4
There are 7 billion people on the planet. Isn't it time that the 1 billion of us who appear super rich to the other 6 billion, do little more?
Wouldn't it be great if there was a better way to contribute to "citizen science", for example?
Ultimately, as evidenced by history, most super-rich reach a stage of life where they realise the riches in themselves were just a way to keep score and large philanthropic contributions ensue.
It's a serious philosophical question; once [1] family financial security and [2]a high quality of life has been secured there is very little left to spend money on other than initiatives that benefit mankind or the natural world.
> once [1] family financial security and [2]a high quality of life has been secured
.. you stop focusing on accumulating more wealth - unless those aren't the real goals, and the driving force is something less wholesome. There are natural limits on the wealth a sane person can achieve, unless they inherit or get incredibly (un?)lucky, but numbers can keep rising long after they lost any connection to anything "real", and just like in gaming, people can get and stay stuck to that. And as long as they keep "winning", only the very best get a chance to pause and reflect.
(For me, this is the best reason to tax the rich - it's not about revenues per se, rather it is about avoiding extremely dense accumulations of political power.)
This seems so absurd. Why cant NSF facilities be insured?
Some scientists are unhappy. The complaints I have heard are that these less-centralized telescopes allowed small investigations to get off the ground, and the new ones are large consortia.
For more: http://news.sciencemag.org/2012/08/major-u.s.-telescopes-fac...
I would have thought the answer to be yes.
If they use technology as we understand it, then presumably yes. Prime numbers are just a unique artifact of basic arithmetic. Our knowledge of prime numbers appears to date back to at least Ancient Egyptian times, so it's quite safe to assume an alien race capable of something as technologically adept as transmitting a signal with the purposeful intent of contacting another race would know what prime numbers are.
The issue is we're limited to our view point, we're exceptionally naive of anything different as we've never experienced it. So, is our technology the only way?
We're designing nanotechnology that could fabricate anything we could dream of, but what if an alien race ended up evolving a unique cell that could do it too. We have white blood cells, they have nanofab cells. Would they even comprehend math if they're just growing jet engines and rocket nozzles?
It's this latter, our unknowable unknowns that will broadside us. How do we relate to something that's unfathomably alien to us.
The good news is you and I likely won't be around to care when we find out what aliens are really like.
I've never understood this sentiment. I would most certainly like to be around if and when we find this out, for better or worse. Why wouldn't you want to be?
Do you feel despair when you step on ants on the sidewalk?
Well no, but neither do I go out of my way to step on them. And I don't see that we'll be so very, very far behind these beings that they're not even capable of recognising we're sentient. Indeed, with all their technology, they should be even more aware of the potential sentience of life than we are.
In the last 100 years or so, humanity has made great strides towards its treatment of lesser animals - we have a long way to go, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to set a goal of zero intentional animal cruelty by 2100. I'd expect technologically advanced aliens to be similarly advanced ethically, or if they do wipe us out, it would at least be deliberate (eg 'the killing star' logic).
Personally, I find that argument a little naive and anthropocentric. Who's to say they need our resources? Couldn't they find resources aplenty in asteroids, on planets closer to their home, or through artificial synthesis? It makes little economic or biological sense to go through the trouble of exploring vast, deep regions of space purely for the purposes of acquiring resources. (And that's even assuming they need the same resources we do, in the first place.)
In all likelihood, an alien intelligence that made itself deliberately known to us would be doing it for scientific or diplomatic reasons. If they want our planet, they could just take it. There'd be no need even to deal with us; they could just lob a few asteroid-sized objects at our planet, eradicate life on the surface, then come in and harvest away.
To your point: any sufficiently advanced intelligence that's going to bother interacting with us will probably have studied us well in advance. It will know as much as it can about us. It might (depending on its alien mindset) have a good understanding of our potential sentience, and a respect for sentience in general.
The real threat isn't from alien intelligence, but from alien AI. A dumb AI, at that, of the kind that mindlessly travels the galaxy, self-replicates, and harvests material without discrimination. But again: a race advanced enough to develop such technology would probably be aware of the consequences of letting it run amok. There would be checks against that scenario by design.
We're very quick to ascribe a bleak, law-of-the-jungle amorality to alien intelligence. But let's think about it. Such an intelligence had many "tests" to pass: a nuclear age (or some equivalent thereof), climate change (or some equivalent thereof), wars, and so forth. If it's far more advanced than we are, it probably passed and survived all those tests to get there. It's very hard to pass those tests in the absence of a complex, well-developed ethical system.
Frankly, I don't think it would end well at all (even if they are benign). We are too smart/proud to let someone set the rules for us, not after being at the top of the food chain for so long.
What we want to avoid is actually the much more destructive force of the 'modern civilization' of organized corporations, like the East India Company.
Don't have too much confidence in that. If a civilization creates AI, it could possibly improve itself and become incredibly intelligent, but still keep the simple goals that it was originally programmed with. Thus endlessly self-replicating, consuming the universe to create bigger computers, or destroy threats to itself, or preserve it's existence as long as possible.
That probably doesn't matter very much to the ant.
Those ants are pests, I pour boiling water down their holes and leave poison around my house because once in a while a few get on my counter, or they cover the sidewalk when they go to war with each other. I have a pet rabbit, vermin, but I put out mouse traps.
An alien species entire reason for making us extinct or pushing us back to the dark ages might be as petty as because we were a visual nuisance, or like Douglas Adams suggested: we got in the way of road construction.
There is no such thing as "advanced ethics". Our human sense of morality evolved under our specific evolutionary conditions. Aliens would be completely different. Even worse, they could be taken over by Paperclip Maximizers (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer).
An interesting short story about aliens that are very different from us http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/
We have a pretty good idea about the limits of encryption. I doubt advanced aliens would have much to laugh about our current state of our encryption systems.
We do? Got any references for that? Take RSA -- it's not even proven that breaking it is equivalent with integer factorization. Even if it was, there are no proof that integer factorization needs to be time consuming at all, there might very well exist an algorithm with polynomial complexity.
And for 'The Book', Paul Erdős, that was from aliens, too. Why? Sure, could there be any doubt, Erdős was one of them!
:-)!
Not easily. They need to get the frequency and phase correct, which is probably hard to do with decade long cycles. If they align with the cycle but are out of phase they never match. If they "choose" another cycle they'll only match at best at twice the period, so 30 year cycles. That probably makes it very hard for any predator species to specialize on them, although not of taking advantage of them when they do happen to be around.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-peter-thiel-sesame-seed-scen...
How much red shift are we talking? So, at the source, at what frequencies was most of the energy from?
What happened to the other frequencies, lower, higher, or much higher? We do believe that gamma rays can travel 3 billion light years without being absorbed or deflected, right?
Let's see a sky map of the estimated locations of the dozen or so signals so far?
> Normally, radio waves travel at the speed of light. This means that all the different wavelengths and frequencies of radio waves emitted by the same object – say, a pulsar – should arrive on Earth in one big batch.
As someone not particularly well-schooled in physics; I envisage quite simply that if I turn on a radio then off again then on again - the two transmissions arrive separately at another source.
Is that not the same for extra/intergalactic transmissions? If an external transmitter broadcast continual signals would earth not receive them with time delays between each one?
HN must have a science grad that can explain why I am mistaken.
tldr; It's just saying that a low frequency signal travels just as fast as a high frequency signal.
What the article means is that if you have a single, very short emission of waves with a combination of multiple frequencies, then in principle an observer ought to observe all of the emitted waves arrive at the same time, regardless of frequency. (Traveling the same distance at the same velocity should mean arrival at the same time, after all.)
In this case, though, they see the radio-frequency equivalent of a short blue flash first and later a short green flash and then a short red flash (and presumably all gradations in between, all blurred into one event of gradually decreasing frequency). The notion (as I understand it: not my specialty) is that the longer wavelengths get slowed down a bit more as they pass through galactic and/or intergalactic dust, so their speed is lower.
Now, what you're probably wondering is, "Why do they think it's a single short event that's gotten 'smeared out' during travel rather than a longer event that continuously changed wavelengths as it happened at the source?" I don't know the answer for sure, but astronomers have a lot of practice in recognizing these things. One possibility is pulse shape: if the pattern of brightening and dimming of the "blue" light looks exactly the same as the patterns for the "green" and "red" light, it's more likely that it came from a single source event rather than a continuous process.
It's clear from the article that the amount of energy required for these bursts would be far in excess of what could be considered practical - even for planet-scope warfare. There is no characteristic gamma pulse which would be expected from an antimatter annihilation, and the pulse length is not exactly what we would expect from this type of weapon either.
But, as Udo kindly did, if we took it seriously, what would a civilisation have to do for us to detect its (warlike) actions and if we did, more importantly, would we believe it?