The SETI Thread

[Akagi]

I'm not sure if this already exists, but welp.

Any interested parties can talk about SETI and alien life, etc. here.

I tried running the Wow! signal (6EQUJ5) through a Caesar cipher decoder. Well, that was a waste of time. 

I just realized this.

The string 6EQUJ5, commonly misinterpreted as a message encoded in the radio signal, represents in fact the signal's intensity variation over time, expressed in the particular measuring system adopted for the experiment. The signal itself appeared to be an unmodulated continuous wave, although any modulation with a period of less than 10 seconds or longer than 72 seconds would not have been detectable.

Oof.

I guess I'll keep klutzing with the Wow! signal.

[magnemoe]

Yes, it was an way to put down signal strength in one symbol, a bit like hexadecimal but going up to 37, possibly higher.
An modulation of less than 10 seconds is very likely if it had modulation else I assume it was an radar. 
As I understand targeting radars or the radars we use to measure asteroids are an constant beam. 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, Akagi said:

Well, that was a waste of time. 

They are trying to make you think so.

Don't give up!

[Akagi]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They are trying to make you think so.

Don't give up!

Never will I ever give up.

[darthgently]

5 minutes ago, Akagi said:

Never will I ever give up.

It has already been decoded.  The message reads:  Be sure to drink your Ovaltine

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, darthgently said:

It has already been decoded.  The message reads:  Be sure to drink your Ovaltine

I thought it said:

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

[darthgently]

48 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I thought it said:

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

Another rumor reports it reads: "We have been trying to contact you about your vehicle warranty"

 

[StrandedonEarth]

5 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Another rumor reports it reads: "We have been trying to contact you about your vehicle warranty"

 

Yeah, I kinda had a feeling that Spaceship Earth was long out of warranty, which means we need to take better care of it…

But I haven’t been able to find the maintenance guide , maybe it’s in the Pyramids…

[NFUN]

35 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Yeah, I kinda had a feeling that Spaceship Earth was long out of warranty, which means we need to take better care of it…

But I haven’t been able to find the maintenance guide , maybe it’s in the Pyramids…

It's in Ark Fleet Ship C, with the engineers

[Gargamel]

I know in the few other threads we’ve had here, (they’re fairly old, not worth merging), the wow! Signal was proven to be a comet, and then arguably disproven. 

But yeah, @Akagi, don’t break your brain trying to decipher that, it’s not a code.   It’s a value.   The Q represents a single digit value in base ~66.   I don’t know the exact base, But it goes 0-9, a-z, and then A-Z or something like that.     Sort of how a YouTube web address isn’t random letters, it’s actually a random number randomly assigned to a video in base ~80 ( Tom Scott does a really good video on this and how YouTube won’t run out of video addresses before the heat death of the universe, or sometime around there.   Big numbers are big). 
 

The 0 value signals are dropped, so only values above background are shown.  Each value also represents a certain length of time, I don’t know if it’s 10 seconds or 10 ms, but it’s some length of time.  
 

All this means that you could quite easily type the data values into Excel (after some formatting changes to handle the base change), and easily show a graph of radio signal strength vs time.   I’m pretty sure it’d look a lot like the greater Dubai region skyline too.  
 

All of this is from memory, but it’s roughly close. 

Edit: My bases were off a bit, but close enough.   The video is worth watching though. 

Edited April 5, 2022 by Gargamel
Added video link

[Spaceception]

I saw the warning, but this thread still seems recent enough to revive.

I've been looking at SETI related topics, and just learned about the candidate signal from TYC 1220-91-1. It looks really interesting, since it seems to have originated from a sunlike star up to 1000 light years away, was a strong signal, and broadcast at 4462.3 MHz, or PI * the hydrogen line (1420.4 MHz).

A brief bit of searching mostly turned up old forum discussions like this, but has there been any studies, ametuar or professional, to see if there was a message within it, like the Arecibo message? And maybe this is my lack of knowledge about radio showing, but the Arecibo message was arranged in a grid corresponding to the semiprime number 1,679, 73 rows by 23 columns, as a clue for how to look at it -  why not a grid like 1420.4 by 3.1415...?

 

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, Spaceception said:

It looks really interesting,

A 72 second blank signal with no data.

Too many other 'could be's ' to go automatically assuming it's actually a signal and not just noise.  i.e. not likely to be an intentional transmission.

[Spaceception]

19 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

A 72 second blank signal with no data.

Too many other 'could be's ' to go automatically assuming it's actually a signal and not just noise.  i.e. not likely to be an intentional transmission.

TYC 1220-91-1, not Wow. Was the TYC signal known to be blank as well?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Just now, Spaceception said:

TYC 1220-91-1, not Wow. Was the TYC signal known to be blank as well?

I pulled that from the second vid you supplied.

My answer is based on this: SETI has been around long enough and is so well known that if there were anything exciting... we'd all know about it.

[darthgently]

19 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I pulled that from the second vid you supplied.

My answer is based on this: SETI has been around long enough and is so well known that if there were anything exciting... we'd all know about it.

Yep.  If there were anything remotely resembling our level of use of the radio spectrum within our light cone, we'd have seen it by now

[kerbiloid]

Instead of trying to decipher the alien encoded TV channel transmission, they should start retranslating this signal omnidirectionally with SETI antennas.

Then the signal provider will send here a servicing brigade to have a look, what jerk is doing that. So, we'll be able meet and greet them.

[Piscator]

15 hours ago, Spaceception said:

why not a grid like 1420.4 by 3.1415...?

How would you arrage a natural number of digits in a grid with a non-natural number of rows and columns? The idea behind the Arecibo message seems to be that you send out a signal with a number of digits that immediatetly shows you how to arrage it into a two-dimensional pattern since there are only two neat ways to do it (73x23 and 23x73). If you received a message with 4463 digits (the last one a little smudged) you wouldn't have an immediate clue how to arrange the content of the message. Even if you made a grid with pi columns work somehow. You would have to try out any number of mathematical and natural constants first. And more importantly, 1420.4 is only a natural constant if you happen to use the second as a unit of time anyway.

Edited February 14 by Piscator
typo

[farmerben]

14 hours ago, darthgently said:

Yep.  If there were anything remotely resembling our level of use of the radio spectrum within our light cone, we'd have seen it by now

Not necessarily.  Omni-directional radio falls off in intensity at 1/r^2 and stars and large magnetospheres pollute the radio with noise.  

If a civilization wanted to send messages hundreds of light years they would be more likely to use a modulated laser than an omnidirectional radio.

Now that more people are streaming content online and through phones the strength of signal is low.

Edited February 14 by farmerben

[kerbiloid]

(Silently tries to count on fingers, how many times had the global set of ideological and political doctrines been changed to the opposite last 500 years...

Tries to imagine the arrival of the alien species, which was appreciating the Earth civilisation 500 years ago.

What if they had arrived to greet the Albigenses or Huguenots, and ask for them?

The same is about any several centuries interval.)

Edited February 14 by kerbiloid

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

(Silently tries to count on fingers, how many times had the global set of ideological and political doctrines been changed to the opposite last 500 years...

Tries to imagine the arrival of the alien species, which was appreciating the Earth civilisation 500 years ago.

What if they had arrived to greet the Albigenses or Huguenots, and ask for them?

The same is about any several centuries interval.)

They'd conclude there's no intelligent life here after watching Gilligan's Island and The Beverly Hillbillies

[farmerben]

Actually we probably need an antenna on the dark side of the moon just to scan the radio bands that are full of human signals.  Our own signals bounced off the moon may be much louder than the signals we are looking for.

Beyond a hundred light years or it would be difficult to detect a civilization exactly like ourselves.  And we stopped building >500kW radio transmitters for civilian use several decades ago.

[kerbiloid]

The really advanced civilizations don't use radio transmissions at all.

They have a lot of time and don't hurry.

They send a GMO-brained servant with a letter to the neighbor's mansion. Or a trained pigeon with an SMS.

[StrandedonEarth]

If there was an omnidirectional radio transmitter at Proxima Centauri, how powerful would it have to be for us to detect it with current technology? Would it even be detectable over the radio noise from Proxima?

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

5 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

If there was an omnidirectional radio transmitter at Proxima Centauri, how powerful would it have to be for us to detect it with current technology? Would it even be detectable over the radio noise from Proxima?

"... if you were to transport Jupiter to the distance of Proxima, its cacophonous outbursts would be roughly a thousand times weaker than the faintest signal our radio telescopes can detect. In other words, this explanation for the detection depends on there being an extraordinarily noisy world orbiting Proxima Centauri. Not impossible, but a bit unlikely.

 

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the signal is really, really local. A microwave oven in the break room of the Parkes radio telescope caused considerable consternation five years ago when it produced signals that, at first, suggested that something remarkable was happening in the distant cosmos. In fact, it was just someone heating up lunch."

https://www.seti.org/signal-proxima-centauri

I don't think this answers the question - but it does illustrate the problem 

Just for fun, here's a bunch of space sounds - from Jovian lightning to Saturn's aurora. 

 

Cool, trippy and weird 

https://www.npr.org/2011/02/20/133914639/tuning-in-space-noise-for-sounds-of-life

 

FYI turn down your speakers before playing.  Mid volume - no more. 

[magnemoe]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The really advanced civilizations don't use radio transmissions at all.

They have a lot of time and don't hurry.

They send a GMO-brained servant with a letter to the neighbor's mansion. Or a trained pigeon with an SMS.

More likely they use lasers in space on ground they uses low power cells like 5G, we are moving in this direction fast. The huge TV signal transmitters is going away as its an waste of bandwidth. 
High power radio still has its uses but more limited like radar or emergencies, how far could you detect the radar from the high power stuff. 
But that is someone else WOW signal.