The LONGEST DX? Possible Alien Signal from Proxima Centauri

ha! You just know it would be......

Alien: Your species has disappointed the galaxy, you have failed, now prepare for total destruction.
Me: FB om tnx qso gl 73 de kj4kpw dit dit

 

Just use 8-foot anodized monoliths... plenty just laying around.

;->

 

Ancient Aliens came to Earth in search of intelligent life.
They didn't find any.....
Ymmv

 

Hello Alien ... if you really exist, please don't come to us, we have Corona on board!

 

From the Guardian:

Though too faint to be seen with the naked eye, Proxima Centauri has come under intense scrutiny from astronomers. At least two planets are known to orbit the star. One is a gas giant and the other is believed to be a rocky world about 17% more massive than Earth. Known as Proxima b, the planet circles its star every 11 days and lies in the so-called “habitable zone”, where the temperature is right for water to flow and pool.

But that does not mean water is present on Proxima b. Despite its apparently cosy location, the planet may well be hostile to life. In 2017, Nasa scientists used computer models to show that if Proxima b had an Earth-like atmosphere, it could easily be stripped away by the intense radiation and solar flares unleashed by its parent star. Under this battering, the 4bn-year-old planet could have lost its entire atmosphere in 100m years.

Pete Worden, the former director of Nasa’s Ames Research Center in California and executive director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said it was important to wait and see what the project’s scientists concluded: “The Breakthrough Listen team has detected several unusual signals and is carefully investigating. These signals are likely interference that we cannot yet fully explain. Further analysis is currently being undertaken.”

Others are cautious, to say the least. “The chances against this being an artificial signal from Proxima Centauri seem staggering,” said Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist and professor of science communication at the University of Westminster. “We’ve been looking for alien life for so long now and the idea that it could turn out to be on our front doorstep, in the very next star system, is piling improbabilities upon improbabilities.

“If there is intelligent life there, it would almost certainly have spread much more widely across the galaxy. The chances of the only two civilisations in the entire galaxy happening to be neighbours, among 400bn stars, absolutely stretches the bounds of rationality.”

It is not only the statistics that look bad. Proxima b is so close to its parent star that it is tidally locked, like the moon is to the Earth. One side is eternal day, the other in perpetual darkness. “It’s hard to imagine how you can have a stable climatic system and all the things you need to get from bacteria, which are hardy, up to intelligent animal life forms, which certainly are not,” Dartnell added. “But I’d love to be proved wrong.”

It is interesting, in a psychological sense, how we create aliens in our own image:

Are alien lifeforms similar to ours? Maybe, and that is assuming they possess the same Genetics we find here on Earth and that these Genetics are Universal; but are they or do they have to be? We don't know! If their genetics are different, and assuming they have functioning neural systems or brains, why should we assume they would speak the same mathematical language or use the same logic that we know?

Why should we necessarily assume they use the same RF in the same or similar frequency bands, or use similar data stream coding techniques. Maybe they have a visible or IR light 'aura' they use for communications. If they do SETI is worthless.

So we place gold discs on Satellites showing our position in OUR Solar system. Suppose these other life forms don't have the same interpretation of these graphics but interpret them as food sources???

Why do we assume aliens have a higher intelligence than do we Earthlings; is it because we have assumed they have developed faster-than-light-travel through the Cosmos? Why should we assume that? Maybe they have not even discovered Maxwell's Equations or the details of atomic matter as of yet? How do we know, assuming aliens do exist, that they were not simply some poor schmucks who developed later than we and were simply put on a life-sustaining rock for an exploratory cruise or are banished criminals from another planet?

Pheel

 

Definitely... ;-)

 

When in Doubt, there's always Thomas Dolby

 

C'mon.
Every child knows.
It was Santa announcing his arrival on planet Earth.
BTW Evidence... Santa is a licensed radio amateur.

 

Reminds me of the wonderful sci-fi novel "Dragon's Egg" by physicist Robert L. Forward.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg

"In the story, Dragon's Egg is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think and develop a million times faster than humans".

 

SETI assumes that any ET transmissions will be designed to be easily found by less sophisticated intelligence-- like us. That means looking for the simplest transmission modes that produce the highest SINR at the RX of the less advanced civilization on the receiving end. This entails narrow bands of transmission at the cosmic microwave window, among other assumptions.

Now, you certainly have to have something to say, and that is 'information'. Likely that will be heavily encoded, some suggest a fractal coding, such as used by image compression, that looks mind numbingly simple and repetitive , until you break the code. Sort of like in the movie 'Contact' with its primer (which brought that notion to a popular audience)..

Its incredibly easy to send an overly intelligent transmission that no one below you will even recognize or detect. Doing the simple--that's hard.

 

Because the thought that WE might be the most intelligent species in the universe is terrifying!

 

SETI...... I remember back in the late 90's when half of the engineers in our office were running SETI on their stations.

As part of the IT staff at the time, and in true Dilbert fashion, we told management it was a screensaver bundled with Windows 95.

 

https://earthsky.org/space/wow-signal-explained-comets-antonio-paris

 

It was widely published, how could they not know. VA6YB