It's not just the region of the sky with the most radio signals, it's the region of the sky with the signal that's (arguably) most likely to be produced by intelligence, of the ones we've noticed so far - the "WOW!" signal.
We are definitely not alone. The great filter, in my opinion, does not exist. It's only the vastness of space and the relatively short time a civilization produces radio signals that makes it appear this way.
Any civilization that realizes that they are not alone quickly stops bleeding RF signals to outer space, or at least learns to mask them as natural.
Chances that two civilizations, if they detect each other, would be on the same level of development are slim. And once a less technologically advanced civilization meets a more technologically advanced one, game is over soon. Ask Aztecs, or Sioux, or pick any other historical example.
You're assuming the probability for life, or at least intelligent life forming, is a lot greater than the amount of habitable places in the observable universe, such that there would be many civilizations. But we don't know what the probability is. It could be rather low, approaching the number of habitable worlds, such that we're alone or very rare, spread apart by vast distances of space and time.
The Great Filter can be a myriad of things. From how improbable life is to the hostility of the Universe. A magnetar has a hiccup and it sterilizes everything in a fifty light year radius. There are a shit ton of things out there that could eradicate life.
Right now I rather believe in the Great Filter. If you look at e.g. Climate Change and the current war mongering including unprecedented nuclear threats, it's hard to imagine the current technical civilization is long-term survivable. During the next 500 years we will get delayed genetic weapons that can eradicate all of mankind, intelligent killer robots, probably even weapons that can destroy a whole solar system, in combination with exhausting all of Earth's natural resources. I used to be more positive but looking at our own behavior and judging that most intelligent life might evolve from former predators and technology involves heavy resource exploitation, the Great Filter seems quite credible.
It's also worth noting that long-term space survivability seems to be extremely hard to achieve, we haven't even managed to create long-term sustainable fully closed biospheres yet.
One possible solution to the great filter is that we're 'first.' It usually gets dismissed out of hand as both improbable and egotistical (or whatever the whole species level equivalent is). But it's also not impossible, and whatever species was 'first' would always think it improbable that they were first, but there has to be a first (if there are eventually more). Since there are so many unknown unknowns in discussing the great filter or the Drake equation, I'd even argue that being 'first' has as much merit as any other explanation for why we don't see other advanced life out there (even if it's statistically unlikely itself).
Your implicit assumption is that not a single other intelligent species decided to harness the universe by, for example, consuming stars for their raw matter, or building Dyson spheres to black out entire sections of the sky.
It is imo on you to explain why there's a hard cap on the exponential growth of intelligent life that prevents it from EVER reorganizing the universe in its own image. Not 99% of the time — that's not enough for these purposes.
Not the first time I've said this but it's highly unlikely that we'll detect technological civilizations through radio emissions. We've had this kind of radio emission but it's incredibly brief so for Earth, you'd have to be listening for a few decades over the billions of years Earth has existed. That's incredibly unlikely.
The far more likely detection method is IR signatures, specifically from Dyson Swarms. A Dyson Swarm is not a rigid sphere (a confusion caused in part by the original name "Dyson Sphere"). It is a collection of orbitals with the intent of making full use of a star's energy output. The beauty of this is it's all rather low-tech needing little more than solar power, stainless steel level materials science and (this is the big one but is an engineering problem not a science one) getting access to basic raw materials.
Just like a cloud looks solid despite being water droplets, a complete Dyson Swarm would be the same. The visible light would be blocked out.
But here's where the IR part comes in. The only way to dissipate heat in space is to radiate it away. A habitat will have to do this. At any reasonable temperature the signature of that radiated heat is as IR radiation determined by the temperature of the radiating object. That's physics.
So if you see stars with low visible light output but shines like a beacon in the IR specturm (comparatively) that's a good candidate for a Dyson Swarm because stars don't otherwise look anything like that. This is what makes any "Hidden Aliens" type scenarios rather implausible. You just can't hide these things.
Let me add this perspective: on Earth we consume (IIRC) about 10^11 Watts of energy. The Sun's energy output is in the order of 10^26 Watts. It is almost unfathomable what you could do with that much power. That's using humanity's entire energy consumption about every 30 nanoseconds.
So what's more likely: 1. Detecting a few decades of radio emissions or 2. the IR signature of what would likely be millions of years?
So I applaud any investigation into the wow! signal just like I do of FRBs. We should understand likely causes but technological life? It almost certainly isn't.
No stake in this game, but your likeliness assumption depends on the idea that a civilization could get to the point of creating a Dyson Swarm. If civilizations are statistically likely to destroy themselves before then, 'detecting a few decades of radio emissions' could be the only scenario.
The Dyson sphere hypothesis always bothered me because it rests on a lot of assumptions, most of them are anthropomorphic in nature, unless, of course, the hypothesis is only meant to recognize a very specific, human-like civilizations with human-like motivations and needs.
Who is to say that alien life would form human-like civilizations at all? Or that Dyson spheres are the "obvious" next steps for even our own civilization? Or that Dyson spheres would even suit the use cases of alien, or human, civilizations?
We know of one instance of a civilization broadcasting radio waves. But a Dyson Swarm has never been seen, it's purely speculative at this point. Uncertainty that Dyson Swarms ever exist changes the expected outcome of searching for them.
I find the concept of Dyson swarms or spheres to be too grounded in what we humans would do now to capture that sort of energy. What are they going to use all that energy for anyway? We may as well discuss how alien civilizations handle mortgage interest rates.
We've got no concept of power requirements or generating capacity for even our own species given a few thousand years. No need to be projecting our own technology onto another potentially intelligent civilization.
Dyson swarms are fascinating concepts, but as we are learning about our own ever increasing energy requirements harvested from our ecosystem, moving around too much energy in a complex system can have undesirable consequences.
I would imagine that a planetary system as a whole has a 'climate' driven by it's host star, and redirecting large amounts of that energy would have unpredictable consequences. While most of the suns energy does leak off into interstellar space, before it reaches that point it interacts with various bodies big and small, solid and gaseous, it generates magnetic fields and powers phenomena we may not be aware of.
Perhaps the choice of creating a Dyson swarm IS the great filter, and any civilization that has achieved it finds itself in a state of 'solar climate crisis'.
Whenever these discussions on mega structures come up I feel compelled to mention the ratios of mass-energy in the universe.
~5% of the universe is made up of the stuff you and I are. Most of that is hydrogen and helium, cooking in stars.
~20% of the universe is dark matter. We know very little about it except that it falls down.
~75% of the universe is 'dark energy'. I use quotes because we know almost nothing about it except that it seems to fall up (!?).
Give us another 500 years and who knows what the %s will look like. We could be missing dozens of whole categories still.
So when talking about aliens and hyper civilizations, I'm on the side that we know too little to even properly speculate. Like goldfish stuck in a pond.
That said, yeah, it's suuuuper fun to speculate about this stuff. I enjoy it a lot too.
> In fact, if we analyse the history of (the few) radio signals that humanity have sent to several targets in the hope of contacting a civilization, none of those transmissions had a long duration or were repeatedly sent for a long time. [...] An extraterrestrial civilization could have opted to behave in a similar manner.
Except SETI sends the equivalent of a greeting card, it would be futile to send a big buzz without information because the huge distances forbid a conversation. This means that the WOW signal should have decoder-friendly information, but IIRC it didn't.
Reading the Abstract I can't help but wonder if their scientists discovered the same thing about us and pointed their 'eyes' (or whatever!) this way. Fun to think about.
The actual title is "An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal"
It does not say that a sun like star was found in a region of the sky with the "most" radio signals.
You can find sun like stars anywhere. It's an analysis of whether there are sun like stars in a region of the sky where the "wow!" signal was detected. That signal was extremely powerful, but has never been detected again.
> In this article an attempt is made to create a list of the possible sources of the signal assuming that, if it was produced by an extraterrestrial civilization, their exoplanet could be similar to Earth.
Citation needed. Quite simply there is no reason given, or obvious, that the exoplanet should be similar to Earth. (Though many Star Trek alien worlds look a lot like California.)
Why would you even bother searching for extraterrestrial works that are not as nice as California? Nobody is going to travel 50,000 light years to get to a colder, drier Saskatchewan.
In some seriousness though, the total range of possibilities is almost endless. You have to start somewhere. Best to start with things you might actually understand.
It's because Earth is the only planet we know of with life. In particular, the environment to support complex life long enough for an intelligent civilization to emerge. There could be other kinds of planets where this occurs, but of course we don't know about them. It could be that the conditions on Earth are a rare combination needed for intelligent civilizations. Or at least, one of the few ones.
I've been to a couple of the planets in the Star Trek world. In fact, there's a portal right off a California highway that will transport you directly to one of these worlds if you can park your car.
Has anyone heard anything about a supposedly classified version of the story that goes into deeper detail as to why this signal was even more significant?
How would you feel if 6EQUJ5 happened to be the passphrase for the day that the operator used tty into the telescope's systems?
I guess if anything, it increases the chances that there is some memory leak or buffer overflow somewhere.
Sadly 1800 light years away means transmission to 2MASS 19281982-2640123 is impractical at best but observing it more to determine if other techno signals originate is a worthwhile endeavor.
The ghosts of a distant civilization may still hold clues and even the knowledge that 1800 years ago we were potentially not alone is still an existential epiphany we are all hoping for.
I have always wondered, how do astronomers identify a particular star? I assume there’s some kind of coordinate system, but how do they keep track of everything with star systems revolving around galaxies which itself are also moving and/or rotating as well as the earth moving and the universe always expanding?
Then there are a bunch of different coordinate systems, you usually want to be doing lookups like "I have this particular telescope at this particular location and orientation, how should I configure it to point at this celestial object" and there is typically some astropy library function that will figure that stuff out for you.
In practice the stuff outside our solar system doesn't change its apparent motion much from our point of view. The further away an object, the less its apparent location changes. So these databases get updated every once in a while.
Spectrum, brightness, etc. all help, but mostly the fact that they don't move relative to other stars very fast on a human timeframe. Even the closest star only shows motion over a decade or so. https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2013/22/3192-Im...
I can't understand SETI at all. We have been listening to the sky for over 40 years with radio scopes and have found nothing, yet funding is persistently available to keep it up. Meanwhile, there are credible reports of UFO/UAP/whatever flying about and nobody will put sensors out to try to gather data on those things. Just recently the US congress has hearings about how the US does not really control its own airspace due to these objects buzzing about, many of which are reported to so radically outperform available human tech that there is only one plausible explanation for them. Yet the SETI community is complete crickets on this issue. Is the goal of SETI to fail? Is it just a radio astronomer job program? Is the UFO stigma really that great? I honestly don't understand doing something that fails consistently when there is ample evidence of a successful outcome by observing things right here on Earth.
Possibly it's just a matter of astronomers being particularly interested in this topic and pursuing it the way they're best qualified to, because we happen to already have all sorts of equipment for gathering signals.
I like the idea of gathering more data on UFO sightings as there have been very credible reports shared by the military lately, but what other sensors do you think would be practical to deploy? They may happen a lot overall, but you can't predict where to place sensors. We see them now because someone happens to have a camera pointed in the right direction, or because they show up on some broad-area radar. What else could be deployed in a practical way to gather meaningful data?
They observe things right here on Earth, even up to the orbit of satellites. That effort, no matter how secretive, is very well funded. Now, looking for a needle in the universal hay stack takes time and dedication, you can't seriously expect a massive sky scan to be completed in four decades, specially when the funding is not that generous.
[+] [-] spindle|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abemiller|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callamdelaney|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|3 years ago|reply
Chances that two civilizations, if they detect each other, would be on the same level of development are slim. And once a less technologically advanced civilization meets a more technologically advanced one, game is over soon. Ask Aztecs, or Sioux, or pick any other historical example.
[+] [-] goatlover|3 years ago|reply
Would explain the lack of evidence just as well.
[+] [-] elorant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanstrange|3 years ago|reply
It's also worth noting that long-term space survivability seems to be extremely hard to achieve, we haven't even managed to create long-term sustainable fully closed biospheres yet.
[+] [-] Razengan|3 years ago|reply
We wouldn’t even have known about such different life ON THIS VERY PLANET if we hadn’t chanced upon their remains
And we will never see them again.
[+] [-] patentatt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babelfish|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] demygale|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathankoren|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bpodgursky|3 years ago|reply
Your implicit assumption is that not a single other intelligent species decided to harness the universe by, for example, consuming stars for their raw matter, or building Dyson spheres to black out entire sections of the sky.
It is imo on you to explain why there's a hard cap on the exponential growth of intelligent life that prevents it from EVER reorganizing the universe in its own image. Not 99% of the time — that's not enough for these purposes.
[+] [-] jmyeet|3 years ago|reply
The far more likely detection method is IR signatures, specifically from Dyson Swarms. A Dyson Swarm is not a rigid sphere (a confusion caused in part by the original name "Dyson Sphere"). It is a collection of orbitals with the intent of making full use of a star's energy output. The beauty of this is it's all rather low-tech needing little more than solar power, stainless steel level materials science and (this is the big one but is an engineering problem not a science one) getting access to basic raw materials.
Just like a cloud looks solid despite being water droplets, a complete Dyson Swarm would be the same. The visible light would be blocked out.
But here's where the IR part comes in. The only way to dissipate heat in space is to radiate it away. A habitat will have to do this. At any reasonable temperature the signature of that radiated heat is as IR radiation determined by the temperature of the radiating object. That's physics.
So if you see stars with low visible light output but shines like a beacon in the IR specturm (comparatively) that's a good candidate for a Dyson Swarm because stars don't otherwise look anything like that. This is what makes any "Hidden Aliens" type scenarios rather implausible. You just can't hide these things.
Let me add this perspective: on Earth we consume (IIRC) about 10^11 Watts of energy. The Sun's energy output is in the order of 10^26 Watts. It is almost unfathomable what you could do with that much power. That's using humanity's entire energy consumption about every 30 nanoseconds.
So what's more likely: 1. Detecting a few decades of radio emissions or 2. the IR signature of what would likely be millions of years?
So I applaud any investigation into the wow! signal just like I do of FRBs. We should understand likely causes but technological life? It almost certainly isn't.
[+] [-] slimsag|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|3 years ago|reply
Who is to say that alien life would form human-like civilizations at all? Or that Dyson spheres are the "obvious" next steps for even our own civilization? Or that Dyson spheres would even suit the use cases of alien, or human, civilizations?
[+] [-] robonerd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Simon_O_Rourke|3 years ago|reply
We've got no concept of power requirements or generating capacity for even our own species given a few thousand years. No need to be projecting our own technology onto another potentially intelligent civilization.
[+] [-] taotau|3 years ago|reply
I would imagine that a planetary system as a whole has a 'climate' driven by it's host star, and redirecting large amounts of that energy would have unpredictable consequences. While most of the suns energy does leak off into interstellar space, before it reaches that point it interacts with various bodies big and small, solid and gaseous, it generates magnetic fields and powers phenomena we may not be aware of.
Perhaps the choice of creating a Dyson swarm IS the great filter, and any civilization that has achieved it finds itself in a state of 'solar climate crisis'.
[+] [-] Balgair|3 years ago|reply
~5% of the universe is made up of the stuff you and I are. Most of that is hydrogen and helium, cooking in stars.
~20% of the universe is dark matter. We know very little about it except that it falls down.
~75% of the universe is 'dark energy'. I use quotes because we know almost nothing about it except that it seems to fall up (!?).
Give us another 500 years and who knows what the %s will look like. We could be missing dozens of whole categories still.
So when talking about aliens and hyper civilizations, I'm on the side that we know too little to even properly speculate. Like goldfish stuck in a pond.
That said, yeah, it's suuuuper fun to speculate about this stuff. I enjoy it a lot too.
[+] [-] asvitkine|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beaned|3 years ago|reply
> In fact, if we analyse the history of (the few) radio signals that humanity have sent to several targets in the hope of contacting a civilization, none of those transmissions had a long duration or were repeatedly sent for a long time. [...] An extraterrestrial civilization could have opted to behave in a similar manner.
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evo_9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runnerup|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattPalmer1086|3 years ago|reply
The actual title is "An approximation to determine the source of the WOW! Signal"
It does not say that a sun like star was found in a region of the sky with the "most" radio signals.
You can find sun like stars anywhere. It's an analysis of whether there are sun like stars in a region of the sky where the "wow!" signal was detected. That signal was extremely powerful, but has never been detected again.
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pigtailgirl|3 years ago|reply
picture of it from PanSTARRS/ DR1--
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yk|3 years ago|reply
> In this article an attempt is made to create a list of the possible sources of the signal assuming that, if it was produced by an extraterrestrial civilization, their exoplanet could be similar to Earth.
Citation needed. Quite simply there is no reason given, or obvious, that the exoplanet should be similar to Earth. (Though many Star Trek alien worlds look a lot like California.)
[+] [-] gfodor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blululu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatlover|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrange|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therein|3 years ago|reply
How would you feel if 6EQUJ5 happened to be the passphrase for the day that the operator used tty into the telescope's systems?
I guess if anything, it increases the chances that there is some memory leak or buffer overflow somewhere.
[+] [-] cosmiccatnap|3 years ago|reply
The ghosts of a distant civilization may still hold clues and even the knowledge that 1800 years ago we were potentially not alone is still an existential epiphany we are all hoping for.
[+] [-] vinni2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephbu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jliptzin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacker|3 years ago|reply
For example Simbad:
https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/simbad/simbad.ht...
Stars and various other objects get string ids like "HIP19550"
https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?protocol=html&Iden...
Then there are a bunch of different coordinate systems, you usually want to be doing lookups like "I have this particular telescope at this particular location and orientation, how should I configure it to point at this celestial object" and there is typically some astropy library function that will figure that stuff out for you.
In practice the stuff outside our solar system doesn't change its apparent motion much from our point of view. The further away an object, the less its apparent location changes. So these databases get updated every once in a while.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wumpus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 29athrowaway|3 years ago|reply
https://spore.fandom.com/wiki/Grox
[+] [-] anonymouse008|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nephanth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erdos4d|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macksd|3 years ago|reply
I like the idea of gathering more data on UFO sightings as there have been very credible reports shared by the military lately, but what other sensors do you think would be practical to deploy? They may happen a lot overall, but you can't predict where to place sensors. We see them now because someone happens to have a camera pointed in the right direction, or because they show up on some broad-area radar. What else could be deployed in a practical way to gather meaningful data?
[+] [-] ASalazarMX|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akvadrako|3 years ago|reply