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Posted: 21-08-2011 22:24 Post subject:

If you have 2 races of sentient beings who have technology, that should make it easier to find enough common ground and enable an interpretation to be made.

Whales and dolphins are intelligent, but they have no means to learn our language. Humans have managed to analyse and generally interpret some of what whales and dolphins are saying, but it's usually simple stuff like 'danger-swim away' and 'I'm looking for a mate'. They don't put together a multitude of words and sentences like we do (apparently). That makes them sufficiently alien that we may never be able to establish a dialogue properly.

Posted: 21-08-2011 22:42 Post subject:

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind of the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

Posted: 22-08-2011 02:13 Post subject:

I think the ability to communicate, understand and anticipate even fairly abstract concepts between humans and other animals is often underestimated.

Posted: 22-08-2011 07:56 Post subject:

"So long, and thanks for all the fish!"

Posted: 23-08-2011 09:18 Post subject:

We need to talk about aliens
The more we consider the possible consequences of contact with an alien intelligence, the better prepared we will be
Alan Penny
Honorary reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, using the Lofar telescope to search for low-frequency radio signals from ET

[...]

Ever since 1960 with the first serious search for radio transmissions from other civilisations (known as Seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), scientists have been thinking about what would happen if evidence for ET were found. Examples of their efforts include the 2010 Royal Society conference on "The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society".

Last week the Guardian reported on a recent paper led by Seth Baum of Pennsylvania State University on this topic, categorising some of the possible consequences – ranging from beneficial through neutral to harmful.

So what's the point? We have never seen these Little Green Men, so why expend effort thinking about what might happen?

Scientists have already had to face this problem in real life. An early occasion was in 1967 when astronomers at Cambridge University using a new radio telescope detected regular blips coming from deep space. They were puzzled because no known source should do that. One possible explanation was ET and the director of the group, Nobel prizewinner Sir Martin Ryle, suggested that they should keep quiet about their discovery and dismantle the telescope, because if it was ET then sooner or later someone on Earth would start signalling back, alerting a possibly evil-minded alien intelligence to our existence.

Fortunately, they soon concluded that it was a natural source – they had in fact discovered pulsars. But there is a continuing controversy in the Seti community about whether it is wise to try and contact ET by sending out messages. For example, the main Seti searchers have agreed a protocol for how to spread the news if and when they discover ET, but have not yet been able to agree a common position on the wisdom of sending out messages.

The main problem is the nature of ETs. What are they like? To be able to influence us, they must be more advanced than us, so will they be wise and benevolent, since otherwise they would have destroyed themselves by now? Or perhaps as a result of a Hobbesian all-against-all struggle the only ET now out there has become dominant by destroying any potential competitors. But even if they were evil would they be able to get at us given the vast distances between the stars?

And it goes wider. Is it wise even to use our radio telescopes to try and detect ET? In 1962 the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle and John Elliot dramatised the risk in a TV series "A for Andromeda" starring Julie Christie. A message from ET was detected which turned out to contain instructions for building a computer. After this was assembled it set about destroying the human race, before being thwarted by the scientist hero.

Considering dangers like that, and applying the precautionary principle, should we shut down all our Seti searches?

Can we tell anything about ET that would guide us, first of all in deciding whether to search at all, then in matching our searches to its nature, and finally in whether to send out signals? My own position, as I argued in a paper presented at the Royal Society Kavli Centre last year, is that our total ignorance about the nature of ET means that we cannot say whether listening or talking is good or bad.

For example, sending a message may cause an evil ET to come and destroy us. Alternatively it may preserve us from destruction by an ET that has become aware of us from seeing our cities and is worried by the aggressive nature of new civilisations, but would be reassured by the peaceful content of a message.

We cannot tell which of the many possible benefits and dangers are more likely, and so we Seti folk can go about our business without reproach. But the more thinking, such as the Baum paper, we do about possible outcomes, the better prepared we may be for the actual outcome after the day of discovery, if and when it ever comes.

It may be good to do this, but is it worth spending real money on? Well, in fact very little money is spent on Seti. There are probably about the equivalent of 20 full-time people worldwide working on Seti, most funded from private sources, together with a little money from individual universities, supplemented with a very small amount from governments. And like all high-tech work it has spinoffs, most noticeably the Berkeley Boing distributed computing system which started as Seti@home, but is now used widely from biotechnology to meteorology. Seti is used as part of university teaching in the sciences, and it provokes thinking in allied sciences from sociology to linguistics.

Regardless of the chances of success, Seti is of real value. But here in the UK, practically no private or government money goes into it. With around 0.5% of the government funds that now go into astronomy (the 1-in-200 effort, I call it) the UK could make a big splash in the Seti world.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/aug/22/talk-aliens-intelligence-contact

Posted: 23-08-2011 23:02 Post subject:

Sure, it could possibly inspire a new computer program? Wink

Posted: 09-01-2012 09:39 Post subject:

Alien hunters: Searching for life
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News

The hunt for signals from intelligent extraterrestrials has been in full swing for half a century. But the effort's flagship facility recently came to a grinding halt. The first of a two-part series on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) takes a look at the facility and what it means for Seti's future.

"It's never been this bad."
Seth Shostak, principal astronomer for the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, is trying the door of an outbuilding at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). Like all the others, it is locked.
"There's always been at least one or two people around who can let you in."

The group of 42 antennas is, as the flyer posted nearby advises, "in the process of being returned to operations". Last April, there wasn't enough money in the Seti coffers to pay the staff, and the facility shut down. Sad

A funding drive raised money from Seti enthusiasts including former astronaut Bill Anders, sci-fi author Larry Niven, and even Hollywood actress Jodie Foster. But it's only enough to keep going for a few months.
"Since 1993, Seti has had to run on private donations from people who think this is an interesting thing to do," Seth tells me.
"I remain confident that we'll find the money to make this a permanent operation. After all, you're not going to find ET unless you have the telescope operational."

But even if the telescope is operational, will the effort find ET? Ask Seth or his colleagues, and you'll get the same answer: it's a long shot. It may take years, or decades, or centuries to pick up a signal.
We humans have only been on the radio for about a century, and listening for cosmic signals for half of that. That is an infinitesimal slice of time in the 13 billion years that our Universe has been around.

Yet, we are probably closer, at least philosophically, than we have ever been to answering the timeless question of whether we are alone.
Fifty years ago, all we had was the Drake equation - a string of factors that, multiplied together, yielded a guess of how many ETs might be out there, phoning our home.
Many of those factors were a matter of complete guesswork in the early 1960s: the rate of star formation in the galaxy, how many stars may host planets, how many of those planets could potentially support life.

Today, some of those factors are being solidly quantified thanks to results from the Kepler space telescope, which is discovering far-flung planets - some potentially hospitable to life - at an astonishing rate.

And where once there were single radio dishes listening in on single frequencies - single radio stations - improvements in the electronics behind the scenes make it possible to sift through literally millions of stations automatically.

So Frank Drake, the originator of the equation, says it is a terrible time for Seti and the ATA to be experiencing what he calls a "valley".
"After many years of quite a lot of action, the economic troubles of the world have had a great impact," he told BBC News.
"There are very few searches going on in the world, despite the fact that at the present time we have far better equipment than we've ever had."

Seti does have its economical ways and means, however. As with other areas of science that require vast computing power, there is the Seti@home screen saver - which sends signals from the Arecibo radio telescope to millions of volunteers around the world.
"Everybody gets a different part of the sky to analyse, and it wakes up like any other screen saver when you go out for a cup of coffee," says Dan Werthimer, director of the Seti programme at the University of California Berkeley and a Seti@home pioneer.

"It goes through the [Arecibo data] looking for all kinds of possible radio signals. Any strong signals it finds, it sends back to our server at Berkeley. Your name is attached to that data, so if you're the lucky one that finds ET, you get the Nobel prize." Very Happy

Other things are changing the nature of the hunt, too.
Radio is one good way to squash energy into a signal carried across the cosmos. But another is the laser, which can focus a lot of energy, or information, into a lighthouse-like beam.
Enter "optical Seti" - a hunt using good old-fashioned optical telescopes to look for laser lighthouses in the cosmos - one of the eight types of Seti searches that Berkeley carries out.

"We think the best strategy is a variety of strategies," Dan tells me. "It's really hard to guess what an advanced civilisation might do."
Back at the ATA, we find a technician who lives nearby to drop off the keys so we can head inside the control room.

Seth tells me that his take is that we should be looking for signs of artificial intelligence, as well as squishy "biological" aliens.
The autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners we have now are just a harbinger of the truly advanced intelligence he thinks will soon be developed.
And if any advanced civilisation can invent its technological successor, these "thinking machines" could carry on searching the cosmos long after their biological forebears are gone.

But it gets even more intriguing. Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University has proposed looking not for aliens but for footprints of alien technology, such as waste from their nuclear energy technology. And he has other ideas.

"The one that most intrigues me is the possibility that the aliens may have engaged in some kind of biotechnology - if they had come to Earth and tinkered with terrestrial micro-organisms, or even made their own from scratch, the products of that could still be around."

In other words, if aliens came through our neck of the woods long before we were here to see them, they may have left deliberate clues tucked in the DNA of microbes that have faithfully copied the message for millions of years.
Prof Davies reckons that, since we're sequencing the DNA of life of all sorts anyway, we should keep an eye out for this kind of "message in a bottle".

But as the locked doors of the Allen Telescope Array remind me, all of this does take money.
Those at the Seti Institute argue that the $2m (£1.3m) a year or so that the wider Seti effort requires is a drop in the ocean compared to, for example, military spending.

Jill tells me that she spends a lot of her time trying to organise a foundation that can fund the effort far into the future - not just money to keep telescopes turning, but also to pay the next generation of Seti scientists.

What is clear, though, is that the Seti effort speaks to something far deeper than the politics and the money issues that occasionally put it in the spotlight.

"Calibrating our place in the cosmos is something that's important for humans to do, to really get a better sense of where we came from and where we're going, and I think that's part of the Seti story," she tells me.
"That question 'are we alone?' hasn't lost any of its impact and its emotive power, even though it's been asked for millennia."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16265519

Posted: 11-01-2012 11:10 Post subject:

The idea of messages hidden in genetic information is an old one, not original to Davies. However I doubt very much that any message would survive for very many generations without mutating into something unreadable.

'and the secret of life, the universe and everyggtthinaccg is ttaggcca ggatta "

Posted: 11-01-2012 15:39 Post subject:

Posted: 12-01-2012 00:15 Post subject:

Posted: 12-01-2012 01:55 Post subject:

Posted: 12-01-2012 01:58 Post subject:

Posted: 16-01-2012 22:32 Post subject:

Alien hunters: What if ET ever phones our home?
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News

For decades we've been sending signals - both deliberate and accidental - into space, and listening out for alien civilisations' broadcasts. But what is the plan if one day we were to hear something?

If we ever detect signs of intelligent alien life, the people likely to be on the receiving end of a cosmic signal are the scientists of Seti, aka Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
This loose band of a couple of dozen researchers around the world doggedly listens to the cosmos in the hope of catching alien communications. It's often in the face of scant funding and even ridicule.
They watch signals coming from the world's largest radio telescopes, looking for anything unusual, or even the flashes of laser "lighthouses" designed to catch our attention.

Seti started as one man using one telescope dish in 1959. Today computers are used to sift through the cosmic radio traffic, flagging up to astronomers any potential calls from extraterrestrial life.
But what might happen if one of those computers found a bona fide alien phone call?
Conspiracy theorists will argue there would be a government cover-up. Even more nervous types might say there would be global upheaval.

Seth Shostak, the Seti Institute's principal astronomer, says both groups should calm down.
"The idea that governments would keep this quiet because otherwise the public would go nuts, is nuts. History shows that's not what happens.
"In the early 1900s, there were claims that there were canals on Mars - a vast hydraulic civilisation just 50m km from Earth. The average guy in the street said 'well, I guess there are Martians' - they didn't panic."

The first job if the computers flag up an interesting signal is to get it confirmed by other telescopes around the world - this would take the better part of a week.
"In all that time, you can be sure people are emailing boyfriends and girlfriends, writing on their blogs... the word will be out there."
So news of alien contact may reach most people via a tweet from a Seti astronomer.

A 1997 "false alarm" signal showed the likely reaction - and the futility of any cover-up attempts.
"We were watching this signal all day and all night, waiting for somebody from 'officialdom', whatever officialdom is, to call up," Dr Shostak recalls. "Even local politicians didn't call up, let alone the federal government. The only people that were interested were the media."

Surely there's an action plan in a red binder somewhere, detailing which international bodies to inform?
Not so. "The protocol is simply to announce it," Dr Shostak says. And then the policies for a chain of information, or command over the situation? "There are no such policies, and I don't think you could enforce them anyway."

The United Nations has a small outfit in Vienna called the Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), and Seti scientists have tried down the years with little success to work with it to fill that notional red binder with plans. Asked what might happen if an alien message arrives, UNOOSA replies that their current mandate "does not include any issues regarding the question you pose".

So planning is left to people such as Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University, who heads up the the Seti Post-detection Taskgroup. But we don't know what kind of information - if any - an incoming signal might contain. And decoding the signal could take years, or decades.

But what might it say? It could just be a beacon, saying nothing more than "Hello, Earthlings, we are here," says Prof Davies.
"It could be something completely disruptive and transformative, something as simple as how to gain control over the nuclear fusion process... which could solve the world's energy crisis.
"Because of the enormous travel time from some source many, many light years away, we have plenty of time to reflect on what the consequences would be if we open up a dialogue on this slow time scale."

Ask anyone in the Seti community if we should reply, and the consensus is yes. But what to say, and how to say it is a thorny problem.
"When we're dealing with an alien mind - what they might appreciate, what they might regard as interesting or beautiful or ugly - will be so much tied to their neural architecture that we really couldn't guess," Davies says. "So the only thing that we've got in common has got to be at a mathematics and physics level."

Back in California's Seti Institute, director of interstellar message composition Doug Vakoch agrees.
"It seems a little hard to understand how you'd build a radio transmitter if you don't know that two plus two equals four.
"But how do we build upon that common understanding to communicate something that is more idiosyncratic to each species? How do we let them know what it's really like to be human?"

Some Seti scientists argue that, once we know where to send an interstellar email, we might as well just send the contents of the entire internet, streamed down a laser light beam. Aliens would then have plenty of information from which to draw patterns, disentangle languages, and see images - of all kinds - of what it is to be human.

Vakoch thinks to send such a "digital data dump" is an "ugly" approach. "There has to be something more elegant to say about ourselves than that."

We could instead express our idea of beauty - albeit crudely - by sending a signal representing the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the prior two: one, one, two, three, five, eight, 13 and so on. It's a sequence seen in spiral galaxies and the way nautilus shells grow, and is tied to the "golden ratio" - an aesthetically pleasing proportion seen in classical architecture.

Dr Vakoch also hopes to show possibly idiosyncratic human characteristics, such as altruism, helping others at a cost to ourselves. To that end, he has prepared a simple animation of a person helping another up a cliff.

But any eventual message will be put together by international consensus - which will only be on the negotiating table if a signal actually shows up. In the meantime, he will keep coming up with ideas of what to say on the interstellar microphone.

"Perhaps more important than even communicating with extraterrestrials, this whole enterprise of composing messages is a chance to reflect on ourselves and what we care about and how we express what's important."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16273512

Posted: 17-01-2012 00:19 Post subject:

Posted: 18-05-2012 23:23 Post subject:

A light hearted look at this topic:

It Is Rocket Science - Series 2 - Episode 1

Return of the comedy that takes a quirky look at the science and history of space travel. Are there civilisations on other planets, and, if so, why do they never call?

Helen Keen stars alongside Peter Serafinowicz and Susy Kane for a second series of the factually-correct but funny exploration of the science and history of space travel. This week examines the Fermi paradox - if the universe is really infinite it should contain infinite life, and yet we have had no contact from alien civilisations. It also takes a look at different ideas through history of what life might be like on other planets, and some of the more surprising suggestions scientists have had on how to get in touch with it, from giant burning parallelograms in the Sahara to sending nude pictures into space....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01hkz33/It_Is_Rocket_Science_Series_2_Episode_1/