Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations

[MechAg94]

http://iopscience.iop.org/0067-0049/217/2/25/article

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/04/25/100000-galaxies-what-quest-for-alien-supercivilizations-really-tells-us/

The second link reminded me of the original article.  It about the study done (first link) to look for signs of alien life in older galaxies.  They were looking for signs those older galaxies were giving off more heat than is accounted for by the stars and stuff alone.  They didn't find any evidence.

Now, I may be oversimplying this and there is likely more to it, but why do they assume some civilization that is billions or even millions of years old would be building stuff that gives off so much heat it makes their galaxy look hotter at this distance?  That seems to be a very very big leap.  It really seems like something someone would do only if they had funding and needed to do something with it, but didn't have anything. 

Any thoughts?

[Monkeyleg]

Global warming?

[vaskidmark]

The light from some of those places took :mumble: to get here.  Masybe those civilizations were not that old and advanced back then?

And why is anybody wasting time and money looking for aliens from outer space?  Haven't they read the sci-fi and watched the movies?  Far better and safer to go into the basement of that creepy old house without turning on the lights, or petting Cthulhu.

stay safe.

[MechAg94]

It isn't just outer space, but other galaxies.

[TommyGunn]

Check the local bar? 

[Ben]

I guess I don't understand how they're coming to their conclusions. They're looking at places billions of years away. A civilization could easily go from caveman to Vorlon in a million years. Maybe there's nothing out there. Or maybe they passed on before we ever saw their light. Or maybe they have yet to develop. Then if they do reach a highly advanced stage, who's to say they won't have a technology we can't fathom, that wouldn't give off a heat signature (or one we could detect)?

[230RN]

I find it hard to envision a universe where "we" are the only ones who "advanced" this far in terms of technology and civilization.  This, given the "billions and billions" of planetary systems and the chemistry involved.

Oh, and the incredibly long time periods involved for carbon atoms to link up in wierd ways.  And although it can be interpreted in sundry ways, there is Biblical precedent for <ahem> "many mansions."

I think it's worthwhile to listen and look for possible contacts with the possible residents of those possible mansions, but given the difficulty of establishing and maintaining contact over the the vast distances involved with our current technology, I myself would not expend great effort and money to actively look for them.

In Hamspeak, it's OK to just "copy the mail" as SETI does, and send out an occasional CQ, but putting a great deal of effort and money into building a 1KW station and erecting a huge antenna system just for the exclusive purpose of making contact with another Ham on Easter Isand is not really worth it.

As far as the "heat-seeking" project MechAg94 refers to, just on the face of it, it looks like a wasted effort.  With all the variable energy coming out of galaxies from mainstream stars, novae and supernovae stars, and pulsing stars, to even bother looking for a little extra heat (or other energy*) from other civilizations buried within one is a real stretch of one's assumptions. 

A very big leap, in MechAg94's words.

My presumption would be that if that amount of heat were involved, they must have destroyed themselves making it.

Terry

* Unless it's coded with information, which is what SETI is doing.

[French G.]

So...what's more likely? We done gone all Predator and can see other worlds or just maybe our math that is based on a lot of assumptions is a wee bit off.

[Perd Hapley]

I find it hard to envision a universe where "we" are the only ones who "advanced" this far in terms of technology and civilization.  This, given the "billions and billions" of planetary systems and the chemistry involved.

Oh, and the incredibly long time periods involved for carbon atoms to link up in wierd ways. 

Why is that difficult to envision? What would make such a thing so unlikely?

[MechAg94]

My presumption would be that if that amount of heat were involved, they must have destroyed themselves making it.

There method and conclusions seem to be full of assumptions.  We can barely imagine what our own civilization would be like if we continued to advance in tech for another 1000 years, much less a few million.  Also, even if someone wasn't far beyond our current technology and figured out a way to spread across their galaxy, why would it increase heat output? 

Unless there is more to the study, it seems it ought to be a target of ridicule and laughter within the scientific community.  But then Global Warming isn't so anything can happen.

[Firethorn]

We can barely imagine what our own civilization would be like if we continued to advance in tech for another 1000 years, much less a few million.

Indeed.  One of the quirks of our modern times is that with the development of new techniques, our quest for more bandwidth has resulted in us becoming quieter on the astronomical scale than we were back in the '40s.

frequency hopping, broad spectrum transmissions look like noise a heck of a lot sooner than narrowband transmissions, especially if you don't know the encoding system.

[HankB]

Indeed.  One of the quirks of our modern times is that with the development of new techniques, our quest for more bandwidth has resulted in us becoming quieter on the astronomical scale than we were back in the '40s.

frequency hopping, broad spectrum transmissions look like noise a heck of a lot sooner than narrowband transmissions, especially if you don't know the encoding system.

I've read that the spike of early-warning radars (DEW line) would stand out as a pretty stark anomaly to any ETs who did a spectrum analysis of our sun/solar system. Your guess is as good as mine of what they'd make of it.

[RoadKingLarry]

I've read that the spike of early-warning radars (DEW line) would stand out as a pretty stark anomaly to any ETs who did a spectrum analysis of our sun/solar system. Your guess is as good as mine of what they'd make of it.

With any EM radiation like RADAR it falls off in strength pretty quick with that whole inverse square of the distance thing. Put a couple hundred of light years behind it and the strongest RADAR pules ever transmitted by earthlings gets lost in the interstellar static.

[Hawkmoon]

Now, I may be oversimplying this and there is likely more to it, but why do they assume some civilization that is billions or even millions of years old would be building stuff that gives off so much heat it makes their galaxy look hotter at this distance?  That seems to be a very very big leap.  It really seems like something someone would do only if they had funding and needed to do something with it, but didn't have anything. 

Any excuse to promote the notion of global warming.

Follow the "logic": Global warming is bad. Too much global warming will eliminate human life on the planet. Mankind causes global warming. Therefore, if they can find evidence of global warming in "dead" galaxies, they can then crank up the rhetoric and tell us that's what will happen to us if we don't stop warming the global.

On the other hand, since it is now "settled science" that humans (i.e. intelligent life) cause global warming, if they DON'T find evidence of global warming they'll then be lined up to proclaim that there's no evidence of intelligent life out there.

[AJ Dual]

With any EM radiation like RADAR it falls off in strength pretty quick with that whole inverse square of the distance thing. Put a couple hundred of light years behind it and the strongest RADAR pules ever transmitted by earthlings gets lost in the interstellar static.

Yep, the "bubble" of radio emissions or the light-front from them is a "dot" that's roughly 200 light-years in diameter. A 200 light year sphere is the same size as the pixels/dots used to represent the stars in most CGI visualizations of the Milky Way galaxy.

The old DEW line radars are much more powerful than the first 19xx-whatever Marconi Morse code CW transmissions, but yes, even they will fade off really fast.

It's just at the borderline of feasibility that we could see "ourselves" at our rate of radio leakage at 200 light years with our best radio telescopes, if we knew where to look and on what frequencies. What everyone forgets is that the transmitting civilization needs to "beat" the Drake Equation too. And to take a serious stab at it, would probably require mining all matter in the Solar System, converting it into a Dyson Sphere, redirecting all the Sun's energy into radio broadcasts sweeping the plane of the galaxy, and maybe a few other nearby galaxies for best odds of detection, and then leaving the signal up and running, for millions, maybe billions of years to allow time for other technological species to evolve to even receive the message, much less reply.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/02/27/article-0-11EF84AB000005DC-183_964x959.jpg

And that's what the study that MechAg94 links to is about. The assumption is that a long-lived technological civilization that's "made it" would also build a bunch of Dyson Spheres (or matryoshka brains) in either a distributed Kardashev Type II civilization, or Type III that actually harnessed it's whole galaxy. And instead of visible light, we'd see an increased spectrum of IR radiation leakage, because again the assumption is such a civilization can't beat the laws of Thermodynamics and eventually heat/IR that's too low in energy to be worth the effort to capture it must eventually leak outward.

So after surveying several thousand galaxies and not seeing any with a super-civilization's macro/mega-engineering IR emissions, either there are no such civilizations, or if there are, they don't operate in that manner.

It's premature to say we're alone, we've only seriously begun to look with scientific instruments that have a chance of detecting anything for roughly 50 years. We've been around for only 2 million to 200,000 years, depending on where you draw the line.  But from the conservative side, that's only .00025% the length of our species existence.  Add in geologic time, Solar System time, Galactic timescales, keep on adding zeros...

However, if we are alone, it's profound too. It would be a horrible shame if we didn't get as far in our Galaxy, or the Universe as we could.

My worries right now are that we find microbes or fossil evidence of life on Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, in the ice fountains of Enceladus around Saturn etc.

Mars I can kind of handwave away, there's a good chance microbes hitched a ride on ejecta/rocks from meteor impacts between our worlds.  Jupiter and Saturn's moons, not so much. If we find even one other parallel genesis of life in our Solar System, it's likely the Universe is lousy with it. But that bodes badly for us, because statistically speaking, whatever filter or event that causes the "great silence" in the Universe lies ahead of us becomes more likely.  

The list potential places the "great filter" for ETI's (and us) resides is something like the Drake Equation itself:

1. Stars? - Plenty of stars. 

2. Planets? - Now exoplanet searches are showing we're lousy with planets. 

3. Hospitable planets? - exoplanet search resuts still coming in, but the dice are being rolled billions of times. Some are in the liquid water zone of their stars now. 

4. Hospitable planets with life? - James Webb space telescope will probably be able to pull O2/CO2/CH4 atmospheric spectra from nearby exoplanets around 2020 or so, and we can make a better guess. 

5. Hospitable planets with complex life? - Dunno.

6. Hospitable planets with complex life that evolve intelligence? Dunno.

7. Hospitable planets with complex life that evolve intelligence who start expanding technology? Dunno.

8. Hospitable planets with complex life that evolve intelligence who start expanding technology that don't die out, or destroy themselves? Dunno. We're not seeing anything like that. No Kardashev Type II or III civilizations.

But each time we check off something on the list towards the bottom, the odds go up exponentially each time that humanity is foooked.  

Then we'd have to hold out hope that #4 is really rare, and we don't see any atmospheres with free O2 or CO2/CH4(methane) ratios that aren't explainable by anything but life. And/or #6 is really rare, because evolution is a blind process that does not have "goals", intelligence/tool-using is a fluke. Or that #8 is explained away that advanced civilizations operate in paradigms that aren't easily visible with traditional astronomy methods, or that it's unlikely we'd ever be visited.

[Firethorn]

And instead of visible light, we'd see an increased spectrum of IR radiation leakage, because again the assumption is such a civilization can't beat the laws of Thermodynamics and eventually heat/IR that's too low in energy to be worth the effort to capture it must eventually leak outward.

Bingo.  See infrared at a rate greater than you'd expect from a brown dwarf, more along the total energy you'd expect to see from a G class?  Maybe somebody's built themselves a Dyson sphere, so the visible light isn't getting out, but an equal amount of infrared IS, because they've converted all that energy into work for something.

Oh, and one correlation with the drake equation:  As the odds of intelligent tool using and transmitting* life around a different star go down(on average), the average distance between such civilizations goes up.  Even if the odds of having more than one are freaking high, you still can end up with them being so far apart that it doesn't really matter.


*I'm not even sure if I'd count ourselves as 'transmitting'.  Listening, maybe.  But we're not beaming megawatt strength+ directional beams out of our solar system to targeted systems.

[RevDisk]

Probably were looking for evidence of stellar engineering. As others mentioned, maybe someone Dyson Sphere'd their sun or another star for some purpose.

Not conclusive in any way, but interesting to look for. Like what everyone else said, too little energy usage at too much distance for folks to notice each other.

[HankB]

Maybe the advanced civilizations out there are based on dark matter . . . 

[MechAg94]

It is interesting to look for, I just question whether their stated methods have any chance of achieving anything or are just busy work.  It still makes a lot of assumptions about very advanced tech based on our limited knowledge being still stuck on Earth.  

I think I read one SciFi book where everyone was essentially their own space ship and flew around between planets/stars.  A ship was just convenience and transport.  Others imagine leaving behind conventional building materials.  That doesn't even scratch the surface of all the million small things that would be different.  

Of course, maybe the other civilizations were infected with liberals as well and never advanced.  

[fifth_column]

What if humans are the first sentient species to evolve?  What if we end up being the elder race of the universe?

[MechAg94]

What if humans are the first sentient species to evolve?  What if we end up being the elder race of the universe?

Bad dreams.    .........for them.

[Ben]

Bad dreams.    .........for them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzJaQtZty5M

[230RN]

That clip^ reminded me...

<way out concept time>
<just reporting it time>
<don't blame the reporter time>

A couple of months, maybe a year ago, the notion was presented to me by a UFO enthusiast that the President has "inside knowledge" that the "aliens" are about to attack the earth.  As a consequence, he has generated every reason possible to get Americans to purchase arms and ammuniton to defend against this exothreat.  The easiest way to do this was to place a strong fear of "gun control" in our minds --thus becoming the whimsical "greatest gun salesman of all time."

This, on  the "rifle behind every blade of grass" theory*.

</way out concept time>
</just reporting it time>
</don't blame the reporter time>

I'm not signing this one so nobody will know who posted it.

* Regardless of whether Yamamoto actually said that or not, it's still a valid tactical theory.

[freakazoid]

What if humans are the first sentient species to evolve?  What if we end up being the elder race of the universe?

Time to start leaving some really random and weird stuff for them to find and be all WTF?

[230RN]

I think someone wrote a science fiction story about that, where the most common objects, after  the corrosion and degradation of many millenia, were interpreted as "religious artifacts," and they constructed a whole fanciful theory on what the religion was all about... with hot debates in their scientific journals about this minor point or that.

In re this, I've been looking at some of the art and culture and stuff from the ancient Etruscans.  Their artworks  seem to be remarkably advanced --to the point where if some were to be placed in today's galleries without identification, it would look pretty damned modern.

Terry