While watching a TV show on the discovery channel or one of those 'learning networks' I came upon a segment that pointed out that once SETI did recieve a single, perfect transmission, exactly what they were looking for, but only for a moment and before they could track where it came from. Needless to say I was blown away (they showed a picture of the paper the recording had been printed on, right next to the occurence there was the word 'wow!').

I have developed my own theory about this. I think that we detected the first radio signal from a developing race experimenting with radio, which may mean that we'll be hearing their news and eventually be seeing it sooner or later.

Did anyone else hear about this?

Yes, and because the signal was never repeated; they have totally disregarded it.

The "WOW" signal

http://www.setileague.org/articles/calibwow.htm

That article says (I'm reading it right now) that it is nearly impossible to find the signal again.

Just a few others.. but nothing extraordinary:

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/~rme/wow.htm
http://www.bigear.org/wow.htm
http://www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/history/History10.htm

Peace.

My brother gets excited every time there's a large spike on the visual representation in Seti@home :D

It will be a while until we find a signal of the type in contact. The problem is the fact that there are so many frequencies. We look for those similar to ours and all the constants, hydrogen, etc. This is beyond our present lack of equipment. To make matters worse, radio telescopes are massive undertakings and require rows to work properly. Maybe we can start a government project to stick dishes on roof tops in a great set of urban chains. Just a thought, not really any possibility.

Didn't it turn out to be a pulsar? I have the SETI program on my pc here at home. Unfortunately, sometimes I can't get a signal from Arecibo let alone outer space!!! Also, who is to assume that an advanced alien technology uses "radio waves", we may well be looking in the wrong "room"?:rolleyes:

Maybe we can start a government project to stick dishes on roof tops in a great set of urban chains. Just a thought, not really any possibility.

http://www.skypub.com/news/special/seti_next.html

The above site discusses this topic, not in detail though.

Thanks for that, book marked for later! :rolleyes:

It seems one of the problems is that the signals can be subdivided into so many different subbands. I think I remember reading at one time that SETI could record signals of upon of a million different channels simultaneously. And that it was still not enough to cover the total band spread. Then there is the interpretation of the data once received. SETI has had a ground swell of help through the "at home" program. Allowing it a concentrate on the acquisition of the signals and not so much the interpretation of the data until the "at home" processes have been run. I still question some of the basic assumptions made when processing the signals but have no better suggestions to offer in their place. And, yes, I do crunch SETI for the Sciforums Team.

Let us for a momemt assume that a planet far away has developed short wave radio and are braodcasting in the range of 11 meter to 25 meter. Let us also assume that they are in the same frequency as our earth stations that run at 50KW to 100KW power. Let us also assume that they also modulate the signal the same way and talk in a language that are close but different.

Under these circumstances, can we be able to collect the signal and really think it came from outspace? Would not our earth staions over power the faint signals? We can not even pick it up (discriminate) , if we are on the moon (unless at the farside)

Ghosting into the realms of Sci Fi for a moment - remember in Star Trek, the Movies? The had trouble understanding "vega" due to the fact they no longer used radio signals and "vega" which was of course Voyager - did!:rolleyes:

Originally posted by Teg
... Maybe we can start a government project to stick dishes on roof tops in a great set of urban chains. Just a thought, not really any possibility.

Teg,

This is actually something I have thought of before. Given the use of differential GPS, it is possible to position something, especially a static something, down to millimeter precision. It would be easily possible to create a bunch of radio antennas/receivers that used differential GPS to position the antennas. You could place a variety of antennas all over the place, each logging and time-stamping its position and time of signal detection, and you could potentially use a post-processing of the data to create gigantic arrays, which would vastly increase your signal to noise ratio on the signals you were trying to detect.

Write your congressperson!


P.S It's too bad nothing'll probably happen for awhile, this whole terrorism thing has completely taken over any action in congress, but I bet it would be fairly cheap to install small antennas on every household in america, as opposed to building more and more huge radio telescopes.

Write to NASA, DirecTV and Sony - if any of these people could do something. I have a DirecTV system. What would be neat is to hook up to a USB port and connect to the computer from the satellite tuner which will have additional circuits to get you the info. This will help sell new tuners.

How true that profit drives much of our world. So a need to be satisfied, a profit to be made, and you have interest and preformance in the desired direction.

Maybe the stat's from SETI users could be used to show ground-swell support for such an idea.

This hamster’s first reaction was that home antennas wouldn’t suffice because the data recording and time stamping wouldn’t be sufficiently precise for radio interferometry. Phase is very important.

However several satellites could continuously transmit reference signals. Each home antenna could digitize and feed its signal over the Internet to a data collection site. The reference signals could be used to triangulate position, to provide a highly accurate time stamp, and to “clean-up” each antenna’s signal. With accurate position, time, and clean signal, interferometry should work.

Imahamster,

You could readily use the GPS constellation for such a reference signal, especially if you used the P(Y) code, although this is a military code and its use is classified. You could use the C/A code, but its resolution is much less. The constellation is about as synchronized as you could ask for at the moment.

A GPS may not be necessary. The streets can be referenced to USGS co-ordinates. Now, if you can take a tape and measure the distances from a close by known survey point, you get the most accurate co-ordinate - unless you live in an island.

Kmguru, this would be an unusual use of the GPS system. The GPS system wouldn’t be used directly for determining antenna location. (Processing the GPS signal at the data collection site could provide extremely precise antenna location and timing.) The satellite signal is the important element. Used as a reference signal it would need to be very stable and have a complex waveform. SeekerOfTruth is likely correct that the GPS signals have those qualities. As long as the home antenna operated in the right frequency range this hamster feels that SeekerOfTruth’s system would work. (Bet some of those Hughes satellite guys are sufficiently interested in space science that they’d help.)

Huh...? I am confused. What timing are you reffering to? If you have a DirecTV satellite, the transponder already has a RT Clock. It can supply the necessary timecode to all receivers. The locations are fixed to earth structures. It is no different than antenna arrays that NASA uses. Except that they are bigger but few of them. We can have 10 million little ones.

Kmguru, perhaps you are right. This hamster thought the GPS system had deliberately built in limits for security reasons. This hamster also guessed that the clocks on the DirectTV transponders would be insufficiently accurate for interferometry. Guesses aren’t as good as knowledge. Hehe.

Some radars use a varying frequency chirp waveform as a reference signal. By convolving the reference waveform against the return signal a highly precise distance measurement is possible. Using similar techniques to compare reference signals from multiple sources to the data from the antennae, highly precise measurements of location and time should be possible. By using the measured distortion in the reference signals one may also “clean-up” the antenna signal. In this manner it should be possible to get clean signals with precise phase information from mediocre antenna data. That should lead to good interferometry.

this all sounds like a plan but what guarantee do we have that the nice folks over at directv and NASA will listen to us? They probably feed their mail to goats.

Originally posted by ImaHamster2
Kmguru, perhaps you are right. This hamster thought the GPS system had deliberately built in limits for security reasons. This hamster also guessed that the clocks on the DirectTV transponders would be insufficiently accurate for interferometry. Guesses aren’t as good as knowledge. Hehe.

...

Imahamster,

The GPS system had a component called Selective Availability or SA that randomized the clock output of the individual satellites as well as introducing errors into the ephemeris data that was transmitted by each satellite. SA was originally intended to degrade the accuracy of commercially available GPS receivers so that foreign powers could not use GPS as a targeting aid for their own ICBMs. Unfortunately, or not depending upon how you view it, commercial enterprises were smart enough to figure out how to remove SA from the signals. This is one of the primary reasons SA was turned off last year. Without SA, you have a fairly accurate real time clock in a GPS receiver and with processing such as that used in differential GPS you can position things down to milimiter level precision. This means you have an extremely accurate clock when looked at over large baselines.

In regards to the use of Direct TV clocks for interferometry, I do not know how accurate the clock is, but knowing how accurate a GPS clock is and needs to be tells me that the Direct TV clock is not nearly as accurate.

To use the GPS system you could have essentially two designs. In one, a separate GPS antenna would be physically coupled to a radio astronomy antenna with the exact distance between the phase centers of each antennna being known in advance. The GPS antenna and receiver would provide both accurate timing and position for the astronomy antenna. If you then 'listened' to the GPS signal on the astronomy antenna, you could perform a limited set of interferometry between the GPS antenna and the astronomy antenna as well as performing interferometry between different radio astronomy antennas.

The second method would be to design a single antenna designed to look at the radio astronomy bands of interests as well as the GPS signals. This would be a little more complicated and would eliminate the possibility of doing interferometry between the GPS antenna and the astronomy antenna, but would potentially be a smaller and lighter package.

The RT clock in my proposal does not have to be accurate for a specific instance of the signal. All you need is a time code as reference when the signal begins. Only one clock can do that. So there should not be any inferometry involved. After you collected those signals, they have to be sent to a master computer for analysis. This is where you need the accuracy and the spatial information. Then it can be sent back to the users for crunching and analysis.

Technically, it is not difficult, someone has to have the will to pursue...

Originally posted by Pollux V
While watching a TV show on the discovery channel or one of those 'learning networks' I came upon a segment that pointed out that once SETI did recieve a single, perfect transmission, exactly what they were looking for, but only for a moment and before they could track where it came from. Needless to say I was blown away (they showed a picture of the paper the recording had been printed on, right next to the occurence there was the word 'wow!').

I have developed my own theory about this. I think that we detected the first radio signal from a developing race experimenting with radio, which may mean that we'll be hearing their news and eventually be seeing it sooner or later.

Did anyone else hear about this?

Yes. I saw it too on a program on Discovery. Its supposed to have happened quite a few times. But these freak cases are not really taken seriously because apparently interference etc can cause them.

- Sivakami.

Is it interference or deliberate?

What if a civilization far away scanning the galaxy and sending out focused transmission to a small area for a short time and goes to the next. By the time they come back to repeat, it may take a month, six months or a year. The universe is a big place.

I have not read anywhere that someone analyzed the signal and found it to contain earth transmissions. I allways read that it was not repeated so they scratch that as a fluke....

Well one conclusion to what happened was that an armchair radio operator fired a message out onto the moon and waited for it to be reflected back at him, but with extreme luck it wound up being obsorbed by a SETI dish, and with more extreme luck wound up being exactly what they were looking for.

On an episode of Sightings (old TV show on the scifi channel) this one guy who claimed to have worked as a janitor or something said that SETI recieved five separate signals from five different species in the Orion Arm (I believe but am not sure). Of course this guy is the only evidence the Sightings blokes had and they just ran his interview and showed some shots of the sky. Needless to say this means that there was next to no proof of this except for a janitor's testimony, and there was no proof that he had even worked there.

Buttt there is always the chance that he was telling the truth, that we've made contact with species from another world. I really, really hope I live to see such an event.

Here are the possibilities:

We really made contact. We found exactly what we are looking for and we were able to decipher the prime numbers or whatever. Then chances are that it will be classified because, we want to learn more in secret in case we learn new technology that other countries will not. Free Enterprise.

We made contact, but since it was not repeated next day. We ignored it. What a waste....

We did not make contact perhaps because we are listening to radio and they are broadcasting television. Technology mismatch.

No one is out there. It is probable too.

Add your own spin. Conspiracy etc....

Yes, its true, at the moment it's just as likely that there really is no other civilization out there as it is likely that the universe is peppered with them. What a sad concept.

Much as kmguru has mentioned, if another species or alien civilization was discovered, chances that Joe Q, Public would ever hear of it are slim or none. Military and political leaders would clamp a national security lid on it so fast that even the discovers would have spinning heads. The chances of learning something new for offense or defense of national interest would be the driving plot behind it. It well could be that our radar stealth tech was inspired by such tech. Who knows?

Originally posted by wet1
Much as kmguru has mentioned, if another species or alien civilization was discovered, chances that Joe Q, Public would ever hear of it are slim or none. Military and political leaders would clamp a national security lid on it so fast that even the discovers would have spinning heads. The chances of learning something new for offense or defense of national interest would be the driving plot behind it. It well could be that our radar stealth tech was inspired by such tech. Who knows?

Actually Wet1, the roots of our stealth technology go back to Soviet research in the 50's and 60's.

Maybe they are the ones who received the signal.:D

<i>...if another species or alien civilization was discovered, chances that Joe Q, Public would ever hear of it are slim or none.</i>

Wrong. There are United Nations protocols in place which deal with the detection of alien signals. It would be world news almost immediately.

Only after it was deciphered by the super computer or some heavy duty resources. And you know who controls those resources?

It is (the listening /deciphering technology) not in the realm of amatuers...at least not yet....

I just got an email from Eman Resu as follows:

wanted to ask in the SETI thread but am unable to do so. Why couldn't "civilians" simply build their own recieving network? Doesn't the advent of the dish networks allow us to couple the dishes and receive in parallel?


(Pls check your username and password to post...)

Originally posted by kmguru
Is it interference or deliberate?

I have not read anywhere that someone analyzed the signal and found it to contain earth transmissions. I allways read that it was not repeated so they scratch that as a fluke....

Makes sense. Occam's Razor.

- Sivakami.

Many groups, like the UN, have various protocols in place to handle various things. But information release is still determined by the decisions of those who actually have it. If Australia's DSD receives a signal, I doubt very much that they'll call the newspapers first.

What we have here is six blind people describing an elephant (I am one of them). What we need is to find out exactly what the method is for transmission (if any) and reception and deciphering of what signal. Then we can find out what the strength and weaknesses are in the process and if in today's technology something can be improved or the whole process is a waste of time for various reasons....

I can put forwards that there is a true possibility of life else where in the universe, but to make my suspicion more tangible, you'd have to look to the ideas of Modeling the universe in a computer to recreate it.

(the understanding is if you input information from the point you start (with data you have collected) to a future point, you should have enough to Model a reverse of how things have been to get an understanding of the beginnings of the universe.

Most will note this as being what Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge intends to accomplish.

Of course I would like to put the point forwards that those calculations would be lapse of other life forms that our own, since they (and perhaps an meteorite worm) seem to be the only evidence of ET life.

This means that a Theoretical calculation has to be derived about how much life exists in our universe to input in the model. (that way if the model has any relevance on our universe it would prove the existance of life, in fact you could even point where!)

My kind of assumption is from the big bang there was 0% life, but blocks that accumilate over years to create life (even if those blocks stayed frozen and inanimate for thousands of years), over some time you can imagine that life would spread throughout the universe from the first explosions and settle, possibly populating about 6-7% of the universe.

Over time there would be a fluctuation in growth, admittedly all life would be stuck to their planets to begin with and some might find themsleves made extinct by changes to their environment.

Life exists in 5% of the Universe, when the first evolved life starts taking to the star's, then there is a sudden (in a relative sense) growth to life populating worlds that would have been uninhabitable earlier. By this point, differing communications systems would have been developed.

Suddenly life exists in an increasing percent of the universe, the only thing that controls its growth is War, Famine, Pestilance (Oh and something us humans created.... Capitalism!)

That is a logical conclusion. The universe slowly fill up with life. Then the question is - are we destined to fill the universe? Life has to start somewhere....and we may be it. OR the theory of parallel evolution that starts in many places.

The other part is what if we are the result of human specis colonizing planets for the last 100 million years?

Each one has its proponents. A debate is worth while....

It's truly an astonishing possibility. There's a book series called Chronicles of Pern (books as Dragonriders of Pern etc.) where humans from earth long ago colonised one planet, but after serious climatic and astronomic cathclisms humans forgott what they were, from where they were and tht their mothership is orbiting around the planets orbit. Just immagine - we are the rulers of Milky Way galaxy and don't even know of it???!!!!;)
And it could be possible. Ancient history has always been my passion. Heaven knows what we will discover tomorrow about ourselves, truth lies within our history.
Bye!

In my line of work, I met a lot of genius scientists. Deep down, we all have the same feeling. And what a feeling!....

To be human is to love...and dream....

In the PC Game 'Homeworld (an excellent game but gets near impossible towards the end. I was unable to finish it:( )' the 'Kushan' species were once part of the greatest empire in their fictional galaxy when the 'Taidan' took their empire and exiled them to a single world. Maybe we were great...once, but eventually our power got the best of us, and we were forced onto Earth with all memory wiped away.

Hopefully we will work toward what we had before.