
Repeating Radio Signals Coming from Distant Galaxy Detected - revicon
http://www.newsweek.com/frb-fast-radio-bursts-deep-space-breakthrough-listen-657144
======
QAPereo
This is the really interesting bit IMO

 _In addition, their observations revealed that the brightest of these 15
emissions occurred at around 7 GHz. This was higher than any repeating FRBs
seen to date, which indicated for the first time that they can occur at
frequencies higher than previously thought. Last, but not least, the high-
resolution data the Listen team collected is expected to yield valuable
insights into FRBs for years to come.

This was made possible thanks to the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT,
which is able to record several GHz of bandwidth simultaneously and split the
information into billions of individuals channels. This enables scientists to
study the proprieties and the frequency spectrum of FRBs with greater
precision, and should lead to new theories about the causes of these radio
emissions.

So even if these particular signals should prove to not be extra-terrestrial
in origin, Listen is still pushing the boundaries of what is possible with
radio astronomy. And given that Breakthrough Listen is less than two years
into its proposed ten-year survey, we can expect many more sources to be
observed and studied in the coming years. If there’s evidence of ETI to be
found, we’re sure to find out about it sooner or later!_

~~~
amygdyl
Cant we see a way to backhaul radio telescope data from very remote locations,
in the same way that Cloudflare is using asymmetric website traffic patterns?
Is there any potential for collecting radio data inexpensively, I mean can we
substitute network scale and geography to such a extent that commodity radio
observatory is possible, in the 20 years to my retirement, or in my life, or
beyond?

I hear you loud and clear about the potential, but I am desperate to get a
clue about how much the ramp will become steep and quick?

Funny thing, if it weren't for the cheap and distributed way of inexpensive
intelligence that had bombarded my senses with new information, I should be
very possibly unaware of the potential for this immense explosion of
discovery!

~~~
windowsworkstoo
Do you mean like the square kilometer array?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Kilometre_Array)

------
tgtweak
Strangely, or perhaps not, the most interesting part of this article to me was
this:

"Using the Digital Backend instrument on the GBRT, Dr. Gajjar and the Listen
team observed FRB 121102 for five hours. From this, they accumulating 400
terabytes of data"

That has to be one hell of an all flash array to take in that much data at a
steady state of 22.75 GiB/s

~~~
polemic
Fun fact: the Square Kilometre Array (SKA telescope) will gather roughly 3
TB/s when it's up an running.

~~~
ourmandave
Would it be a reverse DoS attack when the North Koreans try to steal the data
and 3 TB/s crashes their Pentium II "mainframe"?

~~~
draugadrotten
“There is no greater danger than underestimating your opponent.” ― Lao Tzu

------
Jeremy1026
The article keeps mentioning "intelligent alien life" over and over, then
closes with

| Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from
an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

Way to be a buzz kill.

~~~
ge96
The scale of the universe is depressing.

Edit: because I feel that were stuck here for now. If Voyager took 40 years to
exit our solar system. And solar system in galaxies and galaxies in the
universe...

It's a good thing I'm too busy being poor to be concerned about interstellar
travel.

It is mind blowing though... Way to quote pale blue dot... Everything we have
ever known...

~~~
noobermin
At least you're not a paramecium, or an ant, or a dog, or a mollusk, or an
electron. You have self-awareness which is something many things on many
scales do not have.

Not to mention, you can speak English (world's most used langauge), and have
an internet connection. Hopefully, you make end's meet, and aren't starving in
the street. Even on the scale of other sentient beings, things are all
relative.

~~~
ge96
Hahaha hey man it's my right to complain. I just went to whole foods, live in
a first world country. I do wonder is it better not to know. Yeah I could be a
paramecium under a slide in some high school biology class.

------
stephengillie
New analysis of a known FRB source. They find new signals.

> _The source known as FRB 121101 was discovered back on November 2nd, 2012,
> by astronomers using the Arecibo radio telescope. At the time, it was the
> first FRB to be discovered; and by 2015, it became the first FRB to be seen
> repeating. This effectively ruled out the possibility that repeating FRBs
> were caused by catastrophic events, which had previously been theorized.

And in 2016, FRB 121102 was the first FRB to have its location pinpointed to
such a degree that its host galaxy could be identified. ... And in the early
hours of Saturday, August 26th ... What they found was evidence of 15 new
pulses coming from FRB 121102, which confirmed that it was in a newly active
state._

------
PhantomGremlin
The article has a completely unrelated image, captioned _A colorful deep space
image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, as seen in a NASA handout from
June 3, 2014._

There is no claim that the RFBs came from that area of space.

That "colorful" image is a Hubble image that is incredible in its own right.
It is the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014.
[http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news/91-astronomical](http://hubblesite.org/image/3380/news/91-astronomical)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-
Deep_Field](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field)

 _The HUDF shows a small section of space in the southern-hemisphere
constellation Fornax. Now, using ultraviolet light, astronomers have combined
the full range of colors available to Hubble, stretching all the way from
ultraviolet to near-infrared light. The resulting image – made from 841 orbits
of telescope viewing time – contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending
back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang._

------
avs733
Cue the 'aliens' click bait stories in about 24 hours.

Less sarcastically...has anyone created some sort of internet archaeology
tools that allows quick traceback of information linked from page to page to
show how science becomes news then bad news then click bait?

~~~
DonHopkins
Actually the Ancient Babylonians had clay tablets that could trace the origin
of information linked from tablet to tablet far more accurately than modern
computing devices can.

~~~
Cyph0n
> far more accurately than modern computing devices can

I feel like have no idea how complex computers actually are...

~~~
crgt
I think you missed the Trig Tablets article earlier this month..

~~~
Cyph0n
I really hope you're being sarcastic.

------
rhcom2
> Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from
> an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

Anyone know how?

~~~
jerf
Why would an alien civilization do this?

And I don't just mean, come up with something that maybe some really powerful
but really _stupid_ alien civilization might conceivably do in a silly science
fiction book. Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power.

Even the old standby "well maybe they're just incomprehensible and we can't
understand them" doesn't really work here because when we're talking about
"incomprehensible" aliens we don't usually mean that they're incomprehensible
on account of being cosmically stupid and wasteful.

(I am speaking about what we actually have evidence for. If there's multiple
exabytes of incredible data packed into this signal somehow we have no
evidence for it. I like to distinguish very clearly between "things based on
the evidence that we have" and "airy flights of fancy based on what might be
hiding in the gaps", on the grounds that the latter is unbounded, so while
they are fun in stories, in a way the very unlimited nature of the possible
sets of speculations makes them uninteresting as an analysis of the real
universe, all equally lost in the noise of all the other fantastic
possibilities.)

~~~
magnat
> Explain how this is the best use of their still-limited power

Weapon. I suppose you could ask the same question looking at our nuclear tests
- why someone would waste so much energy in a single event? Maybe it's just
remnants from their firing range?

~~~
arethuza
Or an actual use of weapons.

~~~
PoachedSausage
Perhaps they're celebrating the failed attempt by anarchist revolutionaries to
cause the emperors home star to go nova.

~~~
ddingus
And that's probably genocide on a multi star system level. Good cause to
celebrate.

------
swilliams
But is the frequency of the signals prime numbers?

~~~
jacobush
I always thought an interesting experiment would be to fire off a handful of
nuclear bombs in space. (Rather deep space, like well out of where they could
do any harm to Earth.)

 _Then pace the time between detonations to different prime numbers..._

~~~
srean
> Then pace the time between detonations to different prime numbers...

There is a problem though. Whose time ? Your time, observers time ? Are the
bombs moving with the same velocity ?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity)

~~~
fennecfoxen
> Are the bombs moving with the same velocity?

Relative to the speed of light, where these effects actually become
appreciable?

Yes. Hell yes. Basically identical velocities. Signal to noise ratio issues
will do in this idea long before relativity has any sort of impact; it's not
even close.

------
andy_ppp
Does anyone have a copy of the signal, be interesting to play with and how
many bits of information were there etc.

~~~
kowdermeister
They have some data here and a nice plot :)

[http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=10675%20and%20will%...](http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=10675%20and%20will%20be%20described%20in%20further%20detail%20in%20an%20upcoming%20scientific%20journal%20article).

~~~
andy_ppp
Interesting, looks like the plot of part of an orbit :-/

------
RedOrGreen
I guess this is cool, but not really that novel a result (and yeah, it's an
ATel, not a paper yet, although that's just a matter of time). We've seen
similar burst storms from this FRB source before, which is what allowed us to
localize it in the first place. And I'm disappointed that they used the Hubble
Deep Field - we have very nice deep images [1] of this field already.

But yes, the Breakthrough digital hardware is really pretty neat!

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio-
burst-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/science/fast-radio-burst-
galaxy.html)

------
mda
In the video, she says "even if 0.1% of habitable planets have life, you would
expect over a million planets with some form of life."

Where do we get this 0.1%? why it is not 10^-20% and probability of life in
the galaxy is impossibly small?

~~~
rrock
Carl Sagan talks about this point in Cosmos. Life arose here on Earth pretty
quickly after it cooled. So the thought is that it's not difficult for life to
appear on favorable, habitable planets. A probability of 0.1% may be far too
low.

Remember too, an earth-like planet can have lots of organic chemicals floating
around, and you only have to hit the right combination once over millions of
years to end up with life.

~~~
mda
Even the most basic life seems super complicated to me, I am not sure the
first spark of life has that high probability of happening even under right
conditions. But maybe I am over estimating its complexity.

~~~
le-mark
People have studied this, and basic building blocks (amino acids) arise
spontaneously when electric current is applied to chemical soups for example.
Also when we look around today, we see the end prodcut of billions of years of
evolution, we don't know what truly primitive life may have looked like in the
first few millions years, life forms even more primitive than viruses, say.

~~~
low_battery
Still, a few amino acids are far far away from proteins, let alone all
proteins that work together and makes a simple living cell. Or mechanisms
like:
[https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/mitochondria-14053...](https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/mitochondria-14053590)

it might still be possible "given enough time".

------
gammarator
I don't know why this is getting a press release (beyond presumably the Milner
support). FRBs are mysterious and cool, but this one was already localized and
was already known to repeat. The higher-frequency detection is not too
exciting. This isn't even a paper, just an "ATel"\--roughly the scientific
equivalent of a blog post.

------
Tepix
Just curious: If you wanted to plant a fake signal that looked like it were
coming from a distant galaxy (say 3 billion ly), how far away from Earth would
you have to place your transmitter?

~~~
Rjevski
You can be on Earth and just sabotage the deep space network antennas or radio
telescopes or whatever they use to receive the signals to directly inject the
signal in the processing pipeline.

------
jcoffland
> Despite widespread speculation, the possibility of the signals coming from
> an advanced alien civilization has been largely ruled out.

In other words, none of the scientists want to sound like quacks. How could
this possibly be "ruled out"? Oh right you put "largely" in front of it.

~~~
knodi123
How much effort did you put into answering "How could this possibly be "ruled
out"?" before you assumed it was just a weaselly political decision?

------
DonHopkins
One of my favorite Stanislaw Lem novels is "His Master's Voice", about a
message from space (only accidentally discovered because it was recorded on
mag tape that was recycled as a one-time random pad, which turned out to
inexplicably repeat itself), which had multiple ambiguous conflicting
interpretations.

It's actually scathing social commentary and philosophical satire about how
fucked up government and military sponsored science can be, and the divide
between the social scientists (elves) and physical sciences (dwarves).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_\(novel\))

Throughout the book Hogarth—or rather, Lem himself—exposes the reader to many
debates merging cosmology and philosophy: from discussions of epistemology,
systems theory, information theory and probability, through the idea of
evolutionary biology and the possible form and motives of extraterrestrial
intelligence, with digressions about ethics in military-sponsored research, to
the limitations of human science constrained by the human nature
subconsciously projecting itself into the analysis of any unknown subject. At
some point one of the involved scientists (Rappaport), desperate for new
ideas, even begins to read and discuss popular science-fiction stories, and
Lem uses this opportunity to criticize the science fiction genre, as Rappaport
soon becomes bored and disillusioned by monotonous plots and the unimaginative
stories of pulp magazines.

[https://scifistandpoint.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/the-
voice-o...](https://scifistandpoint.wordpress.com/2008/12/13/the-voice-of-
that-sf-master-stanislaw-lem/)

The hypotheses popular before the existence of the Project seemed to me
incredibly shallow; they ricocheted back and forth between the pole of
pessimism, which called the silentium universi a natural state, and the pole
of mindless optimism that expected announcements clearly and slowly spelled
out, as if civilizations scattered among the stars would communicate with one
another like children in kindergarten. Yet another myth has bitten the dust, I
thought, and yet another truth has ascended overhead — and, as is usually the
case with truths, it is too much for us.

~~~
kagamine
Good sci-fi is good philosophy. A good companion to sci-fi is history. When
people nay-say because we have no proof and 'given what we know today' I am
reminded that most people didn't have electricity 150 years ago. The
combustion engine is being superseded only 100 years after it became
commonplace. Hell, 50-80 years ago half of England didn't have an indoors
toilet and plumbing. What was the population of the US's tech-central,
California, in 1850? The region was hardly populated. The last 500 years, and
especially in the 20th century we have moved at an astounding rate, both
technologically and socially. I have sci-fi books on my shelf from 40 years
ago in which the population of Earth reaches 'critical' proportions at 5
billion. Nay-sayers at the time would never have accepted that we would reach
over 7bn in 2016. Some HNers in the comments here clearly don't realize that a
great many sci-fi writers have been scientists and cosmologists, professional
and amateur, but dedicated to the science of the genre, and from there they
take their starting point.

~~~
DonHopkins
Lem didn't have a very positive opinion about most sci-fi writers, except for
one in particular:

Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

[http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm](http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm)

But that one particular sci-fi writer had some harsh things to say about Lem
to the FBI, and Lem's criticism got him kicked out of SFWA:

[http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick](http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick)

"[...] What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or
even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of
them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from
Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know
this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other
people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite
committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and
sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain
monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through
criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science
fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in
addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party
operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-
controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I
indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our
professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA. [...]" -PKD to
FBI

Why was Stanislaw Lem expelled from the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of
America) in 1976?

The following quote from J. Madison Davis' book on Stanislaw Lem gives an
answer to your question:

Lem has always been critical of most science fiction, which he considers ill
thought out, poorly written, and interested more in adventure that ideas or
new literary forms. (...) Those opinions provoked an unpleasant debate in the
SFWA [the "Lem affair"]. Philip José Farmer and others were incensed by Lem's
comments (...) and eventually brought about the removal of the honorary
membership(...). Other members, such as Ursula K. Le Guin, then protested the
removal (...) and the SFWA then offered Lem a regular membership, which he, of
course, refused in 1976. Asked later about the "affair," he remarked, that his
opinions of the state of science fiction were already known when he was
offered an honorary membership (...). He also added he harboured no ill
feelings towards the SFWA or U.S. writers in particular, "...but it would be a
lie to say the whole incident has enlarged my respect for SF writers".

------
hoodoof
A long time ago, in a ......

------
sanatgersappa
E.T. phone home?

------
GrumpyNl
If there were aliens, we would have known with clear proof. If they are there,
they are light years ahead and behind in technology and no need for crappy
radio signal.

~~~
rgbrenner
_no need for crappy radio signal_

radio travels at the speed of light.... if the speed of light is a hard limit,
that may be the best we will ever do

------
rpmcmurphy
The correct title here should be "Repeating radio noises coming from distant
galaxy detected". The elephant in the room that SETI fans don't really want to
admit is what if intelligence is actually not that smart, but is actually a
viral form of stupidity that leads to self limiting catastrophe?

~~~
EliRivers
Don't want to admit? Self-destruction is a pretty common posited solution to
the Fermi paradox.

------
bleair
Are other astronomers confirming the origin of these FRBs? There's this
example, where an unexplained signal turned out to be caused by a microwave
oven: [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-
ov...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/may/05/microwave-oven-caused-
mystery-signal-plaguing-radio-telescope-for-17-years)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_(astronomy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peryton_\(astronomy\))

~~~
abricot
With our luck it will turn out to just be an alien microwave.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
How about signal from a terrestrial microwave oven being looped back through a
wormhole.

(Probably ruled out easily by parallax.)

