
SETI: No Signal Detected from KIC 8462852 - Schiphol
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=34363
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pheroden
When my great grandma was born, we didn't have flight, radar, lasers, radio,
etc... Why would we think that a civilization capable of building massive
space structures would be communicating in such a slow and imprecise way. The
idea that we've discovered all there is to know about communication over vast
distances is hubris.

We can't see anything because we have not yet discovered what we're looking
for.

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maxander
That we would receive a signal with the radio telescope discussed here would
pretty much demand either that they make tremendous use of a very specific
form of propulsion, or that they are putting a substantial fraction of their
available energy into contacting civilizations of precisely our technological
level. There's no thought that we'd pick up their radio chatter between
themselves- we couldn't pick up Earth's radio noise from that distance, and
we're only getting quieter as our technology becomes more effective.

Aliens in the business of contacting emerging civilizations must find
themselves with an interesting tradeoff between transmitter power usage and
contactee technology level- at a guess, it would be exponentially more
expensive to contact species earlier on in their development. We may still
just not be far along enough that the cost-benefit ratio makes sense to talk
to us.

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holografix
First time I started reading about quantum computers and the idea of entangled
particles I immediately thought it would be a neat way to solve long distance
space Comms. Anyone with a better brain than me care to explain if it could be
a possibility?

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techdragon
In short, "it doesn't work the way you think it does"

People keep digging in this area because it's hard to measure accurately so
we're not 100% yet, but the current consensus is that the interaction between
entangled particles, isn't faster than light and should not be faster than
light.

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toomuchtodo
Do the effects of gravity move faster than light?

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Faint
Well, if it's actually a Dyson swarm in the making, we'll find out, watching
the star go gradually dark during the next few hundred (or thousand?) years..

~~~
wangii
It's an interesting idea. For a civilisation is constructing a Dyson swarm,
the time required to build a 20% coverage one to 30% one should be less than a
decade. If I remember correctly, NASA is already be able to observe 1% of the
difference. So we only need to wait for a year.

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PepeGomez
Is there any reason to expect such narrowband signals, or are they the only
kind of signals they could hope to detect?

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poelzi
Correction: "No signal that we use Detected from KIC 8462852"

And ? Nobody with good physical understanding uses Hertz EM waves for
communication except emergency broadcasts if he is clever. Assumptions over
assumptions and not looking outside the box, this is what SETI does and that's
why they are not seeing anything of interest.

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wangii
It would make no sense if a Type 2 Civilization this close to earth did
nothing to us.

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flatline
1480 light years away...it's just too far for practical travel on any sort of
scale, and I assume scale would be required to "do something" to us beyond
taking a glance - and even that seems far-fetched.

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wangii
Assuming a Type 2 civilization has 10x population of the earth, each
individual of it would consumes more energy than all of human beings combined.
It's reasonable to suggest that light-year to it would be less challenging
than AU to us.

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deepnet
Is there any hope of discovering historical observations of this star ?

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happyscrappy
>1480 light years away

One point consistently glossed over is the fact that if you believe nothing
can exceed the speed of light then even if we find intelligent life we will
never communicate in any meaningful sense of the word. It would be more like
mutual observation. Are there any sci-fi works that acknowledge this
depressing reality and somehow manage to make a workable story?

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maxerickson
_A Deepness in the Sky_ deals with interstellar traders that do not have FTL.

The universe the book is set in has a gimmick to allow FTL, but that book
doesn't use FTL (part of the gimmick is that it isn't possible in much of the
galaxy).

Edit: The Revelation Space books also have lots of people moving between stars
at below light speed.

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SolarNet
The author is also a computer scientist so many of his books are well detailed
for those versed in related fields (the way biologists write sci-fi books that
scatter biology details other readers not versed in the subject would miss)
like people here.

A Deepness in the Sky, for example, touches on open source, technical debt,
project management, memory density, branching, DRM, encryption, stenography,
and other more nuanced topics; but it's a sci-fi novel first. All in the
backdrop of a universe with no FTL (at least for this book in the "series",
more like books in the same universe).

He also does great alien races (the other book in the series, A Fire upon the
Deep, has alien races which behave on different computational architectures to
achieve sentience; and touches on obfuscated code (among other topics) in a
great way).

