
Arecibo Observatory Detects Mysterious, Energetic Radio Burst - givan
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/04/20/mysterious-energetic-radio-burst/
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jpdlla
Pretty cool seeing this here. I recently met someone who works at the
observatory here in the island in a Python user group meeting. I was intrigued
by the kind of work he did over there with Python. But was instantly bummed
out when he told me how their budget has been so dramatically cut during the
past few years. There's some interesting things regarding budget, and one of
the latest repairs that had to be done after an earthquake north from Puerto
Rico damaged one of the suspension cables that support a 900 ton telescope
platform here [http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-
blogs/2014/0409-arecibo...](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-
blogs/2014/0409-arecibo-observatory-earthquake-repairs.html)

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3rd3
I cannot understand why these kind of projects lack funding. Is there no super
rich person on this planet who is obsessed with the thought of
extraterrestrial life?

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melling
I cannot understand why people keep turning to the super rich to solve
problems.

There are 7 billion people on the planet. Isn't it time that the 1 billion of
us who appear super rich to the other 6 billion, do little more?

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ZenPro
What else could they do with super-riches? _shrug_

Ultimately, as evidenced by history, most super-rich reach a stage of life
where they realise the riches in themselves were just a way to keep score and
large philanthropic contributions ensue.

It's a serious philosophical question; once [1] family financial security and
[2]a high quality of life has been secured there is very little left to spend
money on other than initiatives that benefit mankind or the natural world.

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PavlovsCat
Funnily enough, greed seems to occur more often in those who don't really need
it anymore.

> once [1] family financial security and [2]a high quality of life has been
> secured

.. you stop focusing on accumulating more wealth - unless those aren't the
real goals, and the driving force is something less wholesome. There are
natural limits on the wealth a sane person can achieve, unless they inherit or
get incredibly (un?)lucky, but numbers can keep rising long after they lost
any connection to anything "real", and just like in gaming, people can get and
stay stuck to that. And as long as they keep "winning", only the very best get
a chance to pause and reflect.

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steeve
Call me (and Dr Arroway of course) when it starts generating prime numbers.

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Houshalter
Would aliens have any interest in prime numbers, like Earth mathematicians do?

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electromagnetic
That's an interesting question, which simply answered is a plain yes or no.

If they use technology as we understand it, then presumably yes. Prime numbers
are just a unique artifact of basic arithmetic. Our knowledge of prime numbers
appears to date back to at least Ancient Egyptian times, so it's quite safe to
assume an alien race capable of something as technologically adept as
transmitting a signal with the purposeful intent of contacting another race
would know what prime numbers are.

The issue is we're limited to our view point, we're exceptionally naive of
anything different as we've never experienced it. So, is our technology the
only way?

We're designing nanotechnology that could fabricate anything we could dream
of, but what if an alien race ended up evolving a unique cell that could do it
too. We have white blood cells, they have nanofab cells. Would they even
comprehend math if they're just growing jet engines and rocket nozzles?

It's this latter, our unknowable unknowns that will broadside us. How do we
relate to something that's unfathomably alien to us.

The good news is you and I likely won't be around to care when we find out
what aliens are really like.

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josai
> The good news is you and I likely won't be around to care when we find out
> what aliens are really like

I've never understood this sentiment. I would most certainly like to be around
if and when we find this out, for better or worse. Why wouldn't you want to
be?

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toomuchtodo
Its likely a significantly advanced race isn't going to be kind to us.

Do you feel despair when you step on ants on the sidewalk?

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josai
> Do you feel despair when you step on ants on the sidewalk?

Well no, but neither do I go out of my way to step on them. And I don't see
that we'll be so very, very far behind these beings that they're not even
capable of recognising we're sentient. Indeed, with all their technology, they
should be even more aware of the potential sentience of life than we are.

In the last 100 years or so, humanity has made great strides towards its
treatment of lesser animals - we have a long way to go, but it wouldn't be
unreasonable to set a goal of zero intentional animal cruelty by 2100. I'd
expect technologically advanced aliens to be similarly advanced ethically, or
if they do wipe us out, it would at least be deliberate (eg 'the killing star'
logic).

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jonnathanson
Most of the pessimistic alien-encounter scenarios involve the aliens' wiping
us out for reasons of convenience. They need our resources, and we're either
pointless or competitive to keep around.

Personally, I find that argument a little naive and anthropocentric. Who's to
say they need our resources? Couldn't they find resources aplenty in
asteroids, on planets closer to their home, or through artificial synthesis?
It makes little economic or biological sense to go through the trouble of
exploring vast, deep regions of space purely for the purposes of acquiring
resources. (And that's even assuming they need the same resources we do, in
the first place.)

In all likelihood, an alien intelligence that made itself deliberately known
to us would be doing it for scientific or diplomatic reasons. If they want our
planet, they could just take it. There'd be no need even to deal with us; they
could just lob a few asteroid-sized objects at our planet, eradicate life on
the surface, then come in and harvest away.

To your point: any sufficiently advanced intelligence that's going to bother
interacting with us will probably have studied us well in advance. It will
know as much as it can about us. It might (depending on its alien mindset)
have a good understanding of our potential sentience, and a respect for
sentience in general.

The real threat isn't from alien intelligence, but from alien AI. A dumb AI,
at that, of the kind that mindlessly travels the galaxy, self-replicates, and
harvests material without discrimination. But again: a race advanced enough to
develop such technology would probably be aware of the consequences of letting
it run amok. There would be checks against that scenario by design.

We're very quick to ascribe a bleak, law-of-the-jungle amorality to alien
intelligence. But let's think about it. Such an intelligence had many "tests"
to pass: a nuclear age (or some equivalent thereof), climate change (or some
equivalent thereof), wars, and so forth. If it's far more advanced than we
are, it probably passed and survived all those tests to get there. It's very
hard to pass those tests in the absence of a complex, well-developed ethical
system.

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Houshalter
>The real threat isn't from alien intelligence, but from alien AI. A dumb AI,
at that, of the kind that mindlessly travels the galaxy, self-replicates, and
harvests material without discrimination. But again: a race advanced enough to
develop such technology would probably be aware of the consequences of letting
it run amok. There would be checks against that scenario by design.

Don't have too much confidence in that. If a civilization creates AI, it could
possibly improve itself and become incredibly intelligent, but still keep the
simple goals that it was originally programmed with. Thus endlessly self-
replicating, consuming the universe to create bigger computers, or destroy
threats to itself, or preserve it's existence as long as possible.

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frik
Arecibo Observatory was used as a filming location in the climax of the _James
Bond_ movie _GoldenEye_ (1995):

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

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curiousDog
Not to mention but also my ATF movie, Contact

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serf
related, it also appears all over Sagan's Cosmos.

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graycat
With the estimate that the distance to the source is 3 billion light years,
what would the energy at the source have been? How much energy are we talking?

How much red shift are we talking? So, at the source, at what frequencies was
most of the energy from?

What happened to the other frequencies, lower, higher, or much higher? We do
believe that gamma rays can travel 3 billion light years without being
absorbed or deflected, right?

Let's see a sky map of the estimated locations of the dozen or so signals so
far?

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ZenPro
Great link. Can someone with a bit more expertise elaborate on this part -

> _Normally, radio waves travel at the speed of light. This means that all the
> different wavelengths and frequencies of radio waves emitted by the same
> object – say, a pulsar – should arrive on Earth in one big batch._

As someone not particularly well-schooled in physics; I envisage quite simply
that if I turn on a radio then off again then on again - the two transmissions
arrive separately at another source.

Is that not the same for extra/intergalactic transmissions? If an external
transmitter broadcast continual signals would earth not receive them with time
delays between each one?

HN must have a science grad that can explain why I am mistaken.

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Steuard
The phrasing of that section isn't entirely clear, but I think the idea is a
little simpler than what you're imagining.

What the article means is that if you have a single, very short emission of
waves with a combination of multiple frequencies, then in principle an
observer ought to observe all of the emitted waves arrive at the same time,
regardless of frequency. (Traveling the same distance at the same velocity
should mean arrival at the same time, after all.)

In this case, though, they see the radio-frequency equivalent of a short blue
flash first and later a short green flash and then a short red flash (and
presumably all gradations in between, all blurred into one event of gradually
decreasing frequency). The notion (as I understand it: not my specialty) is
that the longer wavelengths get slowed down a bit more as they pass through
galactic and/or intergalactic dust, so their speed is lower.

Now, what you're probably wondering is, "Why do they think it's a single short
event that's gotten 'smeared out' during travel rather than a longer event
that continuously changed wavelengths as it happened at the source?" I don't
know the answer for sure, but astronomers have a lot of practice in
recognizing these things. One possibility is pulse shape: if the pattern of
brightening and dimming of the "blue" light looks exactly the same as the
patterns for the "green" and "red" light, it's more likely that it came from a
single source event rather than a continuous process.

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TimSAstro
Steuard is right, and astronomers have good reasons to expect this behaviour -
wave dispersion. The best link I can find from a quick google is this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_(water_waves)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_\(water_waves\))
-which refers specifically to dispersion of water (typically, ocean) waves,
but the concepts are the same. (Edited to add) We expect dispersion effects in
the case of fast radio bursts due to effects of propagation through the
interstellar medium. Not my area of expertise, but see
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8316](http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8316) if you want a
properly referenced starting point.

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Steuard
Maybe it's worth mentioning that we're all at least a little bit familiar with
dispersion in other contexts: it's the same phenomenon that makes a prism work
to split white light into colors, and that is responsible for rainbows. (The
angle that light bends when passing through a surface depends on the precise
speed that light of that frequency travels on each side. When different
frequencies have different speeds, that's dispersion, and what started as
combined white light splits into a different color at each angle.)

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coldcode
Shows you that the amount of what we know about the universe is likely less
than what we don't. I've always thought that mind boggling discoveries that
change our understanding of the universe is the only constant in it.

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chippy
We are detecting something from a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

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kator
The death star explosion?

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jotm
I think Alderaan's explosion generated more energy :-)

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lifeisstillgood
cool - it just has to Anti-matter weapons taking out planetary hubs with Minds
directing the defences ... :-)

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Udo
The events are too short and too powerful for even Star Trek-like weapons :)

It's clear from the article that the amount of energy required for these
bursts would be far in excess of what could be considered practical - even for
planet-scope warfare. There is no characteristic gamma pulse which would be
expected from an antimatter annihilation, and the pulse length is not exactly
what we would expect from this type of weapon either.

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girvo
But certainly not too short and powerful for the Culture! ;)

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XorNot
Gridfire.

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satori99
Someone has to stop the Idarians

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shutupalready
Is this discovery and the Oh-My-God particle related?

( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-
God_particle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle) )

