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Do not disturb the aliens.

psionl0

Skeptical about skeptics
psionl0
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From the Herald Sun:

Plans to point a radio telescope at the newly discovered Threapleton Holmes B planet were scotched by the BBC for fear that they might contact aliens:
. . . Mr Cox said on BBC radio.

"The BBC actually said, 'But you can't do that because we need to go through the regulations and health and safety and everything in case we discover a signal from an alien civilisation'."

"(I said), 'You mean we would discover the first hint that there is other intelligent life in the universe beyond Earth, live on air, and you're worried about the health and safety of it?'

"It was incredible. They did have guidelines. Compliance."
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I presume the intent is to send a signal to that location? Otherwise, a radio telescope is only a receiver.
And the earth has been broadcasting electromagnetic signals to the universe for over 100 years, with a burst of very high energy electromagnetic activity in August of 1945, which could be detected within a 72 light year sphere.
 
You're trying to make sense out of something said by an FI.

This planet is 600 - 3000 light years away for goodness sake! Nothing is going to happen any time soon.
 
This story is bizarre. It seems that they were going to point a radiotelescope at a distant star and listen, and some regulator shut them down? What the hell do they do when radio astronomers point their antenna that way? I call BS. Either this story is a hoax or the reporter misunderstood something.

How long will it take before UFOologists use this as proof of a government coverup of alien life?
 
It was a joke by Cox, but some places are reporting it as news.
 
odeed said:
It was a joke by Cox, but some places are reporting it as news.
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This sounds a lot more likely.

Anyone else in the UK heard that radio ad with very dramatic/scary background music, and a rather striking voice-over that says something like "...welcome to Europe. Where all bananas are thankfully regulated by the government! :jaw-dropp"

They're alluding to this of course...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromyth#Straight_bananas

The ad makes me laugh every time I hear it.
 
psionl0 said:
This planet is 600 - 3000 light years away for goodness sake! Nothing is going to happen any time soon.
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BBC radio 4 suggested that the fear was the impact detection of "their" signals would have on us.

Sputnik had all sorts of odd impacts, and several new psychological disorders followed that little beep-beep-beep... It would not surprise me if there really are health and safety guidelines... Which would make it even better as a joke.
 
Receiving and interpreting sensible signals from outer space would have the social effect of uniting the fundies in the various religions into promoting a crus-had to the aliens and wiping them out.... being unsaved and all... unless the aliens could convince the attacking horde that VndiemI4(((( Lk@123232###+++4_2 ... one of their prophets, could convince them that Jeebus had been there too.
 
psionl0 said:
So the "banana benders" have a purpose other than just living in Queensland Australia. :D
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Hey, we might be more liberal in this part of he world - but we draw the line at queer bananas. It's unnatural, I tells ya!
 
He was making a joke:
Presenter Shaun Keaveny told Cox: "The idea that intelligent life could be discovered and it might swear and that's why we wouldn't broadcast it – it's such a brilliant BBC thing, isn't it?"
Cox's co-presenter on Stargazing Live, Dara O Briain, later suggested on Twitter than Cox was employing some "comedic licence".
"Actually not banned," said O Briain. "We still did it live on-air and heard nothing, sadly."
He added: "It's still funny! It's just that the BBC don't have an ET policy. Neither did the UN. Only the Vatican did.".....

.....A BBC spokeswoman said: "In making the series there were many light-hearted conversations, one of which was about how different organisations might react to the discovery of alien life."
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I Ratant said:
I presume the intent is to send a signal to that location? Otherwise, a radio telescope is only a receiver.
And the earth has been broadcasting electromagnetic signals to the universe for over 100 years, with a burst of very high energy electromagnetic activity in August of 1945, which could be detected within a 72 light year sphere.
Click to expand...

No really. All our activity bare 2 minutes of intentional highly powered directional signal toward a point 10000 LY away (ETA: LY not year), was omnidirectional, or diretced toward earth, meaning signal strength was lost rapidely in 1/r^2, meaning that *at most* you can make a case for some signal going a few AU outward, maybe 1 LY, before being drown out by interstellar noise. And that was when we were wasteful, nowaday I doubt you could detect us with a station on pluto and an antenna pointed directely towad us.
 
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As Aepervius correctly points out, we are pretty invisible to the universe at most distances outside our solar system. Taken from this epic thread, in this particular post, this table explains it quite well:

davefoc said:
Right now the only two kinds of signals that might be used from what I know would be electro-magnetic and neutrino beams. I've never heard of anybody actually proposing a neutrino beam but it seems at least conceivable since there have been at least proposed experiments to see if neutrinos could be produced in one place, transmitted through the earth and detected at another location.

But there have been suggestions that there are other possibilities than the microwave frequencies that are mostly commonly scanned by SETI efforts. One such idea is optical laser pulses. This is a technical paper about the possibility:
http://seti.harvard.edu/oseti/tech.pdf

I didn't read through the whole thing but they propose that detection of emitters within a radius of about 1000 LY is possible.

Here is a document that I found discussion the detection range limits for different kinds of earth produced electro magnetic radiation:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part6/section-12.html

The actual table is about 2/3 of the way through the paper. I put a copy of the table below:

-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
Source | Frequency | Bandwidth | Tsys | EIRP | Detection |
| Range | (Br) |(Kelvin)| | Range (R) |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
AM Radio | 530-1605 kHz | 10 kHz | 68E6 | 100 KW | 0.007 AU |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
FM Radio | 88-108 MHz | 150 kHz | 430 | 5 MW | 5.4 AU |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
UHF TV | 470-806 MHz | 6 MHz | 50 ? | 5 MW | 2.5 AU |
Picture | | | | | |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
UHF TV | 470-806 MHz | 0.1 Hz | 50 ? | 5 MW | 0.3 LY |
Carrier | | | | | |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
WSR-88D | 2.8 GHz | 0.63 MHz | 40 | 32 GW | 0.01 LY |
Weather Radar| | | | | |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
Arecibo | 2.380 GHz | 0.1 Hz | 40 | 22 TW | 720 LY |
S-Band (CW) | | | | | |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
Arecibo | 2.380 GHz | 0.1 Hz | 40 | 1 TW | 150 LY |
S-Band (CW) | | | | | |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
Arecibo | 2.380 GHz | 0.1 Hz | 40 | 1 GW | 5 LY |
S-Band (CW) | | | | | |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+
Pioneer 10 | 2.295 GHz | 1.0 Hz | 40 | 1.6 kW | 120 AU |
Carrier | | | | | |
-------------+--------------+-----------+--------+--------+-----------+

Notice that a one terawatt signal transmitted from a Arecibo sized antenna is required to reach a range of 150 light years.

So you not only have to envision an advanced civilization. You have to envision an advanced civilization that decides to construct a vastly powerful transmitter, a massive antenna and the desire to use them to engage in what is likely to be only one way communication with a fellow advanced civilizaton.

Seems like a long shot to me.
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We are still in contact with extra-solar system probes of limited output. What is the distance these will go mute, to us?
 
I Ratant said:
We are still in contact with extra-solar system probes of limited output. What is the distance these will go mute, to us?
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Directional emission. Plus at some point it will stop being able to communicate with us.

For example :

Built with the intent for eventual interstellar travel, Voyager 2 included a large, 3.7 m (12 ft) parabolic, high-gain antenna (see diagram) to transceive data via the Deep Space Network on the Earth. Communications are conducted over the S-band (about 13 cm wavelength) and X-band (about 3.6 cm wavelength) providing data rates as high as 115.2 kilobits per second at the distance of Jupiter, and then ever-decreasing as the distance increased, because of the inverse-square law.
Click to expand...

Voyager 2 is expected to keep transmitting weak radio messages until at least 2025, over 48 years after it was launched
Click to expand...

At some point it will stop being able to communicate and since it used 33 year to make 100 AU my guess will be around ~40 more AU for 15 more years.

So 140 AU is about about 2.2/1000 of a light year that's nothing.
 
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