Why is it so quiet out there?

I was going to write a long detailed answer to this but I realized that I was just giving you an abridged version of this paper by Ray Kurzweil

http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr...

This guy is no quack. He's been recognized by President Clinton and Bill Gates, to name a few, as being on the forefront of predicting future technology.

His explanation of why the heavens are so quiet comes at the end of the paper, but everything before that is also really interesting.

Im sure we can say with certainty that we are not alone.

There may be a simple and valid reason why we have heard nothing; Longevity!

We know that a species can survive for hundreds of millions of years. The dinosuars are an example,they could have lived for 500,000 ,000 or 1000,000,000 years but they succummbed to a statistic. The condition of the sun would eventually be a deciding factor,in any case.

The question goes back to "Are we alone in the universe"?

There is no proof but logic dictates that life proliferates througout the universe.

What makes man so unique or so different?

If man had existed with the dinosaurs,his superior survival instincts may have allowed him to survive the catastrophe that wiped out other species

Prehistoric man was intelligent.Dolphins, monkeys and dogs are intelligent.

What changed man and when did the change take place?

Some way the survival intelligence of man changed,that set him apart from the rest of the earths creatures and set the stage for an early demise!

Man developed the ability to be objective! This shortened his life expectancy from hundreds of millions to maybe tens of thousands of years.

This final blow to his dominence on this planet came when he became technological!

One hundred years ago man became capable of broad casting his existence to outer space.

He developed the transistor,the integrated circuit and the microprocessor and hurled himself into a grave yard spiral toward his early extinction.

We became an information society The knowledge of man is shared by one and all.

The earth shrank from a planet sized ball to a small patch of geography.

Individuals,for the most part appear to have survival instincts but the human race seems to be collectively suicidal.

SETI : why are they not bombarded with intelligent signals from outer space,

I believe that technological societies are very short lived maybe on the order of about 350 years give or take,maybe 100 years!

If the closest signal came from 500 light years away it could have been sent before we were capable detecting it or reached here after we were gone!.

Man is getting capable of destroying himself and lots of individuals are just waiting for the technology to mature.

Well it is something to think about!

First of all, radio communications are unlikely because of the length of time they would take to get to any of these planets and back. Secondly, the Earth, despite what many naturalists say, is quite unique in it's properties. It is/has the right:

Distance from its star (temperature),

Atmosphere (Nessicary for the greenhouse effect, which is actually benificial because it regulates the planet's temperature),

Size (Not too strong or weak gravity),

Position in the Galaxy (broad subject, won't enter it right now),

Protection (From asteroids by planets like jupiter and saturn),

and more for life (Magnetic field, tilt of axis, I could go on and on).

Chances are slim that another planet would be so similer as ours, and slimmer that life would be on it.

P.S. Forgive me for my spelling errors.

Maybe all the civilizations have used up their cell phone minutes and don't have rollover.

theres so many different signals in space that we could never decipher .... but they are there and we have had rhythmical static too ,Apparently TV's and radios are not the only things to suffer strange anomalies in their reception! In 1927 it was reported that two American scientists had received strangely delayed signals from space. Apparently signals were somehow finding their way beamed back to Earth after a delay of some considerable time!

Even more curious was the fact that the reception of these signals was staggered into intervals that appeared far too precise for them to have been the product of mere chance alone! The mystery deepened! More experiments were conducted, and to the amazement of all concerned it was found that signals beamed out into space were returning to their point of origin after three of four weeks! Once again these signals exhibited apparently intelligent intervals in the spacing of their transmission, like an elaborate form of celestial morse-code!

In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.

The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.

This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.

But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.

Absorb and emit

“It’s the most interesting signal from SETI@home,” says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. “We’re not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it.”

Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.

Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.

SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak.

“We are looking for something that screams out ‘artificial’,” says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. “This just doesn’t do that, but it could be because it is distant.”

Unknown signature

The telescope has only observed the signal for about a minute in total, which is not long enough for astronomers to analyse it thoroughly. But, Korpela thinks it unlikely SHGb02+14a is the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and it does not bear the signature of any known astronomical object.

That does not mean that only aliens could have produced it. “It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind like I stumbled over,” says Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath, UK.

It was Bell Burnell who in 1967 noticed a pulsed radio signal which the research team at the time thought was from extraterrestrials but which turned out to be the first ever sighting of a pulsar.

There are other oddities. For instance, the signal’s frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. “The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that’s rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet,” Korpela says.

This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.

Fishy and puzzling

The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is “fishy”, he says. “If [the aliens] are so smart, they’ll adjust their signal for their planet’s motion.”

The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second.

What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting. “It just boggles my mind,” Korpela says.

The signal could be an artefact that, for some reason, always appears to be coming from the same point in the sky. The Arecibo telescope has a fixed dish reflector and scans the skies by changing the position of its receiver relative to the dish.

When the receiver reaches a certain position, it might just be able to reflect waves from the ground onto the dish and then back to itself, making it seem as if the signal was coming from space.

“Perhaps there is an object on the ground near the telescope emitting at about this frequency,” Korpela says. This could be confirmed by using a different telescope to listen for SHGb02+14a.