"An image of the Galactic center, made by collecting radio waves of about 1 meter (3 feet) in wavelength, revealed multiple bursts from the source during a seven-hour period from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, 2002 -- five bursts in fact, and repeating at remarkably constant intervals." (Via The Anomalist.)
"Remarkably constant intervals." Isn't that one of SETI's criteria for an intelligent signal? Yes, there are natural cosmic phenomena that can produce repeating "signals" -- but does this mean all such phenomena are necessarily natural?
Whatever is responsible for the anomalous bursts could be some sort of alien technology, perhaps something beyond our understanding. SETI's aliens, after all, are thinly disguised versions of ourselves, governed by the same aspirations and needs. But real aliens are another matter; some ET civilizations (if the term "civilization" is even applicable) could be arbitrarily foreign. Their works might seem utterly implacable or even senseless from our point of view.
Unfortunately, openness to the unexpected is not one of our strengths -- at least at the institutional level. So whatever we've just found out there near the galactic center will almost certainly be attributed to natural causes, regardless whether those causes are known.
There is a classic UFO debunking in which government "researchers," rushed to explain away the phenomenon, dismissed an impressive sighting as an atmospheric oddity so rare that it had never been witnessed before or since. This same need to resolve controversies by explaining unknowns with unknowns has proven nastily persistent and presents a grave challenge to ventures such as radio-based SETI, which seems perfectly convinced that it will know ETI when it finds it.
Personally, I'm not so sure.
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Check out the story about this on Spaceflightnow.com. It has a lot more detail than the Reuters story.
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0503/03object/
Here's an especially interesting excerpt:
"One important clue to understanding the origin of the radio bursts is that the emission appears to be "coherent," Hyman said. "There are very few classes of coherent emitters in the universe. Natural astronomical masers -the analog of laser emission at microwave wavelengths - are one class of coherent sources, but these emit in specific wavelengths. In contrast, the new transient's bursts were detected over a relatively large bandwidth.""
Of course the Encyclopedia Galactica will be transmitting over a large bandwidth -- much more information flow that way!
(BTW, if it is ET, I predict that this is the last we'll hear of it, unfortunately.)
--WMB
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