Thursday, April 07, 2005

Look out for giant triangles in space

"To ensure the signal is unambiguous, an alien civilisation would have to launch a number of objects into orbit around a star. As an example, Arnold imagines 11 objects orbiting a star in groups of one, two, three and five - the first prime numbers. The time interval between each group could also encode prime numbers if the objects were powered rather than orbiting freely. He thinks any civilisation that can engineer giant structures in space would probably not find this a problem." (Via The Anomalist.)

Neat idea, but essentially more SETI anthropomorphism. I think it's more probable that any megascale ET artifacts we discover using telescopes will be constructed purely for the benefit of their creators and might easily be mistaken as natural cosmic phenomena.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haven't various researchers like Sagan and Dyson pointed out that if there are other technological sentient species in the galaxy, it's not likely that they're anywhere near our level of development? They're either back at the homo erectus level or they're millions of years ahead of us in the other direction. Thus its likely that ET HAS the "sufficiently advanced advanced technology" that's "indistinguishable from magic." Don't know if anyone besides Clarke/Kubrick has really thought through the implications of this. They MIGHT be interested in "bringing us along" so to speak, though its not at all clear how they might do this. Very subtly, unobtrusively, and with an extremely light hand probably. The SETI types are really looking for a civilization that's maybe 500-1000 years ahead of us. But if you think how our civilization would look to someone from the Middle Ages (not so very long ago)....

9:50 PM
JohnFen said...

Well, this is a fundamental problem of such exploration, of course. The same problem exists when trying to find life on venus/mars/jupiter/whatever -- we have no idea what to look for. It requires a trade-off, of looking for a subset of your larger goal -- certain stages of alien development, or certain types of biological mechanisms.

I don't fault seti, or astrobiologists for narrowing their field of view. It's pretty much mandatory. I do fault them when they forget that they have made a tradeoff, though.

10:13 PM
Anonymous said...

I think the failure of SETI researchers is mainly a failure of imagination. ETI may also deliberately be making if difficult for us. You can't join the Galactic Club unless/until you pass all the tests, one of which is simply figuring out what the primary medium of interstellar communication IS. And I suspect this is a hard problem.

10:00 PM

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