What will it take to get a decent extraterrestrial DVR?
Some 8,000 antennas are going up in the Australian desert, as reported by Ken Chang, my Science Times colleague. They’ll be listening for signals broadcast from other worlds, but they’ll only be able to pick up really strong ones, like military radar, which is not exactly riveting entertainment. It is not must-see TV. It is not “Galaxy Quest.”
As any fan of that movie knows, television is the great hope for interstellar communion. Aliens come to Earth not to conquer or explore it but to abduct their space-opera idols. They cross the cosmos to recruit a TV starship commander (Tim Allen as a version of Captain Kirk) and hear the Mr. Spock figure (Alan Rickman) utter his signature line: “By Grabthar’s hammer, by the Sons of Warvan, you shall be avenged.” The visiting nerds are Trekkies with real spaceships — and, apparently, a lot better antennas than the ones we’re putting up in Australia.
The problem is that the Australian project is being run by astronomers, not social scientists. They haven’t considered that other worlds might have television, maybe even better television than Star Trek. They’re not thinking of potential papers like “Multi-Gender Stereotypes in Alpha Centauri Domestic Dramas.” “The Parallel Evolution of Universal Sitcom Devices.” “Reality Television As A Precursor to Civilizational Collapse.”
Granted, this would be expensive social science. When I asked Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, what kind of antenna we’d need to pick up E.T. TV, he informed me it would be “a honking hunk of hardware.” (You can see his more detailed calculations here.) He figures you’d need a square antenna about 1.5 miles on each side just to pick up enough of a signal to let you know that aliens were on the air. If you wanted to actually watch the programming, it would have to be many thousands of times larger.
“You’re talking about antennas that rival New Jersey in size, if not in moral authority,” he told me.
I will refrain from another easy New Jersey joke. There is no need to turn the Garden State into an antenna farm. But there’s plenty of room in the Australian desert to pick up another civilization’s space opera. By Grabthar’s hammer, by the sons of Warvan, it should be recorded.
6 Comments
I recently read a couple of books about Tesla. When I got to the descriptions of his experiments on broadcasting energy (as opposed to the old fashioned wires on poles) I wondered what those high frequency, high amplitude bursts of energy might look like from an extraterrestial POV. Could experimental broadcasts like Tesla’s, uncontrolled by regulation or concerns of interference, reveal an intelligent species’ early tinkering with the electromagnetic spectrum? Is it possible that someday aliens will show up here looking for the source of some very unnatural and bizarre broadcasts that originated from Colorado a little more than a century ago? I’d be interested in knowing what the professionals think of this possibility.
— martin g.Would it be possible to select a large, sprawling area and link all the rooftop antennae? Or does the shape matter? Then, would it be possible to interconnect those areas into grids by doing the same with local and remote cities?
— PirateRoThe problem with Seti and the ilk is that it’s failure is predictable if radio communications elsewhere parallel its evolution on earth. Modern digital radio is evolving towards two characteristics 1) optimal compression (e.g. CDMA cellphone) and 2) ultrawideband (e.g. wimax). Both of these endeavor to raise the entropy of the broadcast waveform to it’s maximum achievable state. If you layer encryption on top of that it really does make the entropy nearly that of pure noise. As a result optimal commnications is not difeerentiable from noise.
— Charlie StraussSo the question is what is the time span between when an alien race developes primitive low entropy marconi style radio and when it achieve optimal encoding high entropy wideband radio? 50 years? if our seti projects don’t happen to overlap in time that 50 year window of arriving alien waveforms we have no chance of detecting them.
One can only hope that some portion of the radio spectrum will never have economic drivers for optimal utilization and thus be decipherable in perpetuity. Fat chance.
Our window of opportunity for radio wave detection would seem smaller than Sagan’s limit on the time between when a life form discovers radio and when it discovers and implements the means of it’s own anihilation. e.g. even if we are optimistic can humans expect civilization to endure longer than say the age of the allosaurus. If we don’t overlap in that interval detection of signals is impossible as well.
The fantastic optimist in me wants to cheer efforts like SETI but the realist in me recognizes the futility in such an effort. Many in the general populace, and often found throughout the halls of greater public and private scientific research community fail to grasp the number of variables that go into assuming such intelligent life will communicate with us in a form we are generally aware or technically capable of as the previous commenter noted.
When people talk about SETI, it reminds me of a commercial that Cox Comunications is currently running in our market with a geeky looking guy talking to the cable guy – the dialog basically goes like:
geek-”I went out to the bar and got three girls phone numbers but only one called me – what is the chance that they all called at the same time and only one got through”
cable guy – “probably, like, one in a billion”
geek – “so you’re saying there still is a chance”
— allen olsonWe should look for signals from ‘empty’ space. I personally think it rude to point a listening device directly at a star system. It is the difference between scanning frequencies and wiretapping.
I am a big fan of SETI, but so far it has operated without moral constraints.
— charlie moquinGreat story you got here. It would be great to read a bit more concerning that theme.
— Mobile phone blocker