Finding Frugal Aliens

HollyMinkowski

Gregory Benford said...
Astrophysicist Gregory Benford — standing before the UCI Observatory — believes an alien civilization would transmit “cost-optimized” signals rather than the kind sought for decades by the SETI Institute.

Somebody said...
Assuming that an alien civilization would strive to optimize costs, limit waste and make its signaling technology more efficient, the Benfords propose that these signals would not be continuously blasted out in all directions but rather would be pulsed, narrowly directed and broadband in the 1-to-10-gigahertz range.

www.scientificcomputing.com/news-DS-Finding-Frugal-Aliens-Gregory-Benford-Proposes-Twitter-Approach-072110.aspx

Interesting article... I love stuff like this.
(paging W9GFO )

I don't think that the word "broadband" describes what the Benford's
idea is. Broadband makes me think of a signal covering an enormous
frequency range (like say 1Ghz-10Ghz) I think rather that the idea here is
to look for very short bursts of very narrow band signals that someone
"out there" would transmit with huge power using an antenna that did not
have too tight a focus. It is easier to transmit enormously powerful narrow
band pulses of short duration than it is to send a long distance signal any other way.
These signals would probably be found somewhere in the range of 1-10Ghz.
The Benford's idea would thus be to search for strong, narrow pulsed signals
across this entire frequency range using a high gain antenna aimed not
at nearby stars but at the galactic core where many more possible signal
sources lie clustered together.

Sending out signals of this sort would be relatively inexpensive. Since you
could aim a cheaper, smaller antenna of lower gain toward a section of the sky and
then concentrate your power budget and use it to send a powerful, short burst
of data out in a very narrow signal. Something like 2 + 2 = 4 could be
represented by 10 short pulses .. _ .. __ .... a few sequences following this
pattern would indicate intelligence.

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justasm.blogspot.com/

zoopydogsit

Interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Again, it would depend on their tech level ;-)

For finding a "new" civilization like us, then you'd just listen for anything that is not normal background noise. We've been happily transmitting various low power radio noise for the last 110+ years (experimenting since the 1880's) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio·and certainly ramping up the power and amount since then. We started with a·wisper, but now we are a full blown rock band of noise!·So at the speed of light, anyone withing 100 light years *may* start to hear us, *if* they are listening. Let's hope they are friendly! (though look at the movies we have been transmitting (like ID4, War of the Worlds, District 9, etc) clearly we are sending a message to other civilizations not to visit! ;-).

Likewise for other civilizations out there (assuming there are), hopefully they have Seti programs listening. However they may have long given up hope of finding anything and not listening.

For finding more advanced civilizations, then sure when they first come on line they will be noisy (radio noise beyond normal background noise). However afterward they may go "dark", either by not managing their environment (like us, we probably won't survive in the way we are acting), or deciding to be paranoid (what if we are not alone and others have hostile intentions!), or going to a different medium (I've read discussions of sound pulses going faster than the speed of light (google it), so they may have found something that allows faster than light communication).

So certainly an interesting proposal.

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It's all a function of time.

ElectricAye

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that the mere fact no SETI signal has ever been detected is fairly good evidence that mental telepathy is possible. Why mess with smoke signals when you can use your iLobe?





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Watching the world pass me by, one photon at a time.

localroger

Another reason a technological civilization might "go dark" is that they get their act together. Every signal sent out into deep space is a waste of energy (unless it's intended as a shout-out to the neighbors). With DC transmission lines, fiberoptic grid instead of radio, and other existing technologies it would be possible to vastly reduce Earth's EM emissions, and a lot of the SETI people expect that to happen eventually just because those technologies work better and are more efficient than spraying radio waves in every direction.