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  • 8|: Are alien signals beaming out in fast radio bursts?

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    The extremely energetic events that we see out there in the Universe are usually caused by cataclysmic astrophysical events and activities of one sort or another. But what about Fast Radio Bursts? A pair of astrophysicists at Harvard say that the seldom seen phenomena could, maybe, possibly, be evidence of an advanced alien technology.

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  • :eek: Are alien signals beaming out in fast radio bursts?

    Seems unlikely but it's good that scientists aren't scared to investigate the possibility.

    We are able to listen in to more and more of the universe and we are getting better at narrowing down potential targets to listen to. But (notwithstanding the above) we've heard nothing still.

    Will it change us if it looks as though we actually are the only intelligent life form in our neighbourhood of the universe? Probably not but it should do...

  • I think anyway that as whatever we might pick up went out a long time ago and from very far away we might be, even if it were real, listening to ghosts. That is actually quite eerie.

    If what we are picking up is real, then we should be nipping straws because that means another technologically advanced bunch like ourselves might be gazing with avarice at planets of interest.

  • I think we may be looking in the wrong way. Radio telescopes are looking for CW am or fm signals but just as we're moving to digital broadcast our aliens friends may be using methods that we cannot conceive of for communication. The only thing we might detect is a civilisation slimilar to just in the century past. A small window. Before or after I don't think we'll see it.

    Just as UFO's don't appear on radar, any aliens sufficiently advanced to be able to visit us will surely have their "Romulan cloaking device" fully developed. If we "see" them it would be only because they want us to see them.

  • I think we may be looking in the wrong way. Radio telescopes are looking for CW am or fm signals but just as we're moving to digital broadcast our aliens friends may be using methods that we cannot conceive of for communication. The only thing we might detect is a civilisation slimilar to just in the century past. A small window. Before or after I don't think we'll see it.

    Just as UFO's don't appear on radar, any aliens sufficiently advanced to be able to visit us will surely have their "Romulan cloaking device" fully developed. If we "see" them it would be only because they want us to see them.

    AM or FM is just the method of encoding information on the signal, they are just looking for any signal in the radio end of the spectrum that doesn't seem natural. Seems likely that some kind of electromagnetic radiation will hang around in a civilisation for a long time since it is so easy to use. Just a guess though - once a civilisation has access to huge amounts of energy at miniscule cost then anything goes.

    Cloaking devices are all well and good but most likely aliens will have developed excellent ways of very long range observation long before they come up with them. See how far we have progressed with telescope technology when cloaking devices/warp drives/etc. are still sci-fi for us. They will most likely have a very good idea of who and what we are without needing to get any where near our solar system - unless they want to... That's one of the main reasons for me to think UFOs are nothing to do with aliens - I can't see the point of them playing the games that UFO observations suggest they are playing.

  • Of course if there were "others" out there listening, what would see they see from us first: - Hitler. One of his rallies in the 30s... That would scare them off!

    I don't want to turn this Science thread into a sci-fi one, but many people believe we've already detected signals and perhaps even phone ET from time to time.

    As for UFOs. As you may know from my UFO thread, I believe in them, but what they are, who knows?

    I think anyway that as whatever we might pick up went out a long time ago and from very far away we might be, even if it were real, listening to ghosts. That is actually quite eerie.

    Exactly. I think the more planets we discover (of course we can't actually see other planets beyond our solar system yet) the more likely we may detect signals from a civilisation that is long gone by millions of years.

  • Physicists Uncover Geometric ‘Theory Space’

    A decades-old method called the “bootstrap” is enabling new discoveries about the geometry underlying all quantum theories.

    All this stuff goes over my head. But you do tend to find that some of the top scientists are:

    1. Religious
    2. See patterns in nature like nature has been constructed.

    I don't believe in God, but when I read articles such as this (99% of which I don't understand) I do think there is a possibility that the universe has been constructed and once we understand the building materials of its construction, we'll be able to navigate around it.

  • All this stuff goes over my head. But you do tend to find that some of the top scientist are:

    1. Religious
    2. See patterns in nature like nature has been constructed.

    I don't believe in God, but when I read articles such as this (99% of which I don't understand) I do think there is a possibility that the universe has been constructed and once we understand the building materials of its construction, we'll be able to navigate around it.

    At best a supreme being created the right conditions for a universe and then lit the blue touch paper. This is almost as plausible as the scientific scenario but the religious lads are not able to comprehend that their particular God was at some point created too. The scientific scenario does at least realise it has to come up with a solution to there being initially nothing, and it is sort of working on it.

  • I think we may be looking in the wrong way. Radio telescopes are looking for CW am or fm signals but just as we're moving to digital broadcast our aliens friends may be using methods that we cannot conceive of for communication. The only thing we might detect is a civilisation slimilar to just in the century past. A small window. Before or after I don't think we'll see it.

    Just as UFO's don't appear on radar, any aliens sufficiently advanced to be able to visit us will surely have their "Romulan cloaking device" fully developed. If we "see" them it would be only because they want us to see them.

    If I were an alien I wouldn't want earthlings to see me.

  • All this stuff goes over my head. But you do tend to find that some of the top scientists are:

    1. Religious
    2. See patterns in nature like nature has been constructed.

    I don't believe in God, but when I read articles such as this (99% of which I don't understand) I do think there is a possibility that the universe has been constructed and once we understand the building materials of its construction, we'll be able to navigate around it.

    Yes, absolutely, it constructed itself. Things don't have much of a choice in reality as they are acted upon by forces and conditions. Water boils. No God necessary, just heat. He is necessary to turn it into wine, though. That is something Nature would find absurdly obtuse. Like turning mud into chocolate.

  • Yes, absolutely, it constructed itself.


    To be clear, I don't think the universe constructed itself. Someone or something did it. I think the universe as we know it, is someone else's petri dish.

    So, I don't believe in God. An all knowing, all seeing rather jealous being, at least according to the bible. But I do believe in a creator, or perhaps a architect maybe a better term.

  • Okay, but think of the vastness of the universe, for a start, and the enormity of the cosmos, or the possibility of other dimensions and someone creating this becomes an impossibility. It's just too huge and the temperatures are so high that nothing could create them or not be destroyed by them. They create themselves from conditions extant in the cosmos itself. There is also the idea that the cosmos is designed and that it is somehow mathematical and precise and this has led people historically to think it has been made by someone or something and that it has some sort of planned structure.

    But the cosmos is a terrible and terrifying soup of noxious chemicals and terrific heat, and is a dimension of colliding, spinning objects seemingly held in together and in suspension by gravity and what humans have called "dark matter". It is so vast and so incomprehensible to a species living on what seems to be a beautiful, organised world that people have come to see the cosmos in the same light as our lovely little blue gem floating in a sea of stars with a nice well behaved moon.

    The cosmos is such a frightening prospect when viewed without the mantle of intelligent creator or brilliant architect that few can stand the power of its brutal naked reality, so we tend to gaze up at the sparklies and as we can't see very far, we don't think about the fact that the cosmos, just in our perceivable dimension, appears to go on forever. Even those with access to mighty telescopes have a certain smugness about what they see. I don't think they really comprehend what they see. They don't give me that feeling. They just seem keen to mine asteroids and colonise worlds for their own use and abuse. The cosmos itself possibly escapes most of them. Often, the smug ones use the sliver of knowledge and surmise about the cosmos to try and force socio-political issues onto people on earth. "See? we are unimportant so we should all hug and go global" is the most usual subliminal information they squeeze into their feeding tubes on TV documentaries.

    I think this is why religion is so important to humans. Once a species is able to perceive itself in a certain way and looks out at the enormity of existence, it will, perhaps of necessity, invent some fences in which to enclose this dragon and a invent a creator to explain why it's there.

    I often wonder if humans will be able to face or confront the possibility that there is far more to everything than they could ever have imagined within the context of a belief that there are limits or designers. The sheer force of Independence in the cosmic spectacle might make that impossible for most.

    I don't know what it is and why it exists but I think that the best way to consider the dragon on the doorstep is to try to learn its nature in order to understand it.

    There is the possibility that most humans don't want to do this because of the depression no creator tends to forge in the human psyche. Like having no parents. Like being a small speck of dust in a gigantic beam of light. Humans can't really hold that as well as believe that politics will solve their problems or that some sort of deific power is at the root of existence. Power certainly is, but I doubt that it is a being of any sort or that it is experimenting with our universe.

    Humans need to be capable of accepting firstly their own reality and possible insignificance as well as realising that we might be passing up the chance in a million of being intelligent enough to put out a hand to that dragon on the dark doorstep of the sky. For me, it will not be a terrible dragon but one of the ancient pagan wise dragons, who has the answer that we seek but who can't reach us if we don't reach out to discover it. And we need to stop killing dragons. This has been a bad habit humans have had since first they suspected that all is not what it seems. They tended to kill what they didn't understand or make up stories about it to make it fit into what they thought.

    Some humans are trying to perceive things differently today but I still see far too much ego in their endeavours, and to much simplicity in their conceptions, as though all they really want is a nice playground full of harmless things they can enjoy, where no one ever dies and Shangri-la regenerates itself from some benign source of energy. They are still so smug about what they think they know and about what they think they will be able to do to keep Shangri-la going. It's a very infantile mindset and it is getting more so instead of less so as humans begin the long journey to eventual disorganisation, helplessness and chaos in their slavery to technology. In the future, God may well morph into a giant android.

    That has to go if you want to meet the dragon on the dark doorstep of the sky. But how many humans really want that? Not many. And those who have sought truth and understanding through experience and exploration have always been far fewer than those who have climbed onto the bandwagon of hedonism that is often the result of discoveries.

    Are we our own worst enemies? Yes.


  • To be clear, I don't think the universe constructed itself. Someone or something did it. I think the universe as we know it, is someone else's petri dish.

    So, I don't believe in God. An all knowing, all seeing rather jealous being, at least according to the bible. But I do believe in a creator, or perhaps a architect maybe a better term.

    Who constructed the constructor then?

  • Who constructed the constructor then?

    Don't know. There could many universes but all contained in petri dishes for advanced beings who may live in a realm totally different to our own but in fact live in someone else's petri dish.... and so it goes on.

    Current science believes that the universe began with the big bang, but what caused it and what was before? I don't think something can be created out of nothing, there had to have been something beforehand.

  • Don't know. There could many universes but all contained in petri dishes for advanced beings who may live in a realm totally different to our own but in fact live in someone else's petri dish.... and so it goes on.

    Current science believes that the universe began with the big bang, but what caused it and what was before? I don't think something can be created out of nothing, there had to have been something beforehand.

    But at some point you come back to the same issue that science has - something must have come out of nothing. Only if you believe in a supernatural being can you bypass that one.

    The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle says that you can get something from nothing by the way...

  • I don't agree that the mathematical principle of Heisenberg can answer the illogical statement of making something out of nothing. This might be caused by my inability to accept that nothing can exist. If no thing is no thing then it's no thing. If something, then something. This is the huge conundrum is it not?

    But on a serious note, Hox, do you think that there is a glimmer of hope in solving the conundrum of why and how?

  • But at some point you come back to the same issue that science has - something must have come out of nothing

    I just don't believe that.

    Only if you believe in a supernatural being can you bypass that one.


    Depends what we mean by "supernatural" could be just another advanced being but in a different realm, as I said.

    The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle says that you can get something from nothing by the way...

    Does it? That seems to relate to to the measurement of motion. It's talking about physical particles, stuff that is real.

  • I don't agree that the mathematical principle of Heisenberg can answer the illogical statement of making something out of nothing. This might be caused by my inability to accept that nothing can exist. If no thing is no thing then it's no thing. If something, then something. This is the huge conundrum is it not?

    But on a serious note, Hox, do you think that there is a glimmer of hope in solving the conundrum of why and how?

    I'm not sure we will ever comprehend what is going on, mainly because we are born and grow up in a 3D macroscopic world and by the time we get interested in the reality of nature our brains are too far gone down the common sense route to understand it any other way. However there's been enough bright people about to test our common sense ideas of reality with maths and found that it has failed.

    The uncertainty principle is pretty clear that you can get something from nothing. We (including me) can't get our heads around the reality of it because we don't understand actual reality i.e. we think things either exist or they don't, but the maths speaks for itself (until someone disproves it of course!).

  • I just don't believe that.
    Depends what we mean by "supernatural" could be just another advanced being but in a different realm, as I said.Does it? That seems to relate to to the measurement of motion. It's talking about physical particles, stuff that is real.

    It's not really a matter of belief. Either something has come from nothing or there is something supernatural going on. By supernatural I mean it transcends the laws of physics i.e. it can always have existed "because it has". Any other advanced being must have developed from something...

    As above - our common sense concept of what is real has already been shown to be wrong, but we've only replaced it with maths and not a new physical understanding. There is a time-energy derivation of the uncertainty principle which allows for something to come from nothing.

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