SETI Candidate Signals List

Blue Shift
I've sometimes wondered about the ramifications of finding a signal from an intelligent alien that was coming from someplace so far away that we would never, ever be able to interact with them. In the long run, unless they're broadcasting blueprints for a faster than light starship, I don't think humanity would either benefit or be harmed by it.

At first, it would be interesting to know that we're not the only intelligent creatures in the universe. Just "interesting," though, and not necessarily good or bad. You could understand it as proving that we're even more insignificant than we were before, and that we can't even claim to be all that unique as a species. Or you could get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that we're not alone in the universe. Although for all practical purposes, not being able to interact with them would be practically the same as being alone. Maybe even worse. Lonely.

After the terror of the possibility of an alien invasion settled down, then the whole subject would be taken over by the academics, who we know tend to take exciting things and make them horribly boring. So it would kind of fade away into the realms of those folks who translate cuneiform tablets and things like that. We'd go on about our short, brutal little lives, knowing that some other creature is up there in the sky, but ultimately... so what?

Very odd view to have considering much of our society is based on the texts and works of civilizations we will never interact with as they are in our distant past.

Some even based whole religions on them.

What Ross said is essentially correct. Finding a signal could very well be a lifeboat in that it lets us know that at least someone else out there managed to survive.

tanka418

Ross 54
Given the margins of error in the position of the Ohio State University 'Wow Signal' ( plus or minus 10 arc seconds Right Ascension, plus or minus 20 arc minutes Declination) it wasn't possible to point to a specific star as the possible source of the signal. A great many stars reside within the area defined.

You got those values for RA and decl...I'd like to "see".

Converted to J2000 equinox, the "wow" signal came from:

Declination: −26°57′ ± 20′
Right ascension is split between positive and negative horns:
Postive: 19h25m31s ± 10s
Negative: 19h28m22s ± 10s

Notice the plus or minus for error. In declination it's 20 minutes. For the RA's it is plus or minus 10 seconds.

The area is in the constellation Sagittarius. Here is a image from the wikipedia article:



the two red areas shaded in is where the area of detection was.

reply to post by JadeStar


Actually, Blueshift does have some good points.

Say we detected signals, and they are without any doubt ET in origin. Pin pointing the signal places it coming from a star that is let us say, about 200 lightyears away from us.

There would be a lot of excitement at first. Big headlines, lots of enthusiasm one way or another (the warm fuzzy crowd is all excited, the "ZOMG! They are going to use their alien zombie beams on us!" crowd, the CT crowd talking about how we've known about this for 50 years now, but is just now being disclosed, etc, etc, etc.

Now....let's say it's just a signal that contains no audio or visual information on it, but simply telemetry of some sort.....

While the scientific community would be jumping up and down with joy, and examining that telem data for years and years in dreamy happiness.....your average Joe on the street is going to eventually shrug their shoulders after a while.

What's the big deal? It's a signal with a bunch of numbers? Smeh.......does it tell us anything about them? Why couldn't the signals be television signals with episodes of some sort of ET "Big Brother" show?

Being at 200 light years....even our very first radio transmissions will not have reached them yet......
Any signal we send their way.....well, it will be 200 years before our signal gets there. Will they be listening? And even if they are....it will be at least 400 years to hear a reply......

Average Joe (and all of us) will have been dead for a very long time, and would never know.

Wouldn't stop scientist from being still excited though (and I just had a flash back to Hitchhiker's Guide.....all those millions of years they waited for the answer from Deep Thought....and it was "42"....hehehehehe...).

Now......I can counter that with: let us change the idea a little bit. Let us say it's still a star 200 light years away...but instead of just some telem data signal, it is instead, audio, or even better, video signals....

THAT would captivate many in the world for a very long time.

Even your Average Joe would think it neat that he can get home from work, kick back and turn on his satellite TV and watch broadcasts coming from another world.....even if we couldn't understand it.

I'm pretty sure a entirely new culture would grow up around it. Someone would market it in different ways: "The Alien Show" on The Dish Network. Get your "The Alien Show" T-Shirt, or your "Alien Show" coffee cup!

Blue Shift
I've sometimes wondered about the ramifications of finding a signal from an intelligent alien that was coming from someplace so far away that we would never, ever be able to interact with them. In the long run, unless they're broadcasting blueprints for a faster than light starship, I don't think humanity would either benefit or be harmed by it.

At first, it would be interesting to know that we're not the only intelligent creatures in the universe. Just "interesting," though, and not necessarily good or bad. You could understand it as proving that we're even more insignificant than we were before, and that we can't even claim to be all that unique as a species. Or you could get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that we're not alone in the universe. Although for all practical purposes, not being able to interact with them would be practically the same as being alone. Maybe even worse. Lonely.

After the terror of the possibility of an alien invasion settled down, then the whole subject would be taken over by the academics, who we know tend to take exciting things and make them horribly boring. So it would kind of fade away into the realms of those folks who translate cuneiform tablets and things like that. We'd go on about our short, brutal little lives, knowing that some other creature is up there in the sky, but ultimately... so what?

Someone wrote a good book about that.

reply to post by JadeStar


JadeStar, there are far better way of displaying this kind of data...converting the to a real table would be a huge help, and take less bandwidth. Converting this to a real database would also help...and you don't need anything more than Access. (access is a SQL engine just like MySQL, oracle and sql server).

Using a format like this borders on rude...

tanka418
reply to post by JadeStar

 

JadeStar, there are far better way of displaying this kind of data...converting the to a real table would be a huge help, and take less bandwidth. Converting this to a real database would also help...and you don't need anything more than Access. (access is a SQL engine just like MySQL, oracle and sql server).

Using a format like this borders on rude...

No offense dude, but you are coming across kinda hostile.

Soulece

I hate to break it to you but that video is not the WOW signal.

Of course not. The WOW signal was never recorded as audio, it was recorded as characters on a continuous feed printout. I'd imagine the "audio" was inserted in the video presented because people expect talkies in motion pictures these days. Silent movies aren't as entertaining to short attention span folk.

1ofthe9

tanka418
reply to post by JadeStar

 

JadeStar, there are far better way of displaying this kind of data...converting the to a real table would be a huge help, and take less bandwidth. Converting this to a real database would also help...and you don't need anything more than Access. (access is a SQL engine just like MySQL, oracle and sql server).

Using a format like this borders on rude...

No offense dude, but you are coming across kinda hostile.

Hostile?? Nothing could be further from the truth!

However, there are better ways in which to format and present data.

A line by line list of SQL insert statements is not only difficult on the eye, but actually introduces error. Converting the data into a "human readable" form is always recommended (data reporting-101).

eriktheawful

tanka418

Ross 54
Given the margins of error in the position of the Ohio State University 'Wow Signal' ( plus or minus 10 arc seconds Right Ascension, plus or minus 20 arc minutes Declination) it wasn't possible to point to a specific star as the possible source of the signal. A great many stars reside within the area defined.

You got those values for RA and decl...I'd like to "see".

Converted to J2000 equinox, the "wow" signal came from:

Declination: −26°57′ ± 20′
Right ascension is split between positive and negative horns:
Postive: 19h25m31s ± 10s
Negative: 19h28m22s ± 10s

Notice the plus or minus for error. In declination it's 20 minutes. For the RA's it is plus or minus 10 seconds.

The area is in the constellation Sagittarius. Here is a image from the wikipedia article:

the two red areas shaded in is where the area of detection was.

edit on 1-2-2014 by eriktheawful because: (no reason given)

Congrats! You just discovered that these detections were part of a survey of the Milky Way Galaxy center!

Good sleuthing and good work!

nenothtu

Soulece

I hate to break it to you but that video is not the WOW signal.

Of course not. The WOW signal was never recorded as audio, it was recorded as characters on a continuous feed printout. I'd imagine the "audio" was inserted in the video presented because people expect talkies in motion pictures these days. Silent movies aren't as entertaining to short attention span folk.

^^ 100% This.


One reason I posted this list was to illustrate that the "Wow!" signal wasn't the only such signal. It was just the first such signal. So like Neil Armstrong, it is the most famous.

SETI has received one-time signals like the "Wow!" signal ever since then coming from different parts of the sky.

The key difference between SETI and UFOlogy is that SETI scientists do not rush to judgement on these unknown signals. They do not rush to the media or create elaborate TV shows about the "Alien Signals We've Received".

Instead the catalog them, keep a low profile and wait for better evidence because an artificial signal which does not repeat is -not- good enough evidence to argue for the existence of a technological alien species at its point of origin.

So into the catalog of interesting signals these go, in hopes that one repeats at some point (Benford Beacon?) and at that point then more information about its nature can be gathered to either rule it out as interference or build the case for ET.


If SETI were run by 90% of current "UFOlogists / Ancient Alien Theorists" then these signals would be all over the mainstream media as "proof of ET".



The lesson to be learned here is that UFOlogy needs to conduct itself in a much more rigorous, scientific way if it wants to be taken serious and receive funding for stuff like Project Hessdalen which at least gathers useful and usable scientific data.

tanka418
reply to post by JadeStar

 

JadeStar, there are far better way of displaying this kind of data...converting the to a real table would be a huge help, and take less bandwidth. Converting this to a real database would also help...and you don't need anything more than Access. (access is a SQL engine just like MySQL, oracle and sql server).

Using a format like this borders on rude...

Or I could have just not posted them at all.

If you want to put them in a better format, knock yourself out.
I posted the source links for the files and there's much more on that FTP site you may be interested in.

Databases are your thing after all.

Telescopes are mine.

I think that confirming an ET radio signal would have utterly profound impacts on our culture, even if we never interacted with them.
For one it would all but confirm that life is absolutely abundant in the universe, so it wouldn't necessarily mean we have to find THEM, but just any species.
Secondly, if the star was the aforementioned 200 light years out do you presume that that civilization is still around?
How are they communicating now? Likely with some sort of quantum communication gadget. But it would tell us that there are beings much more advanced than ourselves and we would do well to start managing our own planet more responsibly so we can survive long enough to gain the same understanding they currently possess.

Interesting stuff. I would suspect these are the marginal signals ready for sharing. The real signals strong enough to of interest will not published until they get a release from the UN.
www.ask.com...
Since SETI is governed by this document don't expect then to leak important signals.

From UN document
Once detection becomes public, decision-makers would exert influence by the way they evaluate the importance and handle the publicity of the discovery.

Also

From UN document
Following a confirmed detection, another important variable considered in a PDP is the speed with which the facts of the discovery would become public knowledge. For instance, should a signal of ET origin be sufficiently ambiguous or otherwise difficult to interpret, the detecting party may perceive a need to withhold information about the discovery to prevent unintended reactions from the general public or other political entities.

So anything of real interest must be concealed until the powers that be give the go ahead to release the data. I would like to believe other wise but that's seems to be the official route for disclosure.

Hoping to hear from other intelligent life in the cosmos but skeptical about the process.

datasdream
Interesting stuff. I would suspect these are the marginal signals ready for sharing. The real signals strong enough to of interest will not published until they get a release from the UN.
www.ask.com...
Since SETI is governed by this document don't expect then to leak important signals.

From UN document
Once detection becomes public, decision-makers would exert influence by the way they evaluate the importance and handle the publicity of the discovery.

But the information would be bound to leak as confirmation of the signal is sought. The document pretty much is a guideline not to leak but human nature takes over.

By the way, there have been several leaks since this document was created.

Also

From UN document
Following a confirmed detection, another important variable considered in a PDP is the speed with which the facts of the discovery would become public knowledge. For instance, should a signal of ET origin be sufficiently ambiguous or otherwise difficult to interpret, the detecting party may perceive a need to withhold information about the discovery to prevent unintended reactions from the general public or other political entities.

So anything of real interest must be concealed until the powers that be give the go ahead to release the data. I would like to believe other wise but that's seems to be the official route for disclosure.

Hoping to hear from other intelligent life in the cosmos but skeptical about the process.

What this is for is to avoid a repeat of the EQ Pegasi signal hoax.



If that had happened a few more times SETI would have lost a lot of credibility. Kinda like how every light in the sky and Youtube video of birds, Radio Controlled model aircraft, the ISS or Iridium satellites has taken away from the serious study of UFOs.

Going macro on all of this....

I've often heard SETI criticized among UFO circles for being "secretive" or even "silly".

Allow me to address these for a moment.

I can see why someone might consider SETI to be secretive if they are not involved in the sciences. Like most scientists, SETI scientists are a patient bunch. It might even be argued that they are the most patient bunch since SETI experiments/observations have been done on and off since Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) conducted Project Ozma at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia back in the early 1960s.

We live in an 'instant gratification' society.

As a 20 year old, I am just as guilty of this.

With each generation the hunger for information and knowledge about our world and now our universe grows almost in an inverse square to our patience for that information.

To some, like me, our curiosity drives us to the sciences. Perhaps even driving us towards a career within them. That takes a lot of study (and time and effort) and a lot of hard work.

To others it drives them to suspicion and conspiracy. Which since we're all on a conspiracy forum I suspect a lot of us have gone that route. While it takes a lot of time and effort it to really build a credible conspiracy theory based on actual data, few actually do that.

Instead very vague accusations are made (ie: "We Didn't Really Go to the Moon", "NASA Covers Up Life on Mars", "There's a Secret Moon Base on the Far Side of the Moon", "SETI is Secretive and would cover up any signals") often with very little in the way of hard, unassailable evidence to support such statements and in fact the accusations often place the burden of evidence on those who question their conspiracy statement.

So in the interest of Denying Ignorance I would like to point out and debunk a few things used to criticize SETI.....

1. "SETI is Secretive"

The practice of SETI and in fact all astronomy is heavily reliant on observations often from far-flung parts of the world. Confirmation of a discovery in say, the USA may be done in Europe or South America. This means that an awful lot of communication is going on within astronomical circles. And the rule of secrecy is that the more communication there is the less secret the information one is trying to keep secret is likely to be.

There have been a few incidents where SETI was tracking a signal they thought was alien only to find out upon further tests or seeking confirmation that the signal originated much closer to the Earth by a satellite or other space craft.

In these cases, word leaked out to the same mainstream media most of us detest and rail against and reporters were calling the observing site. This was due to the kind of communications traffic between observatories I mentioned above.

Beyond this, candidate signals have been discussed in the past as they are now in this thread. While such candidates are interesting they are far from definitive, so they are archived. In this case they were on a public FTP server at the SETI Institute which any one can access free of charge. Hardly the way to keep a secret right?

Someone earlier in this thread said something like "That's because the real communications are classified and kept secret."

Assuming there were actual communications received by SETI it would be incredibly hard to keep them secret because of what I mentioned above and beyond that it would make little sense.

SETI is almost entirely privately funded on donations. This was highlighted in 2011 when SETI had to shut down it's Allen Telescope Array in northern California due to lack of funding.

Finding a confirmed extraterrestrial artificial signal of any type out there would not only serve to keep the cash rolling in to SETI but would earn its discoverers a Nobel Prize and their face on the cover of a ton of magazines and newspapers all over the world.

When ET is found by science, the whole world will know about it probably for that reason alone.

Which brings us to the second accusation....



2. "SETI is Silly"

This has become an oft-repeated allegation based on a misunderstanding of what radio SETI is and is looking for. I have heard UFOlogist Stanton Friedman cutely say SETI stands for a "Silly Effort To Investigate".

Nothing could be further from the truth. Here's why:

Often people not familiar with the details of radio SETI seem to think it is looking for either a deliberate message aimed at us or their version of the 50s TV show "I Love Lucy". Part of this is the way the mainstream media has portrayed radio SETI and part of it is SETI putting forth the "best case scenarios" as a means to stir up interest and fascination with it.

In reality SETI is simply looking for artificiality "out there".

There need not be any "message" present. Though a message or encoded information of some sort would make such a detection almost unquestionable.

What radio SETI actually looks for are very narrowband signals because as far as we know, nothing in nature produces signals narrower than a few Hertz (Hz) wide. If SETI detects such a signal rising and falling each day with a certain location on the sky and with certain characteristics which indicate it originated beyond our planet and solar system, then that will be extremely good evidence for ET>

In part of the characterization of SETI being silly, I've seen comparisons of SETI to a native tribe looking at our modern technological civilization for smoke signals or drum signals as evidence of intelligence.

The premise here being that since we've stopped using smoke signals or signal drums, that our use of radio would be equally primitive to a more advanced civilization out there.

This premise ignores the fact that such a "Search for Intelligent Drums and Smoke Signals" (SIDSS) by a tribe living perhaps on the edge of our modern cities might not uncover us using smoke signals to communicate with them. nor signal drums but what they WOULD discover might be the regular smoke emissions from the smoke stacks of a factory or power plant, or the distant drums from a marching band.

In other words, they would still recognize smoke being emitted at regular intervals over time or the organized drumming during certain parts of the year in which marching bands performed. And if they were clever they'd archive all these detections of smoke and drum signals, complete with dates and times.

At some point the scientists of this tribe might come to the conclusion that there is a very strange tribe off in the distance and that they are not alone.

That is because smoke is a byproduct of physical and chemical processes and certain technology even in our technological society produces it at regular and cyclical intervals. The same goes with sound as a carrier for pulses from things like drums, engine noises, the 'clackity clack' from train tracks, etc.

In similar ways, radio SETI could well uncover something quite different from intentional signals or communication from some advanced technology that emits narrowband radio signals as a byproduct of some other activity some super advanced civilization might be up to.

Do you know the signature of a warp drive? Neither do I.

How about what a microwave beam powering a spacecraft many lightyears away from here?

Or the waste radiation from a zero-point or other exotic physics based energy production facility?

Maybe asteroid protection radar?

And god knows what else might be out there producing detectable signals which have nothing to do with intentional communication.

ie: The alien "smoke stacks" might very well be detected by SETI.

Plenty of things in our modern world generate radio signals without us intending them to use them to communicate.

Car spark plugs, your computer's microprocessor, fluorescent lighting, military search radar, doppler weather radar, planetary radar from places like Arecibo, your microwave oven, etc... the list goes on.

What kind of radio signals might super advanced technology produce as a byproduct of their operation? We don't know, but we should probably be looking for them don't you think?

It hardly seems like a silly premise to look for narrowband radio signals in this context does it?




3. "But...but the Inverse Square Law......"

Of course someone is bound to bring up the "Inverse Square Law" which applies to radio signals.

It basically stat that their intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity.

The problem is that people who use this argument usually are using the relatively weak signals our TV and radio stations on Earth produce.

You see the inverse square law with regards to radio can be applied to rule in or rule out a signal if you know the POWER of the transmitter and SENSITIVITY of the receiving station.

None of us know how powerful an alien transmitter might be.

We do know that our most powerful military radars as well as the planetary radar at Arecibo can be detected many lightyears away directly and on the other side of the Galaxy if such a civilization had a radio telescope at a star's gravitational lens.

Likewise if one of our planetary radars or powerful military search radars were positioned at the gravitational lens of a star many thousands of light years away it would be detectable by our current SETI experiments.

We aren't that far off from being able to journey to our Sun's gravitational lens 550 astronomical units (AU) out. So why would we limit advanced aliens to our meek transmitting capabilities?

Not knowing the space travel abilities of advanced aliens who knows what might be transmitting away out there for reasons which might be unfathomable it hardly seems silly to look for artificial narrowband signals.




4. "They have been looking for over 40 years and haven't found anything......"

This last one seems like it would be a valid criticism. But it underestimates the search space.

Radio SETI's search space is 3-dimensional as shown in this chart:



And as you can see above most of that space has not been covered.

Additionally there are other types of SETI experiments being conducted.



At Harvard they're looking for extraterrestrial laser signals (Optical SETI) other experiments look through infrared space satellite data for evidence of large scale astroengineering of things like Dyson Spheres and Ringworlds (IRAS search for Dyson Spheres, Spitzer Search for Dyson Spheres, WISE Search for Type II and Type III civilizations), future large aperture near-InfraRed ground based telescopes will look for Type I civilization waste heat from population centers on extrasolar planets, other future space telescope experiments may comb through the light of terrestrial exoplanets for the spectral signatures of artificial light.

And that's just SETI looking at electromagnetic signals.

There are also SETI projects to look through Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data for signs that someone else visited the moon besides us humans. (See: Dr. Paul Davies of ASU)

There are SETI researchers who look at the DNA of humans and other life on Earth for signs of an artificially encoded message with in it.

There are SETI researchers who are looking at ways in which neutrino astronomy data can be examined for signs of signals from neutrinos.

There are SETI researchers who are involved in experiments in interspecies communication (communicating with dolphins and primates, etc).

And on and on... It's a very diverse, interdisciplinary field.

And not at all silly if one examines its full scope.

As for why do any of this in the first place.....

The answer might be simple: Survival

We live in a time when doom porn is popular, hope at an all time low and most have a hard time imagining our post-modern future beyond 50 or 100 years much less 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 years.

It seems odd but to me it seems people were more hopeful when two superpowers were locked in a Cold War with arms pointed at each other which could wipe out all human life on the entire planet.

We live in a time of amazing discovery, it has been described as a "New Renaissance" in the sciences, astronomy in particular.

We live in a time when more information is available to us for free at our fingertips than any king, dictator, prime minister or president had access to a mere 50 years ago.

And yet people choose to wallow in a constructed gloom and doom paradigm, a future of decreasing returns, a world to be suspect of and feared not embraced and enlightened.

We see false divisions made where none exist, we blow real divisions out of proportion and we turn it all into politics as sports, root for one team, hate the other.

We are in an almost insanely self destructive cycle of NAVEL GAZING.

Perhaps finding that signal, even if it contains -no- information and no message to us breaks us out of that?

Perhaps it would at least give us our hope back and force us all out into the night, to look up, to point to a place in the sky and say, 'at least they made it, maybe we can too?"

Far from being silly, SETI might be the most important science experiment currently being conducted for the long term health of Earth and those who inhabit it.

eriktheawful
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Actually, Blueshift does have some good points.

Say we detected signals, and they are without any doubt ET in origin. Pin pointing the signal places it coming from a star that is let us say, about 200 lightyears away from us.

There would be a lot of excitement at first. Big headlines, lots of enthusiasm one way or another (the warm fuzzy crowd is all excited, the "ZOMG! They are going to use their alien zombie beams on us!" crowd, the CT crowd talking about how we've known about this for 50 years now, but is just now being disclosed, etc, etc, etc.

Now....let's say it's just a signal that contains no audio or visual information on it, but simply telemetry of some sort.....

While the scientific community would be jumping up and down with joy, and examining that telem data for years and years in dreamy happiness.....your average Joe on the street is going to eventually shrug their shoulders after a while.

What's the big deal? It's a signal with a bunch of numbers? Smeh.......does it tell us anything about them? Why couldn't the signals be television signals with episodes of some sort of ET "Big Brother" show?

See my post above for a reply that looks at this and other such criticisms.

reply to post by JadeStar


Good grief, you just wrote an essay. Haha
Sounds like Elle making an appeal to potential investors.

Good post.

JayinAR
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Good grief, you just wrote an essay. Haha
Sounds like Elle making an appeal to potential investors.

Good post.

Thanks. Ellie is my hero. I saw Contact when I was little and I blame that movie and reading the book later for my passion on this and other alien related subjects.

reply to post by JadeStar


Unfortunately the likelihood of the Contact scenario playing out just like that (signal sent directly at us) is very small.

While I agree with the entirety of your post, I think we will find your "smokestacks" before an actual message.

The idea of finding evidence in our DNA is a good one too.

Glad they're looking.

JayinAR
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Unfortunately the likelihood of the Contact scenario playing out just like that (signal sent directly at us) is very small.

While I agree with the entirety of your post, I think we will find your "smokestacks" before an actual message.

I agree. I would even speculate that we might find ET through something completely on the surface, unrelated to radio astronomy.

Maybe we find ET through genetics or particle physics? It's all very exciting and even more exciting is that people are seriously discussing this now, doing the experiments, publishing papers on their results (even null results are valuable in designing the next search).

The idea of finding evidence in our DNA is a good one too.

Glad they're looking.

Me too. I find that one fascinating as well. It was kind of alluded to in the recent movie Prometheus. I think it is a concept that would rock us more than finding a radio signal to be honest.

To know you'd be walking around with a message from ET in your own DNA. Wow. Most people's mind would be blown.