From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Thu Dec 16 2004 - 08:26:32 PST
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=311101&page=1 Is It Time to Scrap SETI?
Researchers Claim Listening For Signals From ET Is Futile
Dec. 9, 2004 - For all those folks out there who are counting the days
During the few decades that scientists have searched systematically for
Don't count on it, say researchers from three institutions. Any advanced
And that, they say, would make those signals indistinguishable from the
Even if we did somehow capture such a signal, we wouldn't know it, says
"If you don't know how to decode it, then you can't make out what's going
The Decompression Issue
A computer can't show a picture that has been compressed by another
We're already doing it, and we're just barely in the communications age.
"This is something we already do in many of our transmissions," Newman
To be fair, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI as it
Thus the primary aim is to find signals that are intentionally sent in our
Yet much of the SETI literature does suggest that ordinary communications
And that's what compelled Newman and biologist Michael Lachmann of the Max
The three built on the pioneering research of Claude Shannon, an
Compressed data, however, looks like just a jumble of junk unless it is
"In our paper we proved that there's an equivalent result for radio
Not a Peep in 10 Years
But what if someone out there really is trying to contact us? That message
"Then, of course, you could easily see it," Newman admits.
Which takes me back about a dozen years to a time when I sat on the porch
He said all those years ago that routine signals from another planet would
But what if someone is beaming a very tightly focused, high-powered
Drake's enthusiasm has always been infectious, but I wondered out loud how
I don't have the notes from that meeting, and couldn't reach Drake for
The SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., which Drake helped found, has
It is more than 20 years old now.
And in all those years of searching, not a single signal has turned out to
Lee Dye's column appears weekly on ABCNEWS.com. A former science writer
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: Thu Dec 16 2004 - 08:38:29 PST
until we hear from some intelligent creature on another planet,
researchers now say we're not going to be able to eavesdrop on the space
alien equivalent of the "I Love Lucy" show.
life elsewhere in the universe there has been some hope that
electromagnetic "leakage" from communications systems on other planets --
such as television broadcasts -- might be detectable from Earth. If that's
the case, then radio telescopes sweeping the sky might pick up those
signals, giving us a window onto other worlds, and finally answering that
increasingly overworked question, "Are we alone?"
civilization would likely encode and compress their communications to make
their systems more efficient, just as your computer compresses files that
you send over the Internet, the researchers argue in a report in a recent
issue of the "American Journal of Physics."
thermal radiation of stars, and thus impossible to detect because it would
seem like part of the universe's background noise.
physicist Mark Newman of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
on," Newman says.
computer unless it knows how to decompress it, and likewise we couldn't
decode a television signal that had been compressed unless we already knew
the code. And, Newman and his colleagues argue, any advanced civilization
which has used wireless communications for even a few decades would surely
have figured out that it makes sense to encode.
says. "We encode (compress) them so they take up less space and we can
send them faster and send more messages."
has come to be known, has never been wedded to the idea that we could
somehow tune in to alien television broadcasts. Astronomer Frank Drake,
who many consider the father of the current effort, told me years ago that
any such signal would probably be far too weak to detect on Earth.
direction by another life form, and thus designed to be easily detected by
us. Newman has been informed of that by many irate readers of his report
who maintain that the search is viable because no one is really listening
for Lucy.
signals might be detectable.
Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, and computer scientist Christopher
Moore of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to take a closer
look.
electrical engineer with Bell Labs who published two seminal papers in the
1940s on information theory. Shannon demonstrated that it is possible to
compress data and thus distribute far more information than would
otherwise be possible. That work is the foundation for much of today's
communication technology.
decoded, and the researchers wondered if that would apply to radio signals
as well.
messages," Newman says. "The most information-rich radio message looks
like thermal radiation, which is the standard kind of radiation that we
see in the sky. So that would make it difficult to tell the difference
between an intentional transmission that was very efficient and just
natural phenomena."
would not likely be encoded because they -- whoever "they" might be --
would want us to understand it.
of Frank Drake's California home and listened to this eloquent scientist
talk about the passion in his life, somehow finding ET.
spread out as they passed through space, weakening as their footprint grew
ever larger. And just as a flashlight grows dimmer with distance, they
would probably be far too weak to detect by the time they reached Earth.
transmission directly at us? Surely we could find that pretty easily.
long that enthusiasm would last. With trillions of stars out there, how
long would he be willing to search? When might he decide that perhaps he
was on the wrong track, that perhaps ET is illusive, or isn't interested
in our primitive society?
this column, but I remember what he said. Picking a number out of the air,
he said if scientists hadn't found anything in about 10 years, perhaps
they would have to rethink their program.
now grown into a large organization of more than 100 scientists and
staffers, due largely to the largess of a number of folks with very deep
pockets.
mean anything at all. If ET is trying to reach us, she must not be trying
very hard.
for the Los Angeles Times, he now lives in Juneau, Alaska.