Gonzaga Debate Institute 2011 Mercury Scholars seti aff
Radio Telescopes Solve Best
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Radio Telescopes Solve BestRadio experiments are better than observational experiments – less energy cost Shostak, Radio Astronomer at SETI Institute, 1 (Seth, April, Vol. 101, Issue 4,Sky & Telescope, EBSCO, “The Future of SETI”) PG Radio works. And 30 years ago, researchers were convinced it works best -- better than light, for instance. The argument was twofold. Microwaves handily penetrate interstellar dust, whereas visible light is blocked. But a subtler point is that radio requires less energy per bit of information, which ought to make it the communication medium of choice for any alien engineers. In the radio regime, the minimum background noise you'll encounter is the faint, 2.7 degrees Kelvin afterglow of the Big Bang. In the microwave part of the spectrum this means you typically need to receive just 50 photons per bit to stand out from the noise. No problem. But at higher, optical frequencies, a photon is more energetic and expensive. Even a single infrared photon packs 5,000 times more punch than the group of 50 necessary to send one bit at microwave frequencies. So higher frequencies mean higher energy costs.
(Seth, April, Vol. 101, Issue 4,Sky & Telescope, EBSCO, “The Future of SETI”) PG Radio SETI may no longer be the only game in town, but it's still the game to which most researchers belly up. That's because the odds of a jackpot, though quite unknown, are unquestionably getting better all the time -- because the instruments are growing more capable by leaps and bounds. The ideal SETI radio telescope can only be imagined. It would monitor every point on the sky, in every radio channel from one end of the microwave window to the other (about 1,000 to 11,000 megahertz), all the time -- a true Omnidirectional Search System, or OSS. Unfortunately, this ideal is a very long way off. But it's no longer impossible to work toward. The STWG team considered what it would take to build a reasonable interim OSS. They were seduced by the thought of a telescope able to find powerful but intermittent signals, the kind that none of the current large SETI experiments has a hope of detecting. AT: False SignalsSETI scientists can identify ET signals definitively Folger, Editor at Discover, 11 (Tim, January, Scientific American, Volume 304, Issue 1, p40-45, EBSCO, “Contact the Day After”) PG SETI SCIENTISTS THINK they know, in broad terms, what an ET signal will look like. To stand out as obviously artificial against a background of natural cosmic radio emissions, the signal would have to be narrow, with a lot of energy packed into a few frequencies. Natural phenomena, such as pulsars and interstellar gases, spew out radio emissions at many different frequencies. If an observatory ever receives a narrowband signal coming from an astronomical distance, the source would almost certainly be artificial. SETI good—prevents false alarms Harrison, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis, 97 (Albert A., After Contact, Google Books, 1997) PG Policy development and advocacy, science education and information control are among the strategies proposed for guiding humanity through the search process and its aftermath. Over the years, SETI committees of the International Academy of Astronautics, along with other groups, have developed policies intended to prevent false alarms (by insisting on careful verification) and to release information to benefit all humankind. Logsdon & Anderson [40, p. 89] hoped to frame the initial announcement in such a way as ‘to minimize confusion, anxiety, fear, and perceptions of threat among the general population’. They sought precedents in strategies for announcing earthquakes, nuclear accidents and other disasters. They found that actual announcements (as in the case of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown) tended to fall short from the ideal. |