[____] [____] The Antennas on the ATA are not big enough to decipher any alien transmission. Tim Folger, Editor at Discover, 01/2011, Scientific American, Volume 304, Issue 1, p40-45, EBSCO, “Contact the Day After” Even if the signal is confirmed as an authentic transmission from an extraterrestrial civilization, it is unlikely that astronomers would be able to extract any information from it for many years. SETI's instruments are designed to search for steady, periodic narrowband radio pulses--carrier waves powerful enough to be detectable across many light-years. The pulse itself would yield no information, other than its artificial nature. Any message content would likely be in the form of changes in amplitude or frequency buried within the pulse. Even a large radio telescope would need to repeatedly scan a small patch of sky to build up the signal pulse above background radio noise. In doing so, it would average out modulations on finer time-scales that might contain a message. Resolving the message would require an antenna far more powerful than Earth's largest, the 305-meter dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico. "You would need something on the order of 10,000 times bigger than Arecibo," Shostak says. Rather than a single enormous dish, such a telescope would probably consist of many smaller antennas spread across a large area and linked electronically. Constructing such an instrument would require international collaboration and funding, with no guarantee that the message--if the signal contained one--could ever be deciphered. "That's not something you'd do overnight," Shostak observes. "That's a big project. I think we would do it, because--gosh darn it--we would want to know what they're saying."
Answers To: Solvency
[____] [____] The ATA will not be able to filter human transmissions from Earth from alien ones. Bob Hirshon, Senior Project Director, Media Programs American Association for the Advancement of Science, 6/20/2011 “SETI at Home Upgrade” http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/sci_update.php?DocID=342 So SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, isn't looking for alien spaceships. Instead, it's looking for radio waves that might be being sent, probably unintentionally, by other civilizations. (Our own radio and television signals, which leak from Earth and drift across the universe, have already passed by thousands of stars; if there are any alien civilizations in those neighborhoods, they could theoretically be watching early Earthling TV shows like I Love Lucy.) SETI looks specifically for something called “narrow band transmissions,” which as far as we know can be produced only by artificial equipment. No matter where you are in the universe, these transmissions will be most efficient at broadcasting signals that can be received at the other end. So SETI believes that even extraterrestrials who are very different from us will probably make use of these radio waves for communication, if they have the intelligence and technology to do so. However, it's very hard to look for these narrow band transmissions, because we produce so many of them here on Earth. Sifting out all that noise, along with natural radio waves that bounce around in space, is a task that the world's biggest supercomputers couldn't manage. [____] [____] There’s no chance of a conversation between Earth and the ETs, we would have to wait thousands of years for a simple reply. Roger Highfield, Editor of New Scientist, 10/5/2005, The Daily Telegraph, “’The greatest discovery of all time’ The chances are there’s life out there, but any message could be thousands of years old and indecipherable. Roger Highfield reports,” There is, of course, a chance, that an incoming message may be sent in response to messages extraterrestrials have already received from Earth. Some of our radio and television from the Thirties and Forties is just now reaching some of the nearer stars. What would aliens make of news of Neville Chamberlain's return from his Munich meeting with Adolf Hitler? The problem is, however, that these signals have only travelled around 80 light years, too little for even the most optimistic SETI sage to raise the chance of meeting up with another civilisation. We may have to wait millennia for a reply, and Prof Davies speculates that it would probably come from an "information processor" that will blur the distinctions we make today between living organisms and artificial non-living machines.
Answers To: Solvency
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[____] Our technology is too primitive to pick up alien forms of communication. Casey Kazan, writer for The Telegraph, 5/11/2011, “Earth's Technology May be Too Primitive to Detect Advanced ET Life” pg online @ [http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/05/earths-technologies-may-be-too-primitive-to-detect-advanced-et-life.html Some of the world's leading astronomers -- including Great Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees -- believe aliens, rather than using different radio waves or visible light to signal, may be using an entirely different communication medium such as ghostly neutrinos or with gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of space-time) or using communication mechanisms we cannot begin to fathom. “The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life -- much less intelligence -- beyond this Earth," said Arthur C. Clarke, "does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime." Lord Rees, a leading cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain’s Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England believes the existence of extraterrestrial life may be beyond human understanding. “They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them. The problem is that we’re looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology." “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.” Frank Drake, the founder of SETI and Drake's Equation, believes that satellite TV and the “digital revolution” is making humanity invisible to aliens by cutting the transmission of TV and radio signals into space. The earth is currently surrounded by a 50 light year-wide “shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions. According to Drake, digital TV signals would look like white noise to a race of observing aliens.
