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SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

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Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#111

Post by godelski »

TheBlight wrote: post #10

While I don't think it's necessarily time to give up on classical SETI, it seems very unlikely we find contemporaneous civilizations interested in beaming radio back and forth. This idea seems more interesting to me: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.08543.pdf Along with combing the surface of the moon looking for existing impacts of potentially artificial objects.

I think the best way to look at it is that placing a structure on the moon is something that will be initially costly, but cause visitation. When then has the potential to bring down the cost as the process "scales" (transit) and then, slowly, Rome gets built. Not that I don't love SETI, but sometimes there's a bigger picture because of a larger interconnection. If there were a few simple moon projects, it could easily build momentum for more space missions in general. Just like a lot of satellites did, but going to the moon is a different ball game than orbit (even GEO).

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#112

Post by nwallin »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #29
nwallin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, This is true. The signals we communicate with amongst ourselves would be too weak to detect using present equipment at any distance. > when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal.. This part is not true. A simple spectrum analyzer will show what radio bands are being communicated on and it's clear as day. > we people are very so…

> we cannot use effects related to quantum entanglement to communicate ELI5 to a non-physicist why not? I thought this was possible, if Alice and Bob share an entangled pair of a set of particles (i.e. each has a clique of particles entangled with the other), and they pre-arrange an algorithm for determining the meaning of different states of their particles. IIRC wasn't this the gist of the "wormhole" paper that wen…

Quantum entanglement is like two dice that "agree" with each other to always roll the same number. If Alice and Bob shake their dice in their hands, and roll it on the table, they'll always roll the same number.

It does not allow Alice or Bob the place a die on the table on a specific number and have the other die roll over to that number. If Alice or Bob try to influence the number that the die rolls, it will break the connection between the two dice.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#113

Post by TechBro8615 »

nwallin wrote: post #112
TechBro8615 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we cannot use effects related to quantum entanglement to communicate ELI5 to a non-physicist why not? I thought this was possible, if Alice and Bob share an entangled pair of a set of particles (i.e. each has a clique of particles entangled with the other), and they pre-arrange an algorithm for determining the meaning of different states of their particles. IIRC wasn't this the gist of the "wormhole" paper that wen…

Quantum entanglement is like two dice that "agree" with each other to always roll the same number. If Alice and Bob shake their dice in their hands, and roll it on the table, they'll always roll the same number. It does not allow Alice or Bob the place a die on the table on a specific number and have the other die roll over to that number. If Alice or Bob try to influence the number that the die rolls, it will break…

But why can't Alice keep rolling the die until it gets to a state that she and Bob agree is a part of an encoding scheme? Is it because she needs to read the number on the die to know whether to stop rolling it, but by reading (measuring) the number, she is effectively re-rolling (collapsing) it, so she could never know when to stop rolling it? In other words, she could stop after she measures a state, but the current state of the system is N, she'd be stopping after N-1, and there is no way to coordinate with Bob to know the difference?

The link I posted downthread seemed to suggest that the No Cloning Theorem is the constraint that makes this impossible. Any chance you can try to explain that within the context of the dice analogy?

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#114

Post by wl »

stephenhuey wrote: post #98
burnished wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heads up; that isnt an even remotely accurate reduction of religion or deities as a concept. I could see the misunderstanding if your only exposure to religion was via christian sermons - they are real big on describing their god as the perfect being that is all powerful and blah de blah - but even their creation myths don't portray an omnipotent being, and much of their bible depicts a deity that strives and mistake…

Not sure what Christian creation story you read, but omnipotence is commonly believed to be a core trait of God. And there's a difference between God allowing bad things to happen and making a mistake. Even when having a dialogue with a human in which it sounds like God is changing his mind, the implication is that God is letting the human work out what, if anything, he needs to change in his heart, and also letting…

Genesis 1: God fashions the heavens and the earth out of primordial chaos, not the creatio ex nihilo people often read into it.

Genesis 2:4 et seq: The earth is already there in rough form. God finishes it and populates it with life.

A very powerful being, yes, but nothing requires omnipotence.

Job 38 seems to reflect more of an omnipotent God. But it's also much later than the Genesis creation accounts, by which time Hebrew culture had likely been exposed to Greek philosophical ideas about what properties God should have to be worthy of the title.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#115

Post by xcv123 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #20
miika wrote: post #14

I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal.. Then, we people are very soon capable of communicating using quantum entanglement, which means it’s beyond wireless and you simply couldn’t tap into it with some antenna. For these reasons I suspect that SETI is waste of money.

"I doubt SETI could detect even our own signals, when it’s encrypted digital data. I mean it’s just noise like any background signal" Just because it's "noise" (ie. random/unpredictable looking) doesn't mean it's indistinguishable from other "noise". Not all "noise" is created equal. "noise" can have properties that make it distinguishable from other "noise". You may have heard of "white noise", "brown noise", "pink…

Encrypted communication would be detectable. The underlying content may appear to be random, but the transfer protocol and encoding itself is structured, not random. It still needs to be encoded then transported with error correction, etc.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#116

Post by xcv123 »

p-e-w wrote: post #41
pavlov wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s science. It’s not in preparation for some kind of imminent encounter whose likelihood is weighed against some other event, but simply trying to understand our universe. Maybe AI can do much better at interpreting signals than humans do, and we should build this lunar station so that the post-human AGI can listen to calls from other distant AGIs. It would certainly have more patience for interstellar communicatio…

Science is a human endeavor, and like all human endeavors, it is subject to human limitations and resource constraints. Humanity surviving is a prerequisite for doing SETI, and that means preferentially allocating resources to projects that work on mitigating existential threats, everything else being equal. Now, I'm not asking that carpenters be reassigned to work on AI extinction scenarios. That wouldn't make sense…

> That's an absolutely enormous expense, that, needless to say, wouldn't be funded by those scientists but by society as a whole.

Looks like you forgot to read the article before commenting.

What enormous expense? They're talking about a cost of $200 million. That is chump change for the _individual billionaire philanthropist_ funding it out of his own pocket, not "society as a whole". This is his play money. Some billionaires own super yachts and other toys that cost multiple times that amount. The Eclipse superyacht cost $1.5 billion, owned by a Russian oligarch. That's 7.5 times the cost of this moon telescope, for one stupid yacht, that itself is a drop in the ocean of expensive toys in the world.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#117

Post by throw10920 »

midasuni wrote: post #54
p-e-w wrote: post #32

While I do share a certain romantic admiration for the grandeur of SETI's goals, I have to agree with those who call this a waste of money and brainpower in our times. The most ludicrous AGI apocalypse scenarios seem orders of magnitude more likely than finding conclusive evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. A second terrestrial intelligence is about to emerge, and the consequences of that might conceivably be…

Mankind puts immense amounts of its metal capacity into firing ways to better advertise things. Your argument doesn’t really stand when Adtech takes orders of magnitude more resource

That's an equally bogus argument. "Mankind" isn't a singular entity with a unified will. Some people spending their mental capacity on adtech has nothing whatsoever with other people deciding to spend theirs on SETI (or not), and there's nothing wrong with people deciding to do adtech.

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#118

Post by nwallin »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #113
nwallin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum entanglement is like two dice that "agree" with each other to always roll the same number. If Alice and Bob shake their dice in their hands, and roll it on the table, they'll always roll the same number. It does not allow Alice or Bob the place a die on the table on a specific number and have the other die roll over to that number. If Alice or Bob try to influence the number that the die rolls, it will break…

But why can't Alice keep rolling the die until it gets to a state that she and Bob agree is a part of an encoding scheme? Is it because she needs to read the number on the die to know whether to stop rolling it, but by reading (measuring) the number, she is effectively re-rolling (collapsing) it, so she could never know when to stop rolling it? In other words, she could stop after she measures a state, but the curren…

You can only roll the die once.

Alice and Bob have a dozen dice. They agree that if they roll a 4, that's the signal for "attack at dawn" and Alice has decided that she wants Bob to attack at dawn. Alice rolls the 12 dice, and at the agreed upon time, Bob also rolls his 12 dice. The sequence they get is 1,5,3,2,2,4,6,5,1,2,1,6. The 6th die is a 4, which is the signal that Alice wants to send. How does Alice signal to Bob that she wants him to look at the 6th die? If Alice can send a signal to say, "look at the 6th die", why wouldn't she just send a signal that says, "attack at dawn"?

Re: SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

#119

Post by Lolaccount »

digbybk wrote: post #106
Lolaccount wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that line a hundred times. But would it? I value SETI and ideas behind it and even the line you just wrote. But would it? The whole thing will just descend into a twisted conspiracy pit of nonsense within 48 hours. _______ How long did governments know about it? Have aliens been interbreeding with humans all this time? Is Joe Biden a lizard crossbreed alien? When do we get to nuke them? ________ This is th…

I think this comes down to how we're using the words "we". Galileo transformed how "we" see the world, but not a whole lot of people at the time appreciated the implications of what he was saying. I think we need to keep looking for ways to answer the big questions because it elevates us. But it's often unevenly distributed in space and time, unfortunately. Basically, I'm saying that the search for alien life is just…

You're right, of course.

The video amused me. I got to thinking - what if the first communication was just spam!

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