Has E.T. Made A Call? (Possible Contact from Intelligent Civilization)

http://www.ktvu.com/news/15054540/detail.html

by dpapathanasiou • 19 years ago

11 41 19 years ago

ktvu.com

dcurtis• 19 years ago

Yeah, our very first message to an advanced civilization should be (from the article):

"Any materials you'd like to give us to help... We're running out of oil," she said.

kirubakaran• 19 years ago

Too bad we won't hear the dial tone when they 'hang up on us'.

ggrot• 19 years ago

If this is credible, why is the article on ktvu.com and not cnn?

alaskamiller• 19 years ago

our fox affiliate is equally a credible news source as a hackneyed cable news show

dpapathanasiou• 19 years ago

I was suspicious of this story, too, for the same reason, and that's why I added the "possible" qualifier to the title.

Still, it's fascinating to think of the possibilities if it's real.

Hexstream• 19 years ago

I think it's ridiculous to think the aliens might be hostile to us...

Imagine a civilization 1000 times more advanced than us. Why would they want to kill the equivalent of cavemen?! And there are so many planets out there, I don't see why they'd want to enslave/destroy ours specifically.

It's not like they could possibly feel threatened by us. It reminds me of some people who wanted to prepare for some kind of war against the aliens. In the very unlikely one is declared, we obviously don't have a fighting chance of any kind. It's civilization-who-can-barely-go-into-space VS civilization-with-faster-than-lightspeed-ships.

But as I said, if they're smart enough to travel the stars then they're certainly responsible enough not to destroy a comparatively irrelevant civilization.

rms2• 19 years ago

>Why would they want to kill the equivalent of cavemen?!

Comparatively irrelevant FOR NOW. But that's discounting the exponential progress of energy consumption. They aren't afraid of our nuclear weapons, but why let us live to develop gamma ray bursts? If they study our psychology at all, they would learn that our leaders wouldn't hesitate to gamma ray burst any potential threats.

henning• 19 years ago

We're all going to die!!!!!!!!!!!

Xichekolas• 19 years ago

If they are that much more advanced than us, would they even regard us as intelligent? Would we be roaches to them?

Eh, I generally agree with you. Just playing the devil's advocate.

eusman• 19 years ago

the nuclear bomb was not used by those who built it

eru• 19 years ago

Workers in a machine-gun factory do not usually use machine guns.

jfoutz• 19 years ago

That's a pretty human-centric view of the universe. The thing about aliens is, they're alien. Maybe they regulate self replication, therefore the humans need to be licensed. Maybe they can't handle the concept of not being alone, like Kricket. No way to know up front.

I'd like to say we have things, therefore humans are slightly more likely to build stuff than destroy stuff. I'd hope civilization works that way everywhere, but there is no proof of that. Really, there isn't all that much evidence.

We'd share physics and math, and that's about it.

However, this particular article is nonsense.

rokhayakebe• 19 years ago

I think any civilization that is a tiny bit more advanced than us (and trust me it really isn't that hard) would wipe us out of the universe, and i personaly would not blame them. you have to sit back and think who would want to share the universe with creatures who hate, envy, kill their own, lies, cheats, destroys their once perfect habitat, pollutes, steals....

anyways my message to you the aliens is "back the fk off before you contract Humanitis. your most advanced doctors would NEVER be able to cure it"

utnick• 19 years ago

is it not hard to be a more advanced civilization than us?

There has been millions of species of creatures on Earth over the time it has been around. We are the most advanced, and frankly the other species aren't really close.

Perhaps we are pretty special.

inklesspen• 19 years ago

Assuming it is feasible to accelerate a ship to relativistic speeds, they could well decide to exterminate us in self-defense. A relativistic bomb delivers enormous destructive power, and by definition, it is never where you see it when you see it, and is probably unstoppable.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#killingstar has a very good writeup on the subject.

Tichy• 19 years ago

If I remember correctly from "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, a lot of human societies have been conquered and destroyed in human history. Kind of the same thing, technologically advanced people discover backwards people and finish them off.

daniel-cussen3• 19 years ago

Maybe we're so far away the only value of our planet and species is for alien anthropology majors writing theses. They'd look at how miserable life is for sentient beings to live in a time when object-oriented programming is in vogue.

edw519• 19 years ago

"Did you say it would take them 3 million years just to get here to destroy us?"

"No, maam, I said 3 BILLION years."

"Oh, good. I feel much better now."

jkush3• 19 years ago

I hate being hopeful when I hear this type of news. It's always a big let down.

kurtosis• 19 years ago

Does anyone have a link to more detailed information about the "signal" that was detected? I'm very ignorant of SETI and radio astronomy - what does it mean to "decode" such a signal? What is the evidence that this signal is produced by a civilization, and does not come from a natural source?

rms2• 19 years ago

From a Google news search, this is the only only source. There's nothing here: http://www.seti.org/news/ so this story is worthless.

eVizitei2• 19 years ago

After searching for correlating articles, I believe that this article jumped the gun. It's cool to speculate on what would happen if we made contact with an alien civilization, but it appears this is premature for the particular signal they're talking about. See here:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2004/09/64818

curi6• 19 years ago

The more advanced aliens are, the more we can make reliable predictions about them. For example, they will have values and ways of thinking closer to what we call "scientific" than "religious/mystical/superstitious/etc." If they did not, they would not become advanced.

Wars are very expensive and destructive. It's hard to become advanced when you keep destroying wealth. On Earth, as we've become more peaceful, we've also become more wealthy, and more able to travel space. The same logic for why this would be so on Earth, applies elsewhere.

eVizitei2• 19 years ago

I don't know. You can't say that "They would not become advanced" just because they had a religious or superstitious outlook. What is to prevent an alien race that attributes their existence to a higher power from achieving technological progress? Would you also say then that our scientists of today who are advancing our level of technology are by definition irreligious?

Likewise, a warlike race of aliens is not hard to imagine. Wars are "expensive" in that they cost lots of money, but when america wages war the money that is spent in such great amounts is spent on American troops and government contractors, who in turn take the money they earned and spend it on other goods, so it does not "destroy" the money. In fact, war is generally an economy booster. As far as the destruction of resources, assume this hypothetical alien race is warlike toward OTHER species, not internally. The things they are destroying, then, are not on their homeworld, but on the worlds of those they conquer, and every world they conquer is another batch of resources for them to sap before moving on.

I just think you can't really predict the way another race would develop based on a random sample of 1 (humans).

curi6• 19 years ago

There are laws of physics, which govern how knowledge is created, and how it is not. Superstitious methods of thinking cannot create a higly advanced civilization.

Knowledge is created by a process of replication (with errors), and selection. In human-level terms, truth seeking requires being open to new ideas, including criticism, and replacing faulty ideas. Attitudes like, "some things should remain mysteries and aren't for us to know," "I can believe whatever I want as long as it makes me happy," or whatever it is behind superstitions, prevent knowledge creation. If those attitudes are too prevalent, and applied to too many subjects, you can't develop space flight, and other advanced knowledge.

daniel-cussen3• 19 years ago

Wars are "expensive" in that they cost lots of money, but when america wages war the money that is spent in such great amounts is spent on American troops and government contractors, who in turn take the money they earned and spend it on other goods, so it does not "destroy" the money. In fact, war is generally an economy booster.

Dude, broken window fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window"

tx2• 19 years ago

Wars are very expensive and destructive. It's hard to become advanced when you keep destroying wealth.

You have it backwards. Wars create wealth. That is, in part, why we keep having them.

curi6• 19 years ago

Is this like breaking windows creates wealth, or what?

Physical goods are destroyed. Man hours are used up. How is that wealth creation?

npotter• 19 years ago

wars create additional financial wealth, but they don't create material wealth. Wars are inflationary. The best definition of wealth has nothing to do with money, but instead asks what the productive potential is. Wars decrease productive potential. They may increase it for one society and decrease it for another, but the sum total is reduced. There are interesting questions here about the destruction of low productivity facilities, say a factory of weavers, versus destruction of high productivity facilities such as a factory of weaving machines.

Also, some wealth is lost in the form of bullets, bombs, and other weapons that are used in the process. It's not the total cost of the bomb, but it is the cost of the physical material that makes the bomb.

jkush3• 19 years ago

That's a very interesting comment tx. I never quite thought about it that way, but that doesn't mean I'm convinced you're right.

khill• 19 years ago

They're just informing us that our planet is scheduled for demolition and that the plans are available for review at the local office in Alpha Centauri.

angstrom• 19 years ago

P.S. Don't forget your towel

pg• 19 years ago

Has anyone got a link to more solid information about this? How clear is it that this is a signal?

dreish• 19 years ago

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=44764&...

has more than you'd ever want to read about it, but I'll attempt to summarize: Inconclusive, but possibly something like a supernova or a neutron star collision, probably extragalactic, and almost certainly _not_ engineered by intelligent life.

jkush3• 19 years ago

false alarm. http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2008/01/16/no-alien-signa...

Has E.T. Made A Call? (Possible Contact from Intelligent Civilization)

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