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Better ways to hear signals for SETI?

P

publiusr

Admiral
Admiral
Over at the Cosmoquest Forum, I saw this listing:


Earth-based radio astronomy below frequencies of 30MHz is severely restricted due to man-made interference, ionospheric distortion and almost complete non-transparency of the ionosphere below 10MHz. Therefore, this narrow spectral band remains possibly the last unexplored frequency range in radio astronomy.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.04711


Then I remembered this:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/25jun_l2/

Wish-list missions for the Ares V range from a 150-meter-wide (492 ft) radio telescope dish to detect whispers from deep space to a 5-meter cube of super-pure water encased in light detectors to assay cosmic rays by their light flashes as they crash through the water. An optical telescope with a primary mirror up to 8 m (26 ft.) in diameter could search star populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies for the "fossil record" of their evolution. It could also hunt for "Earthshine spectra," faint signs of life in the light reflected by exoplanets.


But I wonder if the Earth-Sun Lagrange points are far out enough.

So here is a question. Could the Oort and the heliopause act as 'ground clutter' in blocking faint signals from any extant civilizations?
 
publiusr said:
So here is a question. Could the Oort and the heliopause act as 'ground clutter' in blocking faint signals from any extant civilizations?
Click to expand...

Could they? Probably. But I would think interstellar civilizations would be using more than just the frequencies below 30MHz.
 
Were I transmitting data back and forth to far flung assets, but still wanted to hide my presence from emerging powers--that's where I would go.
 
If I were a more advanced civilization, especially one vastly technologically superior, I'd have maybe moved beyond radio waves.

It is possible that other races have figured out how to use something else to communicate, like maybe using using tachyons as a carrier wave, which I'd want to do if I had off-world colonies, to avoid or reduce the lag inherent in using radio waves. Not that I really know if it'd be possible to use tachyons to send and receive communiques.

But I think we should be looking for tachyons, because I suspect that is what advanced E.T.s would use.

Yes, I know that there are still arguments over whether tachyons even exist, but maybe we just haven't figured out how to detect them yet.
 
I doubt that if we'll ever hear such low frequencies in our solar system. There is such a lot of background noise even in this frequency range. Part of it comes from the planets themselves, part comes from solar flares, another part is manmade and even some animals use that frequency band. It's as if you'd try to listen to a far away hum while being surrounded by 2000 humming schoolkids.
We'd have to build a telescope far beyond the Oort cloud to escape from all that noise.

In my opinion we might stand a better chance by searching indirectly. Looking for interferences of these low frequencies with the higher frequency band, trying to trace these back, excluding known sources and narrowing the list down to the signals of yet unknown origin. With the latter we can see if they form a regular (time-)pattern. From the regulars we can again exclude the perfectly regular ones as natural (like pulsars or double star systems). What's left would be those with slight irregularities as you get when you try to send manually at regular intervals.
Those would be the ones we are looking for.
 
There are times. when looking at snow on old TV sets--that a part of me wondered just what could have been hiding in all that noise...
 
Some more about the WOW signal and others:
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?156198-Other-WOWs


From Ross 54:

The SETI Institute reports an incident somewhat similar to the Wow Signal. This occurred in 2010. The signal was heard for 10 seconds, and never repeated. They were aiming at the star TYC 1220-91-1, a star very similar to the Sun, but somewhat older. It lies about 100 light years away. The signal was heard very near the frequency Pi times the hydrogen line, or about 4462.3 MHz. The signal reportedly reached a peak strength of ~ 300 sigma.

The paper, linked below contains a reference to the incident, on page 12. Otherwise, apparently little has been written about the incident. Interestingly, the same paper contains the following remark: 'Interesting signals without persistence are observed thousands of times per day at the SETI Institute'. One assumes that the instance cited above was exceptional enough to warrant special mention:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1211/1211.6470.pdf

Then too--one can look for artifacts.
http://ufos.homestead.com/seta83.pdf
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/SETV.html
http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040830/full/news040830-4.html

Even Pluto might be made livable http://figshare.com/articles/Extending_the_Artificial_Habitability_Zone_To_Pluto_/1031243
http://terraforming.wikia.com/wiki/Paraterraforming
http://cosmoquest.org/forum/showthread.php?157179-Terraforming-Pluto-Outer-Bodies

I guess we will see.
 
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