[ExI] SETI needs new approach (was for the fermi paradox fans)

[The Avantguardian]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 5:33 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> Where the hell is everybody?

Somewhere in the direction of the constellation of Sagitarius would be my bet. I think it is very premature to conclude that we are alone in the universe let alone the Milky Way, just because no radio astronomers are willing to stake their professional reputations on announcing that intelligent life has been found elsewhere.

Take the 1977 Wow! signal from the Big Ear at Ohio State.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
 
Nobody has ever been able to offer a credible explanation of how one of the most sophisticated radio telescopes of its time recieved a 72 second signal at 1.42 GHz from the direction of Sagitarius. It is unlikely to have been a natural phenomenon because it was less than 10 KHz in bandwidth and most natural phenomena are broad spectrum signals. It is unlikely to be a manmade signal because 1.42 GHz is a reserved frequency for radio astronomy and its use in transmitters is forbidden. Sure it cannot be ruled out that the government might have had some secret 1.42 GHz transmitter for some inscrutable reason but then one is left with an interesting trilemma:

1. There is some very rare astronomical phenomenon that has only been observed once that sends out extremely powerful pulses of narrow band radiowaves centered on the emission line of hydrogen.

2. Some secret conspiracy in the government used a powerful transmitter tuned to a forbidden frequency for some unknown purpose and it happened to get reflected off of some space debris and was then detected by Jerry Ehman.

3. We have, in that instance, detected a radio communication by an intelligent extraterrestrial species but chose to ignore it because it only lasted a short time and was not repeated.   

SETI is tasked with the herculean job of finding a needle in a haystack with the added burden of not being able call a needle a needle unless they find it twice.

Looking at it from the POV of an extraterrestrial species, what possible motive would there be for them to spam the universe with costly gigawatts of energy over and over again when they don't have any reason to suspect anybody might be listening? Or perhaps out of fear that a predator might be listening?

When we (presumably an intelligent species) sent out the Arecibo message, we only did it *once*. Why would they do any differently? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
 
Of course as of 2013, you got these guys offering to send your tweets to Gliese 526 for 25 cents each:
http://thelonesignal.tumblr.com/
 
Still it stands to reason that the most likely signals SETI would detect would be one off signals.
 
Either a hail mary into the void or eavesdropped communications not intended for us. The idea of an ET civilization setting up a beacon seems a little strange from a Darwininian perspective unless it were like the glowing lure of an angler fish. Yet apparently that is what SETI is hoping to detect according to this fairly recent paper by Harp et. al.: 

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1211/1211.6470.pdf
 
The most interesting thing I read in the paper was the following excerpt:
 
"Interesting signals without persistence are observed thousands of times each day at the SETI Institute. Figure 4 for example shows a result obtained in a narrowband SETI search near the PiHI frequency (the number π times the HI observing line of 1420.4 MHz). This (extremely powerful) ~10 second pulse of narrowband radiation appeared in one 50 second observation
period but was never re-observed. This pulse has interesting features: It is observed at a magic frequency in the direction of a nearby and potentially habitable star. Yet we cannot be sure this signal was created intentionally or unintentionally by some transmitter on Earth. Hence after multiple observations over 2 weeks and no re-detection, we gave up (although this direction is added to a catalogue of directions to re-observe as time permits."
 
"Thousands" of non-repeated signals per day? What if just 1% of them were genuine? And if the false positive rate is *that* high, then put a freakin radio telescope on the far side of the moon. No "side lobes" from terrestrial communications then. You could have a com satellite in lunar L4 or L5 to function as a relay station. 

Just my two cents on the fermi paradox.

Stuart LaForge
 
"We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." - Carl Sagan