But it does make me wonder when people ask 'if there is intelligent life, why haven't we seen it?!'. In the minute amount of time we've been looking, we have detected hundreds of unexplained signals from various parts of the galaxy. Sometimes earth based interference is responsible, sometimes its a space phenomena we don't understand yet, but really we have no idea about a lot of them. When we do eventually find other life, I suspect we'll look back at this time and all the stuff we tried to explain away and chuckle.

After all, we are in a rather unfashionable corner of a huge galaxy, and the amount of time we have been developed enough to consider the environment outside our immediate survival needs has been relatively small. Sort of like a late-night family arrival to live in a new neighborhood their 5-year old has never seen before. We're the 5-year old, and we've just finished breakfast and are looking out the kitchen window into our new back yard for the first time. We haven't even really walked out onto the front porch and checked out the neighborhood to see if there's any kids to play with...

Haele

Where are all the advanced civilizations?

If their planets did not have the right conditions to create hydrocarbon fuels then they never made it to advanced technology.

If their planets did have the right condition to create hydrocarbon fuels then they got advanced technology AND poisoned their atmosphere with CO2, destroying their civilization.

OR

If they got hydrocarbon fuels, they achieved high technology but when the hydrocarbons ran out their civilization collapsed for lack of energy.

Any way you cut it, civilization needs just the right conditions to arise, and those very conditions guarantee its collapse. In other words, civilization has a very short shelf life.

Based on our experience and knowledge. There is no way to know what is possible as far as energy or life to be honest.


Until recently we thought nothing could live in the environments like the volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean yet life is there.

We do not know what we don't know is what I am getting at.

Can civilization exist in a volcanic vent at the bottom of the ocean?

That some form of life can exist does not imply that civilization can exist. Without habitat for living, and habit for growing food, the human animal goes extinct.

What makes us think we can recognize it in space?

Orcas, elephants, apes, ravens, parrots, etc. are all sentient intelligent beings, and our human so-called civilization is making life very difficult for all of them.

is the message

A classic, pulpy SciFi flick from the 50's, kind of a cult classic.

A flying saucer takes out the capital building... the dome, of course.

a satellite do this." ???

"Méndez thinks the signal is more likely from something humans put in space, perhaps a satellite that passed thousands of miles overhead.

"The field of view of [Arecibo] is wide enough, so there is the possibility that the signals were caused not by the star but another object in the line of sight," Méndez said, adding that "some communication satellites transmit in the frequencies we observed."

However, in a July 12 blog post about the mystery of Ross 128, he wrote that "we have never seen satellites emit bursts like that" and called the signals "very peculiar".

And then... this rather poorly written article... which was published about 3 hours ago (maybe around 11:00 a.m. EST on July 17) says the only way to be sure is to look at the star again.... which they'll start doing on JULY 16... which was yesterday.

So they should already have some preliminary results... not that you'd know it from this article.

Newsweek says they did conduct further tests yesterday and confirmed the data...http://www.newsweek.com/mystery-radio-signals-ross-128-star-637682 ... which, I assume means they detected the signals again.

They expect to have some definitive ideas about the source by the end of the week.

Here's that Newsweek link:
http://www.newsweek.com/mystery-radio-signals-ross-128-star-637682

And they have a new story up today:
http://www.newsweek.com/ross-128-mystery-signals-aliens-what-happens-638172

Fascinating if this actually was aliens.

I'd like to think we're not alone.

They're hoping to avoid sh!t storms as they come this way to aid survivors.

shouldn't be delicious!

It's only 11 years away. That would put them about a 100 years behind earth, if they have transmissions strong enough to still be detectable from 64 trillion miles away.

Like the professor said, highly unlikely to be a non-natural phenomenon.

"Show me what you got"
"I want to see what you got!"


Strange

Two guys where working in an antenna shack trying to tune a receiver. They kept on getting this interference, this noise. So they decided it must be from the birdsh*t outside covering things up. So they went outside and got rid of the birdsh*t, but the interfering noise would not go away. Then suddenly they realized what they were hearing: The same thing that you see as black and white "snow" on your un-tuned TV - the remnant microwave noise left by the big bang!

The two guys were Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. This happened in New Jersey in 1964. They shared the Nobel Prize.

ANd continued with Bowie classics so I never closed the window until I was done working on the computer !! Listened to so many of his classics today .......

This....

It will take 11 years for them to get it and 11 years for us to get their signal, etc... that's gonna be a really long conversation!

Yu quumgc geh tog hampoja ak

Save us! If Thump can collude with Russians, I can collude with aliens. Who wouldn't?

They're always sending prank transmissions to make us think there's something further out there. Just ignore them.