60 years of silence - so far

[Jimmy Higgins]

In structural engineer, the shear, moment, angular rotation, and deflection are all intimately related, with the later being equal to the integration of the prior related equation. Calculus is very very real and very very physical. While numerical systems can vary, can Calculus? Two people invented generally the same thing, somewhat independently on this planet. Can science exist with an alternative to calculus? What would it look like?

The trouble with alien signals is that we need to be intersecting the signal in a sense of space and time. A civilization from 50,000 years ago and 40,000 light years away, could have been broadcasting for 1000 years, up until the 1850s, and then stopped. One possible problem is intelligent races aren't communicating out there with others, because the limits on travel are quite real, and the inability of travel faster than light (for anything), makes the entire thing pointless. Even when signals reach another, it isn't actually possible to respond due to the distance involved. Sure, we could reply, but if they are thousands of light years away, we are less responding and more just saying "hi" to even more random strangers if they are still there. The reality is that intelligent life could be all over the universe, but spaced apart at such distances that tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of light years separate us.

As quoted in the sci-fi classic film Spaceballs, "Lightspeed is too slow."

 

[steve_bank]

Our TV and radio signals are not likely to be detcted even at the moon.

ET is standing on the surface of planet with a powerful flashlight pointed into space. The planet is rotting, going around a star, the solar system is moving, the galaxy is moving.

What are the odds of it shining on somebody looking out from the Earth that is spinning going around the sun...

ET woud have to be intentionally radiating a lot of power from an antenna designed to radiate into space.

TV and radio transmit antennas are designed to induce max power in Earth bonud antennas, polarization.

You can look up antenna patterns. Dipole, long wire, Yag, and vertical. For max reception you have to be in the max part of the radiation pattern.

Commercial parabolic transmit antennas are not normally pined into space.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The other thing I don’t hear people mentioning (so maybe I’m just wrong about this) is that there’d be multiple signals from different parts of the Earth that get mashed together on the same frequencies so it would turn to noise unless they were all transmitting the same signal. And even if they were they’d not be all in phase. I’d even have to calculate whether Doppler shifts from a rotating source could smear the signal (maybe it wouldn’t significantly but in principle it could). Any ET viewing Earth’s signals would see a point source and thus the total accumulated signal.

 

[steve_bank]

The other thing I don’t hear people mentioning (so maybe I’m just wrong about this) is that there’d be multiple signals from different parts of the Earth that get mashed together on the same frequencies so it would turn to noise unless they were all transmitting the same signal. And even if they were they’d not be all in phase. I’d even have to calculate whether Doppler shifts from a rotating source could smear the signal (maybe it wouldn’t significantly but in principle it could). Any ET viewing Earth’s signals would see a point source and thus the total accumulated signal.

Yes, good point. Had not thought abut that.

 

[Copernicus]

So much of our concept of reality is grounded in the way our bodies interact with it that we fail to understand the difficulty inherent in communicating with beings that don't have human bodies or experiences. People have already commented on numbering systems, which were originally grounded in the way humans used their hands to count. It is reasonable to assume that there will be some convergent evolution going on that will produce beings like ourselves on other planets, but how many intelligent species will have opposable thumbs with two joints and four fingers, each having three joints? Many of the concepts that make perfect sense to us--for example, body postures, gestures, waste elimination, food consumption, sex--will make enough sense to aliens to allow them to make sense or our broadcasts? Even if there are detectable signals that we can receive now, in the brief span of time that we've been capable of it, do we have the ability to recognize them as intelligent communication of some kind? And how could we possibly interpret them, when we still have human languages whose writing systems remain a mystery to us? SETI seems like a good idea, but it doesn't surprise me that it has turned up no reliably good results in all this time.

 

[Shadowy Man]

So much of our concept of reality is grounded in the way our bodies interact with it that we fail to understand the difficulty inherent in communicating with beings that don't have human bodies or experiences. People have already commented on numbering systems, which were originally grounded in the way humans used their hands to count. It is reasonable to assume that there will be some convergent evolution going on that will produce beings like ourselves on other planets, but how many intelligent species will have opposable thumbs with two joints and four fingers, each having three joints? Many of the concepts that make perfect sense to us--for example, body postures, gestures, waste elimination, food consumption, sex--will make enough sense to aliens to allow them to make sense or our broadcasts? Even if there are detectable signals that we can receive now, in the brief span of time that we've been capable of it, do we have the ability to recognize them as intelligent communication of some kind? And how could we possibly interpret them, when we still have human languages whose writing systems remain a mystery to us? SETI seems like a good idea, but it doesn't surprise me that it has turned up no reliably good results in all this time.

The base of the counting may be grounded on our fingers but counting itself shouldn’t be.

An octopus may use base 8 but it can tell one from two.

 

[bilby]

So much of our concept of reality is grounded in the way our bodies interact with it that we fail to understand the difficulty inherent in communicating with beings that don't have human bodies or experiences. People have already commented on numbering systems, which were originally grounded in the way humans used their hands to count. It is reasonable to assume that there will be some convergent evolution going on that will produce beings like ourselves on other planets, but how many intelligent species will have opposable thumbs with two joints and four fingers, each having three joints? Many of the concepts that make perfect sense to us--for example, body postures, gestures, waste elimination, food consumption, sex--will make enough sense to aliens to allow them to make sense or our broadcasts? Even if there are detectable signals that we can receive now, in the brief span of time that we've been capable of it, do we have the ability to recognize them as intelligent communication of some kind? And how could we possibly interpret them, when we still have human languages whose writing systems remain a mystery to us? SETI seems like a good idea, but it doesn't surprise me that it has turned up no reliably good results in all this time.

The base of the counting may be grounded on our fingers but counting itself shouldn’t be.

An octopus may use base 8 but it can tell one from two.

Sure, but then it would see nothing whatsoever of significance* in the number sequence 31415, and would not even recognise 9 as a digit at all.

Pi in base 8 starts 3.11037, which presents another problem; How do you send zero flashes? Assuming, of course, that you even have a concept of zero and of place dependent magnitude for digits?

What is Pi expressed in Roman numerals?

The ancient Romans were human, and highly skilled and advanced engineers**; But if they saw something flashing:
--- - ---- - ----- --------- -- ------
why would they think it was anything other than a random sequence of flashes?
III, I, IV, I, V, IX, II, VI, V, III, V, VIII, IX, VII, IX...
This is just a patternless bunch of small numbers.

If we can't even communicate with human beings from a couple of millennia ago, what hope is there for communication with other species, particularly ones from possibly very different environments?






*Even if it considers the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter to be significant, which is far from a certainty

**I for one like Roman numerals

 

[Copernicus]

So much of our concept of reality is grounded in the way our bodies interact with it that we fail to understand the difficulty inherent in communicating with beings that don't have human bodies or experiences. People have already commented on numbering systems, which were originally grounded in the way humans used their hands to count. It is reasonable to assume that there will be some convergent evolution going on that will produce beings like ourselves on other planets, but how many intelligent species will have opposable thumbs with two joints and four fingers, each having three joints? Many of the concepts that make perfect sense to us--for example, body postures, gestures, waste elimination, food consumption, sex--will make enough sense to aliens to allow them to make sense or our broadcasts? Even if there are detectable signals that we can receive now, in the brief span of time that we've been capable of it, do we have the ability to recognize them as intelligent communication of some kind? And how could we possibly interpret them, when we still have human languages whose writing systems remain a mystery to us? SETI seems like a good idea, but it doesn't surprise me that it has turned up no reliably good results in all this time.

The base of the counting may be grounded on our fingers but counting itself shouldn’t be.

An octopus may use base 8 but it can tell one from two.

Sure, but then it would see nothing whatsoever of significance* in the number sequence 31415, and would not even recognise 9 as a digit at all.

Not as a digit, maybe, but Indian scholars developed the technique of using "0" as a placeholder.

 

[Politesse]

So much of our concept of reality is grounded in the way our bodies interact with it that we fail to understand the difficulty inherent in communicating with beings that don't have human bodies or experiences. People have already commented on numbering systems, which were originally grounded in the way humans used their hands to count. It is reasonable to assume that there will be some convergent evolution going on that will produce beings like ourselves on other planets, but how many intelligent species will have opposable thumbs with two joints and four fingers, each having three joints? Many of the concepts that make perfect sense to us--for example, body postures, gestures, waste elimination, food consumption, sex--will make enough sense to aliens to allow them to make sense or our broadcasts? Even if there are detectable signals that we can receive now, in the brief span of time that we've been capable of it, do we have the ability to recognize them as intelligent communication of some kind? And how could we possibly interpret them, when we still have human languages whose writing systems remain a mystery to us? SETI seems like a good idea, but it doesn't surprise me that it has turned up no reliably good results in all this time.

Math is one thing; we'd figure out pretty quickly if we were getting signals from a civilization that had used a base 8 counting system, and if any future civilization receives our signals millions of years from now they'll be able to deduce our math as well provided those sorts of superficial barriers were the only issue.

I wonder more about some things that physical scientists often take for granted. Language, as you rightly point out, presents serious problems even for human archaeologists working on human data, but those aren't the upper limit on how different two communication systems could conceivably be. As you know no doubt better than I, human language depends heavily on a mostly subconscious and very mysterious cognitive process of category creation. We don't really know except through brute inference how our own brains do this, let alone how some other sentient alien biome might do the same. We tend to assume that all human languages share a fundamental structure, and that assumption is valid within our species.

But is it necessarily reasonable to make the same assumption of life forms that arose completely independently of our evolutionary tree? I think we would have a very difficult time understanding the communications of a civilization that never had an exact equivalent to, say, a human morpheme, or whose morpheme-equivalents functioned in such a different way that we are powerless to reliably translate them.

When it comes to social questions, scientists often have a weakness for assuming that our manner of doing things is somehow inevitable simply because we have no other analogous data sets to draw from than our own. We want to imagine that an alien civilation will just be "us, but with funny foreheads", like on Star Trek. But the truth, if there is a truth, may be far stranger than we can imagine.

 

[steve_bank]

I agree with the Shadowy Man.

Whether or not an octopus knows what PI means is another topic.

An assumption would be an ET that can receive and transmit radio signals would likely have a form of math that understands the relation of circumference to diameter of a circle.

PI shows up throughout math. The equation for a sine wave mechical or electromagnetic radiation is
y(t) = A*sin(2*PI*f*t) where A is peak amplitude, f is frequency, and t is time in seconds.

You can plot it in a spreadsheet.

 

[bilby]

Not as a digit, maybe, but Indian scholars developed the technique of using "0" as a placeholder.

I addressed that in my subsequent edits.

Octopuses aren't likely to have had many conversations with any Indian scholars; And the Romans demonstrated that you can do some very advanced engineering with no concept of zero, and a totally different system of place dependent magnitude of numbers, to that which has become conventional today.

 

[pood]

I don't put anyone on a pedestal and I do not accept authority by title or authority.

Linking a scholarly work, if that’s what you are referring to here, is not a recommendation that you accept what the author has to say on authority. It’s to stimulate thought and conversation.

Scholarly speculation on ET is just that, speculation. An interesting subject but outside the forum I was never interested in that kind of 'stuff'. What interested me was hard science and how things worked, that kind of stuff.

And what was hard science before it was hard science? It was speculation. A bright idea once hit Newton — that things fall toward each other, when the apple falls toward the earth, the earth, just a little bit, falls toward the apple. Nobody in the history of the world had ever hit on that idea until Newton did. His speculation turned into classical mechanics, which later became hard science. Then Einstein speculated that in addition to the fact that the laws of physics were the same in all inertial frames, the speed of light was the same measured in all relatively noving frames. From that conjecture fell out time dilation, length contraction and relative simultaneity.

This is a speculative thread, after all, but the point is that all good science was once speculation. Plate tectonics was nonsense speculation until suddenly it wasn’t.

I would argue that any ET that has the equivalent of our science and technology would necessarily have the same principles of logic and math. Along with that would be speculation of life esewhere and speculation.

Yes, you can argue that. Do you have any evidence to support the argument?

Or an ET could develop technology and never think about about going off world and about other life.

True.

On a problem like this I would go to a white board and work out all te poosibilites and combinations. Enumerate the possibilities.

The civilizations in the Americas never developed science, math, and technology on a par with Europe, Mid East, Rome, and elsewhere.

Incas and Mayas had high civilizations. Civil engineering on a par with Rome. But they never developed something as basic as the wheel to any great extent.

Pre CE China had water powered stamping machines, mass manufacturing of parts.


It is probably not a given that any ET that has the capacity to develop science as we have will do so.

Correct, but I leave open the possibility that ET can develop science with maths and physics that are wholly foreign to us. That’s why I linked the book chapter, not as an argument to authority, but as an argument for the position I am stating here. I suggest giving it a read.

 

[pood]

So much of our concept of reality is grounded in the way our bodies interact with it that we fail to understand the difficulty inherent in communicating with beings that don't have human bodies or experiences. People have already commented on numbering systems, which were originally grounded in the way humans used their hands to count. It is reasonable to assume that there will be some convergent evolution going on that will produce beings like ourselves on other planets, but how many intelligent species will have opposable thumbs with two joints and four fingers, each having three joints? Many of the concepts that make perfect sense to us--for example, body postures, gestures, waste elimination, food consumption, sex--will make enough sense to aliens to allow them to make sense or our broadcasts? Even if there are detectable signals that we can receive now, in the brief span of time that we've been capable of it, do we have the ability to recognize them as intelligent communication of some kind? And how could we possibly interpret them, when we still have human languages whose writing systems remain a mystery to us? SETI seems like a good idea, but it doesn't surprise me that it has turned up no reliably good results in all this time.

The base of the counting may be grounded on our fingers but counting itself shouldn’t be.

An octopus may use base 8 but it can tell one from two.

Sure, but then it would see nothing whatsoever of significance* in the number sequence 31415, and would not even recognise 9 as a digit at all.

Pi in base 8 starts 3.11037, which presents another problem; How do you send zero flashes? Assuming, of course, that you even have a concept of zero and of place dependent magnitude for digits?

What is Pi expressed in Roman numerals?

The ancient Romans were human, and highly skilled and advanced engineers**; But if they saw something flashing:
--- - ---- - ----- --------- -- ------
why would they think it was anything other than a random sequence of flashes?
III, I, IV, I, V, IX, II, VI, V, III, V, VIII, IX, VII, IX...
This is just a patternless bunch of small numbers.

If we can't even communicate with human beings from a couple of millennia ago, what hope is there for communication with other species, particularly ones from possibly very different environments?






*Even if it considers the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter to be significant, which is far from a certainty

**I for one like Roman numerals

Indeed, as I mentioned, admittedly speculation, what if there are advanced aliens who have no concept of a circle? On the face of it this may sound ridiculous, but to say it’s ridiculous begs the question at hand — it presumes the cognitive/perceptual structure of any advanced alien must be akin to our own, which is precisely the point at question, not a premise to be accepted.

 

[Copernicus]

Not as a digit, maybe, but Indian scholars developed the technique of using "0" as a placeholder.

I addressed that in my subsequent edits.

Octopuses aren't likely to have had many conversations with any Indian scholars; And the Romans demonstrated that you can do some very advanced engineering with no concept of zero, and a totally different system of place dependent magnitude of numbers, to that which has become conventional today.

You don't know for a fact that octopuses have not been in telepathic communication with alien counterparts and India yogis. But I accept that your speculation has an air of plausibility. (This is the internet, which runs under Trump Rule #1--concede nothing.) Romans had the best concrete--lost of lime to fill in cracks that would form over time. However, their very advanced engineering could have used the Indian number system. It's not as if they didn't have lots of Hindu and Buddhist scholars around. They just refused to believe that Indians were more technically advanced than they were.

 

[Copernicus]

Indeed, as I mentioned, admittedly speculation, what if there are advanced aliens who have no concept of a circle? On the face of it this may sound ridiculous, but to say it’s ridiculous begs the question at hand — it presumes the cognitive/perceptual structure of any advanced alien must be akin to our own, which is precisely the point at question, not a premise to be accepted.

Indeed, Sumerians had no advanced arithmetic, no geometry, and no Pythagorean theorem, but they managed to construct buildings with perfect right angles. Pythagoras didn't invent the principle. He had the advantage of knowing about the knots in Egyptian ropes that were used to form the right angles.

 

[Gospel]

I've always imagine extraterrestrials use a mathematical framework that sees ours as simplistic or even illusory. The 'unified mathematics' we seek may be rudimentary compared to their advanced grasp, which might accurately decipher phenomena like black hole singularities intimately. Perhaps they coexist with us, earnestly trying to communicate, but finding it challenging to decipher our mathematical representations, seeing them similar in nature to the chaotic aftermath of toddlers that had their way with spaghetti.

 

[TomC]

Unless they can throw out physics

Didn't Einstein do that?
Threw out Newtonian Physics because the best information available in Sir Isaac's day was a bit primitive.
Tom

 

[steve_bank]

Romans were great civil engineers, as were the Incas.

The Romans understood a board was stronger in shear on its edge instead of flat, what we call a beam. Empirical observation. They hasd empirical tables of strength of materials without any underlying science. Romans developed waterproof concrete.

Lines are easy to bisect. A series of bisections and you have a ruled measurement stick. Squares are easy.

Incas surveyed ad built high mountain roads as good as we can do today. It is believed they may have used a cup of water as a level hung from a tripod with two holes on it for sighting. A poor man's surveyor's transit.

There s a lot of technology throughout the ancient world.

All that being said the theory and technology to build a radio is well beyond that.

 

[SLD]

Could Aliens pick up the Arecibo transmission?

IIRC, it was aimed at a globular cluster, but I don't know which one.

But could others pick it up too? Maybe only slightly off the path?

 

[pood]

Unless they can throw out physics

Didn't Einstein do that?
Threw out Newtonian Physics because the best information available in Sir Isaac's day was a bit primitive.
Tom

I don’t think it’s accurate to say he threw it out. He modified and supplemented to deal with a situation that Newton could not possibly know about. Newtonian maths are still good for everyday use.