Breakthrough Listen finds no signs of alien transmissions from 60 million stars
Where are those alien civilizations? Breakthrough Listen, a privately funded project searching for evidence of alien life, has released the first results from its survey of 60 million stars in an area looking towards the galactic center, noting that it found no evidence of any technological transmissions signaling an alien civilization from any of those stars.
The paper can be downloaded here [pdf].
The kind of signals they were looking for were not beacons sent out intentionally by alien civilizations, such as television or radio broadcasts, but unintentional transmissions, such as radar transmissions meant for other purposes but still beamed into space. They found none.
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Where are those alien civilizations? Breakthrough Listen, a privately funded project searching for evidence of alien life, has released the first results from its survey of 60 million stars in an area looking towards the galactic center, noting that it found no evidence of any technological transmissions signaling an alien civilization from any of those stars.
The paper can be downloaded here [pdf].
The kind of signals they were looking for were not beacons sent out intentionally by alien civilizations, such as television or radio broadcasts, but unintentional transmissions, such as radar transmissions meant for other purposes but still beamed into space. They found none.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
This is pretty depressing news …. All thru the 90s and 00s I was expecting some sort of signal ( I can’t have been the only one running “SETI @home”!)… But my hope is that pointing towards the galactic center was a mistake… Too much action going on… Point at the outer reaches of our spiral arms, like where we live… Solar activity is older and gentler and perhaps more conducive to the evolution of, “ahhhm”, civilization like us.
Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief to me.
I think we should be a bit anxious about having any interstellar neighbors *too* close to us.
Given that the signal strength would drop off with the square of the distance, could we really expect to detect any releases of energy into space given that those signals would not have been beamed at us?
How old is the galaxy compared to how old life is on Earth? Perhaps why we haven’t found anything is because they are already gone. The were born, lived, and for whatever reason, died out.
Andi: Precisely.
Humans on the Earth broadcast high power one directional radar beams which have a much higher chance of being detected by other civilizations than our omnidirectional radio/TV broadcasts due to the reason you stated. Still, even using inadvertent radar, it is highly unlikely such civilizations could detect it. The reason is that the Earth is rotating about its axis and revolving about its star. A distant civilization would be in the same situation. For a one directional beam minimally spread beam, it would change its likely seen angular zone in the sky a lot. The alien planet receiver is in the same problem. Maybe they would see it once, but not twice.
More likely the phase civilizations go through with radio, TV and radar is short, then they move on to quantum communications or something we don’t know about yet. Also, what use is getting a message from >100 years ago?
I think they were actually looking for beacons. Haven’t read the entire paper but-
From the intro 1.1: “In this paper, we will focus on strong beacons deliberately transmitted by ETI.”
From the discussion: “We carried out searches for two different types of beacons which are likely to originate from (a) a transmitter placed near the GC illuminating the entire Galaxy and/or (b) any star in the lines-of-sight of our pointings towards the GC.”
My own opinion is there’s little chance to find beacons. If we think about beacons from a transmitter’s perspective it takes a ton of 1) energy and 2) time. I know it’s not impossible to try and illuminate the galaxy, but that’s an incredible amount of power that would have to be maintained for an incredible amount of time.
I think it’s far more likely for there to be listeners like us. But if you’re listening for unintentional signal leakage, it’s likely weak and probably only detectable for nearby stars.
So, if you find something nearby and interesting, do you transmit a high-powered signal towards it for a few thousand years?
When I was a child I looked at the stars and “knew” we couldn’t be alone. Then I grew up.
We’re a big deal in this universe, and we’re alone here, but this universe is an insignificant thing among all of God’s creations.
Looking for beacons?
I’m going to surmise that any civilization that has star-faring aspirations is going to be the apex life form/civilization/organization on the planet. That’s generally how the Universe works.
If you’ve made your way to the top, ‘red in tooth and claw’; why in the heck would you advertise to potential threats?
Andi: Big dish telescopes are pretty powerful, although we could only hope to make out signals in frequency bands where stars are quiet. There’s a sign at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia (one of the two telescopes they used) that stresses how important it is to leave electronics far away from their radio telescopes; it says they would be able to detect your cell phone from Saturn — in airplane mode.
Yes, as you allude to, stars are much farther away, and the paper gives bounds on what they could observe. The paper says an EIRP of 4e18 W for the large set of stars, and 5e17 W for a half million stars. For rough scale, our sun emits about 3.9e26 W of power, and the whole world uses about 2.7e12 W of electricity.
You can boost EIRP a lot by using a parabolic dish antenna — a 25 m dish can get you a bit more than 50 dBi (100,000 times) and our largest antennas get almost 80 dBi (90 million times). So if somebody directed our entire current electricity consumption into a transmitter, and managed to pump that through the biggest antennas on Earth (the ones we actually have could not handle that much power), this study would have detected the signal… barely, in the smaller set of stars, and if the antenna was pointed VERY close to our direction.
Since we seem to have vast evidence of unidentifiable aircraft in our skies, why not listen for transmissions to and from the aircraft.
With the estimated number of stars in our galaxy ranging from 100 – 400 billion, a 60 million sample is a drop in the bucket.