Tag: seti

Undetectability Conjecture

In the recent article `Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observation’ Ken D. Olum, using some inflation-based ideas and the anthropic premise that we should be typical among all intelligent observers in the Universe, arrives at the puzzling conclusion that `we should find ourselves in a large civilization (of galactic size) where most observers should be, while in fact we do not’. In this note we discuss the intriguing possibility whether we could be in fact immersed in a large civilization without being aware of it. Our conclusion is that this possibility cannot be ruled out provided 2 conditions are met, that we call the Subanthropic Principle and the Undetectability Conjecture.

this is one of the more interesting papers on the fermi paradox: we are basically too dumb to be of interest to older civilizations.

Leakage SETI

Previous SETI programs would not have detected an Earth-like civilization. The searches often looked for beacon-like signals deliberately beamed across space. Such beacons may not exist. Also, most radio SETI projects examined frequencies higher than 1 Gigahertz in order to avoid interference from both Earth-based and natural cosmic sources. Instead of looking for deliberate broadcasts, Loeb suggests looking for accidental leakage from an alien civilization. The new MWA-LFD, which is designed to study frequencies of 80-300 Megahertz, will pick up the same frequencies used by Earth technologies. It could detect Earth-like radio signals from a distance of up to 30 LY, which would encompass 1k stars. Future observatories like the Square Kilometer Array could detect Earth-like broadcasts from 10x farther away, which would encompass 100m stars.