Our own technological history has trended toward higher overall energy usage, not less. The Space Shuttle uses a lot more energy than a convoy of donkey carts. The street lamps of London leak more light skyward today than the gas lamps did a hundred years ago. Although individual devices tend to become more efficient, the sum total of energy expenditure goes up.

Of course, a very efficient civilization might find a way to capture and recycle most of its waste energy. Most SETI projects operate on the assumption that the alien civilization is not intentionally hiding from us.

The next generation space shuttles will consume much less energy for take-off. The next generation solid-state silicon-carbide based streetlamps of London will consume a fraction of today's. My mobile phone consumes 1% of the power my dad's mobile did in the 80's. Technology improvements reduces energy consumption. Economical improvements increases energy consumption. I'm not blaming anyone for using their CPU time on extremely unlikely events, I'm just saying that I will use mine on projects that will make a difference.

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Richard, thank you for your input. I'm not sure if I follow your thoughts completely, but I can't see a reason for an ETI-spieces to beam microwaves to their home planet unless they are in war with someone down there and that we accidentally got into the line of fire.

Maybe they all have mobile phones? :-P

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Reality Internet Personality

We may well assume that there is a variety of several different intelligent civilizations out there. Some of them may have an energy-saving life-style, whereas other may use large amounts of energy for activities that we can detect. So, it should be possible to detect those civilizations that use a detectable amount of energy.

Further, I would like to add that using a lot of energy is not the same as wasting it. If, for instance, a star is burning some billion years anyway, it is not a waste of its energy when it is used for communication purposes, e.g., by modulating the energy that it sends out. A first step towards using tera-tera-tera watt machines is not building them from scratch, but making use of and modifying that what naturally already exists.

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We may well assume that there is a variety of several different intelligent civilizations out there. Some of them may have an energy-saving life-style, whereas other may use large amounts of energy for activities that we can detect. So, it should be possible to detect those civilizations that use a detectable amount of energy.

Further, I would like to add that using a lot of energy is not the same as wasting it. If, for instance, a star is burning some billion years anyway, it is not a waste of its energy when it is used for communication purposes, e.g., by modulating the energy that it sends out. A first step towards using tera-tera-tera watt machines is not building them from scratch, but making use of and modifying that what naturally already exists.

So, if an ancient alien civilization starts hurling stars at us, how many of them would have to strike the Aricebo receiver before we'd notice? :-)

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

An INTELLIGENT civilization, far more advanced than ours, has already harnessed the fusion power or even better local sources. It doesn?t need to beam energy. If they for any reason would do this, they would not convert it to microwaves. As far as I understand, which might be a severe limitation, technology improvement tends to reduce power consumption not the opposite. Why would any civilization beam tera-tera-tera watts in a narrow band towards us? I?ll spend my CPU cycles on more plausible programs until I get a reason to search for non-intelligent mega civilizations.

Our own technological history has trended toward higher overall energy usage, not less. The Space Shuttle uses a lot more energy than a convoy of donkey carts. The street lamps of London leak more light skyward today than the gas lamps did a hundred years ago. Although individual devices tend to become more efficient, the sum total of energy expenditure goes up.

Of course, a very efficient civilization might find a way to capture and recycle most of its waste energy. Most SETI projects operate on the assumption that the alien civilization is not intentionally hiding from us.

Octagon, I believe you are completely right here. Given the most energy efficient civilization possible over time it is inconceivable that an expanding civilization (not a 1k population star trek colony somewhere) will increasingly use more and more energy. And by 'use' I mean everything from nonintentional solar usages (like our sun growing grass, eaten by cows, eaten by us) is to be considered a factor.

I wish I could remember a site I saw not long ago where it was discussed this very topic. Beginning with type 0 civilizations up to 4 or so. And then the farfetched type 5,6,7. It was estimated that we are currently a type 0.74. It even included long term projections for when we reach the type 1 to be about the year 2200 if my memory is correct.

Sadly, part of this theorizing concluded with great believability and conservatism that it would only take a few 10's of thousands of years for a civilization advancing at a MODEST pace to colonize a whole galaxy.

If this is true (and I hope it is not) the outlook for us finding a very advanced civilization in our galaxy is grim.

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

One page explaining the civilization types,
also known as "Kardashev scale", is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
"The Kardashev scale is a general method of classifying how technologically advanced a civilization is, first proposed in 1964 by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev." (Wikipedia)

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Strange how some people don't think we'll find ET, and yet still hang around and continue posting, trying to get people to quit. It wouldn't be difficult for an advanced civilization to broadcast a strong signal detectable by us. I think they would probably have 2 transmitters broadcasting simultaneously: one sending out a clear, slow pulse whose main purpose is to get our attention and get our instruments pointing in the right direction. The second transmitter will be broadcasting the main high baud-rate message, which would be hard to detect, but since our instruments will be scanning in the right direction, it should be detectable.

Imagine a central, public-access, collection of Blogs from all the millions of civilizations in our Galaxy, constantly being broadcast and updated by transmissions from all these different civilizations that have learnt the means of reading and contributing to these "blogs" by the broadcasts themselves. Of course, they could contain much more than just blogs, but also warnings of what newly emerging civilizations should watch out for, and maybe a massive Encyclopedia on all sorts of things.

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Imagine a central, public-access, collection of Blogs from all the millions of civilizations in our Galaxy, constantly being broadcast and updated by transmissions from all these different civilizations that have learnt the means of reading and contributing to these "blogs" by the broadcasts themselves. Of course, they could contain much more than just blogs, but also warnings of what newly emerging civilizations should watch out for, and maybe a massive Encyclopedia on all sorts of things.

When we find the second signal, we find that it is a huge stream of information and we've tuned in at just the right moment to get the plans for some fantastic bit of advanced technology.

Had we tuned in a minute earlier, we'd have seen the first part of this article. "Whatever you do, do NOT do any of the following:"

:-)

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No animals were harmed in the making of the above post... much.

Honestly, I'm getting reeeeealy tired of all the wierdos that have watched too much of Star Trek and Star Wars...
See you in Rosetta when you grow up!
/Luke

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Strange how some people don't think we'll find ET, and yet still hang around and continue posting, trying to get people to quit. It wouldn't be difficult for an advanced civilization to broadcast a strong signal detectable by us. I think they would probably have 2 transmitters broadcasting simultaneously: one sending out a clear, slow pulse whose main purpose is to get our attention and get our instruments pointing in the right direction. The second transmitter will be broadcasting the main high baud-rate message, which would be hard to detect, but since our instruments will be scanning in the right direction, it should be detectable.

Imagine a central, public-access, collection of Blogs from all the millions of civilizations in our Galaxy, constantly being broadcast and updated by transmissions from all these different civilizations that have learnt the means of reading and contributing to these "blogs" by the broadcasts themselves. Of course, they could contain much more than just blogs, but also warnings of what newly emerging civilizations should watch out for, and maybe a massive Encyclopedia on all sorts of things.

IAirbuster, I don't think you have read my post clearly. I said "IF THIS IS TRUE (and I hope it is not)"....Don't sign up here 3 weeks ago and start flaming me for nothing. For all I know there are 10 hyper advanced civilizations that have divvied up the galaxy that have all agreed to give us a wide berth to watch us grow. Personally, I'm fairly optimistic and that optimism comes from the Drake equation. I know we have an evidence set of 1 but other than that it's not a bad start.

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

Honestly, I'm getting reeeeealy tired of all the wierdos that have watched too much of Star Trek and Star Wars...
See you in Rosetta when you grow up!
/Luke

I don't really like Star Wars (Mr. Skywalker) and I like Star Trek even less. The writing of TNG was good, but the characters often behave like soulless automatons who don't value human life as much as they should; and nothing against the Rosetta project; I'm thinking of perhaps running Rosetta aswell as SETI. This idea about an Alien blogosphere just seems like something we humans might do ourselves if we had the capability.

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IAirbuster, I don't think you have read my post clearly. I said "IF THIS IS TRUE (and I hope it is not)"....Don't sign up here 3 weeks ago and start flaming me for nothing.

Robert, I think he was talking to me. Again, I'm not trying to convince people to stop participating. I'm only trying to keep both of my feet on the ground at the same time as I'm discussing a serious topic. What do I get? One mad person after the other trying to say that there are civilizations out there that have nothing better to do than sending us radio signals with the power of entire stars./Luke

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Everyone. I don't want to offend anyone, but I think the discussion here includes somewhat farfetched arguments. For example: Let's say that our level of technology today was that the best radio telescopes we could build had the same sensitivity as a normal "Walkman radio". I don't think many people would believe that we could receive alien signals with those “telescopes”, but I guess that it still will be a few persons that could come up with the arguments that there are probably some civilization that has captured the energy of an entire galaxy and converting that to a narrow band of radio signal just to send it to us.
/Luke Skywalker (OK, I’m a Star Wars fan, but I still think that Old George actually made it all up…)

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Imagine a central, public-access, collection of Blogs from all the millions of civilizations in our Galaxy...

Seriously, if there are ETs out there, their only intent is to eat us.

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One mad person after the other trying to say that there are civilizations out there that have nothing better to do than sending us radio signals with the power of entire stars.

Whether they are out there or not, is not currently known. That is the experiment. Welcome to science.

No one knows if they are there. What is undisputable is that with a little hard work (over many years) we can determine, for sure, whether or not they are broadcasting something we can detect. That work starts with the current SETI@Home.

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www.onlinetasklist.com

One mad person after the other trying to say that there are civilizations out there that have nothing better to do than sending us radio signals with the power of entire stars.

Whether they are out there or not, is not currently known. That is the experiment. Welcome to science.

No one knows if they are there. What is undisputable is that with a little hard work (over many years) we can determine, for sure, whether or not they are broadcasting something we can detect. That work starts with the current SETI@Home.

Well Redshift, if you have a "hypothesis" and you try to test that idea by using other people’s money and time, I suppose that it is fare to discuss the plausibility of the hypothesis? By the way, I have a hypothesis that there exist super civilizations out there that are so advanced that they have learnt to communicate with ESP and all I have to do is to sit down and perceive the information. Of course, I need some funding from the government first…

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Luke, in case you were not aware, SETI does not receive any government funds. All their funding is willingly donated by private individuals and groups.

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Founder of BOINC team Objectivists. Oh the humanity! Rational people crunching data!
I did NOT authorize this belly writing!

Everyone. I don't want to offend anyone, but I think the discussion here includes somewhat farfetched arguments. For example: Let's say that our level of technology today was that the best radio telescopes we could build had the same sensitivity as a normal "Walkman radio". I don't think many people would believe that we could receive alien signals with those ?telescopes?, but I guess that it still will be a few persons that could come up with the arguments that there are probably some civilization that has captured the energy of an entire galaxy and converting that to a narrow band of radio signal just to send it to us.
/Luke Skywalker (OK, I?m a Star Wars fan, but I still think that Old George actually made it all up?)

I agree with what your saying but I would like to point out that we all seem to beleive that there is more to learn. To be a bit clearer, we simply do not truly understand the structure of light. If we did actually know the structure of light, do you think we would have a better chance of making a relatively perfectly focused beam? I would say yes. The next assumption would be that we are looking for that civilization. We know that light can be focused, in particular, we have done ok with lasers and microwaves but this does not constitute the best choices to use. Like Octogon pointed out, lower frequencies would be best for penetration purposes. Yes they can detected different wavelengths. They are looking for power levels and patterns.

You also asked why they would point it at us. They wouldn't unless they knew where we were. Assuming the above assumption that they learned of the nature of light and could focus a beam rather well, they would encode patterns that would represent for example repeating or counting patterns. From there they could systematically sweep the sky with the focused signal just as they systematically scan the sky at arecibo.

It really just comes down to 1. Do they know that true structure of light? and 2. Did they send a signal?

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TEAM
LL

Imagine a central, public-access, collection of Blogs from all the millions of civilizations in our Galaxy...

Seriously, if there are ETs out there, their only intent is to eat us.

Well, I hear that they taste like chicken.

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TEAM
LL