OK guys, i have to confess that i intentionally left something out up until now. I just wanted to see if anyone else would pick up on it. Some of you were mentioning the effect.

The bit i left out is that 3 phase A.C. is always transmitted through long distance cables in three's. You will NEVER see high tension power lines as a single pair of wires. They are only ever in three's because the three phases are 120 degrees out of phase with each other. The net effect is that the electromagnetic radiation, or 50/60Hz radio signal, is almost cancelled out completely. This is why if your a kilometre away from high tension power lines, your car radio won't hear the hiss anymore.

Effectively by running the three phase cables in parallel together with each other, the 50/60Hz signal will be dramatically reduced.

But telling you that bit leads me to a more advanced concept in H.V. electrical transmission. When you understand how the three wires cancel out each other, then there is another effect electrical engineers are always fighting but they never fully control - - Its called "Power Factor" and "Load balancing". Because power factor correction and load balancing are never perfect in H.V. electrical transmission lines, my original hypothesis still stands. The 50/60Hz buzz from planet Earth in space is still going to be mankind's loudest noise.

Power factor correction and load balancing would take a long time to explain but electricians deal with these effects every day. Anyone involved in electrical engineering will understand them. Look them up on Google if your not sure.

Power factor correction and load balancing are NEVER perfect, they ALWAYS "Lag" each other. This is the signal that we are broadcasting into space.

John.

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I see you keep thinking your AM radio is listening to 50-60 Hz. It isn't. It is listening to a spark gap transmitter. Something like a dirty insulator. Very very low power in comparison to what is being carried.

Want to see what is actually out there? First build yourself an antenna. 1/2 wavelength should be fine. Then put a simple detector on it, a diode. Now measure the output.

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Gary,
Yes, i know what static car radio's pick up, and i have built crystal radios.

John.

Gary,
Yes, i know what static car radio's pick up, and i have built crystal radios.

John.

On that crystal radio, did you put a 1/2 wavelength at 60Hz antenna? Ideally you would do a dipole, but an end fed will do for this test. Try a resonant turning coil and capacitor for 60 Hz while you are at it. Try and get a decent ground too.

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Yes, That's the point, Even higher frequency transmissions which will carry through the air quite well can not compete with low power interference at broadcast frequencies if they themselves are low power. Even though there are billions of kilowatts in our power grid almost all of it is delivered to our power plugs or dissipated as heat in the wires. Fields that escape are low power and don't travel very far.

Hi!

Could someone put up the following for me to read:

Sample scores (recorded ones) for the numbers returned by the Seti@home client.

That means numbers representing good spike scores, good pulse scores, good gaussians scores and good triplet scores.

E.T. probably will not be found using Seti@home. If my best gaussian score will not get better than 11.5 or my best triplet will not get better than 18.5, is there any hope of detecting something?

Make a guess on E.T.'s numbers!

Hi musicplayer,
There is no page yet with individual results. But the following page displays general current science results for the whole project; http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sci_status.html

E.T. probably will not be found using Seti@home. If my best gaussian score will not get better than 11.5 or my best triplet will not get better than 18.5, is there any hope of detecting something?

Maybe your right, maybe SETI@home won't succeed. But its a bit like buying a lottery ticket, there is always the hope that one day we will win!! And its a lot of fun trying.

In my personal opinion, will mankind ever succeed in finding other intelligent life out there in the universe??

I am 99.9% sure there is other intelligent life out there!! I just think its a matter of time. And this is my lottery ticket, I'm betting mankind will win and we will make contact. The whole universe is just full of life, i'm sure of it. Its just a matter of tuning into the right channel, in the right place, at the right time.

John.

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Can a pulse "spawn" (into or to) a gaussian?

Also, if I am right, the Seti@home (or Boinc Manager) Client only reports what is being detected (by it) and then in the form or by means of numbers.

When do we know whether the numbers are correct or not? Should we believe all or some of it?

My previous PC which broke ran a wild show for me to watch. It has not repeated again.

But unless I get a higher spike score, I will apparently not see a rerun of that spectacular show.

For now.

Edit: Checked the Science Status Page. Apparently 1,860,563,869 spikes in the Master Science Database Table:

How many lines does that mean it has for the spike table?

For me: Apparently some 738 lines in the Main Table (1500 lines in the Spike Table).

Do you find anything if you carry out a sort on "best / highest" number?

At the top:

bs_score: -0.115438 , bs_power: 30.663551330556

At the bottom:

bs_score: -0.698970 , bs_power: 7.9999904674591 (which means "nothing").

I might get a higher spike score eventually. How high should I expect it to go?

Same goes for the other three types of numbers. 1.22 or so for pulse, 11.5 for gaussian and 18.5 for triplet.

We haven't found anything yet. The rest is just hype.

[…] the only reason why we use copper element as the medium for electrical use, is economy […].

Silver is a considerably better conductor, but much less abundant on this planet, making it expensive; in another star-system, depending on what kind of supernova debris was present in its early environment, the relative cost of metals might be completely different. Gold and aluminum are pretty good conductors as well.

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I think that that supernovae produce heavy elements at fairly predictable rates and we could expect roughly the same proportions of elements as we see in our local neighbourhood. It is also reasonable to assume that ET's home world went through a hot and molten stage in it's early evolution. Copper (atomic number 29) would be higher in the crust and generally more plentiful than Silver (47) or Gold (79).

Also, if we make the assumption that ET is at least a few decades and possibly hundreds/thousands of years in advance of us technologically, it should be a fairly safe net that they will have developed cost-effective super-conductive materials whose RF leakage properties we can only guess at.

Hi Y'all,

Is there any idea how many megajoules of very low frequency photons that mankind radiates into space?

Surely any losses of the grid not radated as heat is radated as VLF photons.

I wanted to do a 10 minute presentation for my astrobio class this Friday.

I love the idea that our power grid radiates signal, but how much? I don’t even know where to look for paper for this kind of subject.

The other subject is how clear is the very frequency spectrum in space?

Obviously the CMB radiation is orders of magnitude above the very low frequency spectrum. Which means we don’t have to worry about big bang noise.

Leaving only star, star creation, and planet noise. I have a hard time thinking there are many natural processes that create a pure VLF signal for years at a time.

Even you had a part of the sun resonating at 50 hz, surely it vary greatly and change frequencies over time. Ideally we would be looking for a pure tone between 20 and 2000 hz which wouldn’t vary over time like natural processes.


Can anyone point me to a paper discussing lack/non-lack of astro-noise at very low frequencies?

Thanks in advance,

Michael

Michael,
If you only read the messages posted by me in this thread, you will be able to extract a lot of information about the energy mankind transmits from our electrical power grids alone. By many orders of magnitude, mankind's use of electricity in our homes and industry is the loudest electromagnetic radiation signal being transmitted out from this planet. We would be easy to spot from the other side of the milkyway galaxy because of our use of 3 phase a.c. electricity.

If you were ET looking for other ET's, searching for 3 phase EM radiation from exoplanets would be the easiest way to find another civilization.

I don't know what the total kilowatts output from all mankind's electrical grids is, but you can be sure its big. It would run into the thousands, maybe millions of Gigawatt's. And i do my own science research, i don't know of any academic papers that discuss this topic. The EM signal coming from electrical power transmission grids is unique, there is nothing in nature like it because its 3 phases all 120 degrees out of phase with each other. The signal is very clear and very distinct. Only someone intelligent would be creating this type of signal. Your welcome to quote this forum message as a reference. I would be glad to answer any questions you have.

John.

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Maybe SETI could employ such technique in search for ETI radio signals

Hi Johnney,

Well, your heart is in the right place but science isn’t based on intuition alone. We need hard numbers. For example, the three phase transmission scheme does self cancel quit a bit of noise, that’s the reason we use it.

Another person made an argument about AM radio being reflected by our atmosphere which is a good argument. Thought I’m not sure it applies. Most of the time AM radio is broadcasted vertically but our power grid is aligned horizontally. Meaning any leakage would be in the normal direction to the atmosphere ‘up’ and I would guess it would escape.

The third issue is the size of wavelength itself. It is in the 60,000,000 meter range. I don’t think anyone knows the propagation characteristics of a wavelength this large. It isn’t like anyone has went to space to measure it. We assume it propagates like AM radio but the wavelength is larger than our planet.

I’ll show you an example why we can’t assume things. We know black holes eat photons. That’s simple to understand, but what if the black hole has a 1000 km radius and the photon has a 60000 km wavelength? Can a black hole capture a photon much larger than its light consuming radius?

I’m just pointing out there’s lots of things here we don’t know.

I would say that to see an object, getting some reflected wave from it, you have to illuminate it with a wavelength minor than the object's dimension, otherwise the wave just curves around it and is not reflected. This is true of any wave, not only an electromagnetic wave.
Tullio

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So true Tullio. A bat can "see" an insect smaller than one half inch (about 1 cm for youse guys).

So it's sonar must have a wavelength that is smaller than this. So taking the speed of sound at sea level of 330 meters/sec or so we know that v=fλ or f=v/λ so we have 30,000 cm/ 1 cm =33,000 cycles per second as a minimum. I suspect that bats emit perhaps 40,000 cycle per second sound.

Also the idea of the 60 cycle wave emitting as a photon is mind stretching. It would more realistically be described as a long, slow and lazy disturbance in both the electric and magnetic fields in the vacuum.

Can you detect it here on Earth ( 60 cycle power)?--I don't think so unless you turn up your old style amplifier and listen to the hum from your power supply ripple.

I remember poking a finger in the input of a HP oscilloscope set at 50 Hz (the standard in Italy) and seeing a beautiful sine wave.
Tullio

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I remember poking a finger in the input of a HP oscilloscope set at 50 Hz (the standard in Italy) and seeing a beautiful sine wave.

Yes, by capacitive coupling (or electrical connection) of electrostatic or magnetic pickup by your electrically conductive body from the ambient electrical and magnetic fields.

No photons needed for that.

Some people wear tin or foil hats not understanding the physics...


Keep searchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

I’m a physicist, I assure you that all EM waves can be viewed as discreet packets with discreet energies. hc/wavelength no matter if it is 60nm or 60km.

I have done some research and I'm starting to think the universe is kind of quite below 1000 hz. Solar wind plus magnetic field equals RF, but most of these frequences seem to be in megahertz and some in kilohertz. I find no references to 10 hz at all.

Michael(sirzerp),

Hi Johnney,

Well, your heart is in the right place but science isn’t based on intuition alone. We need hard numbers. For example, the three phase transmission scheme does self cancel quit a bit of noise, that’s the reason we use it.

Michael, my background is in electrical engineering but i have studied several other related discipline's. No, i have not carried out any extensive scientific investigation into the science discussed in this thread. So i must admit, some of the science is speculative. But the theory is solid science. Yes, you are correct that we try to balance the 3 phases, hence this would neutralize some of the EM radiation. But due to electrical inductance and something called "power factor", the balance is never perfect. Another point is that 3 phase a.c. transmission lines are not "screened" like a co-axial cable. They run in free air to cool them. The fact that they are not screened means that even though the 3 phases balance the current flow, there is a massive RF transmission from the lines at 50Hz in Europe and 60Hz in the US. The balancing or power factor correction wont prevent the lines transmitting RF signals 120 degrees apart. So in theory, each of the three lines will act as individual dipole antennas between the Earth and the copper or aluminum wire, if the transformer has been grounded to earth. If the transformer is not grounded, as is the case with some transmission systems, the dipole antenna would be from wire-to-wire, horizontally. or phase-to-phase.

Another person made an argument about AM radio being reflected by our atmosphere which is a good argument. Thought I’m not sure it applies. Most of the time AM radio is broadcasted vertically but our power grid is aligned horizontally. Meaning any leakage would be in the normal direction to the atmosphere ‘up’ and I would guess it would escape.

In the case of the horizontal power lines, you could think of it like an antenna lying flat on the ground instead of being on a vertical mast. With our power line, half the "lobe" of EM radiation will be absorbed into the ground. The other half will propagate vertically out into space. I'm not sure, but you might be right, maybe some of the EM wave will bounce off the ionosphere. But most of it will propagate into space. Think of a radio telescope dish on the ground. The dish faces up into space of thats where you are transmitting too. So really, our transmission lines are pointed in the best possible direction, they face into space, they just don't have a radio dish underneath them to amplify and direct the signal.

The third issue is the size of wavelength itself. It is in the 60,000,000 meter range. I don’t think anyone knows the propagation characteristics of a wavelength this large. It isn’t like anyone has went to space to measure it. We assume it propagates like AM radio but the wavelength is larger than our planet.

The wave should propagate just like any other EM wave.

I’ll show you an example why we can’t assume things. We know black holes eat photons. That’s simple to understand, but what if the black hole has a 1000 km radius and the photon has a 60000 km wavelength? Can a black hole capture a photon much larger than its light consuming radius?

I’m just pointing out there’s lots of things here we don’t know.

This is the way i see it Michael. The black hole is a bad analogy. The wave will propagate just like any other wave. And it does not matter if the wavelength is larger than the planet. If you want to detect massive wavelength EM radiation, you just build your detector to measure and detect a small part of the wave. Its easy to just build your antenna to match 1/60,000,000th of the wavelength. So ET would only need a 1 meter antenna and some clever software to detect our electrical grids.

No, your right Michael, this is just a forum message to chat about the topic. So no quotes or references are needed, its light hearted. But the science i have discussed here is very valuable. In general, before you arived Michael, i tried to keep heavy electrical and technical detail out of the discussion cos i know the folks reading the message might not understand. So i was keeping it timid :) The fact remains, our planet stands out like a sore thumb in space because of our heavy use of electricity through distributed electrical grids. ET could spot us a 100,000 light years away because of this. Of coarse, we only have the grids for about 1 hundred years, so ET will get the signal when it arrives. I have never heard any SETI researcher even mentioning this as a possible way to detect ET. Sometimes science misses the most obvious things. Or maybe i just see things that other people don't see.

John in Ireland.

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