Author Topic: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?  (Read 20816 times)

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Online SiliconWizard

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #125 on: July 01, 2021, 05:19:17 pm »
About alien life, I think distances are just too big to observe alien civilizations.

Yes. That's the most common and most reasonable point these days.

Planets which could potentially host life, and a form of life that could actually interact with us in any detectable way, are much too far away from us - meaning of course, very far away in time. Enough that the equivalent time distance is orders of magnitudes longer than our existence as a species. There just isn't any possible meeting point.

Of course, we may also find "primitive" forms of life in planets that are much closer to us. Heck, we are even still looking for life on Mars. But I think we'd all agree that by now, it's safe to say that Mars doesn't host any species that we could even call a civilization. Some weird bacterias would be our best bet, if any.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #126 on: July 02, 2021, 12:42:24 am »
I'll call that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
That's actually a darned good name for it, I like that.

Not only is it intuitive, but it also has precedents in cognitive sciences: general intelligence factor vs. intelligence quotient.  Latter is measurable using tests, but that which actually matters is the former, but currently can only determine indirectly, for example by making many different IQ tests and looking at the commonalities in the results.  (To simplify, if you could remove all cultural and cognitive biases from IQ tests, you'd end up basically with a test for the g-factor.)

It's only our hubris that makes us think that our intelligence is so special.
Fully agreed.
 

Offline eti

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #127 on: July 02, 2021, 01:12:44 am »
Remember that song, "Video killed the radio star"? Maybe SHORT term, but look - where's MTV now? Nowhere, and where's music radio? EVERYWHERE. See my analogy?
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #128 on: July 02, 2021, 01:31:01 am »
Perhaps a look even further back, to silent film era, is more illustrative.

Not all silent actors made the jump to the sound era.  Some did, like Greta Garbo, Boris Karloff, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.  Many didn't.
The industry, the art form, simply changed.

Whether silent films were the purer art form, or proper electronic hobby necessarily involves ferrichloride, I don't have an opinion.

All I know is that while all things change, as long as we keep records and maintain copies of things we enjoy, those coming after us can enjoy them as much as we did if they choose to; and I want them to have the option to choose.  I myself might yet decide to etch a board on my own, for example, because I have squirreled away some good articles on those old hobby magazines.  Arduino did not kill them in any way; it just brought something different to the table.

Full disclosure: I just stumbled on a machine learning-colorized version of Nosferatu (1922), with a nice orchestra-based soundtrack.
 

Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #129 on: July 03, 2021, 09:42:48 am »
Remember that song, "Video killed the radio star"? Maybe SHORT term, but look - where's MTV now? Nowhere, and where's music radio? EVERYWHERE. See my analogy?
I don't think either radio, or MTV are doing well, at the moment. They've both been replaced by streaming. I've never seen the point in music videos, or watched MTV in the 90s, when it was at its peak. Nowadays, when I listen to music, I put it on YouTube, in a background tab, so don't use the video part.

Full disclosure: I just stumbled on a machine learning-colorized version of Nosferatu (1922), with a nice orchestra-based soundtrack.

Well AI has killed manual colourising to some degree. There's still some need for manual training, to colour thing such as clothes, old vehicles, buildings etc. but most of it can be automated.
« Last Edit: July 09, 2021, 09:52:43 am by Zero999 »
 

Online langwadt

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #130 on: July 03, 2021, 10:03:22 am »
Remember that song, "Video killed the radio star"? Maybe SHORT term, but look - where's MTV now? Nowhere, and where's music radio? EVERYWHERE. See my analogy?
I don't think either radio, or MTV are doing well, at the moment. They've both been replaced by streaming. I've never seen the point in music videos, or watched MTV in the 90s, when it was at its peak. Nowadays, when I listen to music, I put it on YouTube, in a background tab, so use the video part.

Full disclosure: I just stumbled on a machine learning-colorized version of Nosferatu (1922), with a nice orchestra-based soundtrack.

Well AI has killed manual colourising to some degree. There's still some need for manual training, to colour thing such as clothes, old vehicles, buildings etc. but most of it can be automated.


https://www.reddit.com/gallery/mqmvx5
 
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Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #131 on: July 03, 2021, 11:23:54 am »
Remember that song, "Video killed the radio star"? Maybe SHORT term, but look - where's MTV now? Nowhere, and where's music radio? EVERYWHERE. See my analogy?
I don't think either radio, or MTV are doing well, at the moment. They've both been replaced by streaming. I've never seen the point in music videos, or watched MTV in the 90s, when it was at its peak. Nowadays, when I listen to music, I put it on YouTube, in a background tab, so use the video part.

Full disclosure: I just stumbled on a machine learning-colorized version of Nosferatu (1922), with a nice orchestra-based soundtrack.

Well AI has killed manual colourising to some degree. There's still some need for manual training, to colour thing such as clothes, old vehicles, buildings etc. but most of it can be automated.


https://www.reddit.com/gallery/mqmvx5
That pretty much agrees with what I said: manual training is required for things which the AI won't know the colours of such as clothing, but lots of it: sky, trees, grass, plain old asphalt and uncoloured buildings can be done automatically. If the author repeated the experiment, on a motion picture, after training the AI on those original stills, or samples of clothing, he/she would have an authentic result.
 

Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #132 on: July 03, 2021, 06:37:04 pm »
What we are looking for is, in fact, a human-like civilizations but from outer space.
What do you mean "we", kimosabe?  Yes, perhaps the popular press and the "I Want to Believe" types are focusing on human-like aliens, but the serious researchers (as with the SETI Institute, where I used to be involved) are considering all types of life, including virtual and non-organic (as you mentioned).  The only commonality this potential alien life necessarily has with humans is that it produce some signal or other evidence of existence that we can detect from the Earth locale.

By "we" I was thinking "us, humans" as a species.  Individual mileage may vary.

The looking for "human-like aliens" put as "a kind of dumb thing to look for" was not about being stupid.  I apologize if it sounded like that.  My bad phrasing.  I was just trying to highlight how small is the probability to detect aliens.  In fact, while I was writing that I thought SETI ended many years ago, no way I would have aimed at SETI.  (but I googled now and it seems SETI still exists, no idea where from I knew it was ended)

It was not about the pop culture green aliens and flying saucers either.  The "human-like aliens" was about aliens close enough with us so we will be able to notice them (e.g. if a "meme", or the society, or the Internet were to be in fact aliens, we wouldn't know it even if we interact with them daily), and to have a meaningful interaction with them, meaningful from our standpoint (e.g. if it were to discover aliens like the thinking ocean from Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris", that would be more like a curiosity).




I believe we are strongly limited by the place where we evolved, limited not only by our biology, but by our mind, too.  I don't think one day would be possible to know everything.

Our marvelous brain with which we took over over our animal kingdom, brain of which we are so proud of to have would be nothing if one day an alien with a brain the size of an ocean will one day show of.  Size alone matters a lot.  From size and big numbers alone can emerge things we don't comprehend.  We still struggle to define what is conscience.

Another limitation come from the fact we can only see/detect/perceive only a very small part of what it is "out there", being it directly or with instruments.  For example, only 10 generations or so ago we were unaware about radio waves.  Now we are looking for radio signals assuming aliens would use them, too.  Highly unlikely, but does this mean SETI should stop using radio-telescopes?  No, of course we must look and search with what we have, no matter how limited we are now in tools or in understanding.

Another limitation comes from the training of our "General Intelligent" NN (by the way, AGI term is not mine, just that it seems nowadays AGI somehow became the de-facto name, meanwhile searched for AGI prize and it seems there are many, e.g. a $5 mil one).  To give an example about the kind of limitation I picture, let's imagine a very simple NN trained for OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and we tech it to recognize only digits from 0 to 9.  That's the only thing our OCR can, or knows, that's the only thing it can understand, that's its entire world.  Now, if we suddenly show to our OCR a letter, the OCR will either misclassify the letter as a digit, or it might miss it entirely considering it's noise or an ink smudge.  Same with us and very different aliens.  That's why I wrote human-like aliens, or else we would misidentify them or wouldn't notice them.

We evolved and lived here on Earth for a very long time, and in very specific conditions.  In all we do and think there is a gazillion of tacit assumptions.  The very think that we try to reason using logic, and assuming true and false are opposite and can not overlap is already a limitation.

Sure, in math there could be fuzzy logic instead of boolean logic, but math is an axiomatic system and it's abstract.  We can set as axioms whatever, but those axioms will have to come from our NN limited by size and training (unless we want to start from random axioms, which will be quite meaningless), so not even math can pull us completely outside of the box we are imprisoned now, the box of our own limitations.

For now we only know to listen for electromagnetic waves, and we learned how to do that only moments ago (at an astronomical scale).  Maybe we know a couple of other few things than EM waves (thinking Fermi, CERN, LIGO) but not much else.  This is almost like sitting in a medieval castle and hoping to see smoke signaling, but underwater.  Could happen, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it.

Then, there is always the small chance that we are the first and we are the Gods.  We even created life already.  (Thinking here the cloned Dolly sheep, or Craig Venter's team booting synthetic biologic life, or maybe the dude that created living assembly code lines long time ago - I don't recall his name, I think it was contacted later by SETI, too, or maybe it was NASA, not sure, his study was about how the amplitude of random changes between generations, and how that - the equivalent of what temperature is for us - can kill or give birth to small self-perpetuating assembly programs, thus proving life can only be expected to form only in a certain range of temperatures, too much agitation will dismantle it, too little will froze it dead - IIRC this was first tested with PDP assembly code)

What I like to think is that the Universe has much, much more "stuff" in it, and we will never be able to look at it other then through a keyhole.  It's an impossibility to ever know it all.

Is this discouraging?  No, it's entertaining because there are so many to find out about.

So what's the meaning of all this, then?  What's the meaning of life, the meaning of existence itself?  None.  It's meaningless.  We like to assign meaning, maybe so we can have a meaning, too, but there really isn't any.  We insist in pretending there is a meaning, instead of growing up and admitting we are meaningless just like anything else.

Is this good, or bad?  Well, there is no such thing as good or bad either.  The notion of good and bad only makes sense in relation with a given goal.  For example, it's good that I made that soup yesterday.  Not for the chicken.  It depends of the goal if something is good or bad, or in terms of NN it depends of the cost function we want to optimize for.

So, is Arduino good or bad?  It depends of what's the goal when judging that.
« Last Edit: July 03, 2021, 06:41:53 pm by RoGeorge »
 

Offline fourfathom

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #133 on: July 03, 2021, 08:38:50 pm »
I thought SETI ended many years ago, no way I would have aimed at SETI.  (but I googled now and it seems SETI still exists, no idea where from I knew it was ended)

SETI research at NASA was defunded many years ago (this was in the Proxmire "Golden Fleece" era).  In response, the SETI Institute was formed, funded by private individuals, Carl Sagan and Frank Drake among them.  More recently, NASA has been working with the SETI Institute and other SETI groups on exobiology and extremophile research.  There are many scientists who call the SETI Institute home, but get their funding from NASA as they participate in NASA projects.  Some of the key scientists on the Kepler mission are SETI Institute folks.  I was a Director at the Institute for a while, during the Allen Telescope Array project.

There are other SETI ventures.  "SETI at Home" was developed at Univ California at Berkeley.

Yes, we use the tools we have.  We (SETI) do hope that intelligent life, whatever form it takes, will want to communicate with life elsewhere, and that they choose one of the few modes that can propagate vast interstellar distances.  Unless unknown physics are involved, the tools we have may be able to receive these signals.  Of course, ETIs may not want to risk announcing their presence, because of the same concerns that many here on Earth hold.  I think it highly unlikely that random "I Love Lucy" TV transmissions (etc.) can be received many light years distant, and in general as communications technology advances the signals look more and more like noise the window for accidental reception is vanishingly small.  So it has to be a deliberate beacon, one designed to be received.  Highly unlikely, but IMO worth the search if only for "human" reasons.
We'll search out every place a sick, twisted, solitary misfit might run to! -- I'll start with Radio Shack.
 
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Offline RoGeorge

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #134 on: July 03, 2021, 11:42:21 pm »
Thanks for taking the time to explain, and WOW!   :-+

Please, I'm a sucker for firsthand history tales.
How was it there, at SETI?

Offline fourfathom

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #135 on: July 04, 2021, 12:03:04 am »
How was it there, at SETI?
I was barely there at all, and only for a few years.  Back around 2001 I had made a worthwhile donation, so that plus my tech experience and contacts led to me being invited to join the board of directors.  I got to hang out with Frank Drake, Jill Tartar, and many other ridiculously smart people.  I met with Paul Allen a couple of times, as the Allen Telescope Array was getting ready to go live.  Most of my participation was in the "raising money and support" area, but I occasionally pitched in on some tech issues.  Again, some incredibly smart and thoughtful people there -- I learned a lot.
We'll search out every place a sick, twisted, solitary misfit might run to! -- I'll start with Radio Shack.
 
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Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #136 on: July 04, 2021, 07:26:22 pm »
as communications technology advances the signals look more and more like noise
Yes; and I think we should emphasize that this is not because of any transmission technology thing, it is the very nature of information.

In simple terms, it is mathematically impossible to distinguish between a stream of perfectly random bits, and perfectly compressed data.

Is it possible to use the radiation of ones own star as the "carrier", with perfect data compression?  The closer to such "perfect compression" piggybacking on natural radiation sources like stars is physically possible and feasible, the harder it is for even a technologically hyperadvanced civilization to determine that the output of a nearby star contains a compressed signal carrying data.

Indeed, it is the stupid and wasteful ones that are easily recognized and localized.  Makes for an interesting approach to considering possible reasons for the Fermi paradox: the stupid ones get wiped out, and the smart ones keep their environs in order.  Reminds me of why hospitals keep their surgeries meticulously clean, really.  :-X
« Last Edit: July 04, 2021, 08:10:28 pm by Nominal Animal »
 

Offline fourfathom

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #137 on: July 04, 2021, 07:56:02 pm »
as communications technology advances the signals look more and more like noise
Yes; and I think we should emphasize that this is not because of any transmission technology thing, it is the very nature of information.

Well, it's both, really.  We can send random-appearing data using simple modulation techniques (for example on-off AM carrier or simple FSK) and someone will still be able to detect the signal.  Even many near-Shannon-limit modulation methods don't hide the presence of the signal.  It's when we use spread-spectrum and wideband phase/amplitude modulation methods that the signal starts to become undetectable to receivers that don't know the details modulation method being used.

Of course I'm not claiming that we can necessarily decode the simple modulation, just that we will know there's something there.  Decoding it isn't going to happen unless the data is non-random looking. This is why I insist that Aliens use an obvious beacon and coding  if they want to communicate with us here on Earth.
We'll search out every place a sick, twisted, solitary misfit might run to! -- I'll start with Radio Shack.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #138 on: July 04, 2021, 08:20:01 pm »
Well, it's both, really.  We can send random-appearing data using simple modulation techniques (for example on-off AM carrier or simple FSK) and someone will still be able to detect the signal.
Perhaps the following wording works better?

You can detect the presence of noise, but it is mathematically impossible to distinguish between perfectly random noise, and perfectly compressed data.

If someone manages to control the output of a star, even if only at specific wavelengths where the output or a normal unmodulated star contain near-random noise, assuming they have good enough compression techniques, it is mathematically impossible to determine whether the output of any particular star is thus modulated from just examining the output of said star.
 

Offline fourfathom

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #139 on: July 04, 2021, 10:39:36 pm »
You can detect the presence of noise, but it is mathematically impossible to distinguish between perfectly random noise, and perfectly compressed data.

Yes.

All I was saying is that some modulation techniques that are now widely in use will exhibit easily-detectable artifacts.  AM radio, even if carrying a pure noise signal, will have a strong single-frequency carrier.  There will be noise sidebands, but the carrier is obvious.  Even compressed data may have an overlying framing protocol, and this can display detectable patterns.  Other methods, such as spread-spectrum, can be under the wideband noise-floor and be virtually undetectable (without knowing the spreading code) even if they are carrying non-random data.  For true stealth, spread-spectrum carrying compressed (virtually random) data is the way to go. 

But AM modulation is inefficient.  As we reach for communications efficiency, we are heading more and more towards compressed data carried by efficient modulation.  This is less and less detectable.
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Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #140 on: July 05, 2021, 12:22:29 am »
All I was saying is that some modulation techniques that are now widely in use will exhibit easily-detectable artifacts.
Certainly.  My own point was only that we don't know if such artifacts are a physical necessity, or only an effect of our current level of technology.

The reason that distinction is necessary, is because one must understand that with the limitations we humans have right now, we can only detect civilizations with roughly a similar technological level and attitude wrt. energy use.

Or, to put it crudely, are at least as noisy and dirty as we are.

Given sufficient technological or biological capability and will, there is no physical limit to how well a civilization or an intelligence can "hide" itself from detection, that we know of (even in the theoretical sense).

And that, in a very literal sense, means that the argument that "If there were any technological civilizations out there close to us, we'd have heard from them already" is a logical fallacy.  The correct form of that argument is "If there were any technological civilizations at a roughly similar technological level to us out there close to us with roughly similar capabilities and attitude to energy use for communications purposes as we have, we'd have heard from them already".

Put another way, if we discovered a way to modulate some of Sol's output that normally exhibits near-perfect randomness, we could transmit information to nearby stars, and it would still be mathematically impossible from any civilization to deduce the presence of such information from Sol's output alone. Including the rest of us on Earth, by the way. (We already have compression methods close enough to Shannon limit, without easily detectable framing or similar features.  That part is simple.  The hard part is to absorb and emit a specific originally near-perfectly random wavelength or bunch/range of wavelengths in a controlled manner, in distributed fashion over such a large area as the outer surface area of the corona of our Sun.  Math we already have; not the tech.  Except humans would never bother to spend the resources on such tech, when more important stuff like the Kardashians and cosmetic chemicals and whatnot are available to concentrate on.)
Perhaps there would have to be some sort of maintenance breaks, because to implement such modulation at our technological level one would need a swarm of satellites in the corona of the sun absorbing and then re-emitting certain wavelengths in a coordinated, energy-efficient manner.  Using asteroid belt material for the larger satellites, and basically dust for the much more numerous smaller modulation units, such breaks should by default be nearly indistinguishable from a temporary occlusion due to an asteroid belt and/or a passing dust cloud too.
« Last Edit: July 05, 2021, 12:32:52 am by Nominal Animal »
 

Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #141 on: July 05, 2021, 09:25:37 pm »
All I was saying is that some modulation techniques that are now widely in use will exhibit easily-detectable artifacts.
Certainly.  My own point was only that we don't know if such artifacts are a physical necessity, or only an effect of our current level of technology.

The reason that distinction is necessary, is because one must understand that with the limitations we humans have right now, we can only detect civilizations with roughly a similar technological level and attitude wrt. energy use.

Or, to put it crudely, are at least as noisy and dirty as we are.

Given sufficient technological or biological capability and will, there is no physical limit to how well a civilization or an intelligence can "hide" itself from detection, that we know of (even in the theoretical sense).

And that, in a very literal sense, means that the argument that "If there were any technological civilizations out there close to us, we'd have heard from them already" is a logical fallacy.  The correct form of that argument is "If there were any technological civilizations at a roughly similar technological level to us out there close to us with roughly similar capabilities and attitude to energy use for communications purposes as we have, we'd have heard from them already".

Put another way, if we discovered a way to modulate some of Sol's output that normally exhibits near-perfect randomness, we could transmit information to nearby stars, and it would still be mathematically impossible from any civilization to deduce the presence of such information from Sol's output alone. Including the rest of us on Earth, by the way. (We already have compression methods close enough to Shannon limit, without easily detectable framing or similar features.  That part is simple.  The hard part is to absorb and emit a specific originally near-perfectly random wavelength or bunch/range of wavelengths in a controlled manner, in distributed fashion over such a large area as the outer surface area of the corona of our Sun.  Math we already have; not the tech.  Except humans would never bother to spend the resources on such tech, when more important stuff like the Kardashians and cosmetic chemicals and whatnot are available to concentrate on.)
Perhaps there would have to be some sort of maintenance breaks, because to implement such modulation at our technological level one would need a swarm of satellites in the corona of the sun absorbing and then re-emitting certain wavelengths in a coordinated, energy-efficient manner.  Using asteroid belt material for the larger satellites, and basically dust for the much more numerous smaller modulation units, such breaks should by default be nearly indistinguishable from a temporary occlusion due to an asteroid belt and/or a passing dust cloud too.
Well if we discovered a strong source of random noise, in the RF region, would it be reasonable to suspect it might be aliens?

The human race has only had the ability to look for aliens, fairly recently. The fact technology has advanced as much as it has is amazing and could be partly due to chance. Not all human populations developed complex civilisations. Some live in the stone age, to the present day. The reason for the difference in development between populations, is an interesting debate, which can't be fully played out, due to political correctness. Technology might not continue to progress at the current rate. It's possible the downfall of the west, could lead to regression. Yes there might be or have been, even more technically advanced lifeforms in the universe, but it's highly unlikely that even if we find them, they would have already gone.
 

Offline fourfathom

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #142 on: July 05, 2021, 09:56:59 pm »
Yes there might be or have been, even more technically advanced lifeforms in the universe, but it's highly unlikely that even if we find them, they would have already gone.

This is one of the factors in the Drake Equation.  Of course we only know to any degree of certainty a very few of the equation factors.  So we can't currently use the equation to derive an answer, but it's a worthwhile way to at least look at the problem.
We'll search out every place a sick, twisted, solitary misfit might run to! -- I'll start with Radio Shack.
 

Offline hamster_nz

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #143 on: July 05, 2021, 11:30:44 pm »
Well if we discovered a strong source of random noise, in the RF region, would it be reasonable to suspect it might be aliens?

There's random from natural processes, and then there is purposefully random. I feel it would be possible to spot the difference, even if we can't decode it.

I think that it would be the other problem - communications moves to more efficient methods, with only the minimal power used, and all that that power directed at the target (e.g. low power & beam steered rather than multi kW FM broadcasts).

Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #144 on: July 06, 2021, 04:23:34 am »
There's random from natural processes, and then there is purposefully random. I feel it would be possible to spot the difference, even if we can't decode it.
Nope.  It isn't. That is exactly my point.

And really, you don't even do it purposefully.  You do it because it gives you more bandwidth at the price of some computation.
The more efficient your compression algorithm is, the closer the result is to perfectly uniform white noise.  This has been proven, and we humans can already get pretty darn near that, given enough data and computing power to compress it.
 

Offline Nominal Animal

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #145 on: July 06, 2021, 04:46:55 am »
Well if we discovered a strong source of random noise, in the RF region, would it be reasonable to suspect it might be aliens?
No, it would not.  While there are not many sources of perfectly uniform random noise, there are a lot of processes which produce noise with a specific spectrum.  Black-body radiation is ubiquitous.  The absorption and emission spikes we see from matter interacting with that radiation is just something on top we're used to seeing; the underlying spectrum is continuous and very "random".  A purer example, and occurring everywhere in the universe all the time, is bremsstrahlung or deceleration radiation. 

It would be silly to suspect everything.

Which comes a full circle back to SETI.  They really are doing the sensible thing in the search, given our technological limitations.  I support and applaud those efforts, only object to some misconceptions about what the current results really indicate: we haven't ruled out nearby civilizations, only nearby civilizations having similar characteristics of wasting energy in communications.  And, really, I kinda think we aren't that loud (as in easily detectable at interstellar distances), and probably will get much, much quieter in the next century or so.
 

Offline fourfathom

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #146 on: July 06, 2021, 05:46:37 am »
we haven't ruled out nearby civilizations, only nearby civilizations having similar characteristics of wasting energy in communications.  And, really, I kinda think we aren't that loud (as in easily detectable at interstellar distances), and probably will get much, much quieter in the next century or so.

This why I think we should be looking for a deliberate beacon, designed to be detected.  Interception of accidental communications leakage at interstellar distances is extremely unlikely -- even if the modulation and signal have non-random characteristics the signal levels just aren't there.
We'll search out every place a sick, twisted, solitary misfit might run to! -- I'll start with Radio Shack.
 
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Offline Zero999

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #147 on: July 07, 2021, 12:52:35 pm »
Well if we discovered a strong source of random noise, in the RF region, would it be reasonable to suspect it might be aliens?
No, it would not.  While there are not many sources of perfectly uniform random noise, there are a lot of processes which produce noise with a specific spectrum.  Black-body radiation is ubiquitous.  The absorption and emission spikes we see from matter interacting with that radiation is just something on top we're used to seeing; the underlying spectrum is continuous and very "random".  A purer example, and occurring everywhere in the universe all the time, is bremsstrahlung or deceleration radiation. 
Look at it, from the opposite perspective: is it possible to look at the earth's antropogenic EM spectrum and plausibly attribute it to natural causes? Bear in mind that there's a huge peak in the visible spectrum, in urban areas, not currently illuminated by the sun, which is amplitude modulated, with a 24 hour period and is also the case for HF and VHF emissions, to some degree, due to changes in the ionosphere.
« Last Edit: July 07, 2021, 02:57:31 pm by Zero999 »
 

Online themadhippy

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #148 on: July 07, 2021, 01:21:04 pm »
How do we know other lifeforms aren't  trying to communicate with us,just with a method we haven't discovered yet,or even by something that we see regularly and put down to nature,at the moment its raining,we assume thats  nature, but could each rain drop be a 1 and the space between drops a 0 and billions of light years away some little alien is sitting there with his water pistol tapping out a message.
 
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Offline xrunner

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Re: Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
« Reply #149 on: July 07, 2021, 03:17:22 pm »
Maybe a message is contained in pi? Maybe when we're smart enough to get to 500 trillion digits a digital message will be found.

Quote
The value of the number pi has been calculated to a new world record length of 31 trillion digits, far past the previous record of 22 trillion.

Emma Haruka Iwao, a Google employee from Japan, found the new digits with the help of the company's cloud computing service.

Pi is the number you get when you divide a circle's circumference by its diameter.

The first digits, 3.14, are well known but the number is infinitely long.

Extending the known sequence of digits in pi is very difficult because the number follows no set pattern.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47524760
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