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Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?

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Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: fourfathom on July 04, 2021, 10:39:36 pm ---All I was saying is that some modulation techniques that are now widely in use will exhibit easily-detectable artifacts.
--- End quote ---
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.

Zero999:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on July 05, 2021, 12:22:29 am ---
--- Quote from: fourfathom on July 04, 2021, 10:39:36 pm ---All I was saying is that some modulation techniques that are now widely in use will exhibit easily-detectable artifacts.
--- End quote ---
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.

--- End quote ---
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.

fourfathom:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on July 05, 2021, 09:25:37 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.
--- End quote ---

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.

hamster_nz:

--- Quote from: Zero999 on July 05, 2021, 09:25:37 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?

--- End quote ---

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).

Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: hamster_nz on July 05, 2021, 11:30:44 pm ---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.

--- End quote ---
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.

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