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Is Arduino killing the electronic hobby?
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Nominal Animal:

--- 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?
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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.
fourfathom:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on July 06, 2021, 04:46:55 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.
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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.
Zero999:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on July 06, 2021, 04:46:55 am ---
--- 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 ---
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. 

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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.
themadhippy:
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.
xrunner:
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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