Hi,
A week or two ago, I was looking over some info I recently came across on Traveller that had got me thinking about how the Vlani Empire was supposedly within a few parsecs of Earth for almost 900yrs before first contact was made and it got me thinking. I posted a question on the possibility of earlier contact by way of a mis-jump on another board here, but lately I've instead been thinking about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and whether either the Vlani or the Terrans should have suspected that the other was there before first contact was made.
I only recently dug my old Traveller stuff out of my attic, and I'm not fully up on some of the stuff that was published as part of Mega-Traveller, The New Era, GURPS, or T4 so my questions may already be answered somewhere that I just don't know about yet.
Anyway, though, on the one hand part of me wonders that if two advanced civilizations are located relatively close to each other, it would seem possible that they might be aware of each others presence due to electro-magnetic transmissions that each civilization makes, some of which gets radiated out into space and which might be detected by the other civilization.
As such, on the one hand it would seem to me that on Earth or whatever the nearest Vlani planet is, at least in present day, if there were an alien civilization within a few parsecs from here we might be picking up traces of there presence, provided that we are listening.
As I understand it, this is the kind of stuff that SETI (the Search for Extr-Terrestrial Intelligence) is looking for. And from stuff like the book Contact by Carl Sagan, I'm under the impression that one way an alien broadcast would be detected against the background of random background noise in the galaxy is that it would likely appear as a non-random sequence of signals.
However, I am an engineer (or more correctly a Naval Architect and Marine Engineer by training) and one of the things we learned in school as part of doing seakeeping analyses is that a random sea state can be approximated by super-imposing a bunch of regular wave patterns on top of each (each of which has a different amplitude, wave period, and/or heading). Put another way, what this implies is that if you throw a bunch of miscellaneous non-random wave patterns together they will appear as a random, confused mess.
As such, its got me wondering whether you can really detect the presence of an alien civilization by trying to pick up electro-magnetic signals that appear to be non-random in nature, or if all the radio communications from ship-to-ship and ship-to-planet, and TV transmissions, etc wouldn't just all combine into something that appears somewhat random anyway?
I guess an alternate thought would be to instead just look for areas of higher electro-magnetic noise than in other areas of space, as this could be an indication of alot of non-naturally occurring transmissions in that area, but this would assume that we know what is a normal amount of background noise and what isn't.
I know that I can try and look up some of this on the internet, since I suspect that there is a lot of stuff available on line, but I am also just interested in seeing what others here might think as well.
Anyway, just curious to see what others may feel on this topic.
Regards
PF
A week or two ago, I was looking over some info I recently came across on Traveller that had got me thinking about how the Vlani Empire was supposedly within a few parsecs of Earth for almost 900yrs before first contact was made and it got me thinking. I posted a question on the possibility of earlier contact by way of a mis-jump on another board here, but lately I've instead been thinking about the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and whether either the Vlani or the Terrans should have suspected that the other was there before first contact was made.
I only recently dug my old Traveller stuff out of my attic, and I'm not fully up on some of the stuff that was published as part of Mega-Traveller, The New Era, GURPS, or T4 so my questions may already be answered somewhere that I just don't know about yet.
Anyway, though, on the one hand part of me wonders that if two advanced civilizations are located relatively close to each other, it would seem possible that they might be aware of each others presence due to electro-magnetic transmissions that each civilization makes, some of which gets radiated out into space and which might be detected by the other civilization.
As such, on the one hand it would seem to me that on Earth or whatever the nearest Vlani planet is, at least in present day, if there were an alien civilization within a few parsecs from here we might be picking up traces of there presence, provided that we are listening.
As I understand it, this is the kind of stuff that SETI (the Search for Extr-Terrestrial Intelligence) is looking for. And from stuff like the book Contact by Carl Sagan, I'm under the impression that one way an alien broadcast would be detected against the background of random background noise in the galaxy is that it would likely appear as a non-random sequence of signals.
However, I am an engineer (or more correctly a Naval Architect and Marine Engineer by training) and one of the things we learned in school as part of doing seakeeping analyses is that a random sea state can be approximated by super-imposing a bunch of regular wave patterns on top of each (each of which has a different amplitude, wave period, and/or heading). Put another way, what this implies is that if you throw a bunch of miscellaneous non-random wave patterns together they will appear as a random, confused mess.
As such, its got me wondering whether you can really detect the presence of an alien civilization by trying to pick up electro-magnetic signals that appear to be non-random in nature, or if all the radio communications from ship-to-ship and ship-to-planet, and TV transmissions, etc wouldn't just all combine into something that appears somewhat random anyway?
I guess an alternate thought would be to instead just look for areas of higher electro-magnetic noise than in other areas of space, as this could be an indication of alot of non-naturally occurring transmissions in that area, but this would assume that we know what is a normal amount of background noise and what isn't.
I know that I can try and look up some of this on the internet, since I suspect that there is a lot of stuff available on line, but I am also just interested in seeing what others here might think as well.
Anyway, just curious to see what others may feel on this topic.
Regards
PF
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