Access
This article is part of Nature's premium content.
Published online 9 September 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.1091
News
'Galactic internet' proposed
Aliens might have sent messages by tweaking variable stars.
Just by gazing at the stars, earthling astronomers might have unwittingly picked up broadcasts from extraterrestrial civilizations. So says a neutrino physicist, adding that it might take researchers just a few months of searching to find evidence of this alien internet.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Comments
Reader comments are usually moderated after posting. If you find something offensive or inappropriate, you can speed this process by clicking 'Report this comment' (or, if that doesn't work for you, email redesign@nature.com). For more controversial topics, we reserve the right to moderate before comments are published.
"Firing a high-energy neutrino beam into a Cepheid" Continuous terawatts, petawatts? Conversion efficiency and collimation, then interaction cross-section? Beam loss for neutrino flavor oscillation while traversing matter? Time delay and signal dispersion between Cepheid core perturbation and surface appearance? Transmitting no more than 26 ASCII characters/year is silly. Set a bunch of undergrads to analyze the historical record, then apologize.
LOL is this before or after they carve a smiley face on a neighboring planetoid? I'm sorry... I guess I have a hard time imagining that some fragile intelligence would jeopardize it's existence by "messing around" with it's own sun on the off chance that someone else might see it in a few trillion years...
Mr. Malone, why wouldn't sufficiently advanced beings mess around with a star? Why assume it is their home star? If they are "slow" thinkers, the bit rate of communication might be, comparatively speaking, very high. Plus, whoever it is might just plain have time on their hands. "Against boredom, the gods themselves must struggle in vain." (R.W. Emerson) The thing about alien life is, there is no guarantee that it or its behavior relate to any criterion we can imagine before contact. I can't question the technical assumptions "Uncle Al" makes, but again I point to the idea of "slow" life, by which I mean beings who might have lifetimes measured in aeons, whose cognition is so slow that they have not completed a single paragraph of thought during the entire recorded history of mankind. This brings me to an objection I have to the premise of the experiment: communications of this nature might be appropriate to "slow" thinkers, but I doubt that "quick" thinkers would use this mechanism - the original article seems to imply at least a hope that whoever uses this mechanism (if, indeed, any are or have) would resemble us enough for synchronous communciation between us.
Ok, nice basis for a theory, but not doabl These stars are located in galaxies 60 million light years away. If we started transmitting today it would take 60 million years for the first signal to reach the closest start