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Comment by perlgeek | Hacker News Reader

Since it hasn't come up yet: whenever a new astronomical phenomenon is detected, people think "Aliens!" as the reason.

In fact, when the first pulsar was discovered, it was (somewhat jokingly) called LGM-1 for "little green men".

I'm sure the news hype cycle will come up with similar ideas this time, and I'm just as sure that we'll find a perfectly reasonable explanation not involving intelligent, extraterrestrial life forms.

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There was a time when people thought a ball of fire moving across the sky every day must be alive. The universe is full of strange phenomena perfectly explainable by physics. This is no different.

It's really not "perfectly" explainable by physics since we don't understand all aspects of physics yet. If you said "mostly" explainable by physics I would believe you.

Also, if an alien happens to be shining a beam at us rhythmically, that's also "explained" by physics but we won't actually know if the source is a natural phenomena or an alien shining his super flashlight at us.

No, that was the right phrasing. It isn’t perfectly explained, but its perfectly explainable.

It is not perfectly explainable by us, though.

And it may not actually perfectly explainable ever. Nothing guarantees we can get a perfect understanding of physics.

Eventually physicists are going to end up trying to explain signs of intelligent life as new Physics and calibrate their models according to it.

"Greetings from ___." "Oh, hello... uhh, so those signals were your house and not a trefoil of two black holes and a quasar?

This is what I was just thinking. I personally hope if it does happen the reveal has excellent comedic timing.

Hahaha. Aliens contact Earth but nobody believes because the whole situation is extremely funny.

Are you saying that extraterrestrial intelligence is not “a strange phenomena perfectly explainable by physics”?

The map is not the territory; the way people stumble through their maps has little to do with the territory.

People's intuitive maps don't tend to distinguish greatly between the plausibility of sapient suns and the plausibility of sapient aliens.

Of course life at a deep level is just physics. But given that the information content of this signal is relatively low (regular patterns of repeats) and that the amount of energy it requires is immense, I'd bet much more heavily on a natural phenomenon than life-directed activity.

There's no evidence extraterrestrial intelligence is a phenomenon at all. [1]

We can worry about whether it's explainable by 21st century human physics when that stops being true.

[1] Although there is evidence very weird things have happened on Earth, like the recent confirmation that the US Navy UFO videos are genuine.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/27/pentagon-relea...

I’m not saying there’s evidence, I’m just pointing out that it’s a strange dichotomy to say that one one hand, we have explainable phenomena, and on the other hand we have extraterrestrial life. If we ever do find proof of it, I don’t understand why the assumption should be that it won’t be explainable.

Not weird at all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus

Mick West's full playlist with explanations:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-4ZqTjKmhn5Qr0tCHkCV...

An article mentioning Mick West:

https://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/that-navy-ufo-footage-has-a...

The problem is, any form of intelligent life that exists in the same universe as us is going to have to be able to be explained by physics, since that’s what physics does - explain the way the universe gives rise to the phenomena in it which we observe. I mean, if we detected signs of intelligent life that can’t be explained by physics, that either means we have some new physics to discover, or physics has to give up because it turns out there is a form of life not subject to its rules.

Until one day when it becomes true ..

We should beam back our commercials at them... they may just change their mind and switch to ads-free alternative.

"Earth Peoples, we come for the secret of the ShamWow"

We have searched the galaxy and discovered that it indeed cannot be found in stores.

Some of the earliest radio broadcasts are Hitler's speeches, as well as other world leaders preparing their nations for global conflict. So there's that.

That would be TV broadcasts as I’m guessing everyone here seen Contact.

Ironically in 1948 when FM was standardized and countries were assigned spectrums Germany wasn’t really invited as it wasn’t a state for that short period and wasn’t assigned a spectrum so they started broadcasting in VHF because that wasn’t covered by the Copenhagen Agreement.

A few years later people realized that VHF was supper efficient for FM unlike AM and (W)Germany ended up holding all the cards.

This is why (primarily older) VHF FM radio compatible receivers in Europe will have UKW FM or UKW option in the turner which stands for Ultrakurzwelle (Ultra short wave) that was before UHF was standardized above the VHF spectrum.

This is why I come to HN! Thanks for sharing this.

You may be interested in a history of Philips TV Tuners:

https://www.maximus-randd.com/tv-tuner-history-pt1.html

> I’m guessing everyone here seen Contact.

More than once

Alien dad goes windsurfing with SETI daughter, but the only evidence he leaves that it's not the hoax of some rich bald dude is 18 hours of static, so the audience can have both their faith and science, but no blackhole for Matthew McConaughey.

There's a story in which aliens unexpectedly destroy nearly everything in the solar system and when asked why, they explain that they received transmissions of Star Trek episodes and people singing "We Are The World" and so they put together the fantasies of galactic domination with the idea that humans might be close to global unification, and decided it was time to apply a bug bomb to Earth.

In other words, the things we see as negative might not bother aliens much, if they mostly indicate we might destroy ourselves.

Oh no, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

Just finished reading this yesterday. Such interesting concepts! Highly recommended for fans of hard sci-fi.

Available under Creative Commons!

https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

> Since it hasn't come up yet: whenever a new astronomical phenomenon is detected, people think "Aliens!" as the reason.

Same thing with UFOs, despite the fact that there's been decades of R&D into weaponizing and developing novel UAVs.

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