The Case Against Reality

[SloopJonB]

I was in the Tate Turner gallery many moons ago, looking at all the seascapes & landscapes with that inimitable light that he is known for.

Then I saw this.

Turner.jpg

Death on a Pale Horse.

That was painted nearly 100 years before the Impressionists. I was stunned when I saw the date on it.

[kimbottles]

I'm sure PKD would have something to say about this. Where's VALIS?

At my house I do the dishes. To keep myself entertained, I am going through all the Star Trek available on Netflix. I guess when I'm done with Star Trek, the dishes will just pile up.
In a recent TNG episode, the Enterprise encountered a life form that only existed in 2 dimensions. Rather than try to get your head around it, understand that the 2D life form had no perception of 3D Enterprise. Michio Kaku proposed that it's entirely possible that the same could be happening to us. We may well coexist with some universe of unperceived dimension and we are completely unaware.

Or maybe we are just living in The Matrix. Maybe they couldn't figure out what chicken tastes like.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEnJfZ9joY[/youtube]

It is great to see a post from you Rick, I hope we get some more of them.......

[VALIS]

Ever read "Flatland", by Abbott, published in 1884? Me neither, but I did hear about it in school. This book was written as a social commentary, but is best known now for its description of dimensionality, as experienced by two-dimensional beings who encounter three-dimensional and one-dimensional creatures. It sounds like Star Trek is trying to make that same point(!)

Philip K. Dick didn't seem to have a unified theory of reality, but he sure enjoyed taking it apart and reassembling it in various ways.

Radio and laser SETI has really just started looking. We've been trying for a long time, but the efforts have been limited and of short duration. Projects like the Allan Telescope Array are better, but still just getting started. SETI scientist Jill Tarter likes to use the analogy of dipping a cup into the sea, looking at the contents, and saying "Well, I guess there are no fish in the ocean." We use radio (and now, laser) for the search because it's the best we've got. The odds of intercepting the ET equivalent of "I Love Lucy" is pretty remote, since, as we've seen, modern communications technology eventually starts to look like random noise or is otherwise not interceptable. We started with simple AM transmitters, but now most of our signals are either contained by optical fiber, or use modulation techniques that spread and (pseudo) randomize the signal. For SETI to work, we really need an ET to be transmitting a deliberate beacon that is designed to be detected. This is something that we have not done ourselves, other than a very few projects by people outside the "official" research community. The SETI community has been debating for many years the wisdom of transmitting a beacon, and so far no consensus has been reached.

Personally, I find the discussion of reality, religion, etc, very interesting on the human level -- why do we feel so strongly about it, what would an actual answer really do to us, etc. Otherwise I have little patience for unanswerable questions. There are some things we have to take on faith, and I have very little of that (what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence). I tell myself that I am content to live with knowing that I will never know the answer, until I perhaps do. Until then, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.

I will admit that the story of Christ strongly effects me emotionally, and I find that "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is the most powerful principle we have to live by. Is this a form of faith, brought on my my childhood religious and societal indoctrination? No doubt to a certain extent. Oh well, I never claimed to be 100% rational...

[BeauV]

Paul, I remember a couple of years ago a friend provided a graph of the total electromagnetic transmission energy we were emitting from Earth. Someone he knew had been required to build this for our Gov. - interesting. The point was, that while the volume of our communications has shifted to medium that do not transmit (much), we are still puking out a LOT of energy in other weird ways. Most of those 100,000 watt transmitters are still transmitting. I was surprised to learn that, having thought that micro-cells and all would have eliminated the need for a AM transmitter a decade ago. BV

[VALIS]

Yes. you are certainly right, but remember that most of these transmissions are beamed sideways, or to some extent trapped by the ionosphere. AM transmissions (<1.6 MHz) aren't going to get very far into space, and FM and broadcast TV aren't generally aimed vertically.

I think the transmissions most likely to be received by ET are our big radar signals. There's no actual information being carried by these, but they have a repeating pattern that is probably not going to be mistaken for a pulsar or similar star. We've beamed radar from the earth to Venus (for surface mapping) and this signal could probably be detected at a nearby star -- if it happened to be pointing at them. That's a real issue; the signals that we send are either so weak/unfocused that they will be undetectable at interstellar distances, or so tightly aimed (radar, etc) that they are probably pointing into dead space.

We can do amazing things to detect weak signals (see WSPR for a ham radio example) but this requires that we have intimate knowledge of the signal format, which is not the case with SETI.

Frank Drake (SETI pioneer) thinks our best chance is to use gravitational lensing for our transmitters and receivers. Put a SETI station at a specific distance from a star, and it acts as a giant lens to focus the optical / radio signals. I suppose aiming it is going to be an issue.

[kimbottles]

Yes. you are certainly right, but remember that most of these transmissions are beamed sideways, or to some extent trapped by the ionosphere. AM transmissions (<1.6 MHz) aren't going to get very far into space, and FM and broadcast TV aren't generally aimed vertically.

I think the transmissions most likely to be received by ET are our big radar signals. There's no actual information being carried by these, but they have a repeating pattern that is probably not going to be mistaken for a pulsar or similar star. We've beamed radar from the earth to Venus (for surface mapping) and this signal could probably be detected at a nearby star -- if it happened to be pointing at them. That's a real issue; the signals that we send are either so weak/unfocused that they will be undetectable at interstellar distances, or so tightly aimed (radar, etc) that they are probably pointing into dead space.

We can do amazing things to detect weak signals (see WSPR for a ham radio example) but this requires that we have intimate knowledge of the signal format, which is not the case with SETI.

Frank Drake (SETI pioneer) thinks our best chance is to use gravitational lensing for our transmitters and receivers. Put a SETI station at a specific distance from a star, and it acts as a giant lens to focus the optical / radio signals. I suppose aiming it is going to be an issue.

I hope you have gotten to Green Bank, West Virgina! Good museum and interpretive center. The whole RF free zone thing is pretty cool. And the RF tracking truck was a big hit with me. Great receiving gear. And then there is the Byrd Radio Telescope, the largest man made movable land based object in the world! Susan and I REALLY enjoyed that day. Now we need to get to the VLA in Arizona and that scooped out mountain in Purto Rico. Maybe someday to the new 500 meter RT just being finished in China......great stuff.

[VALIS]

Kim, I haven't been to any of these sites, including the huge Arecibo natural dish antenna in Puerto Rico (I think they built the huge dish antenna inside a natural sinkhole.) I'm not as involved with SETI as I used to be, but the subject still fascinates me and I would like to go on a tour of these sites someday. I have been to the Allen Telescope Array a few times (it's near Mt. Lassen), and I spent an afternoon with Frank Drake helping him perform a site survey of the Jamesburg earth station in Carmel Valley. I recruited some buddies who had a good spectrum analyzer, preamps, and test antennas, and we did a scan for radio interference. The Jamesburg station is large dish that was used in the Comsat days (and later), and it was up for sale. Frank was interested in using it as a SETI receiving site. Here's a link to a blog post by my friends: http://pocketradar.com/blog/2012/04/the-pocket-radar-team-and-seti/ That didn't pan out, and I believe that the site will now be used by one of those "rogue" SETI beacon projects I previously mentioned. Here's a link to that project: http://www.universetoday.com/102844/lone-signal-first-continous-message-beacon-to-find-and-say-hello-to-an-extraterrestrial-civilization/