I happened to catch the movie Contact over the weekend, and in the committee hearings after the ‘failure’ of the machine it is contended that Haddin faked the whole signal. Now when the signal was first received they had a whole bit about determining its source, and confirmed “it’s not local”. I presume via some form of triangulation(?).
So the question, would it even be possible, through the use of any number of satellites, to fake a signal such that everyone was fooled into thinking it originated from Vega?
I’m going to say it would be very hard, perhaps imposslble, to spoof a distant signal if it is being triangulated by multiple independent listeners.
You would have to know exactly who is listening and place a stationary, highly-directional source for each of them, in the exact calculated position to confound their specific observation of angle.
it’s not possible to do this for a sustained signal, as you can’t just have a geostationary orbit anywhere you like. I guess it might be easier if you were going to transmit a really short ‘chirp’ signal and you contrived to do it from a bunch of moving sources that you had orchestrated to be in the exact right places at the right time, but you still have to know exactly who is listening, when and where.
Maybe you can tell them where and when ? and then guess what dish they are going to use to listen with ?
So then you send your rocket around the sky to be at the right place at the right time to make look like its at Vega.
Plan falls down when
They detect your rocket(s)
they use a different dish and triangulate with the extra dish(es). Even if you try to constrain the signal to be very directional , >----------------------->, which is fine as you have a single target and beam transmitters are well known (its just the radio telescope used as a transmitter.), well they may well pick it up from a dish nearby too, at least the carrier if not a decodable signal, and triangulate… If you pick very very isolated dishes, they may well deduce the reason for that choice…
There are a whole set of levels of fake.
[ol]
[li]Fake so that everyone says “Hey wow! Look at that!” and they get a letter published in Nature.[/li][li]Fake enough that a subsequent more detailed look at the data doesn’t result in an embarrassing retraction letter in Nature?[/li][li]Fake enough that the next round of grad student trawling that data don’t uncover a set of second order oddities that point to something bad?[/li][li]Fake enough that a concerted effort to establish the provenance and veracity of the signal is good, looking at all the second and third order effects and matching with expectations of the data as recorded with the equipment and location claimed, to ensure that it wasn’t faked?[/li][/ol]
There are some simple things that could get you past the first couple that don’t require much effort.
First up, you just fake the raw data. Write some software to create the signal data, insert it into the data from the observations. If there are corroborating observations, create that data as well. It probably isn’t that hard. Most work will be done on university run equipment, and hacking into the observation computers not hard. (If you need help email Cliff Stoll.)
Next you could fake the signals with radio transmitters. You don’t need a satellite or anything fancy. Radio telescopes are not like optical telescopes, they are subject to a lot of leakage from nearby sources. (Famously electric fences.) A transmitter located anywhere nearby transmitting on the appropriate frequencies would need very little power to be picked up as a real signal. If you had some was of determining where the telescope was pointing (such as a few cameras watching it with a bit of custom software) you could craft the signal to mimic any source you liked.
With corroborating observations you have two issues. If they just point their scopes at the source and check, you just repeat the above. If there is some attempt at interferometry you would need to create some sophisticated systems to sync you clandestine transmitters. Nowadays is would not be terribly hard. GPS gets you a very nice sync capability, probably the same one the telescopes use anyway. You could fake a correlated signal to each of the telescopes, one that resolved the source to silly resolution, and with a great deal of credibility.
But getting all the third order effects just so might be hard. You would need to craft the precise set of interfering effects to match each location - things like ionospheric effects. You would need to emulate the ionosphere’s effects on the signal in real time if you wanted the signal avoid a fingerprint of fakery - wrong background noise for the time and place. And so it goes. If you were tasked with proving the signal as fake, there is a lot of stuff you would be looking for. Rather like proving Photoshopped pics as fake. You look for the mistakes, the mismatches in background. Faking your ET signal to get past that is going to be tough.
I don’t think we mean “triangulate”. We wouldn’t be comparing angles from different locations to get a distance. Anything associated with a distant star is going to be practically infinitely distant for triangulation. Now, if you receive the signals and record the phase of the incoming radio waves using ultra precise timing at different locations, you could get position in the sky with a greater accuracy, greater by something like the ratio of the distance between dishes to the size of the biggest dish. But that would be trilateration, not triangulation.
It’s quite easy. To satisfy the OP I’ll use a satellite as a telecommunication device when hacking the detection system. That’s all that’s needed, no one has a set of headphones on listening to a signal, the data is being processed by a computer that can be hacked.
Actually, you would be using triangulation, precisely to fake the distance being “infinite”. If the source is really a set of satellites in Earth orbit, then triangulation would be adequate to show a finite distance, and that’s what you need to hide.
You could make your satellites into a phased array to very thoroughly fake your signal, but I believe that to pull that off, you’d need them to be spaced very closely, not much further apart than a wavelength, over an area big enough to shadow the entire planet. That’d be a lot of satellites. It’d probably be easier to just launch a single space probe that would fly out to a distance that was far enough.
Of course, in the movie, the content of the signal would be much more difficult to fake, because it also contained verifiable true information, like effective new techniques for refining trace metals, which were said to be of significant economic value all by themselves. One gets the impression that the congressional committee was deliberately ignoring that fact.
I would be totally shocked if we ever detected any deep space “signals” of the kind we are searching for. Any advanced civilization that has mastered interstellar space travel would never try to communicate that way because those kind of signals take an absurdly long time in transit. I think SETI is pretty much a waste of time. I liken it to going up into the Hollywood Hills and sending up smoke signals and deciding that, because you received no smoke signals in reply, there was no life in Los Angeles. LA is teeming with life, but the communication is so sophisticated that it is completely undetectable to the poor primitive in the hills.
The “detection system” is a radio telescope operated by scientists and engineers who built the system. And there are many of them on Earth. There’s no way you can hack every major radio observatory and make them behave like they are receiving a signal.
Things like this are why I just smile at those breathless YouTube videos that start out, “The experts are baffled by…” and “Scientists can’t explain…” then posit ghosts or aliens or something else totally not in evidence.
Interferometry means measuring the phase of the radio wave, not just the intensity. To fake a VLBA signal requires the same amount of equipment and work as analyzing the VLBA data, including atomic clocks to synchronize the phase of the detectors/transmitters.
Sure, there’s no way I could hack an upgrade to the software that gets distributed to every system and briefly detects and records a signal and then then the hack deletes itself from the code leaving no trace behind. It’s impossible to hack computers because they all have such great security. Nobody has ever been fooled by that kind of thing.
SETI isn’t just looking for civilisations that have “mastered interstellar space travel”, just ones that can send a signal (which is what we are also doing, and we certainly aren’t an interstellar civilization)
And AFAWK, there cannot be a faster signal than what SETI looks for, so I don’t know how that’s an argument against SETI.
Are you under the impression that there’s a standard Radio Telescope Control Software used by every radio observatory on earth, and is automatically updated? That’s not how science instruments work. Science instruments are all custom built, each with a unique set of firmware and software.
And most science instrument operators wouldn’t even enable automatic OS updates because that may break their software - they’d just keep it off the internet. Our lab has many computers that we can’t update because of compatibility problems (e.g. hardware driver doesn’t run on newer versions of Linux).
How many different operating systems do you think they use? They will update eventually, and nobody is really looking for this kind of thing, they’re looking for serious malware not a simple prank. The main protection against this or any form of faking a deep space signal is that isn’t worth the time to do in a way that that could be undetected without a massive effort. Done poorly it would just be considered an anomaly and ignored, or be so obviously a hack that it would be discovered quickly. Done well and it will leave those scientists and engineers scratching their heads and wondering why a few seconds of Dark Side of the Moon seems to have been broadcast from Vega.
ETA: and just noticed I missed Francis Vaughan’s post about the same thing. He gets it.
