Uh, dude, we actually are in a mass extinction at the moment and have been since humans spread out of Africa and started eating all the mega-fauna in sight. Also, powerful storms and historic floods in some places. And while I haven’t heard of water turning to blood a lake in India did turn pink this year:
In other words, a lot more of that bingo card should be covered.
After the US assassinated that Iranian general by drone strike in January, plenty of people were talking (not always entirely seriously) about it setting off WWIII.
There’s a more technically inclined article at Scientific American, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/alien-hunters-discover-mysterious-signal-from-proxima-centauri/. Among other things, the article states the signal is actually at 982.002 MHz, so it’s not sitting on an even number of human-invented megahertz.
I just read it was discovered this August in archival data from last year, so how did they know to perform the shifting manoeuvre if they didn’t realize they’d discovered something at the time?
Would a man made radio signal be any more precise?
That’s an excellent question, which I’m now very curious about, if anyone knows the answer. If a measurement of a received signal at 982.002 MHz is within the margin of error for a signal that’s intended to be broadcast at exactly 982 MHz, that actually seems like a pretty good indicator that it’s actually an unidentified signal of human origin.
It depends on how precise the human-made transmitters are. For a sufficiently-precise transmitter, that .002 would rule it out. On the other hand, for sufficiently-inprecise transmitters, the fact that it’s so close to an integer number of megahertz becomes uninteresting.
My guess is that it’s just an artifact of over-active human pattern matching. At the most charitable, that’s a coincidence on the order of 1 in 100. We encounter a lot more than a hundred numbers every day, so we’re sure to find a few coincidences like that.
The only things mentioned so far that use that frequency is small airport distance measuring beacon. Would those generally be that precise?
Are we to assume aliens also measure intervals in seconds?
Of course not. That’s why I listed the proximity to an even integer frequency as a strike against it being aliens.
Nope. DME bandwidth is about 300 khz. Further, it’s a pulsed digital signal. This signal is an unmodulated tone, like a carrier signal.
My best guess is that it’s a malfunctioning radio. It could be splattering harmonics, or have a malfunctioning IF stage or something. I hope they are looking at frequencies that have a harmonic relationshipnwith this one, or frquencies that would result if a transmitter stage failed.
The signal can be considered as an accident or a mistake, if not for one circumstance. The signaling frequency of 980 MHz is a radio wave band that normally lacks signals from spacecraft and satellites. That is, interference or confusion is not particularly likely. Astronomers quite often catch regularly repeating radio signals from space, but in most cases, their source is catastrophic events, for example, the collapse of a neutron star into a black hole.
I’ve heard the arguments that Proxima b probably isn’t habitable because it orbits too close to an active star and it’s tidally locked in its orbit. But it’s curious that the signal is a narrow band EM signal. And it red-shifted. Is there any new information coming out of U of PA? When will they publish their results?
No, look at the article: it blue-shifted.
The wcientists involved say a paper is coming in ‘early 2021’. That would generally mean some time in the first quarter.
My bad on the red-shifted. Do we know enough about proxima b to determine if the blue-shift in the signal is consistent with it’s orbit?
b has an orbital period of about 12 days, so we probably cannot determine what its vector was at the time.
Do you think we know enough about b’s orbit to rule out that the signal’s blue-shift was caused by b’s orbit?
There’s a lot that we can’t determine about an exoplanet’s orbit, at least without some rare fortuitous circumstances, but the redshift we should observe from that planet at any given moment in time is something that we can determine very well.
I thought this was an interesting quote from the article:
“The transmission was apparently monotone, meaning it was not modulated in a manner that conveys more complex information.”
Haven’t these folks read Carl Sagan’s book Contact?
Yes. It was also monotonous.
Heyoooooo!