{"id":370,"date":"2004-09-02T10:03:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-02T17:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/extraterrestrials\/"},"modified":"2004-09-02T10:03:00","modified_gmt":"2004-09-02T17:03:00","slug":"extraterrestrials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/09\/02\/extraterrestrials\/","title":{"rendered":"Extraterrestrials?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since this seems to be Provocative Day here at Preposterous, I might as well throw this one out there: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project has found a signal they can’t explain<\/a>, possibly originating from an extraterrestrial civilization. This is something I’m truly not an expert on, so I’ll just point you to some commentary from Simon DeDeo<\/a>, who brought this to my attention. (Original data here<\/a>.) The basic idea is that they’ve found a signal at 1420 megahertz (a very noisy part of the electromagnetic spectrum) that has appeared a few times, starting at a fixed frequency and slowly drifting (as if Doppler-shifted from a moving source). Certainly the most likely explanation is some perfectly mundane, although interesting, source of emission in atomic hydrogen. I would put the chance that we’ve actually found some intelligent life to be about one in a million. But that’s a chance worth exploring.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, the signal was first identified via the SETI@Home<\/a> project, running as a screensaver on countless home computers. I have it on mine. We physicists are introducing Einstein@Home<\/a>, a way you can help search for signals of gravitational waves from LIGO data, but if we’ve found aliens that will never catch on.<\/p>\n

Now, what I want to know is, do these aliens feel emotions<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Update:<\/span> Ooops! Almost before I finished typing, Simon points me to this disclaimer<\/a>. Now I know how Matt Drudge must feel all the time.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since this seems to be Provocative Day here at Preposterous, I might as well throw this one out there: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project has found a signal they can’t explain, possibly originating from an extraterrestrial civilization. This is something I’m truly not an expert on, so I’ll just point you to some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}