Scientists Search for Type II and Type III Civilizations Using Space Telescope Data

1ofthe9; Below find two links. The first is the Benford paper on intermittent SETI beacons. The second is Dr. Dixon's (of Ohio State Univ.) paper on the transient signals detected by the 'Big Ear'.
lanl.arxiv.org...
adsabs.harvard.edu...

Ross 54
1ofthe9; Below find two links. The first is the Benford paper on intermittent SETI beacons. The second is Dr. Dixon's (of Ohio State Univ.) paper on the transient signals detected by the 'Big Ear'.
lanl.arxiv.org...
adsabs.harvard.edu...

Love Benfords work.

One thing a lot of people don't realize is that we've picked up plenty of transient signals which could not be identified as terrestrial interference but they never have repeated.

The thing is is that these signals are just chalked up to being interesting but unverifiable and filed away for a repeat occurrence. As well they should be.

Were it UFOlogy the first thing they would have done was gone to the news media with them.

andy06shake
reply to post by Specimen

 

I lean more toward the Kardashev scale mate. IMHO the Borg are around or approaching a type II civ. Call me when they build a Dyson sphere/bubble/shell, now that's a type III.

en.wikipedia.org...

edit on 8-1-2014 by andy06shake because: (no reason given)

Wasn't the Borg "homeworld" a huge dyson shell?

My knowledge of Trek is fairly small compared to huge fans of the shows but I seem to remember this from somewhere. I think on the Next Generation?

andy06shake
reply to post by JadeStar

 

Same chance of finding God im afraid considering any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic!

Good Luck all the same!

Arthur C. Clarke would have loved that. Star for ya.

1ofthe9

Wow! Thanks for the info. Are there any papers about the signals and Benfords work?

I think its only a matter of time before we find something.

Yes. Ross linked you to some good work by him.

BTW: Time magazine even did a story on his ideas.

dodol
reply to post by JadeStar

 

nice thread

although observing space is the most popular way looking for alien evidence (especially with modern technologies)
sometimes i feel that we should look the evidence of 'aliens' on our planet. there are tons of 'uncharted' or 'dangerous' places imho, esp underwater, caves, tunnels, etc.
(if you are afraid of being kidnapped by MIB/grays/reptiles, lets go together, we go by a group of >500 people, we'll see how they can kidnap us lol)

most humans underestimate animals because they think animals are less developed (lack of rational mind)
but i feel animals (like dolphin, bats) might hold a key to communicating with 'aliens'

peace.

Well, you might be right. Particularly with regards to dolphins. We're still struggling to communicate with them and they are right here on our planet.

That said, what we're looking for is a technological signature of a civilization out there because that would be easier to recognize and much easier to defend as an actual detection of advanced ETs.

Maybe in 50 years we'll be able to ask the dolphins if they have ever had any contact with anyone else Perhaps a quantum computer will make first contact with its counterpart, not 1,000 light years away but right here on earth in a deep underground cavern. There are plenty of possibilities worth exploring and plenty of very smart people thinking of new ones every day.

There are people in the field who are doing nothing more than applying information theory to dolphin language. Others who are looking for signs of artificial manipulation of DNA in the past (Genetic SETI), others who are looking deep within the ocean at extremophiles or anything else that might be living in the deep depths etc.

The space aspect gets a lot of attention due to our fascination with the sky but there is other stuff going on in the search for life and intelligence right here on Earth.

theMediator
As if type 2 and 3 civilizations don't have their whole planets cloaked...

I mean, there's more than one reason why we haven't found anything yet.
What better way to uphold a "prime directive" then to cloak your planets from lower civilizations.

edit on 8-1-2014 by theMediator because: (no reason given)

Well like the guy said in the video, all it takes is for one civilization to break the "prime directive" for the whole ball of wax to become detectable. So the logical thing would be to conclude that such a prime directive isn't going to always be 100% effective.

JadeStar

Wasn't the Borg "homeworld" a huge dyson shell?

My knowledge of Trek is fairly small compared to huge fans of the shows but I seem to remember this from somewhere. I think on the Next Generation?

'Scuse me, wut? o.O The Borg are one of those not-well-thought-out-races of the Trekverse, no real mention of an originating homeworld was made in any of the series or movies, but the non-canon books had plenty of ideas (not considered valid, being non-canon, though) Could The Unicomplex be what you were thinking of? Not a Dyson Shell, but it would have required massive amounts of energy to operate.
Sorry to dork out, I tend to do that whenever ST is mentioned.

As to finding higher civilizations out there, I don't think we will, at least not intentionally. If anyone else out there behaves with a Prime Directive rule like in Trek, you can almost bet that no contact will happen until we meet a minimum threshold for it. I'm sure if we're being studied/watched, we've had a scant few "oops" encounters, I'll be reasonable there. But I doubt we're at the right global status at the moment for anything profound. That said, if they can conceal themselves watching us, be it afar or up close, we're not going to stumble on anyone more advanced. If we find anyone, they'll be likely as advanced as us, or less so.

Specimen
I have always wondered what type 2 and 3 are capable of. Type one would be the easiest to imagine and to think of,while the easiest thing to imagine about type 2 is how many planets they had colonized compared that of type 1. Since type 1 is pretty much just the stepping stone for any space farring race, type 2 would be incredibly more efficient and alot more establishe.

Type 3 in our context just mean they have been around for along time, and didn't blow themselves when they were type 0,1,and 2. They'd be the most technologically mature of such a scale, also probably the most proud and arrogant of our reality, or 3D in a nutshell .

Type 4, well, if a tree fell over on the other side of the galaxy...They'd probably hear it.

S&F.

edit on 8-1-2014 by Specimen because: (no reason given)

I sort of played a similar mind game with this idea and here is what I came up with.

A type 1 might view us the way a developed country views a developing country full of poverty, squabbling over resources, etc. Pity? Maybe disdain?

A type 2 might view us the way we view spider monkeys in the zoo. They would recognize we have our own family systems, groups, are somewhat intelligent and similar in someways perhaps to their ancestors. Interesting and worthy of further study to see if they attain type 1 status at least.

A type 3 might view us the way we look at an ant hill. We know those ants are pretty fascinating to study but we don't typically think of them day to day. If we look closely at an ant hill we see a social structure, but we all see a type of intelligence that is utterly incomprehensible to us because it is both simple and distributed. While one ant is not all that remarkable, what they can do when they all get together is worth taking notice of.

If I were to guess, barring any setbacks like a major world war, environmental collapse or mass extinction.

We'll reach Type 1 status within the next 50-150 years. so sometime around 2060-2170 roughly.

We'll reach Type 2 status probably within 200-1000 years of that so around 2260-3060 (depending on whether we are limited to the speed of light). With most nearby habitable worlds colonized (if not already occupied by someone or something).

We'll reach Type 3 status 100,000 years after that (assuming we didn't run into a setback, like meeting another Type 3 or late Type 2 on its way to the same place).


As Michio Kaku said, the most difficult transition is likely from Type 0 to Type 1 and it often looks like we might not make it but I'm hopeful that we will, for every bit of doom there are people quietly working to avoid or avert it.

Nyiah

JadeStar

Wasn't the Borg "homeworld" a huge dyson shell?

My knowledge of Trek is fairly small compared to huge fans of the shows but I seem to remember this from somewhere. I think on the Next Generation?

'Scuse me, wut? o.O The Borg are one of those not-well-thought-out-races of the Trekverse, no real mention of an originating homeworld was made in any of the series or movies, but the non-canon books had plenty of ideas (not considered valid, being non-canon, though) Could The Unicomplex be what you were thinking of? Not a Dyson Shell, but it would have required massive amounts of energy to operate.
Sorry to dork out, I tend to do that whenever ST is mentioned.

Thank you! That's exactly what I was thinking of! I knew someone would correct me on that.

Do you remember the episode where they did travel to a Dyson Sphere though? I distinctly remember Patrick Steward so it was TNG.

I think i merged the memory of that episode with the Unicomplex.

As to finding higher civilizations out there, I don't think we will, at least not intentionally. If anyone else out there behaves with a Prime Directive rule like in Trek, you can almost bet that no contact will happen until we meet a minimum threshold for it.

But we have no idea if that minimum threshold has already been met.

It could well have been discovering the Higgs Boson, or developing Warp Theory or simply manipulating electromagnetic radiation or atomic reactions (which we've been doing for 60 years).

If it is something loftier like: is a multiplanet species, that could very well happen in our lifetime with Mars.

I'm sure if we're being studied/watched, we've had a scant few "oops" encounters, I'll be reasonable there. But I doubt we're at the right global status at the moment for anything profound. That said, if they can conceal themselves watching us, be it afar or up close, we're not going to stumble on anyone more advanced. If we find anyone, they'll be likely as advanced as us, or less so.

The thing is they never explained how things could be cloaked in Star Trek. All the ways we've devised to cloak something electromagnetically generate something which is detectable as a byproduct. Granted we're nowhere near experts at cloaking things we're just learning how to make things invisible infrared and visible light but it seems to me that the warp drives in trek would easily have been detectable as gravitational microlensing events in a line.

Even a cloaked ship gave off a detectable signature if I recall. All it would take is discovering this signature.

One of my pet ideas (and I have no where near the background to draw up a proposal for how to do this yet) would be to look for a series of things which appear temporarily to be eclipsing binary stars.

In reality they would be single stars which just had a ship switch on its warp drive thus bending light creating a double image of the star briefly.

That's how i'd search for warp drives. I'd go comb databases like the extreme ultraviolet explorer dataset for point sources which exhibited this type of behavior but were not actual spectroscopic binaries.

JadeStar

Thank you! That's exactly what I was thinking of! I knew someone would correct me on that.

Do you remember the episode where they did travel to a Dyson Sphere though? I distinctly remember Patrick Steward so it was TNG.

I think i merged the memory of that episode with the Unicomplex.

Yep, I know that episode well, it was TNG's "Relics", where they found Scotty in the crashed ship's transporter buffer. I always feel for Scotty every time I see it, 75 years out of the loop.

The thing is they never explained how things could be cloaked in Star Trek. All the ways we've devised to cloak something electromagnetically generate something which is detectable as a byproduct. Granted we're nowhere near experts at cloaking things we're just learning how to make things invisible infrared and visible light but it seems to me that the warp drives in trek would easily have been detectable as gravitational microlensing events in a line.

Even a cloaked ship gave off a detectable signature if I recall. All it would take is discovering this signature.

ST cloaking is, as far as I know, the bending of light around objects to obscure them from the electromagnetic spectrum. Basically, Trek came up with the idea & we're working on getting it going right now. I think if someone out there has any kind of cloaking tech, it's probably more along the line of shifting things out of phase with space-time, like Stargate's Sodan cloaks do. Which would basically be shifting into sub-space, I think. But you are right about signatures, it's bound to be awful difficult to not leave a footprint somehow.

One of my pet ideas (and I have no where near the background to draw up a proposal for how to do this yet) would be to look for a series of things which appear temporarily to be eclipsing binary stars.

In reality they would be single stars which just had a ship switch on its warp drive thus bending light creating a double image of the star briefly.

That's how i'd search for warp drives. I'd go comb databases like the extreme ultraviolet explorer dataset for point sources which exhibited this type of behavior but were not actual spectroscopic binaries.

This is actually brilliant. I'm not aware offhand if there's ever been any tri or binary systems out there that have suddenly lost or gained a star without explanation. I'd imagine that if lensing is a byproduct, we're bound to see it eventually with all the stargazers on this rock.

reply to post by JadeStar


How can one planet encompass a star? I think you may be confusing the episode/film when the Borg went back in time and assimilated our Earth so it looked like the whole landmass was covered with 9 billion Borg. But still that was just the Earth. They did however build a very cool nexus transport system thingy ma bob with a large massive city/station but that's was in Voyager.

JadeStar

theMediator
As if type 2 and 3 civilizations don't have their whole planets cloaked...

I mean, there's more than one reason why we haven't found anything yet.
What better way to uphold a "prime directive" then to cloak your planets from lower civilizations.

edit on 8-1-2014 by theMediator because: (no reason given)

Well like the guy said in the video, all it takes is for one civilization to break the "prime directive" for the whole ball of wax to become detectable. So the logical thing would be to conclude that such a prime directive isn't going to always be 100% effective.

If a 'prime directive'-like protocol was ever applied to Earth, we might already have passed its threshold. If so, we could be in a transition phase, where we are allowed a limited experience of a populated galaxy, without receiving wholly unambiguous knowledge of it.

That could explain some of the small fraction of UFO reports that are persistently unexplainable, even with good, sufficient data. Some of these reports seem to suggest an advanced technology, and possibly fleeting presentations for our benefit.

ST:Voyager is kina required viewing when talking about the borg considering they devote about 2 seasons to them.



The Borg have several transwarp hubs, 9 of them (8 left after they destroyed one to get home in voyager) that allow them to travel to most parts of the galaxy in a mater of seconds, there are 6 other races/groups in the galaxy, one coming from earth (sauropods) that are technologically superior to the borg, all are limited to very small populations or single planet/ship exsistances.

There are two other races, the care taker, and species 259 that are from other galaxies/dimensions that are also above the borg both technologically and cognitively. The thing is the borg are really just a model of your brain, billions of little cells(borg) carrying out thier individual jobs but all are subject to the will of the borg queen and work towards and common goal, not exactly type 2 material. They are really a pretty simplistic group, they just happened to absorb technical prowess from thousands of races and have an efficient way to organize the data.

Im sure I made minor errors in there as Im not some diehard trekie I just happened to netflix ST:Voyager over the last few weeks.

reply to post by JadeStar


True, a type one would view like a third world planet, due to individual colonies and countries are just basic line across land masses. While to them, whole planets are easily colonized in some way. They'd could probably be the only type that could easily understand in relation, but I could also see them look down on us in some ways, depending on how much they know, or try to know. Hell they could ether be smart or stupid.

A transition to type 1 would be hard, but staying type 1 till they are late type 1, would be the biggest test in space faring civilization guesses.

Type 2 on the other, would be just complicated. Their sciences would make type 1 look like they are third world, as well as how well settled they are in interplanetary positions or stations. They would view us like a zoo, but to them our sciences our just basic, while their just blew over the chart. They would easily be the closest thing too a magic wonderland.

Type 3, they'd be like a force of nature, that down on all others. They might even wanna teach a type 2 civilization a few trick with cosmic irony.

War on the other, well that's a different story. War can bring out next stage of technology, like world 1 with tanks and radar, too world war 2 with Jets, missiles, and nuke. A third world war would change our technology drastically to the point it will become normal.

Socially however, might send us backwards to the cave men days, or like Star Trek First Contact where it just villages, with more advanced modern methods.

There should be an initiative that builds robots like Voyager and send them into outer space, in the opposite direction of the centre of the galaxy since it's more likely the further away the more developed/evolved a species might be. When launching any craft it should be anticipated the craft might at some time become noticed by timetravelling civilizations who, when they discover our craft, can jump back in time to the moment it was launched. Then, as soon as someone launched the robot, they would immediately turn up and save us all. No one showing up and the craft should be send in another direction. Which might be just a few grades but trillions of lightyears away and centuries in the future it would be in a totally different part of space.

HOWEVER there is one big catch. With timetravelling, weird things can happen, so many movies about the subject. So we would have to see them as our overlords and we would no longer be independent and maybe one day invent our own timetravel machine as we would be in their timeline when ours and theirs have merged. It might be all kinds of problems arise like collective memory loss and we would all have to remember ourselves, with their aid ofcourse. It's possible the civilization doesn't even exist in our known space but is outside of it but has left devices behind to detect other life.

From the timetravelling civilizations point of view the universe is a big place and it all looks alike. So we would have to provide detailed information in the craft so they can distinguish our surroundings from others. It might be they have so much information about the universe but it's still like a huge forest with few unique trees or maybe none, at most the only recognition might come from different trees having a certain distance between them. And then there's is the problem of time because we might say we are from 2014 but that would mean squat to them, we would also have to be able to calculate the position of the stars at that time, preferably as much as possible.

But theoretically it would have a larger chance than scanning for civilizations and then when one is found, trying to draw their attention with radio signals or sending spacecraft, all things which take more time than trying to find a benevolent timetravelling civilization which has lived in abundance for trillions of years and doesn't mind giving us some second hand spacecraft and information.

The Benford strategy for finding interstellar beacons advocates listening in the direction of the center of our galaxy. The reasoning here is that more and older civilizations will be concentrated along this bearing, and that galactic radii also serve as universally obvious transmission and reception paths.
The Time magazine article, cited above by JadeStar, even mentions this. It also suggests that the famous OSU 'wow signal', may have been from a beacon of this type.
It should be recalled that the 'wow signal' appeared in the constellation Sagittarius, which is in the direction of the galactic center. This signal could not be connected with a known star system. Perhaps it was a remote beacon, set up well away from any solar system, so as not to interfere unduly with radio astronomy or other radio projects in these systems.

reply to post by JadeStar


You said:


"The most common civilization in our galaxy is likely a Type I or II. It is likely that if we were in a galaxy with a Type III we'd know it because as Jim Oberg said the signs would be all around us and easily observable. If a Type IV civilization existed in our galaxy it would likely be almost impossible to detect if it didn't want to be found. And for all purposes a Type V would be referred to by most people on Earth as "God.'"

Let us look again at the phenomena of the pulsars and quasars. Most of you won't know that when discovered, both sets of phenomena were considered to be signs of greatly advanced civilizations. Since all of this business starting with Moon outward is carefully controlled, we have no idea about what the secretkeepers know already as they slip it to us piecemeal to nudge the populace of Earth along toward finally recognizing that we aren't so grand and belong to a Third World world instead.

I already believe that et's are visiting us here, so as far as I am concerned there is lots of alien life out there. The hard part is figuring out just exactly where they are coming from. Stay tuned.

Using Benford's strategy, we might also want to listen a bit in the direction opposite the galactic center. This happens to lie in the constellation Auriga. If any two-way exchanges are going on, we might catch signals aimed at the center of the galaxy from points further out that happened to align with Earth's position.