Contact Was Wrong - Aliens Can't Hear Us | Answers With Joe
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- čas přidán 6. 06. 2024
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Carl Sagan is an absolute legend and a hero, and his book Contact and the movie it's based on is phenomenal. HOWEVER... we examined the central conceit of the story - that aliens pick up our radio signals and return a message with instructions to build a machine - and look at the stars inside the 100 light-year bubble around Earth where our radio waves have traveled. And the potential of this happening... Well, it isn't good.
Sorry Carl.
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LINKS LINKS LINKS
The Contact opening scene: • Contact Intro Full HD
www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/...
www.naic.edu/ao/blog/hunting-...
www.seti.org/seti-institute/p...
imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/ask_ast...
skyandtelescope.org/astronomy...
www.space.com/23772-red-dwarf...
www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ch...
voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/...
arxiv.org/abs/2010.14812
exoplanets.nasa.gov/search-fo...
www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
earthsky.org/space/study-2034... - Věda a technologie
"Take [4500 stars], double it, then add 4000 more". That sounds a whole like like tripling with extra steps lol
Yep. I figured that too. Arithmetic... whaddya gonna do?
Pick a number (2-9) and multiply by 9. Now add the two digits of the sum together and subtract 1. Divide that result by 2 and your left with 4. Every time. It's the beginning of an old David Copperfield magic bit.
@RAYfighter Close, but you mean that summing the digits of any multiple of 9 gives you another number divisible by 9. Hence, why the choices are restricted to the numbers 2 through 9 though it could work with both smaller and larger multiples of 9 as well.
@RAYfighter Okay, fair call. The trick went on to have the person correlate the number with a letter of the alphabet, 4 to D obviously, and then pick a country with the name starting in D. Most people can't get them as I believe there are 4. Dominican Republic, Denmark, and Djibouti are the ones I remember. Obviously 95% of the audience chooses Denmark. Then ask them to choose the second letter of the country they chose, think of an animal that starts with that letter and think of the color of the animal. At this point 75-80% are funneled into thinking of Grey Elephants in Denmark and they are amazed to find out what Sheeple they really are. True Entertainment. :D
Yed, but a bit more accurate
" maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox... is the universe got cable " that's a t-shirt,mug and poster in waiting.
It's not a paradox. It's assuming a whole bunch of facts not in evidence. The only thing dumber than the Fermi Paradox is the Drake Equation.
@@Arigator2 To be fair I don't think the Drake equation is meant to be solved with our current knowledge (despite people trying to do so). It's more of a checklist of what we need to know to find out how many civilizations there are.
@@RRW359 it's stupid because you have to know the answer before you use the equation.
@@Arigator2 Which is why it's stupid for people to use it ATM, but the equation its self is good for figuring out what answers we need to get.
There is no paradox, that's just for people who are contactless and experienceless to fathom.
In discussing the likelihood of habitable worlds where intelligent life has evolved, and developed radio communication technology, within “listening distance” of Earth, we should bear in mind that Sagan’s “Contact” did not postulate the star Vega as the home system of the aliens who detected human television transmissions, and then initiated communications with us. Vega was merely the site of a listening post the aliens had built - presumably, one of many they had placed in various parts of the galaxy.
Excellent point.
Also while Contact did base it's idea that an alien race used Earth's radio transmissions to contact us it did not imply that is how they found us - because even cosmologists here on earth use more advanced method to gauge what a world is made of and whether organic or artificial components of that world are conducive to supporting life like using light spectrometry and soon X-Rays which travel much further than radio waves.
Also the presumption that another race would have our same sense of sight and sound and would use radio waves at all is quite a bit of human arrogance.
Accepting that we are alone is hard, but the more you look into the problem, the less likely it seems there will ever be any "contact".
@@1ManNamedDan - “Contact” did not portray aliens “using Earth’s radio transmissions to contact us”; it portrayed the aliens •detecting• human television transmissions, and in response contacting us by their •own• radio-wave transmissions (which incorporated the tv signal they had received, in order to confirm that they had received and recognized that signal). Sagan did not specifically state whether he was postulating that the aliens had positioned the Vega listening station •because• they had detected planets, in the interstellar neighborhood, that might someday be home to intelligent life, although that could be a plausible inference.
And even if an assumption, that alien species would share our range of sensory perceptions, would be a narrow exercise of imagination, it’s an excessively broad generalization, in itself, to ascribe that to “human arrogance,” since it’s an assumption that is obviously not shared by •all• humans.
@@raphaelklaussen1951 - The more one looks into the problem, the more one should be impressed by the immense complexity of resolving the answer either way: that intelligent life does exist elsewhere in the universe; or, that nowhere else, in the universe’s trillions of •galaxies•, over more than 12 billion years, has intelligent life ever arisen and developed technology capable of emitting and transmitting on the electromagnetic spectrum (or more advanced technology). We have hardly begun even to start to fathom all the dimensions of this question, let alone be anywhere near to arriving at a conclusion over how, and whether, the question will ultimately be answered.
I fully agree with your statistical approach, as well as with the almost impossibility to detect an unfocused signal further than, say, one light-year away… BUT in Sagan’s book the contact came from Vega, 26 light-years away, well within the bubble. Further in the book it appears that Vega’s neighborhood isn’t inhabited, but that some kind of relay station is located there, waiting for civilizations to appear « nearby » and establish contact. The movie was not that bad, but left aside many things from the book, like the final twist with Pi, which I loved …
I don't know why, but the 100 mile goof really tickled me.
"How many habitable worlds are there within a 100-mile radius of earth?" - barely one!
And definitely not 4!!!
There's hardly any intelligent life within 100 miles of the various capital cities on Earth.
There's barely any intelligent life in the cities.
@@system3008 Yeah, but the greater concentration of life, there, makes the appearance of intelligence much more likely. :)
@@pppaybackkk shouldn't we try to find intelligent life on earth before we search the universe for it??
“Shouting into the Void” is a great title for an auto biography.
I would expect the author to publish posthumously, but sure.
Cool band name
Pretty sure that'll be what I go with.
I agree,it is a cool name
Thats the name of my marriage counseling buisness
Yes, Sagan was quite capable of exercising artistic license to tell a story
@@johnnyjericho8472 Dude, this is a year old comment. Go outside and touch some grass. But because I'm feeling charitable, my point was that despite being a scientist, Sagan was also telling a story and disregarded science for narrative at some points. Which is what I said.
@@populuxe1 You know comments stay on CZcams for pretty much ever right? A comment could be 15 years old and someone can still reply to it. It isn't a big deal, but if it is a big deal to you then you should determine a timeframe by which you wish to delete your comments in order to halt replies.
@@Mikhail-Tkachenko Or, you could just check the date on the comment.
@@populuxe1 I don't need to do that as I am not bothered when people respond to my old comments. If I did then I would delete them.
@@Mikhail-Tkachenko You're bothered enough to be annoying about it
two of my favorite scenes in Titanic are the scene with the flares that you mentioned and the scene when the last part of the stern goes under and you can see the name Titanic on the hull as the ship falls away into the ocean. Always gives me chills.
Shouting into the void and the Titanic comparison were incredibly apt.
Actually there was a ship called the Carpathia close to the Titanic when it sank but the Titanic radio operators pissed them off earlier so they ignored Titanic. The lesson there is don't arbitrarily piss people off because you never know when you may need their help.
@@1pcfred
*Californian, the Carpathia was the one that came to the rescue of titanic. And you're story isn't really true, the reality of the situation is always far more nuanced.
@@livethefuture2492 it was a bit late of a rescue. Better than never though I suppose.
“Our sun is a G class star...”
Fo shizzle
yes G as in the G spot for intelligent life to be found 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
@@raven4k998 you say intelligent, I say barely conscious.
Word ✌️
That's why I always carry an umbrella....fo drizzle
Superb content man! That's the most concise summary of the "ET Contact Situation" based on our current knowledge, that I've seen. 👏🏼. Recommending this to my people
Now imagine there is a lifeform out there not advanced enough to build radio receivers, but their senses have evolved to experience it without any mechanical aid. They have lived peacefully for millennia in their primitive civilisations, and now are waging wars about weird voices of gods, that one day just appeared. There might be Intelligent beings killing each other in the name of our worst pop songs broadcasted decades ago.
Dude, stay off the devil’s lettuce 😂😂😂
@@jennifermcmillan9518cornball
@@jennifermcmillan9518 But that's how they developed the psychic skills to listen directly to the radio without a radio! The aliens smoked so much weed that they turned into psychics, and right now about 42 light-years away they're getting the new Juice Newton album and singing along with "Queen of hearts" and "Angel in the Morning"
@@jamescarter3196 you said Juice Newton 🤣🤣. Damn, that makes me feel old. Love your train of thought though.
😕 Aw, that's such a sad story.
We can only detect Voyager signals because we know *exactly* where they are coming from, and *exactly* what we are looking for.
To be fair, planets are pretty predictable too.
@@agsystems8220 the we know what we looking for part is more important, we expect an exact signal, and we wait for it, and we know what could go wrong with it, so we expect even the problems too, an alien signal would be just a tiny bit different background noise.
Yeah, but that doesn't count, right...? If you're looking at a star there isn't a lot of wiggle room to not be pointing directly at a planet.
And also, an entire planet is _a lot_ louder than the voyager probes, in terms of radio emissions.
@@midnight8341 At four light years? No, actually. Inverse square law is a bitch that way. 😉
That rings true for the entire concepts of astrophysics- they find because they expect not find by going there and experimenting
In the book "Contact" the aliens had a listening post that could hear us. it was not their home world.
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
They should have named it Oumuamua
That would mean they could have very many listening posts spread very far from their home world. With their wormhole technology, they could have surveyed the galaxy, or part of the galaxy, and placed their listening posts near planets, or groups of planets close together enough to produce detectable radio signals, that are likely to produce radio-building industrial civilizations. This survey would eliminate all the junk systems that will never produce electrical engineers, and they wouldn't listen to those, saving a lot of listening resources, and increasing the resoucres dedicated to each planet.
Yeah, Vega is only about 25 lightyears away. I don't think Joe has watched this movie for a while.
I have not (yet) read the book, but I was thinking they could have any number of listening posts.
The radio transceiver is on Vega. Ellie takes the pod to Vega where it gets shifted to another wormhole to transit their transportation network.
This is all explained, narrated, and shown in the movie. Maybe review it with that in mind.
What a great video!
Please continue making them!
Gives new meaning to the phrase "In space, no one can hear you scream."
_"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."_ *-- ALIENS [1986]*
{YES, I know _"hear you scream"_ was the movie tagline from *ALIEN,* but I have gone COMPLETELY BLANK and CANNOT think of a single quote from the first movie...😊}
@@Allan_aka_RocKITEman "Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky...."
Right!
@@Allan_aka_RocKITEman " Arrrrrrggghh . . eeeeekkkkkkksssqqqquish "
@@krashdown5814 Woah that's my favorite Alien quote too!!!
The movie did imply Vega was not their home system. So you wouldn't need to exclude by habitable zone. Sprinkling listening dishes in random systems would be a way to expand your bubble.
The book said so explicitely.
Yes, but it would have to be an automated (or perhaps “manned”) listening post, unless they have a FTL communication technology for relaying that info from the listening post.
@@geoffstrickler The movie did imply some FTL communication and transport, presumably to solve that problem. But in the real world, the AI to respond automatically wouldn't even be that far beyond today's technology; the limitations would be elsewhere. (It just doesn't make that interesting a movie plot to meet a robot, so...)
I was thinking about this too. The presence of life-supporting planets within the bubble is irrelevant to the question of Contact's plausibility. It's still improbable because of the falloff in signal strength, but the lack of habitable planets isn't a factor.
I seriously think that any advanced species sufficiently capable of visiting us for millenia, would not only have the capability of instantaneous travel over astounding distances, but also by inference immediate detection of any signal supported by their own galaxy-wide communication systems.
We're only capable of thinking not far beyond the current state of our own technological developments. One hundred years of advance, and the best we can think of is
r a d i o ?
That's like an ancient sea-farer's wooden canoe versus a million-ton Maersk shipping sea-liner.
I didn't know anything about the Earth transit zone. Always nice to learn something new. Sometimes it seems every channel has a lot of redundancy, but when it comes to cosmology there's just so much to learn!
This is exactly why I withdrew from the SETI at home program. For years my computer downloaded and analyzed signal packets looking for a radio signal that had almost no potential to contain a radio signal from a prespace or early space fairing alien culture. Seti had talked about looking for other transmissions of data or laser but I'm not sure how that has progressed. But now I'm going to check their site and see where they are at. Good Job Joe!
The whole almost zero chance thing is fairly obvious, and I am pretty sure SETI is well aware. Isn't their shtick that no signall will be picked up if no one is listening.
It's more of a proof we aren't alone thing then anything actually practical.
I quit SETI@home, due to their always changing the software, eventually it just didn't work on my system. Their loss, as I never turn my computers off and they had 15-20 hours of day to 8 number crunching cores running at 2.8 Ghz. I think it has now been 10 years....that's a lot of data they could have crunched. At anytime I have 2-3 computers running 24/7.
Odds are, the aliens are dead now anyway. I mean we won't be here in a million years when some alien finally grabs a signal.....
@@robertt9342 Good gig though. Wish I could find a way to get huge financing to spend decades producing nothing. "So what do you do?, Nothing...well that is not quite true...me and this stuff...pretends we are going to hear from Marvin the Martian...keeping hope and the dream alive!!...."
@@joeshmoe7967 Huge Financing? As you might recall, Seti is an experiment out of University California Berkley. They got grants to schedule some time on Arecibo, which collapsed but now get some time on FAST in China and MeerKat in South Africa. They compete with many other Scientists for time on these Telescopes. Their budget relies on donations. That's why they send out data packets to volunteers for analysis. I believe the data analysis is in hibernation. Updating to the Bionic program probably would have worked better on your computer. Not hearing from Marvin, doesn't mean he is not there. Just means if he's talking, we need better ways to listen! And that's why they kept changing software. They learned what wasn't working and what changes gave a better chance of receiving a signal.
I’m confused. Are you implying that the movie with the scientist talking to an alien who takes the shape of her dead father didn’t really happen?
I'm pretty sure the movie happened, yeah.
@@thomashiggins9320 I was there, totally happend like that.
Theres no evidence 😏
That movie was terrible lol
There is no evidence that the universe exists outside your own head. So, maybe?
But, in Contact, our radio signals were picked up by a wormhole relay system, so the signal only had to travel as far as Vega, or about 25 light years.
Kind of two different thought experiments going on there. In the movie’s opening scene, we’re shown the extent of our radio bubble to give a sense that in such a big neighborhood, someone should live close enough to hear. The wormhole system essentially dismisses that, putting something like a zoo hypothesis in its place. Are we to assume the aliens seeded the Milky Way with enough listening stations to cover every 100 ly bubble in the galaxy, or is our proximity to Vega extremely lucky? In the latter case, I’d say that level of luck is within an order of magnitude as lucky as Vega having a civilization of its own.
Either way, for the plot to work, somebody immensely more advanced than us has to do something amazing…which helps make Sagan’s point.
That would still take a very long time to get a reply. A conversation would take generations.
I thought it was only for transporting shiny metallic balls?🤔😏🤭
Yeah, during Elly's trip you can see their Vega infrastructure, communications arrays, the mechanical pod transfer structure, etc. That's as close as they had infrastructure so they sent a return signal via radio from Vega. With instructions on how to expand the wormhole network.
Colonel Phillip Corso stated that he witnessed UFO wreckage and Alien bodies being transported by the US Army in 1947 from the Roswell crash. Corso served on the White House National Security Council and at the Pentagon at R&D
Great video and analysis.
Thanks ! Loving you videos!
Take all the stars visible via naked eye, double it and add 4000 thousand stars - why not just (approximately) triple it? :)
He didn't say 4000 thousand. He said 4000.
@@craigcorson3036 You have quite a good eyes there, Sir. Hahaha
@@craigcorson3036 Haha, true, I meant 4 thousand :) Still though...
I wondered the same thing!
Because comic timing
The amount of consistency on this channel is just phenomenal.
Especially that t-shirt! 😆
I'm sure you meant "level of consistency"
Great video, loved it
I'm glad you got around to the 'going quiet' part... another consideration is, as you mentioned, we are using digital modulations (and encryption!) for most of these comms... so, it would sound like just so much noise anyway... unless we're sending a Drake-like simplified message... perhaps one with secondary and tertiary modulations carrying even more information. Too bad ham radio broadcasting is illegal!
"the aliens got cable" ... There are going to be a lot of angry aliens, our experience with customer service, is typical.
They got cable, but they got it from the the galactic AT&T/Movistar/Insert hated monopoly. That's why the can't hear us at all, we are outside the coverage zone.
It's why they're always turning up to wreck the place.
*universal, lol
If they’re using Comcast, they’re probably on hold with Customer Service.
Maybe they can understand Indian accents better than we can.
When the James Webb Space Telescope goes out I'll be playing Half-Life 3.
It should go up in November. Also with the Steamdeck and rumors of a follow up game to Half Life: Alλx you might be right.
This guy is clearly a time traveler. No way anyone could have predicted Half-Life 3
Truth
Alyx is out you can play it
@@Rick_1337 hush.
3:38 😂 Thank you for the laugh! That’s top notch dry humor. Subbed. 👍🏻
Wow ! This was a marvelous video giving visual context to the Movie Contact and about SETI and how “feeble” our contact “signals” really are. Thank you.
But in Contact, the listening post wasn't a populated planet. it was just a huge satellite, designed specifically for listening to our solar system and set up the contact when the time was right. (caveat: I've only read the book. But since you're specifically addressing Sagan, the book is what matters ;)
That's how it is in the movie as well. First stop on her ride is Vega and she looks up and sees the big construction that pumps out the signal to earth.
Well, that raises the topic of any civilizations traveling to other planets than their own.
And that one is even darker, colder, and empty.
Agreed, it's the same in book and movie. The movie even takes the time to point out that Vega is a young star system filled with debris and as such it would not have any habitable planets. At the first stop through the worm hole in the film you see the debris-filled Vega system, and get a brief glimpse of the relay station, before Arroway is sent on to the presumably more distant planetary system.
@@kevinkarpenske To be fair, in the film I do not believe it's expressly stated that she stops at Vega, you have to infer it based on the earlier dialogue, which most people miss. The signal coming from Vega doesn't get elaborated on later like it does in the book, so it's easy to misinterpret that as just a red herring.
@@z-beeblebrox I rewatched the scene today because I was curious about the specifics. Ellie actually exposits that "it's Vega" just before spotting the relay station. Still, I agree that if you're munching on popcorn it's really easy to miss.
In 'Contact' I thought the premise was that there were merely 'listening posts' at various intervals throughout the galaxy and that Vega was one of them. I don't remember that there was any statement that a civilization was located within the actual radio bubble of Earth.
Wasn't Jodie Foster's Dad Alien a Vega-ling? Veganite? Vegan (maybe they don't eat meat, how would we know?)? Anyway, wasn't the projection from a civilization on Vega? I thought that's what they meant, not just listening posts. I haven't seen it in years though. Now I'm curious.
@@jnewcomb James was right. There's a scene where the ship takes her to the "listening post" and she realizes the star is Vega. Then the portal opens up again to send her to the place where she makes fist contact.
@@jnewcomb I think I remember that Vega, the broadcast location of the first message, was only the first link in the 'Wormhole Transport System' and that she went through several 'Jumps' in the transport scenes in the movie before she met 'Dad'.
@@rudylikestowatch Interesting. I'm going to have to go watch it again.
That's correct and is out outlined in the first page of the book. There is just a giant probe at Vega
I love your channel! Thanks for all the super cool content.
The attenuation problem always bothered me in the sense it was never an issue in these movies.
Same here. All of "the Fermi people" ignore attenuation. We might be continuously hearing alien radio but we don't know what it is. Oy Od S;orm tsfop (qwerty) 🙂
Most people have never even heard of that word, let alone understand it or the issues.
The idea behind contact is that an ancient alien race has already explored the galaxy creating a network of listening stations and wormhole transport stations to bring new intelligent species into the galactic community.
Then what? I'm sure aliens with that much intelligence would choose not to mess with a screwed up civilization like ours. They'd let us either: 1)Blow ourselves up; 2)Not blowup, and develop space travel, for peaceful reasons.
If the second possibility happens, then they'd think we were worthy of contact.
But the chances of of that happening are Infinitely small, as in "ain't gonna happen"!
@@emitindustries8304
1. How terribly cynical
2. What makes you think that other life wouldn't suffer the same problems we do as a species? You speak as if our problems only afflict us because we are somehow defective. It's called human nature, which is an extension of our animal nature. Life made us this way.
@@dragons_red nah. But i thing hes kind if right. Would you Waste your time and money. On a random junkie on the streets. Unless he shows that he's prepared to get his shit together. As a human race we actually don't really have any imminent threaths toward humanity. Except. The human race itself. If we sort ourselves out, we don't really need anybody help. I'm pretty sure we solve space travel etc.
@@emitindustries8304 If you saw a child crawling towards a cliff edge, with a lead in its hand with a puppy on the other end, wouldn't you feel as if you had a moral duty to intervene and stop it falling over and taking the puppy with it?
We would be like children to such an ancient species, so they should feel a moral imperative to help us stop screwing up our planet and taking other species with us.
@@communist-hippie "Would you Waste your time and money. On a random junkie on the streets."
This isn't an accurate analogy. Not everyone goes through the "random junkie on the streets" stage, but I reckon that most technologically advanced species* go through our idiotic, selfish, destructive phase.
*Assuming they exist.
It's not wrong Joe, they can't hear us, but it's still therapeutic. Like people writting diaries.
I love all your videos Joe. Thanks for your work.
Another issue that wasn't touched on is that signals below about 30MHz tend to get reflected or absorbed by our ionosphere. I don't think there was anything broadcast on frequencies above this limit until the late 30's, and it wasn't exactly common until after WWII.
Ham operators call this the MUF (Maximum Useable Frequency) in that frequencies above it no longer get reflected by the ionosphere and instead cut through. It varies a bit as well depending on season, sunspots, and other factors that aren't exactly well understood.
And higher frequencies also tend to be unresolvable with respect to solar emissions in the same frequency band. Since from the distance of our nearest neighbour in the Milky Way, any planetary emission cannot be resolved from the Sun's emissions - they look like they come from the same place. Furthermore, because each transmitter is working "line of sight" for radio and television and we only pump out as much power as is needed for domestic transceivers to detect the signal, we overlap TV signals in the same band from different locations. Which means that from a great distance all the signals blend into one - it probably just looks like white noise. Cellular signals are even worse - the transmissions are very weak and are pointed at the ground.
video broadcasting was 46.0 MHz in 1938 at the transmission of the Olympics games
I feel like a tribe in the Amazon wondering why people outside of it can't hear us yelling at eachother.
In fact, in the film Contact, I believe the analogy was an ant in the Empire State Building
That's probably a pretty apt comparison.
@Cyber Ghost 3.1 We can tell from thermal signatures that there are people and roughly where they are but we *still* don't bother. Yet there are so many people assuming that aliens would have some reason to act differently without any real explanation as to why.
We could if there was a point but its a waste of time
@@RRW359 yep the only reason they would come here is curiosity we have nothing of value to be invaded and if they were advanced enough to reach us they wouldn’t have to infiltrate our society they could take over the planet easier than people can get rid of a small ant colony
This video was totally worth watching if for only one sentence: "The Universe got cable." Can't even say how long I've been screaming that at the Fermi people.
Yea. Ever watched Rick and morty? Lol
"free" cable
The other thing is, so much communication is digital. To get the most data across a transmission medium, like a cable or a radio frequency, you use digital compression. This takes any repeating parts of the data, and takes them out. It transmits the repeating part once, then the next time it repeats it just sends a marker saying "refer back to that part back there". The more efficient the compression, the more data you can squeeze into a cable or radio wave. And the more efficient, the less repeating signals. Indeed it's been proved that the BEST compression would produce a result completely indistinguishable from random noise. It would have no predictable features, it would look random.
So digital transmission that use compression, which is most of them, will pass by aliens unnoticed. You can only get the data out of them if you know the compression scheme, and since there's an infinite possible number of things you might put into the compressor, you can't deduce the compression from just the transmitted signal.
So only uncompressed signals are detectable as artifical transmissions, compressed ones seem like noise. But compression is the most efficient way to transmit something. So, in the period after the invention of radio, but before the invention of compressed digital, our signals will be discernible as something transmitted by intelligent beings. Being generous, call that the 20th Century. Before, and after that, there's only noise. So the bubble isn't a bubble, it's a hollow shell 100 light years thick. Outside and inside that shell, is nothing detectable. That shell spreads out, but once it's passed a star system, it's gone, only our compressed digital "noise" comes after that.
Of course we could deliberately transmit repeating signals aliens will be able to make sense of. Like Arecibo did. But being a dish it sent out an incredibly narrow beam. By focussing it's energy into a beam it meant the beam was much stronger, but obviously narrower. So most of the Universe is out of the game for detecting that.
We could rig the entire Earth with enormous transmitters in every direction sending out repeating signals, but that'd cost rather a lot, with little chance of a reward. We're not gonna do that.
@@greenaum Wow, thanks for this enlightening and interesting comment. I learned a lot.
The SETI folks assume that at least some of the alien civilizations would want to make themselves known, and a good way to do this is to use powerful radio signals. We've sent a few one-off signals ourselves, but not with any real candidate in mind. The WOW signal could have been some alien signal's one-off in our direction. As for the Fermi paradox, Enrico actually calculated the time it would take a civilization to colonize it's galaxy without FTL. When he came up with 1-100 million years, he asked where everyone was.
Good video. Thanks!
You're awesome. Such a great channel
Funfact: The opening shot of Contact, you can faintly hear the Seinfeld theme.
Damn! Now I gotta watch the movie again to listen for that weird theme.
@@johndavis6119 same
Fun fact: Joe started his with wannabe by the spice girls
I like how the first music from 1997 was the Spice Girls 😂
Seinfeld was big shit then.
Culture .
Every time you ask, "how many?" I answer, "Billions and billions..." in my best Carl Sagan voice.
Search for all the illions from Cosmos here. It's one of the funniest videos.
GREAT VIDEO!! new subscriber here. Thanks for sharing!
your a great story teller, happy new year 2202
When I took a wireless communication class for my engineering degree, someone showed the math for an isotropic signal to be readable from Proxima Centauri. The math was pretty brutal. On the scale of dumping the output of one of the world's biggest power plants into an antenna.
That’s what I’ve read - that even if there was an alien trucking depot close to Alpha Centauri with the same TV and radio leakage as Earth, we would not be able to pick it up.
That SETI has been looking for beacon signals, because that’s what we can pick up. Meaning, the Milky Way Galaxy may not be as empty of tech civilizations as it appears. Or it may. We just don’t know. It’s an open question mark.
how easy for a wealthy, developed civilization. Geez, one could imagine us doing that within a couple of centuries
@@madams3478 this is why seti was a waste of time and money. The very concept is impossible. Any radio expert knows this even if astronomers like Sagan don't. There are no antennae out there, the film and sagan's book are wrong. I am sure this was pointed out to him on his 1st draft and he had to make up these so called antennae to fix the inheritant flaw in the whole concept.
SETI works for beacon signals.
Did Sagan oversell? Probably. It’s certainly a common enough human foible.
And it’s not the best way, for yeah, for it kind of has a way of coming back to bite you in the butt! I’ve liked Carl Sagan a lot at certain points in my life. One of his early books - _Dragons of Eden_ - was great.
Like a lot of writers, Carl, um (cough, cough!) basically kept writing the same book over and over again! Sorry, but he did. 🏔 🚴🏾♂️ 🏕
@@madams3478 no need to be sorry. The fault was sagan's not yours. I liked his cosmos series, but I didn't really like anything else about him. He was a new York teacher, not a proper researcher who figured there was more fame and fortune in si-fi then what he was doing.
Note: Though our southern neighbours were quite pleased with that broadcast and claimed it a world first, unfortunately for them a small Montreal station named XWA had beat them to the punch. Better known in recent times as CFCF, it had its first commercial broadcast nearly a year earlier.
Well then, you guys need to do a better PR job with your firsts.
Didn't count if we didn't hear it.
*** plugs ears ***
Typical American move, honestly. 😅😆😆
(Coming from an American)
Nicely done.
Wonderful video. .. again
I had always assumed that the broadcasts were picked up by an antenna at Vega, where a station on that "intergalactic subway" was located. Vega is about 25 light years away. Great book and Movie!
3 r r 6rr546uuy go huh hi u go g
"It's a weird connection but my brain did it"
Story of my life right there
69th like. Nice.
Love this video!!!
Good to hear someone addressing Radio Frequency path loss over vast distances.
9:14 Rick: "See? Our cup runneth over!"
Nailed it!
What an annoyingly good reference. Bravo
Cob planet?
Screaming sun?
Tiny world!
@@douglasbillington8521 I liked how quickly they extincted their bacon🤣
Season 5 is awsome.
So here’s the answer to the question “Are we alone?”:
Might as well be…
How true. I believe our creator planned it that way!
@@JesseRedmanBand yep, me too…
@@JesseRedmanBand cringe
I believe until we have visited the vast majority of planets in the galaxy, done lengthy examinations of in the way of biochemistry, and have studied soil, land features, and other aspects of every planet. We can not definitely rule out the possibility of life. Our understanding of the universe is tiny at best. We don’t even have pictures of what distant worlds look like…yet.
In the words of X-Files (I think anyways), the truth is out there.
And I want to believe.
Plus why would god have created an infinite universe if we would most likely never visit, colonize, or even see most of it. Just seems like a wait of time. But as Dr. Kain said in the original Dead Space game, “god moves in mysterious ways.”
For all practical purposes we are alone now. I am a proponent of space crossing AI though. If we ever do come into contact with anything that's the most likely thing it will be. Space really is not the best environment for complex organic life. Nothing is impossible but some things are more probable than others are.
Love your channel
Referencing 2038 Olympics in this discussion is really cool! (I'm now subscribed)
Hey ! This is such a good video :)
I remember a few months back, trying to explain to my colleagues that no, your phone signal doesn't bounce up to space, it goes to a tower on the ground and if it has to go to another continent, there are cables across the ocean for that, it's such a bummer that they don't speak english, I would have loved to recommend your video to them !
Have a kind day 😁
Of course the radio signal from your phone goes out into space and in all other directions from you too. It's not a directed radio beam from your phone to a certain tower. You're just lucky that one tower, probably the closest one, picks up your signal. ET would also be able to pick up your signal if he has the right kind of receiver 👽
@@Frobard
Yes, but the signal is so weak that it would be practically impossible to pick up from outside of the Solar System. And even inside you would need some pretty big detector.
@@andrasbiro3007 Indeed, technically it does but for any practical applications it doesn’t even reach space.
@@andrasbiro3007 Sure, but still. It reaches space though very weak 😋
I'm actually amazed that the signal from a tiny phone is strong enough to be picked up by a phone mast/tower at all.
A radio dish several times the size of a star? That might take a while to build. Better grab a drink and a snack.
Yeah I was thinking that too. It also would be hard to miss because it would literally make its star wobble due to the sun revolving around its gravitational pull.
@@randenrichards5461 no... That's not how that works. A telescope the size of a star doesn't literally have to be a dish of the same diameter as a star... To get the same resolution of a star-sized radio dish, you only need two big radio telescopes orbiting the distance of the stars diameter between them. That's how they build the event horizon telescope, a virtual telescope made of four smaller arrays basically "the size of earth", because it was telescopes spread all over earth.
We could do it by placing large dishes on multiple planets in our solar system and use interferometry to create a huge solar system wide dish. the motion of the planets would help steer the focus of the virtual dish. Billion of gigabits of data collected and processed on Earth by super computers, AI and quantum computers to sort, aggregate, identify and decode alien messages.
Figure out a way to make the dish with ionized gas.
@@grumblewoof4721 Built it on asteroids or moons. Cheaper to get there, no noise and degradation from an atmosphere.
Great video. You've summed up numerous topics that don't get a lot of attention in this space travel television world. Watching movies and tv one would conclude there are aliens everywhere.
Which is funny because the more i learn about the earth and what allowed for life to form here, the more it sounds like a perfect storm of circumstances and that we're a galactic fluke to exist at all, let alone be aware enough to build and modify our surroundings to the degree of ejecting things out into deep space (voyager 1+2).
The intro: "Oooh, hangbag!" from Vic and Bob! Was great!
I actually find all this reassuring as it reinforces the fact that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
True.
And also, scientific wild guesses at statistical probability of events we do not even vaguely understand do not underpin any sort of science. So the answers is:
No one knows.
It’s a safe bet any species 1000+ years beyond us in the galaxy and even outside of our galaxy has cataloged every star any planet and knows earth has life on it. Then, if they have the means to get here quickly, they could easily send spacecraft to discover us and/or keep tabs. Radio signals don’t matter. We’ve been sending biological signals for billions of years.
"The Gaia catalog of nearby stars and it's accurate up to about 10 parsecs"
When they get out to just over 12 parsecs they should call the chart the Kessel catalog!
They should definitely run with that.
The opening was fantastic.
I had a class that required us to watch this movie, and halfway through, the teacher paused it and instructed us to creatively write what we thought would happen next. It was a creative writing class, and it remains one of the middle school classes that truly left a lasting impact on me.
Joe, I love your channel. Study masters in physics but now I just do software development. I miss physics and your channel is one of the ways I get my “science fix”. Keep up the solid work mate
I believe expansion is an illusion. What you are witnessing, is the creation of the universe's substrate to confine conscience observations. Like a foundation built before the house.
Well, you could always build a fusor in your garage. I suggest scaling up the voltage, once you get it working, then switch the negative electrode with one coated with lithium deuteride.
Scale is a real ball breaker when you get your head around it, great video.
I vaguely recall a news report a few years ago where they claimed that radio signals are too degraded to hear anything after about two and a half years.
I recall reading that we could only detect a civilization’s radio transmissions out to about one light year if they were using similar technology. The only signals we send out that are detectable from many light years away are radar.
@@unicorn12345 In the movie they had an outpost with tech orbiting in the Vega system - so planet size listening dish required actually could have been a thing. I mean technically you could build something even bigger than a planet for listening - if that solar system didn't have anything useful and was just used as resources to build an outpost why not go huge?
If an interstellar listening post were useful, where is the optimal location?
Great video.
Makes me worry less about a 3 Body Problem scenario.
For 3/4 of the Earth's 4.5 billion years of existence, life on Earth was a slime mold. The odds of experiencing intelligent alien life in the 50 years we have been looking are very much not good
POLITICIANS have been with us for THAT LONG?!
😊😊😊
What about the 8 billion years before earth existed? A species could have been as advanced as us and looked at our planet as... non existent. Theoretically, if life began 1.5 billion years after the big bang, you're talking about a species that had an 8 billion year head start.... life began around 4 billion years ago, so 4 billion years of extra time couldve made them gods... so much so that we couldn't even detect them.
But so are a lot of the planets and stars around us, some older some younger. I truly have no doubt there is life out there, maybe even in our solar system, life finds away. However, I seriously doubt for multitudes of reasons that there is technologically advanced life anywhere near us and that we will be meeting it anytime soon. Someone has to be first and although life is probably abundant in the universe, multicellular is probably rarer and again technologically advanced life is probably extremely rare. We may be the only ones at this time in our galaxy rare.
I thought in the film, the aliens had built a series of monster antennas all over the galaxy. In the book, the receiver was actually built across asteroids if I remember correctly...the one near Vega.
Wow! I forgot about those things. I really should read the book again and watch the movie again as well.
Thanks for the info! I thought the same immediately. Only way this could work.
They're called Bracewell Probes...An astronomer (Bracewell) wrote about this problem with radio signals being too weak, so he suggested a series of large probes scattered throughout a galaxy. Anyway, the idea is that near stars with potentially habitable planets an intelligent civilization could use bracewell probes to listen for weak radio signals and once found, send a very powerful signal from probe to probe, like a radio relay telling the builders of the probes that a new civilization had emerged and then keep tabs on them till the builders went for a visit.
My first thought seeing this video was, 'Did you even watch the movie?'. There was a listening post set up to pickup and return the signal with the plans encoded. You see it briefly in the movie as she starts traveling though space even.
Pure Hollywood fantasy.
Brilliantly educational as far as perspective is concerned. We have to hope, not even assume, that they’re either radio technologically aware or have gone far beyond that but are capable of radio detection with whatever the hell they’re using/have anyway.
Great analysis. I was trying to figure out what the farthest distance we could still communicate with our aliens using our most powerful transmitter, transmitting the best spectrum, using our most sensitive receiver...but then got distracted by a cookie.
"Thou Shalt Not Debunk Carl Sagan!"
Hail Sagan! 🤘
His ex-wife Lynn Margulis did.
He didn't really debunk him. Sagan was an astronomer and knew what he was talking about, the book and even the movie which made a lot of changes. The way it's framed in this video is a bit cringe but he's just trying to update the idea and educate with subtleties. All astronomers know all this these days, and Carl would too... better ways to send on messages has been a focus of SETI for quite a while.
All hail St. Carl Sagan.
@@jamesdavis727 Ever read up on how Sagan teamed up with fellow doomsayer Paul Ehrlich to run the bogus Nuclear Winter publicity campaign with the same kind of arbitrary formula behind it like the Drake Equation? Their so called "science" was so bogus that Richard Feynman came out and said, "I don't think these guys know what they're talking about." But other physicists were more reticent about speaking out because as physicist Freeman Dyson said, "The science is atrocious, but who wants to be accused of being in favor of Nuclear War?"
THAT was the science behind "Nuclear Winter"! Sagan came out and predicted that the Kuwaiti oil field fires would burn for years and create a Nuclear Winter effect over the Northern Hemisphere. None of it of course happened.
Noticed I said his ex-wife debunked him? Lynn Margulis was a biologist and was developing her Endosymbiosis Theory in the 60s and was being berated by mainstream evolutionary biologists because she claimed Natural Selection didn't create new Life Forms, but just held onto them. In other words she said Darwin was wrong. Sagan deserted her over it because he couldn't have a wife on the wrong side of science. She was vindicated in the 1980s. I took her classes in the 70s and got to know her. She told me Sagan was just a publicity whore and hadn't done any real science for years. I think that was the nicest thing she ever said about him.
In Contact (the book, not the movie) the aliens had listening stations strategically placed all over the Milky Way, they were actively searching for the sort of radio signals we send into space and a program dedicated to contact such emerging cultures.
Was going to comment with this as well. The book describes the listening stations as a pretty massive bit of infrastructure, if I remember correctly, with huge, spherical, planet sized collections of dishes in polar orbits around certain types of stars to maximize their sensitivity in all directions. Basically...Carl thought of this problem ;)
If it isn't in the movie then it's still a valid criticism of the movie.
@@RRW359 Haha, fair, though I'm not sure about the 'Sorry Carl' thumbnail :p
@@softan So that's what that was. Read the book about 25 years ago and saw the movie again recently and it never occurred to me that's what that was. Makes perfect sense. Thanks for that insight.
That requires FTL travel.
Great video, great film :)
Good points within our current understanding of physics.
Thank you for reminding us of important scale factors affecting radio waves in a vast universe. Most people have zero understanding of this.
"Most people have zero understanding of this."
Another instance of "I am smarter than everyone else" -- the real purpose of CZcams!
@@thomasmaughan4798 It wasn't a comparison. It was a simple statement of fact.
@@KpxUrz5745 " It wasn't a comparison. It was a simple statement of fact."
It is a *claim* of fact; but claims do not make it so. You wrote:
"Most people have zero understanding of this."
About 7 billion people inhabit Earth. How many have you interviewed to make your determination of fact?
@@thomasmaughan4798 Omg. Shall we really dance pointlessly around this detail? My point was clear and correct. Nothing left to say about it. I would suggest finding someone else to pick a bone with.
@@KpxUrz5745 "Nothing left to say about it"
Except, of course, to SAY there's nothing left to say about it 🙂
"I would suggest finding someone else to pick a bone with."
Stay tuned!
8:46
I'm not a scientist but I would bet that in a 100 mile radius around earth there are 0 stars
Actually, a 100 mile radius contains a lot of Hollywood stars.
@@andrasbiro3007 lmao
Awesome video!! SETI has always been a pipe dream, but I'm glad we are trying.
Great video
I actually did most of the testing on the lightweight materials used to make the Jame Webb Telescope. I worked as a Lab Tech for the company that made the materials for the telescope and I was always there when they were making the materials so that it was always performed the same way to get more accurate test results. The company is called Hexcel and the plant I worked at is right next door to ATK where the telescope is, or was at the time at least. Very cool project to be a part of and I hope that everything goes smoothly 😊.
Thank you for your contributions to one of the most exciting scientific missions ever!
For the JWST it's been smooth. However the effect of the JWST on the astrophysics field and their precious theories...has been devastating. You do good work
@@montgomeryfitzpatrick473 “Not all that glitters is gold” lol
@@montgomeryfitzpatrick473 Why has it been devastating
@@montgomeryfitzpatrick473 So true 👍
2:45
CZcams: Nudity is not ok here
Also CZcams: Unless it's an alien in which case it's ok since they don't have dangling softtubes to hide.
Oh boy! All those Stargate SG-1 channels featuring the Asgards would be in trouble now
😅😂😜
I think all Scott's videos should have a grey alien sign language interpreter.
@@thundermane362 And that’s why I like running around naked. All superior alien creatures are doing the same, makes me feel a better person (but the sunburn is something to worry about).
we're probably the only lifeform in the entire universe that wear clothes. we're such apes man
Jeezus, you offered a plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox. I had to rewind and make sure I heard you right....!
Love the NdT reference!
One thing you overlooked when discussing receiving signals from the Voyagers is that the people operating the listening stations know where to point the dish, and what frequency to tune in.
Titanic firing it’s tiny flares in the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean is not a weird connection, it’s an apt analogy to how immensely huge the universe is.
"In order for an alien civilization that far away to even detect us, it might require a planet-sized dish." One more reason to build a Dyson sphere!
We should be detecting multiple alien civilisations but we don't. We're alone.
@Gernot Schrader Industrial civilisation has a very limited lifespan on any planet. Ours is just about done, we've used all the good sources of resources now. So while life may exist elsewhere, interstellar civilisations aren't possible.
@Gernot Schrader we will not be leaving the solar system whether we set that goal or not. it's unlikely humans will even land on the moon again. I don't think you've understood. the space programme was a luxury we had when we had cheap resources. we won't have those any more.
@@Withnail1969 atleast we landed on the moon the moon landing conspir is just jealousy with extra steps
I think intelligent life is just conscience if you need a disposable biological shell and a machine to travel not that intelligent
I'd love to hear Joe talk about the very remote Dogon tribe and their knowledge of a star system that can't be seen by the naked eye. How could they know such things?
The Dogon astronomy knowledge has been proven to be a myth/hoax.
Well Sirius A is bright and close, appearing to be the brightest star in the sky, so no surprise that it would be part of someone's mythology. It is a bit surprising that anyone would guess that a binary companion is part of that system, a dim white dwarf star not visible to the naked eye, which we call Sirius B. There are no known planets in the system, so we don't yet know if the Dogon are right about that.
Do you mean the dog gone tribe of West Africa?
Shout out from Puerto Rico. Was here when ite fell in Arecibo and went to it as a kid. 😅
Really enjoyed this video.
I like it when you do videos that give perspective of where we're at and where we're trying to go and what it's going to take to get there
its so freaking vast, nothin can really represent the vastness... what if all our animations and charts and sketches are way off lol. its too overly large out there.
@@kosmique that's what she said
Dude, This was a really good video. You have a great talent for breaking down difficult concepts. You also have a good sense of how to order this information as you tell it to someone. Subscribed!!
Strongly agree.
Have you ever thought that our thoughts creat radio waves that also go out into space?
@@benjiguru2820 No but I believe they create some kind of signal that can be picked up by others nearby. I have had numerous experiences where someone I was with says the exact, and I mean exact word for word phrase I was thinking a second before they said it.
Not in common 'jinx' coincidental way of remarking on something both saw or experienced, I have had lots of those. I am talking 'what are the odds of that exact sentence being said the moment i thought it' kind of way.
I have no explanation, but believe there is some form of mind to mind communication.
I’ve experienced that one time after doing mushrooms with a friend. We had a 5min telepathic conversation, its hard to explain and I guess people will say we were just high but I remember clearly communicating without opening our mouths. We knew exactly what the other was saying, it was like a crazy sync moment enhanced by shrooms picked at the forest, pure organic stuff 🤪
@@JammedClipper how are you so sure it was your friend and not an alien body snatcher?! That is the most common way aliens study us. Drop a spanish fly in the ole drink...maybe a cap or two on the burger, and then bam your in their ship being probed! LoL
As a NASA scientist, biologist, it's impossible to completely understand the circumference of pie on our solar neighborhood. When added to the negative speed of molecular system polarity, it doesn't add up.
After having watched this over twenty times, I think it is your best work.
I was sneezing when you said that's nothing to sneeze at.
bless you
I made that happen.
I don’t care what’s wrong with the ‘film’ it’s still one of my favourite films.
Proof: We received the message, "play more Jack Benny" and "send jello".
“With respect to Carl Sagan…..” That’s actually the funniest bit.