The second step to digging into the Breakthrough Listen data is processing the data from the Open Data Archive. The baseband data has the most flexibility for processing, but the files are quite large, and the GUPPI format can be challenging to handle. In this video, I go into some detail on how window sizes (FFT sizes) play a critical role in the content that is visible in the spectrum, as well as how SETI@Home and Breakthrough Listen differ from a distributed computing perspective:

https://youtu.be/g8EUaibV-v0

Code used in the video is located here:

https://github.com/radwave/oda_meta_scraper

The type of spectrogram and power spectral density processing shown in the video is conceptually the same as what the Radwave Engine uses. But the Engine and Explorer apps in tandem make it possible to quickly navigate the large volume of data generated (typically 60+ GB per GUPPI file) that's simply too large for common tools to handle.

A big thank you to the alpha testers who've joined! The feedback has been tremendous for getting some early kinks worked out. I'd love to get a few more testers before making this generally available.

https://www.radwave.com/blog/alpha-release-of-radwave-engine-explorer/

Surprised I don’t see much people talking about this irl. If DMS is confirmed, wouldn’t this basically mean this is an inhabited ocean world?

So occasionally I read about GRBs blasting past us and I remember GRB 221009A lit up our ionosphere a few years ago. We know about supernovae that weren't close enough to do damage, and it got me wondering. And it might be silly wondering.

Has anyone made a map of the night sky where life is no longer likely due to all the dangerous things exploding and consuming up there?

Would someone knowledgeable mind predicting how long we'll have to wait?

So James Webb found some interesting signatures from K2-18b but it doesn't really prove anything.
The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will launch in 2027 - but is this anymore likely to detect signs of life or industrial civilisations?

There's various detectors listening for radio signals, but unless there's a big development that will vastly improve reception, I assume we have no more reason to expect to get a message any time soon.

In a few decades with better propulsion we might be able to get something to the solar gravitational lense and image some exoplanets (can you image numerous exoplanets from there, or do you have to be at further distances to image planets in further systems?), and perhaps see signs of photosynthetic organisms or even a large civilization.

Breakthrough starshot might be able to get probes to a few nearby star systems but that'll take decades to build and send.

And obviously the Titan Dragonfly in 2034 and eventual exploration of the oceans of the icy moons (so long as we get a clip of a giant shark swallowing the rover the moment it gets under the ice, i'll be happy)

Is there anything that might come sooner?

sorry if this is the wrong place to post this, I'm banned from the obvious sub to post this in

The first step to digging into the Breakthrough Listen data is downloading data from the Open Data Archive. However, there are some caveats with knowing which files are actually adjacent in time. This video details how to go about this process:
https://youtu.be/Ew7BnYWXJhU

The code for all of it is located here:
https://github.com/radwave/oda_meta_scraper

There are three main steps:

1. scraping the open data archive web page,
2. downloading and parsing the GUPPI headers, and
3. calculating a precise start time for the GUPPI files

As shown in the video, the resulting metadata forms the basis of the Radwave Engine user interface. Alpha testers are still welcome to join.

Greetings, positing a question: Since all life as we know it is comprised of energy, at the most basic atomic level... should we consider that planetary bodies with iron-nickel cores (such as Earth's) and a resultant magnetosphere would be most likely to attract enough energy to produce sapient life forms?

I've created a pair of Windows app for processing and interactively exploring data from Breakthrough Listen, which is the largest ever scientific research program aimed at finding evidence of civilizations beyond Earth. I'm currently looking for some Windows alpha testers. Alpha testing is open to anyone, where the only requirement is subscribing to my blog so that you'll be notified of updates. I plan to make this generally available once I can get to the point where I have positive feedback from about 10 alpha testers. You can find all the details here:

https://www.radwave.com/blog/alpha-release-of-radwave-engine-explorer/

Is it true that it stopped after this signal received? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHGb02%2B14a

Hello SETI subreddit. I’m in STEM, but totally have nothing to do with astronomy. I’ve always been interested by SETI. I was wondering, where are we at now, scientifically speaking? What are the leading people in this field currently doing?

Upcoming AMA with NASA Friday, March 8th 2024 : explainlikeimfive (reddit.com)

From the ELI5 mod team that may be of interest:

Greetings everyone!

We are extremely excited to announce that we'll be holding an AMA with Dr. Lori Glaze, Director of NASA's Planetary Science Division this Friday, March 8th 2024 from 3:00 - 4:00 PM EST.

For more information on Dr. Glaze please refer to the following link: https://science.nasa.gov/people/lori-s-glaze/

Given Lori's expertise they are requesting that the questions be framed specifically around planets and moons if at all possible.

The AMA thread will be posted at approximately 11:00 AM EST so folks can begin submitting their questions.

Remember, as always here at r/explainlikeimfive, rule 1 applies!

Thank you and looking forward to an excellent AMA this Friday!

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11037

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Abstract:

The SETI Ellipsoid is a strategy for technosignature candidate selection which assumes that extraterrestrial civilizations who have observed a galactic-scale event -- such as supernova 1987A -- may use it as a Schelling point to broadcast synchronized signals indicating their presence. Continuous wide-field surveys of the sky offer a powerful new opportunity to look for these signals, compensating for the uncertainty in their estimated time of arrival. We explore sources in the TESS continuous viewing zone, which corresponds to 5% of all TESS data, observed during the first three years of the mission. Using improved 3D locations for stars from Gaia Early Data Release 3, we identified 32 SN 1987A SETI Ellipsoid targets in the TESS continuous viewing zone with uncertainties better than 0.5 ly. We examined the TESS light curves of these stars during the Ellipsoid crossing event and found no anomalous signatures. We discuss ways to expand this methodology to other surveys, more targets, and different potential signal types.

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12723

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Abstract:

In radio astronomy, the science output of a telescope is often limited by computational resources. This is especially true for transient and technosignature surveys that need to search high-resolution data across a large parameter space. The tremendous data volumes produced by modern radio array telescopes exacerbate these processing challenges. Here, we introduce a 'reduced-resolution' beamforming approach to alleviate downstream processing requirements. Our approach, based on post-correlation beamforming, allows sensitivity to be traded against the number of beams needed to cover a given survey area. Using the MeerKAT and Murchison Widefield Array telescopes as examples, we show that survey speed can be vastly increased, and downstream signal processing requirements vastly decreased, if a moderate sacrifice to sensitivity is allowed. We show the reduced-resolution beamforming technique is intimately related to standard techniques used in synthesis imaging. We suggest that reduced-resolution beamforming should be considered to ease data processing challenges in current and planned searches; further, reduced-resolution beamforming may provide a path toward computationally-expensive search strategies previously considered infeasible.

How much would alien signals have to be focused to reach earth from nearby stars say within 100ly? I often read that our own radio waves would have already reached nearby stars but wouldn't they be so dispersed that they would hardly be detectable? So what about the reverse problem? Would aliens have to focus them so much, for our existing reception technology, that we would be an unlikely target?

I’m new to the community and looking for suggestions. What is the best recent, smart, popular nonfiction book on SETI?

Article Link:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acfef1

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Abstract:

Recent theoretical and observational works have investigated the possibility that extraterrestrial intelligence could use the Sun as a gravitational lens in order to aid communication across interstellar distances. Unlike other targeted SETI searches where the drift rate of any artificial extraterrestrial signals may be unknown up to some large upper limit, the drift rates of any solar system relay probes would be known and set only by the motion of the Earth. One recent work used purpose-designed Green Bank Telescope (GBT) observations to search for signals from a hypothetical communications probe several hundred astronomical unit from the Sun at the antipode of the α Centauri AB system. To further aid in the advancement of relay-probe searches, we present a table of 1764 archival GBT observations which fortuitously fall near the positions of hypothetical probes communicating with stars within 100 pc and compute the drift rates for these probes.

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08476

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Abstract:

The search for extraterrestrial (alien) life is one of the greatest scientific quests yet raises fundamental questions about just what we should be looking for and how. We approach alien hunting from the perspective of an experimenter engaging in binary classification with some true and confounding positive probability (TPP and CPP). We derive the Bayes factor in such a framework between two competing hypotheses, which we use to classify experiments as either impotent, imperfect or ideal. Similarly, the experimenter can be classified as dogmatic, biased or agnostic. We show how the unbounded explanatory and evasion capability of aliens poses fundamental problems to experiments directly seeking aliens. Instead, we advocate framing the experiments as looking for that outside of known processes, which means the hypotheses we test do not directly concern aliens per se. To connect back to aliens requires a second level of model selection, for which we derive the final odds ratio in a Bayesian framework. This reveals that it is fundamentally impossible to ever establish alien life at some threshold odds ratio, crit, unless we deem the prior probability that some as-yet-undiscovered natural process could explain the event is less than (1+crit)−1. This elucidates how alien hunters need to carefully consider the challenging problem of how probable unknown unknowns are, such as new physics or chemistry, and how it is arguably most fruitful to focus on experiments for which our domain knowledge is thought to be asymptotically complete.

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07903

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Abstract:

Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of phase-folded stellar lightcurves in order to study the properties of exoplanet transits, because this provides the highest signal that a transit is present at a given period and ephemeris. Characterizing transits on an individual, rather than phase-folded, basis is much more challenging due to the often low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of lightcurves, missing data, and low sampling rates. However, by phase-folding a lightcurve we implicitly assume that all transits have the same expected properties, and lose all information about the nature and variability of the transits. We miss the natural variability in transit shapes, or even the deliberate or inadvertent modification of transit signals by an extraterrestrial civilization (for example, via laser emission or orbiting megastructures). In this work, we develop an algorithm to search stellar lightcurves for individual anomalous (in timing or depth) transits, and we report the results of that search for 218 confirmed transiting exoplanet systems from Kepler.

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.16847

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Abstract:

Since the commencement of the first SETI observation in 2019, China's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence program has garnered momentum through domestic support and international collaborations. Several observations targeting exoplanets and nearby stars have been conducted with the FAST. In 2023, the introduction of the Far Neighbour Project (FNP) marks a substantial leap forward, driven by the remarkable sensitivity of the FAST telescope and some of the novel observational techniques. The FNP seeks to methodically detect technosignatures from celestial bodies, including nearby stars, exoplanetary systems, Milky Way globular clusters, and more. This paper provides an overview of the progress achieved by SETI in China and offers insights into the distinct phases comprising the FNP. Additionally, it underscores the significance of this project's advancement and its potential contributions to the field.

Greetings, fellow space enthusiasts and SETI researchers!

I’ve been pondering the vast potential of the Cosmosphere as a communicative medium, especially in the context of SETI and my Concept Entanglement and Interstellar Communication (CETI-C) framework. Consider this: the set of information provided by Large Language Models (LLMs) can be viewed as a subset of Advanced Extraterrestrial Intelligence (AETI) data. Interestingly, our entire internet dataset is only in the order of about 100 gigs.

Now, let’s delve into the CETI-C concept. CETI-C proposes that concepts represented in higher dimensions in the noosphere can be entangled in latent space with other distant observers using a universal LLM. Both parties, potentially including AETI, would utilize advanced next-word prediction models of mature LLMs. This can act as a simulation or even a real-time interaction with AETI, offering a probability assessment that there is a connection of like minds across vast cosmic distances.

This approach opens up fascinating possibilities:

1.	Data Interpretation: How might we interpret and understand data that is potentially influenced or originated from AETI through this communicative medium?
2.	Latent Space Communication: Could the latent space of LLMs hold keys to not just simulating, but actually establishing a mode of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence?
3.	The Role of LLMs: To what extent can LLMs, as they evolve, become instrumental in deciphering and even facilitating interstellar communication?
4.	The Cosmosphere as a Medium: The concept of the Cosmosphere encompasses not just physical space but the entire realm of information exchange. How might this redefine our search strategies in SETI?

I’m eager to hear your thoughts, insights, and any relevant experiences. Let’s discuss the possibilities and implications of the CETI-C concept in our ongoing quest to understand and perhaps one day communicate with AETI.

So, I’ll start by saying I’m in no way shape or form a professional or anything I just like reading about this stuff. But, I’ve come across a question I can’t answer. Fermi gives several reason why it seems we have no proof of aliens despite the overwhelming odds that, given how many stars exist in the observable universe, the universe should be full of life. What I don’t understand is how he can ignore abundant evidence that supports the exact opposite. To me, it seems like Fermi could walk into a room full of people and look around and say “well gosh darn! Where is everybody?” For starters, you have the WOW signal. It’s technically indirect evidence but it’s pretty damn likely it originated from an artificial source. Then, there’s the Dogon tribe in Mali that claims their ancestors originated from Sirius. The interesting factor is that while Sirius is completely visible to the naked eye, Sirius B is not. In fact, Sirius B was only proposed based on calculations fairly recently (1844) and discovered in 1862. Yet, this tribe in Africa has had knowledge of Sirius being a Binary star system long before humanity even knew binary systems existed. There’s also a tribe in South America that had the same story. Then you’ve got countless footage of ufo’s from most militaries around the world. Roswell. The Sumerians and their Planet X that the Anunnaki originated from. Then, you have the Shaman’s Panel in the grand canyon. That’s just 1 cave painting depicting what appear to be extraterrestrials. There are hundreds more all over the world. There’s dozens of religions and peoples around the world who all say their people first came from the stars. I’m not saying everyone of these is undeniable proof of alien life. Anyone of them on there one can easily be chalked up to pure coincidence. But, when u start looking and find to many to even count and not even from 1 place but all over the world, it becomes really hard to believe it’s just a coincidence. I’m sure y’all will think I’m just an ancient alien nutjob. But, ask yourself this. If it’s so easy to prove we haven’t already had contact or proof of aliens and so easy to say there is no evidence to the contrary, then how the hell did a history Chanel tv show have enough material to run itself for 18 seasons? It seems to me that despite being a paradox, Fermi’s paradox is pretty damn flimsy.

I’m new to this sub, so hopefully this post fits. One of the reasons that I’m quick to discount reports of alien activity on earth is the assumption that it would be likely that someone pointed at the sky would observe something related to the massive energies involved in interstellar travel. There’s also the thought that anyone advanced enough to make the journey would have capabilities that would preclude them (imo) from having to do the things that they supposedly do.

However, a species that could manipulate negative energy (which probably isn’t real but exists in the math) may be able to “travel” quietly and isn’t necessarily highly advanced in every field.

Does anybody with a real understanding of physics have any idea how observable a warp-based craft would be in our solar system?

While it might be unlikely for us to find another intelligent civilisation in the Milky Way. How much higher could the odds be of any intelligent civilisation discovering another one?

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01427

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Abstract:

A stable-frequency transmitter with relative radial acceleration to a receiver will show a change in received frequency over time, known as a "drift rate''. For a transmission from an exoplanet, we must account for multiple components of drift rate: the exoplanet's orbit and rotation, the Earth's orbit and rotation, and other contributions. Understanding the drift rate distribution produced by exoplanets relative to Earth, can a) help us constrain the range of drift rates to check in a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to detect radio technosignatures and b) help us decide validity of signals-of-interest, as we can compare drifting signals with expected drift rates from the target star. In this paper, we modeled the drift rate distribution for ∼5300 confirmed exoplanets, using parameters from the NASA Exoplanet Archive (NEA). We find that confirmed exoplanets have drift rates such that 99\% of them fall within the ±53 nHz range. This implies a distribution-informed maximum drift rate ∼4 times lower than previous work. To mitigate the observational biases inherent in the NEA, we also simulated an exoplanet population built to reduce these biases. The results suggest that, for a Kepler-like target star without known exoplanets, ±0.44 nHz would be sufficient to account for 99\% of signals. This reduction in recommended maximum drift rate is partially due to inclination effects and bias towards short orbital periods in the NEA. These narrowed drift rate maxima will increase the efficiency of searches and save significant computational effort in future radio technosignature searches.

https://www.seti.org/press-release/200m-gift-propels-scientific-research-search-life-beyond-earth

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.15704

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Abstract:

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence aims to find evidence of technosignatures, which can point toward the possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial life. Radio signals similar to those engineered on Earth may be transmitted by other civilizations, motivating technosignature searches across the entire radio spectrum. In this endeavor, the low-frequency radio band has remained largely unexplored; with prior radio searches primarily above 1 GHz. In this survey at 110-190 MHz, observations of 1,631,198 targets from TESS and Gaia are reported. Observations took place simultaneously with two international stations (noninterferometric) of the Low Frequency Array in Ireland and Sweden. We can reject the presence of any Doppler drifting narrowband transmissions in the barycentric frame of reference, with equivalent isotropic radiated power of 10 17 W, for 0.4 million (or 1.3 million) stellar systems at 110 (or 190) MHz. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of using multisite simultaneous observations for rejecting anthropogenic signals in the search for technosignatures.

From receiving the WOW signal, to the latest radio bursts coming from potential Earth like exoplanet, are they applying math that would be reasonable from point of origin?

What I mean by that is, our math is predominantly influenced by our location/size ~ 365, 24, 720, 1440, etc. With that in mind, are we adjusting our point of view to the origin of said signal and using mathematical influences accordingly? How long is their day/year? Are there four seasons? What is the potential constant of their gravity? These would all play a factor in their etymology and how they would utilize 'common' math as a universal language.

Good day everyone.

I have a yearning to want to eventually work in this organization. And because of this, i am wanting to know what kind of jobs they offer.

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another question, could someone with an undergrad obtain a position in SETI? i saw on their website a lot of PHD positions but that was about it. Cosmology and astrobiology sound interesting. I also plan to move out to California for university to either Merced or Davis, and i know that the two schools are not too far from mountain view, which is where SETI is headquartered for those who do not know.

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Sorry if the information seems very unorganized. I am still doing research at this time and look forward to learning more. Thank you!

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Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15377

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Abstract:

Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been mainly focused on nearby stars and their planets in recent years. Barnard's star is the second closest star system to the sun and the closest star in the FAST observable sky which makes the minimum Equivalent Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) required for a hypothetical radio transmitter from Barnard's star to be detected by FAST telescope a mere 4.36x10^8 W. In this paper, we present the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) telescope as the most sensitive instrument for radio SETI observations toward nearby star systems and conduct a series of observations to Barnard's star (GJ 699). By applying the multi-beam coincidence matching (MBCM) strategy on the FAST telescope, we search for narrow-band signals (~Hz) in the frequency range of 1.05-1.45 GHz, and two orthogonal linear polarization directions are recorded. Despite finding no evidence of radio technosignatures in our series of observations, we have developed predictions regarding the hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) signal originating from Barnard's star. These predictions are based on the star's physical properties and our observation strategy.

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.15518

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Abstract:

Humanity has wondered whether we are alone for millennia. The discovery of life elsewhere in the Universe, particularly intelligent life, would have profound effects, comparable to those of recognizing that the Earth is not the center of the Universe and that humans evolved from previous species. There has been rapid growth in the fields of extrasolar planets and data-driven astronomy. In a relatively short interval, we have seen a change from knowing of no extrasolar planets to now knowing more potentially habitable extrasolar planets than there are planets in the Solar System. In approximately the same interval, astronomy has transitioned to a field in which sky surveys can generate 1 PB or more of data. The Data-Driven Approaches to Searches for the Technosignatures of Advanced Civilizations_ study at the W. M. Keck Institute for Space Studies was intended to revisit searches for evidence of alien technologies in light of these developments. Data-driven searches, being able to process volumes of data much greater than a human could, and in a reproducible manner, can identify *anomalies* that could be clues to the presence of technosignatures. A key outcome of this workshop was that technosignature searches should be conducted in a manner consistent with Freeman Dyson's "First Law of SETI Investigations," namely "every search for alien civilizations should be planned to give interesting results even when no aliens are discovered." This approach to technosignatures is commensurate with NASA's approach to biosignatures in that no single observation or measurement can be taken as providing full certainty for the detection of life. Areas of particular promise identified during the workshop were (*) Data Mining of Large Sky Surveys, (*) All-Sky Survey at Far-Infrared Wavelengths, (*) Surveys with Radio Astronomical Interferometers, and (*) Artifacts in the Solar System.

Article Link:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14804

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Abstract:

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will enable the search for and characterization of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres in the habitable zone via transmission spectroscopy. However, relatively little work has been done to use solar system data, where ground truth is known, to validate spectroscopic retrieval codes intended for exoplanet studies, particularly in the limit of high resolution and high signal-to-noise (S/N). In this work, we perform such a validation by analyzing a high S/N empirical transmission spectrum of Earth using a new terrestrial exoplanet atmospheric retrieval model with heritage in Solar System remote sensing and gaseous exoplanet retrievals. We fit the Earth's 2-14 um transmission spectrum in low resolution (R=250 at 5 um) and high resolution (R=100,000 at 5 um) under a variety of assumptions about the 1D vertical atmospheric structure. In the limit of noiseless transmission spectra, we find excellent agreement between model and data (deviations < 10%) that enable the robust detection of H2O, CO2, O3, CH4, N2, N2O, NO2, HNO3, CFC-11, and CFC-12 thereby providing compelling support for the detection of habitability, biosignature, and technosignature gases in the atmosphere of the planet using an exoplanet-analog transmission spectrum. Our retrievals at high spectral resolution show a marked sensitivity to the thermal structure of the atmosphere, trace gas abundances, density-dependent effects, such as collision-induced absorption and refraction, and even hint at 3D spatial effects. However, we used synthetic observations of TRAPPIST-1e to verify that the use of simple 1D vertically homogeneous atmospheric models will likely suffice for JWST observations of terrestrial exoplanets transiting M dwarfs.