Parkes to look for Aliens!

Russian billionaire Yuri Milner has put up $100million to look for signs of extraterrestrial life.

The Austrialian effort will be headed by the supervisor of my MSC pulsar project Matthew Bailes of the Swinburne’s Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing.

From the Swinburne press release : "The search will be 50 times more sensitive than previous searches for extraterrestrial intelligence, covering ten times more sky and scanning at least five times more of the radio spectrum – and doing so 100 times faster than previously possible."
www.swinburne.edu.au/media-centre/news/2...-for-alien-life.html

The effort will get about 20% of the science observing time in Parkes for five years to look for aliens. Though some of that time can probably be shared. In return Milners will help the upgrade of equipment at Parkes including a new supercomputer which can then be used by astronomers for research so everyone seems happy with this announcement.

Matthew and the Swinburne team are experts in radio astronomy, supercomputing and in particular pulsar research. If there is a weak signal out there to be found this folks will find it. And it's great to see 'The Dish' at the forefront of this research and getting significant upgrades.

Perhaps I should have stayed over there and done a PhD afterall. I could be dining with little green men and Russian billionaires by now!

Well, its as good as any seti enthusiast could have hoped for,
Imagine if they do find something, the world will seem alot smaller.

I suppose aliens are the only way the Russians can get an ally, lol

The focus of SETI is still to use the EM spectrum, in particular, radio being to slow for communications with ET civilisations. The constraint being the speed of light.

The on going search for ETI via EM signals can at best produce primitive civilisations due to their excessive slowness for interstellar communications.

Its surprising the lack of exploration into the studies on faster than light (superluminal) communications to promote the development of new communication technologies.

Eamonn

eansbro wrote: Its surprising the lack of exploration into the studies on faster than light (superluminal) communications to promote the development of new communication technologies.

Can you elaborate on that a bit Eamonn? If an advanced civilisation did have some superluminal capability how would we even being to search for it given that such communications are forbidden by our current understanding of the universe?

Their has been some research into FTL communications. Here are some examples.

Superluminal speeds have been conducted by the Italian scientist E. Recami on faster than light particles with imaginary mass admitted by special relativity called tachyons (see A Review”, Rivista N. Cim. Vol.9,page 1, 1986)

Superluminal solutions of quantum mechanical wave equations for ordinary massive particles (see M. Z. Rached, E. Recami & H. E. Harnandez F., Eur. Phys. Journ. Vol. D 21, page 217, 2002).

G. Nimtz has achieved superluminal communications with the transmission of a Beethoven symphony up to fifty times the speed of light in vacuum through special guides, thus activating contact interactions caused by stray fields in the internal walls of the guides (see the report G. Nimtz, G. Foundations in Physics, Vol. 1193, 2011).

Superluminal speeds are interpreted by Nimtz via tunnel effects compatible with special relativity or by Santilli via stray fields in the interior walls of the guides that are not representable via relativistic quantum mechanics.

An experimental collaboration at CERN headed by the Italian scientist A. Ereditato measured in 2012 neutrinos traveling undergrounds from the Geneva Laboratory in Switzerland to the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy at superluminal speeds ( report www.santilli-foundation.org/docs/OPERA-experiment.pdf ).

A wireless space communications signalling architecture could be built, based on new technology for converting transverse EM into longitudinal (scalar) electro gravitic waves.

The inductive coupling with the gravitational field provides a very weak gravitational component to the transverse waves. The longitudinal wave solutions may be independent of the transverse solutions and that the longitudinal solutions consist of only electric and gravitational vector components with an accompanying scalar wave.

Longitudinal electro gravitic waves do not interact with the propagation medium as do transverse waves and make good candidates for space communication. Not only will longitudinal waves pass through intervening material, but they may be made very directive and, thereby, avoid a 1/r2 loss. This requires an antenna design for converting transverse electromagnetic waves into longitudinal electrogravitic waves for using with the two way communication equipment and the reciprocal antenna design for converting longitudinal waves back into transverse waves to use in a current receiver.

Using existing SETI radio telescopes with the above conversion/modifications could provide superluminal communications directed to specific stars.
This does break the laws of physics as we know it.

Eamonn