Contact?

Scientists — real ones, not the Bill Nye type, but honest to goodness scientists — have found repeating radio signals in space. These aren’t the normal bursts that happen from time to time. These are happening again and again. And, the source is repeating, but the actual pattern of the bursts isn’t.

This was in the news recently, but was actually first reported a year ago. Not many really picked up on that.

I’m not saying it’s aliens, but … well, you know.

So, what’s going on? I tell you what I think. I think the aliens want to tell us something. But what?

Could they be offering us the secrets of the universe? Could they be telling us our Space Shuttle warranty is about to expire and we need to press ‘5’ to talks to a representative?

What do you think is going on?

22 Comments

  1. Taking the question seriously, it’s going to be some kind of stellar phenomena. When broadcasting using an omnidirectional antenna, the original power broadcast is spread out over the surface of the expanding sphere formed by the signal. At interstellar distances, the amount of power received by a one square kilometer antenna is so low it is well below the background noise of the universe. I did the math once, and if I recall correctly it was 1 x 10^-29 watts when starting with a gigawatt transmission (our most powerful RF source that I know of is only 7 MW). So, 0.0 …1 watts, with the “…” substituting for 27 zeros. A directional antenna that, say, directs all the power down a cone that is 1% the volume of a sphere raises that power to 1 x 10 -27 watts. In order to use radio to communicate over even a single parsec requires both sending and receiving antennas the size of the moon, and of course, they have to be pointing very precisely at each other.

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