back to article 15 'could it be aliens?' fast radio bursts observed in one night

Fast Radio Burst-hunters have suffered London Bus syndrome again: fifteen have shown up at once. A bout of sky-watching at Green Bank in West Virginia, under the auspices of the Breakthrough Initiative's Listen project, has turned up 15 pulses from repeater source FRB 121102. Boffins already knew FRB 121102 was enticing: back …

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  1. Ben1892
    Black Helicopters

    Clearly a cover up "discovery" for the HAARP anomaly that's been used to create hurricanes Harvey and Irma

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Kids

    It'll be kids having a rave.

    Alien kids, but kids none the less.

  3. Christoph

    It's not aliens

    They could communicate locally using far less power. They only need that huge signal if they want to communicate over distances like 3 billion light years.

    But just to say "Hello?" "Yes, I hear you" would take six billion years. Who is going to approve the budget for that? It simply does not make sense. A reply coming back after a period longer that the age of our solar system?

    1. Mage Silver badge
      Alien

      Re: It's not aliens

      I agree, it's not aliens.

      I have a longer explanation I've given before as to why Radio Telescopes are great for science but not going to receive Alien transmissions, unless the Alien starship is nearer than the nearest star. Otherwise, we'll spot possible alien life or even their industrial pollution via spectrographic analysis. The James Webb should be a good addition for that search.

      I look forward to someone figuring out what FRBs actually are. Though we likely don't want such a generator nearby. Some sort of magnestar is my guess.

      An advanced civilisation doesn't even need FRBs for navigation. Pulsars are good for that and can even be used to navigate within our own solar system or the whole galaxy. The missing ingredient is a "starship". A generation ship is feasible but doesn't get the TV ratings.

    2. Filippo Silver badge

      Re: It's not aliens

      They don't need that much output to communicate, true. They do need that much output to blow up their enemies' stars, though.

  4. Locky
    Alien

    Are we sure

    it's not just some bloke in Lancashire mowing their lawn?

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/24/false_northern_lights_alert_issued_to_entire_uk_caused_by_lawnmower/

  5. Notabot
    Mushroom

    Obviously..

    'Disaster Area' tuning up their instruments.

    1. Lotaresco

      Re: Obviously..

      "'Disaster Area' tuning up their instruments."

      At least we are located in a listening area at an appropriate distance.

  6. Lotaresco

    'could it be aliens?'

    Betteridge's Law of Headlines applies.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What are the chances?

    I think minds immeasurably superior to ours have been scrutinizing us, and slowly and surely, drawing their plans against us.

    Stay off Horsell Common for a while......

    1. Aladdin Sane

      Re: What are the chances?

      The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one.

      Which, as we all know, happens 9 times out of ten.

      1. theN8

        Re: What are the chances?

        Obligatory l-space reference:

        https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Million-to-one_chance

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It is obviously either

    Natural and interesting,

    or Alien "warp drive" test failure, no doubt wiping out its own solar system in the process by constantly warping in and out of normal planes of existence in perpetuity bending time back around itself to repeat the test until the end of the universe.

    Given its not going anywhere it can't be a normal engine test, and at those energies I would expect their power source to deplete before this many bursts were detected.

  9. Thomas Steven 1

    Doesn't powering down active Alcubierre-White propulsion produce something akin to this

    Is it possible that a FRB could be an Alcubierre-White warp drive equipped spacecraft skipping through space/time and taking breaks every 15 minutes to make minimally destructive progress around a galaxy.

    https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/140635-the-downside-of-warp-drives-annihilating-whole-star-systems-when-you-arrive

  10. arctic_haze
    Boffin

    Who or what had 10 million trillion trillion joules to play with, 3 billion light years away?

    A pan-galactic spammer?

    Actually I like the idea that we see starship propulsion aiming by accident towards us. But the truth will be some boring magnetic fields and hot plasma. As usual :(

  11. AdamWill

    no

    It's never lupus, twins, or aliens.

  12. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Windows

    Hawking Bacon

    Professor Hawking (and Elon Musk) seem to be the sciency showbiz equivalent of bacon: getting their soundbites on subjects they scarcely know anything about makes everything better!

  13. JJKing
    Coat

    Is that like 1.2 jigawatts?

    10 million trillion trillion joules

    I wonder if they have a flux capacitor to go with that amount of energy?

    Mine's the one with the speedo set to 141.622kph.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    HipHop Angle...

    It could be a new loudmouth rapper!!!

    After all, "...Mr. West showd up 'in the buildin' with his Swagger turned up to a hundred thousand trillion..."

  15. johnnyblaze

    Radio? Not so sure

    Would potentially advanced cvilisations even be using radio? It's an archaic communication method with some massive limitations. Surely they'd be using some form of quantum entanglement communication would be the order of the day - ordering a Maccie D's from the other side of the universe would be easy then.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Radio? Not so sure

      Neutrino laser would work.

      Plus any "accidental" interception would look like a big supernova etc.

      An interesting possibility is using gravitational waves (namely HFGWs) that only show up at quite high frequencies so you'd need a very sensitive detector.

      As it appears LIGO can generate as well as detect long wavelewngth GWs it might be worth launching a "GSETI" project that detects anomalous signals appearing to be mathematical such as sequences of primes in binary.

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