Clearly a cover up "discovery" for the HAARP anomaly that's been used to create hurricanes Harvey and Irma
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 …
COMMENTS
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Monday 4th September 2017 08:15 GMT 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?
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Monday 4th September 2017 08:51 GMT Mage
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.
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Monday 4th September 2017 12:41 GMT 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.
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Monday 4th September 2017 12:46 GMT 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
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Tuesday 5th September 2017 12:08 GMT 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.
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Thursday 7th September 2017 06:05 GMT 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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