SETI question

[parkinho]

Hi guys,

 

Could someone possibly tell me what is the first image that an alien race would receive? I'm sure that I read somewhere it is Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympics in Munich.

 

Cheers

[5614]

That was in a movie, I remember it, and the movie, just not the name... I don't know but doubt it is correct.

[Xavier]

The movie was Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan.

It was suggested that the broadcast of the opening ceremony of the 1936 Olympic Games was picked up at Vega some 20 (?) light years away. That broadcast and the whole Berlin Olympics, was intended to be a big propanga event for the Nazis (but the black American Jesse Owens won 4 gold medals in the prestigious sprint events) and to that end the Germans built a system to broadcast the event all across Europe. It was not until after the second world war that broadcasts of such power were commonplace.

However, the reduction in signal strength over such a distance is around 10^30 times so I suspect that the mere 100 times increase in output wouldn't be much of a beacon. (That said, the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, now forty years old, was confidently expected to be able to hear the carrier signal from Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars broadcast at about the power of a mobile phone with reduction in signal strength of 10^11 times). If they could hear the Olympics, perhaps they could detect Marconi's first transatlantic wireless message though there wouldn't have been enough of it to make sense of.

The first sign of life is probably the oxygen atmosphere of Earth, detected as we are now doing for other star systems through subtle shifts in the spectrophotometric spectrum of the sun as Earth passes in front of it. Perhaps the smog and pollution in our atmosphere is signalling the rise of an intelligent race?

 

There was a plan when SETI was at the height of its popularity to turn the whole SETI idea on its head and build the biggest transmitters we can send signals to selected nearby stars. It makes sense as the signal strengths that we can presently detect could only be from signals deliberately sent to us.

[us.2u]

This site may be of interest to you Xavier...us.2u

 

 

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

[Newtonian]

The image would more likely be felix the cat!!!