New Scientist magazine reports on a paper by Hippke, Domainko and Learned, suggesting that fast radio bursts, which were first discovered in 2001, may be artificial signals produced by alien – or human – technology. Ten fast bursts of radio waves have been detected within the past 15 years, and the delay between the arrival of the first and last waves is always very close to a multiple of 187.5. The authors claim there is a 5 in 10,000 probability that the line-up is coincidence, and they argue that no known natural process can explain this curious fact. They conclude that if the signals are not due to “a [natural] galactic source producing quantized chirped signals” (which would be “most surprising”) then “an artificial source (human or non-human) must be considered, particularly since most bursts have been observed in only one location (Parkes radio telescope).” The authors consider the possibility that fast radio bursts are “Earthly noise” – a strong possibility, since they “show arrival times with a strong correlation to Earth’s integer second,” which “hints at some man-made device, such as mobile phone base stations.” The article in New Scientist points out that if the signals are produced by aliens, “the aliens would have to be from what SETI scientists call a Kardashev Type II civilisation” – one which “has a star’s worth of output at its disposal,” and is capable of capturing all its sun’s radiation, throwing material into a black hole and sucking up the radiation, or alternatively, traveling to many planets and stripping them of resources.
What do readers think about these curious radio signals? Are they human, alien or natural? Whatever your conclusion may be, this is a clear-cut case of Intelligent Design reasoning at work in the scientific realm.
I think they shouldn’t even mention the possibility of aliens as long as they’re not even able to tell for sure if those are “earthly noises” or signals from outer space. It’s ridiculous…
Sebestyen
“Quantized chirped signals”. Not peeps? That rules out hyper-intelligent intergalactic bonobos.
Um, the chirps don’t come from any particular DIRECTION?? How exactly are they being received? And since Earthly use of burst transmission of radio messages is used for the purpose of making them harder to detect and decode, only really dumb aliens would attempt to use compressed messages to send Earth greetings along the line of “Hi, this is Zeta Reticuli. Please send more ‘I Love Lucy’.”
Richard Dawkins and Francis Crick, each atheists, both appealed to ETs rather than God to explain life.
Richard Dawkins stated the situation as such in his interview with Ben Stein:
Francis Crick was much more explicit than Dawkins, and stated it best in his book “Life Itself”
Although to be clear, Crick, though he said ‘DNA evidence speaks of intelligent, information-bearing design’, emphatically stated elsewhere that what we see in biology was merely the ‘appearance of design’ that we are seeing.
But alas, the ‘appearance of design’ in life dies extremely hard.
Some researchers have apparently taken Crick’s suggestion that, “Our DNA was encoded with messages from that other civilization”, seriously and they now claim to have detected the extraterrestrial ‘WOW signal’ in DNA
The problem with Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick, as well as the “WOW” researchers, appealing to ETs to explain the ‘appearance of design’ in DNA is that information is uniquely the product intelligence.
In fact, unguided material processes have never been observed to create a single instance of functional information.
In fact, just one observed instance of material processes creating non-trivial functional information would falsify Intelligent Design:
Paul Nelson used the fact that only intelligence can create functional information to argue that Methodological Naturalism should be dumped as the prior assumption of science. (Personally, I never thought that science had any prior assumptions until I heard atheists invoke Methodological Naturalism as supposedly ‘THE’ uncompromising assumption of science).
And indeed, as Dr. Nelson pointed out, there is a very sharp dividing line between what minds produce and what the laws of physics produce.
Of related note, free will, (which atheists insist is merely an illusion), is strongly correlated with our innate ability to create functional information:
And yet free will, and consciousness, though necessary for the creation of functional information, are not reducible to the laws of physics, but are both considered “axioms (founding principles) of standard quantum physics theory.”
In fact, not only is consciousness considered an ‘axiom’ of quantum physics, but consciousness is now found to precede material reality.
In other words, due to advances in quantum mechanics, the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this:
And to solidify the inference that information comes only from a conscious Mind, and the inference that the conscious Mind of God precedes all of material relality, it is now found that material reality reduces to a ‘information theoretic’ foundational basis:
It is hard to imagine a more convincing proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, than finding that both the universe and life itself are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an inherent ability to understand and create information.
I guess a more convincing evidence could be that God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was God.
But who has ever heard of such a convincing evidence as that?
Verse and Music:
Of supplemental note:
As a Christian who has seen a few answered prayers during my life, I find it strange that the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) organization spends millions of dollars vainly searching for signs of extra-terrestrial life in this universe, when all anyone has to do to make solid contact with THE primary ‘extra-terrestrial intelligence’ of the entire universe is to pray with a sincere heart. God, who created heaven and earth, certainly does not hide from those who sincerely seek Him.
I would think that personally communicating with the Creator of the universe would be a lot more exciting than not communicating with some little green men that in all realistic probability, given naturalism, do not even exist.
Old SF fans like me have long been aware that radio waves are not a very practical form of interstellar communication They take too long to get there.
I still remember the old TV show that brought it home to me. It was a short-lived series called (IIRC) Men into Space made in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The episode in question concerned an alien signal picked up by a radio telescope on a Moonbase. They determined that the point of origin seemed to be a star that was something like 500 light years away, relatively close in Galactic terms. The point being made was that whoever sent the signal, if they were anything like us, would have been long dead and that any reply we sent wouldn’t arrive until the senders were long dead. At the time that made my hair stand on end.
Oner other question concerning radio transmissions is that we have been broadcasting into space for maybe a hundred years, for the sake of argument. So there is an expanding bubble of these emissions, currently about 200 light years in diameter spreading outwards at the speed of light. My question is, given that the signals are getting fainter and fainter as they spread outwards, at what point do they become so weak that they are lost in the background radio noise of the Universe?
If we knew for a fact that there were aliens in that particular region of space then in lieu of a natural explanation, explaining it as ETs would be reasonable. But we haven’t established the existence of aliens and there are good reasons for thinking intelligent aliens would be extremely unlikely. So a natural explanation is much better at this point.
We do know that intelligent creatures could evolve on the surface of a planet, as we have, and we humans could conceivably send such a signal one day so we have a justification for a design explanation.
This could be a case where we say that the design provides evidence of the designer, but that only works when we’ve ruled out every natural explanation, and that can only happened when we have a complete understanding of everything in the universe- which is impossible.
If we could somehow decode the signal and it was clear that is was a communication then that would be positive evidence. More positive evidence would be if we could use our telescopes to visualize a VERY large created object ( Death Star?) in the vicinity of the signal.
The false alarms we’ve had in the past, such as the “LGM signal” should also make one wary. On the other hand there is still the ‘OMG’ signal from the 70s ( or 80s?) which still defies explanation
“We do know that intelligent creature could evolve on the surface of a planet, as we have,”
You do realize that you are posting on Uncommon Descent, where it is not a given that humans, or any other life, randomly evolved by unguided material processes? i.e. Hence the ‘Serving The Intelligent Design Community’ header?
You may be able to state what you just stated on PZ Myer’s blog without question, and even be applauded for it, but here you are required to actually provide empirical evidence to prove your claim. Good luck with that. You will need it. No one, despite years of looking, has been able to provide any empirical evidence to back up your claim that unguided material processes can produce any non-trivial functional complexity/information (much less produce humans).
Well, some radio chirps were identified as coming from the microwave oven at the cafe next to the Parkes radio telescope. Can’t help but wonder if there aren’t other devices somewhere behaving in a similar way.
http://www.skyandtelescope.com.....-05122015/