Fall 2005 Issue

Shouting in the Jungle

 By Dr. H. Paul Shuch,* N6TX

Nearly half a century of SETI science, and still not a single confirmed transmission from “Be- yond.” What kind of DXpedition is this?

When Frank Drake conducted the world’s first SETI experiment in 1960, he was just days into the project when he heard a loud, periodic signal from Up There. “My God,” he thought, “could it really be this easy?” The signal was, of course, RFI, a phenomenon with which every subsequent effort to detect evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence has been plagued. No, it wasn’t that easy, then or now. The bands, it seems, are dead.

After a while, when the band seems dead, any sensible ham will want to stir the pot. So why aren’t we calling CQ?

The whole question of transmitting from Earth is fraught with controversy. Every ham knows that if everyone is listening and no one is transmitting, no one is going to know when a band opening occurs. That’s one of the reasons why we put propagation beacons on the air from exotic locations. Early on, SETIzens thought that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations would accommodate us immature Earthlings by providing just such beacons, to draw us into membership in the Galactic Club. Thus, the early SETI experiments, beginning with Drake’s, concentrated on searching nearby sun-like stars for just such strong and steady beacons. If they are abundant, you’d think we would have heard one by now.

We haven’t, though, and not necessarily because the bands are dead. Maxwell’s laws quantify propagation, and they suggest that even a modest beacon, properly aimed, will easily be detectable by Earth’s receive technology, across the interstellar gulf. Maybe, then, it’s time to rethink our assumptions. Advanced civilizations, if indeed they exist, apparently don’t announce their presence using radio waves. Do they perhaps know something we don’t?
 

The San Marino Scale is an ordinal scale between one and ten used to quantify the relative risk of a given electromagnetic transmis-sion from Earth. Each numeric San Marino Scale value correlates to a subjective measure of risk, from Insignificant to Extraordinary.

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