Carl Sagan did not found SETI, that's right from the start, Carl Sagan was one of the founders of the planetary society in 1980, SETI was founded a little later, on November 20, its end, exploring the origins of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the mysteries of the cosmos in general, but focusing on the search for intelligent life, Technosignatures, which is what is called now, signals of possible technological civilizations, whether radio signals, signals are also sought light signals by means of lasers, the remains of drifting spaceships, could also enter all those technosignatures.
And now lately, with the analysis of atmospheres on these planets, we also want to include the issue of atmospheric pollution as a technosignature, that is, the emission of certain gases that are only the product of industrial emissions, of artificial emissions. There are certain gases that only originate from industrial processes and I don't think we still have such fine technology, but in a few years, with the next super telescopes it will surely be possible to detect this type of gases in the atmospheres of other planets, there will be little left.
Sagan joined SETI in 1985, at that time Carl Sagan had enormous scientific prestige, he was a support because SETI was originally very small, had few resources and was very modest. Sagan's presence was essential to support the development of SETI, its growth, and government financing, because at that time it was also in danger of disappearing due to lack of funds. Scientists have to eat and they have to operate and they have to handle computers and equipment, etc. These things, these jobs require many hours, many resources and unfortunately have minimum salaries, but he obtained those funds and SETI grew.
The issue, what is in the news now, is a statement published on March 5, where Dr. Vishal Gajjar and researcher Grayce C. Brown state the central idea of this research is that SETI could be overlooking signals of extraterrestrial intelligence, not because they do not exist, but because the space weather of the star where the signal is emitted, from the planet that emits the signal, distorts that signal.
Traditional SETI searches focus on radio signals, ultra-narrow radio signals, that is, very precise peaks, in the blue, a narrow signal, a very precise peak at a specific frequency, because it is the easiest to separate from what are natural processes, because natural processes, stars, supernova explosions, everything, many events in the universe produce radio signals, but what we are looking for are artificial radio signals and that is why we look for that artificial characteristic in the signal.
The problem is that we are looking for that type of signal, a sharp and strong emission, which, by the way, is already complicated, because the Earth would have to be right at the emission point of that signal, otherwise it would be difficult to capture or impossible directly. However, the authors of this research affirm that if an intelligent alien civilization emits a signal, even if it is perfect like the ones SETI is looking for, the plasma of its star, the stellar wind, because it ends up distorting that signal before it leaves its star system, it ends up widening it, ending it. transforming into the altering signal, and that is what you see in the green graph above the blue.
It is as if a pure and high-pitched tone is spread out into a wider and weaker signal, the result is that the peak power drops a lot, the signal falls below the detection thresholds used by SETI and goes unnoticed, although it is there, the researchers imagine this that this graph that you see, the signal below, the blue one would be what the seti is looking for, but what comes out of the star system, even if what comes out of the planet is blue, what ends up coming out of the star system distorted by the wind The star of the star, specifically the one that that planet orbits, ends up being the green thing that SETI is not tuning into, it's basically that.
The SETI is not tuning properly to look for these signals from other technological civilizations, this is confirmed because the researchers managed to make real measurements of how the signals of spacecraft in our own solar system are distorted, that is, the signals sent by the ships that are on Mars, for example, or those that are exploring Jupiter, they verified that they suffered a distortion due to the solar wind, even so, it is not a huge distance, that is, the distance between Earth and Mars or between Earth and Jupiter is not the distance that that signal affected by the solar wind would travel throughout the entire solar system, until the heliopause, which is as far as the solar wind reaches.
Throughout this journey the signal would end up very distorted and they will surely have also measured the signals from the Voyager ships and will have seen that they also have this type of distortion. The most problematic stars, according to researchers, are red dwarfs. Red dwarfs are smaller and cooler than the sun, but they are the most numerous. They are 75% of the stars in our galaxy and in fact they can live much longer than the sun,
200,000 million years.
Currently, SETI's main search is not for red dwarfs, it is for stars similar to the sun, yellow dwarfs and orange dwarfs, but the signal also suffers from this type of distortion, and until now they had not realized this phenomenon after years of listening to noise from the cosmos. This happens a lot in science, sometimes you are doing something that you think is correct and it turns out that you have forgotten how simple it is.
The point is that now what these researchers recommend is to look for signals that are somewhat wider than traditional, observe at higher frequencies where the effect is less and model the widening according to the type of star, that is, according to a red dwarf that has certain winds, well in one way, according to a star like the sun, well in another. basically that they retune the search that SETI is doing, that is what they are asking for.
In short, in theory it is not that there are no signals, but perhaps we have been listening with the wrong filter, although the question is why they would emit radio signals with enough power to reach other stars. Why would they do it? because it has its risks and it also has its drawbacks and it is a very interesting topic of debate.
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