Corruption

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So, asks Enrico Fermi-  where are all the aliens?  Why haven’t we detected them?

I think it’s because we haven’t been looking hard enough, or at the right time.

As our communications technology improves and we switch from simple modulations like AM, FM and QAM to things like DSSS and OFDM, the radio spectrum of our civilization looks more and more like white noise. In a hundred years or so, I would not expect to see anything that looked remotely like a carrier wave between DC and light.

This gets more convincing if you’re looking at the world from a long way away. We are already seeing a shift from highly powerful single transmitters (say, that AM radio transmitter kicking out a megawatt on a few hundred kHz, one per country) to non-synchronized repeaters (say, that FM network at 100 MHz where each transmitter only reaches a few dozen miles). The ranges on the surface are limited because of the curvature of the earth, so the frequencies are reused outside of line of sight. What this looks like from space is noise as all the transmitters interfere with each other- and not in a predictable way, since their master oscillators all drift at different rates.

Then there’s the ongoing shift from broadcast (which necessarily uses a small number of very powerful transmitters) to unicast media like cellphones; there isn’t the slightest chance you could even tell there was a cellphone network on the ground from space, since the frequencies are reused on a radius of less than 25 km; from a lightyear away picking out a single base station would require an unfeasibly large aperture (which would be no good for a sky search unless you had a ridiculously long time to perform it).

And then there’s the modulation issue; while GSM uses GMSK which can be relatively easily found with an untargetted search, UMTS and CDMA use spread spectrum, which is to say, a modulation based on a known pseudorandom number sequence; if you don’t know the PN sequence, you have absolutely no chance of figuring out there’s even a signal there without a damn strong hint (like a known pilot tone).

This gets even worse with OFDM, where the spectrum is intentionally as similar to a block of white noise as possible (after all, the more similar a signal is to white noise, the more effectively you are using the spectrum).

Try computing the power spectrum for an uncompressed text file a couple hundred kbytes long, and then again for a bzip2 compressed version of the same file.

Therefore the absence of alien signals is quite possibly just because they’re a century more advanced than us, or a century less advanced (and thus unable to make strong enough signals to pick up with our primitive VLA or whatever).

Let’s say it took us five billion years to evolve (close enough, right?) And it took a few billion years for the stellar nursery our Sun came from to acquire enough “metals” (astrophysics term) to make a star with a dirty enough composition to make complex chemistry. (Let’s assume chemistry is a prerequisite for intelligent life.) Therefore the window of possibility for the age of neighbouring civilizations is a few billion years wide.

Two hundred years in a few billion years is not a big window of detectability, but that’s all it would take to make them undetectable unless they’re actually *trying* (and spending a respectable fraction of their planet’s resources on terawatt radio transmitters) to be found.

And if electronic noise at 160bpm isn’t your thing, a more classic rock oriented song:   Sidewalk Serfer Girl by the Super Furry Animals (from the album Rings Around The World).  Classic Welshrock combines with recording studio trickery to tell a somewhat unlikely story of love and confusion.

The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly coloured, and it’s very loud and it’s fun for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say “Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.”

And we… kill those people. Ha ha ha. “Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride. Shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account and family. This just has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter because it’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want.

It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourselves off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what you can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, for ever, in peace.

- Bill Hicks.

Allow me to explain.

I had an argument with someone the other day who seems to believe that people had the right to vote according to their religious convictions, and therefore to live in a state where the law reflects those beliefs.  If there are more of them than there are of you, he reasoned, that’s okay.  

He also seemed to believe that his people (mentioning no names) had a monopoly on human misery.  I would like to point out that I have no problem with any particular group of people, race, colour or creed-  excepting that I cannot abide hypocrisy, greed or intolerance.

This is the problem.

I am a lesbian.  Most of you already know this.  I am just wired to fall in love with women;  indeed, right now, I am deeply in love with a woman and I hope that this never, ever ends.  What you might not realize is that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people (let’s just say GLBT) have been historically abused in the most systematic and brutal way possible.  Jews had it hard during World War II?  So did we.  They had their star of David, we had our pink triangle.  But take a step back a few years and you’ll find Jews, Christians, Muslims- and even the modern democratic State- killing GLBT people.  They’ve had it in for us since time immemorial.  Heck, you don’t even have to go back as far as the War to find governments and other misled people killing and mutilating GLBT people-  the British establishment managed to kill Alan Turing as late as the late 1950s, and most US States didn’t remove punishment laws for sexual orientation until even more recently.

Whose hands were we suffering at?  The religionists, of course.  ”Family values”, et al., have been the rallying cry for these people since the end of the War.  They’ve been killing us for thousands of years, and we have never managed to stop them because there are more of them than there are of us.  It’s as if the Second World War ended, and instead of locking up the Nazis, the Powers that Be let them continue to exist, just as long as they didn’t kill any more Jews.

Do you see now why I’m so hurt and angry when we make a step forward, towards being recognized as the equally valid and real human beings that we are, and then they push us back in this way?

Wake the fuck up, people.  This is wrong.  What you are doing is wrong.  Sure, you have the right to vote however you please.  What you don’t have the right to do is to remove people’s rights based on your personal feelings on whatever matter.  People’s rights should be defined by whether the exercise of those rights will infringe the rights of others.  That’s what the United States Constitution is about, and if you don’t get that, well, then you shouldn’t be voting at all, because you’re missing the point entirely.

What the hell is wrong with you?  ”Preserving tradition” is okay, but as Time Lincoln told me earlier when he visited, if tradition were a good basis for a system of government, you’d be subjects of King Whoever right now.  Why are you people trying so hard to hurt each other?  Why does it even matter to you what other people do with their lives?  Can’t you see that you’re destroying families here?

I’d compare you to someone, but autogodwination doesn’t become me.  Morons.

If eyes could see by infra-red

The sky would shine with dusty fronds

The remnants of tremendous stars

So beautiful to poets sent

But my heart would still and I would frown

For with such eyes I could not bear

To look upon a heavenly body so warm as you.

Is that adoration sparkling in your eyes

Or is it just photons

Not knowing where to put their faces

Embarrassed to enjoy

Shedding light upon your situation?

Are you smirking because it’s funny?

Or does your face betray a true emotion?

Not a net devotion

But maybe a gross infatuation

A subliminal limerance

And a preponderance to use too many long words

And question a good thing

In a love poem.

Here’s the secret: we’re all terrible with computers. Most people don’t realize it, but bumbling around trying to work out how to make it do something is what we, the engineers who design and build the machines in the first place, spend most of our time doing.

So there’s the secret. 95% of the time, we don’t have a clue what’s going on with the bloody things either.