Astronomers in China Claim Possible Detection of Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Man, I&#x27;m tired of clickbait headlines and the whole news industry in general. I think I&#x27;m getting old.<p>This hasn&#x27;t been confirmed by anyone else yet. The most likely explanation is that it&#x27;s radio interference from ourselves. Last time people got excited about this it was satellites, another time it was a microwave oven.<p>They have tourists at this location in China, to try and make some extra money. The tourists aren&#x27;t allowed to bring their cellphones - how well do you suppose that&#x27;s enforced?

&gt;Similarly, another famous set of signals once supposed to have come from aliens, detected between 2011 and 2014, turned out to have actually been made by scientists microwaving their lunches.<p>This confirms what I&#x27;ve always suspected: microwave ovens are alien technology!

&gt; Scientists have yet to rule out human radio interference as the signals&#x27; source

My understanding of this, is that the signal intensity required to be detectable on earth means that messages would have to be intentionally beamed at earth with ridiculous energies. It seems unlikely that any significant fraction of civilizations would be doing this toward any sufficient fraction of sky.<p>If we were trying to detect a duplicate civilization to ourselves, (assuming our signals had propagated further than ~100 light years) we&#x27;re certainly not producing signals of sufficient intensity that we could detect our own signals with the detection equipment we&#x27;re using.<p>It also seems like there&#x27;s likely to be a lot of pressures on a civilization to become more energy efficient for a long time before progressing to expensive technologies like dyson spheres and whatnot. I still think such things are our best bet for detecting ET civilizations.

&gt; However, the scientists say their findings are preliminary and should be taken with caution until the analysis is complete.<p>&gt; Tonjie has added that his team is planning to take repeat observations of the strange signals to conclusively rule out any radio interference and obtain as much information about them as possible.

This is being picked up by new outlets but the original source article in the Chinese news was deleted with no explanation.<p>Most articles being pushed now, including this one, are slow to acknowledge this.<p>Seems like odd behavior.

I&#x27;m normally pretty open minded about alien detection. I expect there to be many out there - but this is premature. I don&#x27;t believe they have even re-observed the sources. Then they need to publish and the community needs to pull it apart and mull it over for a while. A genuine detection will probably take many years to reach consensus, even if the source is beaming out prime numbers.

Spoiler: it&#x27;s never aliens.

Let the aliens microwave their alien ramen in peace!

Does the message say &quot;Do not respond, or the inhabitants of my planet will destroy you&quot;?

&quot;it is not an alien civilization, until it is&quot;

Real journalism is dead. This is a prime example.

clickbait nonsense about aliens now on hackernews. why?