The Long Delay Echoes

The subject here is a scientific mystery that was well documented by European scientists in the 1920s and 1930s, well before any man made objects were launched into outer space, and then was largely forgotten. The phenomenon has since apparently disappeared, although anecdotal reports still pop up from time to time, and a low level of interest persists. We are discussing it here, because although no one knows for sure what caused the Long Delay Echoes, one plausible explanation is Bracewell Probes. The Long Delay Echoes (LDEs) just possibly might be a clue to how to find such a probe.

Some Basic Background You may Wish to Skip

 I'm sure you know that radio waves generally travel at the speed of light, and can be bounced off of various surfaces and also off the Earth's ionosphere if the radio wavelength is long enough. The speed of radio waves can be a bit slower if they are traveling through a medium such as a plasma or water, but generally the speed is not much less than the 300,000 kilometers per second we are used to. That means, if we send a radio signal out, and see it come back to us, then to calculate the distance to the reflector, we divide the time delay in seconds by 2 (since it went out and back), and then multiply by 300,000 kilometers per second to get the distance. Then, if we send out a radio signal and it comes back 2 seconds later, it must have traveled 300,000 km each way, or most of the way to the Moon. Amateur radio operators often enjoy bouncing their signals off the moon, which generally exhibits a very weak echo delayed about 2 and one half seconds. Strong echoes, or echoes delayed longer than 2.5 seconds, are not moon echoes.

Since the 1960s, there are many radio repeaters in Geosynchronous orbit, but the round trip delay is much shorter than the moon -  less than half a second, and you generally won't see a satellite echo at all unless your signal parameters are just right - and probably illegal.

The Skeptical UFO Investigator, Part 1.

This post is a companion to the talk I gave at Balticon 47, and is for people who would rather not watch the video, or would like more more details not in the video.

I've been investigating UFOs for over a year now, and plan to continue. Rather than explain exactly why this is, I am going to try and show you, one bit at a time. Much of the interest is driven by the human element, but perhaps not all of it.

As I have explained before, I don't know whether the Earth has ever been visited by non human intelligences from elsewhere, and I think it's highly unlikely that anyone else does either. I am skeptical we would know it when such an encounter was happening, though right in front of us. Our perceptions of such events would be fragmentary and distorted, and we would likely interpret them as magic, or supernatural.

Encounters of that very sort have been recorded all through human history, and continue to this day. Puzzling, often frightening, and frequently life changing events take place every day. Many of these, it turns out, are due to known bugs in the human perceptual and conceptual machinery, and others are merely hoaxes. UFO investigation has a more than 60 year history, and the truth continues to elude. I want to know why this is.

Let's go and have a look, I say, and let's see for ourselves what is going on.  Woody Allen once famously said that 80 percent of life is just showing up.  Let's show up where the saucers are seen and look for whatever patterns are there.

Searching for Bracewell Probes - part 2

In the first part, we talked about some of the variables that I think could control the observables of a Bracewell Probe.  This is essentially a first, crude move toward mapping our ignorance of these hypothetical machines.  We can't know what Bracewell probes are yet, or even if they exist at all, but perhaps we can constrain or at least make some reasonable assumptions about what they could be.

Searching for Bracewell Probes - part 1

Ronald Bracewell

Bracewell Probes were first discussed by Ronald Bracewell in a 1960 Nature paper. The basic idea is send robotic probes to solar systems that seemed promising, and these probes would sit and wait for millenia looking for signs of intelligent life in those systems, and should those intelligent creatures ever reach a certain measure of sophistication, then either radio home for instructions, or simply provide a library of advanced knowledge that would help these lowly beings achieve a kind of galactic citizenship.
that the "Superior Communities" would

Bracewell Probes still seem like a sensible way for superior communities to reach out in their galactic neighborhoods, whether their intentions are benign or defensive. Rather than guessing when to send probes to check out a suspect solar system, they simply strike out for all of them in the neighborhood, and then wait. Would their purpose be, as Bracewell conjectured, to enlighten us, or simply to alert the rest of the superior community that here there be uppity apes?