SKYLINE Trailer

[filkertom]

Comments

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Sir! Sir! We've cracked the message we intercepted! It says "I thought YOU packed the munchies!

[saganth.livejournal.com]

Oh. Great. A cross between Independence Day (cheesy but fun), Spielberg's butcheri--I mean, version of War of the Worlds (sucked) and Cloverfield (gave me nightmares). I think I'll pass on this one. :P

[shadowe_wraithe]

I think I am with you on passing on this one...didn't see Cloverfield, but this trailer actually gave me the heebie-jeebies....not in a nicely scared way...

*Shudders*

[saganth.livejournal.com]

Yeah this is the modern equivalent of the 50s alien invasion movies - vastly upgraded effects obviously, but the same terror-inducing premise and delivery.

[biomekanic.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to know I'm not the only one thinking Indecloverday.

[susan-the-rogue.livejournal.com]

Definitely going to have to catch this one. I love alien-invasion movies, and this looks like it ought to be pretty good.

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

We are *way* too freakin' noisy. If there are a lot of alien civilizations out there, there is quite possibly a reason why they're not easily detectable.

Babes in the Woods.

Tom

[saganth.livejournal.com]

I'm more inclined to think they see us concocting stories like this one, as we have many times, and saying "Yeahhhh, let's not go there, they're xenophobic jerks."

[sidebernie.livejournal.com]

I actually heard recently (although I'll be deuced if I can remember where. Some science-y pocast, I think) that most radio signals actually tend to fade to background noise after about a light-year or two. Unless we're actually deliberately aiming a signal out (assuming this is accurate), I doubt anyone past Alpha Centauri can hear us. Unless they're already here monitoring us, in which case we were doomed anyway, so.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

The inverse square law would tend towards a simpler explanation that they're simply just too far away and that we're not likely to get any signal that's not directed towards us directly -- anything else would be REALLY faint and lost in background noise. The same goes for any signal that we're sending out.

I'd have to do the math to really work it out, but I wouldn't say that we're all that noisy on a cosmic scale.

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

If I remember right, the total planetary broadcast output in the radio/TV bands about 1985 was strong enough to be detected by our 1985-level equipment out to about 40 light years. I'm pretty sure it's dropped off since then with so much going on cables and towers.

Tom

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

If you can find a reference on that I'd appreciate it.

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

Looked all over--couldn't find anything easily. I sent a message to beamjockey-- he's got an interest in radio astronomy and might be able to find the information we need.

Tom T.

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

Courtesy of Bill Higgins (Beamjockey):

Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth
W. T. Sullivan III, S. Brown, and C. Wetherill
Science 27 January 1978:
Vol. 199. no. 4327, pp. 377 - 388
DOI: 10.1126/science.199.4327.377
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/199/4327/377

An online account of the same question is:
http://history.nasa.gov/CP-2156/ch5.4.htm

Bill recently talked to the author of the paper and he said that we're quieter now and that the paper should be updated.

Tom Trumpinski

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

Read the second paper. It looks like the BMEWS radar signal from NORAD would be detectable out to 15 light years using off-the-shelf 1978 technology. The signals from TV stations at the time were 100 times fainter.

Doing a Fermi-style back of the envelope calculation to adjust for progress in signal processing technology (approximately one million-fold due to the computer revolution), I figure that 2010 equipment, using parallel processing like SETI does, could detect the BMEWS signal at a distance of 15,000 ly and the TV signal at about 1500, assuming a dish was focused exactly on the planet itself.

At those distances, it's more a problem of the detector finding the right spot, since the point source would be so damn small. I see no problem, whatsoever, though, at detecting a 1978-style TV/radar using civilization in the Gilese 581 system.

Tom T.

[smparadox.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of a book by Dean Koontz, "The Taking". Started off as an alien invasion, turned out to be something else. The ending was a little weak, but a good book overall.

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any Koontz (Yeah, I live under a rock), but at the end of the trailer, I was thinking, "Hey! What if the kicker here is that there is something heading towards Earth, and these guys have come to transport the Human Race to another planet, as a sanctuary? It's for their own good, after all, and they're too pig-ignorant to understand if we try to actually explain what's going on... We'll ask forgiveness afterwards, rather than get permission beforehand."

[smparadox.livejournal.com]

Kind of like when Steve Irwin would fish a snake out of a freezing cold spillway that would have killed the critter, and apologize to the camera for the snake's attempts to kill him, because the snake didn't know he was trying to help....

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

Precisely!

[dysprog.livejournal.com]

Can we have a movie where the aliens are nice guys? one where we all get along?

[tcgtrf.livejournal.com]

ET

Tom

[dysprog.livejournal.com]

It's been along time, But didn't the adult humans act pretty sucky at the end? I don't remember exactly.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

This looks like a miss to me

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

It's a cookbook!