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HD164595

Eric Korpela, someone involved in SETI posted this message. We may want to hold off on celebrating a discovery for a bit still.

I'm sure that many of you have seen the news reports of a "SETI signal" detected from the star HD 164595

I was one of the many people who received the the email with the subject "Candidate SETI SIGNAL DETECTED by Russians from star HD 164595 by virtue of RATAN-600 radio telescope." Since the email did come from known SETI researchers, I looked over the presentation. I was unimpressed. In one out of 39 scans that passed over star showed a signal at about 4.5 times the mean noise power with a profile somewhat like the beam profile. Of course SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate. Multiple detections are a minimum criterion.

Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there's really nothing about this "signal" that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view. All in all, it's relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint.

But, of course, it's been announced to the media. Reporters won't have the background to know it's not interesting. Because the media has it, and since this business runs on media, everyone will look at it. ATA is looking at it. I assume Breakthrough will look at it. Someone will look at it with Arecibo, and we'll be along for the ride. And I'll check the SETI@home database around that position. And we'll all find nothing. It's not our first time at this rodeo, so we know how it works.
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Probably terrestrial

In the framework of this program, an interesting radio signal at a wavelength of 2.7 cm was detected in the direction of one of the objects (star system HD164595 in Hercules) in 2015. Subsequent processing and analysis of the signal revealed its most probable terrestrial origin.
As for the other objects of the RATAN-600 survey, it is too early to claim about any reliable scientific results. Using the obtained measurements, we are only able to estimate the upper limit of the detection of the studied areas. It can be said with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet.
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This seems like the WOW signalWP all over again, a one-off detection of a spike signal.

A SETI Signal? | SETI Institute has some calculations of the amount of energy needed to radiate this recent signal from its putative source.

The Effective Isotropic Radiated Power is around 1020 watts. If a transmitter is radiating in all directions, that's what its energy-consumption rate would have to be for us to see what we see.

Using an Arecibo-sized telescope (1000 ft, 300 m) would require around 1012 watts. Much more manageable, and close to humanity's current energy consumption.

There is also a certain problem with radio signals' travel time. The putative source is about 92.5 light years away, meaning that its signal was transmitted around 1923. But the transmission-system operators saw the Earth when it was 1830. That was long before practical radio transmission, let along interstellar-detectable radio transmission. So they'd have no idea that the Earth would be worth transmitting to, unless they concluded that the Sun was enough like their star to make it worth a try.
 
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