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Domain: coseti.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to coseti.org.

Comments · 6

  1. Optical SETI by TheSync · · Score: 2 · on Hunt Intensifies For Aliens On Kepler's Planets

    Optical SETI is the way to go. A 10-meter diameter visible telescope has a gain 80 dB greater than that of the 300-meter Arecibo dish.

    Current NIF lasers can deliver petawatts for nanoseconds, and could easily outshine the sun during their pulse if provided with a reasonably large telescope.

  2. Re:Offensive weapon by M1FCJ · · Score: 1 · on Radio Telescope Has Military Uses?

    You are not that far away from the truth. Signals like radio waves follow square law which means to double the signal you have to quadrouple the power. Also the disk is nothing but a parabolic mirror. As opposed to light waves, doing interferometres out of radio telescopes is easier, because of the larger wavelength. 1mm might be small but it is much much larger than 400-700 nanometers which is the visible light. As a result timing of the signals can be calculated easier and that's why radio astronomers build things like VLBA.
    Large dishes like Arecibo were designed and built well before VLBA and not a lot of people build massive and inflexible telescopes like that, any more.
    Low-cost designs like One Hectare Telescope are designs just like you mentioned. The problem with such systems is the cost of the (many) receivers and transmitters, a typical reasonably good quality ham radio HF tranceiver costs around 1000 pounds, ten thousands of these will mean the experiment suddenly got far too expensive.

  3. coseti.org by qwasty · · Score: 1 · on SETI Predicts We'll Find ETs by 2020

    coseti.org promotes the optical approach to seti, which makes a great deal more sense than radio seti. Anyways, I don't plan on posting again here, so I'll quickly mention the #setiathome chan on EFnet, in case anyone wants to IRC the topic of SETI.

  4. Optical SETI by JoeGee · · Score: 2 · on SETI@Home Revisits Its 100 Best Signals

    A project like this http://www.coseti.org/ might succeed where radio SETI fails. Quite a few people think a focused, high power laser might be a better mode of communications between stars.

  5. Richard Hoover, Astrobiologist, said so for years. by ke4roh · · Score: 2 · on Possible Evidence of Martian Bacteria
    Some years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Dr. Richard Hoover, leader of the Astrobiology Group at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, on the prospect of life on Mars, particularly based on things he had found in the ALH80001 meteorite.

    SPIE-The International Society for Optical Engineering captured the bulk of Dr. Hoover's presentation in an interview published in their December '96 magazine. This September 1998 article offers pictures of the fossils found, as does a July 1997 article. Another story announces a fossil find in another meteorite that fell on Murchison, Victoria, Australia.

    Many people question the science, but it would seem people should question the scientific community which has held its hands over its eyes when faced with the prospect of life on other planets. The community is just now peeking between its fingers and beginning to accept that there might be life elsewhere. In the presentation I attended, Dr. Hoover noted that NASA set up rules in advance of the Viking missions - that any one of the several (4?) tests coming back positive would be indicative of life on the red planet, but once some of the tests came back positive, they decided that all of the tests had to be positive to confirm the existence of life on Mars. Such has been the distinctly non-scientific approach of the community when confronted with the distinct possibility of life on other planets.

    More links:

  6. Re:Lasers by Pooua · · Score: 1 · on Looking For Aliens In All the Wrong Places
    The only group that could realistically put this together is the government.

    Uh, no, that is incorrect. Current Earth technology would be able to detect a low-wattage Argon Ion laser beam (say, 10 watts) from 5 light years away with only modest equipment. The cost of such a transmitter is comparible to what is currently being spent on SETI; I'd estimate it quickly to be less than $5000. A 1 kW transmitter would be a bit pricey for an individual, but even small shops could afford such units. A 1 kW laser would be able to communicate out to 100 light years using current detector technology; that would be do-able for under $10 000.

    You might want to have a look at

    http://www.coseti.org/osetimap.htm

    The first page loads a bit slowly, but it has lots of interesting info.

    As long as you guys want to pursue this with your own money, fine. I could even argue that a laser communicator designed for intersteller communication would come in useful for human civilization, someday. I consider SETI itself to be a colossal waste of time and resources, but whatever keeps you off the streets can't be all bad.