Posted by
emmett
on from the et-phone-home-two-point-oh dept.
Rafael writes "The SETI@home project, aimed at using a computer screensaver to search for alien signals, seemed almost as crazy as searching at all. However, it became a phenomenon and an ever-increasing Internet addiction. Now SETI@home is being improved. Check the history at the BBC's Web page."
An intelligent signal was detected by a Windows user in Memphis last month but was kept quiet by SETI. They knew it was a message from an alien race but they could not decode what it meant. An encryption specialist who knew someone at distributed.net handed the message over to them and unbeknownst to users, the message was inserted into the key-cracking server. Early this morning the message was cracked and experts were amazed at the significance and wisdom the contacting race had bestowed upon us. The NWO wanted to keep this to themselves and control the rest of the world however with the release of Kevin Mitnick this morning this was impossible. Kevin broke into Top Security systems at NASA and stole this incredible piece of knowledge and has now given it to the world. Without further hesitation, the message:
This is not a trivial question. Firstly, SETI@Home uses the Aricebo Radio Telescope. This is a very nice dish for radio astronomy, but useless for SETI work. It's far too small. The smallest useful dish or array will be the hectare array, being built by the SETI Institute. Aricebo will only be able to detect signals from nearby stars that are: (a) at LEAST as strong as our most powerful RADAR, (b) SUSATAINED for a substantial period of time, (c) containing information on a carrier wave, (d) orbiting a planet or star, with no compensation for motion
In short, leakage (the most likely sort of signal to be found) will be invisible, actual RADAR type devices will be screened out (too short a duration and no information content), and any civilisation advanced enough to WANT to locate other civilisations by sending deliberate signals are likely to be filtered, by being screened out as local interference through a lack of doplar shift.
Methinks that SETI@Home is ingenious, but is using the wrong telescope. And it'll be finished before the RIGHT telescope has been built & put on-line.
As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house. Don't blame them - look to yourself first.
Having said that, SETI@Home's attitude has been somewhat attrocious. They've been going on about security, when that was never the cause of them going non-Open Source. Progress was. And part of that is their fault. They refused to set up a CVS repository, did VERY slow (and low-quality) releases, and basically impeded themselves at every turn. They should have done a damn sight better than that. Yes, there were only a few people there, which is EXACTLY WHY they needed to use CVS, rather than relying on manually testing every e-mailed patch, and rolling a fresh tarball by hand every few weeks or months.
Honestly, if SETI@Home has shown anything, it's shown that we should be less worried about intelligence "out there" and rather more worried by the lack of it down here.
-- It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Well I'm seeing a lot of "what happens when they run out of data" posts deep down, so let me contribute my $0.02 worth of radio astronomy:
Much of the current data was picked up during the Arecibo upgrade, where the telescope was essentially out of commission and staring up at the sky.Since the earth rotates, the sky over the telescope changes, so just grabbing all the signal ("drift scans") still provided useful data.
Arecibo is huge - 305m in diameter, almost exactly a kilometer around (makes a good jogging track!): that's too large to steer. So it was designed as a spherical dish section, not parabolic like a sattelite dish: a parabola sees perfectly in one pointing direction, but a spherical dish can see fuzzily in any direction.
During the upgrade, the old line feed has been augmented by a Gregorian reflector, which allows perfect focus from a spherical dish. But the line feed still exists, as you can see from the pictures. So now, while the Gregorian takes astronomy data, the old line feed can continue looking off in some other (random) part of the sky, and take useful search data! And if the piggyback project is still running, the SETI people also get first dibs on all our data to search for their signals.
With additional tests for pulsations, one wonders how many of our pulsars the SETI people will rediscover. Useful check on their processing quality, I'm sure...
Arecibo's neat - consider visiting if you ever get a chance. Takes your breath away to realize the size of it all!
-- "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Slashdot Mirror
An intelligent signal was detected by a Windows user in Memphis last month but was kept quiet by SETI. They knew it was a message from an alien race but they could not decode what it meant. An encryption specialist who knew someone at distributed.net handed the message over to them and unbeknownst to users, the message was inserted into the key-cracking server. Early this morning the message was cracked and experts were amazed at the significance and wisdom the contacting race had bestowed upon us. The NWO wanted to keep this to themselves and control the rest of the world however with the release of Kevin Mitnick this morning this was impossible. Kevin broke into Top Security systems at NASA and stole this incredible piece of knowledge and has now given it to the world. Without further hesitation, the message:
FIRST POST!!!!
God Fucking Damnit
In short, leakage (the most likely sort of signal to be found) will be invisible, actual RADAR type devices will be screened out (too short a duration and no information content), and any civilisation advanced enough to WANT to locate other civilisations by sending deliberate signals are likely to be filtered, by being screened out as local interference through a lack of doplar shift.
Methinks that SETI@Home is ingenious, but is using the wrong telescope. And it'll be finished before the RIGHT telescope has been built & put on-line.
As for "Open Sourcing" SETI@Home, it was, to start off with. The original UNIX client was GPLed. Hardly anyone bothered to do anything with it, and so they closed the source & shoved it over to a commercial house. Don't blame them - look to yourself first.
Having said that, SETI@Home's attitude has been somewhat attrocious. They've been going on about security, when that was never the cause of them going non-Open Source. Progress was. And part of that is their fault. They refused to set up a CVS repository, did VERY slow (and low-quality) releases, and basically impeded themselves at every turn. They should have done a damn sight better than that. Yes, there were only a few people there, which is EXACTLY WHY they needed to use CVS, rather than relying on manually testing every e-mailed patch, and rolling a fresh tarball by hand every few weeks or months.
Honestly, if SETI@Home has shown anything, it's shown that we should be less worried about intelligence "out there" and rather more worried by the lack of it down here.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Much of the current data was picked up during the Arecibo upgrade, where the telescope was essentially out of commission and staring up at the sky.Since the earth rotates, the sky over the telescope changes, so just grabbing all the signal ("drift scans") still provided useful data.
Arecibo is huge - 305m in diameter, almost exactly a kilometer around (makes a good jogging track!): that's too large to steer. So it was designed as a spherical dish section, not parabolic like a sattelite dish: a parabola sees perfectly in one pointing direction, but a spherical dish can see fuzzily in any direction.
During the upgrade, the old line feed has been augmented by a Gregorian reflector, which allows perfect focus from a spherical dish. But the line feed still exists, as you can see from the pictures. So now, while the Gregorian takes astronomy data, the old line feed can continue looking off in some other (random) part of the sky, and take useful search data! And if the piggyback project is still running, the SETI people also get first dibs on all our data to search for their signals.
With additional tests for pulsations, one wonders how many of our pulsars the SETI people will rediscover. Useful check on their processing quality, I'm sure...
Arecibo's neat - consider visiting if you ever get a chance. Takes your breath away to realize the size of it all!
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."