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SETI@home Explained, From Inside
eheien writes: "The IEEE currently has an article detailing SETI@home, written by the project founders. The article goes into a great deal of detail on how SETI@home works, how sensitive the search is to signals (it can detect a cell phone on Saturn's moons), how successful it has been, and so on." It's a good read, and has some impressive numbers about the project that most SETI@home participants may not have realized.
for awhile, i had 5 linux machines running packets 24/7.
about the time i hit 1000 data packets processed, i learned that they were accepting money from the co founder of microsoft.
that's a little like taking maney from organized crime...so i pulled the plug/couldn't care less now.
but it was interesting to learn how to set up all the boxes, diald, etc., plus there was always the hope of something significant happening.
i checked over at distributed.net but it was looking pretty yawnish, and california was getting hit with a heat wave and was dipping low into the barrel, so i just packed it up.
if something interesting for distributed stuff comes up again, and energy sanity has returned to california, i might be interested in bringing everything back up.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
FIRST POST!
"on how succesful it has been"
No offense to the guys at Seti@Home, but wouldn't success mean the detection of a extra terestrial signal?
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Insert Witty Sig Here
And on top of that, what can we learn from the signal we may detect? What does the signal contain? It's exciting!
It seems to me that the point of SETI@home is that even this (relatively) basic search is consuming enormous amounts of CPU cycles. Searching for signals more complicated than this is just not technologically feasible yet.
seven two six five
seven four six one seven
two six four two e
If you meant something else..."never mind"
---- Sigs are bad for your health ----
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
I don't think gravity waves move faster then light.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
umm, unfortuantly, I don't run distributed software for the sheer thrill. I run it to win the damn money. Who says I am going to, but I compare it a lot to the lottery. I don't have to pay w/this and I have a lot better odds of winning (like 1 in 1800). SETI I don't win anything and it may even cost us our lives (key word is MAY) in the future when we start fucking up the lives of other worlds not just our own...
:)
:)
I will stick to what is harmless and could give me money
No dorky clubs for me where I compare how much CPU time I wasted going to a program
As to composite signals from several stars: yeah, right. Composite signals from two or more places converge into intelligent signals in at the most one place. It is a fair bet that lifeform capable of sending interstellar signals know some basic geometry. Setting that place to be earth would make no sense unless they knew that we are here and were only trying to reach us.
Even if we could only detect one part of this "composite" signal it would still definetly be irregular enough to qualify it as an alien communication. This is essentially what seti@home is looking for. It is not trying to decode anything, just detecting irregularities that might implicate intelligence..
Non-consecutive frequencies? What does that have to do with anything. Seti@home picks frequency bands and distributes those as chunks to work on. If someone should happen to send a signal modulated at a frequency higher than half of the bandwidth of those chunks it would not really matter! It would create a sideband and only this sideband would show at some other chunk. This would definetly be an irregularity that sets off all kinds of alarms and people would start to investigate more.
How the hypothetical aliens encode their message is totally irrelevant to seti@home. If there is a transmission method besides modulation of electromagnetic radiation it is also irrelevant to seti@home. If, however, this transmission can be received with a radio telescope it is more than likely that seti@home will catch it. Even if it catches only a part of some wierd pattern it is enough. We don't need to know more than a fraction of the message to know that something is being sent and for this seti@home is more than well equipped!
SETI@Home is impractical. There is very little chance in finding anything, and even if there was, it would most likely be given to someone who runs it for 2 seconds, then decides that it isnt cool enough, and goes back to the "OpenGL Windows Logo".
I quit running data processing stuff as soon as I began to overclock heavily. My machine needs its rest!
The SETI project makes an assumption that because Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe it follows that a transmission from another species would necessarily be at that frequency. The other species would choose to transmit on the frequency that is most likely to be listened to. Although this assumption may make sense to us, it does not necessarily follow that it will make sense to another sentient life form on another planet. It is essentially attempting to predict the behavior of a species about which we know nothing other than they are sentient and have developed technology.
We must consider the possibility that another species would choose to broadcast on another frequency. The reasons for choosing another frequency may be cosmologically or mathematically significant. That is, since we do not have a complete theory of the everything (unified theory), we may not yet recognize that there would be a better frequency for broadcasting. One that would be the most obvious choice to a species that had already developed a unified theory. Therefore SETI may be looking at the wrong frequency.
Another siginificant issue is the power required to send the transmission any significant distance in Galactic terms. I won't get into that (because I can't remember the stats of the top of my head) but suffice it to say, that it would require many more times the power generated on earth every day.
Frylock: That's not a toy!
Master Shake: You say that about everything you own. You should own toys. They're fun.
um...
s/intercity/intensity
Damn spellchecker...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Even though, it kills my CPU heavily, it's still need to watch when your extremely bored, and no new slashdot articles have been added in the past 15 minutes. Don't you hate that? I know schools that run seti@home on all there machines, hoping to find something. I know for a fact, they won't.
Ah finally someone who relates to me... Hey, why did I get modded down for being a troll?? It's not MY fault is some coward posts shit in response to my post... Dang. That's irritating.
Gene Simmons will consume your soul...
I doubt that i am smarter then most of the people who run seti. However, It doesn't mean that they are not wasting their time. Just because "hundreds of people" believe something, does not mean that it is correct. "Lots of people" have done lots of stupid things. Give me valid mathematical reasons why I'm wrong, or shut the hell up. I won't submit to the "They're smart, they must be right!" line
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You know, just semi-offtopic, but that Windows screen saver app SUCKS. My PIII-733 linux box with the text client completely blew the doors off my Win2k PC running the stupid graphical screensaver client even though they were both running 24/7. I don't remember offhand but I believe my linux box could do 4+ blocks in the time my Win2k PC did 1 (24 hours!!) WTF. That 3d display must be really inefficient.
Really *knowing* that We Are Not Alone would have a major impact on the collective human psyche (as well as drive a huge increase in the sales of weaponry to mid-West USA survivalists *grin*). We don't have to be able to travel a couple of hundred light years to meet them.
One big problem is that we've only been emitting radio signals ourselves for the past 100 years. An alien civilisation would have to be at a *very* similar stage to ours to pick us up (or vice versa). How many are we missing because they don't use those old-fashioned radio waves, or haven't invented them yet?
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
it can detect a cell phone on Saturns moons
Dammit, I knew I shouldn't have made that call.
They're sure to find us now...
it can detect a cell phone on Saturns moons
:-)
Hang on, the only way to be sure of this is to have tested the hypothesis. That means they're picking up cell calls on Saturn's moons. Doesn't this strike anybody else as being perhaps odd? I know Vodafone are on a campagin of world domination, but I didn't know they had bought out telcos out there!
A cell phone is a horrible design for sending long range signals. It's omnidirectional, pratically powerless, and not at an ideal frequency. If you wanted to send a signal to other worlds, you'd have no problems if you knew what to do. The single problem is the huge ammount of time it takes for a signal to get from one place to another.
Mind you I am speaking on technical merits only, ET is merely a human manifestation of the need for hope that there is something better out there. The new religion if you will.
There is some concern as to who might answer such a transmission. Would the Vulcans come by for a drink as in Star Trek, would the Babylon 5 Vorlons stop by for some new DNA samples, or would Damon Knight's Kanamits show up?
I'm not an actor, but I play one on TV. - Me
You know, with all these Seti@Home clients churning away, could the bulk EMF from the computers be interpreted as a sign of intelligent life from Earth to the Aliens?
Except possibly for some, low power, illicit, transmissions, we've never transmitted on the hydrogen line.
I think you may be thinking of the Encounter 2001 transmissions (science URL given, not the commercial one). These used 5,010.024 Mhz.
The much earlier one, from Arecibo, was somewhere around 2,250 MHz, although I cannot find a reference to positively confirm that just now.
These frequencies are chosen because they are the frequencies of existing planetary radar transmitters, and, in turn, might represent frequencies near military radar frequencies; they were not chosen because of any likely significance to ET.
The Arecibo message was sent to the (historic) position of a globular cluster (M13) in our own galaxy. The Encounter 2001 messges were sent to the (proper motion and light time corrected) locations of relatively close stars.
...and the first response?
"ME TOO!" (likely posted by a Sirius On-Line customer)
-LjM
Check this quote:
Figure 1. SETI@home uses the National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center's 305 meter telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Now wouldn't HAARP's efforts directly effect this type of technology??
That's a pretty big "if". Gigantic in fact.
That means they definitely are NOT communicating via radio waves.
Well, it depends. If you are *deliberately* trying to communicate with a civilization on a lower rung of the technology ladder, you don't send your message by subspace parcel post; you send it in some way that the receiver can, well, receive.
The vast majority of the database's signals are evidence only of terrestrial intelligence.
And here I was, thinking there was no such thing as terrestrial intelligence...
Los Angeles - Jan 12, 2347
After burning through approximately 2.12E678 CPU hours of computer time in over three centuries of existence, SETI@Home is finally calling it quits.
Their search for extraterrestrials has foundered, producing only a few candidate signals per year, none of which has ever been proven to be of extraterrestrial origin. Says Lars Pendelson, current project president: "Yeah, we just can't see going on when they are more practical applications of the technology".
Those more practical applications were discovered recently when the SETI@Home team discovered a promising possible alien signal was actually a cell phone call placed by an astronaut on the Saturn space station. Lars comments, "Yeah, we were really pissed about that one - we had the code geeks working overtime decoding that one, only to discover it was some bloak talking dirty to his girl on the Saturn space station. But at least we found a practical application for the technology".
Beginning next month, the SETI@Home space array and orbital server farm will be redeployed routing cell phone traffic for Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and the asteroid belt.
Users of the SETI community were understandbly dissappointed that their pet project was going away. The slashdot community in particular was in an uproar, having just recently narrowly edged out Team Microsoft in a heated, centuries long stats battle.
Lars knows that the user community will be let down, but hopes that they realize that finding ET is an "utterly hopeless and wasteful quest." He continues, "It's just plain stupid to waste all this equipment, when cell phone service in the outlying solar system is so poor."
off topic as well, same thing happened to me on Christmas Day. Ruined my DII play disc...luckily, I'm still alive....thought I was gonna die for a sec....scared the crap outta me!
Roaming Charges for Saturn's Moons can be as much as $100 for each minute; but You can step up your service contract to include all of the Moon's and half of the Jupiter moon's for only $39.95.
Oh, and just following the link at the end of your post:
COUGHCOUGHBULLSHITCOUGH...*ahem*
I got 6856 hours and counting...
True... If somebody cared to donate a 5,000 processsor supercomputer to Seti@Home then maybe we could take a more wholistic approach to looking for ET. Of course that'll never happen, but it should be noted that the popularity of Seti@Home far outstripped what the organizers expected. Plus, computers are going to keep getting faster for a good number of years, so maybe a few years down the road, a lot more indepth analysis of the signals could be done.
The article says:
Our search for extraterrestrial intelligence assumes that an alien civilization wishing to make contact with other races would broadcast a signal that is easily detectable and easily distinguishable from natural sources of radio emission. One way to achieve these goals is to send a narrowband signal. By concentrating the signal power in a very narrow frequency band, the signal will stand out among the natural broadband sources of noise.
Ok, now, if the little green men have a headstart on us, and they are smart enough, why don't WE SMART EARTHLINGS not broadcast to THEM a powerful narrow frequency signal? If our guesses here are right about their higher intelligence, they probably have better resources for computing and will be able to process whatever it is we're sending... And all that, given that some gov body on earth is willing to invest in a project where a signal is being transmitted for over 50 years from earth towards space, and is willing to understand that IF the signal is being received and translated, a response will come in YET ANOTHER 50 years (And notice my optimism about the distance in light years, and in cycles of response!)... well, if such a goverment existed, it would be in Amsterdam, where pot is legal :-)
My two buckazoids :-)
Skaag.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
If "communicate" means a dialog, then obviously we aren't -- it's forbidden by the laws of physics. But even if we lucked out and found aliens 5 or 10 light-years away, the speed of light wouldn't be the important thing. The important thing is that we'd have nothing in common. The galaxy has existed for billions of years, so there's no reason to think we'd both happen to discover radio technology at almost the same time. A randomly chosen intelligen species is likely to be either millions of years ahead of us or millions of years behind us in development. If we were a million years ahead of them, they wouldn't be doing radio. So most likely they'd be so far ahead of us in terms of development that it wouldn't be a two-way dialog where we both have profound thoughts to offer each other.
Is there any point? Don't be silly. Discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be the most important intellectual event of the last thousand years.
maybe we should work on traveling these kinds of distances in space first.
What's your logic? Radio is fairly easy. Physical travel across interstellar distances is ridiculously hard. The energy required to accelerate a 100-ton space ship to 10% of the speed of light would be about 10^20 joules, which is hundreds of times greater than the entire world's annual energy budget. Sending people to Mars isn't even likely to happen within the next 100 years.
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"....This threshold corresponds to 7.2 × 10^25 W/m2 at our finest frequency resolutions, or the equivalent of detecting a cell phone on one of the moons of Saturn...."
:o]
Holy $hit! thats one powerful cell phone! Nokia's new feature: instant user incineration upon pressing the "send" button.
musta meant 7.2 × 10^-25 W/m2.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Military radars tend to be wideband. If they actually pointed in one direction in space, the range would go off as the fourth root of the bandwidth. They don't point in a constant direction, so the observation time will be limited. Once you exceed a time of about 1/(bandwidth) the range is proportional to the fourth root of the observation time if you tune the observation time to the in beam time, and the square root if you use a fixed observation time.
SETI@Home has a bandwidth that is 100s to 1000s of times too narrow to be optimum for such radar (square root penalty, I think) and uses a fixed observation time for the purposes of the above range formulae.
The power that one has to consider for such calculations is not the peak power, but the average power.
The one sort of radar that definitely does have the necessary characteristics for detection at well over 50 light years is CW Doppler radar used by Arecibo, Goldstone and others for measuring asteroid orbital paremeters. This has a relatively constant direction (they know where to point from optical observations). It's disadvantage, which it tends to share with other radars, is that it unlikely to produce more than one detection, which means that it can't be confirmed; I think some people suspect that we may already have detected such signals, but have to discount them as one off events.
All our attempts to send our own messges have used this sort of planetary radar transmitter.
Listening on 1.42GHz tends to favour intentional contact signals over leakage. Although the SETI@Home configuration can't achieve this, Arecibo ought to be able to detect its own radar transmissions across the galaxy.
> The assumption is that ETI would use radio
> because the laws of physics prohibit anything
> faster, but if that's true, why would they even
> bother?
Well, we have been sending RF garbage into space since Der Fuhrer hosted the Olympics in 193X, regardless whether or not it was feasible to be sending people to Alpha Centauri or it was too far away to really talk to Little Green Men. Bets are that ETI has been doing the same thing as well.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
I should add, that whilst fourth root for range may not seem that bad, the number of candidates stars depends on the cube of the range, out to a few hundred light years, so the 100 million, or so, bandwidth discrepancy will result in about a million times less chance of detection for the same total signal duration and mean transmit power, compared with a CW beacon at the minimum useful bandwidth.
The limited in beam time may well further reduce the candidates by a factor of over a thousand.
I was modified down to Offtopic for my post? Considering it was "on-topic". Some moderators at /. should get a brain transplant!
Poof!
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
As long as they don't bounce the signals off our own satellites, everything is okay.
As long as they don't bounce the signals off our own satellites, everything is okay.
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
So what you're saying is: ET can't phone home?
- if you love something, set it free; if it doesn't come back, hunt it down and kill it
So what are the roaming charges for Saturn's moons?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
...there will be a SETI@Home story posted on /. and ET will finally make him/her-self known to the masses:
:)
ET (ET@QUADRA-5.EAM3002.GALAXY.NET)
FIRST POST!
Sorry. Humor for the evening
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
I think the more interesting thing than the technology behind seti, is the sociology.
:)
Thousands of people are using it, religiously. I've been running it since it came out, i've overclocked my computer father, upgraded my processor, and even went so far as to install it quietly on the server farm at work
I'm not sure if people are in to it because they Dig feeling like part of the worlds largest computation (information age mob mentality?) or simply because we're incredibly lonely and, more often than not, thourougly dissapointed in the human race. The fact that you have seti at home clubs and organizations, people hold personal meetings to discuss how many work units they've burned in the last month (I guess thats the other factor... what better way to flex your hardcore box), Almost outweighs the fact that you can hear cell phones on saturn... besides, from what i hear, the long distance rates from there are deadly.
It's a base station!
Chris Mattern
Fortunately, searching for signals in a data stream from a radio telescope is an easily distributed task. We can break up data from an observation into frequency bands that are essentially independent of one another. In addition, an observation of one portion of the sky is essentially independent of an observation of another part. This lets us divide a large dataset into small chunks that a personal computer can analyze comparatively quickly. In this way, we can distribute the work to people willing to donate their spare CPU cycles.
Yes, this will catch most signals directed at us. But, what if aliens are sending a composite signal from several stars? Also, what if the aliens are sending a signal whose principle is as yet unknown here, and it occupies nonconsecutive frequencies?
The point being the data should be examined for more than one kind of pattern, and patterns introduced and/or obliterated by the distribution network should be accounted for.
Goat sex free since 2001
This article doesn't seem to go into any real new detail. The only interesting data is that they seem to be trying to expand their search by adding a new telescope. While this is a great idea, the SETI@home project can only do so much crunching.
The problem to date, to my mind has been that the processing is too front end intensive. This project should do rough curve fitting first (ie do quick calculations on client computers, to find a general idea of the curve) and then select areas of interest to farm out more signifigant data to client computers. But that's just my opinion.
who knows, with 10 gHz possibly on the way, this discussion may be a moot point as I send it.
hmmmm?
I think you miss the point of the clients in SETI@Home. The purpose of the clients is to do the pre-filtering, so that Berkeley has a manageable number of candidates for subsequent processing.
The only real curves they have to work with are the curves of event rate against detection threshold, and they had good ideas of those already; these are used to set the reporting thresholds for the clients. They will consider themselves very lucky if they find even one confirmed ET, so they are not trying to construct maps of ET density.
The original concept did assume restricting the work units to ones from the plane of our galaxy, as those would give the highest proportion of Sun-like stars, but that was when they didn't think they would have enough clients to process all the data.
Unless and until we have detected several ETs (who may then tell us where to look for the others!) we have no means of calibrating any rules we use to select good candidates.
There is a shared memory interface to a separate graphical display on the Unix version. I have a feeling that the specification for that interface has been published, but I can't find it at the moment.
Many of the graphical features are available using third party tools, using data in the state.sah file; it's basically only the real time spectrum and the real time amplitude profiles that require a special interface.
It doesn't seem like we would get much out of it and it could court disaster. If alien races intercept our signal, then THEY are the ones that receive the knowledge that they are not alone in the universe. They might be afraid to respond. On the other hand, they might be aggressive or deparate for a change of scenery and we just alerted them to our presence. The safer method of searching for extra-terrestrial life is to receive signals instead of broadcasting them. But that leaves the question: If we ever were to receive a signal, would we attempt a response?
is there really any point to have this project. even if we find intelligent life (and i am willing to bet that the odds are a LITTLE against us) how are we going to respond or communicate if they are 150 light-years away. by now they probably have forgotten that they have sent the message. maybe we should work on traveling these kinds of distances in space first.
So that's what has been happening for 1485 hr 26 min 30.3 seconds on my computer! I was wondering what was going on with that thing...
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Good question.. this is what the SETI program is trying to find out. That question is like asking "can we go to the moon" around 1930. Many people seem to think it's possible, and have theories to support them. Many don't, and have theories to support their positions as well. Obviously in the 1950's it was pretty clear that we could, even without actually accomplishing the feat, changing the problem from one of theory, to one of engineering.
I really don't think that SETI will find any signals (note, this is a nearly completely groundless position, based solely on gut feeling). I also think that it would be criminal to miss a chance to communicate with another intelligent civilization, simply by not listening.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
It is called SETI Monitor and is listed on the main SETI@Home site under Related web sites - Add-ons for Windows clients.
You can get it at http://users.surfree.net.il/l.fainshil/
I am sure there are tons of other utilities that do the same thing but I like this one.
SETI Monitor displays a graph of the the spikes and gaussians found on the work unit currently being processed along with the estimated time left, estimated total time for the WU and other technical information taken from the state.sah file.
It also remembers all your past work units with all the above stats for each and can display a summary page of all the spikes and gaussians you found since it has been running.
I've been using SETI Monitor for a few months now and although the information it displays is interesting in the beginning, it slowly becomes almost as boring as the screensaver graphics. But I still like the feature where it keeps track of all the WUs that I have processed (and you can GREP through its list of old result files to do your own stats).
Happy crunching.
Might this not be due to the fact that the telescope is a passive instrument, and does not put out any sigificant signal of its own?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
am i the only one who thinks that seti@home is the biggest waste of cpu cycles ever?
it's immensely popular because:
1. it was the first popular distributed project that was more easily understood by the public than breaking some 64-bit code.
2. communicating with aliens has been a primary theme in science fiction in the last 100 years
3. many so called spiritual people have turned from believing in the Supreme Being to superior beings.
4. X-Files
there's no doubt there is/was/will be intelligent life out there. but i think it's much rarer than most people think. the incredible series of events that created intelligence on earth is staggering in complexity and randomness. granted, there are probably many other random even paths that lead to intelligence, keep in mind that intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable. it's a strategy a small part of the animal kingdom happened to stumble across here on earth but it was all luck that allowed intelligence to survive. if it wasn't for a couple of well timed asteroids, the proper amount of radiation, etc. the world would now be owned by insects (and maybe one day it will) as they are the most efficient form of life on the planet.
so lets assume that intelligence is needed in sending a coherent message that we can detect. how long have we, as the human race have had the capability of generating radio waves. a century perhaps?
if the universe has a finite age, we can assume that the development of intelligent life took some window of time and it's not an unreasonable assumption that any intelligent life in the universe had only evolved to the point of sending radio waves in say the last million years.
and here's the kicker. how long will an intelligent lifeform survive? we have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already. every year more ways of wiping out the intelligent population on our planet are developed. if anything, we're more at risk because most of us have relaxed since the end of the Cold War. how long do we have? lets say 400 more years before something catastrophic happens (i think further out and that and we may have settled enough extra terrestial worlds that we'll make it, but that's a big if).
we have to assume that other intelligent races will face similar problems as we do, intelligence came out of competition, after all, so do wars and tribal/religious persecution...
So lets say the average window during which an intelligent species can broadcast a meaningful radio message is 500 years.
combine this with the time to intelligence mentioned earlier and we have a very tiny portion of space that SETI can cover considering the limitations of light speed.
and this is assuming that the intelligent species that happens to be in the perfect region actually bothered to develop radio waves in the first place (or equipment that sends radio off as a side effect). not every atmosphere will bounce radio waves the way it does on earth, maybe our otherwise perfectly located race never needed radio, they developed a different communication system (light based) or have ESP or something.
my point is that yes there is life out there, but this seti@home project is a pipe dream. we are using billions of cpu cycles for something it may be impossible to find. ever. and think of another thing, 99.9999999999999999999999999% of your these precious cpu cycles are used to analyze completely random noise. at least if the seti@home shared their cpus with other radio astronomy projects, that would be cool.
use your cycles at folding@home or similar projects instead. every work unit is meaningful and the possible results of f@h have the potential to be immediately useful to humans now.
i don't expect seti@home to go away, but i do wish people would stop caring less about the stats and get off the et kicks and realize that crunching useless data is still the same as not using your cpu idle time at all.
there are other distributed projects that are much more meaningful but can hardly get started because of seti@home's success which is mainly driven by media and the recent infatutation with the super natural into which et's fall for some bizarre reason...
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
It makes me wonder, and i'm sure i'm not the only one, is Seti@Home real, or is it running cpu cyles on my machine to bog me down, and to give me a really neat screen saver? I have about 500 units now, running it for more then a year, I've never seen anything cool about it. The only reason I still run is to complete against my friend, for units.
I know seti@home has been rather popular, but I see from some of the posts here, as well as many friends & co-workers, that people are growig bored with the client. there may have been 2.1M volunteers, but I'm sure a fair percentage, if not a majority, have dropped off the seti wagon in favor of other screensavers.
that's not to say SETI@home isn't doing great, I hear they've even been in the situation of not having enough work units to send out, but this whole project could be made into something much bigger, much grander.
I sure S@H could be looking at this data with more precision than they are currently, through numerous refinements to the search criteria and formulae. The limit is only in how many cpu cycles they can reliably expect. I believe the volunteer membership base could be doubled with one very minor refinement to the graphical client: by briefly blink-highlighting canditate signals in the 3axis bar graph gizmo. The article mentions that they've accumulated 1.1 billion candidate signals to date. You can be relatively certain that if you've completed even 1 data unit, you found one of these signals.
It seems to me that the eventual boredom with the SETI@home client is due to the almost complete dearth of feedback or accomplishment. the information displayed on the client is interesting, but it changes very slowly and in a completely predictable way. The simple psychological reward of blinking a triplet or a phased pulse when a canditate signal is hit would go a long way towards providing the rewarding sense of accomplishment people seems to be hoping for out of this project. This simple new feature would not interfere with the science and hardly slow down the typical cliet computer, so I say please!~ add this feature!
:)Fudboy
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Being able to detect a cell phone as far away as one of Saturn's moons is actually pretty lame. Remember, the intercity of a wave in space is relative to the square of the distance. So, if you tried to find something a thousand times the distance of Saturn to earth, it would be a million times weaker. Saturn is only about 1/14,000th of a light year away. IIRC the nearest star is about 10 light-years away. So, in order to year a signal from there, you would need a transmitter about 140,000^2, or 19 billion times as powerful as a cell phone. Take that out from 10 light-years to 100 and you'll need 190 billion times more power then is used in a cell phone.
I don't know how many objects exist that close to earth, but I don't think its that many. While there very well may be something out there, sending signals, I seriously doubt that it will ever be picked up by seti at home.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
That's a good idea, but there are a ton of dreamers (such as myself) that will continue to plod away and use SETI regardless of the feedback I receive. Bluntly, I use SETI completely in the background (no screensaver), and run it all the time. To me, it's more important the feeling knowing that I am a part of a larger whole, and working on something that I would really like to see happen within my life. Just the proof that intelligent life exists, just the little part that I play in the search, is meaningful to me. And besides, it's not like I am using those cycles for anything useful, now.
As the song goes:
"So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
Because there's bugger all down here on Earth"
--"The Galaxy Song", Monty Python's Flying Circus
"Don't mind me cutting myself on Occam's Razor"
If they could, then we could hack it and add cool things like the very neat idea you mentioned, and probably some other goodies as well.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Wonder how they got up there, maybe an agressively telco looking for new markets ?
Conversely, I realized that I could have been easily hoodwinked by a great sounding operation that I understood (basically) only on faith! I guess the lesson here is caveat downloader!
Any plan to get aliens to give us hyperspace technology , so i can become a star fighter piolet for real in my spare time , is a good idea, but if we contact a race like the borg , then i would like to take this time before i join the collective to say " SETI sucks , you pasty face troll nerd wankers , you owe me a private conscience "
I fully support SETI@Home, however I don't think SETI@Home (or any of our current search techniques) are going to be successful.
A few quick assumptions:
1. We do not understand everything there is to understand about physics.
2. Any alien civilization out there capable of communicating beyond their planet is most likely far more advanced than us.
3. Any alien civilization far more advanced than us will have a better understanding of the laws of nature than us.
Leads me to believe that they would have developed a means of communication by now that we haven't even thought of. If they're capable of traveling faster than the speed of light (for all you UFO buffs out there), they must ALSO be capable of communicating faster than the speed of light.
That means they definitely are NOT communicating via radio waves.
So what could they be communicating with? Perhaps they open up mini wormholes and send signals through those. Perhaps there's yet some force of nature (specifically type of signal) we have not yet detected [insert Star Trek signal name here]. Or maybe they're using something like quantom entanglement (http://www.qubit.org/intros/entang/).
I imagine that IF these aliens exist, one day we might just suddenly open a floodgate by tapping into their version of the internet. We just haven't figured out how to do that yet. Or they don't exist, or they do exist and they're so far away and physics is so limiting we'll never find out they do.
Whatever it may be, I doubt radio is the source, but as someone said above, it'd be almost criminal to not look.
Does anyone have any idea if there are any projects in which we are transmitting this kind of signal?
Don't be fooled by the article. Those guys aren't really the founders. Here's the real scoop from the REAL seti founders:
QIn'latDaq jevwI'
QIn'lat veng jaHtaH jevwI'
veHnaghmeyDaq QanmeH nejta' ghotpu'
'ach Hur ratlhta' wa' loD
ghaHDaq jaHta' qeylIS' 'ej jatlh nuq bIvangtaH
mughIjbe' SuS jatlh nagh ruSwI' je vISo'be' qabwIj
SuSDaq vIQam 'ej muvuvmoH 'oH
batlh Qochbe'ta' qeylIS 'ej vengDaq jaHta'
jajchu' ghoSpu' jevwI' 'ej loD HoHpu' 'oH
ghotpu' jatlh qeylIS qoH vuvbe' SuS
--Shoeboy
The real importance of detecting a single alien signal is to start a new global war economy, we must be prepared to fight back the bad aliens, right? imagine how much cash NASA would receive for the space program, imagine how much cash would be available for the nations so they can do they own research. I don't think answering the real question "Are we alone" is the point.
I mean has it found a large black oblisk yet? Or is it specifically programmed to search for ET's cell-phone?? And yes to pick up on another comment thats a heck of a long distance call! :- invalid password / re enter
This article is a very nice description about what seti@home does, but the question is: Does it even have a chance of working? The assumption is that ETI would use radio because the laws of physics prohibit anything faster, but if that's true, why would they even bother? Most likely they would be too far away to really talk with wouldn't they?
Their damned cell phone wouldn't work a block from the store I bought it in. (I know the store location has nothing to do with tower positions, but still, it's the principle of the thing).
-josh
If there's anyone out there at all, it's a pretty safe bet they further out than Saturn. If they have their own SETI (Search for Earthling Intelligence) project running, would they hear us? Nope, because we're not actually transmitting anything to them - because it's too expensive. Listening is much cheaper than sending (hardware plus the power required), and SETI isn't exactly rich. It's kind of like the net in certain areas - everyone wants to leech, but who's uploading? If we aren't, why would they?
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
As a young whippersnapper in the late 70's/early 80's reading about SETI and their magical hydrogen line, I wondered this:
Therefore, why would alien intelligences use this frequency? It would not only affect their own ability to do astronomical science, it would destroy their ability to look for signals from us. The only application for communications on this line is directed signalling of a specific planet that may have developed radio astronomy but not be actively looking for alien signals. (A warning... `We accidentally shot a planet in your direction during a mega-stellar touch-football game, sorry about that.'?)
If you really think about it, the idea of omnidirectional radio beacons for interstellar signalling is dumb, but if I were to do it, I would choose a radio band that was extremely unlikely to be produced by any space gases or stars or whatever. A more reasonable tack might be to devote our efforts to finding decent planets around decent stars in a decent age range, then taking a directed broadband listen. The neat thing is that then all the acceleration mumbo-jumbo is sort of known, and we can get a decent clear snapshot of the planet's emissions.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
...Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that the S@h guys make it pretty clear that they alone are in charge of determining what is or is not an "important" signal. They also state that users are not allowed to contact the media or otherwise claim to have found something significant. That is S@h's job. I think that offering too much feedback will convince some users that they have found ET and will start to pester the S@h people.
Although you can consider the info displayed on the graph predictable or boring, a signal way off the norm would be easily recognizable by looking at the numbers. I'm not saying it would be a sign of an ET signal, just obviously not the run-of-the-mill static. In fact S@h has had these before, but all were explained by either test signals or faulty data from the telescope.
Don't think that I am against your idea from a psychological point of view. A reward is a reward and would increase membership. These guys just don't want to deal with it.
--
dman123 forever!
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
Let's crack useless encryption keys instead!
"And like that
It seems to me that the eventual boredom with the SETI@home client is due to the almost complete dearth of feedback or accomplishment. the information displayed on the client is interesting, but it changes very slowly and in a completely predictable way.
Yeah, I always thought they should add an "ET Counter" that displays the total number of aliens your computer has found so far!
"And like that
So, I wonder, are WE transmitting a repeating signal at 1450 Mhz or near it? If WE are not transmitting a distinguishable repeating signal near 1450 Mhz, why would we expect anyone else to?
"Wait! There's something coming through in the harmonics!"
"What is it?"
"It's hard to say, I can only decode one letter at a time. I'll send them to the screen."
YHBT, YHL, HAND.
"But what does it mean?"
dave
Why search for E.T. intelligence? If you are not happy with most of the human intelligence... (I agree with you in that ;) )
why search for a better intelligence ouside this planet?
I think we can make a powerful AI with many parallel distributed contributors...
The unused cycles could be used to train Artificial Neural Nets instead of processing signal from a big telescope...
Of course, there are other nice projects like Folding@home than can be very good too.
--
ACid
--
ACid
success means that they have significantly reduced the uncertainty as to whether a signal exists. Although it would be nice to have a result that positively confirms existence, it is also a success if they can say that, in spite of machine errors, forgeries, etc., the probability that there is a signal above a certain level has been reduced by an amount significantly larger than the error margin of the process.
Back on December 13, I got a message from SETI@Home (which I too USED TO be running) talking about expanding their search. As I remember it, that was a day or two after California had had a stage 3 energy alert--where reserves had dropped below 1.5% of capacity, and they were about to start rolling blackouts, cutting peoples' power off for 90 minutes at a time. They were also talking about (or did?) requiring some big energy consumers like Intel to turn their lights down to half their normal brightness or something. So you can understand that I was less than impressed to hear that the project that's already burning through how many trees a day? (I heard it once a long time ago) was expanding its efforts. Don't let the rhetoric about "spare cycles" fool you--a lot of the computers running this thing would be off or in low power mode if they weren't. I know, I once had 3 computers running it that would have been off.
Yes, if we found a signal proving there was intelligent life out there, it would be significant (though as others have mentioned, probably not exactly USEFUL since it would take so long to send a message back), but keeping the lights on and the environment clean are useful too.
Anyway, on December 13, inspired by the email from SETI@Home, I wrote up a little "message received from outer space" news story and posted it to one of my web sites.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
...To what the article's about! This is actually some pretty neat stuff, and an informative article, (that spam eater one was too) but then a barrelful of monkeys comes in to fill this space with useless stuff. This breakdown of how SETI operates is interesting... I always wondered what they did...
--------------------------------- Born Again Bourne Again Believer: New Life, GNU/Linux Be Free!
If your phone has a removable antenna, the technology is available today. You just need to buy the Sprint PCS Radio Telescope Antenna option. Of course, you'll need a couple dozen semi trucks to carry it around in. And it cuts your battery life down to about 0.0027 seconds, so you'll need the optional Sprint PCS Hydroelectric Generator too.
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Personally I think these little green men would be more advanced than to use radio signals... they have a headstart on us of 2 billion years (or so they said last week), so they've had a little time to work these things out. Or was that little grey men...
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
It's actually about 1,420MHz, not 1,450MHz. We are not transmitting at that frequency because of an international convention that preserves it for radio astronomy, because it is a frequency emitted by hydrogen clouds in interstellar space.
It's chosen for SETI@Home, because:
There are conflicts in SETI@Home, in that they are looking at this frequency, which is a presumed beacon frequency, but, at the same time, searching a wide range of chirp values. One fairly reasonable assumption is that a beacon would have the chirp pre-cancelled in the direction of the target, resulting in all the signals only having the chirp predicatable from the earth's motion.
Currently, there are political (risk of first strike and fear of promoting one particular ideology) and financial (high power transmitters are costly to run) problems with transmitting our own beacon.