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Interview With a SETI Astronomer

Posted by Hemos on from the the-craft-behind-the-scenes dept.

Siduri writes "We at Pigdog Journal conducted an interview with SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, and I think it's pretty interesting. He talks about the technical details behind what SETI and SETI@home do (the two programs are very different), and he speculates about the nature of alien intelligence. He's also quite funny."

83 comments

  1. Speculation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    His speculation is all wrong.

    Lotsa love,

    Bob from Mars.

    1. Re:Speculation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      He also said "We have only looked at a tiny fraction of the radio spectrum"

      Yep - he's right about that; they definitely not looking at our "first post" transmittion frequency.

      Lotsa love,

      Bob from Mars.

      PS. That new M. Night Shyamalan film 'Signs' is all wrong too.

      PPS. Mel Gibson sucks.

    2. Re:Speculation by SEWilco · · Score: 1

      Well, right now there are thousands of Slashdot readers operating in parallel attempting to extract hidden meanings from the interview.

  2. Interesting but... by jamirocake · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...we should first find intellgent life forms here on earth =]

    --

    --Manuel
    "I hate quotations, tell me what you think"
    1. Re:Interesting but... by The+Great+Wakka · · Score: 2, Funny

      Search for Terrestrial Intellegence, eh? How about these guys . They have the same idea, clearly.

      --
      Everything is mainstream now.
    2. Re:Interesting but... by orkysoft · · Score: 1

      Yes, that site's quite funny, with its Quake Equation :-)

      --

      I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
  3. Entire text by ant_morgan · · Score: -1, Redundant

    Interview with Seth Shostak ?Reported 2001-12-21 19:42 by Siduri

    Roswell, Dyson Spheres, and the Price of Photons

    "I wouldn't even listen to this part of the tape."

    Seth Shostak: "...something I probably shouldn't talk about, because the boss will get very upset about it. [mumble mumble] invasion of privacy. But, I mean, you can talk in general about the fact that the public, of course, is often unable to distinguish among things like alien visitation, abduction, the idea that there might be, you know, monuments on Mars that have been left for our edification and things like that, and what we do. There is that continuing problem, because it seems that the level of science education in the country is not very high, so they don't understand the difference between science and other approaches to trying to understand things.

    And I guess from our point of view, scientists are often fairly impatient with people who don't understand science, their line of argument. That becomes obvious to me whenever I'm on a radio show where there are call-ins, because people will often call in and say, "well what do you really think about Roswell," for example. That question's almost guaranteed on a radio show. And what do I think about Roswell? I think Roswell's probably a very nice town. And I think the fact that it's claimed that aliens made a navigation error there and, y'know, somehow crashed, even though they haven't any other time, has been pretty good for the Roswell chamber of commerce. But I don't think the story has anything to do with aliens.
    [Siduri]

    Siduri could beat up Katie Couric

    Siduri: Well, so, how does SETI?just as, you know, a first groundstarting question?how did SETI decide on radio signals rather than any other form of trying to see whether there was extraterrestrial life?

    Seth: Well, that's a good question, because in fact...

    [At this point The Compulsive Splicer starts menacing Seth with a camera.]

    Seth: You got her, I hope, because my eyes were closed in that shot.

    The Compulsive Splicer: That's fine. Yeah, I need to get all of us.

    Seth: Okay. Yeah, how did SETI get started with radio. That's a good question because in fact if you think about, sort of step back from the whole question of what particular SETI experiment you're doing, you might say, "Well, how do you know whether there are aliens out there?" There are lots of ways you could conceivably know. You could look around and see if they're walking the planet. That's legitimate, although I don't think they are, but you know, you could ask that question. The second thing is you could look for astroengineering, for example. You could look for giant artifacts in space. I mean, the galaxy's been around for two or three times as long as the earth has been around, so if there are civilizations out there a lot of them?most of them?will be way ahead of us.
    [Seth Shostak]

    Seth has no particular affection for Neptune

    Unless civilizations routinely destruct very quickly, they self-destruct because they invent technology and then they invent the H-Bomb and they blow themselves up. If that's what normally happens then maybe there aren't very old civilizations. But I'm more optimistic than that.

    So a lot of civilizations could be way beyond us, so maybe they're doing stuff that you can see, that's obvious?you know, they're building something that's big. Let's see here, maybe they have giant rockets and you can see the exhaust from these rockets. Maybe the rockets have magnetic brakes and you can see the radiation from the magnetic brakes. People have thought of a lot of things. Maybe they've left, you know, giant monoliths on the moon for us to dig up, a la 2001. You know, it's not impossible. We wouldn't know, because nobody's really looked at the moon for those sorts of things.

    So those are all possibilities. The trouble is most of them don't sound terribly fruitful because even though the aliens might be building big stuff, you don't quite know what to look for. I mean, how do you see it. There have been some experiments in that regime, I mean some people have done some things, they look for what are called Dyson spheres. Do you know what a Dyson sphere is?

    Siduri: Um, I know of it only...

    Seth: Take Freeman Dyson, you just roll him up like a marble and you have a Dyson sphere. No, Dyson spheres...

    TCS: It's the Ringworld except a sphere world, right?

    Seth: Yeah, exactly, exactly, which...turns out the Ringworld's a little unstable...

    Siduri: I was about to say, I know of it from an old Star Trek text adventure game ["The Kobayashi Alternative"], where you went to visit a Dyson sphere world.

    Seth: Yeah, exactly. You take apart some outer planet. Like Neptune?Neptune's not big in your life; you don't mind taking apart Neptune. They take it apart and rebuild it as a giant sphere, cover the inside with solar cells, for example, and that might be something that an advanced civilization might do. That kind of thing. People look for that, they look for Dyson spheres by looking for stars that have a lot of infrared. But you know, they've only looked a couple hundred stars. Not much is it?

    So, there are all those approaches, but then people thought "well, maybe the best thing to do is look for signals." And the reason that got started is that a couple of guys, they were at Cornell University, a couple of physicists, just worked out really simple calculations. They said "If you take the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth, and our best receivers, how far apart can you separate these two things and still be able to pick up the radar transmissions?" And they figured, oh, well, it'd be, you know, thirty thousand miles or a thousand miles or something like that. And it turned out it was light years.

    So they realized, hey, it's pretty easy to send a message that can go from here to another star. So maybe aliens are doing this. So that was 1959 and by 1960 people were already looking for the signals. Now, immediately other people said, well, maybe that isn't the only way to do it?maybe they'd be flashing lights at you or something like that. And it turns out that the physics tends to favor the radio. Mostly because, I don't know if you remember high school physics, but the amount of energy in a photon is proportional to the frequency of [Seth starts muttering equations]. Energy equals hf or [mumble mumble]. Anyhow, all that means is that light photons, a single light photon has got a lot more energy than a single radio photon. So if you want to send a bit of information from here to Alpha Centauri it's cheaper, in terms of the energy, to do that with radio than to do it with light.

    So, you know, that's been the argument for many years. Now that argument isn't very solid anymore. I wouldn't even listen to this part of the tape.

    "Next question."

    Siduri: Well, I was gonna say, I have a list of softball questions from your biggest fan, and then I have a list of hardball questions. And one of the...

    Seth: The softball questions are from my biggest fan? Is that my mom?

    Siduri: No, I told you that there's a guy on the list that was a big fan of yours, and was all but asking for your autograph. And so I have a list of questions from him...

    Seth: I hope he's not a Czech. [I think that's what he said. He was muttering again.]

    Siduri: Hum?

    Mark Territory: From Scotland?

    Siduri: Uh, yes.

    Seth: Scotland?

    TCS: Paul from Scotland?

    Siduri: Yes.

    Seth: Paul?

    Siduri: Um, he's just seen you I think, on like, radio shows.

    Seth: Seen me on radio shows.

    Siduri: Or, heard you on radio shows.

    TCS: Heard you on TV. [Everyone's talking at once. I'm not sure this was what Splicer said.]

    Mark: Might be a stalker, I don't know.

    Siduri: But he's in Scotland, so I don't think you have to worry about him. But anyway, so one of the hardball questions was: "Our own civilization has only been using radio to transmit messages for less than a hundred years. Now these messages are increasingly being delivered in a digital, often encrypted form that is practically indistinguishable from white noise. What sense does it make to search the radio spectrum for such old-fashioned messages that we ourselves have only bothered using during this brief window?"

    Seth: Good question, Paul.

    Siduri: No, that wasn't Paul. That was Zach.

    Seth: Good question, Zach. Next question.

    No, no, no, he was absolutely right. I mean, if you look at the kind of signals that we're currently using, sort of spread-spectrum signals and things like that, they're very complicated, and they're completely unlike the kind of things we look for in SETI. The kind of things we look for in SETI are signals that are just what are called narrow-band signals, that are on one spot on the radio dial. So they take all the energy of the transmitter and pump it all into one small frequency range. Okay? You with me?

    Siduri: Yeah.

    Seth: All right. The advantage of that is that it makes it really easy to find the signal because all the energy is in a small band so it really stands out as a big spike of energy. Whereas if you spread it out over five megahertz, like a TV signal, then the energy's spread all over the band and it's very hard to find. But on the other hand, the actual signals that we use are spread out, more and more. And ET will be at least as advanced as we are, so you might say, "Well, why would they make those narrow-band signals?"

    And the answer is, probably: most of the time, they don't. For their own internal communications they probably wouldn't do that. But if you have a beacon, which you want to hear at great distance?if for some reason they want to get in touch, or they're sending the galactic weather report, whatever, GPSs?there's lots of things that would have narrow-band components in the signal. So that's what we look for. But Zach has a point.

    Siduri: So the assumption is that they would have to be kind of trying to get in touch.

    Seth: They might have to be trying. Or, I'm not sure I would even go that far. If you asked Marconi a hundred years ago, what would he think the radio signals would be like in the year 2001, or whaddya think people will be using this technology for in the year 2001, he wouldn't have had a very good idea. He probably wouldn't have gotten it right?not much of it, anyway. So for us to say what kind of signals ET uses, a hundred thousand years ahead of us, what kind of signals he's producing?you could guess if you want. Probably not a very good guess.

    I mean, one thing you always need is high-powered radar to look for incoming comets. Long period comets. Cause they can come in, and as you know, ruin your whole day. Land in Yucatan. But I mean, he has a point. It's just that we're looking for the signals that are easy to find.
    [Mark Territory]

    Mark follows TRUTH like a shark follows BLOOD

    Mark: Are we also looking for the signals that might be accidentally broadcast?

    Seth: Yeah, well, that's the question, and that's the question that Zach is really asking. And Shannon jumped to the conclusion, as she is wont to do, that we can only pick up deliberately broadcast signals. But you don't know what ET's using radio for, so...

    Siduri [jumping to a conclusion]: ...We could happen on something.

    Seth: Yeah, we could trip on, as I say, a radar that they're using to warn about incoming Klingons, if you don't like radar warning about incoming comets. And in that case, then...

    Mark: We'll get to those questions later.

    Seth: And then you can say, "Well, it wasn't deliberate, but we got it anyhow," see. So in a sense SETI doesn't care. Yeah, what do we care.

    How the Hell That All Works

    "And if you don't hear ET there? Well, tough toe-corns."

    Mark: Now, I imagine there must be many, many false alarms. Things that are picked up and determined to be background noise, anomalies, perhaps galaxies emitting natural things that while they have patterns, they're not signs of intelligent life. How do you determine whether a pattern is background noise or a signal?
    [Seth Shostak]

    Seth indicates where the ay-leens come from

    Seth: Yeah, well, this is a question we get asked a lot?"Do you have a cryptologist or a cryptographer sort of looking at these things to say, well, this looks natural, that looks artificial?" In a way we do, although we really don't. We don't have any cryptographer. We can barely afford to have someone just clean up the rooms. The way it's done is, the nature of the signal itself is the decryption. If it's a narrow-band signal, that's something that's really easy to build a transmitter to make, but that's extremely difficult for nature to make. Nature doesn't make narrow-band signals.

    I mean, listen to quasar with a radio telescope and you hear "PSHHHHH." It almost doesn't matter where you turn your knob, you'll hear that blank noise 'cause it's all across the band. Even if you listen to a pulsar, pulsars go on and on, maybe a thousand times a second, faster in some cases. But what you hear is "PRRRRR" or "PSH-PSH-PSH-PSH-PSH." It's still white noise. It doesn't matter where you're tuning your radio. You'll hear the pulsar, you see. Tune across a wide, wide range of frequencies and you still hear "PSH-PSH-PSH." So that's clearly nature because nature doesn't care about wasting a lot of energy. No person who was designing a transmitter would build one that sent ten pulses a second all over the band. It's a total waste of energy; it's bad engineering.

    So that's how you do it, you say, "Hey look, if they put all the energy into a small region of the dial, that's something nature never does but transmitters do all the time." So that's how you tell.

    Mark: Now, have we scanned the entire spectrum?

    Seth: No, not by any means. We have only looked at a tiny fraction of the radio spectrum. Our experiment, Project Phoenix, which is run by the Institute?[pointing to a photograph on the wall] that antenna, the one in the middle?looks at more of the spectrum than any other experiment ever has. It's looking over from 1,000 to 3,000 megahertz. Each channel is about 1 Hz wide so that's like 2 billion channels for each star that we look at. That's still not the whole spectrum.

    Mark: This is actually a question that came from one of our contributors. I don't know if it was Paul or Zach. They were under the impression that the signals are scanned for 300 seconds, approximately?

    Seth: Yeah, that's about right.

    Mark: How do you determine which bands to target first?

    Seth: Oh, well, we just start at the bottom of the band and work up. How are you gonna know. If you start at the bottom of the band you may miss ET's transmission at the top of the band, yeah, but maybe if you start at the top of the band you'll miss his transmission at the bottom of the band. You don't have any information about that so you just?it's a matter of being methodical. We always do it the same way. Start at the bottom of the band and work up. It takes, you know, about ten to twelve hours to go through all those frequencies for any given star.

    Mark: Yeah, but how much information is captured in that five minute window?

    Seth: Well, in a five minute window you're listening to 28 million channels. So you're getting information about 28 million, actually, it's 56 million channels. It's 28 million frequency channels, but the receiver has?there are two polarizations that you're actually sensing, so there are actually two receivers in one at the focus, so it's actually 56 million channels. So during that five minutes you're looking for signals that are within those 28 million frequencies. And if you don't hear ET there? Well, tough toe-corns, move up and do 300 seconds on the next batch of frequencies. No ET? Go up the dial a little bit and do more, and that's the way it's done. And actually, observing one star isn't done at once, it's done in pieces, over the course of a couple days.

    Siduri: I believe Paul's exact question was, "Ask how the hell that all works."

    Seth: How the hell that all works. Well, what didn't I answer?

    Mark: Perhaps you could start by telling us, once the data is collected by the telescope, where does it go? The project has been going on longer than hard drives have been in common use to store this data.

    Seth: Mm-hmm.

    Mark: Does it get printed out onto paper reels?

    Seth: In the old days it was printed out on paper, yeah, it was. Not anymore. Those were the good old days. You could come in and there was only one channel, or ten channels, or some small number of channels, a hundred channels. So it was possible to put all the data out on a, usually a line printer. In the very earliest experiments it was just a strip-chart report. You know, one pen on a piece of paper. Maybe two, if you had two pole positions. When Frank did the first experiment in 1960, that's the way it was done. He just had a little motor that essentially turned the knob on the receiver and turned it up and down the dial, very slowly, you see, so the frequency was changing. And you could just look at the output. And he had a loudspeaker connected to it. It was all very simple. And then ten years later you could look through a hundred channels at once, so then you needed a line printer.

    That was what was being used in 1977 at Ohio State, when some guy came in in the morning looking through the stack of computer printout, and saw one big signal and said "wow!" Wrote WOW next to it. The Wow Signal.

    Mark: Can you talk a little bit more about that?

    Siduri: Yeah, whatever happened to that?

    Seth: Yeah, the wow signal. Well, it's pretty wow-y. But it doesn't seem to have been ET. Lots of people have gone back and they even, they immediately had a following beam on the sky that swept through that same patch of the heavens, just shortly after they got that signal, and didn't see it. And people have gone back there looking, you know, with more sensitivity, more frequencies, and nobody's ever found it again. So it's not good enough. It's like seeing a ghost in your basement once. It's not enough to believe in ghosts. If you see them every time you look, now that's okay, you might believe then. So it was undoubtedly some sort of interference.

    Siduri: Is that the closest you've ever come to finding...

    Seth: Well, how do you know? That's like pregnancy, I mean, are you close? It's not a matter of close, it's yes, it's a one-bit experiment. It's not that you're close. There have been lots and lots of false alarms. Particularly in the early days, because in the early days you would usually report the data. As you said, it was before hard disks. But what would happen is that you would go the telescope and you had a hundred channels, and normally you would just write everything to computer tape. Back with these big tapes, and you would put them on computers wherever you were, and play 'em back, and then look at all the data.

    And you'd always find signals. You've got these huge antennas, you know, with very sensitive receivers, and hundreds of channels, thousands of channels, and now millions of channels, so of course you found signals. But then what did you do? What do you do with them? You could call up the local papers and say, "By the way, I found all these signals," and that would work the first time. But, well, how do you know it's ET? And you say, "well, I don't know." Then the next time you went back to Tucson you'd try to look at those parts of the sky again. And that's very tedious.

    But now, what we do, is we check out all the signals right away, in real time. All the data's processed real time. So you don't leave the telescope with a stack of mystery signals. You know each one of them because you tracked it down. So in the early days there were lots and lots of these sorts of false alarms. Not anymore.

    Mark: Does that mean that the sensitivity to signals may be less now than it was before?

    Seth: No, the sensitivity's clearly better now. The sensitivity's better but the processing's better. That's just because, you know, digital electronics is better than it was. So now you can conceivably process everything in real time. That's the way it's done. When you're sitting down there in Puerto Rico, you're sitting at the control room, and the signals are coming in about?you get hundreds of signals every night. Hundreds. And each one of them is checked out. So far each one of them has been us.

    Well it is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science."
    [Siduri]

    Siduri trusts no one

    Siduri: But now, I thought that was what SETI@home was doing.

    Seth: Well, that's a different project. That's a Berkeley project. We process all our data, as I say, real time. And any signals that look like they're good are verified by a second telescope at Jodrell Bank, in England, just south of Manchester. We have a slow-speed line that sends the information about a handful of signals, whatever you have in those 300 seconds, sends that information to Jodrell Bank. And then they're looking at the same star. So here we are in Puerto Rico, and there they are in Jodrell Bank. And we're both pointing at the same star, so if we find signals here, then these guys spend the next 300 seconds checking those out. So they're always 300 seconds behind the Arecibo telescope.

    Siduri: That's clever.

    Seth: Yeah, and obviously, if it's really ET, you know you should be able to find it in both places. But beyond that, you're on the rotating earth, and if you do a little geometry you realize that, well, the motion of the earth means that these two telescopes are moving?with respect to whatever star it is you're looking at?at a slightly different rate, so there's a slightly different Doppler shift, so the frequency ought to be different here than there. A small amount, but it's easily measured, see, so there's a little microcomputer that does that simple high school geometry, and looks for that change in the Doppler shift. And if it doesn't find it, then it knows this is not ET: this is a telecommunications satellite. So that's another trick.

    So they all get checked out. Now, SETI@home, that's data that's taken by the Berkeley crowd, on the same telescope but in a different way. And their data is of a nature that, you know, you can look at it two months later and still be interested. With ours, ours is so sensitive that if you found anything, you would want to check it out right away.

    Mark: And how often does that happen? Do you get calls in the middle of the night, saying "check this out right away"?

    Seth: Well, I'm usually sitting there. I usually have the 6 to midnight shift; Jill Tarter takes the midnight to 6 AM shift; Peter Backus comes in and spells one of us. You're actually there. And if it finds a signal, I mean, it doesn't?you don't get these giant klaxon sounds and red flashing lights. MM-NEE! MM-NEE! I mean, that would be great, that's what it is on Star Trek, but what actually happens is the workstation goes "beep." You barely notice it.

    But then it says, you know, "I found these six candidate signals," it's a real signal. And what it does is, it sends them to Jodrell Bank, right. And if they come back from Jodrell Bank?almost always, they come back "sorry, Charlie, this is not it"?but every now and again something gets through the filter. So Jodrell Bank says, "Looks good to me." And meanwhile it's looking in a database of known interferers to make sure it isn't in there.

    If all these systems are "go, this could be the big one," you still don't call up the airlines and get a ticket to Stockholm. Because what happens next is it, you know, "beep beep," it comes again. And you're still not paying much attention. But now what it's done, because it's found a signal that both telescopes think might be real, it breaks the observing. It stops going up the dial and it now moves the Arecibo telescope away from the star. Just a little bit. Maybe the diameter of the moon or something like that. Just that far away. And the signal ought to go away now. If it's really ET, if it's really coming from the star, the signal oughtta go away. Now, if the signal's coming from some telecommunications satellite that's wheeling overhead, that signal's bouncing all around, I mean it's so strong, bouncing around the telescope structure, it doesn't really matter where you point the antenna. You'll pick up that signal. So, if you point away from the star and you still get the signal, you know right away it's not ET.

    But if it goes away, it might be ET. Or maybe the telecommunications satellite just went over the horizon at the same time. And that can happen too. So if it goes away, then you keep looking, and you move the antenna back on the star and see if the signal comes back.

    Siduri: Does your heart start speeding up at about that point?

    Seth: At about that time, if it goes off, and it goes away, then you pay attention. Because it's sort of fun. And you always set the sensitivity so this happens once every couple nights. And if it doesn't find it there and then it comes back and it does find it again, then, yeah, then you become more interested. And if it goes off and doesn't find it, then you're standing up. That doesn't happen very often. It's happened to me once or twice. That's when you get excited.

    And at some point, you know, it'll do this half a dozen times, and then it sort of throws up its little computer hands and says, "I don't know what this is anymore. This is something you know how to decide. I don't know what to do next." I don't know, I think only once has it ever gotten to the point where the computer didn't know what to do next.

    Siduri: While you were there, or...?

    Seth: Well, I was downstairs, and we were observing simultaneously?No, we had a remote setup downstairs. I wasn't actually at the telescope. This was '97, I was at Greenbank, but the second telescope that we were using those days wasn't working that day, and that was how we got fooled.

    Siduri: Ohhh.

    Seth: But we got fooled for something like 16 hours. That was pretty interesting. It was very interesting to see how people reacted when it looked like this was the real thing.

    Siduri: How did people react?

    Seth: Everybody was simultaneously excited and nervous. That's true. Nobody went home, nobody went to bed. People just hung out. The engineers were all hanging around the computers downstairs. And I half expected that we were going to see the government show up. Everybody expects that the government would move in if we ever got a signal. But the government had no interest in moving in. Much to my disappointment. Even the local, the Mountain View government didn't want to move in. Nobody wanted to move in.

    [We laugh. But, transcribing this, it occurs to me that a real conspiracy theorist could take this as proof that the government already knows about aliens! Because why wouldn't they react to an extraterrestrial signal, unless they had some way of knowing that it was a false alarm? And how could they know that, unless they already knew where the real aliens were? Hmm?]

    Seth: I sort of hoped that the pizza guy would move in. We were getting hungry. But what did happen is that the media started calling up.

    Siduri: How'd they know?

    Seth: Somebody just called them. I mean, there's no secrecy, so, you know, they called up the New York Times. And they called me: "What about that signal?" I said, "Well, we're following one, but, you know..."

    Siduri: So you would really know right away.

    Seth: Oh, you would know right away. Yeah. In fact, I really do believe you would not only know right away; you would know before we had fully checked out the signal. Because how long is it going to take us before we believe it? I mean, surely within an hour or so you'd be beginning to get the idea that this might be it. But it still could be a software bug, it could be?you know, there are all sorts of things that can go wrong. It's an extremely complicated system. It involves two telescopes, it's a one-off device so needless to say it isn't fully debugged, and all that. So you'd say, "okay, this is looking interesting, but I'm not sure I'm going to tell the world I found ET yet. I'm going to call up somebody at another antenna, another radio observatory, and say, 'You check this out, with your equipment, not ours. Because you've got a completely different system, and maybe yours isn't buggy or whatever, if that's what it is.'"

    And they would say, "Okay, well, we'll do that, but we can't get to it until tonight, because, you know, the star isn't up yet, or we have to change the receiver," whatever. So they'll spend some time doing that, it'll maybe take a day or two. And so surely, four days, five days can easily go by before enough have seen it to say "Okay, I'm willing to stake my reputation on it. This is for real." But long before that happens you'll be reading about it at Albertson's in the check-out line. That media won't wait; they'll run with the story before you've confirmed it. Everybody will, they'll be going "oh, the sky is falling, interesting signal!" So that's the way it will happen.

    Siduri: So you actually do observation work on a regular basis.

    Seth: Yeah, I go down there. We observe at Arecibo. These are some pictures I took; I didn't take that one, but this is what we were using when we found that interesting signal. In fact you can see the box over there, that trailer, that's Project Phoenix. That's in West Virginia. The other one's in Australia. So we get to use this for a couple weeks in the spring and a couple weeks in the fall.

    Siduri: How many observers are there?

    Seth: Well, we're doing SETI so we observe at night, because the sun would mess up these narrow-band signals, so for us it's better to observe at night. So we observe from 6 PM to 6 AM. We just break that into two shifts, from 6 to midnight and midnight to 6. So you only need two astronomers, actually, but usually there are three of us there?Jill Tarter, who was sort of the prototype for the Jodie Foster character; Peter Backus, who heads up the observatory operation; and myself. The three of us. But there are also a bunch of engineers. The engineers are much more valuable than the astronomers. The astronomers are pretty stupid, and the engineers are pretty savvy; they're much smarter than we are.

    Mark: I have to ask, it seems like a false positive signal would be about the best April Fool's joke ever. Has it happened yet?

    Seth: Oh, you mean where somebody would try and sort of hoax a signal? Yeah, well, we've thought about it, and maybe they have too.

    Siduri: [laughing] Thought about it.

    Seth: Well, we wouldn't do it, because it's very important that people have faith in our?that this is a good experiment, that's competently run, that's important to us, because we're running with their money, after all. So we have to do the best job we can, so obviously we're not going to make a hoax. But somebody else might. Maybe a couple undergrads would find it interesting to do that.

    But it's actually quite hard because?you know, getting a signal into the Arecibo telescope probably isn't all that hard; you have to just walk up there with a transmitter and turn it on. You can do that, I can picture that. Of course it has to be in the right frequency bandwidth at, by the way, I might say, the right time, because we're only looking at a certain small part of the band at any given time, so you're gonna have to know all that, but it's not? well it is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science. Yeah, they could do that, they could do that.

    But the point is that they then also have to fool the guys in England. So they gotta?now it's becoming bit more involved, right, because now they have to have two telescopes that believe this signal. They've got to get the right Doppler shift, so they'd better know their geometry. And then they've got to be savvy enough to, when we do this very simple test where we move the telescope back and forth, to turn the transmitters on and off. So they essentially have to be, it really has to be an inside job, I would say, because they need to know what we're doing when. And I don't see it happening as an inside job. It's just not going to happen. But, you know, I won't say it's impossible. I think it's very, very hard. Very hard, but certainly not impossible. That's why you would check it out for a few days.

    "I think that if you had real physical contact?I can't imagine that would be good."

    Mark: There was another question Zach had.

    Siduri: Zach has great questions.

    Mark: Essentially the gist of his question was: by sending out radio signals into space, we may be able to alert other civilizations, other intelligences, that we are here.

    Seth: Mm-hmm.

    Mark: Is that a good idea?

    Seth: Well, depends on how you regard the aliens.

    Siduri: [quoting Zach] "Do you believe that the aliens would be friendly, and if so, why?"

    Do you believe that the aliens would be friendly, and if so, why?

    Seth: Yeah. Well, who knows, I mean I'm not a specialist on alien psychology, but then again who is? Nobody is. Nobody knows what the aliens would be like. About all you can say is that on Earth, aggression pays, a certain amount of aggression. And if you sort of look at the history of, you know, being found by more advanced civilizations, it usually doesn't work out in your favor. I mean, the Indians kind of welcomed the Europeans at first, but then they all got smallpox and things like that, I mean it wasn't a good deal. They got wiped out. And it wasn't just the disease, they got wiped out, you know, culturally.

    The South Sea Islanders was always of interest to me. James, Captain James Cook's explorations. And he was under orders from the admiralty not to hurt anybody, and he by and large didn't. He almost never hurt anybody, and only when they did something pretty atrocious. He was only there to collect information. Nonetheless, when he lands in Tahiti or Fiji or whatever, these guys are sitting around, they're happy worshiping red feathers and rocks and things like that. And these guys sail into their bay, and they've got these big ships, and they've got cannons, they've got metal, they've got the wheel for goodness sakes?they've got all this stuff. And somehow after you've seen that, worshiping these red feathers just doesn't seem, well, that interesting anymore. These guys are clearly way ahead of you technologically, and they must be ahead of you spiritually as well, so whatever religion they've got is clearly better than what we've got.

    You know, that kind of thing so rapidly destroys your culture. Now that's a situation where these guys weren't there to hurt anybody. So I think that if you had real physical contact?I can't imagine that would be good. And even in some sense, getting information might have some negative effects, if you understood it. Because if suddenly they're saying, "hey, here's all this science, here's all this physics, so guys who are doing all these research projects at Stanford Linear Accelerator, you can keep doing that if you want, but maybe you want to read this. Oh, the cure for death, yeah, that's over here too in this section, you might want to read that." That would be somewhat discouraging for a lot of people. But I don't think it will come to that. I don't worry about any of that.

    Siduri: Why not?

    Seth: Well to begin with, we are broadcasting out into space. You could say, hey, that's a dangerous thing to do. But SETI isn't doing that, I mean, that's not us. That's ABC and NBC, and if you're really worried about it, you should petition the networks to shut off their transmitters, because they may be only ensuring the destruction of civilization as they know it. I mean, you could do that; maybe you should. But I wouldn't worry even about that. To begin with, most of those signals are very diffuse. TV is on all the time, of course, and they are high-powered transmitters, but it turns out they don't deliberately broadcast in the direction of space very much. Advertisers don't see a whole lot of benefit.

    So they don't do it. The military radar does broadcast out into space, that's much more detectable. But even so, we've been on the air for 50 years. The galaxy's been here for 10 billion years. Fifty years is a very small fraction of that. And in another 10 or 20 years we won't be broadcasting into space very much, because everything will be?you'll have a fiberoptic line coming into your house, you'll get your TV that way. So this is a very temporary problem.

    Mark: But if we assume that an alien civilization is more advanced than us, and has done away with the need for this wasteful broadcasting using radio waves...

    Seth: Then what are we listening for?

    Mark: ...and has more efficient means of communications, might they also think that it's a bad idea to broadcast out, because there might be someone bigger and tougher than them? Might there be thousands of civilizations that are remaining silent for that reason?

    Seth: Yeah, right, exactly, everybody's intimidated. Yeah, could be. That's been proposed as an explanation for why we haven't heard anything. They said, "Yeah, well the reason you haven't heard any aliens is because it's not a good idea to shout in the jungle." Right? Cause there's things out there that are bigger and have longer teeth than you do. It's not a good idea. There may be some truth in that, but again, this is sociology, so what do you know. But I do find it difficult to believe that all civilizations are that way.

    You might say, "Okay, look. Broadcasting from our planet is not a good idea. We don't know what's out there. But putting a radio beacon over there, right, so that we can navigate over these short distances that we want to cover in our galaxy, that's not so horrible. I mean, they may find a beacon, but the beacon isn't where we are, the beacon's over there." Or you just send robotic vehicles out into space, and they don't transmit until they get very far away, or something like that. There are lots of ways to beat this rap.

    And it may be that you feel you are the meanest dog on the block, you know, you just don't worry about this. You're the Galactic Federation, so you've got a license to do what you want. It's like the British navy. They're not afraid to take to the high seas. I don't know. It's all very interesting, and obviously very speculative. And you could say, you could talk yourself out of this, and say, "Nobody's ever gonna broadcast, it's entirely too dangerous." So then what do you do. Just don't listen? You don't get anywhere that way. At least if you listen, you have the chance of proving this thesis wrong in some way, and you have very interesting information if you find something.

    So it's sort of like sitting around with Chris Columbus in 1492 and saying, "Forget the wooden boats, Chris. They probably won't work, and you won't find anything interesting anyhow." You could probably talk him out of it. But, you know, it probably was worth trying the experiment. But obviously, I work for the SETI Institute. We think it's worth trying the experiment.

    "So that's kind of neat."
    [Splicer]

    Splicer looks into the Pattern, as
    the Pattern looks back at him

    TCS: Do you look at things other than the simple narrow-band signals? Do you look at the patterns that are created here on Earth, to see perhaps what you should be looking for?

    Seth: Well, no, not so much, because keep in mind that in order?if there are radio signals washing over this room right now, as we expect that they are, then they're going to be weak. Because if they were really, really strong, probably we would have found them by now. There have been some surveys in the entire sky. And so if there were persistent, very powerful signals somewhere in the sky, those would have been found. So the expected ET signal is not going to be, you know, enough to cook birds at this distance or anything like that. They're going to be weak.

    And in order to find weak signals one thing you can do is, as it were, make a time exposure. Just the way, with a camera, if you want to take pictures at night, you leave the shutter open for a long period of time and let the light build up. You can do that, and you can see very faint things that way. Astronomers do that all the time. But if for example you were making a photo of a pulsar, with a telescope that way, and you exposed the film for 20 minutes, then you wouldn't know that pulsar was flashing, would you? It would just be a bright spot on the film.

    Well, we do exactly the same thing in the radio. We, as it were, integrate the signal over 300 seconds in order to build up the sensitivity. But that means if it's changing a hundred thousand times a second, or millions of times a second the way a TV signal does?all that's gone. It's all lost. So that's why finding the message is much harder than finding the signals; finding the signals you can integrate. What we do do is, we look at?we break up the data into one-second chunks, and we see if there are any pulses in there. Slow pulses. Beep. Beep. Things that are longer than a second in frequency. Then we would find those. We do look for those kinds of pulses. But nothing more complicated than that, because of the sensitivity.

    Siduri: I think Steve was asking, though, if we were looking at what we're sending out there, just accidentally?

    TCS: That's what I asked, although I think that Seth in his answer addressed that that was not...

    Seth: I should have said...

    TCS: ...that it wouldn't be very fruitful to figure out what we're sending out if we're not going to be able to hear it.

    Seth: Right. What you're saying is that what we should be looking for is the kind of stuff that we send out?

    TCS: Right, and you said that we wouldn't be able to hear the kind of things that we send out.

    Seth: Yeah, what you could hear from Earth are powerful military radars?not very interesting to listen to, but powerful?or TV signals. You know, one-third of the power in the TV signal is from the carrier, which is this very narrow-band component of the TV signal. I don't know if you know this, but a TV signal is spread out over four or five megahertz?a big chunk of the dial. But there's a very sharp carrier component, which your TV set needs to tune in. So one-third of the power is going in there. And that's 10,000 times easier to find than the picture itself. So that's what you would hear from Earth, is carrier signals. Really big antennas could see I Love Lucy. You'd know that the TV transmitter is on, you just wouldn't know what show it is. If you want to know the show you'd need lots of antennas.

    Mark: Is SETI looking at different kinds of modulation other than just amplitude?

    Seth: Well, as I say, we don't look for really modulation at all, we just look for energy within a given band. The way it's changing...

    Mark: Perhaps polarization changes, or...

    Seth: Yeah, you could look for all that, those are ways to encode information on the message. But unless it's very, very slow?really slow?then we won't see it, because we just average everything. As I say, it's like taking time exposures. Take a picture of the city and you'll see that the stoplights have red, green, and yellow all lit up on the film. All the real information about how that's cycling is gone.

    Siduri: Now, isn't there an optical SETI program starting up?

    Seth: Yeah. There is. In fact, that's the Berkeley one; picture's over here. But there's one the Institute is involved with, and that's at Lick Observatory, down near San Jose. You ever been to San Jose?

    Siduri: Uh-huh.

    Mark: Nice drive up there. I wondered what those...

    Seth: Mostly, they?actually, that's where a lot of these extrasolar planets have been found.

    Siduri: Really?

    Seth: Yeah. Geoff Marcy, who found probably more than anybody, works at San Francisco State, and Berkeley. But that's a telescope that he's been using. Now he's using the Keck telescope in Hawaii. But they still use this thing; they use it for a lot of stuff. Anyway, there's a telescope out there; I have a picture. There's a telescope up there with a one-meter mirror, and this young lady, Shelley Wright?she was an undergraduate, 23 years old I guess, or 22?she built a box to go in the back of this thing to look for flashing laser pulses. And so every night they use that telescope?not every night: those nights that it's available, which is about half the nights?they point it at nearby stars.

    What they're looking for is flashing lights. And the reason this makes sense is because?I mean, you might think "Enh, that doesn't make sense, because the star itself is putting out a lot of light and that'll swamp any laser on a planet orbiting the star; you can't even see the planets, how could you possibly see somebody's laser?" Well, it turns out that if you take the most powerful lasers that we could make, the ones they have at Lawrence Livermore and places like that, that if you aim that laser into a mirror that's the size of this table or something, and then aim it at a nearby star, and put all the power from that laser into a billionth of a second flash, you see, concentrating the energy in time now, then for a billionth of a second that laser will outshine the star.

    Siduri: Oh wow.

    Seth: Yeah. So, what she does is, she just looks for a billionth of a second and looks for a bunch of photons coming in. It wasn't originally her idea, but that's the experiment we're involved in. And that's kind of neat, because nobody's really done that much before, so you could maybe find something. Maybe some alien civilization nearby has a big laser, and they've just got a little mirror assembly for the output of the laser, and it directs the light onto a big mirror [mutter mutter]. But, you know, they just ping each star that's near them for five seconds a day or ten seconds a day. They don't know which ones might have civilizations, but they just do this, automatically. And then all we have to do is get a lot of people looking at a lot of stars and we'll see some that are pinging our way. So that's kind of neat.

    Siduri: How long has this been going on for?

    Seth: It's been going on for about six months. I mean the idea of looking for flashing lights in the sky is not new, but actually doing it is new.

    --
    Knowledge Speaks, Wisdom Listens -- Jimi Hendrix
  4. this is the part regarding SETI@home by ant_morgan · · Score: -1, Redundant

    This is the part that I figured probably has the most relevance to the slashdot crowd:

    SETI@home

    "I think it's just the open-face fish sandwiches that everybody wants."

    Siduri: So what's the relationship between the SETI Institute and SETI@home?

    Seth: Cordial. Well, there aren't many SETI experiments in the world. To begin they figure SETI's all one giant organization, which it's not. SETI's just an acronym. There are a half a dozen SETI experiments going on. But in terms of radio SETI, the big ones are right here in the Bay Area. What the Berkeley guys do, they're just two guys.

    Siduri: So there's no formal relationship.
    [Seth ]

    This is Seth's telescope, but sometimes
    he lets other people drive it

    Seth: Well, we support them, we give them a bit of money, because we know these guys. But it's a different experiment. What they do?I'll tell you what they do, because it's pretty interesting. If you look up you can see there, [pointing to a photograph] you see the way this thing works, which is that there's a big reflector: the radio waves come in, they bounce off, and they go into here, this buckyball [there's a bit I can't make out here; Seth is facing away from the tape recorder] boink boink, and then into the receiver. So that's what we're using. By moving this thing around on these tracks, we can point to anywhere within 20 degrees of the receiver, and then you just wait for the Earth to rotate. You get a lot of the sky with this thing. And then this telescope is pointed straight up and you can actually see... [voice trails off as Seth turns away again]

    But there's a second receiver over here [mumble] so this is an old kind of receiver, picking up signals in random spots on the sky. We're looking at stars, but this is just pointed at random spots in the sky. Maybe somebody's using this thing [the main antenna] to look at pulsars, while this [the second receiver] is pointed at some random spot in the sky. The Berkeley guys collect data from this thing. And it's random spots in the sky, and it's moving around, and they never look at any patch for more than about one and a half seconds, so they can't use this integration trick. But they get all the data they want out of it, right? They figure, look, we don't know where ET is, and random spots are as good as any other spots. And you know, you could make that argument, nobody knows. We think it's better to look at stars, but nobody knows.

    So they collect the data with that thing. And then they just have a setup over in the control room. And they collect this data and they just send it on back to hard disks in Berkeley. And then they take about 2 percent of those data and distribute them on the web for SETI@home. That's how that's done. It's much less sensitive, that data, and the real problem, actually, for them, is the followup. Because people find signals of course, just as we do. They'll find signals. And you're processing this chunk of data, these data were taken three weeks ago or three months ago, and you find something and send it back to Berkeley. And so they're running software that notes that, and just waits for that antenna perchance to be aimed back at the same patch of sky again, which it will, ultimately, once every two years or so. And it will say okay, and have that data processed, and compare those data with the ones that were processed maybe two years earlier. You know, this processed by Melvin and this processed by Molly, and see if they found the same signals at the same frequency, in which case they both get the trip to Stockholm.

    Actually, even that wouldn't work, because you can work out the statistics, how often that would happen by chance, just random noise. You have to find it three times. And then it's probably...

    Siduri: But people are falsifying signals, at SETI@home. There have been people actually...

    Seth: Really?

    Siduri: Just to get the...

    [There's a break here, because we had to switch tapes in the recorder. Meanwhile, here's an old article about people tampering with SETI@home data: http://www.spaceviews.com/2000/01/23a.html]

    Seth: Does this mean you're doing this?

    Siduri: No, no. No, I'm not, but I was reading about security in peer-to-peer systems, and...

    Cellphone: Ring! Ring!

    Siduri: Oh, I'm sorry, that's me.

    Seth: This could be the big one.

    Cellphone: Ring!

    Siduri: Be quiet. Are you going to be quiet now?

    [The phone is quiet.]

    Siduri: Um, and they were talking about how the fact that a person is getting no money from falsifying their end of the system does not necessarily mean that they won't do it. Like, there's all sorts of other reasons.

    Seth: Money is not the only incentive?

    Siduri: Exactly. And they pointed to problems that the people at SETI@home were having as an example of that.

    Seth: Interesting. Yeah, I guess that's true.

    Siduri: Nobody's getting paid to do this work. But people want to increase their standings, you know, so they'll just make up all kinds of stuff.

    Seth: Lots of reasons other than money. I didn't know that they were actually faking the data. Because what the guys over at Berkeley normally do, is they send the same data set to at least three random downloads. So that they compare returned signals. And if somebody fakes a signal in their data, their chunk of data, it won't agree with the other two people. There's usually more than two others, but they would get the other two holders, who will agree but they won't agree with him. That kind of voting system. So I think that's the way they try and guard against this.

    Siduri: So what's in Stockholm? Why would they get a trip to Stockholm?

    Seth: Oh, yes, Shannon, you obviously haven't investigated that. Isn't that where they give you the Nobel Prize?

    Siduri: Ohhhhkay, I see.

    Seth: I think it's just the open-face fish sandwiches that everybody wants. "What's in Stockholm." Not much, I'll tell you.

    --
    Knowledge Speaks, Wisdom Listens -- Jimi Hendrix
  5. See also... by igaborf · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tune in the Universe -- Amateur Radio and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

  6. Funny? by Knunov · · Score: -1, Troll

    "He's also quite funny."

    I guess funny is as funny does...

    Maybe you have to be an alien or BIG DORKY SLASHDOT NERD FUCK to find him amusing.

    You want funny? THIS is funny:

    What's the difference between Jon Katz and a bucket of shit?

    THE BUCKET

    I'm a Karma fatty. BURN THEM EXCESS POINTS OFF, BABY!

    Marine Corps Haiku
    This is my haiku
    There are many others like it
    But this one is mine


    Semper Fi and Happy Hunting Devil Dogs!

    Knunov

    --
    Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
    1. Re:Funny? by afree87 · · Score: 0, Troll
      BIG DORKY SLASHDOT NERD FUCK

      Yeah, that's me! You've got it!

    2. Re:Funny? by schmink182 · · Score: 1

      This is my haiku There are many others like it But this one is mine

      Hmm, last I checked haikus had the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. Since when did they let you use 5-8-5? Weird stuff...

    3. Re:Funny? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That is part of the humor...

      You see, Marines, a.k.a. Jar Heads, aren't supposed to be the brightest bulbs on the tree.

      Get it now?

      It's never as funny when you have to explain it...

    4. Re:Funny? by Rumagent · · Score: 1

      get a life...

    5. Re:Funny? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "It's never as funny when you have to explain it..."

      its probally just not funny like you

  7. Intellegent Life? by The+Great+Wakka · · Score: 0

    Clearly, it's probably found us, looked at us, and then decided to ignore us. We are sooo boring. Why would ANY species even care about us in the first place? We might be interesting from a scientific standpoint, though.

    P.S. This story is just ASKING for wacky UFO-ologoy websties to be posted. Consider yourself warned.

    --
    Everything is mainstream now.
  8. Drake? by Wire+Tap · · Score: 5, Informative

    I read through (most) of the article (I just could not bear with all that "Well, you know..." so I didn't finish the whole thing, but I was suprised to not read about FRANK DRAKE and the DRAKE EQUATION. The Drake Equation is arguably the underlying force being the entire aim of SETI.

    And, nicely pasted from E2, here is a good idea of what it is:

    An equation used to estimate the number of technological civilizations that may exist in the galaxy. There is no exact answer to Frank Drake's famous equation, but it nonetheless a tool for the scientific community, and the force "behind every project at the SETI Institute."
    N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

    Where:

    N = The number of civilizations in the Milky Way whose radio emissions are detectable.

    R* = The rate of formation of stars with a large enough "habitable zone" and long enough lifetime to be suitable for the development of intelligent life.

    fp = The fraction of Sun-like stars with planets is currently unknown, but evidence indicates that planetary systems may be common for stars like the Sun.

    ne = Number of earths per planetary system. All stars have a habitable zone where a planet would be able to maintain a temperature that would allow liquid water. A planet in the habitable zone could have the basic conditions for life as we know it.

    fl = The fraction of those planets where life develops. Although a planet orbits in the habitable zone of a suitable star, other factors are necessary for life to arise. Thus, only a fraction of suitable planets will actually develop life.

    fi = The fraction life sites where intelligence develops. Life on Earth began over 3.5 billion years ago. Intelligence took a long time to develop. On other life-bearing planets it may happen faster, it may take longer, or it may not develop at all.

    fc = The fraction of planets where technology develops. The fraction of planets with intelligent life that develop technological civilizations, i.e., technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.

    L = The length of time that communicative civilizations release detectable signals into space.

    --

    Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.

    1. Re:Drake? by jamie · · Score: 2
      "I didn't finish the whole thing, but I was suprised to not read about FRANK DRAKE and the DRAKE EQUATION."

      Get your paws off me, you damn dirty karma whore :)

      Frank Drake actually shows up, but his last name isn't used. Seth couldn't be talking about anyone else; this would be Project Ozma:

      "When Frank did the first experiment in 1960, that's the way it was done. He just had a little motor that essentially turned the knob on the receiver and turned it up and down the dial, very slowly, you see, so the frequency was changing. And you could just look at the output. And he had a loudspeaker connected to it."

    2. Re:Drake? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe that's because we're all sick of reading about the Drake equation (hint, hint).

    3. Re:Drake? by SGDarkKnight · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The equation makes alot of sence, but the only thing that Drake takes for granted is that all life is based on life here on Earth. Given that we dont have anything else to compare it to, but still. Don't you think thats a really basic generalization of how life works. I for one dont think we should be basing the creation of life everywhere in the galaxy with realtion to the way life was created here on earth. It would be pretty arrogant to think that way. For all we know, it could be the exact opposite everywhere else and we are the exception. But then again, I could be wrong.

      --

      ...A no smoking section in a restaurant is like having a no peeing section in a swimming pool...
    4. Re:Drake? by Wire+Tap · · Score: 1

      Yeah yeah, everyone needs a boost now and again.

      I had the opprotunity to do some research at the Green Bank Radio Observatory last December(woo! dish time!), and while I was there, I saw Drake's original receiver. It is just a monument now, on the right side of the entrance, but it is still inspirational. One could only imagine the ensuing watershed that would result in alien contact, and to think that it started with (in the modern sense of searching) that little array of antennas is simply awe-inspiring.

      --

      Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.

    5. Re:Drake? by CatherineCornelius · · Score: 1
      Whilst the Drake Equation is important, it's certainly not "the underlying force [behind] the entire aim of SETI", and not as important as Drake's other work, from Ozma onwards.

      The Drake Equation was simply an effort to provide a standard focus for discussion of the probabilities of receiving a signal from extraterrestrial civilisation.

    6. Re:Drake? by at_18 · · Score: 1

      Actually, the Drake equation is useless to calculate how many civilizations are in the Galaxy, simply because many of its parameters are unknown.

      It's mainly intended as a framework for discussions about SETI topics.

    7. Re:Drake? by StrawberryFrog · · Score: 2
      There is no exact answer to Frank Drake's famous equation,

      That is somewhat of an understatement. For most of those numbers, we simply haven't the faintest clue. How many real experts, for instance, do you think we have on "The fraction of planets with intelligent life that develop technological civilizations"

      but it nonetheless a tool for the scientific community

      Not really, as it makes no predictions at all except "once you have studied and done statistical anysysis on a large number of solar systems, inhabited and not inhabited, you will be in a position to estimate how many of them are inhabited" Well, Duh!

      The Drake Equation's only use is to underscore just how ignorant we are of so many factors that might determine what's out there.

      --

      My Karma: ran over your Dogma
      StrawberryFrog

    8. Re:Drake? by Webmonger · · Score: 2

      If there are other ways that intelligent life can develop, that just means there would be more intelligent life in the universe than this equation predicts.

    9. Re:Drake? by Jebediah21 · · Score: 1

      *sigh*
      I sometimes doubt earth has intelligent life.

      --

      Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
    10. Re:Drake? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where N 10^-10

  9. At last, the truth can be told by CatherineCornelius · · Score: 1
    Seth Shostak:...turns out the Ringworld's a little unstable...

    Thanks for that. After all the rumors, I think we deserved to be told officially.

  10. I like this analogy.... by Merik · · Score: 1

    putting a chip in my brain would be like putting an engine in a horse

    "You might get a faster horse, but why bother with the horse part? Why not get rid of the horse altogether and replace it with a Ferrari? I mean, really?"

    I still want my brain chip!!!!

    --

    --

    What is the sound of this sentence?

    1. Re:I like this analogy.... by praksys · · Score: 1

      He needs to think about this from the horse's point of view. Would you rather be knackered or upgraded?

    2. Re:I like this analogy.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Eventually, if the humans still want to exist, AI will say that having human bodies is too much of a waste, but humans are welcome to upload themselves into some sort of virtual world, and they will seem to go on as they were. Otherwise, perhaps they would be allowed to run as a primitive process in AI's mind--without access to protected areas, of course--but not much else. To still exist as a human--without the aid of AI's abilities--will be too painful. It would be like watching your species suddenly go from having the relative abilities of dolphins to oysters. You'd probably kill yourself. It would be like becoming severely retarded overnight, but still having the pre-retardation perspective that would make retardation unbearable.

    3. Re:I like this analogy.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why not just make the pie taller.

  11. Nature of Alien Intelligence? by Mentifex · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) will most likely discover either biology-based intelligence like our own, or an advanced form of machine-based Artificial Intelligence.

    Alien civilizations conducting a similar search in the near future are likewise likely to find either us humans or the AI mind-species that succeeds us in the onwards march of Technological Singularity.

    Along the lines of the SETI@home project. there is also a kind of AI@Home project to the extent that independent AI programmers have been creating Visual Basic Mind.VB and Java-based Mind.JAVA AI.

    Whether we find Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or not has a bearing on the Theology of Artificial Intelligence, because if we find that we are not alone in the universe, we will have to re-think our ideas on our relationship to our Creator.

    1. Re:Nature of Alien Intelligence? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do piss off. If you can program a good AI, go do it. And not in JavaScript, either.

      This is irrelevant, and as an AI researcher I find the idea that you consider to require theology to be utterly ridiculous.

      Goodnight, and Go Away.

  12. Hey you by Kjella · · Score: 1

    You've been reading my .sig too much

    Kjella

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  13. Seth and the Fermi Paradox by cybrpnk · · Score: 3, Informative

    Seth has also written a series of articles on SETI, the most interesting of which to me was the one on the Fermi Paradox. If they're out there, theyve been out there for a LONG time...so why don't we see the astronomical equivalent of jet contrails from their warp drives? Any spacefaring civilization should be all over the Galaxy ... not just come by Earth. So where are they?

    1. Re:Seth and the Fermi Paradox by cybrpnk · · Score: 2

      Hey...forget space aliens, why can't I find my "LT SLASH A GT"?

  14. Worst interview I ever read by igomaniac · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I thought the point of writing up an interview was to isolate the interesting information from all the [sigh] and [mumbles] and "well..." and " I think [uhm] maybe - well, if you look at it like this, it might be.."

    Why was this terrible writeup ever posted? I couldn't bear to read more than half of it...

    --

    The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
    1. Re:Worst interview I ever read by sparkyz · · Score: 1

      Agreed, poor editing. Still it was generally a good and informative interview, characterized by intelligent and informed questions and Seth's gentle self-deprecation and lack of arrogance make him just the right spokesperson for a worthwhile project. I really learned a lot; and if you haven't been by to read the whole thing yet, you're missing it out.

      --
      Oops
    2. Re:Worst interview I ever read by Ivop · · Score: 1

      It's a transcription. --Ivo

  15. Is this a real interview? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It looks fake...

  16. Looking for the Wrong Stuff by Alien54 · · Score: 2
    What is interesting is that we may be looking for the Wrong Stuff;

    if you look at the kind of signals that we're currently using, sort of spread-spectrum signals and things like that, they're very complicated, and they're completely unlike the kind of things we look for in SETI. The kind of things we look for in SETI are signals that are just what are called narrow-band signals, that are on one spot on the radio dial. [...] The advantage of that is that it makes it really easy to find the signal because all the energy is in a small band so it really stands out as a big spike of energy. Whereas if you spread it out over five megahertz, like a TV signal, then the energy's spread all over the band and it's very hard to find. But on the other hand, the actual signals that we use are spread out, more and more. And ET will be at least as advanced as we are, so you might say, "Well, why would they make those narrow-band signals?" And the answer is, probably: most of the time, they don't. [...] (but) there's lots of things that would have narrow-band components in the signal. So that's what we look for

    Let's face it, if EM transmission goes the way of the Napoleonic Semaphore system, then we will not have a chance to intercept the new technology.

    --
    "It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
    1. Re:Looking for the Wrong Stuff by Animats · · Score: 2
      I've been saying that for a while. Everything SETI@Home could find is legacy radio technology. The FCC wouldn't allow the startup of a new service with significant energy in the carrier today; it wastes spectrum space.

      Early radio was about 80% carrier and about 20% content. (Broadcast TV still is.) Any signal that doesn't look like noise at first glance is grossly inefficient. (Listen to modems to get this.) Modern radio signals, like spread-spectrum cell phones, digital radio, and broadcast HDTV, only have a few percent overhead. And so they look like noise.

      Nevertheless, almost all useful radio signals have some redundancy, for synchronization, framing, or error correction. There's stuff to look for.

      The problem is that you need a receivable signal, with a signal/noise ratio good enough that you could potentially extract the content, just to find a modern signal. It's possible to detect much weaker carriers than you can demodulate, by averaging over a large number of cycles. That's why SETI tends to look for carriers.

      Looking for carriers made sense at first, but now that the whole sky has been searched repeatedly for carriers with no finds, it's clear that nobody is blasting a carrier at us. So here's where SETI is today:

      An old joke had it that the drunk searched for his lost keys not where they were dropped, but rather in the yellow circle of a nearby lamppost. Upon being questioned about the logic, he offered the compelling response - he searched where the light was better.

    2. Re:Looking for the Wrong Stuff by Lars+T. · · Score: 2

      Ahh, but there is still the EM noise that most our technology creates, like your computer for instance.

      --

      Lars T.

      To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

  17. EQ Pegasus, Conspiracy or not? by Bowie+J.+Poag · · Score: 2, Interesting



    It would have been interesting get Seth's reaction to the growing rumors surrounding the discovery of a signal coming from EQ Pegasus a year or so ago.

    For those who don't know what i'm talking about, the scientific comunity has been argueing about the "discovery" of an extraterrestrial signal comming from EQ Pegasus, a small binary system situated about 27 lightyears from Earth.

    The signal capted by Paul Dore with a small radio-telescope was distributed to several observatories for analysis. Astronomers don't really know what to think about it. A press conference was scheduled, but it was cancelled due to threats from an unnamed source. There are rumors the Air Force was involved in silencing the guy who found it, starting some suspicion that it could have been a deep space probe, a CIA "Black" project, or similar. The signal would have been capted the October 22 & 23, which is some weeks after a powerfull Radio-Telescope from Arecibo would have picked a strange signal comming from EQ Pegasus in a project called Phoenix. Astronomers had concluded that it was just interference coming from a geosynchronous satellite.

    The SETI program tried in vain to pick up the signal, and they said that this was either a big joke, or interference.

    Makes you wonder.

    Cheers,

    --
    Bowie J. Poag

    1. Re:EQ Pegasus, Conspiracy or not? by tilulilu · · Score: 3, Informative

      It is most likely a hoax. Seth's comment about EQ Pegasus can be found here.

    2. Re:EQ Pegasus, Conspiracy or not? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Doesn't make me wonder... if you read the article you'd see that SETI does checks to make sure the signal is not from a satellite or some other source... like by moving the telescope away from the target and back again. One non-reproducible signal captured on a single radio-telescope could be absolutely anything or absolutely nothing.

    3. Re:EQ Pegasus, Conspiracy or not? by Markus+Landgren · · Score: 1

      It was a hoax. The screenshots of the supposed hit contained different signals on top of the same background noise, courtesy of cut and paste.

      Besides, both the frequency and the location were made public, so if you think it's real you can just point a radio telescope there and see for yourself. Several people did and found nothing.

  18. "Astronomer" ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Give me a break, an astronomer is someone that does real work, like physically goes into outer space and does real exploration. Not some fat ass nerd that thinks hes going to find ET by using distributed computing to decipher "alien radio signals". Give me a fucking break, they are never going to find anything, its all a crock of shit.

    1. Re:"Astronomer" ? by Aiee · · Score: 1

      Last time I checked, the people who went physically into space were referred to as "Astronauts", "Kosmonauts" and "Euronauts", depending on wether they were from the US, Russia or Europe. (There may be more terms for other countries, but none that I am aware of). An astronomer does not faal into any of those categories, nor would any of those guys have been physically into space without an army of what you appear to term as "fat ass nerds" doing all the research and construction work for them. I am inclined to aggree that the chances of them finding anything are pretty slim, but hey, they're still bigger than if we weren't looking at all.

      --
      -----------------------
      I pushed the red button
  19. asdfgasdfds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

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  20. ahklsjflasfhlksjd candy cane by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    6a SLASHDOT a
    0e4 LAMENESS 9
    4f7c FILTER e
    ed8c6d 6
    a a9a7c 4
    c c4b3e 5
    a d5e1c 7
    a e8f5a 5
    e d6d9c 3
    d a2d2e 4
    b a7a7d 6
    f b0b2b 8
    e d4a8d8
    2 1c2a6
    3 5b3f
    4 4b6
    4 5e
    2c SLASHDOT d
    7b1 LAMENESS 7
    1f3d FILTER a
    eb6d2b 1
    f f7a3f 9
    d f7e7f 1
    d c7c1b 0
    e a0b2c 3
    a e5a4f 8
    c d2a7c 7
    f b3d5a 2
    b c2a3c 0
    b d7f2d8
    2 7b2e7
    7 3d6d
    5 5f4
    3 9a
    9b SLASHDOT b
    7c6 LAMENESS 1
    9f2b FILTER f
    aa5e4d 8
    a c8b8a 0
    b e1d0a
    f c3c1b 1
    f c4d8e 8
    d f7b3f 6
    d c7d3b
    f e2e4a 1
    b e5f6a 7
    a f5b7a0
    9 6d6f1
    6 8d7c
    7 7c5
    0 8c
    4b SLASHDOT b
    7f6 LAMENESS 8
    3d4a FILTER a
    fe2f3e 7
    a d5b3e 3
    e f1e5a 4
    b f8c7d 4
    b f4f2f 5
    c e1f8e 1
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    d a7f8b9
    4 9b8b7
    7 6e7d
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    6e SLASHDOT d
    6a3 LAMENESS 4
    1b2b FILTER b
    ba0b6c
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    6c SLASHDOT b
    7f5 LAMENESS 6
    5a2f FILTER e
    dd7c7e 6
    e c2d8f 8
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    c d1d1d 0
    b c4a1e 7
    b b8e1b5
    8 1d3e4
    3 2d6f
    5 3b9
    2 2c
    6e SLASHDOT e
    9b3 LAMENESS 4
    3f2e FILTER a
    cd4a8b
    b d5d5a 4
    f e5d4d 3
    e b2c3d 1
    c c4b3b 2
    d a8b5e 3
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    c f4e9e 3
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    6 5d9c0
    5 c7c
    2 3a4
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    8f SLASHDOT b
    6a5 LAMENESS 2
    3b6c FILTER d
    ea8c3f 8
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    1d SLASHDOT b
    2d8 LAMENESS 4
    4a6a FILTER a
    ac7f4b 6
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    3 7e

    1. Re:ahklsjflasfhlksjd candy cane by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      wow good job proving that your a life less dick that has nothing better to do go get a life

  21. See a real live radio astronomer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This interview, brilliantly transcribed as it is, hardly does Seth Shostak justice. The man, quite frankly, is freaking hilarious.

    And you, too, can see him, without annoying pigdog interviewers, at the 55th annual Conference on World Affairs, held in Boulder, CO, April 8-12, 2002.

    Watching this guy tear into the hardcore UFO nuts here in Boulder is highly entertaining...

  22. Incoming message by NiftyNews · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Incoming Message. Location: 534.325, 366.121, 6342.436

    "For the sake of the entire universe, we here at N@BFbfdt beseech you - Please cease all transmissions of the six coffee-shop slackers program or we will be forced to destroy you."

    --
    ------
    Today's Top Deals
  23. seti is bunk by yulek · · Score: 1, Interesting

    seti is bunk (article i posted on epinions a year ago)

    --
    in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
    1. Re:seti is bunk by An+Onerous+Coward · · Score: 2
      I agree with much of your analysis about the psychological reasons for the popularity of SETI@Home. A lot of people probably run the program because they've read a lot of sci-fi, or watched the X-Files. Some of your criticisms of the likelihood of discovering other intelligent life are also valid, and discussing the relative merits of SETI@Home vs weather modeling and protein folding is a tarpit I'm not willing to climb into today.

      But in the end, your review relies heavily on claims that you cannot possibly know to be true.

      "seti@home makes a lot of assumptions in order to make it's goals seems plausible. . ."


      No. SETI researchers make no such assumptions. They certainly don't make many of the assumptions you've claimed they make. For example, you say that one of SETI's assumptions is that every planet that develops life will eventually develop an intelligent civilization. I know of no serious researchers who assume such a thing. In fact, the URL you listed to demonstrate this assumption says precisely the opposite.

      You correctly claim that our own evolutionary history would indicate that intelligence such as ours is probably an unlikely development. But you incorrectly claim that "intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable." We only have a very few examples of intelligence, and not enough to make such a statement. Sure, brains are expensive, but judging from the success of mammals, they're a valuable investment. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the evolutionary paths of thousands of worlds, and compare them.

      The rest of your review is based on several other unprovable assumptions:

      - That the civilization will not invest the time or resources in contacting other worlds.

      - That the energy requirements of a long-term project would be prohibitive.

      - That most civilizations will self-destruct within a few centuries.

      As to the first two, we don't know what energy technologies will be developed in the future, how committed a civilization might be to finding others, or how good a very advanced civilization would be at picking candidate planets to beam signals at.

      For the third, I would dispute your claim that "We have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already." Even in the event of a full nuclear exchange, the extinction of the human race would not be guaranteed (please see the scientific simulation, Fallout for further information). We could certainly survive if a major city was nuked every decade or so. In short, I think the long term survivability of the human race is higher than you claim. More importantly, since we have no prior data, you have a rather flimsy basis for making these claims.

      This is part of what makes SETI research so valuable. Finding out how common other intelligence in the universe is tells us a lot about our own situation. Even if we did a complete, thorough search of the entire EM spectrum for ten thousand years and came up with nothing, we'd still have learned something valuable. We'd have learned that successful, intelligent species are very few and far between, and that it was even more important that we not screw things up.
      --

      You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!

    2. Re:seti is bunk by yulek · · Score: 1
      "seti@home makes a lot of assumptions in order to make it's goals seems plausible. . ."

      No. SETI researchers make no such assumptions. They certainly don't make many of the assumptions you've claimed they make. For example, you say that one of SETI's assumptions is that every planet that develops life will eventually develop an intelligent civilization. I know of no serious researchers who assume such a thing. In fact, the URL you listed to demonstrate this assumption says precisely the opposite.

      no, i really think you need to reread this. they specifically say that a planet that spawns life will evolve intelligence 100% of the time. to me that's utter bunk. they plug rediculous values in drake's equation's variables.

      You correctly claim that our own evolutionary history would indicate that intelligence such as ours is probably an unlikely development. But you incorrectly claim that "intelligence itself is not evolutionarily stable." We only have a very few examples of intelligence, and not enough to make such a statement. Sure, brains are expensive, but judging from the success of mammals, they're a valuable investment. The only way to know for sure would be to look at the evolutionary paths of thousands of worlds, and compare them.

      this is what i meant by a some very well timed random events. without them, mammals would not have been given the opportunity to evolve. mammals didn't evolve brains because they could, they did it because they had to due to the particular ecological pressures present. had those ecological pressures NOT been present, there were much better mechanisms to spend "energy" on.

      The rest of your review is based on several other unprovable assumptions:

      - That the civilization will not invest the time or resources in contacting other worlds.

      SETI always uses us (earth) as an example. so i'm doing the same. how much have we done to contact other worlds? what if all the other intelligences are ALSO just listening?

      - That the energy requirements of a long-term project would be prohibitive.

      how is that unprovable? we're looking for radio signals. we know what energy costs it takes to send multidirectional radio signals for huge distances (astronomical).

      As to the first two, we don't know what energy technologies will be developed in the future, how committed a civilization might be to finding others, or how good a very advanced civilization would be at picking candidate planets to beam signals at.

      yeah but come on, radio communications is a PRIMITIVE and energy INEFFICIENT technology. by the time future energy technologies are developed radio waves might not even be used.

      - That most civilizations will self-destruct within a few centuries.

      For the third, I would dispute your claim that "We have come close to wiping ourselves out several times already." [discussion of nuclear war's effect on our survival]

      i admit my statement is a cynical one, however we have to admit things look pretty bleak! and self-destruction doesn't have to mean nuclear war! there's plague, nano-technology, chemical weapons, ecological disasters, and a score of destructive ways we'll develop in the next 50 years.

      This is part of what makes SETI research so valuable. Finding out how common other intelligence in the universe is tells us a lot about our own situation. Even if we did a complete, thorough search of the entire EM spectrum for ten thousand years and came up with nothing, we'd still have learned something valuable. We'd have learned that successful, intelligent species are very few and far between, and that it was even more important that we not screw things up.

      i suppose. or that they are not willing to talk to us. or that we missed a critical segment of the sky. or that our algorithm had a bug in it (remember when SETI was sending the same block to every computer for a few weeks?). or that we're the only ones stupid enough to use EM in the first place (what if all the other intelligent beings use ESP?)...

      --
      in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
  24. Ubiquitous encryption by bstadil · · Score: 1

    Maybe ANY advanced civilisation uses quantum encryption / communication for everything. This means that any communication has one sender and only one reciever. Any "listening in" by a third party like SETI will only get White Noise.

    --
    Help fight continental drift.
  25. Previous interview/chat by Freshman · · Score: 2, Informative


    Here's an another online chat/interview from 2 years ago conducted by ABCNews.com with the same guy.

    A Chat with Seth Shostak: Listening for E.T.

    --

    ----------
    "They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
  26. Why is slashdot so obsessed with Seti? by HanzoSan · · Score: 1, Flamebait



    We all know Seti is a complete waste of resources, why not have an article talking about how to cure aids or cancer with distributed computing?

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
    1. Re:Why is slashdot so obsessed with Seti? by canadian_right · · Score: 1
      We don't all know that seti is a waste of money. In fact, a few million people have donated their spare computer time because they think it would be important to discover alien life.

      Short term thinking will be the death of the species.

      --
      Anarchists never rule
  27. A better question is by HanzoSan · · Score: 2



    Why would we want to find alien life in the universe?

    Say we did find aliens. Then what? First no scientist would ever believe we actually found it. You'd have a situation where the world is flat instead of round because people see its flat.

    So say you did prove somehow (if thats possible) that theres alien life via some radio signal, then what?

    People never even stop to think what comes next if Seti ever did find alien life in the universe.

    However I dont think Seti ever will and think its a waste of money, and if they ever did i dont think people would believe it because theres no way to prove it really is from an alien source and not something else.

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
    1. Re:A better question is by canadian_right · · Score: 1
      You seem to be confused about what a scientist is.

      If we found PROOF of aliens, all scientists would believe it. Now, getting an apparently intelligent radio signal may not be enough proof, but if we do get some good proof, of course, scientists will believe it. That's what it means to be a scientist - you look at the facts and not just your beliefs.

      Moving the Earth from the centre of the universe to a minor speck around a minor star has actually had an affect on certain mainstream religions, societies attitude towards science, and other 'minor' changes. I'm sure proving that there are aliens will have a similar affect.

      The idea that everything that doesn't make a profit is a waste of money will, I'm sure, be the United States downfall.

      --
      Anarchists never rule
  28. SETI? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    well personally i don't really belive that we could actually search for extraterresteral life with our current technological knowledge. The most probable case is that most ET lifeforms probably have a very different technological level than we do. For example there might be many different ways to transmit signals other than EM waves. What if they used some not-yet-known methods to broadcast their message? They neglect this possibility. They're assuming their knowledge of physics is 100% correct. In fact, as seen in history, most of these theories are proven incorrect, or at least inaccurate. The assumptions those guys make are really so narrowminded assumptions...

    It seems to me that it's a political thing to blind the public from knowing what's *really* happening...

    1. Re:SETI? by jnana · · Score: 1
      And what's really happening? Aliens are among us, infiltrating our government and trying to subvert our religion? Give me a break.

      You obviously haven't read the article and don't know what you're talking about, or you would know that they don't "assume their knowledge of physics is 100% correct." This is something that only a complete and utter moron would think, and to believe that scientists are really as stupid as the people who think these sorts of things is a bit insulting. Only people who think of science as a kind of magic think things like, 'they're assuming their knowledge of physics is 100% correct.'

      Seth explains in the interview--if you cared to read it before telling us what 'those guys' think--that, yes, it is possible that they use only encrypted signals that are diffuse and not narrow band and that we wouldn't be able to detect them, but he says that it's a bit like Columbus getting ready to sail and being told that he'll probably die, there's probably nothing out there, and even if there were, he wouldn't find it. Of course, there is always the possibility of failure, but the chance of failure is 100% if you don't try.

  29. Means of communication by metlin · · Score: 2

    Seth has a very important point.

    "...they look for Dyson spheres by looking for stars that have a lot of infrared. But you know, they've only looked a couple hundred stars."

    "..So that was 1959 and by 1960 people were already looking for the signals."

    "...So if you want to send a bit of information from here to Alpha Centauri it's cheaper, in terms of the energy, to do that with radio than to do it with light."

    "So, you know, that's been the argument for many years. Now that argument isn't very solid anymore. "

    That's a very insightful statement. Perhaps we are yet to discover yet another means of efficient mode of communication. Now suppose Earth were to try and make contact with another civilization, would we use smoke signals or radio?

    Just imagine what would have happened if someone had transmitted a radio message just about 200 years ago? We do not even know if someone did.

    Perhaps it is possible that some alien civilization has a much more efficient and better means of communication, and they are trying very hard to tell us something, but hey, would we know it even if we saw it?

    Perhaps they should try blowing up stars next or something ;-)

    1. Re:Means of communication by HanzoSan · · Score: 2



      Or Aliens could figure we arent worth the time in paying attention to. Kinda like we dont pay attention to ants.

      --
      If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
    2. Re:Means of communication by An+Onerous+Coward · · Score: 1
      Perhaps they should try blowing up stars next or something ;-)


      That might be a rather extreme way to go about it. :) Besides, what would they assume was being communicated? I don't think there's any natural way for a star to blow up in the middle of it's life cycle. But if they know something we don't, they may just assume something perfectly natural happened. 'Twould be a waste of a good sun in any case.

      Now, in a similar vein, I once heard an interesting concept in interstellar communication: Just dump a few tons of tritium (or some other artificial isotope) into the sun's atmosphere. The emission spectrum given off by the material would show up on any spectrography equipment they might have pointed our way.
      --

      You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!

    3. Re:Means of communication by metlin · · Score: 2

      Actually, you do not even have to go that far. It is more than enough if you can direct a few hundred kgs of any isotope with a small half-life to the sun, when you have solar storms.

      This would automatically cause wierd spectra. But the sad thing is that Chandra (the telescope) recently spotted real astronomical bodies which give out such spectra. So, even this maynot be a sure fire way of letting them ppl know our presence.

    4. Re:Means of communication by Ivop · · Score: 1

      There are in fact a lot of people who study ants on a regular basis. --Ivo

  30. If they are smarter than us by HanzoSan · · Score: 2



    And this is something we never even consider.

    Why the hell would they be using radio when they have nano technology, and mind to mind communication via some more efficient technology via lasers, or Electro magnetic type technology, really why would they be using radio if they've been around for millions of years before us when we are using radio after not even a million years of being around.

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
    1. Re:If they are smarter than us by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      radio is electromagnetic and what does radio have to do with nanotechnology?

  31. We forget by HanzoSan · · Score: 2



    If we have stealth aircrafts which can bypass enemy radar, how do we know aliens dont have cloaking and arent flying around watching us right now?

    I mean if they are so much more advanced, its not like we could detect them with our technology.

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
    1. Re:We forget by BattyMan · · Score: 1

      The Vulcans have been watching us for years...

      --
      Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
  32. That interview was painful to read! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That was the worst interview I have ever had the displeasure to read. There were small entertaining or informative portions but what I don't want in an interview is a verbatim transcription of the interview tape without editing that extends for so long and covers so little.

  33. A few points, probably too late in the discussion by edo-01 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    As Seth points out in the interview, an alien civilization may be using spread spectrum radio broadcasts instead of the relatively easier to detect narrowband transmissions, they may well be using non-radio EM or even a kind of communication outside of our current knowledge of physics - an Einstein-Rosen bridge or something even more exotic.

    But as he says, we can't wait for some new kind of physics. What we have NOW for picking up signals from other starsystems is a bunch of radio telescopes and as far as we know the most likely kind of signal to look for is either a deliberate "here we are" kind of message or "leaked" stuff like our TV broadcasts that have strong carrier signals. Sure that leaves out a hell of a lot of potential signals to look for but SETI has a very limited budget - Colgate probably spends more a week marketing toothbrushes than SETI uses in a year - so they have to look for the most likely candidate with the resources they have.

    As new tech become available to then such as the 1hT array in a few years they can widen the search from hundreds of stars to millions. If there is only one civilization in that search group that was broadcasting back when the light we see left their sun then there's a good chance we'll hear them.

    What gets me though is that given the lifespan of the galaxy there's time enough for millions of technological civilizations to arise - but *not all at the same time*. It could be that there's only ever one or two radio capable species alive in the whole galaxy at any given time. Even if there are hundreds or thousands of civizations active right now each is trapped at the bottom of a relativistic-well: there could be a bunch of guys with tentacles a hundred lightyears away sending us a "hullloooo? HELLoooooo??" message *right now* but it'll be a hundred years before we get it. Shit, Alpha Centuri could have been beaming out "pings" for fifty years but gave up 4.35 years and one day before Marconi built the first radio. But coinidences do happen, and they are more likely when playing the odds so I am still caustiously optimistic.

    Given all of this, as is pointed out in the interview, maybe what we should be looking for is not something transient like a radio broadcast or a laser pulse - but examples of stellar engineering that would be evident for millions or billions of years, Dyson Spheres or something. Though to my mind any civilization that can build a Dyson Sphere has probably discovered an energy source a lot better than solar - zero point energy or something, so there may not be a hell of a lot of Dyson Spehere out there.

  34. Where are the aliens? by Pedrito · · Score: 2

    I think I've posted this before, but I'll post it again.

    I've long believed there are ETs out there for us to meet, but the truth is, if they're out there, I doubt highly that they're in our galaxy, which pretty much puts them entirely out of reach for any sort of contact, communication or otherwise.

    I'm not going to post the link again 'cause I'm tired of posting it, but Scientific American ran a great article about 2 years ago about the chances for intelligent (and exploring) life in our galaxy, and the result is, if they existed, they would have colonized the entire galaxy by now. At least, statistics agree with that, and I believe in statistics.

    At only a bit ahead of our current technology, it would only take 5 million years to colonize the entire galaxy, a blink of the eye in astronomical terms. Therefore, we're here, and nobody else has colonized. If they had, their fingerprints would be everywhere.

    Nobody is more disappointed than I by this. I want to meet the ETs, but frankly, I just can't reasonably believe that they're there anymore (at least not in our galaxy).

    There are also compelling arguments about the series of events that led to multi-cellular life and later intelligence on our own planet. Many of these were "accidents" or "luck".

    You add to all this that the fact that every extrasolar system (save one), where we have found planets, they have gas giants in the "habitable zone", or between the "habitable zone" and the star ,which means that no liveable planets could survive (the gas giants would toss them into the star, or more likely, out of the system).

    Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think we're alone in this galaxy (with the exception of life that either has no interest in exploring, or a lesser intelligence than us).

    1. Re:Where are the aliens? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And just how stars are there in our galaxy, and how many extrasolar planetary systems are there? And how many galaxies, and how many billions of years since the first planetary systems formed? Those are very, very big numbers you're considering. The improbable becomes very, very probable in such conditions. Remember this intelligence you speak of on Earth had developed in merely 10 million years.

  35. [OT] Re:seti is bunk by yulek · · Score: 1

    goddamit, why the hell did someone metamod this to "overrated". did you even bother following the link i posted?

    i swear to god, slashdot is becoming impossible to post to, there's a small community of posters who automatically get a 2, and hardly anyone else can get a friggin voice.

    i think the article i link to is very interesting and worthy of discussion...

    --
    in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
    1. Re:[OT] Re:seti is bunk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      So you think that the article you wrote and linked to is "very interesting and worthy of discussion?"

      The problem is, no one appears to agree with you. It wasn't a "metamod" either, just a plain old vanilla, "this isn't that interesting, I'll mod it down."

      Try writing in complete sentences with some sort of capitalization and punctuation and maybe you'll be taken more seriously. Also, it's an epinions product review. This is like linking to a user comment on IMDB. It has undergone zero editorial review. It's not an article at all, just a comment. And, as a comment, it doesn't stand well on it's own. Therefore, "overrated." No conspiracy.

  36. No all scientists wouldnt by HanzoSan · · Score: 1


    Just like they didnt believe the world was round in the past.

    You see, its very difficult to prove stuff like this, we've gotten rocks with bacteria in it from mars, we see proof of water on mars and other planets, how much more proof do we really need? WE even have people on earth claiming they see UFOs and Aliens, crop circles and so on and so forth.

    With the proof we have, scientists dont believe it. ITs going to take more than some sound waves from the sky to prove aliens exsist, they will have to land in front of the white house on multiple TV stations in front of millions of people, and people will have to go see it in person because they still wont believe it. (could be a hoax, people can manipulate the images, etc etc)

    Its going to take, ALOT of proof, not alittle, to convince scientists. And I think that proof will be actually seeing an alien in person and studying it.

    --
    If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
    1. Re:No all scientists wouldnt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      On the contrary, everything scientists know about the cosmos is based on "sound [sic, they are electromagnetic] waves from the sky" as you say. These waves are the only way we can detect other planets, stars, and galaxies. The Big Bang theory is based solely on evidence from "waves from the sky". General relativity was first proven through observation of these waves.

      In other words, much of modern science is founded on these signals. Of course, if aliens actually landed in Los Angeles, that would convince everyone of their existence. But detecting an obviously intelligent pattern in a signal would also be a definitive proof.

      Scientists work quantitatively, through math and logic. The probability that such a pattern would arise through random interactions is infinitesimal, comparable to that of a typewriter-monkey producing Shakespeare. It doesn't matter that radio waves are intangible and undetectable without scientific instruments. Logic tells us that such a signal is proof enough.

      A quick rebuttal to your other arguments:

      • Scientists never believed the world was flat. There were very few scientists around at the time when that was a popular belief.
      • Finding primitive bacteria on Mars says only that there were once primitive bacteria on Mars. It says little about whether intelligent, non-primitive life ever appeared elsewhere.
      • Crop circles and the like can be far more easily explained: they are hoaxes or claims from ignorant and/or crazy people. Note that astronomers have never seen a UFO, and they are experts at looking at the sky, and do so all the time. You'd think they'd be the first to see them. But only ignorant laymen claim to have seen them. The second-hand observations of non-experts are not conclusive evidence. Radio signals, on the other hand, are.