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SETI to Upgrade Software, Telescope
Professor_Quail writes "Space.com reports that SETI@home is planning to transfer it's operations from Arecibo to another telescope in Australia, where they say lies an increased chance of finding extra-terrestrials. The Australian telescope is more powerful, with a wider view of the sky; scientists are betting that this new telescope will also help find signs of 'shriveling' black holes."
Parkes is the radio telescope that stared in the movie "The Dish" which describes when it was used to receive the transmissions of the first moon landing.
Guess I should've read the article first:
According to Hawking's theory, "black holes give off radiation and therefore lose mass," Anderson explains. "So small black holes will basically kind of dry up and go away. In the moment of their disappearance, the theory predicts that they will give up a short burst of broad band radio radiation. Our data from Arecibo is an ideal place to look for that sort of thing."
"It seems like if we're looking for aliens, the last place we'd like to look is in the middle of a black hole. "
Well, you see black holes compress matter- it's like a thick-spot in space, since a mass the size of Jupiter can fit into the size of a strawberry. Imagine for a moment how many thousands of alien civilizations could fit inside these black holss...
All of them screaming, "LET US OUTTA HERE! IT'S CRAMPED AND SOMEONE FARTED!"
Yeah, I'm sure that's it. :)
It's probably signalling a change of just what kind of actual research-program we'll be running, but it'll look the same. One thing bothers me though: higher-res means slower conversion of the data. Instead of a year to examine a year's data, it could be decades...
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico receives information from about one third of the sky, all in the northern celestial hemisphere. But what if ET is lurking in the southern skies? The Parkes telescope in Australia is the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere and can observe all of the southern sky. Fortunately, SETI colleagues in Australia have agreed to colloborate with SETI@home and host a new data recorder at Parkes. Work on this new SETI@home data recorder is well under way. The new instrument will record data from 13 places on the sky simultaneously, observing 13 "beams" at a time compared to the 1 "beam" at Arecibo. We are trying to raise funds to conduct these southern hemisphere observations for SETI@home. Funding permitting, we expect the new data recorder to be installed and operational at Parkes in early 2003. For more information on the Southern Hemisphere SETI@home plans, see "SETI@home Gearing to Expand the Search" at the Planetary Society
They also name "AstroPulse - the search for pulsars, ET, and black holes" and "To support future projects we are developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)"
There is also the planned project time line until 2005.
and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article. SETI@home has been collecting data at the Arecibo radio telescope for the last several years, and we have observed pretty much everything that is visible from that location. We are building a new data recorder that will be capable of observing broadband data/many independent narrow bands, and we will be using this to observe in Australia. We have also applied to re-observe any interesting locations we have found at Arecibo, using this new equipment.
For the last several years, we have been using the data we have gathered for several purposes, amongst which are mapping the Hydrogen distrobution in the milky way and searching for SETI. We are about to start a new project that will search for broadband pulses (which must be very short in durration), which can be encoded to have a reverse dopler effect, which would be a clear sign of ET. However, a normal pulse would be a sign of an evaporating black hole, which has been predicted but never observed.
This new project will run on a system called BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrasturcture for Network Computing (yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License). However, BOINC is not limited to running only Astro-Pulse (the previously mentioned project) and the next generation of SETI@home, but will also be running other independent distributed computing projects. More information is available at the BOINC and SETI@home websites.
There's no sig like SIGSEG
Please SETI@Home developers, if you chance my reading this please consider what I have to say.
Graphicless client. Yes I'm aware there is a command line client, it is a main in the ass to get running and have STAY running for many people. I'd like a client I can load up as a service in WinNT or a deamon in Unix that will run without my futzing with it or having to do anything but have the damn thing load from init. I think there's a slew of other SETI@Home users who'd appriciate this as well.
Worker threads. Oh please oh please oh please in your next revision add worker threads. I really don't need the graphics run in one thread and work units processed in another. I've got a dual P3 system that is on 24/7. Half of its processing capacity is sitting idle since I don't run the S@H screen saver. The monitor is off whenever the system isn't in use so the screen saver isn't much use.
Those two are the most important for me really. I run a couple distributed computing clients at different times but I started with S@H and have a special place for it in my widdle heart. I'm in it for the search itself, not to just have a cool screen saver. I think there's plenty of others who wouldn't mind a built for speed version of your client.
As an aside, does anyone know if any of the S@H work units are recycled and fed into other projects like studying pulsars or radio emitting variable stars? I'm not too up on the format of S@H work units but I thought it'd be cool if astronomers studying any sort of celestial phenomenae in radio bands could recycle WUs for their own purposes, even if they don't have a big distributed cluster working on them.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
"Well, you see black holes compress matter- it's like a thick-spot in space, since a mass the size of Jupiter can fit into the size of a strawberry. Imagine for a moment how many thousands of alien civilizations could fit inside these black holss..." Black holes are singularities - that is, a single point in space with an infinite density. Nothing can live there, as everything is shredded into it's component sub-atomic particles before they even get there. They are formed by the collapse of massive bodies in on themselves - a favourite is when white dwarfs (the still-beating hearts of dead stars) accrete too much matter and go over a critical limit (something like 1.6 solar masses. I'm not too sure on this, and my textbooks are so far away...) leading to them collapsing in on themselves and a black hole forming. You can't get closer to a black hole and return from it than it's event horizon, the surface around it where the escape velocity is >= the speed of light. Well, you can, but you won't be around to tell the tale! If a hole is rotating there is a region known as the ergosphere where it is possible to get the universes most impressive gravitational slingshot from. Even a small black hole takes around 10^60 years to evaporate. The universe is about 1.4x10^9 years old. It's gonna be a long time until the black holes start disappearing, never mind the supermassive ones at the heart of galaxies. Physics is great.
(does not mention SETI yet, at least not prominently)
Perhaps not, but the link from that to the Long Baseline Array is quite interesting. There is a map of the array of telescopes - the spread is huge!
One thing that makes me continue to run SETI@home instead of more "practical" applications like protein folding is the simple fact that SETI@home will not generate money for the originators of the project. The results of protein folding and AIDS research will ultimately result in some people getting filthy rich, and if they want that they can bloody well do the work themselves.
The phrase "Come on, people." happens to be a sentence fragment. This is the /. message boards, not Harvard School of Law, the internet has always been a pretty casual environment, basically, if you know what someone means, it doesnt matter if they write like a Rhodes Scholar, or a layman. Lighten up a little, you will find yourself with lower blood pressure, and chicks will dig you.
I hate sigs.
There is no logical reason why one part of the sky will have more chance of detecting a signal than any other.
Yes there is. The Arecibo radio telescope is situated in the northern hemisphere, which can only view the outer arms of the Milky Way. Not only that, Aricebo can only sweep 30 degrees of the sky with 1 beam.
Parkers is in the southern hemisphere, which can view the central dense mass (laymans' term - lots of freaking stars in the middle) of the Milky Way, and sweep 70 degrees of the sky with 13 beams.
In other words, we went all over 30 degrees in the northern hemisphere, lets take a look at the highly populated (star-wise) section of the Milky Way in the unscanned southern hemisphere with a bigger and better telescope.
Common sense, really.
There are essentially no searches being carried out in the Southern hemisphere at the present after the Howard government in Australia chose to withdraw all funding back in 1996.
Maybe someone could look at an Asteroid@Home option as well?
"I'm tired of all this 'Aren't humanity great' bullshit. We're a virus with shoes" - Bill Hicks
While I understand the need to search for near-earth asternoids (the extinction of the human species doesn't appeal to me), there should be some resources reserved for projects like SETI. In retrospect, when we think of the greatest achivements of science, more often than not we think of the advances that changed, in a fundamental way, our understanding of the natural world. I don't see how knowing that the earth orbits the sun rather than the other way around made anyone's life better at the time, but the proof of this ranks as one of the greatest achievements in human history because it revolutionized the way we thought about God, ourselves, and the world we live in.
I think that the discovery of an extraterrestial civilization would be an achievement on par with the proof of heliocentrism. Knowing that there are civilizations on other planets would have no immediate practical consequences (we wouldn't be able to travel to their planet and meet them), but the knowledge that we aren't the only civilized species would radically alter the way that we think about the world, especially in terms of theology and metaphysics.
What I, in my ignorance, consider to be a waste of resources is the development of new elements. This is something that has no practical value and no effect on our worldview. Creating new elements in particle accelerators must be very, very expensive, and the finished product only lasts for a short period of time. Even if they found that, somewhere down the line, element 315 is stable, it wouldn't matter because they're making these things one atom at a time. If element 315 had an atomic mass of 700, they'd have to produce something like 8x10^20 atoms just to get a gram of it. I vote that we take their grant money and use it to search for near-earth asteroids.
Steve
Take a clue from KLAT2
"KLAT2's 80/64-bit double-precision performance is around 22.8 GFLOPS, a very respectable number. Then again, using 3DNow!, KLAT2's single-precision ScaLAPACK performance zips to over 64 GFLOPS"
Optimize clients for different architectures. MMX, 3Dnow!, SSE, SSE2, Altivec, Hyper threading, x86-64 etc.
Might be nice to jump from 50 Tflops/s to 150/s just by using processor specific instructions.
Since the client will be open source, users may try it anyway but perhaps SETI could offer some kind of contest to insure the code gets audited properly.
For programmers out there, imagine placing "Optimized code for the largest distributed computing project in the world, resulting in a threefold increase in performance" in your resume.
Being personally responsible for adding 100 Tflop/s to seti@home beats the hell out of running clients on a few idle machines.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I notice that they will make use of the multibeam receiver to get effectively a 13 times increase in stuff they can look at at one time.
.5 degrees across (quick back of the envelope calculation there, so to speak). What in the sky is within .5 degrees? Globular clusters and the centre of the milyway galaxy (or indeed, other galaxies). You won't find life in globular clusters, because there are simply far too many stars too close together, and life would be cooked. Same thing for the centre of our our galaxy. And since you can only see entire globular clusters or supernova in other galaxies, I refuse to believe any civilasation could produce more radiation than a supernova, so we won't be able to see anything that far out!
:)
I wouldn't think this would be terribly useful. When you go up into the focus cabin, and realise the 13 recievers are separated by not more than about 40cm (the dish is 64 metres across) - ie, you are looking at an area of the sky about
Not to mention I really hate seeing such a useful instrument such as the multibeam receiver wasted on such a useless task as SETI, but they are probably (hopefully) only piggy backing on the electrons going to other experiments.
On a more serious note, are these characters saying that there are more advanced stellar civilizations in the southern sky than the northern sky? One shudders at the contorted logic and statistical analysis that could have led to such a conclusion.
It's a perfectly logical conclusion if you've ever looked into the night sky in the southern hemisphere. A larger amount of the milkyway is visible from "Down Under" and, given the relative proximity of our own galaxy's stars, it would seem a better set of candidates.
Simon
What is the point in SETI?
.....
/me removes tongue from cheek...
Certain parts of society are already liasing with aliens, and we have been for some time. Wake up and smell the coffee!
Yes and those documentaries, MIB and MIB2, were fascinating, weren't they?
Calling Parkes mroe 'powerful' than Arecibo is somewhat confusing. Arecibo actually has a much larger disk, so it can detect fainter sources (one definition of powerful). However, it gets this collecting area at the expense of being unable to steer, while Parkes can point all over the sky. The other issue is the multibeam receiver. Parkes with multibeam can observe 13 positions at once, while Arecibo is constrained to one. In this sense Parkes could be said to be 13 times as powerful as Arecibo.
It should be noted that there is also a multibeam receiver at Jodrell Bank near Manchester. I'm not sure if this has been involved with any SETI observations.
As to going to the south, an earlier SETI search by META found a few signals that might've been of artificial origin, but these did not repeat, so were not cast iron SETI candidates. Intrigingly, these sources clustered along the Galactic Plane. By moving the search to the south, SETI will be able to see far more galactic stars. The reference for this is: Horowitz and Sagan, 1993, Astrophysical Journal vol. 415 p.218.
If advanced alien civilizations existed in numbers significant enough for us to hear their radio transmissions, the probability is overwhelming that at least one in a nearby galaxy would have embarked on a program of colonization. Evolution favors organisms which have a drive to expand (otherwise they would have been out-competed). Technological civilizations inherit their evolutionary drives and will share this expansionist tendency.
Expansion can be performed at a significant fraction of the speed of light. von Neumann machines - self-replicating, nanotech-based robotic spacecraft - can fly to a new system, make copies for exploration and colonization, and more copies which get sent off to other stars, all using local system resources. An entire galaxy or even group of galaxies can be explored and colonized at perhaps a tenth the speed of light. A million years will be enough to cover all the stars in a galaxy; a few times that will cover the local group of galaxies.
Once a solar system is inhabited by a technological civilization, its most important goal will be to manage the primary resource, the energy production of the central star. Stars in unmodified systems radiate 99+% of their energy wastefully into empty space. A civilization will want to capture that energy and put it to work, by building a Dyson sphere or some similar structures to collect the wasted light and heat from the star. Star systems inhabited by advanced civilizations will look very different from the ones we see in our galaxy.
The galaxy is ten billion years old. Our technological culture is no more than a few thousand years old. If other technological species have arisen, chances are statistically overwhelming that they are at least tens or hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. This means that they will have had ample time to fully explore, colonize and even modify the entire galaxy.
The only plausible way this can't happen is if there are no other technological civilizations out there. And in that case, SETI won't work, we won't find any signals. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can draw from the fact that we live in a galaxy unmodified by technology.
If the galaxy were so full of advanced life that SETI would work, they'd be here, and everywhere else in the galaxy, by now. Therefore SETI can't work.