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SETI@Home Revisits Its 100 Best Signals
cmbrothe writes "The Planetary Society is running an article about SETI@Home's plan to revisit its 100 most promising signal candidates. The article also outlines the criteria for selecting the candidates."
Just for fun, I googled the 1977 "Wow" signal mentioned in the article and every so often in SETI news. Found this good BBC article on the subject.
This blatant karma whoring is brought to you by the letters "ET".
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
score= N*(bv-bv0)*exp(0.5*(bv-bv_sun)^2)/(par+0.01)^3
How exactly do you test the validity of a formula like this?
That's easy -- it's clearly wrong. It's saying the Sun gets the lowest possible score according to the 3rd factor, when it should obviously get the highest score. (They left out a negative sign.)
Why do journalists put formulas online when they don't have a clue what they mean?
There's no proof there was life on mars. There's only a theory that mars could once have sustained life. That and a pile of rocks that looks like a smiley-face.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Sure, the astrometry (positions) in Hipparcos are better than in Tycho 2, and Hipparcos contains more information about the stars than Tycho 2 (e.g. variability), but still. I would in fact think that Tycho 2 would be better for SETI than Hipparcos, but they may have their reasons.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I'm not talking about all the regular satellite communications. Are we intentionally broadcasting any messages for the universe at large?
Short answer is no - apart from at least one PR message sent out from Aricebo in the 70's IIRC.
And would regular satellite communications appear barycentric? It doesn't sound like it. So, if we're not broadcasting barycentric signals, why would we expect other lifeforms to broadcast them? Or are we braodcasting something barycentric?
The current SETI efforts assume that we will be receiving signals from a beacon aimed at least generally in our direction and which will be very high power. This is obviously a big assumption, but the problem is that we don't have the technology at the moment to detect "alien TV"-strength signals. Those signals would be utterly missed by the Aricebo effort, as they are too weak to resolve against the background noise. The Square Kilometer Array radio telescope might be able to pick up alien TV signals out to a dozen or so light years.
I tried to dig up the paper, but these guys are really publishing a lot of stuff. this may have something to do with it. The author's homepage is here, you can look through a list of some of his papers.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Nice scientific arguement. Read this page on NASAs site.
That should read:
nyy lbhe onfr ner orybat gb hf
All it takes is nukes and nerves.
The dish is fixed into the bowl-shaped depression,
but the detection apparatus in the focal plane (if
that's what they call it) can move around.
Regards, RGC.
I want to live as an honest man, to get all I deserve and give all I can, to love a young woman who I don't understand.