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."

Comments

formula for likelihood of life

[guidobot]

The formula used to rank the different stars according to the likelihood that they would host a communicating civilization is:

score= N*(bv-bv0)*exp(0.5*(bv-bv_sun)^2)/(par+0.01)^3

where

N is a normalizing factor, 1.65x10^7
bv is b-v color
bv0 is b-v color of the bluest star in the catalog (-0.41)
bv_sun is the b-v color of the sun (+0.65)
par is the parallax in milliarcseconds

How exactly do you test the validity of a formula like this?

Window of contact

[hpeg]

I can't believe that people are still looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, hooing to make contact one day.

Stanislaw Lem once described the window of contact as the tiny amount of time in a planet's life that an intelligent life form has to evolve far enough to create enough noise around their planet that will be picked up as non-static background noise, until its civilisation dies the entroy death.

Even if we picked up something now, it would only be a tiny flicker of something that existed millions of years ago, with no hope of us ever meeting whoever created this glimpse of order in the chaos of the universe.

We are alone out there. Confined by the same rules that hold our universe together into a tiny section of space and time. The best we can hope for is to become nomads, travelling to near systems in the hope of making them inhabitable when this sun gives out. If we haven't fallen into the ashes until then.

Re:Window of contact

[mmacdona86]

As others have pointed out, we could pick up something that existed a few score or a few hundred years ago, and that would certainly be interesting.

Even knowing there was intelligent life somewhere else millions of years ago--and if the signal was millions of years old, it would necessarily represent an extremely advanced civilization, powerful enough to transmit a signal to another galaxy--would be extremely interesting scientifically and philosophically.

Finally, it is only conjecture that the "Window of Contact" is brief. For all we know, once civilizations get to a certain point of development, they last forever, and slowly but surely colonize all the inhabitable parts of their galaxy.

Re:Hi SETI people....

[Idarubicin]

Me? I'll spend my spare CPU cycles trying to find a drug combination to cure cancer.

Very noble of you. Among other things, I have spent my own time, not my computer's, working on cures for cancer. (Right now I'm back at school.) I could have been earning much better money pushing paper--actually, I took a 25% pay cut to do cancer research.

You know what? I was running SETI@Home on my computer at the time. And I don't feel guilty about it. Maybe there was a better use for those cycles, but I think of it as a sort of hobby for my computer. People who spend their spare time watching football, or playing with electric trains, or painting--forget what their computers are doing, shouldn't they be working on 'more relevant' problems?

Breast cancer killed my best friend's mother this summer. I would love to see a cure for cancer, as well as for any number of other diseases--Alzheimer's runs in my family, and my uncle has diabetes. But if fear of death is to set all of our priorities, leaving no room for a sense of wonder and exploration--what's the point of living?

If you really want to help people in a tangible way, please--go out and give blood. Not just after a terrorist attack, but every two months. Or volunteer at a food bank. Not just at Thanksgiving, or Christmas, but year round. Write a cheque to a charitable organization. If you can't afford that, write a letter to your government representative--tell them what their funding priorities should be.