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

Playing the Odds

[Nintendork]

I'm telling myself that it's not going to happen, but what if more than one of those 100 candidates turns out to be the real thing. What a shocker that would be!

I mean, with the amount of planets out there, I'm sure there's a whole lot of life and a lot of intelligent life. It's just that we hope to find one other intelligent race and people aren't even thinking about finding more than that.

-Lucas

Would they detect themselves?

[wowbagger]

While I am a contributor to SETI@home, I have to wonder about the following question:

"Given the rules they place on a signal, would SETI@Home have detected the past attempts we've made to contact other stars?"

Consider the past efforts at Arecibo to send a message to other stars. We focused on one star for a couple of hours, and sent a message. Perhaps we repeated it over the course of a few days.

Now, let us suppose that a civilization with a similar technology to ours was located on a planet around Proxima Centauri, and let us suppose they did exactly as we did in our transmissions at Arecibo. Would that signal have been found by SETI@Home?

Given how the SETI receivers might not have been looking in the right places at the right times to see more than one transmission, might that signal have been discarded because we did not see more than one instance of it?

Are we broadcasting, too?

[Seanasy]

I'm not talking about all the regular satellite communications. Are we intentionally broadcasting any messages for the universe at large?

If, however, the barycentric frequency of a signal remains steady, this almost certainly means that it is designed to compensate for the movements of its own host planet. In other words, it would point to a deliberate intelligent design.

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? Can I tune in?

Re:Are we broadcasting, too?

[Idarubicin]

It's not that SETI@Home is ignoring non-barycentric signals; they are just assigning barycentric signals a higher priority for examination.

This is a pretty reasonable approach, actually. Barycentric signals imply deliberate action. Further, they imply that the signals are intended to be received by someone or something (not necessarily us) beyond the immediate space about the transmitting planet.

SETI@Home is certainly not ignoring non-barycentric signals, they are only prioritizing the (literally) billions of potential 'hits' they have accumulated. I'm quite sure that if we started seeing large gaussians every time Arecibo swung past Proxima Centauri, nobody would ignore them even if the peaks Dopplered a bit from planetary orbital motion.

On the flip side, no--we are not broadcasting any barycentric signals right now. An alien SETI@Centauri project might assign us a slightly lower priority because we're not making a deliberate effort to be noticed. Nevertheless, continuous radio and television signals across multiple frequencies would probably make us quite an interesting target to any race with good enough detectors and large enough dishes.

More info on the top 100

[i8a4re]

There are two things I'd really like to take a look at, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

First, there is a program that can convert the work unit files into a wav file. I think it would be pretty cool to listen to some of these top 100 signals. I've played with the program on quite a few work units and never been able to hear anything but static. As strong as the top 100 signals are, you should actually be able to hear something.

Second, there are a few places on seti's and related sites that show a picture of what a good signal looks like. Why don't they take a grad student and make him run through the top 100 signals and record what the graphics look like when it is processed?

I've actually emailed them before and requested both of these. I've never gotten a response nor have they posted either. If they have, then I've just missed it.