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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."
the signal must sound like a humpback whale...
Is that the REAL signals will obviously be coming from starships in nearby space which have either warp/hyperdrive and will therefore be NOWHERE near where they were when the signal was first detectred months or years ago.
lysergically yours
'First, the least reliable signals must be weeded out in a process called "data integrity check", and those that are most likely the result of detection or computer error are eliminated' So they're going to throw out all of the signals that were a result of detection. Hmmm...
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?
Five billion candidates? Seems to me like they should have weeded some of those out along the way. Wasn't that the point of getting all that computational power, to come up with a manageable sample of promising possibilities?
Brevity is the soul of wit
-- Polonius
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
"Ah, a signal. Quick, beam a signal back, and...uh...wait 30,000,000 years for a reply! Cool!"
sounds like your typical tech. support query.
/me crosses fingers that my packet detected ET
would i get modded up for that?
Wasn't that telescope destroyed in Goldeneye? How are they still using it?
Lasers Controlled Games!
If they've done any research to correlate the number of possible signals to the frequency of radio broadcasts featuring Michael Jackson...just a thought, I mean, they are looking for aliens...
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.
The day that SETI searches for signals might be one of the most important dates in mans history J
This is because we might actually find a CONFIRMED signal of intelligent life!
But it most probably will be nothing (the chances of us getting a hit see slim to none based on the probability )
Only if the govt had a copyright/IP treaty/agreement with the alien civilization.
Oh, and btw, quit turning every goddamn post into a lame ass rant or joke about the RIAA or DMCA. Thank you.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Obligatory comments here...
Did I miss any?
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
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?
www.eFax.com are spammers
And sue those aliens later!
Who says two way communication is the only way we can take advantage of the finding? If they're more advanced than us at the time in their history when the signal was sent out into the cosmos, we'll learn a lot just by listening.
Imagine if 50 years ago, they could watch our current TV programs, listen to our current radio broadcasts, read the internet.
Hell, even if we don't advance because they're at the level we were at in the 20s, a LOT would change because aliens would be FACT instead of FICTION.
-Lucas
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.
But what about the Genesis Project? That planet came to life in just a few short years. Oh what horror to think that the reborn Spock might be left behind!
Almost all celestial signals vary in frequency over time. That is because they originate on moving celestial bodies, whose velocity relative to the Earth changes constantly. This causes the signal's detection frequency on Earth to vary as well, in a phenomenon known as "Doppler drift." ... 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.
a rk goals of the SETI project, would this really have any chance of hitting anything?
While this is as good a plan as any, i suppose, given the find-a-possibly-nonexistent-light-switch-in-the-d
I mean.. why would an intelligence compensate for doppler shift? The only reason i can think of that they would is if they were trying to beam "hello out there" signals into outer space. Do *we* (i.e. humans) compensate for doppler shift when we broadcast those random signals into space trying to find aliens? Or are they hoping to find interstellar communications between an alien race and its own starships?
And anyway, would this really work? I mean, everything in the universe is moving away from each other, but they're all doing it at different speeds. One would think that the signal the aliens put out would have to be specifically targeted at earth itself in order for its frequency to stay constant, if the signal was targeted at something else the frequency wouldn't drift at quite the right rate (assuming the way you compensate for doppler shift is, in fact, to vary your frequency) to be constant from earth.
Is any of this right?
A cover of "Peppermint Twist" recieved from a point near Epsilon Eridani, played on what sounds like oil drums and unlubricated condoms using a 68-tone scale. Great beat and you can dance to it if you have five legs.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
this is like the recent Saturday night live "weekend update" bit where tina fey says
FEY: Scientists have discovered a gene which makes Onions water out eyes, creating the possibility for tearless onions
FEY: Hey guys, why don't you work on that whole CANCER thing...that's a bit more pressing, just put the onion project aside and CURE CANCER
I'm not talking about all the regular satellite communications. Are we intentionally broadcasting any messages for the universe at large?
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?
Warning: the following post contains material that can be considerd possible flamebait. You have been warned!
The reason that SETI@HOME has been embraced by the computer community at large is that the computer community has a large segment of individuals who
- have seen every Star Trek episode aired.
- live in eternal hope that their computer will be the one that provides evidence of extra-terrestrial life.
- don't care a tinker's cuss for a cure to cancer, because it doesn't affect them.
This just proves the conspiracy to hide alien life from us!
Woopty Doo Basil, what does it all mean?!
And we'll have to find the nuclear wessels.
And we'll screw up the time line by creating transparent aluminum.
i understand the 100% scientific approach to weeding out certain stars that have not been around that long:
When it comes to scoring signals, however, not all stars are equal. This is because, according to SETI wisdom, some stars are more likely to host a communicating alien civilization than others. Thus, for example, only main-sequence stars are considered for signal-scoring purposes, excluding red giants and white dwarfs. Short-lived stars, whose lifespan is only a few million years, are also excluded from consideration, since complex life would not have had time to evolve in such an environment. Nearby stars, on the other hand, get "extra credit" in their scoring, since it would be comparatively easier to communicate with civilizations in our galactic neighborhood than with those in distant parts of our galaxy or beyond. Finally, the more similar a star is to our own Sun, the higher its score, since it would be more likely to host a civilization similar to ours.
and maybe this sounds really really stupid and like i should stop watching star trek - but i don't actually watch it! but surely a far advanced alien race could be migratory and move to one of these less advanced planets. like maybe for the sunshine?
While SETI@home will be using the Arecibo dish to observe the most significant 100 signals, wouldn't it suck for the intelligent signal was the 101st? If there are billions of signal candidates, I imagine the 101st signal is still interesting.
I also wonder if they are going to put the most interesting signals in the middle of their dish time, so that the operators have some warm up time... Putting the most interesting ones first might not be such a good idea if the engineers haven't had a chance to have their coffee/tea/etc. kick in.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
"Ah, a signal. Quick, beam a signal back, and...uh...wait 30,000,000 years for a reply! Cool!"
If we do get a radio signal from 30 Mil years back you can be sure as hell whoever sent it wasn't trying to talk to us.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
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
Unless they had time travel. And encoded the instructions to build the time travel device in the radio wave. Then we could build it, go back in time, and respond before they even sent the first message. Of course then they would have never sent the instructions in the firrst place....
*sound of head exploding*
When UD works on one of the many operating systems that I actually use, I'll be there (and I'm hardly going to be using wine on SPARC).
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
Indeed, who needs billions of bogomips of processing when you have a deaf guy and a lesbian to notice the one signal that really matters. Wait, wasn't there a token black guy as well? And do we need a golden haired child, or was that the lesbian as a kid? Oh god, I can't remember! It's hopeless, I tell you, hopeless, there are too many variables.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
with modern high end CPU's taking up 50-70W at full load thats like keep on a lightbulb on 24/7.
That's a great idea. If everybody leaves a lightbulb on (preferably outdoors) 24/7 instead of running Seti@Home, the aliens will be able to see us (at night, anyway).
When I get home from work, I'm shutting down Seti@Home and turning on my back porch light.
That's EXACTLY what I'm talking about!
I know I'm responding to an AC, but I hope that your grandmother didn't die alone. And I even hope that you don't die alone.
Never mind about life millions of light-years away, life that's dead by the time we might hear its "Hello, world". Concentrate on the life around you, before its gone.
I get the feeling that we, metaphorically speaking, wall flowers. Leaning agains the wall at the side of the dance waiting for _someone_else_ to some invite us out to play.
Other than the accidental leakage, are we beaming out anything intentional for SETI@marklar?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I was hoping people would like to join my project of SBI@home (Search for Buluga Intelligence). I will be puttting a microphone in the middle of the Red River (stationed in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada), in hopes to pick up signals sent directly to us, with intent, from buluga whales. Once we have communication with them, we will attempt to pin point exactly where the buluga whale was when he/she sent this message to us. Even tho the signal may have taken 1000 days to reach us, and even tho we would be analyzing signals sent from the buluga whale sometime in september of 1998. THEN - We will attempt to decipher the message and send back the signal with a witty 'first reply' joke ... Which will be the first intergalactic joke. (next to seti@home that is) ...
THEN - me and the buluga will chill and have beers
would be that life isn't rare. Therefore, we don't have to treat the Earth carefully, because our situation isn't unique. Clear-cut those rainforests, slash-and-burn agriculture is best; pollution controls - we don't need no steenking pollution controls; biodiversity is for weenies.
:-) :-) :-) (because sometimes sarcasm/humor goes unrecognized)
Oops, *how* far away did you say these other planets are?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Not to cavemen, but those bluprints would be obtainable a couple thousand years later and would be useful to us in the mid 20th century.
You don't like puzzles, do you?
Sure, if the SETI project gave conclusive proof that there was alien life, It would be a day that would go down in history.
But, it has to be rock solid proof. Not just a signal, we need a communication from another world. Otherwise CNN will have someone on there within the hour making up 50 other possibilities for the signal.
--ST
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
Better still, what if the aliens have figured out how to upload your mind out of your meat body and into something more permanent.
We could all become IMMORTAL. Bwa ha. Bwa haha. Bwahahahahah!
Joking aside, contacting aliens would be a much more significant event than curing cancer. We already have a more than effective way to replenish the population on this planet.
Maybe, maybe not.
While there are most likely no practical aspects (see note) to finding extraterrestrial intelligence, the psychological possibilities range from none to downright stunning. First and foremost would be the effects on religion, wiping away any vestige of a trace of Galileo's persecution, but probably kicking up a new fuss. Not to mention that religion is used as an excuse for a great number of today's world's ills. (Notice I said 'excuse', not 'cause.') Second might well be a push to 'measure up' to the other example of intelligence.
Note: As for practical aspects, what if we found they were broadcasting information. Trojan Horse stories like Cosmos and Species abound. Stories have also keyed on the problems of being handed technology rather than discovering it.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
~Idarubicin
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.
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
100 Best Singles!... Thats what i'm Talking about!.. 100 hot alien singles with hot alien bod's and hot.... uh... oh.... signals.... dang..
never mind....
"just another ugly toad waiting for a kiss from a princess"
A radio signal is likely to be the first known contact with alien life.
There is no telling if the SETI@Home process will be the means of picking up that signal. But, the odds are actually quite good.
The problem is that no one knows how long it will take to find it (or them). But, in the end the chances of success are great. One day on the big dish could be like looking out into your neighborhood and expecting to see a new neighbor unloading their Ryer Van. One day is likely to be a bust. But, that does not mean it is not the right thing to do.
Chances are that we will be communicating with aliens via radio for thousands of years before we visit them or they visit us. It is a simple factor of how difficult the alternative tasks are. Radio communication is relatively easy. And, even if radio waves take some time to transverse the space it is so much more likely than a physical movement.
We will hear from them if they exist. Whether this current SETI project will do so is simply unknown.
NexuSys - Linux support by the best
Wouldn't it suck if the 101st most insteresting signal was actually created by aliens? I guess it'd be too bad they didn't make the cut.
"Sorry if this comes across as flamebait or redundant, but I just think that there's more relevant problems here on Earth that we could fix."
We all have our choices. The reason I chose Seti over cancer is because alien research is underfunded, cancer research is not.
So we little green aliens go to all the trouble to put the
transmitter far away from any other radio sources (like stars
and galaxies) - we shift the frequency to compensate for the
orbit of your planet around your sun - we listen to your
transmissions and send ours back on channels we know you
must be listening to - and we get modded down for all of
those things? Damn!
So what DO we have to do to get more Karma at Seti?
www.sjbaker.org
Actually, I was thinking that SETI@Home should not only "revisit its 100 most promising signal candidates" but burn them onto a CD-ROM set and make a deal with the record company whose name is synonomous with compilations, K-Tel, to sell them. The perfect gift for the geek who has everything...
GMD
watch this
Dear Sir/Madam/Globunsk/Srhamel/Goot:
:)
I'm the ruler of Andromeda-3, an M Class Planet in the constellation of Andromeda. My father, the fifth ruler in the Pfthoskkkrkfhhdfkfk dinasty has been robbed. If you could lend me your intergalactic bank account so I can transfer my funds to Alpha Centauri...
I can't seem to find the /. story where this is explained. Can you tell me what I missed?
Thanks!
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
BINGO!
A signal of this type would have to be directly targeted at the Earth by intelligent creatures. The alien scientist must have detected Earth's presence, and orbit (and perhaps they've picked up some "I Love Lucy" to prove we're intelligent... Erh...). They then sent a special, compensated transmission ment for us, and us only. And they must have been doing this for an extended amount of time.
Maybe such a signal might be just slightly interesting? Perhaps this is why SETI bumps any signal of this kind to the top?
That's why SETI call it a "Magic Signal". It's a clear attempt of a fellow civilization to contact us, specifically.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
It is. That scene was shot on location at Arecibo, the worlds most gargantuan telescope of any kind. Impressive bit of equipment, innit? To bad it can't be pointed, being sunk into the mountain and all ;-)
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
For me, it was the other way around: the first thing I thought when I saw the movie was "hey--how did they get permission to film at Arecibo?".
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The interesting part about attitudes towards SETI is what they say about our own future. What is happening with our civilization? Where will we be in 100 years? In 1000?
Many people are pessimistic. They think we're bad and getting worse. They expect that we will destroy ourselves soon, or sink into a dark age, or otherwise lose the ability to communicate with the stars. So they can imagine a galaxy full of life but not much of it communicating at any given time.
But let's suppose that things continue on as they have. Look at the grand sweep of human history. We see a continual growth of capability and power. Even a poor person today in the West has technology which would have been unavailable to the richest person in the world 100 years ago.
Imagine that this continues to happen. Technology not only advances, it speeds up. The next 100 years bring more changes than the last 1000 years. Nanotechnology, biotech, AI, physics advances; we could be living like gods in 100 years.
And let's assume that social trends continue. Racism and sexism was ubiquitous 100 years ago. Now they are recognized as great evils. As our power grows and our moral sensitivity increases, we will want to help those less fortunate than ourselves. We will end poverty and suffering among humans, because it will be easy compared to the power we have. We will turn to the higher animals, and do what we can to improve their lives as well.
And we will turn outwards. We will reach out into the galaxy with communications and explorations. It will take centuries, millennia, but as our capabilities grow we will eventually find even the great interstellar distances easy to cross. We will search the galaxy for life, ready to cherish and protect anything that we find. And if we could meet a culture less advanced than our own, we would do what we could to ease their suffering while still respecting their chosen path.
This may seem like an absurdly optimistic vision, but it's nothing different from what has happened in the past! Anyone who looks with clear eyes at the record of human history and who extrapolates it forward should see this as a very plausible and likely future path. The reason that it's not explored much in literature is because there aren't that many dramatic possibilities in a world which is as much improved over the present as our own world is over the past.
The point is that if this is the likely path for a civilization, it would suggest that other cultures in the galaxy would also be spreading outward and would probably be here by now. The fact that we don't see them, that we stumble along and still suffer great and preventable catastrophes, suggests that really life is not so prevalant in the galaxy after all.
So ironically, both the optimistic and the pessimistic view of humanity's future suggest that SETI won't work. The pessimists believe that any advanced culture will wipe itself out; and the optimists believe that such a civilization will spread through the galaxy and render aid to less developed worlds. Either way we won't find intelligent signals on our expensive radio telescopes.
What are the odds of a random collision of atoms of a certain solar system producing life?
What are the odds of a random string of radio signals mimicking life?
If B>A, we have some problems.
...unless we time it just right. So it takes 30,000 light years for a message to reach us, and it reaches us today. We build the time machine, go back about 60,000 years, give or take as needed... and time our answer to reach them 30,000 years ago tomorrow, just a day after they sent the first message!
Brilliant, eh?
Just got to be careful not to accidentally mess with prehistory while we're back there. Unless you subscribe to the closed-loop theory of time travel which states that we exist because at some point in the future we will go back in time and accidentally shape history into the form it is today.... How's that for a head-exploding thought?
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
what if the ETs broadcast in visible light space and see the Radio wavelengths? Assuming life is going to be like us in any way is kind of... arrogant, don't you think?
Hinckley? You missed!
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
First off, without much risk of anthropomorphising extraterrestrial life. You have almost a 33/33/33 spread between likely candidates for intelligent life:
One, they're going to be quite a bit behind us in technology, and haven't developed radio broadcasting technology yet.
Two, they're at parity with us, which means we won't be picking up any broadcasts anytime soon, in fact, we may have to monitor radio signals for the next thousand years (even if we advance to better methods of communication, which then involves using some equipment that'll be centuries obsolete- That takes real determination).
Three, they're considerably ahead of us, and while only a couple hundred light years away, have developed radio communications hundreds of years before we had the technology to listen for it, resulting in the signals being missed by mere decades.
As for the assumptions, what is the possibility that they are using methods that we haven't even tried/discovered yet? Quite high. For the purpose of interstellar communications, you would need a signal that's fairly free of distortion from nearby stellar bodies, and can maintain a fair signal strength over several light years of distance. Also, hypothetically, the signal would have to maintain coherance without significant degradation due to moving at FTL travel, if said hypothetical ETs have such. Radio waves in theory would have this problem, therefore they would be inappropriate for this use.
Now assuming such a technology exists out there, then there's almost zero chance of our picking up a significant trace, because as we ourselves have demonstrated, when a method of communication goes obsolete, why bother going back?
For example, how many still use wireless telephone systems (the old transponder based systems that amounted to an overpriced CB, with a paid operator on the other end to dial the phone numbers for you, in use before the mid 80s)? None. Even though said systems can be used today, it's unlikely anyone would want to, when there are cheaper and easier systems in use.
This, in sum, is the flawed assumption that most ET research is based on. Looking for species as advanced as ours or better, using an outmoded form of communications that have been obsolescent for centuries or more by their standards.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I think of it as a sort of hobby for my computer.
That reminds me of Dharma and Greg...
This is my dog Stinky...and this is Stinky's dog, Nunzio.
My computer's hobby is downloading porn...
I can't tell you how many pictures of naked motherboards I've had to delete.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Imagine some alien RIAA-like organization finds out about this SETI project that distributes their valuable inter-universal IP-protected radio signals to thousands of computers all over a damn whole planet!
Hopefully there's just a flat yearly fee we're allowed to pay to the broadcasters...
Their lawyers will go nuts if they ever find out.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
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.
That's the where the Vulcan homeworld is - known as the home of the funkiest party goers of the galaxy!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Is that the same as cowboynealcentric?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Only as far as our radio broadcasts have reached, at best ~120 light years. On the other hand, anyone within eighty light years would notice that ordinary old Sol has suddenly become one of the brightest radio stars in this neighborhood of the galaxy.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
A project like this http://www.coseti.org/ might succeed where radio SETI fails. Quite a few people think a focused, high power laser might be a better mode of communications between stars.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!