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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
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?
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.
Wasn't that telescope destroyed in Goldeneye? How are they still using it?
Lasers Controlled Games!
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
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"
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...