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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?
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.
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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
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.
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
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.
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.