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SETI@Home 2nd Look at Possible Hits
cpk0 writes "This article from MSNBC discusses how data returned from SETI@Home users is beign retested by the Institue for a possibility of alien radio signals being included. At just over 4 years old, I think this would be the first big break for SETI@home."
This is a followup to a December Slashdot story. Apparently this is getting some major attention in the mainstream media lately.
yeah!! bomb these terrorists aliens!!
and bring them democracy and liberty!!
I'm sure they have the original data. The only thing they have to do to settle a claim like this is to reprocess the data in question.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
that civilization is probably long extinct
You're assuming they also have Bushes as leaders. That's unlikely.
what if what we think of cosmic background noise is in actuality encrypted data transmissions, meant to be indistinguishable from background noise?
Then it wasn't meant for us. We're not trying for a man-in-the-middle attack, we're looking for life explicitly trying to contact another civilization.
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Well, you will be glad to hear that no tax money goes to support SETI. Zero public resources are spent on it.
Everyone that contributes to SETI, from Paul Allen to Team Lambchop, is spending their own resources of their own free will. They obviously think it's not a waste.
So, what exactly are you complaining about?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Now what?
Any transmission there and back will have a 6k year life span. That's far to great of a distance for us to explore yet, and far to much of a time to comprehend between signals. So how will we deal with another society 17,597,088,000,000,000 miles away?
My pessimism says we let it divide us even more. Some will claim it as Atlantis, others will see it as home of the Aliens that have abducting them. The religious zealots will condemn, and our government will try and ignore it.
My optimism hopes that it will inspire us to space. Give us a goal worthy of sending Humans to, and something that will also inspire kids to get more involved in Science.
I know that there has been much written about what a positive result in this search would mean to society, but I'm wondering if anyone else has their own thoughts?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
How about this? You spend your spare cycles on something you think is important, and I'll do the same.
Sound good? Alllllllllrighty then.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
The probability of catching radio waves from intelligent life forms in a 4 year window is crazy.
I don't know we've been sending signals pretty much continuously for over 50 years. They could be sending something but we just haven't got it yet.
The distances they'd have to travel are enormous, and that civilization is probably long extinct, and the spectrum we are looking at is very narrow, and our definition of intelligence is also very narrow...
I'll give you the first point, the second is doubtfull since they could only be a few hundred away, they've probably changes but extinct? doubtfull. Even if they are extinct does it really matter? We kind of got a speed limit already so chances are we wouldn't have much meaningful communication anyways. The fact is that all we need is a confirmation of their existence, and if we were able to distinguish their signals we might get some interesting TV programs. Which brings we to you narrow spectrum comment. The fact is that we've pretty much saturated the spectrum for quite a region. If the aliens did used radio waves for their communication as well they would be likely to use up a fair region also meaning all we need is one hit from that portion. And I'm not sure what you're getting at with def'n of intelligence. Either thier sending signlas or their not. Maybe that they've found a better means of communication?
what if what we think of cosmic background noise is in actuality encrypted data transmissions, meant to be indistinguishable from background noise? Too many assumptions are taking place, it's really a waste of resources.
Well hopefully they didn't feel the need to encrypt everything. So what if they did maybe someone else didn't. I really don't see anything here to convince me that your assumptions that we won't find anything are any more convincing than the assumptions that could lead us to something. As to a waste of resources perhaps if you consider the cycles that people actually do donate to be a small resource that could better go to curing cancer than perhaps. On the other hand in real economic costs it's almost trivial! Really when it comes down to it we're drilling for oil. We probably won't find anything and it costs a bit to do it but if we ever find something...
I stole this Sig
"People could lend their cpu cycles helping something worthwhile out Folding @ home [stanford.edu] instead of looking for something that isn't there."
If we knew that nothing was out there, Seti wouldn't be looking for it. Seti doesn't know, none of us knows, and you certainly don't know.
It's one thing to say "medical research is more important", it's another to say that something doesn't exist when there's no proof that it does or doesn't. Space is awfully large.
What if the little green have the cure for Alzheimers and Parkinsons?
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Using your logic:
Our race somehow muddled through millions of years without finding little green men.
That said, I run SETI@home myself. According to my SETI@home user profile, I've dedicated 1.788 years of CPU time so far and I've been a user for 3.694 years. So I'm certainly not against the program.
But to say that everybody's going to die anyway, so why bother is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. By that logic, we might as well shut down all the hospitals, and repeal all the laws on murder. After all, we're all going to go sometime.
It's kind of interesting. I've been using SETI@home for years now, and as far as I know, it was the only distributed computing application when I first started. For a long time, it certainly seemed the most worthy of my spare cycles. Now, however, there are apps for cancer research and other life and death ailments. It's got me thinking...
Which discovery would have the greatest impact on us? ET or a cure for cancer? Now, nobody supports space exploration, research, etc. more than I do. And I've put my money where my mouth is on this subject. But I've thought about this.
If today, while watching CNN, I saw breaking news, and it was a press conference where NASA or SETI or some other organization announced definitive proof of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, how would it change life here on earth?
Well, most likely, the news media would immediately wet their pants, ask all kinds of stupid questions "is it likely that they're hostile?" "Could they support the terrorists?!?" etc.
But that wouldn't last long, because eventually the scientific community would be able to explain to all but the thickest skulled journalist that that they're 500 light years away, and that the message we received left their planet while Christopher Columbus was still alive. They'd also have to explain to them that it would take just as long for us to *respond* to their message, and that with a 1000 year delay, the very civilization that sent the message might not even be there any more.
So to make a long story short, if SETI finds ET, all it will do is make us *know* that ET is out there. It won't make any difference in our day to day lives what so ever. Basically what we are undertaking is the most expensive quest to find an answer to a trivia question ever. Because that's all we can hope to get out of this: trivia. Knowing that there's ET intelligence is no more useful than knowing that in another million years there will be another Hawaiian Island.
Now what about cancer research (just to name one example). Let's say that distributed computation does lead somehow (I'm nowhere nearly as well versed on how this works as I am SETI@home) to a cure for cancer... Millions of lives will be saved. Millions of people will be spared suffering. Drugs or treatment programs will come to market. This will effect economies. Our understanding of our own biology will be expanded, and that could lead to even *more* quality of life improvements. I'm sure there will be other benefits that I can't even think of.
Being the space buff that I am, finding ET would move me more emotionally. Wow, what a discovery. But it wouldn't actually *do* all that much. I have no illusions that it would. On the other hand, medical research is perhaps one of the most noble things that we can lend our proc cycles to. And it's been tempting me for several months now. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone else.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
This is slashdot. S/he needs a reason? From SETI@home's donations page:
Yeah, it does sound like a real sinkhole for money, doesn't it?
Why is it that people whining about waste always pick on the government and nonprofit tries like SETI@home? Could their objection be to the ends, and not the means they claim to be ridiculing? Gillette's initials plans, at least, were to spend $300 million on marketing the Mach 3 razor. Their previous model, the Sensor, cost nearly $200 million to develop. If you want to complain about waste, why is it you're choosing the idealistic scientific endeavor?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.