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.

Comments

Re:Hack

[Directrix1]

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.

Re:What a waste

[SpamJunkie]

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.

The late great Carl Sagan once wrote

[wiggys]

http://www.seds.org/billa/psc/pbd.html

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.

Re:What a waste

[LMCBoy]

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?

And if they find ET?

[Shadow Wrought]

Assume for a moment that this second pass finds a signal that is not random and is coming from a Sun like star 3,000 light years away. We watch it with more and more telescopes and damn if it doesn't send a big old red flag of intelligence.

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?

Re:And if they find ET?

[Skyshadow]

So how will we deal with another society 17,597,088,000,000,000 miles away?

That's a plausable scenario and a good point. A signal lag time which represents most of the whole of human history is obviously not workable, and given the size of the universe (big), it's not hard to see it happening.

But that hardly means such contact could in any way be considered a failure. As I see it, we as a species stand to gain a lot from it:

A data point for the Drake equation. Hey, if *somebody* else is out there and within 3000 light years, there are quite probably a lot of other somebodys out there.

Potential research value. Their science may be more advanced and would certainly be different from our own. We could almost certainly pick up insights into our universe just by interpreting and communications (or, at least, Fox could steal their reality shows and produce them on earth).

Mindset. A lot of the conflict of the last 50 years or so has been centered around the fact that our technology is making the earth "smaller" far faster than our various cultures are able to compensate for. This sort of discovery could give some perspective as to what "us" means, or at the very least drive some competetive juices that drive humans (gotta get to Mars, gotta colonize the Oort belt, gotta get good at this whole space thing...)

Sure, some people'd react badly to it. We'd probably see some mass suicides, maybe a couple of new religious cults, but that'd all encompass people who'd go for that shit anyhow (Tom Cruise, etc). Seems like a fair trade-off to me.

Re:What a waste

[LMCBoy]

How about this? You spend your spare cycles on something you think is important, and I'll do the same.

Sound good? Alllllllllrighty then.