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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.
It would be nice to see more people running SETI@HOME to take advantage of those spare CPU cycles.
Maybe I'm being too poetic, but with a world on the brink of war, a confirmation of an alien civilization would be an amazing thing right now. Maybe give our leaders a kick in the ass that their petty squabbles are not the end all be all of our existence.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
The probability of catching radio waves from intelligent life forms in a 4 year window is crazy. 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... 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.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
There were so many well-publicized hacks to SETI@home that I'll bet that there will be a lot of skepticism about any results even if we discover a jpeg file of an Arcturian time machine in there.
The only problem they have with Seti@home these days is the statistics.
I know a few people who actually compete over who has computed the most packets. People also try to cheat to get high stats, that is where it goes wrong...
Therefore it might be better to ditch those stats all together, or at least make them less informative...
I don't know, I used to be so interested in SETI, but in the last few years I've lost all enthusiasm for it. I guess because, ultimately, I don't think its likely that intelligent civilizations are very dense out there, and if they did, we'd probably never recognize the signal...and if we did, I'd say, 'okay, now what? We still have to go on living alone because we can't talk back and forth, so it's even more disappointing to know they exist but are unreachable.' We'll probably destroy ourselves before that's an issue, anyway.
As someone who scanned that part of the sky for seti@athome (so to speak), I got a mail from our berkelean chums, suggesting that a lot of media interest might be forthcoming. I mentally scoffed at the possibility, but here I am talking about it on a *cough* reputable site like slashdot!
seti - acting under the auspices of the planetary society - were kind enough to ask whether I'd like my fifteen minutes now, and make my name available for interview to those legions of reporters who'd be after a human interest angle.
Of course, 'human interest' is exactly not the reason I signed up for seti@home, but there you go. Nonetheless, I volunteered, just in case they want a European perspective. However, I really, really doubt that anything will come of it. Just like a seti user should.
People could lend their cpu cycles helping something worthwhile out Folding @ home instead of looking for something that isn't there. Helping the fight against diseases like Alzheimer and Parkinson is a lot more rewarding than looking for little green men.
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
"Now what?"
Good question. Whatever the consequences, bring it on. Yeah, we'll probably see new religions appear. They'll be radical cult like messes that contribute nothing. Our existing religions will adapt, because they're good at it, or they wouldn't still exist.
Bring it on. I've got about 30 worthwhile years left in me. I have no intention of allowing the fools of this planet to keep me ignorant. Lets have at it.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
This finding might inspire NASA to move up their next generation of deep space telescopes and infereometers, like the OWL project that uses adaptive optics in a array that spans 300 square meters.
Of course, we do need to get improved reuseable launching systems in place first...
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
What about sending out our own space signals??
We have been sending out weak radio and TV signals into the universe for over 50 years now ( and more...) However, I doubt that any of these same signals coming from other solar systems would be detectable by us.
Instead of listening in to E.T. - Why don`t we go ahead and beam out stronger signals to `local` planets that would seem like likely candidates to harbor civilizations. For instance, http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mwm/planet.html, these seem like they could be potentially good targets.
It could be, like SETI, a joint effort too. In order to sustain the signal on a certain timeframe, specific dishes around the planet set up by amateurs and universities could be responsible for targetting specific planets for a number of days(hard due to earth's rotation). A central team would be responsible for targets and messages sent while others executed.
I have sent this to the SETI institute as an idea, but never received a reply. If you agree that this is an interesting idea, maybe you could interest them in it too.
http://www.seti-inst.edu/email.html
Thanks.
Ever consider how many hours a week you spend reading slashdot, watching TV, or listening to music. Practially speaking what you spend most of your spare time doing is a complete waste of time and resources.
Why aren't you volunteering your time to something that will actually help humanity? Try volunteering in a soup kitchen. Cut all power to your house in order to reduce greenhouse emissions. Travel everywhere by bicycle. Give all of your money to charity.
There are other more practical and worthy uses of the time and resources you waste on yourself. It's time to shift those resources to tasks which will actually improve the world's quality of life.
To get real for a moment, SETI@home has about half a million machines running at the moment. That might represent at most one percent of the available resources. There's plently to go around.
Granted, I'm not unbiased, since I'm working on the observing schedule right now. Next week, Arecibo...
Support SETI@home
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).
I highly doubt we'll be able to recieve the equivalent of "Mr Wizard" or "Bill Nye the Science Guy" (Morbo the Xenogeneticist would be quite entertaining tv though)
we might get a glimpse of what they have, that is considering we can even decide what is in the carrier and subcarriers, the modulation type, are they even 10 based? they might be a race based on 9 or 11 for their "decimal system" the periodic table may be listed backwards or sideways from their point of view.
remember EVERYTHING we have as a "standard" is only a decision made by a person or group of people for no real concrete reason other than perspective.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.