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

could be just what we need...

[mike77]

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.

Re:could be just what we need...

[uptownguy]

I can imagine a beautiful, peaceful alien race. Free of crime, war, and violence

I wrote a short story on this subject. When they step foot off of their ship, just like any other visitors to a foreign shore we greet them with open arms. They come in peace... they don't want our oil... They don't want our water...

They want to convert us...

Makes sense if you think about it. Missionaries would be on that first ship, my friends. And if you think the whole Arab vs. Jewish vs. Christian thing that's playing itself out right now looks bad, just imagine an alien religion gaining mass numbers of converts (free technology, free alien schools, nice little carrot there)and the opposition to it...

Summary: Just because they are free of crime, war and violence doesn't mean that those buggers won't spell trouble!

What a waste

[Quasar1999]

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.

Re:What a waste

[Skyshadow]

I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your police work there, Lou.

Firstly, the distance that signals from another potential civilization *could* be enormous, but then again they could be reasonably small. There are a pretty fair number of stars within, oh, 100 light years or so of our own primary. The real question there is what sort of values to plug into the Drake equation, and we won't have a good idea there until we collect some data points.

Secondly, why would you assume that an alien civilization would carefully hide their transmissions? We don't, even though we understand that we're basically advertising the location of our planet with TV and radio and radar. Besides, if you really wanted to mask your location, you'd stick to cable. Sure, we wouldn't pick them up, but for each ultraparanoid civilization (and I'll grant you that they very well may exist), there are probably others less cautious.

Sure, we could be all the life that's out there -- in the absense of any concrete proof, there's always that chance. That said, I personally have a hard time believing that in a universe as big as ours the there's a unique instance of anything. Anyhow, putting in a minimum of effort seems pretty reasonable when you're talking about making the greatest discovery in the history of history, doesn't it?

Hack

[Deton8]

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.

Issue

[BenV666]

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...

Guess they were right

[rde]

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.

Re:And if they find ET?

[TheHawke]

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...

What about sending out our own space signals??

[mech_attack]

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.

Re:Like others have pointed Seti can seem a waste

[SETIGuy]

No doubt actually finding and verifying(good luck) alien signals would a great discovery. But at the same the practically speaking its a complete waste. All of these people could and should be donating to something like Folding or some other distributed effort that actually will probably help humanity by finding a cure for cancer or some other disease. But I guess actually helping your fellow humans is less glamourous then being the first nerd or geek to discover some faint signal which when discovered probably won't even be accepted by the rest of the world and will be debated forever.

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...