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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.
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.
---
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.
I always thought that "settee at home" was a reference to armchair astronomers.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
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...
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.
Alien message decrypted: "Greetings. I am the Democratic, peaceloving, and openminded President Eroeg W. Hsub, from the plant Htrae. We will allow your planet to continue to produce weapons of Galatic Destruction, instead of wiping your puny solar system off the map.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
(from the article) "Our chances right now [of finding something] are small," SETI@home chief scientist Dan Werthimer said in a telephone interview. "But you have to plan for success"
He continued: "and in this case, success would mean an intergalactic war that would result in the destruction of entire galaxies. We have already begun training our astrosoldiers in the art of zero-G warfare, but chances of defeating the alien menace is slim. I for one welcome our new alien overlords... Hail ants."
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
Someone in the Pleiades needs help moving 50 billion quatloos out of a forgotten government bank account, and they want Earth to help.
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.
Besides MSNBC, other medias are *revisiting* the SETI@home project. Read for instance this Space.com article, published yesterday (March 10, 2003). Tariq Malik wrote: "Researchers spearheading a worldwide effort to find ET, or anyone else out in space besides us humans, plan to revisit a group of their most likely candidate radio signals using the world's largest radio telescope." He added that "the Arecibo Observatory will work for three and a half days, starting March 18, to revisit the candidate signals identified by SETI@home users."
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.
Dear Mr Seti@home project leader,
we can tell for sure that your software needs some serious revision because as it is it doesn't work well in finding alien lifeforms.
Respectfully yours,
Alf
Mork
E.T.
Chewbecca
Yoda
Spock
Signatures are for stupids.
It's not really a 4 year window. You can sample 10 seconds of data and the time origin of the information that reaches you in that period can range from a year to many billions of years.
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!
or they are running out of money, and need some more.
"Hey...that data sounds just like a....Higgs Boson!"
Just an idea...
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
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?
There is also an article here.
"No! All your base are belong to us!"
What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centuri?!!!
If you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, then that's your own lookout. "
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The fact that we're still using screen savers on non-monochrome monitors is proof we're not advanced enough for first contact.
Greetings, earthling!
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data returned from SETI@Home users is beign retested
Too bad that those CPU cycles can't be used for spellchecking Slashdot submissions.
the signals will be calls to American Idol.
Advance note to comic book guy:
Yeah, yeah, I do know they couldn't have received those TV signals from Earth yet.
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.
Part of the problem is the cost. By using the distributed method, they are actually getting the best bang for the buck. The cost of building the kind of computer to crunch the numbers, or renting the time on someone's system is simply too high.
By spreading the work around the world to the 4 million subscribers, the cost of the project really is quite low. It also allows them to pay for more time at the observatory (they have to pay to use the telescope).
Basically, it may not be faster, but it is cheaper in the long run.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
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
The best Jack Handey I ever heard went like this:
One day my son asked me "why does it rain?" I told him it rained when God was crying. Then he said "why would God cry?" and I told him "Oh, probably because of something you did."
My motto is: Never give up - unless it's harder than you want it to be.
"It's hard to believe that entire families can be torn apart by something as simple as wild dogs."