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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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
No, everybody's going to eventually die one way or another, and we have no problem making replacements. Curing any given disease is just a temporary stopgap which isn't that significant in the big scheme of things. Our race somehow muddled through millions of years before we had cures for any diseases.
OTOH, finding little green men would probably be the single most significant moment in human history.
"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.
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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.
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.
And wouldn't ya bet the first words the aliens say to us are "Have you guys found a cure for Alzheimers yet?"
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.
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.