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SETI Goes to Arecibo To Stat *Candidates*
Neuropol writes "In the most rescent Seti@home news letter. Seti recieved (only!) 24 hours of telescope time at Arecibo to investigate interesting points in the sky where signals have not only shown up once but several times in data crunches in the last 4 years. The Planetary Society web site has an excellent summary of the reobservations.
The Seti web site lists the reobservation targets
and the 7,000 users whose computations directly contributed to finding them."
Earth turns, does it not? Basically the huge dish sees what's right above it at any given time. 24h time allocation lets the reobservers see the whole sky. They just 'listen in carefully' at each reobservation point as the sky turns.
They can also (I assume) do limited 'pointing' by turning the reception gear that is hanging at the center of the huge dish.
Compare this to the fact that the "normal" data they use is from a insignificant, tiny telescope.
Uhhhh no. The data they get is ALL from Arecibo, but most of the time it's just 'wherever it happens to be pointing for someone else's research'. The only difference is that for 24 hours they got to decide what it's pointed at.
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this article?
Although the SETI@home team was ready to pounce on any possible extraterrestrial signal the minute it was detected, nothing resembling such a signal was detected in real time, during the observations. This, however, is no cause for discouragement: real-time analysis is very rough, and would only detect the strongest and most obvious extraterrestrial signals.
it's in my head
For many purposes, Arecibo is quite restrictive; for seti@home, it is excellent - unless, of course, ET lives due north or south.
The Milky way is quite "flat" when you look at the whole galaxy, so if the earth is rotating in the same plane, you should be able to hear quite much. Right "up" or "down" there probably won't be as many candidates. Anyone know on what "scale" we're listening? Would that even matter, or are we trying to listen "locally", galactically speaking.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Latest research concludes that the average memory of a member of the online community "Slashdot", seems to be something less than 3 months(original story)
That, or the internet is severely lagged at the moment(There was that IP over avian carrier thingy...)
well, if it's a stupid signal, why bother... 'take me to your, er... duuhhhh'
Seriously though, it's not as though SETI is competing with space exploration in any serious way. Since it's been privatized (and even before, actually), the yearly budget for SETI is _much_ lower than the cost of launching the cheapest satellite. Interplanetary travel is orders of magnitude more expensive.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Seems like /. is in the list, with less than a thousand units returned. Way to go!
Who assumes that? Certainly not the SETI @ Home people.
There are quite elaborate "protocols" for weeding through the many, many signal patterns the SETI project does hear, precisely because it ain't necessarily so. That's, um, a whole lot of what the SETI project is doing, if you would care to consider what all those home boxes are up to with their spare cycles.
The most obvious example of a naturally occurring regular pattern -- mentioned prominently in the article /. linked to -- is pulsars, which tick away regularly and give off a very distinct radio signal pattern.
(You really want to read a criticism or two of the "watch watchmaker" thing you're arguing. Go find a critique or two of Darwin's Black Box, which is basically the same argument made on the same, sub-molecular level that you're already thinking of.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
But not for much longer and definietly not on the frequencies Seti is searching. I give our current single carrier based broadcast signals another 70 years before they are completely replaced by cable, line of sight, spread specturm, laser or whatever. Any of which will substantially reduce power and/or off-planet radiation.
SETI doesn't search the easy to use frequecies used by broadcast media because they would be swamped by terestrial signals. But they argue that some benevolent advaned race (the Vulcans I guess) will be broadcasting in some strange area of the microwave spectrum because it has something to do with water (you're gonna have fun with that aren't you).
So put all that together and plug it into the famous equation and I get a probablility of $lt;1 that we will find ET. 150 years of braodcast in a >10 billion year old universe!
But for all we know the signals from aliens could be encoded in the DNA of space fairing viruses. Aliens who "see" with radio could be happily spewing light into the galaxy for anyone to detect. A non-water based life form may be broadcasting to us at the "sulphuring hole" frequencies.
You've got to be pretty lucky to find an alien.
Art is the mathematics of emotion
I checked on a whim and my username for SETI was on their list of those who's units were contributed to this, and it was - but I was never notified of anything about it