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."

Comments

Re:24h is a lot

[zcat_NZ]

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.

Re:i thought

[Troed]

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.

Inclination to galactic disc...

[Kjella]

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

Re:i thought

[el-spectre]

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.

Patterns? - Read the protocols

[ianscot]

Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life.

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.)