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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."
Hey, this isnt your neigbours dish antenna, they got a whole day on the largest radio-telescope in the world. This thing has 300m diameter. Compare this to the fact that the "normal" data they use is from a insignificant, tiny telescope.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Me neither.... :)
Lets just say that with us checking the rest we made it possible for these lucky guys to find a real hit
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
My name is not on the list. Damn. Oh well, I hope we find something regardless.
Well, as someone who *did* make it to the list...
I feel exactly the same as you do.
I don't care about some top-6000 candidates list (although I will admit, I did originally hope to make it to the top 1000 overall... But failed, sigh. Just couldn't compete with the likes of SGI and Pixar <G>).
I care that maybe, just maybe, all that otherwise-wasted CPU power went toward helping us find the first real proof of intelligent life off-planet.
Doubtful. The thing about passenger jets is that they take you to places that you have business going to - places with stuff like oxygen.
How long will it be before "common" space flight is even possible, let alone with destinations to go to?
50 years is far too short.
I know 24 hours may not sound like a lot, but just consider all they other "hard" science projects out there competing for resources. Getting 3 days on one of the largest radiotelescopes in the world is actually quite an achievement. Especially if you consider than most scientists consider SETI to be a bunch of crackpots.
-E2
The evil monkey commands you to dance.
Bad luck then. This is - to some extent - a game of chance. But you have to play it to have any chance to win.
"Near the middle of the last century we learned how to make rockets which took us beyond our earth for the first time."
And in those 50 years we have just got better at making overgrown, unreliable, inefficient, at best, only partially reusable bloody FIREWORKS. Our space programs are a sick joke, flinging man and machine into the big black through brute force because we haven't thought of a better way. In 50 years we have gone virtually nowhere in terms of technological advancement: we have cleverer probes, faster rockets, bigger payloads but there is nothing fundamentally different from the V2 rocket. Before space travel can really - for what of a better term - take off we need to get a technology that doesn't rely on strapping the traveller to a giant tube containing huge quantities of volatile chemicals in big tanks and then igniting them in a combustion chamber.
It is way cheaper to analyze radio data, especially in the way SETI@Home does it (using voluntary contributions of computing power and data being a side product of other observations) than to send even a single astronaut into low orbit. We should keep on sending people into space but projects like SETI@Home don't harm that effort any more than other astronomy research.