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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."
What you say?
Ummmm...read the article. Three days, eight hours each. They sound very non-geeky ;-)
-Tupshin
Regardless of how you feel about Seti@Home's mission, whether or not it's worthwhile, I think 24 hours is quite a bit short.
Vonal Declosion
My name is not on the list. Damn. Oh well, I hope we find something regardless.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
let's just hope that if they ever find anything using SETI that it's not fucking jodie foster's dad.
Yea, I read that right after I posted. At least I'm normal for a slashdotter. ;P
Banaaaana!
I thought that I had read a couple weeks ago that the SETI reinvestigations had turned up nothing. I think i read this on google news...
Logic, macros, and more
Telescope geeks rejoice. But what should one say for a radio telescope? "First wave"?
Money for nothing, pix for free
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?
I hope an actual radio astronomer comes and clears things up, but...I suspect that the image given in "Contact" of radio astronomers sitting near the equipment, monitoring it for a signal and guiding the search moment to moment is probably quite misleading.
Instead, I bet they write something like a perl script that executes a well-researched plan on a preset schedule. In theory, the 24 hours of data collection could have been a very non-eventful period, hardly requiring any caffeine at all.
Of course, once the results all come in, that's probably when diet coke and vivarin time really starts.
being the largest antenna and its SET IN THE ground - how they turn this thing?
two things can happen:
1) they turn it very very slowly - a lot of the 24 hr is wasted pointing the dish
2) they don't turn it and wait until the dish points in the right place - a lot of the 24 hr is wasted waiting
anybody knows?
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I'm only 30, heavy smoker but I think with stem cell research I can always get a new pair of lungs long enough to see the day I can fly me to the moon.
With an attitude like this you can better hope for stem cell research to come up with an artificial brain....
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Check it out...
1 - 20 of the computers who crunched data that lead to discovery of these "reobservation points" come from computers in Antarctica!
WANT INFO ON A COUNTRY?
Thank god they did not have more telescope time or they might have found my secret super villian orbital base where I am currently using the weightless environment to concoct a series of deadly patents which will allow me to take over the world.
(insert evil laugh here)
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
oops i mean 1 - 20 of the "reobservation points" were discovered by computers in Antarctica! Damn you, Mary Jane!
WANT INFO ON A COUNTRY?
Perhaps if we're lucky, we'll receive the first episode of their SCI-FI series - "Pale Men From Earth!"
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.
the 24 hrs were broken into 3 sets of 8 hrs. during the first set they reobserved 80something targets. passing over the area near each for a short time. so, ~10 targets an hr is about 6min each.
what if the aliens took a 10 min break?
or what if whatever organization on the alien world that signals to us was only allowed 1 day, and it was yesterday.
a place as big as the universe could be constantly monitored for 1000's of years, and may still come up with nothing.
What the fuck kind of crapulous spellchecker let this one through?
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot that the Slashdot editors don't actually USE the cocoaspell service that's part of the OS on their shiny Ti books.
That was classic intercourse!
Pay no attention to those scabs!
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.
Ummmm...read the article. Three days, eight hours each. They sound very non-geeky ;-)
That's terrible!
Don't these people realize they're looking for signals from the stars, and the stars only come out at night?!
And even if they do find something, anything an alien civilization happens to broadcast during daylight hours is likely to be nothing more than soap operas, talk shows and infomercials.
I insist that the scientists wait until prime-time, and equip the telescope with a cable descrambler, to catch all the good alien shows.
The reobservations have been done halfway March (which is stated on the page that is linked too), so this is not really *news*. For now, there do not seem to be any interesting results from these reobservations.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
All you will need is money....lots and lots of money. So a mere mortal such as myself will probably not get to go to space, the mega rich will. In the next 20 years we should have atleast one space hotel, or I will be VERY disapointed! So I may not make it, but you can be Cher will!
In fact the re-observations happened a long time ago (in March i believe) but the scientists are preparing the data to analysed by the SETI@Home program. Apparently it is quite a hard task as they used different instruments than for their usual data.
Last SETI Update : 21/05/2003
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
I insist that the scientists wait until prime-time, and equip the telescope with a cable descrambler, to catch all the good alien shows.
Nothing like Good Alien Pron. I hope they're green =)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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 even if they wanted to it's hard to point a telescope (whether it is radio or not) at something which is currently on the other side of the Earth.
Actually there are also stars aviable for search during day time but they are not visible for the normal eye as the sun outshines them.
But a RADIO Telescope can still look at them.
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
"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.
Day and night time has nothing to do with stars being on the wrong side of the Earth.
A radio telescope can't see though a planet sized lump of rock.
The world would be a sad, sad place without South Park. ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Please don't mod this a troll because It's not.
I just find it fascinating, how the SETI project is looking for signals coming from outer space that have the tiniest pattern to them. Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life. But back on Earth, they have been studying DNA, which has an incredible pattern. Yet they say that it doesn't have an intelligent creator.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
Yeah, but we've got the bastards' names so we can make sure we get them before the aliens get us.
Just out of curiosity, does Seti@home tell its users if they picked up any interesting data or patterns?
I've been running this off and on for years, and the only thing they've sent me is congratulations emails for processing a certain number of data sets. So I wonder, if I did find something of interest, would they let me know?
The Internet is generally stupid
In the words of the time honoured Spectrum games, Congraturation! You sucsess!
You're exactly right. The eStar project is a robotic telescope network, as well as having various databases of previous observations. The telescopes and the databases can be queried in the same way, with the databases returning rows and the telescopes zooming off to look at the object in question. All of this is controlled in Perl.
This takes some of the glamour out of astronomy in favour of more rapid results. I still remember the images of Hubble sat at the lower end of a very very big telescope, gripping a notebook in one hand and a pipe between his teeth as he readied himself for a night-long observing session. Still, if Larry Wall can find us some aliens then more power to him, I say.
that SETI is just trying to get free HBO for three days :-P
SIGFAULT
Seti: "Hey Look - We can confirm that this is a radio signal!"
//scraps space plans
World:(begins to panic)"Really? How far away are they? How old's the signal?"
Seti: "Well, these signals came from that star cluster over there about 950,000 years ago."
World:(disappointed)"Almost a million years ago - and they never invented space travel"
World:
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
But then they'll get sued by some kind of Super alien DMCA... I wonder if their encryption is like DVD, crackable with a few lines of perl... Actually maybe they code in english, and talk in perl...they're aliens and probably sound like it anyways..
Give materials science another decade or so, and hopefully we'll be able to make a space elevator or three.
Good enough for you?
I mean, Linux runs on ANYTHING! It's compatible with my orbiting brain lasers!
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
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.
Too bad that penalty wasn't applied to you at age 27.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Distributed Computing: If you have enough monkeys with typewriters you still can't write Hamlet, but you might be able to find a needle in a haystack.
How about moving it to Cuba, covering it with an artificial lake, and destroying part of the receiver in a fight with Boromir?
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
I think I've said my piece.
Who are you?
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
If they are that hostile, they'll attack anyway. Wouldn't you want at least a little forewarning?
And what, may I ask are you going to do with an Alien? Screw it/her? Not bloody likely. This is not Startrek, you know, its Real Life!
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I hope you're not suggesting they hack their cards or illegally unencrypt signals just because "they happen to be falling into our backyard anyway."
I don't think I want us to have to deal with an alien DMCA lawsuit with their version of the MPAA. Maybe it's just me.
I had a sucky sig.
This has been out since March. It is now June. Where have all you been for the past three months?
What will happen first? SETI will find proof of extra terrestrial intelligence, or weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq? Perhaps we need WMD@Home. WMD in Iraq has a lot fewer candidate sites, but so far the odds look about the same.
Except that in the time that it takes for the signals to travel to earth, the copyright time might have expired (except for relatively close star systems).
Say, DirecTV and other companies should be lobbying Congress for longer extensions to copyright holdings, lest some alien civilization start freeloading off of them in 200 years!
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
In it they plausibly assert that deciding to run the mothership on Apple Xserve's is a good idea because no major Earth government would defy the monopoly and run anything other than a Windows OS.
With any luck, she will be left there.
Knowing SETI's luck, they'll be just about to start their telescope time when the whole place gets blown up by a British secret agent...
You must think in Russian.
What, this is about science?
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
> And what, may I ask are you going to do with an Alien? Screw it/her? Not bloody likely. This is not Startrek, you know, its Real Life!
And besides, only starship captains score with the alien chicks.
Xenobonking, I think they call it at Starfleet Academy.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
For example, when my computer was working on the data in an area near the equator at the body of leo (look at the third yellow square for leo--that's approximately the location), I mixed in some Elvis with the data, and got back a 20-second pause in the bitrate.
I have to say: it's really been great to be able to analyze the dynamics of distributed processing, and I'm really grateful to the SETI-at-home project for letting me be a part of it.
[PS... on a different note, it's interesting that the greatest frequency of data is right along the milky-way's equator. On a not of caution, I think that says something more about the system they're using, than about their data.]
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
After accusations of "cheating" ran rife near the end of Seti@homes run, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't find a thing.
for example
or another one a little closer to home
Got a better idea? Sometimes the best methods the laws of physics will allow are the best ones.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yeah, and we will have commercial supersonic flights. After all, they are much cheaper than space flights and there are enough rich people in the world to sustain such commercial endeavor.
What? They are retiring the Concorde? Yeah, but this is only to replace it with a better plane. What? No replacement? Why? The riches can't afford the lousy $6000 ticket?
You get the picture? Going to space is not as cracked up as it sounds, and if I were a billionnaire, I would rather give $20 million to charity than go into space. And I think that many rich people have the same priorities. Thus, there will be very little people civilians going to space in the next century unless some technical revolution comes up.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
So 'stat' is now a verb, in the neckbeard-Unix-wizard sense of "to quickly check out [a file] for its essential details"?
I swear if I ever hear somebody say "Yeah lets go to that bar and stat all the hot chix" I am going to laugh... and then start flailing wildly as yet another unixism perverts our spoken language.
We can only hope that the aliens signals AREN'T saying things like -
"Mighty your Penis"
"Viagra available at low cost"
"I am president Mbeke, help me transfer a million dollars"
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J