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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."
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?
rescent
reobservation
Thank god for the "Editor" union...
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/
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.
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
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.
Mostly, they just observe what happens to be above as the earth turns. They can effectively move the viewing position by two degrees either way by moging the position of the receiver across the focus, and the tilt of the earths axis "nods" the view up and down over the year, so in a year they get to see about half the total sky. Lokk at the maps on the Seti@home page to see what they can see.
For many purposes, Arecibo is quite restrictive; for seti@home, it is excellent - unless, of course, ET lives due north or south.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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
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...)
"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.
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
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..
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.
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