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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
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.
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'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/
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.