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SETI@Home Publishes Skymap
An anonymous reader writes "The skymap of where in the night sky to find the most promising SETI@Home signals is reported today, along with the research plan for the March Stellar Countdown project. The dedicated use of the Arecibo Telescope to revisit these spikes, pulses, and steady signals, focused on 166 star candidates. Those 166 were pruned from the five billion signals that have been found since 1999, depending on the signal's persistence, closeness to a known star, and frequency. The next step is particularly fascinating, if a signal appears to have increased since the first observation put that star on the checklist."
...that even alien signals so nicely fit a bell curve? Does this mean the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence will be largely disappointing? ;)
libertarianswag.com
Sounds more like it's involved with a new crap reality show than SETI@Home.
I thought that seti@home went bankrupt awhile back...? Maybe not x00m
How can they be sure aliens will live close to a star?
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
That seems horribly inefficient!
Have the SETI people ever heard of cepstral techniques?
There should be no need to iterate thousands of times over the pattern recognition algorithms when you can just take anouther FFT of the log magnitude spectrum to eliminate doppler shift (the same as what audio engineers would call 'pitch.') Cepstral analysis has been eliminating pitch in audio signal processing for decades. Too bad nobody told the astronomers.
What a waste of all those CPU cycles!
.. about 14000 hours for the past.. 6-7 years.
And to think my computer use to just fly toasters when it was idle.
Live web cams
Supposing SETI finds something, will the government let out the news to the general public? What about all the historical cases of UFO sightings? Apart from constantly gazing at skies, should we also not try to demand opening up of all classified government documents about any possible UFO sighting?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
But there really isn't anything wrong with trying.
Besides, Seti@home really helped to bring about this idea of 'distributed computing' to the world. And for the science in that end of the project I would be hard pressed to say this project isn't already a success.
But the more I think about it the more I think that radio signals are not the way we are going to find intelligent beings.
For one I question if we are capable of picking up the radio signals we are sending out.
If there was an earth, a duplicate of us, technologicaly, socialy and so forth, say 10 light years away, do we have the ability to pick up it's radio signals?
And for that matter we have had radio for a very short time, just over 100 years. And our use of it is on the way out already. In another 100 years we will probably be producing a fraction of the radio waves we produce now.
Any way you look at it the odds are stacked against Seti@home.
But I still congratulate them on giving us geeks something to talk about.
"Following up on what is an equivalent of a million years of computation..."
When the RIAA talks about the "equivalent number of CD burners", it's a meaningless inflation. Here's another example. It would have served better to mention the number of SETI@Home clients. A true and meaningful figure which would still have conveyed the scale and a sense of awe.
God, how pedantic and picky of me.
Or is SETI@home an example of how automation can result in inefficient and frivolous behavior? I mean, just because it's mindless and runs while you're away it's suddenly amazing and important. I'd say the the only thing amazing about it is the potential to turn millions of computers into a worldwide zombie DDoS attack.
Not that I don't think we should be exploring, but there are more inspiring frontiers to conquer than distant radio static.
Cool! Now I'll finally be able to find my way home...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
That seems horribly inefficient!
Well, hopefully, IPv6 will alleviate some of these problems!
They refuse to make any optimization to the original program. Note the lack of even SSE support after all these years.
At least 3 places on the map appear to have a bunch of signals that fall in a strait line. Is this some purpousful scanning pattern on Earth's part, or are there lines of UFO's up there?
Table-ized A.I.
In the side panel on the right:
"Extrasolar Life Briefing
# 3,000+ visible galaxies (Hubble Telescope)"
not according to this. Dumbass reporters.
Why do we always assume that the aliens will be more advanced than us? How do we know we won't be visiting alien planets and abduct its inhabitants? Just a little something to think about...
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
Except that it'd be pointless, even if they did get a signal. It'd be a signal hundreds or thousands of years old.
Besides, Seti@home really helped to bring about this idea of 'distributed computing' to the world.
Pardon the pun, but what planet are you from? SETI was NOT the first, Distributed.net's RC5 challenge significantly predates the SETI@home client and was enormously popular. At least Distributed.net's ruler thing will be USEFUL.
Oh, and interesting to note that when SETI@home first started up, they ran out of data to process. So you know what they did? They just fed the same data back to clients, over and over and over again, without telling people- acting like they still had new data to process. A lot of people were furious, when someone realized it. The SETI@home project people wasted a lot of resources(power) for the sake of avoiding embarassment. Sorry, I don't have much respect for people who pull that kind of crap.
Please help metamoderate.
haven't given up on finding intelligent life on earth.
As rare as it is there must be some concentrations of it.
Banaaaana!
OK... the article notes:
"The next step is particularly fascinating, if a signal appears to have increased since the first observation put that star on the checklist."
How could it have increased?
These signals are coming from light-years away.
Even if the aliens learned, somehow (say, a year ago) that we were listening for them, finding this out instantly via some sort of "subspace radio" or the like, the signals we have received since then were ALREADY IN TRANSIT when the SETI@home program began.
Besides, there'd be no way for them to know we're listening, let alone to find that out within the last year.
Or maybe I just grossly misread the poster's meaning?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I bet you wear black.?
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
As for the century long delay, just start talking. Wicked lag time, but eventually you'll get something said.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
You make good points, but I have thought of all that before and am still interested in SETI. I guess its either natural human curiosity, or just too much Star Trek...
The unofficial
The cost of the SETI program is well worth it if we can discover solid evidence that intelligent life exists outside the solar system.
We won't need to send signals, because we've been sending signals with the advent of the TV.
Once we have our own interplanetary travel infrastructure, then we can start thinking about actually visiting. By then humans may actually be able to make such a trip.
After vast effort and the expenditure of moderate sums of cash (SETI is really done on the cheap), scientists will be elated to finally discover an alien signal, and chagrined to find that it translates to the rough equivalent of a rude hand gesture and a raspberry. :-)
(or possibly "If all you can detect is this signal, you're too stupid to bother with. Stay home and evolve for a few million years.")
I'm reposting this because apparently, there are a lot of moderators modding down as "troll" anyone who posts anything that even smells like "SETI is stupid". Despite getting one "interesting" mod, my post is now buried. So, here I go again. THIS IS NOT A TROLL. I've made a statement(SETI is pointless) and I'm backing it up with a lot of reasons why. Seems like good discussion material to me.
The whole thing is pointless. Here's why.
* Chance of physically intercepting the signal is next to nothing. They don't get much radio time, and they can't cover much of the sky.
* Now chances of actually recognizing the signal as intelligent life are unknown. They've got some great theories. Who knows if they're right?
* Ok, maybe you see it and you recognize it. Can you decode it?
* Alright, so who cares if you decode it, you FOUND INTELLIGENT LIFE that existed at least several hundred of years ago
* Ok, so you send a reply. You figure out where that source planet will be when the signal finally reaches it.
* "The aliens get it" requires the same hurdles. Mainly, they have a SETI program, they've got their ears pointed in the right direction, they identify the reply as intelligent life, etc. Hell, it assumes they haven't nuked themselves into extinction like we're on the steady path towards.
* Now, lets say they decide to reply(ie, they're not xenophobic, they don't think it's pointless, etc). It takes another couple hundred years to get back to earth, assuming they aim right etc.
* Now you're assuming someone here on earth actually is still listening. In a couple hundred years, is anyone going to remember SETI? We have trouble keeping languages around!
* Great, someone's actually listening and gets the signal. You've just had the century-long equivalent of the 20 second bar conversation. "Hi". "Hi". "So, uh, send radio signals often?"
SETI people conveniently ignore almost all of these obvious problems that make the entire search pointless.
Please help metamoderate.
You know what? These people are a disgrace....Here's why....Now chances of actually recognizing the signal as intelligent life are unknown.
I think you answered your own criticism here. Nobody fricken knows. It is a Columbus-like exploration: sail and see what you bump into.
Ok, so you send a reply.
Who says we would send a reply? Maybe we will just listen more in and watch their version of I Love Lucy.
Table-ized A.I.
What's more sexy: Aldebaranis, Altairans, or "Vacuumers"?
All the signals from space are messages:
Penis enlargements
Breast enhancements
Displaced aliens with large amounts of money that need YOUR bank numbers.
Do we REALLY want to reply?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
If they were using the cepstrum to correct for doppler shift, they could get several thousand times speedup; much more than just four.
Er, um, you are aware that "Contact" is a work of fiction, right?
More seriously your post seems ill thought out. Yes, the odds of finding anyting are rather slim, especially considering that our only sensors are inside the sun's area of interference. However you seem to be underestimating the importance of finding evidence of non-human sentience. Carrying on a conversation is nice, don't misunderstand me, but I'd be happy just knowing for sure that we aren't the only ones out here. Sure, the odds are that there's other people in the universe, but I'd like to know for sure.
The cost is quite low, really, and its spin off effects are already prooving to be of benefit in the short run. The truth is that "pointless" research has paid off time and again. Maybe SETI won't pay off, but the fact is that it might.
Oddly enough, you didn't mention the single biggest problem facing the SETI program: the likelyhood that use of omnidirectional radio is not long lived. Here on Earth we're already tending to move away from powerful omnidirectional signals. Increasing use of laser, microwave, fiberoptic, etc is slowly killing off true broadcast radio. Some people suspect that within another thrity years or so the only omnidirecitonal broadcasts will be quite weak and short ranged (equivalant to cordless phones).
Still, even given that, I'd say that the potential benefit of SETI vastly outweighs its miniscule cost. You've got to take chances sometimes...
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Agree with you here. I disagree completely with your viewpoint, so I wrote a reply. Moderating you down was uncalled for.
I will note, however, that your rather pointlessly aggressive language is doubtless what caused the people to mod you as a troll. Tossing about terms like cult and suchlike isn't really the best way to make points.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
They refuse to make ANY updates to the original client (written for 386) because they feel it will somehow invalidate all of the previous data.
That seems horribly inefficient!
I was under the impression that this had more to do with redundancy of complex data for purposes of security to ensure someone does not spoof data? If the analysis were to proceed by simply taking a derivative of the FFT and using that, the data would concievably be easier to forge? Perhaps this also is one of the reasons that the Seti@home crew is unwilling to make platform specific optimizations?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Ha! Pathetic modders.
You can't label ALL these posts as trolls!
Bwa ha ha ha.
They couldn't detect ourselves from .25 light-yesrs away even...
They're looking for a beacon that's sent out on purpose.
I'm not sure a race that keeps shouting "I am here" is worthy of being labeled "intelligent"...
what - they don't listen to the news?
If I had any mod points you'd get a funny one, man.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the WOW signal. read the link..it'll send chills down yer spine!
I'm pretty damn sure they could be getting a many thousand times speedup.
The process is to take a FFT of the log magnitude spectrum, and look for peaks in the cepstral domain instead of periodicities and triplets in the spectral domain. Maybe there is some reason you can't look for gausians that way. Maybe I ought to take this to email and see what the SETI@Home people say.
They couldn't detect earth if it were .25 light years away... I asked them.
They are looking for a beacon that someone is sending out on purpose.
I think a race that sits around shouting "I am here" is either very stupid or very confident and mean.
Or is counting on some other race being very stupid, and hoping the other race is not very confident and mean as well.
ah, the complexities of intergalactic politics.
Is this a big Pig-Latin joke? All the letters are sort of reversed in the writeup:
CEPStral: SPECtral
QUEFrency: FREQuency
CEPStrogram: SPECtrogram
What is up?
Table-ized A.I.
The point is first to get the proof. If we have proof that there's anyone out there and we know where they are (or did) transmit from then we can start looking for more information and in different formats.
There are a lot of "pointless" projects out there, cold fusion, AI, room temperature superconduction, teleportation, time travel, an end to world hunger, "peace keeping", Battlestar Galactica as visioned by Richard Hatch. Luckily there are still dreamers out there wasting their time and money trying the impossible. Who know's maybe they'll succeed.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
As spamming techniques get ever more sophisticated I confidently expect my currently under construction clinic to be innundated with aliens looking for penis and tentacle (I dont want to discriminate) enlargement.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Screw #slashdot. What a ghey channel. All people do is talk about anal sex and blow jobs from goats. Usually these types of comments originate from drdink himself. The conclusion is that drdink is a flaming-buttfucking-cumburping-ass-puppet-all-hogt ied-up-with-no-place-to-go who's happily been on the receiving end of many a good bukkake session from time to time. He sits at home masturbating his cock all over his area51.slashnet.org server in anticipation of hoping to get another pizza boy to come over and lick sauce off of his swolen-and-blistered-from-too-much-jacking-off cock while dressed as a little school girl whore with a buttplug in his hairy ass late at night.
The signal is intercepted in a location that runs in a wobbling path nort and south of the galactic plane. Clearly this must be due to the telemetry signals from a passing flying saucer. Anybody believe that? I didn't think so. Continue grinding air, anyway. I'll stick to compiling the latest kernel.
I think you make excellent points, but the other side also has some good points to make too. Me? I'm just glad someone is doing something. Its hardly resource intensive (theyre not tying up aricebo for months and people leave their PCs on anyway) and in many ways it can be seen as baby steps towards *some* understanding of potential alien contact.
>They don't get much radio time, and they can't cover much of the sky.
Granted, but that could change tomorrow with funding.
>Now chances of actually recognizing the signal as intelligent life are unknown
I wouldn't say that. Primes in binary would be pretty obvious. Even a something trivial that isn't a pulsar but repeats could be seen as meaningful communication i.e. someone is saying "I exist!"
>Ok, maybe you see it and you recognize it. Can you decode it?
Even if they cant or if its just numbers, the proof that life exists off our sphere is revolutionary and will change humanity forever. That's something to take seriously even if we don't know what we're being told.
> Great, someone's actually listening and gets the signal. You've just had the century-long equivalent of the 20 second bar conversation
I don't think the consensus at SETI or SETI-like projects is to build a conversation. Its about discovery. The proof that intelligent life is abound in the universe, like I mentioned above, is more than justification for the projects.
I think people with your kinds of criticisms have a very high expectation of a very limited project. That doesn't mean that the project isn't worthwhile or can't deliver goods. It just wont deliver the goods you seem to want - a "telephone" like conversation with aliens. A verified signal is more than enough to bowl the world over. Who knows how it will affect us. Will space exploration get a second boom? Will people take global disarmament more seriously? Will the religious scream bloody murder?
Who knows. Like I wrote above, its not an expensive project and I hope to see more SETI stuff in the future, especially powerful wholesale transmissions to likely candidates.
i think you like to touch aliens inappropriately.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
A universe full of life, all with seti programs, just listening to each other listening to each other.
A universe full of introverts, wouldn't it be ironic.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Apparently, many people within the scientific community are beginning to question why distributed computing is being used for SETI@home instead of a project with more scientific merit.
Folding@Home kept CRASHING my COMPUTER
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Actually, I don't think that the receivers used by SETI are sensitive enough to pick up anybody's omnidirectional signals. If we pick up anything at all, it would be because they are beaming massively powerful signals in a narrow beam directed specifically at our solar system. We certainly aren't going to stumble onto any random local alien TV broadcasts.
After spending years searching the radio frequencies on earth for intelligent life, the closest I have found are Dr. Laura, Howard Stern, and Rush Limbaugh ;-) Maybe there is intelligent life on other planets?
Programs doing number crunching shouldn't crash your computer.
Sounds like you have a poorly cooled (and probably overclocked) CPU.
Chances are aliens will be made of it-- matter, that is. There's more matter near stars, especially more tightly packed matter as is likely to make up or provide nutrition or building materials for them.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
So all the civilizations, capable of building radio beakons and moving them away from the star for clearer transmittion will be excluded, as every megawatt transmittion with goal of reaching other civilizations should originate by the planet!
Hm. Strange ideas.
"The next message will be sent by us in 0.00063 of galactic second".
Hyperom.com
If I have a sure-fire algorithm to pick the next power ball number, but it takes a lot of CPU cylcels to find it... will y'all help me out?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
damn those metamorphosizing metamoderating moderators. damn them.
What about George Bush?
=)
What a waste of all those CPU cycles!
Ahh the very nature of Seti@home.
After I quit using it my power bill went down over 20$ a month and I'm not kidding in the slightest.
Before that it struck me - what's the actual probability of finding intelligent life? I work in tech support 90% of all the people I talk to each day are complete morons.
As we are quickly discovering, RF isn't the ideal way to shuffle information around. As a result, Earth will soon (within decades) abandon RF in favor of pure optical communications. Assuming most intelligence follows a similar path, we can expect they will emit detectable RF for perhaps a century. On a geologic timescale, this is much less than the blink of an eye. Therefore the odds of us catching another intelligence when it is at the RF stage of tech evolution is vanishingly small. So fugeddaboudit.
Hmm...
Maybe we should work this from the opposite end... Use the highest power transmitters available to broadcast something for years and years!
How about Pr0n, for example? I'd love to see what aliens would think about "That blue Pr0nWorld orbiting the yellow star".
Perhaps they'd have anal-probe tours... Perhaps they ALREADY DO!
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Seriously, I have problems picking up TV stations at all without cable, and the broadcast is only ~20 miles away (over hilly terrain). Granted I don't have the best antenna, but we're talking about lightyears here. The only signal I pick up reliably is the Sun (just tune your TV to some random station, it comes in quite clear, channel 8 works pretty well for me). Alas, I find little evidence of intelligent life on cable either. Its all random noise.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
They marking you "troll" because of the idiocy of your opinions, and the asinine way you construct your arguments.
Have you ever been asked by your parents to go look for something and then you just peer under your bed for a second and say: "Nup. It's not in my room!"?
That's what spoofing looks like. It would be a greater waste of CPU cycles to redundantly check every result many times over on "trusted machines" if it was easy to spoof a negative result.
It brought distributed computing to the forefront of media attention and to many user's desktops. For that, I give it credit.
I used to think we were simply looking into outer space with the SETI project and hearing complete silence. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. Even in the 'relatively quiet' radio bands, there's still a whole lot of signal going on, and by and large we can't tell it from noise.
The article mentioned is a bit humble when saying 'oh yes, there were more than 166 candidates'. Yes, there were a 'few' more, and it was pretty tough to pare the list down to something the Arecibo could be solidly used for, according to the Planetary Society
Nor is the search in the radio band the be-all end-all to all the observation techniques; to that effect, there are a number of other observations and techniques underway.
I suppose the "saddest" thing at the moment is that we honestly cannot currently tell the difference between "nobody's out there" and "ten billion civilizations are out there", due to our narrow and infrequent observation bands, our simplifying assumptions, and our limited processing power (think of the difference another 50... or even 10 years will make to that).
I suppose an additional question we might have to face if we hear an ET signal: how many people will play it backwards and hear Elvis or the Devil?
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
could be even worse... but that raises the question - would we even be able to comprehend the alien version of goatse.cx?
This space available.
And the message is........ "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."
[NASA engineer] Son of a bitch!
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Did you provide tech support for seti@home users? ;P
John Kerry is a Joke!
That is a very arrogant assumption - it's that mentaility 'build it and they will come' - there is a good reason why people who regard themselves as having a 'superior intellect' do not hold office. Can you imagine a politician with an attitude like that? I think you are all dumb - but please vote for me.. And why on Earth did your electricity bill go down? I leave my machines running 24x7 - so I don't see how extra CPU cycles will make a huge difference to my power bill
If you'd like to contribute to the project,
please visit the SETI@home web site at
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu.
The project is also sponsored by the Planetary Society,
the University of California, Sun Microsystems, Paramount Pictures,
Fujifilm Computer Products, Informix, Engineering Design Team Inc,
The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Intel, Quantum Corporation,
and the SETI Institute.
SETI@home was developed by David Gedye (Founder),
David Anderson (Director), Dan Werthimer (Chief Scientist),
Leonard Chung, Hiram Clawson, Jeff Cobb, Charles Congdon, Charlie Fenton,
Kyle Granger, Eric Heien, Mike Hill, Michael Kang, Eric Korpela,
Matt Lebofsky, Peter Leiser, Brad Silen, Woody Sullivan, and Adam Wight.
hell, they even refuse to -funroll-all-loops
the first thing I read said, "SETI@Home publishes SkyNet."
Holy shit, distributed processing program on all of our computers. The machines plotting against us is already happening!
i hope everyone is a source of a alien-civilsation!
more brains to think creativilly.
maybe they also have TV and computer games?!
10 years from now, 10'000 TV channels! yeah!
The dawn of machines.
light is pretty slow ...
;)
while the photon is traveling thru "empty" space it's arguing with space thru the whole trip. terrible!
there MUST be something instantainiesly! but it's probably un-messurable. all the hard physics using acctual matter will never discover it!
it's going to be a good guess from someone! just like the german guy who sat infront of his fireplace and just thought of the form of the benzol ring (6 c-atoms in a circle). he had no instruments (elec.microscope) he just sat there and had a really good idea to explain it.
i wish Einstein would have never existed!
terrible to have to think how much the univers (and everything in it) is lagging!
funny: i can think/imagine the lag while i'm lagging; i'm probably not 100% accurate with my lag estimate
Before we get all sci-fi here, remember that the US can barely shoot down a missile with their "rocket defense". While the Earth is a much bigger target, you're trying to hit an object from 44,5 trillion km away (closest star), and at 0.92c you'll not be able to make any course correction at all. And the Earth is orbiting the sun, and the sun the galactic disc, making a rather complex movement compared to space. How much does 5 years+ of inaccuracy add up to? I imagine quite a lot...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If that just because only moron's use your companies product? ;-)
>>I work in tech support 90% of all the people I talk to each day are complete morons.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Now I'm no physicist, and I don't know how potential energy is measured relative to a pair of celestial objects, but assuming the velocity of the spaceship relative to the target planet started at something FAR less than .3c, wouldn't that mean that the spaceship somehow had to acquire most of that 15 million megatons of energy itself? Where would that come from? From it's fuel, or fuel it gathered along the way (magentic fusion ramjet equivalent or something)?
A-Bomb
Let's look at the links in this article:
-
"skymap" points to the astrobio article
-
"most promising" points to the skymap
-
"project" points to a past slashdot article about SETI@home
-
"these" points to a description of the signals SETI@home looks for
Here's my suggestion:Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
These are some serious questions that need to be addressed before we invite more aliens into the country, I think.
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
what's the actual probability of finding intelligent life?
I look at in this way: What's the probability of finding intelligent life vs. the probability of me getting cancer.
I switched from seti@home to folding@home.
http://www.d2ol.com/SARS.html - I use this as a USEFUL use of CPU time... I've already clocked up over a hundred drug candidates 'tested'.
Seti uses a lot of CPU time, CPUs draw more power when under load. I'll leave you to work out the rest.
I was just thinking about this based upon a comment posted arguing that if life evolved on another planet similar to Earth and they developed fire, the wheel, etc. millions of years before us then they'd most likely have the radio as well. But if that's the case, then they would have had a Bill Gates figure exploiting their own ancient tech boom. So they too would have progressed to digital radio transmission, and their own music distribution industry would have insisted on protecting the content and then their Mr. Gates would've pioneered the march to encrypting their radio transmissions. So in all likelihood, what are the chances that a lot of those radio signals we are picking up that do not make any sense are encrypted signals being distorted to protect content? Or, what if their computer systems evolved off their own native versions of the Atari ST and Commodore Amigas versus Windows? (we'd be screwed!) And, if there are multiple spacefaring species out there, they too probably have defense strategies and they would definitely encrypt their broadcast transmissions. Just some points to ponder duing the wee hours here in Pacific Standard Time today...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Luc&s^df./l;lkna+7pqoAk$#R%s]f, you've got some splainin' to do!
I leave my machines running 24x7 - so I don't see how extra CPU cycles will make a huge difference to my power bill
Let's just look at the CPU. CPUs have millions of transistors (a Pentium 4 has ~42 million), and each transistor is an electronic switch. The transistor technology they use is Field Effect or "FET". The most common would be "MOSFET". To maintain the state of the switch as ON or OFF, the device holds a small charge (positive or negative depending on the device) and the charge acts to "pinch off" the channel for current to flow, or to open the channel, as the case may be.
While a transistor is just sitting there in a particular ON or OFF state, it uses very little electricity. However, to change the state, you have to either charge or discharge the gate. When you charge or discharge it, this results in a small but finite amount of current flow, and there being resistance in metal and silicon, this results in power being consumed (at a rate of the current squared, times the resistance). So a transistor that is constantly switching will consume power, but a transistor not switching will consume very, very little.
So, if you home computer is just sitting there doing nothing, then it isn't using most of the chip, and the transistors just sit there waiting for the next instruction to execute. However, when you're running SETI @ Home, the CPU is constantly crunching numbers, and the transistors are constantly switching.
If you want to see this yourself, run a temperature monitor on the CPU while it's not doing anything, and then when you run SETI@Home or DOOM. You'll notice that the temperature spikes when it's doing something, and this is just used up energy. If you have electric heat in your house, and live in a cold climate all year long, you may not see the difference on your power bill, but I don't think that applies to most of us.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
seti... echelon... what's the difference?
I thought that lots of stars can't even be seen or detected? Many stars look like they're close when really they're just bright, while a dimmer star may be many times nearer compared to that brigher star...?
I suggest you read Slashdot
If I use ~15 extra watts running at 100% CPU for a month 24/7, that's 10 kW hours at 10 cents a kW hour (source http://www.howstuffworks.com/question91.htm) which makes a dollar. Explain the remaining $19 a month.
leaving the monitor running to display pretty graphics maybe..
I think that is just putting too much attention to detail.. Using my espresso machine, toaster and kettle for one morning probably chews up more power than a computer running at 50-90 watts.. It just seems a little pedantic to worry about an extra dollar or two on an electricity bill - and I live in Australia where climate control requirements are fairly minimal compared to the USA which is the most energy hungry nation on Earth. If you guys are that worried about energy - hang your washing on the line instead of using a dryer - it works for me (more so than spending a night running calculations on a few extra watts - the extra monitor time of which probably just used more energy than a month of distributed processing).
So we shouldn't bother listening for extrasolar transmissions because... they are probably just the last transmissions of a race being bombarded by alien warmongers?
Here's a question: what fucking morons modded this post up as "Insightful"? Moderators, here's a suggestion: read the fucking post instead of skimming and modding on length. And tune up your bullshit detectors, because they are clearly out of calibration.
Man, I hope I get one of you knuckleheads in my metamod list today.
For all of you questioning the utility of SETI@Home (i.e. "It will do no good, we will never find a signal", etc.), I have a question:
Do you MetaModerate?
If so, then how do you justify the one but not the other?
www.eFax.com are spammers
wow, your post made no sense.
brrrrr. that was cold
Sorry, but cepstral techniques don't do what the SETI people need them to do. The de-chirping needs to happen coherently (i.e. without any loss of the phase information from the original data and signals that it might contain). The reason for this is that the signal-to-noise of a detected periodic signal is much less if you use an incoherent technique like the cepstrum rather than a coherent one. And since they are looking for very weak signals, they need every bit of S/N that they can get.
OTOH, I have developed a cepstral-like technique to detect binary pulsars in data almost identical to the SETI@home data. You can read about it here or here if you are interested.
They sunk my battleship!
Explain the remaining $19 a month.
Well, you spent $1 on the CPU, so you spent $2 on cooling. The other $17 is probably traceable to your A/C - that's 3kW.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Whatcha talkin' about willis? No flex capacitor? What were you thinking.
today is spelling optional day.
One of those cheap OEM systems that is not designed to dissipate the heat generated by the CPU they stuck in there running at 100%?
I've been impressed by the quiteness of many of those OEM systems, until I figured out they assume the CPU won't be maxed for very long and go from there.
Extra-terrestrial life looks for YOU!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
Well, if there are aliens transmitting, then either they have confirmed that there are no other intelligent races in the galaxy (which would mean that the transmissions came from us), or they are really stupid and anyone could kill them. He wasn't saying that we shouldn't listen for transmissions, just that we aren't likely to find them. If an alien race was about to be destroyed, they might as well put all of their planet's power into one last transmission of their knowledge.
Consider the size of our galaxy, the number of stars and planets where there may be intelligent civilizations. Think about how many of those would know of our existence, and then actually contact us. Are we looking in the right direction? At the right frequencies? Do we have sensitive instruments enough? Even if we do, can we know what is a signal and what is not? I'm not optimistic. :(
You really don't think all these aliens have come half way across the universe to FEAST on us, do you Gordon?
however, these stars are thousands of light years away, and we didn't find a stargate in gizeh...
I work in tech support 90% of all the people I talk to each day are complete morons.
I often have to call tech support. 90% of the time I get put through to a complete moron.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
One thing that we must remind ourselves when dealing with ET is the raw fact of distance and time. A light year is a hell of distance if your not light. But skeptics must remind ourselves one thing, space-time is a complex beast and the whole light speed defense can be explained away in a variety of given circumstances.
For instance "The Lightyear Ridgid Rod Telegraph" scenario (LRRT) The LRRT scenario asks this: If you had two rods 1 light year in length joined in the middle on a pivot and move the rods together or apart wouldn't the other ends move at the same time (remember that this assumes they are perfectly ridgid) thus your message would exceed the speed of light as the cause and effect over distance happen at the same time. It is simple but serious arguments like the LRRT that reminds us that the speed of light may not be the fastest thing in the universe. Add in entangled atoms that are miles apart and the whole things gets ugly.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Or Dr. Farnsworth's drive which moves the universe about the space drive
I'm not convinced.
Please tell me why you think that the complex spectrum can contain signal information that the magnitude spectrum doesn't.
It seems to me that the spectral phase is independent of the existance of a periodic signal. You might benefit from more bins in the FFT, but keeping the phase component can not make up for that, can it?
Thank you for the pointers to your very informative papers.
Trying to draw 3D molecules on my desktop is more than 'number crunching'
Sounds like you have a poorly cooled (and probably overclocked) CPU.---WRONG!
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