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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? ;)
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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!
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?
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They refuse to make any optimization to the original program. Note the lack of even SSE support after all these years.
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...
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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.
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They're assuming that any species capable of producing a radio signal has evolved on in an environment capable of providing the tools to do so. That pretty much leaves: planets.
Planets, as far our theories go, are generally formed during the creation of stars and seem to generally be captured in orbit around stars. (Of course, I doubt anyone has made a wide search for planets not close to stars.)
Thus, to look for life, look near stars.
If they were using the cepstrum to correct for doppler shift, they could get several thousand times speedup; much more than just four.
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?
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I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the WOW signal. read the link..it'll send chills down yer spine!
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.
There seems to be some misunderstanding here based on replies and moderators. I will try to clarify this.
Okay, looking at the map, the orange dots near the following locations are in lines:
7.2hr, +20 deg., near Gemini, 6 dots.
17hr, +20 deg., near Herculese, 6 dots.
14hr, +25 deg., near Booties, 5 dots.
The UFO statement was just a joke. But, I am curious as to why those orange dots do fall into a line on the map. I am just asking a question.
Table-ized A.I.
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
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.
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).
[roughly, where can I learn more about chemosynthesis - based ecosystems?]
Try googling on "black smokers". Here's a quick overview: an introductory lecture about black smokers
I gues why searching near stars is the preferred approach. Although civilizations might exist away from a star, more likely they exist near a star.
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