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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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Sounds more like it's involved with a new crap reality show than SETI@Home.
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.
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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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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.
Cool! Now I'll finally be able to find my way home...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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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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
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.")
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.
First off, even if we never find life out there, the mere existance of SETI@home helped get the idea of massively distributed computing out there as a viable option.
Second, I don't think anyone is claiming that radio waves are a viable method of intersteller communication (frankly, all the options there suck, barring the discovery of handwavium or similar magic-tech).
The point isn't to find a race out there to chat with. The point is to find evidence that, at some point in the past, *someone* out there emitted radio signals. Are they still around? Can we call them up and discuss deep, philosophical questions? Maybe, and probably not. But proving that intelligent life exists or existed off Earth, even if it went extinct long ago by our reckoning, is a worthy enough project, in my less-than-humble opinion.
James.
"I have spread my dreams under your feet, Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams." - W. B. Yeats.
You think nobody would care if we found evidence of intelligent life on another planet?
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
If seti finds an alien signal, it will probably be alien pay sat-tv signals. We won't be able to decode them because of the DMCA.
Surfing the net and other cliches...
(Who Meta-Meta-Moderates the Meta-Moderators?)
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.
SETI managed to get the public in on it though. Finding Aliens is a whole lot cooler than crunching meaningless numbers. ...
Right?
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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You're mostly right, but you're completley wrong. The fact of the matter is, SETI probably won't find anything like you say, and it will take too long to talk to anyone we do find, but SETI isn't hurting anybody, and it might help. End of story man. I don't see you doing anything to answer the mysteries of the universe.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
OK all you people who wouldn't get excited if they found a signal, raise your hand... Thank you sir. Sir. You may sit down now sir.
OK now all you other people...
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?
You presume that any civilisation we find is on the same technological level as we are.
There is the possibility (probability perhaps) that a found civilisation is far in advance such that it might take 100 years for our message to rech them but when it does they engage thier ftl communication system and promptly tell us how to build our own if we don't have one by then already.
I'd agree with you that the chance of SETI being successful is probably slim, but it's not pointless, because there is *a* chance, and that's worth exploring.
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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
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.
Oh great. So by intercepting them, we become felons and get sued by the RIAOP8 (Recording Industry Association of Omicron Persei-8)?
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
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
Actually, I think they were doing pretty bad for a while but later secured more funding and now they're alright.
Not me, I'm leaving as soon as I find my home planet.
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.
Programs doing number crunching shouldn't crash your computer.
Sounds like you have a poorly cooled (and probably overclocked) CPU.
* 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.
Agreed... but it doesn't hurt to try. Also, don't forget that to develop advanced techniques or better alternatives, one needs to start with the basics. You don't start riding a bicycle without learning how to balance or how to walk. Same thing here. What they are doing may be "primitive" and next to useless but I'm sure some good will come out of it--if not now, in 50 or 100 years ago.
* Now chances of actually recognizing the signal as intelligent life are unknown. They've got some great theories. Who knows if they're right?
Intelligence is an overrated word that is used to oppress lower classes. There is no such thing as intelligene--at least when you look at things from a macroscopic scale. The point wouldn't be to find intelligent lifeform--rather it is to find ANY lifeform. Whatever you find may or may not be "intelligent" (for example, if you find aliens that have mastered electromagnetic waves but haven't even figured out how to build a 10 story building, are they "intelligent"?).
* Ok, maybe you see it and you recognize it. Can you decode it?
This will be the tough part IMO. Even if you find something, it could take hundreads of years to decode the message. Stanislaw Lem, a Polish sci-fi author who has written many sci-fi novesl (including Solaris), postulates that it will take 100+ years to communicate with an alien (even if the alien made physical contact). Humans can understand each other's language because we made it all up; and we can understand animals because we are animals. The same cannot be said of foreign aliens.
* Alright, so who cares if you decode it, you FOUND INTELLIGENT LIFE that existed at least several hundred of years ago
I can't believe you are dismissing this. If contact is made (or evidence is found), it will be the MOST IMPORTANT human event in the last 500 years. It will be bigger than theory of gravity, theory of relativity, development of transistors,computers,electricity, World War II, rise of Communism, Nazism, etc. Discovery of aliens will likely result in elimination of religions (or religious wars), massive scientific "push", etc. It will alter our understanding of the universe. We will know that we are not "alone". In addition, this can provide more answers to the meaning to life and further philosophy...
* 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.
They may or may not have technology dealing with electromagnetic/radio waves. But the hope is that they will. For all we know, they may be far more advanced in that area... As far as aliens nuking themselves, it is a possibility. However, I don't think it will be the case. Humans are very violent (we kill each other, destroy nature, etc). I think the probability of finding more peaceful beings are higher than finding ones that are more violent than us.
* 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.
This argument is moot. There will be a massive lag so people can't communicate. However, we (and them) can sort of figure out that something is out there. Also one should keep in mind that this will be a long term action, done to benefit humanity as opposed to the individual. For instance, if you send a signal now, someone 200 years from now may get back the response from the alien. It does not benefit you
......The worst thing in my life happened when the stock market started mattering more than the economy
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
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.
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.
Because the resolution of the map is too low to differetiate the discepancies between the route of the configurations you noticed and a straight line?
In other words, the coast of Norway may be as ragged as the hem of a hippie's cutoffs but look straight on a low-res map.
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...
You presume the point of SETI is to communicate with aliens. It is not. It is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So they only need to answer your first two conditions, and those are some of your weakest ones. In fact, you seem to advocate them getting more money, as then they will be able to cover more of the sky and have a better chance with increased funding for their projects.
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.
Because that's the "line" of the sky they're aiming their sensors at, nimrod.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
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
Does anyone else know that little green men was not the entire point of the project? A lot of science is seredipitous and SETI looks for patterns (yes with FFTs) which *could* indicate some sort of intelligent life, but which much more likely will indicate interesting space phenomenon. Looking for little green men was a marketing ploy to get the public enthused about the boring task of grinding through a bunch of data in a very methodical fashion for no express purpose. And future scientists will likely do masters work grinding through the "candidates" to explain which ones are pulsars and which ones are possible black holes (or the rhythmic burst of gamma radiation as small bits of proto-matter is sucked through an event horizon which leads us to believe we have found black holes), which ones are the death throws of a giant blue star heating and cooling and throwing off seas of it's radiant atmosphere as the changes within the doomed star begin to lock the heat of the solar furnace within it's core and prepare for the surreal explosion of a super-nova (someone could get published if they found one of those in the data). And something which is not readily explained? That is the chance of a lifetime.
Forget a cosmic "message in a bottle". We could not possibly determine any content from that far away unless the little green men figured out a way to put a huge shutter nearby their sun and used it as a giant semaphore. If your are doing science for science sake you are taking measurements and expecting to find only mundane results. The really exciting thing about SETI is that it is has never been possible to throw this much data through such an effective sieve.
If you have reason to expect the unexpected, little green men are certainly an unexpected thing; little green men are also an unfortunate legacy of marketing decision made early on in SETI which cost it funding and nearly killed the project entirely. Clever renaming to the High Resolution Microwave Survey (a better description of how the project was expected to serve the science community) got funding for another year and was able to pass the technology on to the public where it partly lives on with SETI@home. This renaming also left politicians feeling betrayed (the joke was that HRMS stood for "He Really Means SETI") and there was so be no more funding to "look for little green men".
SETI is a *really* good thing.
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!
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.
They don't get much radio time, and they can't cover much of the sky.
Having one bad eye is better than being blind.
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*
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
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
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.
Because that's the "line" of the sky they're aiming their sensors at, nimrod.
If so, why *just* those areas? I am still puzzled. I would use a criss-cross pattern if I was trying to study a general area, not one line.
Table-ized A.I.
Are you suggesting that the map is truncating or rounding to a kind of grid pattern? Possible, but the spacing looks too uneven for that in some places, at least in the horizontal dimension. Plus, one "line" is slightly diagonal.
Table-ized A.I.
Extra-terrestrial life looks for YOU!
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
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. :(
Because the telescope is a fixed earth telescope, you can't move it around so it only covers a portion of the sky. It sits in a natural dip on the earth so the dish is completley immovable, but huge. The telescopes home site is http://www.naic.edu/open.htm
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Because the telescope is a fixed earth telescope, you can't move it around so it only covers a portion of the sky.
Yes, but it "scans" different areas as the Earth points to different places, because the Earth is tilted. Also, they can move the small receiver near the top for fine-tuning position. Plus, one of the "lines" is diagonal.
Table-ized A.I.
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? ]=-
The earth does move, but with relation to the rest of the universe not by a lot. Your looking at the same band of sky all the time if you stand on one point of the earths surface. There are apparent seasonal changes but thats got to do with the position of the sun and which part of the band of sky above your head is visible at night. Thats why you never get to see the southern cross in the northern hemisphere, or the north star in the south.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
Maybe the alien civilisation has got to a sufficiently advanced stage where they can send a signal out to the star systems that might support life in the local area.
When someone replies (or is themself detected) then they might consider that we will soon be worth contacting. The 100+ years that it takes for our signals to return to them would allow them time to prepare for the ensuing war that would no doubt follow soon after.
I for one will welcome our new alien overlords.
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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