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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.
The likelyhood of aliens living near a star is probably based on the idea that most lifeforms are somewhat similar to ourselves, and need light/heat from a star to survive.
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If we find aliens I hope they like beer.
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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!
It would have to be some form of heat source, capable of producing an immense form of heat. And since Richard Simmons in spandex would take years to get that far, stars will have to do.
.. 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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Because it's more likely than aliens living in the nothingness between stars (a vacuum near absolute zero where atoms per square mile are counted on one hand). Just my guess.
It's not impossible for something we're only guessing about in the first place, but unlikely given what we believe to be true.
-ptah
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.
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.
Please help metamoderate.
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?
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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
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.
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
Well... we're far more likely to find an extra-terrestrial settlement on a planet where it'll still be there (in theory) each time we check, then trying to look for the Battlestar Galactica or the Katana Fleet or whatever.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
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?
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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
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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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.
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
oh, and also "Liftering" as opposed to "filtering".
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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 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.
However, to be more consistent with popular media science measurement systems, we would more correctly say that a sheet of interstellar space the size of a football field and the thickness of a human hair would contain about 3000 atoms.
* 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
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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.
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.
Well, it could be argued that Zahn's books are far better than the last two movies that Lucas has made...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
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
R* is the rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life. These stars are neither too hot (too close) nor too cold (too far) for life to form. This happy middle ground is also known as the Goldilocks zone.
Fp is the fraction of those stars with planets. Planets normally form only around stars. Some solar system have no planets and hence very little chance of having life as we know it.
All life is dependent on energy is some form or another. For most life on this planet, that energy is the sun in the forms of light and heat. While other forms of energy have been found to sustain life like chemosynthesis in the deep ocean trenches, this phenomenom will be nearly impossible to detect from earth. It is far easier to detect stars, but that doesn't mean locating a signal will be a breeze.
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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!
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:
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"skymap" points to the astrobio article
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"most promising" points to the skymap
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"project" points to a past slashdot article about SETI@home
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"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.
Yeah, the problem with the Drake Equation is that its nigh-useless. All seven of its factors are (for the most part) completely arbitrary. You can use it to prove whatever you want, and people frequently do.
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
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).
[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
A search on google under "chemosynthesis" will find some articles on this phenomenom. Bacteria the base form of life that is directly dependent on chemicals that spew out of the trenches. All other forms near the trenches are in some way dependent on them like most of the food chain on the surface is indirectly dependent on plants.
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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.
While the computations from the Drake equation are useless, I think that it does provide some insight and analysis into which factors are important in limiting our ability to contact other species. As science evolves, certain aspects of the equation change. For example until the discovery of life near the ocean trenches, Ne, was thought to be limited to worlds which are like our own. After that discovery, it opened another class of planetoids that may have life, like Europa and Mars.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.