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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."
Or combine them! Each week we get to vote a new race out of the universe, and at the end, the final two races get married.
And here's the surprise: the newlywed alien couple will have Disaster Area play at their wedding, and be given their own Heart of Gold Spaceship as a wedding present!!
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.
http://www.fsckin.com/
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?
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
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
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.
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.
actually the "bell curve" effect is the effect of the "plane" of the milky way intersecting with a cylinder (distorted on either end in this projection). The cylinder is "unwrapped" , thus the plane appears as a sinusoid due to the intersection angle of the galactic plane.
It is also interesting that the radio telscope can only tract objects in a band across the sky, due to physical limitations of a ground based radio telescope. This "can" mean that there are as many as ~4 times as many potential signals out there (since they don't line up with the galactic plane we can assume they are nearby star systems which are scattered about the plane).
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.
Could you imagine if we managed to discover, decode and re-transmist some alien television or radio signal?
We could all watch Omicron Persei 8's version of Single Female Lawyer.
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.
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
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.