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SETI Project Scientist Discusses Prospects
An anonymous reader writes "Today Astrobiology Magazine interviewed SETI@home Project Scientist, Dan Wertheimer, about subjects including the first detailed 'best of SETI' candidate reobservations for repeating telescope acquisition on the most promising 166 star candidates. Their policy is not to release precise sky coordinates on the best ones yet (so far a signal called SHGb11+15a), with this type of Gaussian signal shape. The candidates number some 400 million Gaussians and 5.7 billion spikes."
but I, for one, welcome our new radio communicating alien overlords.
I'd love to give it a go with my very own personal radio telescope (dish.jpg). Sure it'd be hard to point, and maybe not possible to receive anything at all, but I'd like to try :-)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Yeah, but they don't name the people whose SETI clients actually found these prospects. Bah!
--
Because the networks haven't been putting out anything but complete and utter crap. Maybe some alien crap will be better.
He says in his book "Age of Spiritual Machines" that if aliens existed and were advanced enough to send us signals, they would in all probability have mastered the use of nano-technology and could probably fit a lot of things into extremely small spaces. So, if they actually wanted to probe earth, they might be sending in virus sized particles which we might not be detecting at all. A very novel idea, considering our view of aliens has been more in terms of flying saucers and ET etc.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
It'll probably turn out to be an alien goatse when they finally get it decoded.
for a long time, being a windows user, I of course used the screensaver version to do the math. However, it's come to my attention that using the command line makes for better efficiency, less CPU devoted to nice graphs, more CPU for crunching numbers. I read somewhere it was between 5-10% faster. Anyway, just a heads up for you seti folk running windows who want to squeeze a few more results out in a day :)
damn, i didn't think clearchannel had THAT much influence
Forget it. They're laughing at us. We're trying to find transmissions based on how we'd transmit data now. We're looking for smoke signals from civilizations that use Wavelet enncoded HDTV. We're trying to find cizilizations similar to our own; intellegent species have probably advanced way beyond some local interplanetary WIFI model. They're probably chuckling at our feeble attempts right now. Chuckling in their own vieny large headed kind of way. Puny humans.
What will be the next step after we detect a signal?
What can we possibly learn from a buncha backwaters critters still interested in such a primitive form of communication as radio?
-or-
What can THEY possibly learn from a buncha backwaters critters still interested in such a primitive form of communication as radio?
v.m
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
We'll offer them some colored beads and rum, and see if we can trick them into giving us Risa.
Now selling Star Trek themed vacations to Risa. Paypal Accepted!
Seti keeps looking for easily discernable patterns in the signals they receive.
But look at what has happened here on earth as we moved toward digital communications. The more we compress the data, the more random it seems at first glance. I'll bet someone could prove that mathematically.
For example, consider the sound that a modem makes over the phone.
Also, to avoid interference when transmitting, signals are multiplexed over multiple wavelength. Again, I'll bet further technology improvements will make those future signals seem even more random to a current receiver.
In order to see through the apparent randomness in digital signals, you need to know how the signal is encoded.
Therefore, what SETI should be looking for are signals that, at first, appear as white noise. Then try to decode them.
By looking for simple patterns, like carrier waves, SETI will only be able to detect an advanced civilization for a period of around 50 years, and that's assuming that they start broadcasting signals that will reach space before they make the transition to digital.
What will be the next step after we detect a signal?
/. them into oblivion!
Clearly, we will
The study also mentioned that they processed the radiotelescope signal to extract the audio component. Listen to SHGb11+15a.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
If Alien were trying to communicate with use why wouldn't they use radio/tv signals that would get out attention. If there technology was great enough to detect our presence why would they want to contact us. Are humans trying to contact and communicate with deep sea fish in the atlantic? When you were in school did you talk and hang out with the dumb kids. No cause there was no reason to communicate.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
The search for alien civilization is akin to a search for Yeti, angels, or ley lines -- insofar that the belief in all these is a psychological panacea for weak-minded and/or desperate people grasping for something to believe in.
It makes me sad to think of all the computing resources wasted on aliens when those computers could have been doing something useful like simulating proteins. Of course, proteins are hardly as glamorous or exciting as SETI's ridiculous sci-fi fantasy.
SETI actually brings up a very interesting issue. So let's say they do find an alien civilization, would SETI get to copyright and patent the material that they gleen from the alien civilization?
Could we use any of the alien stuff as prior art to refute patent claims we don't like?
Considering the amount of money at stake, I have no doubt the SETI lawyers will play the SCO game and resist any actually release of data.
We're not necessarily trying to find transmissions based on how we transmit, we're trying to find transmissions that don't look like background noise.
Even if you can't decode wavelet-encoded HDTV, it's certainly still going to be identifiable as a signal that didn't happen by accident.
steve
damn, i didn't think clearchannel had THAT much influence
Uh, it said intelligent beings from other galaxies...
intelligent beings from other galaxies using radio
Obviously *not* the work of ClearChannel.
do not read this line twice.
I've contributed over 5000 work units to SETI and even found one of those "interesting" signals. I stopped a while ago. Why? a few reasons:
1. I realized that the amount of time a civilization would use anything recognizable over radio waves would probably be pretty short. From the invention of radio until every signal is compressed and/or encrypted would probably be a few hundred years at best. compressed and encrypted data would just look like noise and probably wouldn't stand out. So it's either no-radio or unintelligible radio signals for billions of years with a small "hearable" window. not too promising that we'd be able to catch that.
2. There are better or at least more interesting causes out there for CPU donators. Folding@home has the potential to contribute to a nanotechnological or medical revolution. United Devices is a project to test cancer drugs and the results go to Oxford in case you're wondering about the for-profit nature of the company behind it. Finaly, the climate prediction project is contributing to a better understanding of planetary climate dynamics.
My side interest is Mars exploration and terraformation which is a pretty much just consists of reading literature on the subject. However, with contributing to nanotech, cancer drugs and climate prediction, I am making a small dent in the effort to adapt both ourselves and technology to making a new world.
I realize that last part was a bit offtopic but I thought I'd at least give a little reasoning behind why I choose to run those ones.
Blaze a trail to the New World
that's not SHGb11+15a...
that's the sound of the signal from Contact.
Spooked me a little before I realised what it was, though.
Of course, that is assuming they haven't already sold into .NET . . . maybe that is why SETI is not letting the world know where the signals are coming from yet.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
You forget - here on Earth you have people still using communication methods from years gone by on the 'ham bands'. And CB still exists/is used.
So while the 'newest' stuff a majority will use, the 'old ways' - writing with quill pens and an ink-well - will still exist and be in use.
Running a little off-topic here, but I feel I need to quote this from the article:
SETI@home is now our planet's largest supercomputer, averaging 60 teraflops, thanks to 4.7 million SETI@home volunteers in 226 countries.
Three years ago I created one extra seti account by mistake, for which I processed 3 packets.
According to the seti@home individual user stats page, this account has processed more packets than 46.361% of their users.
I wonder if they count the idle and non-active user accounts when they claim 4.7 million users?
If not, it's probably safe to exclude about 50% of that user mass.
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
Nothing in these stories specify why they're not releasing the co-ordinates yet, and I thought Slashdot readers might be particularly interested in this.
I work at a computer lab which is used by a branch of a certain space agency (not NASA, but they have similar policies) and we process a lot of data for these folks (It's a bit like SETI@Home, but we get what are called the 'higher level' packets, given only to accredited packets of ramen.)
When you're dealing with signals from large distances (over a few thousand miles) you need a lot of gain on your aerial to get a strong signal. This is why they use giant dishes at places like Aribico, because the largeness of dish allows the signal to be taken and magnified when it gets here, so you get a clearer signal from a noisy signal (for the non scientific people here.. it's like how in CSI they can zoom in a noisy picture and 'clean it up' or look round corners and stuff).
Well, this high gain aerial 'sucks up' (again, non science speak) a lot of the signal. This means if they gave out the co-ordinates everyone would try to listen in to the stuff coming from that area, and diminish all of the signal so that SETI couldn't pick up anything even on their big aerials. It's kinda like how if a radio station has more listeners, they have to turn the signal up.. but we can't tell the aliens to do that!
The same thing happens with light, but to a lesser extent. Theoretically if you had a million people looking at a single LED, the light would be so spread out that it would appear to go off. This is why, as children, we're told not to look at the sun, because if we all did that, we would be plunged into darkness.
Anyway, I hope that cleared it all up.
mogorific carpentry experiments
"Their policy is not to release precise sky coordinates on the best ones yet (so far a signal called SHGb11+15a), with this type of Gaussian signal shape." Guess they're afriad of someone /.'ing the coorodinates?
Yes, we are laughing...
So I wouldn't expect civilizations using radio to send out messages that looked completely like white noise, I'd expect the messages to look like white noise + error correction coding. How we would distinguish such messages from actual white noise, I haven't a clue.
What's more worrying is that we can really only expect to receive strong omnidirectional broadcasts. If I were designing an interplanetary/interstellar communications network I'd probably have weak omnidirectional signals for wireless end nodes, but then use wires (where possible) and lasers (where necessary) to connect all the nodes together. Why would an advanced civilization be wasting power to leak messages across the entire sky?
I would never even begin to consider telling you what cause you should devote your time to, please don't take this post in that manner.
I agree that the time a civilization would uses radio waves would be short, however the signals they did send out are still monsig through space.
Also, if some race wanted to be found, radio would be one of the methods they try, kind of a lowest common denomenator.
Plus, just because are race seems to be finding digital the way to go at this moment, doesn't mean an other race would. Nor does it mean that it will turn out that digital is the way thing will go.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It is just another way to ensure that all the Kurweil fan boys keep paying the bucks for his book and talks!
It isn't about predicting the future, it is about making money.
The Law of Falling Bodies
you left out half his analogy. he said we are LOOKING FOR SMOKE SIGNALS. when you do that the equipment you use CAN NOT pick up wavelet HDTV signals no matter how hard you try.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
If there is anything coherent at all in a signal, it will differentiate itself from the background noise. Even spread spectrum (CDMA) signals can be found. Ultimately, any actual content you transmit will only achieve pseudorandomness.
--- Ban humanity.
It's in a box at 11h RA, +15 Dec.
...than RSA.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Why? It wasn't your post. To be honest, I was trolling. It just seemed to turn into humor. Mod it accordingly.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Does anyone know what the overall earth looks like? in the radio spectrum at least.
Have we ever launched a radio telescope way out in space, and looked home?
And I don't care about someone who died a lot of time ago and will be dead forever to have mercy in something that doesn't exist. Religious shithead.
That's a false assumption you've made. SETI admits that it has very little chance of detecting a civilization like our own - one that is just haplessly sending out signals - unless that civilization was very very close by. SETI is looking for more advanced civilizations that intentionally make their presence known by intentionally transmitting signals in ways that have been purposefully selected to be obviously non-natural. That's why SETI checks frequencies like pi*H and the space between OH and H2.
So, you're right. There's probably little chance that an alien civilization is using radio in a way we can detect. They are probably using fiberoptic cables for most traffic and transmissions that are so well compressed they are indistinguishable from noise for the rest. If they have colonies the communications between them are probably so highly directional we'll never pick them up. But maybe they went through the same process of searching that we are going through. And maybe, when they didn't hear anything, they decided to announce their presence. That's what SETI is looking for. OK?
None of the known extrasolar planets are supposed to be particularly good candidates for life, though that Vega case maybe indicates a solar system a little like ours, with rocky planets in the interior orbits... or that's the speculation.
We've still got a ways to go in refining our way of just looking for the things. To narrow any search based on them would be premature.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Oh you vile Vegans! Always laughing at other races! But you won't laugh for ever!!
Our space legions *will* destroy you next time!
While I was reading your post, I could feel the neurons in my head being sucked out. Now I gots a overwhelming urge to go out and buy me a pick-em-up truck, a gun rack, and a CB radio.
Sheee-it.
Is the default radio noise of space white noise? Does encrypted data look like white noise? Is it necessary to use an easily detectable carrier for communications? Is seti not really just searching for other species at a similar technological level to our own? Even if we do find a signl with seti, doesn't it suggest that we are finding a species who we are unlikely to encounter for a very long time (i.e. they have as long to go to be able to reach us as we have to reach them), rather than finding a species with "star-trek-tech"?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Any compression advanced enough is indistinguishable from noise. That might be a difficult task then.
-Adam
#!/bin/csh cat $0
without refering to DATA?
Let's ask Faith Plus One lead singer, Eric, how he feels about comparing Jesus with Linux and Windows to discovering alien existence!
It would seem feasible in years forward when we begin unraveling the particulars in how concsiousness is encoded in humans to make other beings here on earth similiar enough to us to make do with human semantic and semiotic exchanges from that it would be possible to extrapolate enough data to instill a pragmatic program to unravel the myraid ways in which beings can observe, manipulate, and believe of the universe.
Are we running into playing into a gambit with our understanding that does not include all the possible iterations of intelligence we observe already on earth? Why are we not Gentically Engineering Dolphins or the like in hopes of making them viable scientific partners? I'm sure we would lose the votes of anyone who would presume human superiority but how far must we extend that before we confront something that is not us but better to realize that when we have the ability to manifest life esp intelligent life we should. If people think that they are going to terraform everything out there and/or build endless human habitats at the extreme expense needed in terms of energy to mantain artificial pressure/temp/humidity gradients they may be more inclined to consider the engineering of life to suit the habitats we already have.
The challange we face being the only technologically advanced species in the solar system is fraught with a sense of ambiguous superiority that is preventing us from researching avenues that may be our best hope in creating an analog of alien intelligence. Namely we have many canidate species that are waiting for us to begin a rapid evolution program so that they may join ranks with us in asking these questions of universal significance that may not ever be realized by a singuluar species. Let JC Lilly's and Goodall's beginning of a verncaular between species inspire us all to look outward.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I still strongly think that we should maybe just 'shut up' instead of sending signals all over the place and trying to contact another planet.
/.. The aliens will be pissed off if they get a couple million 'grow your penis' messages.
One of these days a civilization will catch one, spot us and they will destroy us just because we could later hurt them if we continue to develop and spread.
Damn we are sending signals since the 30s and even if they are weak, they must be quite far now.
I'm fine with listening but I wouldn't send high power messages like we are doing.
Remember about that guy that used to send his spam in deep space ? It was covered by
Iraq: war to save the U
but you have to accept Christ as your saviour and King, AND mean it. This is the idea of faith. Jesus died for one simple purpose. When he died on the cross, all of man's sins died with him. A sacrificial lamb if you will. That is why without accepting Christ and acknowledging his very sacrifice to us you will not find eternal redemption on the next plane. Even scientists practice faith in some form - otherwise why keep forging ahead?
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
We're all of us monkeys. I gotta admit, even if what we find is an Alien coconut trap with some tasty treats inside and a hole too small to pull our fist out of, I'd rather devote my life to that puzzle that withdraw into the self-indulgent solipsism my family calls its particular religion.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
CB has been used for less that 100 years. That's not old, when you consider that it takes 100,000 years for a signal to cross our galaxy.
What if they don't use the electromagnetic waves for data transmission at all.
They might be using some quatum physics phenomenon to transmit data, in which case it is way over our heads. :)
This is false, and a confusion of data from transmission. Compressed data does in fact look fairly random (in fact, the less random it looks, the poorer your compression is). However, the only way to get the random data is to decipher the transmission, which is bloody obvious and would stand out like a sore thumb. Assuming what you're saying is true, we'll receive signals we have no hope of deciphering, but they will not look natural by any means. The data is random, but the transmission that carries that random data will look quite unlike white noise or anything of the sort.
Look at it this way: if an ancient civilization had stopped chiseling plain text on stone tablets and started chiseling compressed data streams, we would look at the compressed data and have no hope of ever understanding the message. But we wouldn't look at the symbols chiselled on the rock and say, "I don't understand this message, it must be natural phenomenon."
If you broadcast compressed and encrypted data by radio, or heck, if your broadcast a stream of random bits, it's still every bit as obvious as the chiseled stone tablets. Your "small 'hearable' window" is in fact huge. We would be able to hear the transmissions just fine. We just won't understand what they're saying.
But at that point, we just send them an unencrypted, easy to understand signal, and wait for a response. (We might even get one before they get ours, as they may be doing the same thing we are and have already detected our untranslatable babble and want clarification...)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Query: If one checks the "Clear screen" checkbox, and sets the clear screen timeout to 1 minute - does that recover most of the CPU time?
I ask because I've found that my Windows box runs a little slow for games when it's running the background Seti@home client.
InThane
I'd love to do that one but it's bl00dy ms-windows only... so for now I'll stick with crunching seti units... and see what they switch to later.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
An encrypted transmission is like a formatted disk containing encrypted data. Impossible to decipher, but patently obviously not natural.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Then how would *they* recognize their own signal to "decode" it?
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
Universal box, but what do you use to gather and present your data? The digital suite that is sold seems to be only for windows.
Like most things worth having, a solution will eventually present itself, especially on Linux. There is a Linux, open source, solution in the form of Linradio. Enjoy.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
That is not true for every signal. While that's true for many, sometimes you have to fight though a lot of attenuation or noise and you can't use those tricks. Think about radar, instead of communications. We even fire radar from Earth at the planets and such.
I mean come on, folks. Jesus uses a Mac. It's obvious. And any other view is heresy. Can I get an Amen?
Actually I can prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns since it is a logical contradiction. Invisible things by definition cannot have a color.
Happy people make bad consumers.
No it's not. We already have dozens, if not hundreds, of applications (like GPS) that reside below the background level of noise and require advanced processing to extract the information. It's a very simple concept; if no one knew the frequency or code of GPS, it would be virtually impossible to find the signal below the noise level. And that's a system that was invented 20 years ago.
Moreover, just because data is encrypted does not mean that the modulation technique does not leave a signature.
Most modulation modalities actually apply pseudo-noise to the signal to keep the power spread in a constant envelope in case someone sends all zeros, for instance. Without the spreading, the "all zeros" signal would become a single spike of power at a particular frequency, which could overdrive the amplifiers.
I have an unencrypted carrier on satellite AMC-3, but through a spectrum analyzer it looks just like encrypted DVB or DigiCipher II signals on the same satellite, like a guassian with a flattened top.
Of course, I don't believe in RF SETI. The size of antenna required to create a beam powerful enough to be seen several lightyears away makes it impractical. Optical and X-Ray SETI is where it is at.
I just shot coke out of my nose. MOD THIS UP! I haven't laughed so hard in weeks!
You hear that? We don't need no frickin' science! We have... a Book!
You mean the Koran, right?
Intelligent life is NOT a certainty. For 3 billion years, the only life on this planet was single-celled organisms. Complex life is only 500-600 million years old. The dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years, and there is no evidence that any of those were even slightly intelligent. There are many possibly sentient creatures around now - the great apes and cetaceans, but only one has developed technology in the fast few thousand years, probably as a result of the exceptional circumstances resulting from the ice ages. Just looking at our planet, intellent technological life is an extremely unlikely occurrence.
If it means I can get a clean picture on my telly, the I for one welcome our new Wavelet Encoded HDTV Masters.
Da Blog
Friends, I think the facts point to the existence of at least 59 extraterrestrial civilizations. I submit that all life .. whether it is
Earth-based or not .. is cursed by sin. Because of this, all life is in need of salvation from that sin. We know from historical record
(the Bible) that the Lord Jesus Christ spent 33 years cleansing this planet of sin. Because the Bible is inerrant, we must assume that
33 years is the exact amount of time required to purge the sin of a planet. (After all, if it were more or less, that would imply an
imperfect Christ .. something that is not allowed by Scripture.)
We also know that Jesus pledged to return one day. So far, He hasn't. This means that he is most likely purging other civilizations of sin. Christ died 1,970 years ago; assuming that He is not bound by the speed of light, that gives Him enough time to purge 59 planets of sin. (If he is limited by lightspeed, things get complicated, but there is no reason to assume that such an arbitrary natural law applies to God.)
The point is that with each passing year that Jesus does not return, the odds for extraterrestrial life go up. This is a good thing. I for one am excited about the prospect of life among the stars, and I am convinced that it exists. Don't let an overly-narrow interpretation of Scripture dictate a purely ethnocentric worldview to you; it will only hold you back.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
First of all, there is no indication that nanotechnology is even feasible. People thought for centuries that they could turn lead into gold by chemical means and yet they never succeeded. Nanotechnology is the new alchemy, hyped by startups starving for money and a few people trying to make a name for themselves with unscientific mumbo-jumbo.
Second, virus sized or not, those probes still need to get from one star to the next. That's a considerable problem even for very tiny probes. You might be able to propel them with a ground laser, but braking would be tricky and if someone were shining a high-intensity laser in our direction for the many years it takes to travel interstellar distances, we'd notice it.
Third, if there were nanoprobes zipping around in any significant numbers, we'd notice. We conduct a lot of sensitive experiments and have a lot of sensitive equipment. Nanoprobes would have some sort of effect on that.
Kurzweil has always been doing nice PR for himself. Too bad he rarely delivers much.
Wouldn't it be easier to get Gates to donate a mere $30 million and get Virgina Tech to build a "Big Mac" 6 times larger?
Oh wait a minute Gates would insist on naming the aliens WIN-ites.
Even if you can't decode wavelet-encoded HDTV, it's certainly still going to be identifiable as a signal that didn't happen by accident.
Not at all. New ultra wide band radio (UWB) is low power and looks like noise, at least to the analysis methods SETI is employing. We probably wouldn't be able to distinguish it from natural background noise.
Then how would *they* recognize their own signal to "decode" it?
They know the bit sequence (for direct spread spectrum modulation), decryption keys, and the compression algorithm. Unless you know all three, the signal will look like noise to you. And SETI certainly doesn't even attempt to deal with those possibilities--they are effectively just looking for analog AM and FM transmissions.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
No, if there is intelligent life out there, they are just waiting for us to develop the technology for them to be able to "phone" us; there is nothing they can gain by visiting in person that they couldn't gain by simply talking to us, and faster-than-light transmission of information is a lot more likely than faster-than-light transportation of living beings...
On the other hand, the simulation we're living in may not have the capacity to emulate entire alien cultures...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
"Some people are searching the heavens for signs of intelligent life. I still haven't given up hope of finding it on this planet!" -- Lily Tomlin
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Why does everyone assume that aliens, if they do exist, would be a good deal more advanced than we are? It's quite possible are signals aren't being understood by cave dwelling aliens who are still learning to bang rocks together.
In which case, I hope we're still around in 20,000 years for them to find when *they* start looking.
With luck, and some hope, we might even be able to help them out of the self-destructive idiocy of their social adolescence. If we can avoid driving our own collective hot-rod off the cliff in our near future, that is.
And how would these virus-sized particles navigate to Earth (including making the inevitable course corrections), and transmit the relevant information back to Rigel IV?
Ray Kurzweil's book makes a huge number of grandiose claims, some of which might come true, the vast majority of which probably won't. Very few of them are ever actually supported by much solid logic, let alone evidence.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
And unless the 'space' is 'reused' the CB's will continue to exist in that 'space' - just like Ham's still (mostly) exist in thier space.
I'd bet whatever 'advanced' civilization would still have people holding onto the 'old ways' along with the occational grade-school-science-program-radio-demo that might be able to be picked up....once we get lucky and know where to look.
Not quite. You can copyright the instantiation of the data, though not the data itself. For example, SETI could not copyright the data they received (anyone can receive it), but they could certainly copyright the way that data was presented (printing the results on paper).
Don't you mean "Single Female Lawyer"
just look at the mascot. Sure, He wants the stability and security of the BSD core, but politically there's no way He could embrace BSD.
Uhm, well, they obviously know what they're sending, and what they're trying to receive. Just like our TV. Signal goes over the air, and by magic, a picture appears on the screen. Why? Because it knows how to decode the signal, because it knows what to look for, because that's what you'd send if you wanted someone to decode it.... Or am I missing your point completely?
If we limit the age of the universe to 13.7 billion years, that puts some fairly tight constraints on the evolution of life, especially advanced civilizations, in the universe.
If the universe is older by a older by a small amount or perhaps a few billion years, or even greater (which an eventual solution to the age paradox might bring us to), the possibilities for extra-terrestrial life become more and more possible.
Given enough time, even "kooky" theories like the panspermia hypothesis become more and more likely, since distance, lack of speed, and survivability drastically cut the probabilities of anything resembling viable life making it across the vast tracts of space, but time increases it.
(Not to say that it happened, of course - run-of-the-mill abiogenesis could easily have happened instead... or as well.)
Panspermia is a bit worrisome a possibility, in some ways. It would mean that some/many/all alien civilizations might share anything from RNA to DNA to histones to mitochondria. Depending on how advanced the 'seeded' lifeform was (could be anything from a fragment of proto-RNA to a whole eukaryote), we might have to worry about not only bacteria on our future journeys to the stars, but viruses as well. On the plus side, chirality may be conserved, so we don't end up starving to death eating left-handed sugar (L-sucrose) and starch on alien worlds when some layabout gardener on staff mixes salt and Roundup in the fertilizer in the Earth terrarium.
There, that's my fun little bit of tinfoil hat speculation :)
Klaatu berrada nicto...
Er, I mean, back to your irregular program...
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
The number of users who have this rank: 5
Uhh... are there 4 users who tie for 16,590th place?
The data is random, but the transmission that carries that random data will look quite unlike white noise or anything of the sort.
Why? The universe is full of strong sources of radio signals. How can we be sure that some (many, most, all?) of them are not space transmitters of AlienTV? Compressed data is undistinguishable from random data, you said it yourself. Maybe we're already recieving hunders of channels of AlienTV, it's just that we don't have descambler boxes.
Don't get me wrong, I crunch my number of SETI work units per day, I'm just curious since I didn't find a satisfying answer.
What is the volume of space these stars occupy in metric Volkswagens?
According to http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/numusers.html there are over half a million active (returned > 0 WU(s) last 28 days) users at the moment.
That aside, the issue obviously is not whether or not it would appear as background noise to them, but as background noise to *us*. The signal would be strong enough so that they could distinguish it from noise close to the origin of the signal, whereas *we* could not.
Now, that said, I feel I should point out I have absolutely zero training/education in this area, and there very well may be certain pecularities with radio communication that would render what I've just said as complete bullshit. This however, is what I would *expect* to be the case.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
Alien 1. The humans have built a huge supercomputer and are about to reveal and BROADCAST our position!
Boss Alien. So? Destroy it.
Alien 1. But It covers the... entire planet...
-end of signal-
SETI has won the right to be the distributed computing platform of choice on my rig because it doesn't have any problems with my firewall (a Linksys router and Norton Firewall 2003). Folding@home and fightaids@home simply won't connect to their services from my machine.
Therefore:
Zeta Riticulans: 1 (of 1)
Terran Diseases: 0 (of 2)
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*