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."

Comments

Did I find one?

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Yeah, but they don't name the people whose SETI clients actually found these prospects. Bah!

--

Re:Did I find one?

[Chanc_Gorkon]

This looks like the named them to me (at least the Gaussians). Personally, I don't know if I want to be known for finding the signal. Jodi Foster's character sure got alot of negative attention in Contact.

An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[civilengineer]

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.

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[Viking Coder]

The problem with signals is that they're passive. The civilization doesn't gain ANY information by sending signals - only by receiving them. =)

A physical object (the size of a pea?) could be sent very close to the speed of light - so I don't see that as a problem. What, 90%? Maybe even more?

But it'd be a pretty amazing technology, indeed, if such a small object were capable of sending back any data to the home system. It'd take a tremendous amount of energy for such a small transmitter to be effective over such distances.

Right?

Actually, I guess repeaters could do it. You send out a chain of the pea transmitters, and have them repeat info back along the line. Shoot them out a minute apart, and the signal only needs to be strong enough to be detected at a range of about a light minute. Still, a crazy distance, but a heck of a lot easier than 20+ light-years. Granted, you'd have to send them out for about 100 years - at a pea per minute. Hmmm...

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[Fnkmaster]

It's based on our assumptions about the rate of progress of technology. If we assume that nanotechnology is 50-100 years off from practical usage, then we can reasonably state that for our culture and society, the gap between developing radio signals strong enough to send to space in detectable amounts and developing nanotechnology is only about 150-200 years worth of technological development. Assuming that other species rate of technological progress is similar to ours, we can assume that their gap between development of radio wave transmission and nanotechnology is similar, perhaps 200 years worth of technological development.

The argument from there relies on the fact that 200 years is a drop in the bucket in cosmological time - just because we happen to be at this particular point in time developmentally doesn't really imply that other species and cultures would be at anywhere near the same point. So it's far more likely they'd either be too primitive to send radio waves, or advanced enough that they have viable nanotechnology.

Obviously, this argument assumes that nanotechnology is practicable and will be successfully developed in the next 100 years. :)

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[4of12]

probability have mastered the use of nano-technology

The thought occurs that we might be the ping packet.

Send out a clump of amino acids, hope some land in favorable water, then wait.

We're expected to return electromagnetic waves if and when we're successfully "done" and where we are.

Not sure what to expect of traffic after that, though.

The second ping could be a doozy.

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[Anonymous Coward]

additionally, I suspect that an object the size of a pea going more than 50% of c would either be eroded by interstellar dust before it ever reached its target or at the very least would get very hot and be obviously visible to infrared telescopes - especially if there are a lot of them.

So basically, I don't the pea theory is a very good one.

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[Strange Ranger]

Mod parent up!

That's the whole problem with SETI in a nutshell. It only looks for radio signals. Meaning we are looking for signs of alien intelligence in that super-narrow drop-in-the-bucket window in any given alien civilization's development when they MAY have used radio signals, and it assumes those signals penetrated the aliens upper atmosphere so that we could detect them.

It's like looking for that needle in the haystack, except the needle is only in 1 of a trillion haystacks, and then it's only there for a split second before it disappears and moves to another haystack.

Not to mention almost every instance of convincing alien life in SF and "xenobiology" is so strange and different that the likelihood of them using radio is very small. Think of Card's Buggers, or Vinge's ant-like aliens, or the ever infamous super-intelligent shade of blue.

Maybe their version of a brain sees radio waves the way we see color. Why then would they ever broadcast a global signal? It would be like broadcasting a red tint over everything you see. They would communicate so differently that the idea of them broadcasting radio might be insane. Come to think of it, the whole idea of broadcasting a one-to-many signal might be a human idea. Maybe that kind of broadcasting would be like a human broadcasting something inside a movie theater.. RUDE.

you could go on like this forever. I'm not against SETI. But it sure seems like the equivalent of looking for human life by sticking a big microphone out the window, and then arguing over squirrell chatter vs. possible Bantu language clicks.

In other words, neat, but let's not get carried away.

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[Anonymous Coward]

I also don't get the religious types who can not see the possibility of alien races all the while believing in something I consider to be little but ancient fables passed down by our ancestors to scare the kids into being good.

I question a "God" whose highest respresentative on our planet (the Pope) is stricken with debilitating disease, shouldn't this top holy man be exempt from lifes pitfalls? Oh of course bible believers will find some "out" written in the pages to explain it, they always do.

All religions seem to have built in "no questioning this book" terms as well, that's convenient.

My favourites are the religions that have built in "anyone who doesn't believe this book should be killed" clauses, much more convenient at making your cult^H^H^H^Hreligion the dominant force on earth.

Personally I believe it should be illegal to teach kids any religious beliefs and let them decide at 18 what "faith" they have, my guess is they'd mostly wake up to reality which is we live, we die and that's about it.

Besides, religion is mostly for the clowns in society who have a tough time dealing with the fact they will be dead eventually, "a wonderful afterlife" sounds better to them than the reality of "lights out completely". The only freaking afterlife that exists is the memories of the dead still around in the living, which only lasts for a generation or so too. How many of you think about your great-great-grandfather or any of your lineage before that? How many of you hear from those dead relatives?

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[stwrtpj]

The second ping could be a doozy.

Or they could think that we failed their expectations and send the equivalent of a DoS attack.

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[Johnny Mnemonic]

The second ping could be a doozy.

I guess it would be a portscan next, eh?

That's a pretty interesting idea--if you're looking for a habitable climate in something as vast as the universe, it doesn't pay to explore each potential system individually--so you do the biological equivalent of "throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks". Then wait to hear from the organism that develops.

I don't think such line of reasoning bodes well for our future, though, and is precisely why we're in "listen" mode rather than sending--if such a scenario is true, the ET are more likely than not to say "thanks determining this planet is a proof positive. You're no longer needed" and eradicating us like a petri-dish culture.

Re:An excellent point from Ray Kurweil

[Razor Blades are Not]

Not to mention, how do they slow down when they get where they're going ? I mean, if they're *not* intended as kinetic missiles, they have to have some means of coming to rest at their destination. This implies some sort of means of propulsion. If they're pea sized, that's some serious power source that has that much potential energy in such a small package.

Then there's guidance, and obstruction avoidance, just to name two other problems.

No, if there are aliens that are using these nano-sensors (and still obey the laws of physics as we understand them) then these sensors would probably have to be dropped onto our world from very close by. I'd suggest the most sensible way is to send a "ship" armed with these things and have it act as the way point. Data can then be sent back from there, either in other (smaller) ships (secure and slow) or radio (insecure, and as fast as we know how to travel = which is still slow compared with the distances we're talking about)

I used to run seti@home

[hookedup]

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 :)

Re:I used to run seti@home

[surprise_audit]

A lot of people want to see the pretty pictures so they know something is happening...

Re:I used to run seti@home

[peragrin]

I run Seti@home on two machines, an Athlon 550mhz, 128mb ram, running linux, and a pentium 1.4 256 mb ram running win me(yea Iknow but I like the eula better than winxp) either way, on average and once must average it out as different work units compute differently. the Athlon 550 is 3-4 times faster at processing units, than the pentium. Interstngs side effect even when the athlon 550 was running win98 it was 2-3 times faster. Command line helps but compiler options help more

Let's say we find somebody out there.

[kutuz_off]

What will be the next step after we detect a signal?

Re:I wish they would release the data

[Space cowboy]

Err, yes. The idea was to look at the most-promising ones myself (maybe the top-10), not the entire dataset.... That's a matter of pointing and recording, trivial really.

Simon.

Copyright on the Data

[yintercept]

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.

Re:Copyright on the Data

[bigpat]

The law covers humans. Or in some case we have decided to treat certain other creatures a certain way under the law... prior art would have to be human prior art and by the same argument alien's would not have any ability to copyright something unless the law or the reading of the law were expanded to understand that aliens are people too.

But that would be a legal leap on the order of magnitude as when women abd slaves became considered people too.

Re:Copyright on the Data

[Anonymous Coward]

You're obviously not a lawyer. I can guarantee you that for many businessmen and other such scum the first thing will be how to profit from such a monumental event in human history.

If Jesus came back, 5minutes later he'll leave after being swamped by the TV networks wanting an exclusive.

used to do it. found better causes

[kippy]

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.

4.7 million users?

[skurk]

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.

Correlation?

[BallPeenHammer]

I'm curious about whether there's any correlation between the signals they find most "interesting" and the locations of known extrasolar planets. I'd say if any of the interesting signals come from a place with planets, it has to be significant.

Not sure I agree

[HarveyBirdman]

One of the reasons the military, for example, uses a lot of encryption is that it's very hard to hide a signal of any kind. This is why frequencies are still so sensitive- you have to hide anything possible you can about which signal is yours because it's very easy to scan the spectrum and find them. I don't think any information signal can truly melt into the background and still carry usable information.

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.

Reverse Radio telescope?

[jhines]

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?

Re:I wish they would release the data

[tka]

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.

Re:This is like monkeys trying to figure out books

[subspacemsg]

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. :)

Re:used to do it. found better causes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:I wish they would release the data

[trentblase]

Unfortunately, no dish makes it hard to "aim" it at a particular star, no?

undetectable

[penguin7of9]

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.