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

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.

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 :)

Let's say we find somebody out there.

[kutuz_off]

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

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.

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.

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?