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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!
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?
They do.
here.
Click on each of the signals.
Iraq: war to save the U
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.
*/
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
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
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.
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...
Yeti, angels and ley lines are at best, implausible. The idea of other intelligent life forms "out there" somewhere is at least *plausible* and therefore not the waste of time you seem to believe it to be. The degree to which energy/money is spent looking for it can be argued, but you can't say "never." It happened here, so it follows that it could happen elsewhere.
[ insert your own witty .sig here ]
From one Anonymous Coward to another, that's a very stupid argument. It's one thing to insist on unfalsifiable claims of UFO sightings, alien abductions, and secret government converups. These are claims for which there is no evidence.
It's another thing to point a telescope at the sky and see if anything's there. It's an experiment, doofus, and it's being conducted by scientists who are curious. Nobody's saying "There are aliens and we've found them!" They're just looking for evidence that might be there.
Honestly. You apparently have a swaggering disdain for curiosity and a stagnant, utilitarian mind. Yeti? Angels? Ley lines? Your examples are ridiculous.
Aliens are also generally a ridiculous subject, at least when dealing with examples as above. But SETI is a speculative experiment in astrobiology, not a venture into the realms of science fiction.
The Law of Falling Bodies
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.
Yeah, I want my computer analyzing proteins, which will then be used by large drug companies to make expensive drugs that I will end up paying huge amounts of money for when I need them in my dotage, with the only known side effects being impontency and the random growth of extra limbs.
Great.
Intelligent life is not "something to believe in." It is a mathematical and statistical near-certainty, given what is known about the size and composition of the universe.
Searching for yeti is like searching for a needle in haystack when you have no reason to believe that there is even a needle in it.
Searching for ET is like searching for a needle in a haystack that lies directly under the flight plan of a leaky needle-carrying cargo plane.
One of these has slightly better odds...
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?
Now, since the conditions for the existence of each target are unknown and incalculable in these cases, you can't even compute a probability. Hence, I declare (according to our present knowledge and understanding) that all of these things DO NOT EXIST.
Yeah, because atoms didn't exist until we discovered them. Likewise, the sun really did revolve around the earth until we discovered otherwise. And disease was caused by bad spirits, and were nothing a good bleeding couldn't cure.
Yes, we can never prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns. As far as we know, the prerequisites for invisible pink unicorns (IPU) do not exist in this universe.
But we already have the evidence for one (marginally) intelligent species in the universe. Ergo, they exist, and we know the prerequisites for intelligent life also exist.
It would be extreme foolishness to claim there is no other intelligent life in the universe.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
It would be as stupid to believe in the non-existence of alien civilizations as it would be to believe in their existence, given present evidence. I prefer the more intelligent response: lacking evidence one way or the other, suspend judgement. Do they exist? I don't know. Do they not exist? I don't know.
Now let's take the scientific leap: how do we find out? Hey, I have an idea, let's look!
That's SETI in a nutshell. Unlike you, a lot of people think the best way to answer these questions is to take a look at the world and see what the evidence is, rather than make baseless asumptions one way or the other...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Any compression advanced enough is indistinguishable from noise. That might be a difficult task then.
-Adam
#!/bin/csh cat $0
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
A mathematical probability depends entirely on our ability to understand all of the variables that form a complete picture.
Based on our ability to predict the weather, it is very doubtful that we have a complete model, and we do see activity every year that both increase and decrease these particular odds. Until we have a complete model/understanding, you may say it is a near fact based on probability, but you would be wrong, it is just a belief, based on a group of assumptions.
Get a free ipod.
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."
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.
I mean come on, folks. Jesus uses a Mac. It's obvious. And any other view is heresy. Can I get an Amen?
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.
Intelligent life is not "something to believe in." It is a mathematical and statistical near-certainty, given what is known about the size and composition of the universe.
We know virtually nothing about how life started, so in all honesty we haven't a clue how probable life outside our solar system should or shouldn't be. All that we do know is that the universe is really, really big. But given that we have no idea what kind of conditions and probabilities surround the emergence of life, we really can't say how likely life out there is, let alone intelligence.
Intelligent life is not "something to believe in." It is a mathematical and statistical near-certainty, given what is known about the size and composition of the universe.
Sorry, but no. First of all, noone knows how life evolved here or how plausible it was. Ask any biologist with a minimum of self-respect.
Second, there are compelling arguments (like the "Fermi paradox") against ET life which have swayed many highly respected scientists towards an "against" position. Fermi himself won the Nobel, if you remember.
I think what SETI does is worthwhile, since there is a possibility of ET life. What you're doing, however --trying to intimidate people from holding a reasonable opinion by saying stuff like "it's a mathematical certainty" (which nothing non a priori can be, for that matter) --is intellectually dishonest and, quite frankly, amazingly stupid.
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.
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.
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.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
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.