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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."
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
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
It'll probably turn out to be an alien goatse when they finally get it decoded.
<Marvin the Martian>
Where was the blood-curdling scream? There was supposed to be an "Ahhh! My Eyes!!!" scream!
</Marvin the Martian>
--
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.
*/
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.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
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
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?
Are you joking, I can't tell. If SETI finds conclusive proof of the existence of alien intelligence, I think the last thing on most of our minds will be copyright law.
I mean, it's like asking if Jesus comes back will he prefer Linux or BSD. The significance of the event so far outweighs the debate that the debate is rendered meaningless.
Yes, it's a real radio telescope - they're pretty simple beasts really. Big dish, tuned receiver at the right frequency (or a frequency-converter, and a normal radio receiver), and a computer at the other end.
:-) external receiver tuned to the Water Hole frequencies (the gap between the OH line and the H2 line in the radio spectrum, at around 1420 MHz - pretty typical for radio astronomy, it's a relatively quiet part of the spectrum.
I use a WinRadio (despite the name, it's a universal box
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"Oh my god, it's full of .... EEEUUUUWWWWWWW!!!"
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
Therefore, what SETI should be looking for are signals that, at first, appear as white noise. Then try to decode them.
That is single-handidly the dumbest thing they could do.
The sky is ABSOLUTELY FILLED with white noise. Nature is random, that is the whole point of looking for NON-random signals; they suggest intelligence at work.
Another point is that we are not just looking for signals that are essentially radio-pollution from another civilization, we are looking for DELIBERATE signals from a society trying to communicate with us. Why would they encrypt or otherwise obfuscate those signals?!?!
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
And if he does we can always just have him nailed to a cross or something...
I'm just kidding! We're talking about Linux users here, not a bunch of zealo...oh, wait...
do not read this line twice.