Slashdot Mirror
SETI Finds Interesting Signal
Several readers sent in notes about an interesting signal discovered by SETI. No real evidence of Someone Out There, but not fully explainable either. Another reader submits a blurb suggesting that aliens should send spacemail, not signals: "Rutgers electrical engineering professor, Christopher Rose, has an article on Nature magazine's cover today describing the most efficient way for our civilization to be discovered by aliens. On this question of better to 'write or radiate', his conclusions: better not to send radio transmission, when physical media like DNA on an asteroid can declare a terrestrial presence. Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip. Rose has some great information payload sizes as examples (like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)."
I for one welcome our new intelligent extra terrestrial overlords!
(Sorry, it had to be done...)
gadgetophile.com
No one's gunna pay attention to us until we have warp drive anyway.
The space unintentionally left unblank.
I, for one, welcome our No-Definitive-Proof-Of-Existance Overlords... or something.
Oh, and to be on topic, here's some other interesting signals....
When dealing with the vastness of space, how can you advocate physical over transmission. The article does nothing to describe why sending an object with mass 1/1000000 the size of a planet that we would notice is somehow preferable to trying to boost a signal.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
If it's 100 pounds, it's not really a laptop. Where I used to work there was a 75 pound tower with a handle on top, maybe that's what they're getting at...
I don't think I've ever seen a website slashdotted so fast.
No comment.
Aren't we supposed to be welcoming our new insect overlords and something about toiling in underground sugar caves?
Damn, that would suck. Hope you meant 10 pounds... :-)
*CONSPIRACY* I bet the govt is pushing DNA technology so we can grow the DNA sequence that was sent to us in 47 out in Roswell......
My thoughts... its just a matter of time. The universe is WAY too fricken big for us to be alone.
And if we are, I guess will we ever find out considering how BIG space is?
When does faith in god over power the desire to go one step farther?
Voyager scientists attach a plaque on the outbound trip - aliens attach a plague on the return trip.
...I hear about something like this, I just have to wonder how we know what we're looking for. I mean, seriously... life outside of our solar system is probably not at all like the life we find here on Earth. At least, I sure hope it's not. In any case, how do we even know what to start looking for?
with a mathematical pattern embedded into it. Use the amino acid codings. Maybe encode a special pattern into both a new radio signal and into the DNA. That should reduce odds of the signal being interpreted as a freak of Nature (unless of course the alien civilization chooses to believe the signals are $DEITY in origin).
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I can either get really excited about the possibility that we've found extra-terrestrial life... ...or I can assume this is just some strange fluke, like it almost always is.
What am I saying... almost always? It ALWAYS is. But there's gotta be a first time...
...it's a distress call from the New Scientist webserver!
If this turns out to be an MP3, it looks like someone is gonna get sued (it would be filed as RIAA v. Zorack Doe)
While I originally applauded SETI's efforts, I'm beginning to find this a bit ridiculous. When you lose your dog, you don't normally wait for it to find you: you look for it. We're basically sitting here waiting for a message, when we should be physically searching. Chances are any life worth finding in our neck of the universe won't be communicating via radio signals anyway.
I think the latest Mars expedition was a good step: look for livable areas, later look for life. Don't sit around waiting for it to come to you.
Scientists have announced that /.ers are emitting tachyon particles, as a server targetted by /. readers has gone down so quickly that many believe it wasn't even up when the article was posted
Physical objects are a tad harder to find. We would be happy to find a civilization like our own... however, we didn't notice a rather large until three days after it had almost hit our planet. The other real snag happens to be major as well - it doesn't travel at the speed of light. Puts things on a slightly larger timescale, doesn't it?
webpage
Wow this is really spreading, first all us humans start using the sneakernet to transfer all of our *iaa contraband files from person to person, now ET is going to do it too!
It looks like the general idea is if you don't care how fast your "letter" gets there you go cheep with bulk rate shipping, but when it really has to be there yesterday nothing beats the higher cost overnight service.
Rose has some great information payload sizes as examples (like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)
I'd rather not send a menu with the greeting.
Not to mention the time involved for those rocks to travel interstellar distances. The radio signals will get there at the speed of light. Assuming the rocks don't vaporize along the way, by the time they arrive anywhere, we're talking millions->billions of years later... by which time if we haven't gone extinct, surely we will have already acheived interstellar travel.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Pardon me while I step out to light up my giant "WELCOME TO EARTH" sign.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
...or does hurling an asteroid at a distant planet sound like a good way to piss ETs off? On a more practical note, it also sounds like a good way to infect a planet with some such bug. And if they weren't talking about targeting a planet with that "communication medium", then it seems really absurd that that could be a better way to communicate than radiating. Radiating allows you, with relatively little energy expenditure, to send your message out in many different directions hoping someone gets it. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
I didn't read any of the articles yet because they all appear to be slashdotted. Nice going everyone.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip
Commander Willard Decker : V'ger... expects an answer.
Captain James T. Kirk : An... answer? I... don't know... the question.
it is "something"!!
:) but new astrophysical phenomena.
Maybe not aliens (I'm sometimes to sceptical to get excited, although I'd like to be
AFAIK, pulsars (these fast spinning dead stars with rotational periods in the msec-sec range) were discovered as someone looked at the data and though "wow, aliens, this periodic signal".
Do not run. We are your friends.
...100 pound laptop
I for one welcome our new giant alien overlords!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
My wife weighs about 100 lbs, can sit on my lap, and contains a complete copy of the human genome.
Uh? wasn't that the plot of The Andromeda Strain way back in the 70s - the best guess as to the purpose of the wierd crystalline polymer-eating blood-coagulating alien bug was as a friendly greeting, and it was just unfortunate that it happened to eat certain long chain molecules found in human vein walls?
Looking at that signal that we are broadcasting to the ET's, they are going to get it and think we are a race of sentient Atari game character, and wonder one thing:
Do they know about the magnet? Can they get the chalice across walls?
"Sig free in '03!"
Oh well, it's probably aliens requesting to be removed from our spam email list.
Bah.
They will have evolved, just like critters here, and just as likely as not they will be nasty ones if they were tough enough to survive long enough to be interested space stuff. Look at the slashdot lot - would you trust them with your daughter?
Giving them Earth DNA just gives them clues that we are here (which is of course the point) but more importantly tells them everything they need to know to make some bug spray especially for us.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
As I understand, a spread spectrum signal won't appear as a strong peak in fourier space (that's what seti is essentially looking for).
Any thoughts?
ET Phone Genome
can't sleep. clowns will eat me.
mirror the site here. Really. This is one of the more interesting /. stories!
Single Female Lawyer
the first ignal we see from any "Advanced" culture will likely be an advertisement for some new alien pop up blocker or penis enlargement product!
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
Maybe it's just me, but I think such an event will broaden my horizons, make me rethink life and change it for the better - and hopefully also help us as a whole (ie humans) to forget violence, wars, differences etc in the larger scheme of things.
Again, maybe it's just me, and maybe I'm rambling, but I have nothing to do, the site's Slashdotted.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Oh yeah great idea! Let's get them a head start in the impending inter-galactic war so they can fine-tune their bio-weapons on the way over.
Well, either we are the only intelligent life in the universe or we are not, either answer is awesome.
I think I might rather hang onto this information until we're sure our new-found neighbors are friendly.
Any civilization using radio may be using a lot of encrypted digital signals to communicate among themselves. Wouldn't a sufficiently advanced spread spectrum scheme seem like noise?
Perhaps I am naive, but I think about the things human beings could always see, but couldn't understand until their knowledge progressed past a certain point.
Why discuss physical versus transmission?
Do both.
Send out various satellites, in various directions, and have them broadcast a signal as they go.
is here on
Scotsman.com.
there's really no reason to assume that life outside our solar system is like us OR not like us, is there? "like us" seems like a logical place to start, but no one's going to give you a definitive on either being absolute.
Where's the data? I want to see the signal data. I'm sure it would be confusing to see without the proper perspective and backgrounds into the physics behind their radio telescope and ambient radio noise and whatnot, but I want to look at it anyway.
"'Yrch!' said Legolas, falling into his own tongue."
I don't think an extinct civilization is going to have an easier time finding 100 DVD's on some asteroid....
Didn't we attach a plaque depicting naked humans? Isn't this _Our_ first interstellar prOn? Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing some signals from other planets, shows like RALF (Retarded alien life form, the must see show, with those strange pink squishy hyoomanns) and Dr.What, the time travelling doctor in his retardis. Seriously though, wouldn't it be interesting to see an alien cultures spin on entertainment? Do they have DRM? Will we be able to crack it?
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1028302004 /
So there.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Sweet, where can i get one? ;)
...it read "PH1RST P0ST!!!"
Don't worry, NASA scientists have already modded them down.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Don't go! It's...it's a COOKBOOK!
The last few days my client for Seti has had problems connecting to get more data to inspect. Can this possibly be a coincidence that I can't get more data, and now someone finds an 'alien signal'? I think they'coming, they are trying to keep us from seeing them by shutting down Seti, but it won't work...I am getting out the Celestron and heading out to watch!!!
I sent in this article - very cool read and makes me wish for FTL travel!
...There are other oddities. For instance, the signal's frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. "The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that's rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet," Korpela says.
New Scientist is reporting that the signal "also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope...*snip*
... so we can launch her out into space! Not in the direction of the signal, but rather into the sun! :P
I wouldn't call it a laptop if it weighs 100lbs, unless it gets to sit on my lap while I'm in space.
The 50's 'world of tomorrow' thinking is just the updated version of this. Aliens (read: any advanced civilizatoin) are like us, just like God made us in His Image, except for the bad parts. Therefore they are mathematicians and scientists. They use radio waves and other technologies that we use, just like savages in the jungle use spears like ancient Europeans used to.
I think when/if we do come into contact with trulu other life or intelligence, it will totally blow our collective and individuals minds, like way more than LSD.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Isn't that a little heavy for a mobile computer?
Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away
19:00 01 September 04
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition.
In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.
The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.
This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.
But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.
Absorb and emit
"It's the most interesting signal from SETI@home," says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. "We're not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it."
Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak.
"We are looking for something that screams out 'artificial'," says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. "This just doesn't do that, but it could be because it is distant."
Unknown signature
The telescope has only observed the signal for about a minute in total, which is not long enough for astronomers to analyse it thoroughly. But, Korpela thinks it unlikely SHGb02+14a is the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and it does not bear the signature of any known astronomical object.
That does not mean that only aliens could have produced it. "It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind like I stumbled over," says Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath, UK.
It was Bell Burnell who in 1967 noticed a pulsed radio signal which the research team at the time thought was from extraterrestrials but which turned out to be the first ever sighting of a pulsar.
There are other oddities. For instance, the signal's frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. "The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that's rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet," Korpela says.
This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.
Fishy and puzzling
The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is "fishy", he says. "If [the aliens] are so smart, they'll adjust their signal for their planet's motion."
The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times fas
like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!
You can forget about on-site warranty, though..
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
The theory that the decoded alien messages read "V1aGr4 4 ultra low prices!!!!1" is pure speculation...
we are looking for math. Math is truth. Truth is universal.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
Ok, now if they can't decipher or get anything out of that signal I think they should made available a file with the data to anyone who want to try to poke and study the thing. They found it with the help of the collectivity so they should give to the collectivity the option of working on it. They should also give the exact coordinates of the signal.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Although maybe it is more efficient to send "mail" than radio signals for nearer systems, to go 10 times as far, the radio power needs to be increased by a factor of 100, but 1000 times as many packages need to be sent. At some point, that radio signal is going to be be more efficient.
The canonical announcement for this kind of event is "Wow!".
Get off my lawn.
Wrong! There is intelligent life in the Eleventh galaxy on the planet Nepthor, which will conquer Earth in the year 5482, utilizing us for slave labor in the Shelonian salt mines.
Think of it the other way around. What if an alien race somewhere sends us a rock with their DNA printed all over it (and possibly some nudie pictures to boot). Anyone in their right mind isn't going to believe the rock came from an alien race. Whoever finds the rock will be lucky to sell it for $5 on eBay. Some find.
Here is an article that is un-slashdotted as of 0057 Universal Time.
"an interesting signal discovered by SETI."
Excellent. Let's get busy and Slashdot it...oops too late!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Move along now, this movie has already been created. It's called Species and it was released in 1995.
Life is not for the lazy.
beep boop beep beep ...
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... beep beep boop beep
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
That we might not want to give our human blueprints to unknown aliens of unknown intent and intelligence?
Fucking - Duh!
Alien_mastermind "You see, it's actually quite simple. We make a signal appear at an 'empty' point in space and they'll just eat it up. They'll spend so much time theorizing and conjecturing that they'll miss our decceleration from hyperspace."
Alien_sidekick"Hey boss, how we gonna do that without the latest hyperspace frequency propagator? All we have is the older Rev A."
Alien_mastermind"Don't worry about a thing! They'll never pick up on that. It only drifts about 32 Hz--good enough for government work!"
... and apparently its form the lost gods.. er I mean wormhole aliens of our ancestors!
Hello Baltzar, Great news! No intelligent life on third planet, but I just saved a bundle on my space-car insurance. Tell the Gecko we'll be over for dinner, 10-4, over-and-out, later buddy, Bizstar84!zirc (no spam) nept.com
Mike www.sharecube.com
Now when the Grandchildren ask I will have to tell them I heard about the greatest discovery in the history of the human race on Slashdot... Then they will know Pops is a real nerd.
PS- anybody got a mirror?
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
BTW #1, why do I want to subscribe to Slashdot (grin)??? This SETI potential-find was first posted on Matt Drudge's website very early this morning with a link to the NewScientist article that was "Drudged" vice Slashdotted almost immediately.
BTW #2, there are actually a bunch of candidate signals
-- ...
I believe the SwiftVets and also
I believe Juanita
http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1028302004 e ws/2004/09/02/walien02.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/09/02 /ixworld.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/n
Could quantum entanglement be used to communicate data through a signal this way? If quantum entanglement is truly instantaneous and can happen at any distance, can it be used to communicate with a distant planet in real-time, rather than having to wait for a signal to travel for years?
Just what we need.
More Rigelian scams.
More 100% natural enlarger from Bellatrix.
More cheap software from Mintaka.
Fantastic!
I know scotsman.com looks fishy, but it's not a troll link, folks. It's news.scotsman.com, Scotland's national newspaper online. It's not a troll. I'll bet my karma on it. :)
They just forgot one little detail:
If we want to cover as much space as with a radio signal we have to sent several billions times the amount of matter available on earth to multiple directions at the same time. Its similar as with radio signals. The farther you send, bigger is the amount of space to cover and bigger is the number of probes you have to send to cover it.
Just a little detail. :)
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
We'd need something with a renewable energy source, like a bussard ramjet, to be able to broadcast a decent signal strength.
..........FULL STOP.
The plaque was actually attached to the Pioneer spacecraft, not Voyager:
Wiki Link
Instead, Voyager had a golden record which contained sounds/images of earth:
Wiki Link
Bored? Visit my exciting counter page!
Would you reveal who/what/where you are with all the rampant spam going on?
As soon as they are discovered, from whom do you think they will receive their first spam?
That'll definitely put a twist on the spam you receive huh?
I'm not sure that qualifies as a laptop...
Twenties Retirement
Thanks Messrs magenbrot and jafiwam! [mod them up plz!!]
the entire information equivalent for our global genome
Did anyone else get the visual of some intelligent being licking their chops while reading that plaque?
If we actually send the DNA, maybe it would be like a variety pack. Maybe not-quite-so-advanced civilizations' plaques are traded around the universe like baseball card versions of Chinese menus.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
when we invent warp brakes!
Alien one: what was that! Was it the martians was it the centaurians?
Alien two: Naw prolly some race that just invented warp speed, give them a couple of thousand years and then they will invent warp brakes.
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/Candidates/SHGb 02+14a/SHGb02+14a.html, according to the scotsman article.
We seem to be hard-wired with an innate desire to connect our consciousness with that of the Other. The thing I wonder about - is this a fundamental desire that is simply specific to humans because of the nature of our species, or is this more of a general rule - that as creatures become more conscious, the desire to connect becomes more and more powerful?
Ummm
At least with EM stuff it tends to want to radiate in a lot of directions since we broadcast so much stuff. The sheer amount of noise we're bashing out is what SETI is looking for in reverse.
Unless we throw as many rocks as radio signals, I utterly fail to see how a small rock is going to actually increase our odds of anyone stumbling upon us.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There seem to be so many being given away anyhow..
Ooh! And some Viagra. That should show how far our race has advanced.
Rutgers University has many proffessors and all of them usually when they are at the Busch Campus center eating lunch talk about a lot of interesting things. Like all things interesting, there is an assumption made and that is if the message is time independent then it is ok for it to take so long to send such a message. ....
But I am sure this whole thing was based on an idea somebody had during lunch.
But most of all if there was life out there they are most probably laughing at us becasue we seem to have a tendency to keep killing our own kind and destry the planet we live on.
In short the guys at SETI are _looking_ for life, not communicating with it. Supposedly they sent out a message on the frequecy of the vibration of a hydrogen nucleus, so if the inhabitants on a certain planet knew and saw such a wierd spike they may think there maybe life out there. So then we have two people looking in the dark and not one. Also one more thing what would we do with all our unused CPU cycles on our overclocked, broadband connected computers when we are out
If you want to send a good message, send one that describes our achievements as a race, our dreams and aspirations. I believe that this sort of message will say a lot more about us and about what we are really made of. Is it more important to know what you were born with, or what you made with what you were given?
Cheers,
Adolfo
Hasn't anyone at SETI read The Forge of God? We need to just STFU and listen, not broadcast where we are so the Destroyers can find us! (In a nutshell: a highly paranoid alien race listens for broadcasts from nascent technological civilizations and eradicates them before they can become a threat.)
Seriously, we have no idea of the mindset and capabilities of alien civilizations. The novel's viewpoint is arguable, but caution dictates that we determine the intentions of outsiders before we announce our presence (cf. American Indians vs. Europeans).
...blasting off the entire human blueprint is such a hot idea. You got a 50/50 split on potential entities, and that would be the universe-all good/bad. Giving potential bad guys the plans to the human species seems a little risky.
Perhaps a few hours of late night TV commercials might be more appropriate. Give them something to ponder on. If they are dumb enough to investigate it, we'll have the upper hand. If they are smart enough to recognize that we are bad news and probably loony tunes, they might leave us alone, and we really don't want *smarter* ETs swinging by, do we?
First crop circles. Now this. Oh my!
... Therefore they are mathematicians and scientists. They use radio waves and other technologies that we use ...
You do realize that in the SETI context "advanced civilization" means "technologically advanced civilization"? If they are an advanced civilization they will have a basic understanding of science, of how the universe works. Electromagnetism is an elementary part of that understanding. Our methods for establishing communication do not have a western or human bias. Counting off prime numbers is pretty neutral, an advanced civilization should recognize that this would be a quite improbable natural phenomena. Similarly the frequencies we would use for such signals would be pretty neutral, a multiple of a universal constant, another improbable natural phenomena. Some things are universal, not products of human or western culture.
Would we even want to be contacted? Given that the probability of finding someone within even a few thousand years of our level of civilization is very remote given the age of the universe, isn't sending out signals advertising our presence to the universe potentially careless?
I mean, I don't subscribe to the B-movie caricature of evil conquering aliens, but I think any contact with a civilization that is like to be millions of years ahead of us will cause enormous cultural shock.
Slashdotted at 8:32 pm ? I thought people only read slashdot at work...
"The surest sign that there is intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us yet."
like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!
That actualy gave me some sort of crazy idea. Well, I think we could somehow just throw away into space old computer hardware properly modified for long space travels and to be extremely easy to use. Just throw them away in any and all directions. They would contain pictures and data somehow understandable by almost anyone.
Hey, even if some Alien somehow, someday stumble across such a computer, even if he doesn't understand shit about shit, he'll certainly get the idea that this is not a rock and somebody somwhere was intelligent enough to make that.
I know it sounds simple and a tad crazy, but I'm sure the concept could be developped a bit and end up in something realistic. There SO much computer garbage these days, the project (launching aside [maybe X-Prize people could help?]) would be dirt cheap.
You are more than the sum of what you consume. Desire is not an occupation.
lets talk about israel and palistine..or at least remind people of it. Two groups wanting something the other has...land...these groups are of the same species from the same planet and yet they fight and kill. Who are the fucking idiots who come to the conclution that any "advanced" civilization will automaticaly be peaceful and nice and like us just the way we are. This is obsured. There is no correlation between aliens being avanced = nice and fuzzy. We should not be sending signals in any form telling the universe who we are and where we live....listening might be a good idea. Hell that might be the reason we havn't found anything yet....the aliens don't want to advertise their presence becouse what might find them might not be so nice.
If any "advanced" alien culture finds us I for one am hoping that we have nothing they want.
stendec@gmail.com
If there is other intelligent life out there, how do we know they're not hostile? Putting our DNA on an asteroid or sending out our genome could give hostile aliens all the information they need to develop deadly biological weapons to use against us. Granted, the chances are extremely slim, but why take the risk? Other things like numerical patterns that don't occur in nature are just as easily recognisable as originating from an intelligent mind.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
We get signal!
Main screen turn on!
and so on...
Question everything
Please, please, tell me that the 'aliens' won't use the abomination!
At least that's how I read this plaque that was bolted on Pioneer 10.
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
"Zooblefarb 6 needs women!"
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Doesn't the entire galaxy know it is unsafe to open mail from an untrusted source?
"Here's are planitary genome... have fun... Don't try anything from the red pages..."
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Get ready!
8^0
That signal was from me.
It must have happened when i moved my T.A.R.D.I.S over from my other pants.
"First Post"
Mysterious signals from 1000 light years away
19:00 01 September 04
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
In February 2003, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) pointed the massive radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, at around 200 sections of the sky.
The same telescope had previously detected unexplained radio signals at least twice from each of these regions, and the astronomers were trying to reconfirm the findings. The team has now finished analysing the data, and all the signals seem to have disappeared. Except one, which has got stronger.
This radio signal, now seen on three separate occasions, is an enigma. It could be generated by a previously unknown astronomical phenomenon. Or it could be something much more mundane, maybe an artefact of the telescope itself.
But it also happens to be the best candidate yet for a contact by intelligent aliens in the nearly six-year history of the SETI@home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope.
Absorb and emit
"Its the most interesting signal from SETI@home," says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. "Were not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it."
Named SHGb02+14a, the signal has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz. This happens to be one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
Some astronomers have argued that extraterrestrials trying to advertise their presence would be likely to transmit at this frequency, and SETI researchers conventionally scan this part of the radio spectrum.
SHGb02+14a seems to be coming from a point between the constellations Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1000 light years. And the transmission is very weak.
"We are looking for something that screams out artificial," says UCB researcher Eric Korpela, who completed the analysis of the signal in April. "This just doesnt do that, but it could be because it is distant."
Unknown signature
The telescope has only observed the signal for about a minute in total, which is not long enough for astronomers to analyse it thoroughly. But, Korpela thinks it unlikely SHGb02+14a is the result of any obvious radio interference or noise, and it does not bear the signature of any known astronomical object.
That does not mean that only aliens could have produced it. "It may be a natural phenomenon of a previously undreamed-of kind like I stumbled over," says Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath, UK.
It was Bell Burnell who in 1967 noticed a pulsed radio signal which the research team at the time thought was from extraterrestrials but which turned out to be the first ever sighting of a pulsar.
There are other oddities. For instance, the signals frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. "The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet thats rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet," Korpela says.
This does not, however, convince Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes. He points out that the SETI@home software corrects for any drift in frequency.
Fishy and puzzling
The fact that the signal continues to drift after this correction is "fishy", he says. "If [the aliens] are so smart, theyll adjust their signal for their planets motion."
The relatively rapid drift of the signal is also puzzling for other reasons. A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observ
I for one welcome our new alien overlords
Our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut, and pleases us mightily - Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)
Why listen on a wavelength where according to the scotsman article ( I couldn't get the NS article because of slashdotting ) Hydrogen emits and absorbs energy? Since Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe comprising any interstellar smog, then wouldn't it be liable to absorb any signal at 1470?
Eat at Joe's.
I can't get to the original article site, but someone on the S@H boards says this is a copy. I cannot verify that, but here's the text.
IIRC, with a sufficiently big parabolic antenna we will have an arbitrarily large antenna gain (since the beam is concentrated in one direction only, not spreading everywhere), which means that the signal strength will drop off at the rate of 1/r^2 only for very large r, and it will be much stronger than the signal by an omnidirectional antenna at the same distance. Of course, IIRC to reach 10 times the distance you will need an antenna gain 20dB higher, or the diameter of the antenna must also be 10 times larger. Probably such antennas are just too big to build, and it becomes really hard to point the beam accurately.
See this.
If "over 400 government, military, and intelligence community witnesses testifying to their direct, personal, first hand experience with UFOs, ETs, ET technology" isn't good enough for you, then start here to research our gov's own documents, and then go here and dismiss these reports with "swamp gas" or "venus" or "a flock of birds". And when you're done there, pick up Richard Dolan's UFOs and the National Security State", possibly the best referenced and researched book on the subject.
This "we may contact other intelligent creatures someday" is a farce. They are here and have been for millenia.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
It was "magenbrot" and "jafiwam" who found these signals running SETI program. These men are true heros.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Disclaimer: I am not a SETI scientist, but I play one on my home computer.
Named SHGb02+14a, the possible alien communication has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz - one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy.
If the signal was some multiple of a prominent hydrogen line, I'd be more inclined to think it's ET. The hydrogen line would be a universally understood reference frequency, and a frequency that is a multiple of that frequency by a factor of 2, 3 or pi would be a frequency that wouldn't have a lot of naturally occurring interference. When the signal is the prominent hydrogen emission line, it seems a lot more likely that this is a previously unknown natural phenomenon. Some hydrogen out there is being excited by some form of naturally occurring energy. That's still not a bad discovery, and is a good example of the surrendipity that's always been at work in science, and it shows that SETI is doing *real* science, despite what SETI's detractors might argue.
The unexplained signal appears to be emanating from a point between the constellations of Pisces and Aries, where there is no obvious star or planetary system within 1,000 light years, and the transmission is also very faint.
That seems a bit suspicious too. It would require an enormous amount of power to broadcast a signal we could detect over that large distance. Wishing doesn't make these things true, but I'd certainly prefer a signal from a closer neighbor, so we could have a meaningful conversation.
So far, the telescope has managed to pick up the signal for only about a minute in total, which is not sufficient for astronomers to analyse it fully.
That's the problem with a fixed dish. It points where it points, and it moves as the Earth rotates. SETI gets "leftover" time on Arecibo, making it difficult to do the research they'd like to do. That should change soon when SETI has access to their new large array of dishes forming an interferometer that they can point where they want, and dwell on an area for a much longer period of time. Paul Allen may have been instrumental in creating the evil Microsoft empire (see how I worked in the mandatory /. anti-MS bias?), but he's provided adequate contrition for that sin by funding Scaled Composite's X-Prize hardware and the SETI interferometer. What a dude.
Other questions arise over the signal's frequency, which oscillates by between eight and 37 hertz a second. Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes, believes that the drift in the signal makes it "fishy".
OK. He's an optical guy. But he's never heard of Frequency Modulation (FM radio)?
Assuming it's a natural phenomenon, this might be Doppler shift? I don't know how quickly the frequency drifts, but large planets have been observed close to stars with orbital periods of a couple of days. With weird objects like black holes and neutron stars, which definitely have the power to produce signals we could detect from that far away, who knows what type of weird celestial mechanics might be involved?
This unexplained phenomenon has now attracted the attention of radio astronomers. It'll get the instrument time required to collect a lot more data, and we'll probably learn what's causing this signal fairly soon. Man, ya' gotta' love science.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Folks, we're not alone any more. Once you get the data file, plot it as a function and get a best-fit polynomial approximation for (it's not terribly complex). Take the second derivative.
Now, notice that there are lots of places where the new graph will almost touch zero (coming within 4% of mean) then reverse direction, but in other places the line continues right across zero like a typical sine curve. Also note that the zero-crossings and near-zero-crossings are at almost regular intervals.
Next, assign an arbitary "zero" to those places where the graph reverses direction suddenly, and "one" to the actual roots. String those zeros and ones together.
Starting at 11.32 seconds into the signal, I got a string of 11 ones then a zero, then 13 ones and a zero, then 17 and a zero, then 19, then 23, then 29, then 31, then 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so on until the resolution falls off at about 43.87 seconds.
You heard it here first, Slashdotters. We're not alone anymore! I'm literally trembling while I type this. WE HAVE NEIGHBORS!!!
I'm not sure what the name of the data file meant, but I guess we'll know more when their server comes back online.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Dear Sir/Madam,
Let me start by introducing myself. I am Sub-Commander Qulon Zarg, credit officer of the Trans Galactic Bank Ltd. I have a concealed business suggestion for you. Before the Pulson/Darius war our client Overlord Argus Vader who was with the Gandor Star Force and also business man made a numbered fixed deposit for 18 calendar months, with a value of Twenty millions Five Hundred Thousand Zerglian Dollars only in my branch. Upon maturity several notice was sent to him, even during the war early this year. Again after the war another notification was sent and still no response came from him. We later find out that the General and his family had been killed during the war in bomb blast that destroyed their entire planet. After further investigation it was also discovered that Overlord Argus Vader did not declare any next of kin in his official papers including the paper work of his bank deposit. And he also confided in me the last time he was at my office that no one except me knew of his deposit in my bank.
So, Twenty millions Five Hundred Thousand Zerglian Dollars is still lying in my bank and no one will ever come forward to claim it. What bothers me most is that according to the to the laws of my country at the expiration 3 years the funds will revert to the ownership of the Episilon Prime Government if nobody applies to claim the funds. Against this backdrop, my suggestion to you is that I will like you as a foreigner to stand as the next of kin to Overlord Argus Vader so that you will be able to receive his funds.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE:
I want you to know that I have had everything planned out so that we shall come out successful. I have contacted an attorney that will prepare the necessary document that will back you up as the next of kin to Overlord Argus Vader, all that is required from you att his stage is for you to provide me with your Full Names and Address so that the attorney can commence his job. After you have been made the next of kin, the attorney will also fill in for claims on your behalf and secure the necessary approval and letter of probate in your favor for the move of the funds to an account that will be provided by you.There is no risk involved at all in the matter as weare going adopt a legalized method and the attorney will prepare all the necessary documents. Please endeavor to observe utmost discretion in all matters concerning this issue. Once the funds
have been transferred to your nominated bank account we shall share in the ratio of 70% for me, 25% for you and 5% for any expenses incurred during the course of this operation. Should you be interested please send me your private phone and fax numbers for easy communication and I will provide you with more details of this operation. Your earliest response to this letter will be appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Sub-Commander Qulon Zarg
You need a FREE iPod Nano
If you accelerate towards your destination then you keep accelerating without limitation. Thus, you'll get to wherever you're going in ever shorter amount of time for you. While you can never make it to light speed w.r.t. any matter in the universe, it doesn't mean you can't squash the amount of space between you and the destination.
..
As you accelerate, the distance left to travel also becomes less and less. Assuming you could accelerate very, very, very quickly, then you could conceivably close the distance between you and the destination to within, say, a few inches also very quickly -- from a standstill to high acceleration from Earth.
Now traveling what was 1,000 light years over those few inches is very fast in your time, but for observers in your old frame of reference, they'll be long gone upon returning to your original frame of ref. But other than that
I guess my biggest questions are, is anything I said true? and if not, where did it all go horribly wrong?
Depending upon how smart these "aliens" are, I think it is wise to assume that they may have the technology to manipulate dna as they wish. So, if we gave out the "source code" to the human race, it is wise to assume that if they wanted to, they could find the weaknesses in our genome and create a virus to wipe us out.
open source is one thing, but sending the entire human genome to a bunch of crazy psychopathic aliens is a little insane, doncha think? They could reverse engineer our genetic makeup and send secret aliens that look like real humans, or create some evil disease that will wipe us all out in the buffer overload of our dna. I for one don't think we need to aid the evil aliens in their quest to wipe out mankind and take over planet earth.
It has always kind of worried me that we're so happy about announcing our presence to whoever. Not only that, but we're now sending out the code to our DNA.
Is this a good idea?
How do we know that right next door, comparatively, there isn't intelligent life that for one reason or another might be inimical to humanity? Face it, we are just down out of the trees, and I have always thought that it might be a good idea to lay low, so to speak, rather than trying to yell "Here we are! Here is our genetic code!"
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
but what would happen if it evolved?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Nothing per se, but I think you're putting arguments in my thesis that aren't there ;)
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
So here I am sitting around wondering when this will hit Slashdot, so I send the link to my buddies and stuff and go "damn, site's offline" and curse the script kiddies and go on with my day.
:)
But it was you guys all along! [StrongBad tear]
Seriously. To your credit, I first found out about SETI@Home on Slashdot and ran it for years on spare computers.
Now I have made SHGb02+14a my beeyotch.
Then you guys Slashdotted the article before my mom could see it.
"All your base are belong to us"
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
"never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of tape backups" or something like that. It may not travel at the speed of light, but remember bandwidth = data/time. Put enough physical data on an asteroid (or in a stationwagon) and you can beat any pipe our puny human technology is capable of.
"Rose has some great information payload sizes as examples (like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)."
It is interesting that we are now counting bits with units of "our global genome per 100 pounds of laptops," but the Library of Congress jokes aside, what does "our global genome" mean in this context? I assume it is some human's genome, right? But only one human? Pair of humans? Male and Female? How much percentage of genome is shared by all of the humans? In other words, how much redundancy would sending every human's genome introduce? How can those variations be described so the reciever of that information could produce not only an army of clones, but a minimum of actual population capable of further reproduction and evolution?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
OK, one of the articles states that the "Break Even Point" for sending energy vs physical data is around 10^14 bits of data. With this in mind, and text being ASCII as 7 bit, or binary as 8 bit (easier math for me at least) that is 1.25x10^13 charcters. Lets assume a 5 charcter average word ( I know this is slightly small, six and a half is probably better, but close, again easy math.) This gives 2.5x10^12 words that can be used. If I remember my History and english classes (been a few years) a typical page is around 300 to 500 words. Again, lets be easy with the math and use 500. This gives 5x10^9 pages of info. I remember most of my textbooks cecking in at around 1500 pages so we have a whole library (3.33x10^6) of books that can be transmitted toa location for the approximate price of shipping those books. How about we choose a few good texts that explain our learning and run with that. The data needed to convey intelligence and civilizatin is much less than a whole library.
On the other hand without a whole library to sift though who is going to make sure the picture is fair and balanced... lets touch that when they are ready to visit.
Hope this picture helps a bit
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
new scientist is down.
can you post that text file?
a new analysis of interstellar communications claims that, rather than sending radio signals, aliens would find it far more efficient to send a "message in a bottle".
:p
I suggest looking in Egypt
Finally, with all that checked, someone might try to see if the radio waves are transmitting an actual message
I've been spending a lot of time lately with signal analysis - high speed sampling of analog signals [i.e. high bit-rate digitization of analog phenomena] and the subsequent software analysis of the digitized sequences - and it strikes me as a really, really difficult [maybe impossible?] problem trying to decide if a stream of 0's and 1's is just noise, or if it represents some phenomenon worth paying attention to.
Consider something as simple as "Hello World!"
In a word processor [or a web browser] that is capable of recognizing ASCII, it looks like
When we switch to base ten, we get and, in base 2, Pretty soon, if you don't know what you're looking for, this stuff becomes indistinguishable from gibberish. ["Ewww - the high bits are all zero!!!" Well, congratulations Einstein - now tell me what the other seven bits mean.]It's my understanding that, to this day [i.e. some fifty years later], the vast, overwhelming majority of Venona traffic still hasn't been decoded: Out of some hundreds of thousands of intercepted cyphertexts, it is claimed that under 3000 have been partially or wholly decrypted.
So my question: Are there any standard texts or treatises on the theory of how to distinguish interesting signals from large amplitude noise?
I am assuming your post is for real, in which case it certainly sounds interesting. I can't duplicate the procedure you're describing since the site is currently quite dead. I haven't given this much thought so I'm not going to bother trying to poke holes in your theory, and I don't have any knowledge of what the data actually is so it would be a waste of time anyway. Have you considered emailing the results of your analysis to the SETI folks for their thoughts?
OK - so suppose we buy into the 'sending physical objects' idea. The problem is how the recipients will recognise that it's there. If you sent a bazillion objects each the size of a penny in a scatter-shot approach - then you are no better off than transmitting radio - the chances of being hit by one is 1/Rsquared - just like radio - and the 'signal' is remarkably brief.
So send something bigger - but how big? Something the size of a baseball that could soft-land on their planet wouldn't work - we'd never find something like that if it landed in the middle of the pacific ocean or buried itself in ice at the poles or in sand in the sahara.
It has to be VERY big - like bigger than a house...but then accellerating a LOT of them up to an appreciable fraction of lightspeed gets EXPENSIVE.
Better that it have a radio on board to transmit to the civilisation on arrival.
But soft-landing is REALLY hard. You probably don't have good orbital parameters for the planet you are aiming for - after thousands of years in space, it would have to be smart enough to manouver to it's target. If it has all those computers on board then maybe it would be better to leave it in a relatively easy solar orbit and just have it broadcast radio on nice high power. It could start transmitting when it first hears signals coming from one of the planets - indicating that a radio-using civilisation is nearby.
If the sending civilisation is reasonably advanced, it could send a simple AI computer with a huge database to chat back and forth with the recieving civilisation. Include designs for a machine to send a reply back again.
www.sjbaker.org
As Carl Sagan's pointed out in is book, Contact, no matter how complex or compelling the message from beyond, there will be people who will think it's a hoax.
Or to put it another way, even if God himself this very day with his own hand placed a crucifix in orbit around the earth replacing the moon, science would explain it.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
And it reads:
s t f u n u b
k t h x b a i
No way! Why send out our blueprint to another civilization, who if they are intelligent enough to decipher and identify our genome, they would surely be intelligent enough to the clone humans and come visit and we'd be none the wiser! AHhhh! anyone seen "V"??
I second that. If you could put the text file up someplace it'd be greatly appreciated.
Who the hell writes this stuff, and how did they get to be a science writer if they don't know herz *means* per second?
This is one of the many reasons why I ignore things in New Science until I've seen them somewhere else.
What prevents someone from hacking into a Seti network packet and make it seem like the signal meant something?!
It would be a good idea.
ncevysbby is aprilfool rot13'ed
Pings are getting returned from newscientist's ip address (194.203.155.123) just fine... could someone with a little more knowledge of the vagaries of the Internet take a look at the situation and find out what exactly is wrong with newscientist's server?
are you serious?
you sound serious.
you have a very low id, hmmm.
score 5 interesting, well that doesn't say much.
text file please.
greetings human. your skin looks ... delicious!
Mod parent down, the text filename is april fool ROT13'd
He's pulling your legs. ncevysbby is aprilfool rot13'd.
The public lynching will be held at 12 noon tomorrow. Or something.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Does it really help out with stuff like this anyway? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious.
Please
Put the name of the text file, ncevysbby, into this here Rot13 translator, and you will see that it spells aprilfool.
- They got the signal three times.
- It "has a frequency of about 1420 megahertz - one of the main frequencies at which hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, readily absorbs and emits energy."
- Parent. I'm excited by this, too.
Against:- From the Scotsman article: Other questions arise over the signal's frequency, which oscillates by between eight and 37 hertz a second.
Paul Horowitz, a Harvard University astronomer who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes, believes that the drift in the signal makes it "fishy".
- It could be a natural phenomenon that we haven't seen before yet.
Now, where do I find me an ansible so I can talk to these guys?think maybe we can mod this guy back to april?
that don't make NO SENSE!!
Never mind, I was suspicious of the post of course (thus my preface, the "assumption"), but I gave it some creedence due to the low user ID. Last time I'll make that mistake.
I had it running on my desktop for a week, and it didn't find a single alien.
A 100 pound laptop?
Not unless I have an 800 pound lap.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
You assume they have a base 10 number system though.
Worst... intelligent... civilization... ever!
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip.
We need only look at what that V'Ger does in the 23rd Century to realize the folly of such things.
In space, no one can hear you moo.
This is really, really exciting. I can think of several possible reasons for the anomalies found in the signal thus far. I'm also aware I'm twisting the facts to fit a theory.
The signal originates where there is "no known star system". Of course. You (advanced alien culture) place the radio source outside your own system, for several reasons - so that the signal won't be confused with a natural source (pulsar, etc); so it won't interfere with radio reception on your own planet; and (for those of an especially paranoid bent) so that if anyone does try to physically investigate the source of the signal, they're not lead directly to your home planet. Instead, set a "tripwire" up on the device - if it's disturbed, send a signal back to the home planet (a scenario explored in Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", which became the basis for "2001").
The frequency is wavering? Of course! Set the signal to repeat over as broad a frequency range as possible, to attract as much attention as possible - not everyone will be looking at the "waterhole".
Did I mention I was excited?
More technical info here... http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/Candidates/SHGb 02+14a/SHGb02+14a.html
Considering that we have probably only evolved to a fraction of that of some of our nearest celestial neighbours, I think that if anything we should be masking our presence rather than attempting to announce it. We may just end up inviting the schoolyard bully into our sandbox when we have no right to be throwing sand just yet. After all, considering evolution and the vastness of time and space, isn't it reasonable to assume that there are life forms in the universe that would see us as insignificent and potentiallly exploitable? Or worse yet, dispensible! Hyperspace bypass anyone?
But, by all means, lets continue the search for ET.
Just now, listening to Coast to Coast with George Noory (formerly Art Bell), he had Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute on discussing this story. He said, basically, that the reporter (at NewScientist) was kinda lookin for a story, so he found one, if you know what I mean. ...
Mr.(Dr.?)Shostak said the first he heard of this was within the last couple days, and when he contacted the SETI@Home folks(which is NOT part of the SETI Institute, but they certainly have a working relationship) to find out what was going on, they also weren't really sure what the hoopla was about.
Apparently the reporter didn't fully understand the intricacies of the signal hunt, if you will, and got WOWed by a marginal-to-non wow.
Oh well. But if Coast to Coast isn't buying it
sorry to burst the bubble. i'm disappointed, too.
8#
DrudgeDoted
Choose yours. :)
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Well, it's a hoax as you can see.
But the way he described it, the signal would have been in base 1, not base 10. In base one, you would write 11 as
11111111111
and 13 as
1111111111111
In the hoax post, the signal supposedly was made up of strings of a certain number of one's delimited by a single zero. Thus, the signal would be in base 1. Terribly inefficient, but simple I suppose.
There are many primes near zero (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 etc.)
h tm l
Excuse me.
One is not prime.
There is no room for argument.
It's in the definition.
http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.prime.num.
Have a nice day.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Hmm, that really cuts into the heart of my argument :-)
Anyone have a URL to a PCM sample of the signal? It would be most interesting to evaluate. NewScientist.com is quite inundated at the moment.
It's a cookbook!
While Japaneese is a quite different culture than my own there are many more things that are the same than different. For instance some Japaneese wear hats and so do I, they have 2 arms, 2 leg etc and so do I. It would be infinetly more difficult to translate a language from a race of beings whom we've never seen on a planet we've never seen.
That's stupid. We did that centuries ago - plenty of our asteroids reached Earth, but you never noticed. We're so past that now... why haven't you noticed our UWB transmissions of 4D fractals? We've been sending them for 5 years. It goes without saying that spread-spectrum hyperspacial mandelbrots can't possibly be found in nature. There's no better proof of civilization than that!
Thew Japaneese have a quite different culture.... my bad.... Must... Preview
All internet acronymns aside, this really made me laugh out loud. Sorry for being short. This is just an issue that irritates me.
I've been in arguments with people over this (I swear, I'm a fun guy) where people bring out all sorts of reasons 1 should by prime, ignoring the mathematical definition of primality.
Anyway, yeah, it was totally irrelevant. Carry on.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
you do NOT pay for this with 'your tax dollars' (whine whine whine). It's privately funded, mr. 'my-tax-dollars'-whiney-byatch. so why don't you file a Freedom of Information Act request to find your missing perspective.
I am shocked by the blatant bias evident in the voyager plaque; Is this what "intelligent life" on planet Earth looks like? Where are the African-American brother, the obviously homosexual, the kid in a wheelchair, the nerk, and the "cheerfully chubby" munching on a burger? Those are "intelligent life" too, you know.
Earthoids- Click here for FREE_TRIP_TO_MARS.
Meanwhile Norton releases "SpaceProtect - TM" which provides full support in blocking those junk SETI Spam message from Space?.
(like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)
You want me to send them my old TRS-80 Model 4P?
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Alan Boyle of MSNBC has this take:
It's divisible by 23....
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick
Nobody seems to have noticed this paragraph of the Article: So, everytime they detected it it started at 1420 MHz and then started shifting? How could asignal from 1000 Lightyears away react in such a way? Do you think the aliens restart the signal every time we are looking?
No, sorry, everyone. This looks pretty much. like a malfunction of the telescope in Arecibo.
Why not mix the suggestions and have a spaceship with an ion drive that has a transmitter which can be aimed at the closest star ?
You wouldn't need to correct trajectory much, since you'd just be aiming at getting away from your earth and you would reduce the transmission power requirements.
Might explain why the signal found by S.E.T.I. is coming from nowhere. You'd have to check the parallax shift to determine the actual signal distance.
I'd have no explanation for the shift in frequency though, if it came from a spacecraft.
Maybe the data is in the change of frequency, not intensity, or frequency is intentionally shifted to make the signal noticably by planets that rotate themselves.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
... for the first few scenes of boradcast TV, most likely to contain endless stuff about Der Fhurer.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
All our radio and TV broadcasts are travelling at the speed of light already. No way to put a lid onto that, so better keep watching.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!"
Yeah. That would be hell for the aliens. They'd grow humans in test tubs and the humans would fucking kill everything in sight. After that they'd come blow the shit out of Earth.
But SETI is not attempting to make us dicoverable.
It is trying to dicover others.
And in any case our radio and TV signals are already travelling at the speed of light in outer space. No way to stop that at all.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Waiting to discover alien life to change your ways is the greatest lame excuse to do nothing at all about it.
In regard to all humans dropping their differences in brotherly love once they realize the threat posed by an alien civilization, er, yeah sure MR Hippy.
I can almost see it: the different religious leaders lobbing the new masters to favour their own fairy-tales, each political group doing the same.
You obviously know very little about human history. What are you? An alien?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I don't know what you think, but I'd rather stay undiscovered.
Just look at what we're doing to earth - the "alien" people must think we are a bad and exploiting civilisation that is better to be exterminated.
Or they keep on laughing why we still use gas and coal to make energy and pollute the air.
I still favour the bad scenario, where they use their technology to conquer earth.
Bush's handlers are going to shit themselves when the aliens come down and make Puerto Ricans the kings of the world.
...if multiple clients reports it as "interesting" or more, do the damn calculation yourself. The number of interesting packages (at least in terms of really interesting) is so incredibly low (mostly you're just listening to background noise), that it doesn't take away the "distributed" aspect of it.
So if you have a modded client, probably the most you can do is to mask a real signal. Wohoo...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be." - Pink Floyd.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Obviously noone would look for intelligent life here --- why do you think people are so busy trying to find it elsewhere?
.. that will show them
Some claim that the best proof of extraterrestial intelligence is that they have _NOT_ attempted to contact us...
If extraterrestial lifeforms will ever show up, it will Vogons coming be to clear away this pathetic planet..
Go ahead Bush, don't let them get that chance, blow up the planet
Actually, the mathematical definition is just... a definition. Which means aliens could consider 1 to be prime, if their definition said it was.
:-)
(Sure that breaks the "only one prime factoring" property of any integer, but if we get a signal that said 1 2 3 5... we shouldn't drop it because it contains 1
A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second.
Doesn't Hz stand for frequency, 1 per second? How can this be 1.5 'events' per second per second?
After all we call our partners too using mobile phones.
So there might even be a transmitter without a culture, not to speak of an "higher" one !
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
(Sure that breaks the "only one prime factoring" property of any integer, but if we get a signal that said 1 2 3 5... we shouldn't drop it because it contains 1 :-)
..."
But if we do, our reply should start out "You dumbass,
Similar to what motivated Voyager scientists to attach a plaque for the outbound trip.
h tml
That link in the header is for the Pioneer plaque, not the Voyager golden record..
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
How could one locate the position of this on the Hubble Ultra Dense Field? Does that even make sense?
Instinctively, I would tend to agree with those who say aliens more advanced than we are might just decide to enslave us. But on second thoughts, I'm sure they won't. A class society will never be able to develop the technology needed for interstellar travel.
Then again, if communist aliens visit us, this won't be good either. It would be 'socialism from above', quite literally.
And that's a bad thing, folks.
How are you gentlemen !!
Please point your antennas elsewhere, planet is currently slashdotted.
839*929
Probably the most successful troll I've ever seen, at least as far as putting readers on an emotional rollercoaster.
...wait until you see SpaceMail!
Anomalous: deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
Canard: a false or unfounded repor
I know that's supposed to be funny... but anyway, it takes an intelligence to know one. SETI is looking for an intelligence comparable to our own, no matter how dumb or smart that means.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The modulation would just have to be very slow so they don't integrate the whole modulation over the "staring" period.
I take this to mean we'll be uploading our DNA via 56k?
Lose = not win
You there, you must be almost thirty. Have you ever kissed a girl?
-tid242
With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science. --Carl Sagan
Uller Uprising by H Beam Piper.
Best Slashdot Co
The people at SET@home are denying it, saying it's just a rumour that got out of hand.
Of course, if the LGM's got to 'em first and put those slimy mind-control worms into their ears, of course that's what they'd say...
RIAA deems radio signals are copyrighted. Closes down SETI for downloading signals. Also sues every person who is/was using SETI software on their machine, as well as every computer manufacturer in the country.
Microsoft avoids lawsuit by bundling Jason Timberlake box set with purchase of Windows.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
You based my credibility on how relatively long ago I created an account on a particular free non-credentialled web board? Are you nuts?
Put another way, you don't know anything about me except that I have a 4-digit UID, but you figured that was enough to make me a paragon of reliability?
To those who were tricked:
If it makes you feel better, I was going for "Funny" instead of "Informative". I mean, you have to admit that all of the clues were there. I even explicitly revealed the joke and alluded to the fact that everyone would know it as soon as the server came back online and everyone realized that the data file was a 404. Sorry if that was too much of a ride for anyone; it wasn't supposed to be.
If you have to take something away from this, then let it be your own willingness to have unknown "experts" prove the things you most want to be true. I'm Just Some Guy with a CompSci degree and enough math to make a halfway plausible sounding practical joke. I told you what you wanted to hear and you gobbled it up without vetting me, your source, my any means other than my Slashdot UID.
Still, I truly am sorry for anyone who got too excited about the post. I really did mean it as more of an innocent practical joke between friends than as a cruel joke on strangers.
Take care,
JSG
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The 1995 movie Species was about creating an alien life in the lab using DNA sequences broadcast from outer space. Of the course the alien was maleovalent gorgeous horny chick.
Is it me, or does anyone else think that actively inviting other life to come to us seem like a really, really bad idea...
I just dropped SETI about a month ago after 2k workunits and one candidate.
I got tired of the information void that they were presenting on server/app status when rolling out BOINC. They got numerous offers from a range of supportive folks from students to users to faculty at OTHER colleges to keep the web page up to date and ignored them.
The newsgroups that allegedly supported the project looked like text book examples of bad usenet w/the flaming and "screw you, you're a volunteer" msgs. The user/support forums on the website were seemingly user run w/little input from the project as well.
After losing my old my-deja email and credit for those units and all this warm fuzzy support, I decided to take my CPU cycles elsewhere.
(and bask in the glory of being ignored there too no doubt)
What if the alien society followed the principles of modern capitalism: ever-growing production driven by insatiable consumerism driven by ubiquitous advertising? This is not far-fetched looking at human history. 99.9% of the 100,000 years humans have been on earth they contentedly hunted and grew crops. Then came along came captialism which causing population, wealth and knowledge to explode. Might this same drive cause an interstellar culture to take over the galaxy or universe? Would these aliens broadcast advertising to potential new consumers?
Dateline: 2025 Scientists in 2004 opted to abandon sending radio signals into space to attract alien life. Instead, they sent samples of human DNA to distant asteroids and on spacecraft sent into the universe in hopes that someone or something out there would find it and learn more about our life. They did. They took the DNA, altered it (though this reporter is confident they would say "improved" it), and sent it back. This explains the horrific devestation around the globe by the 400' mammoth humanoid monster that is currently plaguing our planet. So remember, each city laid waste by our extra-terrestrial cousin is twisted thank you to the scientists of 2004! Way to go, Guys!
Hey, it could happen!?
Quantity [size] does not denote quality [life]. Life is unique to us. Extrapolations cannot be done on a sample of 1. etc.
I for one welcome our super-intelligent space monkey rulers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3621608.stm
Selected quotes:
"About 150 signals survived the process and were subjected to further scrutiny but none passed the final test to be classed as a potential signal from ET."
"Dr Horowitz, who looks for alien signals using optical telescopes, told BBC News Online that it was "not new and definitely not a signal"."
best SNL/ST reference eVAR
Anyone questioning that maybe we don't want them to find us? Any beings capable of interstellar travel would certainly be unimpressed with some backwater apes inhabiting a nice life-sustaining planet with many resources.
I know there was some debate over whether to put that plague on Voyager for just this reason.
Yeah. Open Source is great. Gotta love it. But this, methinks, is too much.
Open Source OS? You bet. But Open Source US?
Sola Deo Gloria!
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/09/02/space.sig nals.reut/index.html
Parent doesn't know what he's talking about (not surprising given his website is all about a fantasy game). Hz/s (cycles/s/s or cycles/s^2) indicates how fast the frequency is changing. The same way that acceleration is m/s/s or m/s^2.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I was going to say something along similar lines, but I wasnt going to be as polite as you.
I like your analogy of ASIC v CPU, but even that elevates conscious decisions, let along logic based decisions above their rightful place. The way I think of it is: Consciousness is the process of updating one's internal representation of oneself. Ie, there's what you're thinking and then there's what you think you're thinking. [People who have an unusally poor representation of themselves are better known as "assholes"]. Since it is beyond virtually everybody's capabilities to hold a detailed understanding of what happens inside a tv, its amazing that people can believe that they have a reasonable understanding of what's going on in their own brain. Consciousness, let along logic, is a tiny tiny fraction of it. Truly restricting oneself to logic would leave you incapable of deciding what to have for breakfast.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
to respond to the latest SETI news with "Open Source it!"
Teflon is in fact tough. It absorbs a great amount of energy before failing in tension (bullet proof vests). However, it's not so great in compression. Compression is what most organisms need to hold them up and move around. Think of the force of weight pushing down on your bones. So, your theoretical creatures wouldn't be very large as compared to Earth creatures, or their bones and shells would buckle under their own weight.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
Namely _Forge of God_ and _Anvil of Stars_. Maybe not such a good idea to go announcing our presence, perhaps?
No hard feelings, eh?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
First thing to realise is that we aren't getting rid of our emotions... unless you want a brain surgeon to hack out your amygdala but then you'd end up shagging pavements.
Anyone who uses a PDA knows that computers are already better at organising our lives than we are. As soon as somebody writes the software, they'll be better at making decisions for us too. Within 50 or so years, we'll be obsolete.
The only alternatives that I know of are neural implant and emotion-tuning technologies. The latter are already here, just not primetime yet.
According to this bbc article, it's just an ordinary signal, one that they are not even particularly excited about, and are not going to investigate further. Another media blow-out (of proportion).
a 100 pound laptop!
You're not putting that thing on MY lap.
100lb laptops? Is it 1980 again?
A 100 pound laptop? So we're assuming aliens are much larger and/or sturdier than ourselves? The planet of the Paul Bunyons....
Nothing to see here. Move along.
The smoke signal analogy fails because we are discussing "technologically advanced civilizations" that have a basic understanding of science, of how the universe works.
What was that saying (I'm paraphrasing Orwell's work since I can't find any direct quotes offhand)"
"1 + 1 = 3 and sometimes 4 if we so desire. We are at war with Eurasia not Oceania and always have been! Now... How many fingers am I holding up?" -Winston (from 1984)
If all humans believed there were 3 continents and all the aliens believed there were 4 continents? Who would be right?
I guess the race with the bigger ray cannon.
My computer is processing data with a base frequency of 1419MHz.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
becomes dumbly obvious as a message when it loops over and over and over again
Doesn't a Pulsating Radio Source [PULSAR] loop over and over again?
By contrast, doesn't 120V/60Hz [cf 240V/50Hz] wall current loop over and over again?
Now tell me which is interesting and which is uninteresting. And does either one of them transmit a "message"? Or are they both more akin to noise?
1) That there is life out there besides our own
No real evidence to back up the belief, only lies, damn lies, and statistical probability.
2) That life out there is looking for us
What makes us special?
3) That life out there doesn't already know about us
Maybe nobody wants to talk to us.
4) That life out there is friendly
Not to be overly paranoid, but what basis for friendship can we really have with extraterrestrial beings? How do we know that we won't be simply wiped out as an infection or treated as a food source?
Ok, so I guess their existance is unlikely, but then,these radio-emitting creature could kill each other by their radio output, like microwaves - one evolutionary advantage, but it is also probably why they moved into outer space, to flee from their rivals on the crowded planet. ;-)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Look at the entropy of the data stream, and look at the frequency spectrum of the signal.
I ought to know enough about discrete ergodic theory to know the answer to this, but is there a simple definition of "entropy" in this situation? And how does it depend on the sampling interval? I.e. does the value of "entropy" change as the sampling interval increases, from 1 second, to 2 seconds, to ..., to infinity?
Similar problems with "the frequency spectrum" - just trying to decide on a time domain sampling interval [prior to applying a Fourier Transform] is a whale of a problem in and of itself.
As an aside, I'd ask you the same questions I asked another poster: Doesn't a Pulsating Radio Source [PULSAR] have a nice, stable, utterly utterly predictable spectrum? Similarly, doesn't 120V/60Hz [cf 240V/50Hz] wall current have a nice, stable, utterly predictable spectrum? Now which is interesting, and which is uninteresting? And does either one of them transmit a "message"? Or are they more akin to noise? By the way, we get this very sort of problem in our lab - 60Hz wall current pollutes our signals, but, mathematically, the pollution is very similar to e.g. the kinds of pollution we get from mammalian respiration motions, so we have to decide things like "respiration, or wall current"? And until very recently we what I had presumed to be noise generated by bad leads or metal touching metal, until I realized that it was emanating from a heating lamp that we use to keep mammalian temperatures at 37C.
Anyway, I've been thinking about the possibility of using Wavelets and Mother Functions that are specifically tailored for each situation, but that brings me to the next point:
Most noise sources have very high entropy, and spectra that fall into a few well-defined shapes.
What are these "few well-defined shapes" [again, presumably relative to which "well-defined sampling intervals"]? The presumption with "well-defined shapes" seems to be that you've studied a plethora of known noise generators, and their known spectra [relative to some agreed-upon sampling interval], and have catalogued them. [And, for the record, if anyone knows of some standard text or treatise which presents this catalogue, I'd love to know about it. Thanks!] But the assumption with a communication from some random, hitherto unknown [but intelligent] alien species must be that you do NOT know what form their communications protocols will take and what "shapes" the associated spectra will comprise.
Signals (or rather, symbol streams in a decoded signal) that are intended to convey language have their own very-recognizable statistical patterns as well.
Again, could you clue me in as to these "very-recognizable statistical patterns"? For instance, I'm familiar with the Shakespeare authorship question, and the use of word pattern analysis to try to determine whether Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was actually writing under the pseudonym "William Shakespeare" [turns out he doesn't fare very well in the pattern-recognition tests, whereas Queen Elizabeth, of all people, fares quite well], but again, in that instance, you're taking known phenomena [the surviving works of "Shakespeare" and the surviving letters of de Vere, or of Elizabeth] and analyzing them for patterns, whereas in the case of transmissions from outerspace, you're trying to "analyze" almost infinitely many EM point sources [there are what, 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone?] and trying to both discard the ones that are noise and, at the same time, zero in on the ones that contain an UNKNOWN but intelligent language.
Again, if it were so easy to decode these things, why is it that some of the brightest minds in the American NSA and the British MI5/MI6 still can't decode the overwhelming majority of the Venona traffic, even though the agents being monitored were speaking in KNOWN languages, such as English and Russian?
For that matter, how easy would it be for us to decode ASCII
>Rose has some great information payload sizes as examples (like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!)."
What century is this guy from? No company ever made a 100 pound laptop! At best the earliest lugggables weighed in at 35-40 pounds.
How many of these 100 pound laptops will it take to ensure that any alien civilizations find them? How much Mass does Earth have? Does Rose propose we mine all of the planets for construction materials? How much does it cost to launch a 100 pounds into LEO, How much does it cost to launch a 100 pounds out of the solar system?
How about doing something more constructive first, like lowering the cost of space travel, faster space proposion engines, Developing new renewable energy sources for teresteral needs, etc... before we start building 100 pound LAPTOPS to send to the stars!
(like the entire information equivalent for our global genome fitting on a 100 pound laptop!).
Get this man a Thinkpad!
for lawyers of the extraterrestial beings to show up with a cease and desist order for spamming THEM with SETI signals.
I ought to know enough about discrete ergodic theory to know the answer to this, but is there a simple definition of "entropy" in this situation?
The short answer is "no"; it depends on how you decode the signal into a symbol stream, and several other parameters. However, most signals of natural origin have noiselike content no matter how you decode them, giving high entropy no matter how you measure it. An artificial signal that's intended to be easily picked up would be designed to have low entropy when interpreted in a very basic way (though this could be made more complex as an IQ test, per one of my other posts).
Similar problems with "the frequency spectrum" - just trying to decide on a time domain sampling interval [prior to applying a Fourier Transform] is a whale of a problem in and of itself.
The bandwidth and intensity of your signal impose limits on the data rates that may be present (due to photon count, and other environment-induced noise). This would let you pick reasonable parameters for frequency-domain analysis given the strength and bandwidth of the received signal. SETI's already doing something like this, I believe. The only major problem I can see offhand is that a signal may be modulated too _slowly_ to recognize with a small window, but I don't consider that a likely scenario if the signal is intended to be understood (they'd modulate it as quickly as possible while still having reasonable noise resistance).
As an aside, I'd ask you the same questions I asked another poster: Doesn't a Pulsating Radio Source [PULSAR] have a nice, stable, utterly utterly predictable spectrum? Similarly, doesn't 120V/60Hz [cf 240V/50Hz] wall current have a nice, stable, utterly predictable spectrum? Now which is interesting, and which is uninteresting? And does either one of them transmit a "message"? Or are they more akin to noise?
This question has confused astronomers as well - it was conjectured that pulsars were artificial beacons, until a natural explanation of them arose. An artificial signal intended to be picked up would be made unambiguous by encoding information that would not be generated by natural processes under any conditions. Encoding the first handful of prime numbers is a good way of doing this (either as binary, or as a series of delays between pulses, or what-have-you). Similarly, emitting a narrow-band signal at a small multiple or simple fraction of the wavelength of a naturally occurring spectral line would be recognizable as artificial. A repeating pulse is artificial-looking, but not artificial-looking enough to be unambiguous. So, I'd expect a beacon to have a more blatantly artificial pattern.
Most noise sources have very high entropy, and spectra that fall into a few well-defined shapes.
What are these "few well-defined shapes" [again, presumably relative to which "well-defined sampling intervals"]?
Flat spectra for white noise, 1/f spectra for "pink noise" or "flicker noise", and things like Poisson and normal distributions. Sampling interval doesn't really matter, here, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it up - think of this discussion as referring to continuous-time aperiodic transforms. Changing the scaling factor you're using alters the size but not the shape of the frequency spectrum that results.
Look up texts for semiconductor device physics for discussions of a number of examples of these types of noise come from. Celestial noise sources come from very different sources, but they still tend to follow the same types of distribution (as they arise naturally from the action of various simple classes of random processes - see a statistics text for a discussion of this).
The spectra of artificial signals is radically different, at least if produced by simple equipment or intended to be interpreted by simple receivers. You get a pair of spikes, lobes, or top-hats for a signal modulated onto a carrier. If you're deliberately making the signal as artificial-look
ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE Slash said: Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Yeah, well- tell that to the swarm of monoliths on Jupiter.
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Only 3 hits for "SHGb02+14a" on Google......something fishy. :-/
What if the universe itself is intelligent and created quasars to communicate with us and we just ignore them because they are natural phenomenon?
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
You know he deserves it.
Bill Gates announced today that Microsoft has signed an exclusive licensing agreement with our new, intergalactic friends that grants them DRM-compliant access to all of our minds.
RIAA expressed gratitude that Microsoft was taking the lead in extending backward-thinking, money-grubbing, and innovation-squashing to previously-inaccessible corners of the galaxy.
FSF lawyers could not be reached for comment, as they have so far refused to cross-license Microsoft's "Legalease v.2.0" DRM technology, and are not allowed to speak.
It says: "F1rst p0s7!"
Hmm... a spin 40 times the speed of earth's rotation. From a source where no planet is thought to exists. Hmm could this signal come from an alien probe?
"There are other oddities. For instance, the signal's frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second." I'd say there are oddities, how much is 37 hertz per second anyway?
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/83 7354.cms
From: Dr. H. Paul Shuch
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2004 00:41:07 -0400
Subject: SETI public: False SETI@home alarm, courtesy of the press
To: "Dr. H. Paul Shuch"
SETIzens,
Today, I've received nearly a hundred emails about a three-time
SETI@home hit, reported in today's New Scientist. Sorry to throw a wet
blanket on this otherwise exciting announcement, but I have to tell you
the press attaches more significance to this observation than do the
astronomers themselves. Here is the text of an email received today
from SEI@home director Dan Werthimer of U.C. Berkeley (and now in Arecibo):
>it's a zero on the rio scale.
>none of our candidates are very interesting - they are all
consisitent with noise. we will continue to observe many
of the candidates over the next few years, but there's
nothing on the candidate lists we are particularly excited about.
>a reporter from new scientist read the seti@home web pages:
in particular there's a section on "candidate signals" where
we discuss how we score signals and we show the data from
the 220 candidates we re-observed at arecibo 1.5 years ago.
these web pages are old, but the reporter made an exciting
story about them, by exagerating their content and mis-quoting
us and quoting us out of context, and making a press release
about one of the candidates that has a bit higher score than
the others.
>i talked to a couple of reporters today, explaining we've seen
stuff like this for the last 30 years, and it's always turned
out to be rfi or noise, and that there's nothing to get excited
about, and that when you look at 50 trillion bytes of data,
occasionally you'll find patterns that look unusual just from
noise...
>i wish we had something in our data to get excited about.
>tomorrow we'll start using the multibeam receiver you guys made
to map HI in the galaxy. the HI survey will take about five years.
we begin in 12 hours.
>best wishes from arecibo,
>dan
The Rio Scale to which Dan refers is a one-to-ten tool SETI scientists
use for quantifying the importance of a candidate detection. For
details, see http://www.setileague.org/iaaseti/rioscale.htm.
Sorry this one wasn't The Signal, but as you can see from Dan's last
comment, that won't stop us from continuing the search!
Yours for SETI success,
Paul
Microsoft was granted Patent number 213,468,347 for "communication over instellar distances using hydrogen radio frequencies...". MS attorney-bots just launched to prosecute.
Don't forget Bones.
ST makes a helluva lot more sense when you see the Kirk/Spock/McCoy thing as a love triangle.
Young go getter in Star Fleet hooks up with older Medical officer. When young go-getter gets his own command, he hooks up with young, exotic science officer and drops his older lover.
This really accounts quite well for the bitchy rivalry between Spock and Bones. Next time you watch ST, think of this subtext during all interactions between McCoy and Spock. McCoy is obviously the jealous ex, and Spock is the smug current lover.
So, why does Kirk put the moves on every attractive female alien? Maybe he's bi, but more likely, he's keeping it in the closet. Can't let anyone, especially the higher ups at Starfleet, know he is homosexual. So, I guess society in the future will be just as repressive as it is now.
By the way, this is not an original idea. I think I first read about the idea a long time ago, but I might also have heard the theory from a gay geek friend. I'll have to ask him if he remembers.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
A value is a value, no matter what base you use to name it.