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SETI Researcher Quashes Signal Rumors
brainstyle writes "According to Dan Wertheimer of SETI the whole ET signal excitement is more hype than science. I told myself it was in all likelihood nothing special, but I'm still disappointed. Darn."
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so if this is really nothing and they at SETI aren't interested, where'd all the damn hype come from in the first place? thats what i dont get....who started it, and what happened to them?
i understand its so very probably not an ET signal...but what if it was?
Moo.
I think you would probably find that the people who want to find extraterrestrial life really, guinuinely want to find it. They would neither risk being considered cranks by repeatedly saying "found one -- oops, psyche" nor would they willingly participate in a cover up if they did.
A lot of scientists already think of SETI as being a little flaky. Giving people reason to believe that more would be silly.
[ then again, since I can't prove a negative, I can't completely rule out the assertion either. =]
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Y'know, I get really tired of all this bullshit I hear. It's bad enough to hear this bullshit when I interact with "normal" people -- do we really need this on slashdot as well?
Look everyone, making any sort of contact with an alien civilization would be such an incredible discovery, there's no way the government could ever keep it quiet. Christ, they can't even keep China from obtaining detailed blueprints on every single nuclear weapon in the US arsenal. So how are these nincompoops going to keep a bunch of scientists -- who have given up the chance to be reputable, respected, and published for the chance to discover life -- quiet? I don't care what kind of blackmail or torture or whatever technique they used -- there is no way they could keep all the scientists quiet. What's to stop a terminally ill SETI researcher from spilling the beans?
Guys, just relax. There is no conspiracy. The reason SETI has to vehemently deny shit like this is because the media blows everything completely out of proportion. They are trying to contain the situation before everyone picks it up and starts running with it. Occam's razor and all that jazz.
GMD
watch this
What was that biblical line where Jesus said "My father has many houses?"
The point is that nothing has been interprited that way because aliens aren't among us. If they were, those people would find SOMETHING in those texts to justify them, and "prove" that they were right all along.
FYI, incidentally, Kabbalah isn't a book. The Zohar is the main Kabbalist text. (And, as it happens, deals with all sorts of angels, seraphs and other extra-terrestrial creatures.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What are you hoping they find?
That's actually a very relevant question which hits many UFO believers right in the scrotum.
In my experience 75% are looking for "Shiny happy aliens holding hands", who will of course descend upon us soon, revealing mystical knowledge that will take us, as a species, to the next level of evolution, relieving the believer from his job at K-Mart.
The other 25% believe in horrible, scary aliens, who will of course descend upon us, wreaking havoc and mayhem and instituting a new reign of terror, relieving the believer from his job at K-Mart.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Holy shit! WTF is that all about?
The thing that gets me is he keeps going on and on about the 4 corners of his cube. Last time I checked a cube had 8 corners, 4 corners is just a lowly time square...
ROFL! I noticed that too. Even if he was talking about sides it would be 6
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
SETI researchers favor those frequencies because they lie in a metaphorical "water hole" .
"If [the aliens] are so smart, they'll adjust their signal for their planet's motion."
Only one thing I always say about this: It's a very naive to assume aliens are smart. We're not all that bright by the standards we seem to expect of aliens, and we used to be a lot dumber. We're just as likely to detect an early industrial civlization by their sitcom broadcasts as we are to detect some hyperadvanced godlike race beaming lasers at us accross the galaxy.
Can someone explain to me why the shift in frequency is not being considered as the signal itself? It doesn't take rocket science to create and broadcast an FM signal, and we've even learned how to cope with the doppler effect as we drive along listening to the radio in our cars.
Perhaps 1420 is the start-of-message signal?
Realistically speaking, if I took a reading of a signal that always started the same way and behaved the same way no matter when I started, I would suspect an artifact of the equipment or software.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Now if you look on this site the 1400-1700 Mhz range is used by radio astronomy and weather satellites. So with that 3 questions:
Now I'm probably wrong on all of this. Which is why I love
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
>> The signal is moving rapidly in frequency
:)
Isn't that the whole point of FM? (i.e. frequency modulation... varying the frequency to encode data?)
Couldn't it be a signal from a stationary source that's being modulated as a carrier wave? Think outside your tiny box once in a while...
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
The story on the 'near miss' astroid had something along the same line: they shared information so soon, they didn't even knew squat about the information themselves.
In the end it proved to be nothing.
But what if this isn't ?
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No offense dude but your average layman would consider another swing by your most promising signal to date after a lengthy and extensive search would be a moderately high priority, even if it is a relatively low probability of success. Jeeze you'd think you understood alien civilizations intimately the way you were talking. The fact is there are so many unknowns here you may not understand the nature of such a signal and based on transient observations may not be able to deduce anything other than you have a candidate and in this case the **ONLY** candidate signal to make it this far. At the very least they may be an interesting astronomical phenomenon there.
Consider for a moment there may be an alien project on that planet, and some guy struggling for budget to keep his signal transmitter running and you don't have all the time in the world, maybe they had an equipment upgrade between your scans, or a change in transmission theories. Maybe the have detected methane and oxygen in our atmosphere after extensive surveys of their sky and are targeting us with a signal.
My point is not that this is likely, but given this is the only signal and we don't know much about most of the factors in Drake's equation and the anthropic principal is at work here thare are many reasons for *showing a little bit of enthusiasm* and checking out this signal one more time, and not taking your sweet time to do it.
You are asking the wrong person. SETI doesn't get to point the Arecibo radio telescope. They piggyback the signal and look at the section of the sky the telescope is looking at (for different researchs), and analyze any signals coming down.
There are about a zillion research projects that compete for a scarce resource, telescope time. Each telescope has a time assignment committee, that will decide who will be able to point the telescope. SETI is the last in the list. So you should send your request to Arecibo, not to SETI.