New and Improved SETI

nomrniceguy writes "The new year is sure to be memorable for SETI, as glossy new instruments come on-line. At Harvard University, a survey telescope designed to sweep massive swaths of the sky in a hunt for extraterrestrial laser flashes is becoming a reality. In Puerto Rico, the famed Arecibo telescope is getting a new feed that will speed up searches by seven times. And in California, the SETI Institute and Berkeley's Radio Astronomy Lab will soon be scanning the star-clotted realms of the inner Milky Way with the first-stage implementation of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and will eventually boast 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. This impressive antenna farm will be spread over about a half square-mile of terrain."

Comments

How'd they get the funding?

[JaxWeb]

As interesting as the SETI project is, I just wonder how they manage to find the funding to build massive Laser detection devices.

Really, what are the chances of this finding anything?

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[dlleigh]

As interesting as the SETI project is, I just wonder how they manage to find the funding to build massive Laser detection devices.

The all-sky optical SETI system at Harvard receives its funding from The Planetary Society and the Bosack-Kruger Charitable Foundation.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[gardyloo]

This is the traditional reason to take on graduate students. They (usually) have two eyes, you know.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding the funding for Seti and some other things that may encourage your discussion, the following jpg pages from the early '80s may help:

http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/ct44.html

http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/ct45.html

http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/ct46.html

Source: http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/index.html

They describe the early days of "CETI", which was being directed towards a giant array of dishes pointed at space.

The main argument against this was... what it one attracted Darth Vader.

The laser project is similar to the searching of light that was inititiated by Nick Marshall's Project Starquest (the group before Kent Cullers' Project Seti).

I personally have enough problems with Redmond Borg... and really don't want to see the 'real thing' attracted by a search for E.T.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Vulture101]

very very small, but its worth doing it. Just think of the impact in humanity if just one discovery was made...

its kinda like the big lottery, your chances are very small but you still play it, the prize is too much tempting.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Anonymous Coward]

You may play the lottery if it didn't cost too much. You surely wouldn't play if your family was hungry and unsheltered. That money could be better spent elsewhere.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[mbrother]

Are Americans, or most people in the world, "hungry and unsheltered" because of a lack of money? I don't think so. Politics, and other issues, are the major obstacles. SETI, and astronomy in general, is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. It's ridiculous to prioritize the problems of the nation, or the world, and then apply all resources to solving the first one, then the second one, ad infinitum. That's not a wise thing to do.

One of the things that makes human civilization great, in my opinion, is that we care about this sort of knowledge. We value it for it's own sake. There are ways to determine the nature of the universe and our place in it. A culture that fails to look past its immediate physical needs of food and shelter is a short-sighted one that isn't any greater than a troop of babboons.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Waffle Iron]

That money could be better spent elsewhere.

Money spent on sports, cars, stereos, TVs, wine, restaurant meals, movies, snacks, games and vacations could also be better spent elsewhere. Am I correct to assume that you have completely forsaken all of these frivolities in favor of helping your fellow man?

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Anonymous Coward]

A professor of mine at the University of Texas, Hans Mark; told us about SETI in the early days. Apparantly he was rather involved with its adoption.

He told me one interesting thing: If we were to detect a signal from an intelligent civilization it would give man hope. Hope that we won't destroy ourselves and end our own civilization.

This may seem like an awkward conclusion, but if you were to take the Drake equation (the equation that gives probability of contact) one major factor is the period of time that a civilization survives.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[colmore]

It seems like the likelihood of finding an alien EM radiation broadcast is
Chance that they're close enough * chance that they're using that technology * chance that we're capable of identifying the signal as such

with laser light there's the added wrinkle that there could be a signal origin close enough to us, but it could simply be aimed in the wrong direction. the chances of a laser originating from a point any significant distance away from the solar system coming in our general direction is microscopically low, so it seems like we're banking on them knowingly signalling earth.

so we're banking now on aliens knowing we're here and actively trying to get in touch with us. my guess is that if they're advanced enough to do interstellar travel, and they felt like talking, they would come up with a method that's a little harder to miss.

of course i suppose they might have just done a survey of solar systems, worked out which ones are potentially habitable and left lasers counting off prime numbers pointed at each of them.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Anonymous Coward]

I 3 you for that reply :)

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Esion Modnar]

what are the chances of this finding anything?

Unknown. Since nothing has been found so far (that we know of), you couldn't give odds.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[5h3wman]

While I agree with you that SETI isn't the reason people are hungry, I do think the money would be better spent if used on space exploration. The chances of discovering someone/something in space from our little spec of a planet is so remote, it can hardly be justified. And even if we did, then what? Trade cooking recipes? I think we should spend our money on exploration and the pursuit of knowledge regarding the many things we KNOW exist, and still are far from understanding.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[5h3wman]

Actually, you can guess at odds. And it's somewhere between no way and not gonna heppen. Having said that, I would be the first one to eat my humble pie if Yoda did give us a shout out. Could you imagine what we could learn? Imagine the countless potential for new methods of war and corporate greed!

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[vincecooks]

I had a telemarketing job in an office building at the intersection of Hollywood & Vine Streets for about a week back when I was in junior college, a couple of decades ago when they were trying to launch probes. My favorite opening line was, "Do you think we should go to Mars?" I was cold calling for private donations to the Planetary Society, one of the tele firm's biggest cleents.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Kenardy]

The more likely use of lasers aimed at us would be to re-establish contact when our technology had sufficiently matured that we could hold up our end of the conversation.

That, of course, presumes that VonDaniken isn't a total nutcase and 'they' have already been here.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[AusG4]

Yes, leave it to Mr. Bush.

How about, instead of complaining about spending money on science, you bitch about the US government for spending billions waging wars overseas?

Some people -really- have fucked up priorities.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[some guy I know]

This is the traditional reason to take on graduate students [as LASER detection devices]. They (usually) have two eyes, you know.

... until one of them detects a LASER.
"Do not look at LASER with remaining eye."

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[TapeCutter]

This is space exploration in the radio wave length, except for the laser thingy. Even then, I read somewhere that natural lasers may exist in exotic locales in the Universe. Both of the systems are just super fast pattern matchers and humans just love finding patterns. I imagine the raw data would be used for all sorts of less spectacular but still interesting studies.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[nutznboltz]

You surely wouldn't play if your family was hungry and unsheltered. That money could be better spent elsewhere.

The fundemental problem with feeding the poor is that they end up having even more babies and then you require even more food to feed them. This would be OK if the Earth wasn't basically an island in space meaning it's not infinite. This means when you do things that boost the population you just defer the suffering and death to a future generation which will be even larger than this one and that implies more suffering and death than if you were to let people starve today.

If you think birth control and education is the answer, where the track record of success? I'd love to see evidence that this is working to make the human population fit sustanedly on this planet.

more

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[jridley]

Yes, I think telemarketers should go to Mars. Here's a buck.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Anonymous Coward]

SETI... they have such great equipment that could maybe one day be recycled for use in legitimate astronomy.

Anyway, if the snipe-hunters didn't use it, the money would probably go to some dumb thing like feeding the hungry.

Stupid, "the hungry". :p

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Atryn]

If you think birth control and education is the answer, where the track record of success?

From: The University of MI, here's a quick example I found with a very basic web search. Note that almost every result page I found described the correlation between education, birth control and population growth rates:

Both Thailand and the Philippines began with roughly the same sized population in 1950, 20 million, of which young males accounted for about 10 percent, or 2 million. Thailand had a slightly lower fertility rate in the 1950s, but the real difference came in the 1960s when Thailand began what has become one of the world's most successful national family planning programs. The Philippines lagged behind because its family planning program was held hostage to religious resistance. It also had weak overall public services - education, health and other things - held back by a pervasive weakness of government. By 1970 Philippines young males were a third larger in number than their Philippine counterparts (1.7 to 1.4 million). Today (2000) there are 4 million young male Filipinos against only 2.8 million Thais. Which country bears greater costs of providing education and jobs? By 2025, Young Filipino males will number 4.7 million against 2.7 million young Thais. The Philippines is fostering a large cohort of young men who need schools and jobs to keep them in society; without those amenities, this population will be vulnerable to leaders who can use them for their own purposes, ostensibly through providing work and a sense of belonging.

Most research shows that higher levels of education, espescially education of females on topics of family planning, lead to lower birth rates.

Re:How'd they get the funding?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever somebody says this, another person has to point at the defense budget of about every western country. So here it is. *points*

@home? =oP

[El Gordo Motoneta]

So where do I download the client for this?

And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet the giant orange somethings in the sky won't register as a single bleep on these new shiny instruments...

Re:And yet...

[Almost-Retired]

And yet the giant orange somethings in the sky won't register as a single bleep on these new shiny instruments...

Ahh, but they do. Each of those stars has a noise in the water hole frequency coming out of it, including our own sun, which has sufficient radio frequency power output that any satellite dish's rx signal meter is pegged while the dishes so called beam, crosses the sun. Every comm satellite we have out there suffers from this effect twice a year, for a few minutes each day for 5 to 10 days each spring and fall as the sun crosses the equatorial plane headed the other way. When the sun has many kilowatts of noise output, its a bit hard to pick out a 10 watt satellite signal trying to compete with that.

However, thats above the "water hole" by about 2.5GHZ. Because that frequency, near 1420MHZ is quite transparent, its a good place to listen, and most stars within 10000 light years will cause the noise level out of the receivers at Arecebo to rise, often with enough charactar to the noise that the star can be identified just from its noise signature.

There used to be a visualizer (ksetispy) for linux that could display that as the dish scanned across nearby stars, but it quit working with the 2.6 kernel advent.

I'm hoping we'll get a chance to handle some of the data coming from the Allen Array, and it sounds as if its going to be ready for "first light" before too much longer.

The lazer search is a bit more far-fetched, but then so was radio, in 1891. Each of these observation instruments we build will teach us how to do a better job with the next generation.

Cheers, Gene

Re:And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, the vogon destructor fleet is yellow, isn't it?

350 Antennas

[Tackhead]

> "... 350 antennas, each 20 feet in diameter. This impressive antenna farm will be spread over about a half square-mile of terrain."

~fitzprrklpop~ople of Earth, can you hear us now?~fwopzzwwep~

Re:350 Antennas

[El Gordo Motoneta]

nah. that should read
~fitzprrklpop~ople of nice bule ball, can you hear us now?~fwopzzwwep~

Re:350 Antennas

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it should be more like ~fitzprrklpop~~fwopzzwwep~ Why would they speak English in the first place.

Re:350 Antennas

[Anonymous Coward]

What?! They do in all the films! Are you telling me I can't trust Hollywood as good source for all my information? Now that's just silly

Re:350 Antennas

[Anonymous Coward]

They are actually speaking Rigelian. By an astonishing coincidence, both of our languages are exactly the same.

Direct Link

[RobertTaylor]

Direct link to seti.org press release without all the crapola popups etc.

Re:Direct Link

[sH4RD]

Popups? What popups? Get a better browser dude!

Re:Direct Link

[RobertTaylor]

Hi Dude!

I use firefox... adverts as well = crapola , not just popups.

Re:Direct Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont be a fool! The adblock plugin for Firefox works miracles!

Re:Direct Link

[Morlark]

Yes, I can confirm these outrageous claims. The adblock plugin for Firefox brought my per dog back after it was run over by a truck! So please, everybody download this wonderful plugin, because you never know when you're going to need a miracle.

'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[Anonymous Coward]

So do they expect to be able to see space battles between Klingons and Romulans or something?

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[El Gordo Motoneta]

No, man. laser pointers!! think of the cool laser pointers
the aliens must have!!

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[SeaDour]

From the Harvard Optical SETI web site:

"A high-intensity pulsed laser, teamed with a moderate sized telescope, forms an efficient interstellar beacon. Using only "Earth 2000" technology, we could build such a laser transmitter. To a distant observer in the direction of its slender beam, it would appear (during its brief pulse) a thousand times brighter than our sun."

Simply put, a targeted laser pulse would be exponentially more efficient than using a power-hungry radio antenna.

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[myukew]

actually it's just much cooler to communicate using light instead of radiowaves because you need much less energy...

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply put, a targeted laser pulse would be exponentially more efficient than using a power-hungry radio antenna.

Assuming you knew where to aim it.

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[Linker3000]

Vader (increasing death grip on pilots neck from a distance of several metres): SO! master pilot, tell me why the new Death Star - the pride of the Empire - was damaged by a collision with a small moon while establishing a parking orbit at Omega-4?

Pilot: Sir (cough, splutter), it's not my fault - we were completing our orbital parking procedure as per instructions when this a**hole from Sol-3 shone this frickin' blinding laser beam into the cockpit and we missed the last orbital beacon.

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a wannabe trekie! Lasers are not used in Star Trek. They are mentioned in one episode as a 'vastly inferior' type of weapon that poses no threat to the Enterprise-D.

No, I don't live in my parent's basement!

Re:'Extraterrestrial laser flashes'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Laser pointers used by those aliens dont just blind you. They burn a hole right through your skull.

And let's not forget who is funding a lot of this

[mOoZik]

None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?

Not that I'm being a jerk about it, but it is only fair to note that without him, most of this would probably not be possible. Not only did he contribute millions to SETI, but also funded the Alien Telescope Array which the Slashdot blurb mentions.

not now

[eille-la]

Why not wait quantum computers to make this job? For the moment the distribued project should be only used to calculate things urgent to people, as the whole processing power we have now is a joke if we compare to nextgen ways to design CPUs. Research for health is IMHO a priority for what we can do at the moment on earth.

Re:not now

[mOoZik]

WAIT? We don't have the time to WAIT. Nothing was ever accomplished by WAITING. You have to do what you can NOW and change with time, as it warrants.

Re:not now

[Jane_the_Great]

You think we should be trying to find ways to prolong life? That's absurd.

The population of this planet is rising at such a rapid rate that I seriously doubt that the quality of life will be worth living for in 50 years. If anything, we should be using distributed computing power to find new ways to introduce population controls. This could be accomplished through either mind control devices or undetectable birth control drugs in the water supply. In conclusion, please don't breed.

Re:not now

[gustgr]

Sure... finding aliens will improve our quality of life.

Re:not now

[SeaDour]

Every SETI-related thread never fails to bring a comment or two about the "waste of cycles" SETI@Home is, and how we should all be looking for cancer-fighting protein folds instead. Most people fail to see any importance in efforts to answer one of the greatest questions of all time -- that is, "Are we alone?" -- and would rather keep their eyes firmly planted on the ground, devoting our resources to our own internal affairs. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with a desire for the betterment of the human race, but that doesn't mean we *all* have to be focused entirely on this pale blue dot.

Listen, we all gotta pick our own battles, and if I want to help out what is arguably one of the most exciting prospects in all of human history, then just let me be.

Re:not now

[Rosonowski]

So we presume. For all we know, they could be worse off than we are.

Re:not now

[Jane_the_Great]

Was your comment intended as a reply to mine? I believe you must have misread what I wrote. The person I was replying to was making the case that instead of searching for alien life, we should be using computers to do medical research. I was making the case that better medical technology further creates the overpopulation problem.

What exactly does "Sure... finding aliens will improve our quality of life." mean in this context? I never made any statement regarding how finding alien life would affect the quality of human life. I was talking about the effect of further medical research on the quality of human life.

Please, reread my comment. It is clear you did not understand it.

Re:not now

[rokzy]

> Sure... finding aliens will improve our quality of life.

of course it will. the entertainment value of religious fundamentalists' heads exploding will be worth all the effort. and the religious apologists will be amusing too, just like the Iraqi Information Minister was.

Re:not now

[sheppos]

Fair point, but no-one's forcing you to run this. Try folding @home instead.

Re:not now

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole processing power we have now is always a joke if we compare it to nextgen ways to design CPUs. You have to start sometime.

Re:not now

[Anonymous Coward]

what the fuck is this pile of nonsense?

Re:not now

[aldoman]

You do know that the UN is actually worried about a huge drop in population growth in 50 years time?

In 50 years time, they predict that China, India and other '2nd world' countries quality of life will have improved to roughly what ours is. This means people stop 'breeding', as they have better education etc.

The world's population is going to top off at around 9billion and start falling after that. The earth can easily support 9billion, 15billion would be where we start to struggle with current farming techniques... and even then in 50 years it is likely we will be able to colonize other planets.

Re:not now

[Jane_the_Great]

Source?
Let's see a UN report that says the population is going to level off.

Re:not now

[ckedge]

.
I've got no problem with answering one of the greatest questions of all time - but it's a waste of power and effort to re-calculate the same thing 50 times over.

Why have 50,000,000 computers doing SETI when they only have the data necessary to keep 500,000 busy with useful analysis? Those other 49,500,000 should be doing something else useful. But clearly the 49,500,000 people too many are all too stupid to figure that out for themselves, and squander a huge resource.

Clear?

Re:not now

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly the grandparent's point was wasted on you, even though it was written in plain site. Let me show it to you:

"...and if I want to help out what is arguably one of the most exciting prospects in all of human history, then just let me be."

See? He (or she) doesn't give a flying fuck what you think about wasted cycles, doesn't give a damn about your statistics, or analyses, or anything you can say. The point made by the poster is that s/he wants to be part of the SETI@Home project.

You can take your bitching little whine about wasted CPU cycles, and shove them up your big fat arse. This person wants to be part of a project, and fuck knows why you haven't realised this, but each of us has a choice. OUR OWN GOD DAMNED CHOICE. You have absolutely NO say in it. So take your "wasted cycles," take your sarcastic responses, take that shotgun and put the business end in your mouth and pull the trigger, but don't try to blame me for what is essentially YOUR CHOICE. I don't give a fuck.

I applaud the grandparent for being a part of SETI. I applaud you for being a part of medical research. But for the love of god, STOP WHINING THAT OTHER PEOPLE WON'T DO WHAT YOU WANT. I'm not one of your minions, and if I want to be a part of SETI, I fucking well will. Got a problem with that? I know you do - you've said as much. But you know what? I don't care, and I never will. That's my prerogative.

Re:not now

[HuguesT]

Because computing something so subtle as a SETI event is something that shouldn't be done only once. People cheat (sending back fake results), computer miscompute (overclocking anyone?), data gets lost in transmission and whatnot.

Maybe 50 times is too many but once is not enough.

does it also mean that

[bikerguy99]

aliens will be beaming stronger and less complicated signals to Earth?

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[mOoZik]

Sorry, that Allen Telescope Array, not Alien.

STI?

[theundead]

Is there a tool or project out there searching for the elusive 'terrestrial intelligence?'

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[malarkey]

Allen ?= Alien

Maybe he's just trying to phone home.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[mattdm]

None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?

No problem. We already resolved this internal conflict when Linus went to work for Transmeta.

Folding at Home

[gustgr]

In my opinion the http://folding.stanford.edu/ project is more important and perhaps more interesting than SETI. If you can help, I ask you to contribute with it.

Re:Folding at Home

[Anonymous Coward]

Read at least the summary. The article's about SETI. NOT about SETI@home.

Re:Folding at Home

[Anonymous Coward]

SETI is not SETI@Home. Your comparison made no sense.

Re:Folding at Home

[Almost-Retired]

In my opinion the http://folding.stanford.edu/ project is more important and perhaps more interesting than SETI. If you can help, I ask you to contribute with it.

First, they have not to my knowledge issued an update to the original program for linux. I installed that one about 3 years ago when it first came out, but it was such a cpu hog the machine simply wasn't usable when it was running. Seti is a nice kid, running at a nice of 19, meaning it only runs when nothing else needs the cpu. Sure, the cpu stays at 100%, and gets a bit warmer, but it isn't feelable in terms of how this machine runs. FoldingAThome needs to take a few lessons from Seti, not take over that machine, after all it is MY machine. Its entirely possible it might be able to do great work, and I think it will, but when it has to have 100% of the machine instead of 98%, screw em & the camel that rode in on them. Until they learn that lesson, its not going to be running here.

Cheers, Gene

Re:Folding at Home

[balster neb]

This is slightly unrelated.

The article is about SETI, not SETI@home.

The latter is simply part of the larger SETI project that involves several telescopes, and independent computers looking for signals full time. SETI@home is used for processing lower priority areas of the SETI data.

Re:Folding at Home

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pande Group has updated the Linux client all that time and the outcome is not much different than the Windows or MacOSX counterpart. There are functional differences, but the client is running at nice 19 and does not take over the machine.

Re:Folding at Home

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI
I've been running Folding@Home for two years on my PIII-450MHz-XP, and it runs fine and smoothly, the same as SETI (which I was running prior to F. )

Re:Folding at Home

[smoker2]

Well I'm running F@H on this machine right now, (FC2, AMD Sempron 2500, 512 RAM) and its not slowing this machine down any.
The linux version of the software has changed a few times since you tried it perhaps.
How can you refuse to use something without seeing what the current state of affairs is ?

top - 20:21:53 up 19 days, 2:42, 3 users, load average: 1.00, 1.02, 1.04
Tasks: 94 total, 2 running, 91 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.0% us, 0.3% sy, 97.4% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.3% si
Mem: 515744k total, 511564k used, 4180k free, 22036k buffers
Swap: 915696k total, 12660k used, 903036k free, 258172k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
29078 smoker 39 19 15732 8028 3292 R 97.8 1.6 431:32.12 FahCore_78.exe
2487 root 15 0 222m 63m 157m S 1.3 12.6 8007:46 X
1069 smoker 17 0 2028 900 1624 R 0.7 0.2 0:00.02 top
2680 smoker 16 0 18680 5996 16m S 0.3 1.2 3:30.31 magicdev
4824 smoker 15 0 28212 16m 20m S 0.3 3.2 1:03.79 gnome-terminal
1 root 16 0 3212 456 1320 S 0.0 0.1 0:02.91 init
2 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.66 ksoftirqd/0
3 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.40 events/0
4 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.04 khelper
5 root 15 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
21 root 5 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd/0
31 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pdflush
32 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.52 pdflush
34 root 12 -10 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
22 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.11 khubd
33 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:42.32 kswapd0
107 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod

Plus I am dloading white box linux via Azureus BT client.

Hello, 2005 calling ....

What else is learned from SETI

[failedlogic]

Let's assume that there are no other life forms in existence and/or there are none that we may reach by radio signal. Is there anything else which can be gained from the SETI program? Is there other knowledge gained, perhaps a deeper understanding of radio communications...?

Re:What else is learned from SETI

[SeaDour]

How about an answer to the question, "Are we alone in the universe?" and starting revelations about the uniqueness of life on Earth, for starters.

Re:What else is learned from SETI

[rokzy]

well as far as I know it kicked off the whole popular public distributed computing thing. SETI@Home was the first one *I* heard of.

Re:What else is learned from SETI

[Jeff DeMaagd]

First, this gets into pure and applied science.

Applied science involves research dedicated to solving a particular problem.

Pure science seeks knowledge of the universe for its own sake, from the subatamic to the universe and beyond. It doesn't always have a direct impact in our day-to-day lives but it helps mankind's understanding of the universe. The times humanity is directly helped in a "practical" problem, it takes longer than applied science to get there.

Re:What else is learned from SETI

[jayhawk88]

There isn't a facet of life on this planet that would not be fundamentally changed forever by the discovery of intelligent life on another planet. I mean, short of Jesus coming back to life, it would pretty much be the most significant thing to happen in recorded history.

Re:What else is learned from SETI

[JohnnyCannuk]

Well, for one, it might put a few smug Xtian fundementalists in their place...

That alone makes it worth it....

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[metlin]

Well, Paul Allen funds a lot of good research.

I was part of Project Halo/Digital Aristotle, an AI project which aims to learn (and solve) conceptual problems in physics which was funded by Vulcan ventures.

In fact, Vulcan Capital funds a lot of really cool stuff.

In my opinion, Bill Gates and Paul Allen are doing the world a favour - they are businessmen who make money off one industry, but help in the progress of several others. When was the last time any of the CEOs of Walmart or Oil Magnates helped fund such things as research and the like?

And not to mention the fact that places like MSR do a lot of awesome research in and of themselves.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Zocalo]

Actually, Paul Allen largely bailed out of the operational side of Microsoft years ago; he was more involved with Asymetrix by the launch of Windows 3.x. In the last few years the only times I seem to hear Paul Allen's name is in connection with *extremely* generous philanthropic gestures toward the science & tech sectors. You might remember his massive backing of Scaled Composites' effort in claiming the Ansari X-Prize for example?

As far as I am concerned Paul Allen is the very best thing *ever* to come out of Microsoft.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[AndroidCat]

Darn, I figured the Alien Telescope Array was using detectors from Roswell or something.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Jugalator]

None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?

Guess what... One may dislike what Microsoft does and whatever that guy is responsible for doing there, but still like what he's doing here. Why is that so hard to imagine?

How many qubits would we need...

[Anonymous Coward]

...before SETI became worthy of research? If fact, why not suspend all research until we have more horsepower. All this wasted protein folding should wait for the quantum computers as our current microproccesors are only worthy for Far Cry.

Classical "there is more pressing problems"

[ArcticCelt]

Research for health is IMHO a priority for what we can do at the moment on earth.

Long time ago in some cave...

Ogtor! I told you to stop wasting your time with that wheel invention thingy and don't even think to start working on that metal melting process waste of time. There is much more important stuff to do like hunting animals with rocks and sleeping to regenerate.

Re:Classical "there is more pressing problems"

[eille-la]

A high quality of life is required to do any deep research in anything.
How an intelligent researcher will continue his work once he is dead because we did not know how to cure him of a cancer?

Re:Classical "there is more pressing problems"

[AstroDrabb]

How an intelligent researcher will continue his work once he is dead because we did not know how to cure him of a cancer?

I agree that cancer and AIDS are very important topics that need more funding. However, when we find cures for those two, Mother Nature will throw something new at us. It has always been this way. There will always be some major health battle that we as a world must fight. However, I think it is silly to stop all progress in other technologies to just fight health issues. Health science is just one branch in the tree of science. All brances of science are interwoven and advances in one branch of science often helps advance other branches of science.

Pff... this is just another plot

[lordsilence]

by the feds to catch those people laser-sniping the aircrafts.

I wasted this http://setiathome2.ssl.berkeley.edu/fcgi-bin/fcgi? email=webmaster%40x-term.com&cmd=user_stats_new many CPU-cycles for SETI@home.

Re:Pff... this is just another plot

[lxt]

No, they're being proactive - it's to catch people laser flashing the ISS :)

Signal processing

[Anonymous Coward]

Domestic spy agencies could learn much in the areas ubiquitous surveillance.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[rokzy]

as good as all their charitable things are, they can easily afford it, and more.

and it doesn't remove the fact they are fucking up the IT industry and now keeping society back years, maybe even decades.

plus, true charity is anonymous. it's hardly altruistic (or anything remotely resembling it) when you give a small fraction of your wealth in exchage for having your name or company's name all over stuff. that's called "advertising" or "ego".

Misattribution

[Cally]

As is obvious from a glance at TFA, an unfortunate misattribution makes it appear that the submitter has plaigarised the Space.com story (obviously they didn't, if they had they'd have linked to a different story...)

Don't Bash Paul Allen

[Space_Soldier]

I do not want to sound friendly to Microsoft, but Paul Allen is the best thing that happened to the exploration of space lately. Not only that we have a new SETI, but we also have SpaceShipOne, and soon we will have SpaceShipTwo. This is the second best use of Microsoft revenue. The first one is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps people in Africa.

Re:Don't Bash Paul Allen

[rhealz]

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does a whole lot more than just help Africa - although they do a lot work there, too. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm

Re:Don't Bash Paul Allen

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

This is the second best use of Microsoft revenue. The first one is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps people in Africa.

There is a conspiracy theory that their foundation is helping microsoft in africa more than it is helping the people of africa. The theory goes that the foundation will only pay for name brand AIDS drugs and that they actively work to discourage locally produced and orders of magnitude cheaper "clone" drugs.

The reasoning, or so the conspiracy theory posits, is that by supporting American-style intellectual-property rights in drug patents, they are helping American-style intellectual-property rights in copyrights (anti-piracy) and software patents (anti-OSS) in Africa too.

Make of it what you will.

huh??

[Anonymous Coward]

What are the chances that an alien species uses radio waves?

Isnt this about the same as the chance that they speak english?

Re:huh??

[Anonymous Coward]

I started explaining why. but have decided you're an idiot.

Re:huh??

[david duncan scott]

Well, electro-magnetism appears to be a fundamental aspect of the universe. I'd say that it's more comparable to the chances that a terrestrial species uses sound -- one might have to listen to frequencies strange to us to hear the very low sounds that elephants use to communicate at long distances, and bees may dance instead of using sounds at all, but it's a reasonable thing to try.

Re:huh??

[Sophrosyne]

They were looking for Radio waves- not radio transmissions.
Every electric device you own releases some EM pollution- and they were using some assumptions in hopes that they might stumble across a planet with lots of EM pollution.

Re:huh??

[Phixxation]

They were looking for Radio waves- not radio transmissions.

Every electric device you own releases some EM pollution- and they were using some assumptions in hopes that they might stumble across a planet with lots of EM pollution.

EM pollution is/was *one* of the variables in the search, not it's primary or only, by any means. Unfortunately, our very own galixy produces massive ammounts of electromagnetic radiation, including energy on the radio-wave spectrum.

On a side note, I always thought it interesting to think that while one civ. might be listening and filtering out such EM 'pollution', others might be listening to Planet Xeres 101.5 Galatic Rock ;-)

Something More Productive

[ticklemeozmo]

I'm as interested in space as the next geek, but I can't help but think of the thousands of computers out there can be running more productive things. I really didn't have any suggestions, and I'm not saying its fruitless. I'm more or less hinting towards there being bigger priorities?

Possibly along the lines of clicking thousands of click thru to get money for battles against the *AA? Again, I didnt' have any substantial, other than the nagging feeling...

Anyone else come up with anything? I suppose they should be more CPU-oriented rather than bandwidth-oriented.

Re:Something More Productive

[adeydas]

Playing games could be an option...

Re:Something More Productive

[maggern]

I changed from SETI to World community grid, which works with public problems like cancer and smallpox.

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[mOoZik]

You're being unfair. You DON'T have to give your money to ANYONE or for ANY CAUSE, but when you decide to give millions for such causes, or a billion+ to fight diseases in certain other countries, well, I applaud that. You are the kind of person who can't be pleased, as your genes have modified themselves over the years on Slashdot to have a gag response to anything remotely related to Microsoft, even if what Gates, Allen, and others are doing should be celebrated, congratulated, and enjoyed.

Alien lasers

[Batte]

"At Harvard University, a survey telescope designed to sweep massive swaths of the sky in a hunt for extraterrestrial laser flashes is becoming a reality."

a.k.a. the "Alan Parson's Project".

A book recommendation and a name drop

[mbrother]

I'm currently reading a pretty good book on the Fermi paradox that includes a big chunk of material on SETI: If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens... Where Is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to Fermi's Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life by Stephen Webb.

A few years ago, when I was observing quasars at Lick Observatory, I got to have dinner with Frank Drake (of Project Ozma and Drake equation "fame"). He was there working on the start of an optical SETI program. It was cool!

Re:A book recommendation and a name drop

[starburst]

Drakes formula allows some kind of estimate as to the number of intelligent societies there might be "out there".

The following is from a great book by A.K. Dewdney: Yes, We Have no Neutrons.

The formula is N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fi x Fc x L

For which:
R* = number of new stars that form in our galaxy each year
Fp = fraction of stars having planetary systems
Ne = average number of life-supporting planets per star
Fl = fraction of those planets on which life develops
Fi = fraction of life forms that become intelligent
Fc = fraction of intelligent beings that develop radio
L = average lifetime of a communicating society

The formula has appeared in several popular science magazines with the values set to:

N = 10 x 1 x 1 x 1 x 0.01 x 0.1 x L

So, N = 0.01 x L

The only numbers in the formula which anything other than a guess can be made are R* and L. Based on current observations most set R* at 10. Everything else in the formula would be a wild guess, except for L. More is known about L than any other part of the formula, since we are a communication society. Since we receive more and more of our communication from satellites, cable, and the internet, we are broadcasting less and less away from the earth. In the near future we will likely go dark as a significant source of radio/broadcast signals capable of being detected from space. If we say that our source of signals is about 100 years, drop the 100 back into the formula and you get 1. That must be us.

Re:A book recommendation and a name drop

[ArsSineArtificio]

Not really on topic, but because I thought you might be interested: at the Ohio Historical Society they have the actual, original, fanfold paper printout of the "Wow" signal on display. The whole page is, e.g., "000110001120001000" and then "0010006EQUJ500010200" with, of course, Ehman's famous note in blue ballpoint. How cool is that?

Re:A book recommendation and a name drop

[mbrother]

That is cool. There's a picture of the "Wow" signal in the book I mentioned above.

Re:A book recommendation and a name drop

[fossa]

Which reminds me of a question... We spend all this time and energy looking for alien signals, but are we actively broadcasting anything interesting for aliens who may be looking for us?

Quacks!

[fuzzy12345]

So a laser covers what percentage of the sky at even one light year's distance? Trying to see a randomly pointed laser located a great distance away is the silliest thing I've heard yet. But it's from the folks at Harvard, so obviously they're seeing something that I'm not.

Th article is poorly written: "Just about everyone has peered through cheap binoculars having only a narrow field of view. They don't peer long." -- If I wanted a wide field of view, I wouldn't need binoculars, would I?

Re:Quacks!

[mbrother]

Lasers do have an intrinsic beam spread -- it comes out of their physics. That is, the beams are not perfect parallel rays. The exact numbers depend on the wavelength, the beam size, etc., but the odds are probably somewhat better than you're thinking. The strength of the approach is that a laser would be clear evidence for an extraterrestrial civilization and easy to pick out from natural sources.

Re:Quacks!

[Jimmy_B]

The point is not to see a randomly pointed laser - that would be silly. Think about it; if an intelligent alien civilization wanted to find other intelligent life, how would they do it? They would look for potentially life-bearing star systems, and try to send a message to them - by, for example, shining a laser that's tight and powerful enough to be detected from the target, and encoding data in the frequency or amplitude of that laser.

It's extremely unlikely that we'll find anyone who isn't trying to contact us, so the goal is to look for something that's trying to make itself stick out. We aren't looking for things that are randomly pointed.

Re:Quacks!

[droleary]

They would look for potentially life-bearing star systems, and try to send a message to them - by, for example, shining a laser that's tight and powerful enough to be detected from the target, and encoding data in the frequency or amplitude of that laser.

I've made this point in past SETI threads, but nobody who favors your style of approach has given me a good answer: How do you actually accomplish that thing you just hand-waved? Put yourself in the place of the alien. Heck, if you assume there are aliens, then you are an alien to them! Plan what you just described and just imagine all the complexities you/they face actually trying to pull it off.

I mean, what does "potentially life-bearing" mean for an alien? How many light years out will they be willing to look? When they shine their very tight beam, will it really be in our direction? That is, their observations detect where Sol (or whatever star) was x years ago and their message has to be sent to where it will be in x more years. How accurate would they have to be in all those things, and yet still have beam spread and strength to detectably cover an entire solar system?

And even then, how long are they going to just spew out that energy, both in terms of pulse length and project duration? What are the odds that they'd be sending longer than the inhabited planet is behind the target star, what are the odds they're sending when the detectors are facing the right way as the planet rotates, what are the odds that the civilization is even looking for a signal at the point in time it arrives? How long are they willing to do it all and wait without a response?

Re:Quacks!

[HuguesT]

Obviously the civilization sending out the beam couldn't be very far away, probably a couple of hundred light years away, but this is still a sizeable number of systems.

The laser beam spreads naturally, so you wouldn't need to be all that accurate, from a few light-years away the beam is already as wide as entire solar system.

It is not hard to estimate where to send a beam given the known distance to the target system (which from less than 200 ly away can be easily measured with accuracy by triangulation), and the yearly travel of the target system against the background of stars. In fact our civilisation can solve that problem already for system less than a few tens of ly away. A slightly more advanced civilization would have zero problem with this.

A life-seaking civilization would put automated orbital stations to that task, they would be facing the right way all the time, and would probably send beams to many systems at once. They would be willing to do that for as long as the station lasted, drawing power from the Sun itself. How much would each beam require? I don't know, a few gigawats maybe. This is where science-fiction comes in. How long would such a station maintain itself? With current imaginable technology, only a few years. Who knows what more advanced civilizations can come up with? They would need to be willing to wait for an answer for at least twice as long as the distance to the target system. Hundreds of years!

It's very far fetched, but not unthinkable. If the listening technology is available now to us, why not take a look?

Re:Quacks!

[droleary]

Obviously the civilization sending out the beam couldn't be very far away, probably a couple of hundred light years away, but this is still a sizeable number of systems.

That would actually work against you, since more potential targets means more resources you have to allocate or split amongst them.

The laser beam spreads naturally, so you wouldn't need to be all that accurate, from a few light-years away the beam is already as wide as entire solar system.

Again, the signal spread works against you as much as a beam works for you. You'll have to use more power if you hope to be detected as your signal spreads wider and wider. Too narrow, though, and you risk missing the target completely. I've seen no real discussion on what would have to be done on the sending end to produce a directed, detectable signal.

It is not hard to estimate where to send a beam given the known distance to the target system . . .

I never said that part was particularly hard, I just noted that it is never a question that seems to be asked or addressed. People naively assume that what you see is what you get, but looking into space is looking into history. Just because you observe a candidate solar system a hundred light years out doesn't mean that your message arriving in another 100 years will find the system in the same "receptive" state.

It's very far fetched, but not unthinkable. If the listening technology is available now to us, why not take a look?

Because it doesn't make sense to waste resources on such a long shot that matters so very little. What can we meaningfully gain by detecting an alien signal? You admit they'd have to be more advanced that we are to be broadcasting rather than receiving, so what does it gain us when we know about their advanced technology but they don't know about us? Are we going to send back a 100 year signal that says we're here? If so, then what? What kind if conversation do you expect will take place with a 200 year round trip? Simply assume that aliens are out there and still essentially unable to fix your little human problems, and then just get on with your life.

Re:Quacks!

[HuguesT]

You raise valid points, however I do think there is something to gain from knowing others are out there. Even if we can't communicate meaningfully this will put our little daily endeavours in a new light, I think. They might also be broadcasting something more interesting than just "hello world", who knows?

Most of the objections you raised are based on the physics we do know. There is an awful lot we do not know.

Re:Quacks!

[droleary]

Even if we can't communicate meaningfully this will put our little daily endeavours in a new light, I think.

I'm not sure I understand what light that might be. It sounds like you're still trying to hold on to a human-centered Universe when you could just as easily give up the assumption that Earth is somehow special. Sure, it would be nice to know for certain that we're not some odd quirk in this vast Universe, but I'm not sure what you think we'd gain compared to simply just discarding the egotistical assumption that we are alone.

They might also be broadcasting something more interesting than just "hello world", who knows?

I haven't seen a sensible argument that they be broadcasting anything at all; that's why I started this thread. If you can't make a solid case for even a single bit, don't kid yourself about them spewing out vast libraries of knowledge.

Most of the objections you raised are based on the physics we do know. There is an awful lot we do not know.

Point being? It's not like SETI is using a detector based on we-do-not-know physics. So while it is possible messages are coming to us by means we don't understand, we're just as ignorant of them today as people 100 years ago would have been with a laser signal. And some of my other issues are exactly as relevant (e.g., you can't point a receiver at a system you see and expect to get a faster-than-light signal; you have to point to where its "now" location is).

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Will_Malverson]

Also, don't forget that SpaceShipOne was also "A Paul G. Allen Project".

Black void

[jeffkjo1]

Each time I read a story on the search for ET, I become a little more disappointed. With the vast expanses of space out there, it seems surprising that we haven't found a signal, even if by accident. Perhaps I've seen one too many bad scifi movies, but where in the heck are the aliens.

A bigger question: why are all of the other solar systems so darned far away?

Re:Black void

[borgheron]

Maybe we're the first. I'm not kidding. I have no doubt about life beyond our solar system.

GJC

Re:Black void

[Feztaa]

Perhaps I've seen one too many bad scifi movies, but where in the heck are the alien

They're doing the exact same thing we're doing: financing crazy programs to listen for evidence of aliens who are likewise waiting to hear from us.

I say instead of building all this listening equipment, we build some broadcasting equipment! Announce our presence to the universe! ;)

Re:Black void

[mbrother]

We are broadcasting...all the time. Military radar in particular produces a powerful, albeit directed, signal. This is called "leakage" in the SETI game, and we can detect Earth-type leakage out to some distance, but not as far as one would like. Furthermore, as we develop things like cable TV and other wired technologies and reserve broadcast airwaves for low-power activities like cell phones, our leakage diminishes. There may be a limited amount of time for a civilazation to be radio bright.

Most SETI experts believe that we're more likely to detect an advanced civilzation intentionally broadcasting rather than one leaking at our tech level, so that's what they've looked for first. And actually, we have sent out our own intentional broadcasts, the first being from Frank Drake in the 1960s toward a distant star cluster.

Re:Black void

[jfengel]

A bigger question: why are all of the other solar systems so darned far away?

Uh... because everything is. Space is mostly, uh, empty space. The nearest other solar system is around four light-years away, and the nearest one after that is six light years-away.

Space is just really, really big, and there's not much in it. Most of the night sky is black, which means that from here to the end of the universe fifteen billion light-years away there isn't anything along your line of sight in 99.999% of the sky.

On average, even taking all the stars into account, space is more empty than the best vacuum we've ever achieved in a laboratory. And it's really, really, really big. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. (Props to Douglas Adams.)

So the aliens may be there (I sure hope so), but finding them is like looking for a microscopic needle in a cosmological haystack. If it weren't the fact that we hope these needles are broadcasting, we wouldn't even bother looking. And when the signals come from that far away, you've got to listen really, really closely. A gigawatt of signal from 4 light-years away is 10^-23 watts per square meter, a unit so small we have to invent the name "yoctowatt" to describe it. If Arecibo were pointing right at it would still only receive a few zeptowatts. And that's for the closest star. Twice as far away, you get 1/4 as much signal. The nearest other galaxy is 1 million times further, which means the signal would be 1 million million times less strong (one trillionth, in American terms). We don't even have units for how small that gigawatt signal would be. x,w,v,u,t,s,r,q,o,p,n,m... maybe it's a "miptowatt" per square meter (and a "neccowatt" arriving at Arecibo).

So basically don't be surprised if you don't hear anything for a while.

Re:Black void

[jfengel]

Before the "of course the aliens are already here" people get to it, I should note that a gigawatt signal that happened to be beamed at us (rather than to one of the other million or so G-class stars in this galaxy) from a measly four light-years away would arrive as perhaps nanowatts per square meter, or maybe even microwatts. Assuming, of course, that they were broadcasting right now (or rather, four years ago), as opposed to during some other part of the ten million year history of humanity.

Wouldn't it just suck if they were zapping us with a few terawatts of signal that just happened to arrive during the Renaissance, then they got bored? Juuuust missed it (geologically speaking, that is).

So it's not totally a fool's errand. It's just still gonna take a while.

Re:Black void

[Decaff]

So the aliens may be there (I sure hope so), but finding them is like looking for a microscopic needle in a cosmological haystack.

Not at all. We could detect TV signals from a culture like ours a significant fraction of the distance across the galaxy - these signals are broadcast in all directions.

The problem is that signals deliberately transmitted over interstellar distances are likely to be highly compressed, and a suffiently compress signal is indistinguishable from noise.

So, basically, we are only likely to pick up accidentally broadcast signals from relatively primitive technological cultures (like ours). I don't hold out much hope.

Re:Black void

[Lost_In_Specs]

I believe there is intelligent life out there, but I feel that the chances of us detecting them is slim to none.

The assumptions that go into SETI are a bit far-fetched to me. I think of it as a kind of psychological and technological anthropromorphism. We are making big assumptions in thinking that their technology is going to be similar to ours, and an even bigger assumption in thinking that they share the same curiosity and interest in finding other life beyond their own stellar systems.

If they have followed a similar technological path to us, wouldn't a species a bit more advanced than us be more likely to be quieter than us (electromagnetically speaking)? Why pollute their spectrum with all the cr@p we are? So I feel that a chance detection of stray EM noise would be unlikely.

A bigger question: why are all of the other solar systems so darned far away?

I'm writing a game set in nearby space, and according to the best database I was able to compile, there are 3588 star systems within 120 light years. Few of them are as inhabitable as our own. The majority of the systems have red dwarf primaries and the zone in which liquid water can exist is so small as to be insignificant. Brighter stars tend to be variable, too young or too short lived. Nearby livable systems (by human standards at least) are pretty rare, and those that seem likely have already been scanned many times.

Re:Black void

[burns210]

We only scan a fraction of the sky, for only a few years. The chances that we DO find something are pretty small to begin with, and we even scanning at 100% of what we could

folding@home seti@home

[leprkan]

OR instead of wasting our computer time searching for aliens that most likely aren't out there or won't be able to return our signals, we could make use out of our computer time by folding cells to possibly find a cure for cancer and other diseases. http://folding.stanford.edu/ I urge ALL of you to switch from seti@home to folding@home

New and improved

[Tablizer]

Now we can detect new and improved aliens, not those scrappy ones who crash saucers in New Mexico, poke people in the ass for kicks, and gobble up Beagle Mars probes.

Could we be the first?

[borgheron]

Seriously, could we be the first advanced civilization? I have no doubt that there are other civilizations, but perhaps we are currently the most advanced.

GJC

Re:Could we be the first?

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one would like to start a motion that would re-excommunicate Copernicus for heresy that was only recently repealed.

Re:Could we be the first?

[zoloto]

shit... there goes the galaxy. (/spaceballs jab)

kidding and half-serious remarks aside. This wouldn't surprise me. But humanity has to come a long way from where we are now before we can start interacting with other civilizations and another planet's many other races/governments etc.

Hell... let's draft the first version of a "Prime Directive" now. Leave them alone unless they're as advanced as us, type of a thing. /could be so //I hope

Re:Could we be the first?

[burns210]

Ofcourse, it is possible.

The chances, personally, are (astronomically) slim, but ofcourse we could.

But picture it this way. Even if 2 civilizations(us and the Other Guys) started at roughly the same time. Even if intelligent life(humans, as opposed to dinosaurs) start at about the same time... Our path, on Earth, was not very 'efficient' in getting to where we are. Wars, for a start, slowed us down significantly. Then things like the Dark Ages, where we actually LOST intellectual ground for a couple hundred years.

It is possible we are the most advanced, but mathmatically unlikely. We are, as statistics would always guess we would be, probably 'somewhere in the middle'

Re:Could we be the first?

[Oligonicella]

"Hell... let's draft the first version of a "Prime Directive" now. Leave them alone unless they're as advanced as us, type of a thing."

Why? Could you provide a good reason?

Re:Could we be the first?

[The Asmodeus]

I hate war as much as the next guy but war I bet has advanced us much more than most will admit.

Nuclear energy, rockets, flight, bronze... Conflict and especially life and death possibilities motivate.

I bet that if we where always peaceful, we'd still be using horse drawn carriages.

Re:Could we be the first?

[tasadar24]

If the "people" are suddenly catapulted from a low technologically stupid society to one with weapons orders of magnitude better then they are, without having first developed intellectually, what do you think could happen? Maybe it's my own ignorance but I see the Middle East as having exactly this problem.

Re:Could we be the first?

[tryone]

Seriously, could we be the first advanced civilization?

Sure, in a few thousand years...

Re:Could we be the first?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how statistically likely is it that an advanced civilization can arise without wars, or any waste at all? Just by having such a lovely planet to live on (after all, we haven't found a single one like in so far) might have given us a big bump up. It's also probably likely that life on Earth originated perhaps as soon as it could have in the universe at large, due to all sorts of fiddley reasons involving metal enrichment in first generation stars, the formation of galaxies/solar systems/etc., development of complex biosphers, etc. While if aliens aren't precluded for some basic reason, I imagine there have to be more advanced societies somewhere in the universe, I think it's also equally likely that there aren't more advanced societies in our local neighborhood. I think someone once calculated that any civilization that arose more than say a billion years before us would either have wiped themselves out, or taken over the galaxy by now, so it's extremely unlikely that advanced alien civilizations exist if we're still around to wonder where they are.

Re:Could we be the first?

[lachlan76]

How do you think WE would cope if a more advanced civilisation gave GWB or Osama a death star?

Re:Could we be the first?

[fzammett]

Actually, the human race has proven unequivocally that the philosophy of the Shadows, not the Vorlons, works best for us. War has advanced our scientific knowledge far more than peacetime ever has.

I'm not saying we should constantly be fighting wars, nor that we should seek to kill off lesser parts of ourselves, just that war has propelled us forward tremendously, more than periods of relative peace have.

What do the Microsoft Millionaires do?

[Embedded]

It's my view that as they have taken on the system and won, Microsoft (substitute any large agressive organization) and the grubbing for money seems less than what these people wanted in life. Certainly less than what they wanted to be remembered for. They cannot help but see Linus will be remembered for "Linux" (he didn't give up his ethics). Now, Paul Allan will be remembered for Space Exploration and "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" will be remembered for charity. If I could make my own job I might fund FTL drives and/or wormhole research, wouldn't you?

Friends in Space

[lildogie]

Our planetary network ports are open. Send us your packets!

whoreabull corepirate nazi felons still at it?

[Anonymous Coward]

you can bet that yOUR creators are still/even more peaced off.

all is not lost?

consult with/trust in yOUR creators. restraining unprecedented evile/restoring civilizations since/until forever. see you there?

Some are always Myopic

[DumbSwede]

Things that fire the imagination often provide the groundwork for other things of more practical benefit. You berate donating cycles to SETI@Home versus say Folding.stanford.edu, BUT what are the chances the distributed online Folding project wouldn't even exist if SETI@Home hadn't blazed the trail?

Progress relies on a Free Market of ideas. Priorities must be made, but focusing everything on the few things deemed immediate and important will no doubt ironically cause a slowing of technology in general and impede progress in the long run on the very things you decide were more important to the exclusion of all else.

Of course there is always the morality card to be played by some as in "look how much better I am than you, I donate to such and such, and if you don't, you are morally bankrupt"

Re:Some are always Myopic

[Anonymous Coward]

Minor terminology nitpick, as this probably isn't what you meant by "Free Market of ideas." But I think progress depends on just plain Free ideas, not a free market of them. In other words, it would suck if SETI@Home patented the idea and limited everyone else's use of it. Which they could have done, had they been so inclined. *Shudder*.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

I was part of Project Halo/Digital Aristotle

At first I read that as "Project Digital Arsehole"... I need more caffiene.

Kzins..

[mavi_yelken]

Hope we don't find them, or something like them...

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Narishma]

It's Allen, with two Ls.

* Holds three fingers up. *

OT: Re:Direct Link

[AstroDrabb]

without all the crapola popups

There were popups in that link? Have you ever heard of Firefox? Heck, I have heard that even IE on WinXP SP 2 now stops popups.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[selderrr]

true charity is anonymous

lol... do you realize how stupid that comment is ? Maybe Paul Allen & Bill Gates give three gazillionsquillionfabrillion dollars anonymously. But you'd never know, wouldya ?

You've just proven how single-sided your thinking is.

They aren't going to be sending signals...

[bradbury]

I said this at a lecture I gave at the Extro III conference. We don't talk to worms (refering to C. elegans) and they don't talk to us (refering to aliens). Anyone who believes aliens are sending us signals suffers from a significant misunderstanding as to how intelligent they might be (so far beyond us that we are *dust*) or a delusional fantasy (similar to that our president is subjected to) that they would be sending us messages.

Wake up and smell the roses -- the reality is out there in the physics. Just read the evidence.

This is not to say that there are *not* aliens out there and that we cannot detect them. They are probably out there and we can probably detect them. But the approaches the SETI Institute and the groups as Harvard and Berkeley tend to be misfounded on the basis that they are going to try and communicate with us. Any ass would see that the probability of detecting those civilizations out there who ARE NOT trying to communicate with us is higher than than any few who are trying to communicate with us.

*If* one properly understood the evolution of advanced civilizations this would be understood. But most people engaged in SETI lack that knowledge.

(Sigh)

And as a postscript... Reality is about hard, repeatable evidence. And so whether it is about the president and his "faith" based perspectives or about SETI and "yes I heard them once" or "I hope to hear them once". Neither perspective cuts the mustard.

Re:They aren't going to be sending signals...

[Sophrosyne]

There is a chance that there are alien civilizations "out there" that are equal to, or less advanced than the human race.
Not that I am sticking up for SETI, but I don't think they have ever assumed that aliens would be trying to communicate with us- they are merely trying to find evidence that there are other inhabited planets, with creatures that are using electricity like we do.
It is part of our culture to believe that aliens *must* be smarter than us- and that humans are inherently stupid... but perhaps people should look at it a different way-
We are the most capable and smartest creatures on this planet- we choose not to reach our potential-- but the potential is there-- and perhaps we are the smartest life-forms in the universe....

Re:They aren't going to be sending signals...

[minator]

*If* one properly understood the evolution of advanced civilizations this would be understood. But most people engaged in SETI lack that knowledge.

So, you do understand evolution of advanced extraterrestrial civilations?

Could you tell us how you got this understanding...

Re:They aren't going to be sending signals...

[jqpublic]

It doesnt matter if they are sending signals at us or not, only if they use radio waves are part of a planetary communication system. The sensitivity of the Allen Telescope Array is such that it can detect the equivalent of Earth's TV leakage around the nearest stars.

Re:They aren't going to be sending signals...

[Tharn]

Yes, and it is important to think about *how* we got that smart. We are exactly as smart as we *need* to be in order to survive this planet and our own nature. It is difficult to imagine natural evolutionary pressures which could have produced our species any smarter than it is. Why do people assume that aliens will be so much smarter than us? What evolutionary pressures would make them so?

No, it is likely that aliens (unaugmented) will be approximately on the the same order of intelligence as the dominant species of this planet.

Re:They aren't going to be sending signals...

[Anonymous Coward]

*If* one properly understood the evolution of advanced civilizations this would be understood.

Man, I love it when people (scientists especially)form a grand complex theory based on a single data point (possibly no data at all depending on if we can be considered advanced or not). It reminds me of when the theory of how solar systems were arranged had to be flushed down the toilet as soon as we actually found another planetary system. In short, your theory of advanced civilizations might as well be based on Star Trek episodes for all the "hard, repeatable evidence" it has (assuming, of course, your theory is not based on Star Trek episodes).

Seriously though. In a later, even snobbier post, you mention that you have a crapload of SETI literature. If it was published by humans, congratulations, you either have a great treasure trove of science-fiction novel ideas or toilet paper (unless it's on the web, I've never tried to wipe my ass with a USB cord).

If any of that crap was either published by an alien species or by humans that have extensive contact with alien species (and can be proven), then yes, by all means, link it.

Re:They aren't going to be sending signals...

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution doesn't need to make us smarter once we are smart enough to do it our selves. Think about genetically modified human babies that can be given a boost mentally (and every other aspect of humans) that is entirely not required by evolution.

Re:They aren't going to be sending signals...

[Just Some Guy]

We don't talk to worms (refering to C. elegans) and they don't talk to us (refering to aliens).

True, but we sure as hell talk to dogs, monkeys, and dolphins - all of which we assume to be less intelligent than us - because they're obviously able to respond appropriately.

Objectively speaking, we're not stupid. We certainly don't have first-hand knowledge about the universe outside our little pocket, but we've learned the language of sub-atomic particle and relativity. Even if that doesn't qualify us for "Rookie Of The Galactic Year", it definitely puts us somewhat higher on the IQ spectrum than dust.

[...] or a delusional fantasy (similar to that our president is subjected to) that they would be sending us messages.

You resorted to an ad hominem in the opening salvo. Poor form from a purported "expert".

But the approaches the SETI Institute and the groups as Harvard and Berkeley tend to be misfounded on the basis that they are going to try and communicate with us. Any ass would see that the probability of detecting those civilizations out there who ARE NOT trying to communicate with us is higher than than any few who are trying to communicate with us.

Out of the thousands of ET civilizations we've found so far, how many of them were through intentional versus inadvertent means? What? You don't have a single data point to guide you? Guess that means that Harvard and the SETI Institute aren't the only asses.

Re:A high quality of life is required

[ArcticCelt]

First of all, lots of the money comes mostly from donation and private sector (think Paul Allan) then SETI@home project is done by volunteers that give their CPU time for free. They decided to support this project because it give them hope that some day we will be more than an isolated specie killing each other for resources on a small rock turning around the sun. If someone tells me that I must live without dreams and only occupy my time with practical URGENT matters I prefer die right now. Asking the world to do the same is equivalent.

In my opinion football, baseball, basket ball and rap music are a much bigger waste of human resources and money than researching for the most important discovery of human kind. But many people will disagree with me because sports and entertainment makes them dream and keep them going in life and I respect that.

Our world must have a balanced strategy and the amount of resources used on SETI are insignificant compare to what we spend on War, Entertainment and Everyday Comforts. Think to cut on those before touching a penny of SETI.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[nwbvt]

If no one else will, I'll object. I really don't care if he sells a product no one on slashdot particularly likes, but aren't there better uses of his money than searching for something for which there is almost zero chance of finding? Like education or curing diseases? Or even funding pure science?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, its his money and he can spend it on whatever he wants. I have no right to tell him what he can or cannot do with it. But I do have a right to tell him what I think he should and shouldn't do with it, and frankly, I feel this goes in the latter column.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Shazow]

How can anyone be labelled altruistic if their deeds are not known?

- shazow

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[dont_think_twice]

None other than Paul Allen. Yep, of Microsoft fame. Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?

Well, considering that he made his money through illegial exploitation of a monopoly (which set the computer industry back approximately 10 years), I feel perfectly comfortable booing and hissing him.

Consider this anaologous situation: Saul Ballen spends 20 years robbing middle class households by breaking in windows and stealing money out of wallets. He invests the money he steals, and at the end of the 20 years he has amassed quite a fortune. He gives a small amount of that fortune to some good causes, such as SETI, and keeps most of it for himself.

Do you think that it is wrong to criticize Saul Ballen simply because he gave some of the money to good causes? What Saul and Paul did are different in structure, but nearly identical in effect. As a society, we treat the two cases differently, but this is mostly due to the influence corporations have in our justice system. In terms of morals, Paul and Saul are equally bad.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

He's the same kind of guy who insulted the guys at Penny-Arcade for giving video games to hospitals.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[D-Cypell]

Boo, hiss, where are the groups of objectors now?

Well me for one...

True, SETI is a 'sexy' project for geeks and sci-fi fanboys but how practical is it?

Even if this thing detects 'something' there will still be a large number of sceptics. The broadcasting 'E.T.s' had better be damn specific in their message so that it is clear to everyone on the planet that it was not naturally occuring. Otherwise it just an expensive way to piss off the religous fundementalists (and we have seen first hand what happens then!).

Also given the potential distances involved, a two-way conversion would be problematic at best.

Essentially, the best-case seems to be "We found a blip that could be something, but even if it was, it was broacast a few million years ago". Worst-case is that Mr Allen may as well wipe his backside with the banknotes.

In summary, we can all put our storm trooper costumes away. Darth Vader isnt coming to recruit anytime soon.

Personally, I feel that making sure everyone in the world has at least the basic... "Food, Water and Shelter" requirements of life would be a good first step for investment. We can explore the intriquing and unimaginable vast expanse of pratically nothing, later.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[mbrother]

If I were rich, I actually think I'd be a lot like Paul Allen. I'd want to buy an NBA team, build expensive telescopes for astronomers, and open science fiction museums like he has.

I'm still waiting for Bill Gates to build a suit of Iron Man style armor so he can go fight crime and rival companies, but Marvel would probably just sue him.

And just as an FYI

[bradbury]

Before anyone goes attempting to drag me through the mud. Please be aware that I probably have the largest, most interlinked databases of SETI literature in the world. I *do* know this field.

And as for an attempt to discredit me from an intellectual perspective... Go ahead... give it your best shot.

Re:And just as an FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

Troll.

Re:And just as an FYI

[Anonymous Coward]

And as for an attempt to discredit me from an intellectual perspective... Go ahead... give it your best shot.

Such comments suggest you have an inferiority complex.

Re:folding@home seti@home

[SB5]

I already use a program that uses all of my extra computer cycles/time. Its called WindowsXP you might have heard of it. Its a resource hog.

What if they're already here and observing.

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

And what if they're just waiting for us to be able to deal with it.

Thus, I think the better question is not "Are we alone?" but rather "Do you REALLY think we'd be able to deal with it, right this minute, if we (on a mass scale) realized we weren't?" and the related but important "If 'they' were 'further along' than us, and not just microbes in wet sand, could we deal with that too?"

A while back I emailed some of the SETI founders about this and got back a "We have procedures in place for proper dissemination of the information if it is discovered", which says NOTHING about how we are prepared to handle the emotional/psychic impact, which cannot of course be ignored. Thus, I no longer support SETI, choosing to spend my CPU cycles on something more practical like Folding@home. Discovery that we are not alone is not "usual" news, and due to its uniqueness has a high unpredictability of mass emotional/psychic impact, and I don't believe it will be something that will be treated by publishing the results in Physical Review Letters, so to speak.

Two other quick things-
For a distantly plausible workaround to the speed-of-light problem/argument against intelligent life already being here, google Miguel Alcubierre.
One last tidbit. I read somewhere (take with a huge grain of salt of course) that "they" like our music and actually owe us a lot in royalties, and are holding onto this for now (and some other things) as a good-faith gift in the event of public contact. Wouldn't it be ironic, the RIAA being a major supporter of a public First Contact?

Re:What if they're already here and observing.

[Zeneris]

Spot on. The problems with SETI are: * The whole point of Lasers is that they produce highly directional light, they are probably not pointed at us, so it is very unlikely we will see any light from them. * The speed of light means that any conventional electromagnetic communications we may detect could be centurys old. * Laser beams diverge after a certain distance and can get scattered by dust/gas etc, also power square law means that any light we do see will probably be too weak to compete against major astonomical sources of light. * IMHO any advanced species would probably use something better than Laser light for communications e.g. Masers, gravity waves, quantum entanglement, controlled astronomical events or some space time loophole (e.g. wormholes, folded space) to send long distance communications. * Any long distance communications would probably be very expensive so it is very likely that they would be rare, precisely targeted and heavily encrypted. Basically I think SETI is a waste of time, even it they are right that advance ET life exists, it'd be dumb luck if they pick the right communications channel and vector in space time to see anything, i.e. I don't think SETI have a chance in hell until we can at least do reliable FTL communications in space.

Re:What if they're already here and observing.

[hyfe]

So you personally e-mailed the SETI founders, asked them a deep and complicated question, and made the groundbreaking move of choosing not to support then based on their inability to answer your personal question? How dare they not be at your beck and call!

A little full of ourselves are we?

Re:What if they're already here and observing.

[droleary]

And what if they're just waiting for us to be able to deal with it.

I think they should stop waiting and do what we would expect aliens to do: Extermination! I mean, what's there to "deal" with? If there were aliens here, showing themselves would be an observable fact. Fuck the humans who can't deal with simple facts. Of course, extermination brings up some major question on why they are here, but I'd be OK if they popped up and said, "Hey, humans, we've be here for 500 years and in that time we've come to the conclusion that your Earth-centric religious zealots are holding you back from a greater universe of understanding, so we're going to off anyone who can't get past the whole "God and man" fable, and if you have a problem with that kind of thinning of the herd, you'll be thinned, too." They'll get even more points in my book if they make such an announcement in late December. :-)

Re:What if they're already here and observing.

[carvalhao]

I mostly agree with what you claim, although I still keep one CPU running SETI@Home.

All of our human gonverment system, be it a democracy, monarchy or dictatorship, is based in an implicit social contract in which citizens pay taxes and abide to the law in return form some form of safety, be it in the form of an army, police corps, hospital or retirement plans. If a government shows itself unable to provide such safety, it soon falls. If all governments in the world could not garantee safety against a superior form of life, there would be a generalized colapse of gonvernmental authority and total chaos.

Then again... all aliens speak English and there will be that one man army super hero guy that will lead us all to safety. Right?! :)

Re:What if they're already here and observing.

[verus vorago]

nonsense - no government in the world can guarantee safety. It's the illusion of this that was destroyed for Americans (and "western liberal democracies" in general) on 9/11 and for many others at various different points in history.

Strangely enough, this seems to have strengthened the various governments rather than weakened them.

As has been proven time and time again, human beings are much tougher and more resilient than we often give ourselves credit for.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[mforbes]

So how much of your spare cash have you thrown at education or curing diseases? And speaking of curing diseases, it seems that Mr. Gates already is already heavily involved in that arena (the Bill & Linda Gate Foundation); therefore it wouldn't make sense for Mr. Allen to duplicate his efforts.

You're right: you have a right to say what you believe he should do with the money. Fortunately, he has every right to ignore you.

I like SETI

[dj42]

I don't care what the chances are of them actually finding anything. I think the fact they are doing it exmplemifies something more important and fundamentally reassuring about human society. That we can peacefully explore the Universe, whether it be by travelling in it, monitoring it's output, etc.

Seti is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Seti is a joke, do you really think if seti or anyone finds an ET signal they will tell us? Any gov't would kill just to keep it a secret, so they can study it and make contact with the ETs, in hopes of gaining knowledge to conquer this world. If an alien starship did crashed in NM or anywhere else, you can bet the gov't has it in some undergroup Research base where the gov't engineers are reserve engineering it.

SETI and the rest of the UFO stuffs are for the pop culture folks.. ET research is serious business, and the gov't will do everything it can to keep it a secret.

Re:Seti is a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true I think since a couple of months ago they "discovered" a signal and said it was valid, then the very next day they acted like they had never heard of the signal that the SETI software had discovered. I think there was a government coverup with that and even many Slashdot posters, on the day that SETI retracted their previous press release about the validity of the signal, thought it was highly suspicious that SETI would do something like that.

Re:Seti is a joke

[jeffmock]

I've got to put in my 2-cents worth.

Over the last year I spent about 6-weeks at the arecibo observatory. I'm an engineer that did FPGA designs for a backend spectrometer for the new 7-beam ALFA receiver used for both SETI and radioastronomy.

During the recent lunar eclipse there were a bunch of us sitting outside drinking rum and watching the sky. After awhile it occurred to me that I was the only american in the group. I pointed this out and someone
else pointed out that there were actually no two people from the same country visiting the observatory at the time. (In fact there were two Italians, but he was correct aside from that).

So, in answer to the parent thread, the scientific community that works at arecibo is amazingly diverse, information is freely exchanged, and the scientists that I have worked with tend to be lefty anti-establishment types. If some indication of ET were found, government officials would probably be the last people to find out.

As further evidence, when pulsars were first discovered and the mechanism for regular radio pulses was not understood, pulsars were initially called LGMs (little green men) only partially in jest as a possible explanation. I don't think there is evidence of an attempt to hide pulsar discoveries back when they were called LGMs.

Finally, SETI is a longterm proposition, it's the sort of search that is best measured in centuries. Sadly SETI is subject to the whims of politics and fashion that work on a much shorter timescale. The ~$12M/year it costs to run the arecibo observatory is the best spent money I've ever seen.

jeff

Re:folding@home seti@home

[JohnnyCannuk]

I'll use my spare cpu cycles as I damn well see fit thank you. If YOU want to do folding for cancer, go for it. I for one will continue to run seti@home because I for one see it as valueable. You clearly do not. So be it.

But don't try pushing your idea of right and wrong on me or many of the others that choose to look for ETI rather than folding for cancer.

Aliens may not be there? Well "folding" may not find a cure for cancer ("cancer" of course, being a popular turn of phrase for literally dozens of diseases - curing breast cancer may not help anyone with leukemia, but I digress). I'll "waste" my time any way I feel like.

Now, if I were to say something like "why doesn't the US spend 1 months worth of the cost of the Iraq war on cancer research and find a cure " but I would instantly be labeled a troll, so I won't.

I'll just say I urge ALL of you out there to run SOMETHING, anything, of your choice and share your spare CPU cycles for the betterment of society, be it seti@home or folding@home or something else.

Just check the holier-than-thou judgements at the door.

Re:folding@home seti@home

[MikeCapone]

Or they could run BOINC and share their CPU cycles between many projects...

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[C10H14N2]

Funny, not too long ago, there was a sense of noblesse oblige--in a sense, yes, you DO have to give something away when you reside in the social stratosphere. This is the same thing that got Martha a major glove-slapping in court when she had her lawyers recite a litany of her charitable contributions and the response was that it is not extraordinary for someone in that position to do those things, but rather it would be extraordinary for such a person _not_ to do those things. It is expected and considered not only foolish (for tax purposes) but, to put it mildly, it is the lowest form of tackiness to be wealthy and yet have no sense of charity. When your money comes from the labor of thousands of other people, yes, you are expected to throw a biscuit here and there.

It's primarily the newly rich that have this attitude of "it's mine, allllll mine" and that's why there is such a long standing disgust from both above and below.

Um.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello,
I regret to inform you that as the representative of the Official Geek Organization (OGO), I must revoke your Official Geek Badge. Your failure to recognize the obvious reference to DNA's H2G2 series is a serious breach of our Geek Code, and cannot be taken lightly.

Given your rather interesting post, future reinstatement of said badge is likely... but you're gonna need to read the books first.

Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
Official Geek Organization /. Rep.

Re:Um.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic isn't it that the official geek rep posted as an anonymous coward. Yay for amusing (and I'm sure accidental) upholdings of stereotypical geeks everywhere, that alone proves they've sufficient credentials to be the official rep ;).

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

dood that's awesome, wow, just think of it, science funded by Paul Allen's leftovers

Re:folding@home seti@home - is it that good

[RedLaggedTeut]

Well, I like folding at home too, but I wonder whether there aren't easier ways to produce a molecule that matches another molecule that you want to stop.

For example, subject a molecule generator such as: a (modifed) bacteria, to radiation to cause mutation, then selectively breed the bacteria that match best. I must admit, lots of loose ends in my idea, but you might be able to work in parallel if done right.

SETI assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

High powered radio developed on earth because it works.
It works because of the ionosphere.
A radio development conducive ionosphere requires a planetary magnetic field that is 'just like ours' coupled with a sun that generates the same level of ionization in an atmosphere 'just like ours'.
This does not mean tha some other intelligent life might not develop radio. However, the idea that they would develop radio in the same way and along with it the concept of high power radio being suitable for long distance communication and the consequent cultural mindset that radio, because of this, might be used for interplanetary communication is pretty far-fetched, even if one does accept that there may be millions of planets withing radio range that have inteligent life.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[kalidasa]

Personally, I have no objections to Paul Allen or Bill Gates, as human beings. Gates especially deserves kudos for his philanthropic work (which is far more extensive, relative to his net worth, than is strictly necessary to win him respect). But that doesn't change my distaste for some of the things Microsoft has done under Bill Gates' direction. When Paul Allen does things I like (funding this, SpaceShipOne, etc.) he'll get my praise; when he does thing I don't like, he'll get my criticism.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[mbrother]

We honor and celebrate the robber barons of the last century who did similar, or much worse. Think about how many schools, museums, etc., bear the name Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc.

Personally, I think you should criticize specific actions rather than the people themselves. Instead of saying "Paul Allen is bad, categorically" why not say "Paul Allen profited from Microsoft's unfair business practices" when the topic is relevent, and "Paul Allen is now doing some good and interesting things with his money."

I mean, if he's just so awful he could just hoard his money and do nothing useful with it all.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[zzyzx]

"Personally, I feel that making sure everyone in the world has at least the basic... "Food, Water and Shelter" requirements of life would be a good first step for investment. We can explore the intriquing and unimaginable vast expanse of pratically nothing, later."

That assumes that the exploring of the vast expanse of practically nothing couldn't lead to anything that could help the masses.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[2TecTom]

OMG, like what, visiting /. leads to moral blindness??

Rather, it is critical reasoning that leads us to reject the accumulation and subsequent dispersal of assists acquired illegally or immorally with the obvious understanding that such is a quite poor, and unprofitable, misuse of the world's resources.

Frickin' laser

[cno3]

Hopefully they can uncover why the aliens are shooting lasers at our pilots.

I suspect it's something along the lines of "Clear the air space! We've got to get us some red staters to anally probe."

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

(*sarcasm*)Yes I'm sure the millions that people like Bill Gates donate through foundations such as the Gates Foundation is keeping society back years.

It sounds like you think that keeping society back has some direct relation to the IT industry and these "problems" we read about on /. But most problems in society that people are dealing with are issues such as disease and famine (which the Gates Foundation donates heavily to). The Gates Foundation has an endowment that is currently at $27 billion, and I'm sure it will grow to a much higher number before he dies.

Paul Allen provides alot of the same type of donations, for noble causes that some people such as yourself take for granted. But I guess he just does that for advertising and ego, right? It must have nothing to do with the love for what he is donating for.

If you really think that society is being kept back, then maybe you should go donate some of your time or money, eh?

Super weak!

[zmollusc]

So all the aliens 20 light years away who have just heard about SETI starting up and have started building radio transmitters will be wasting their tme now we are switching to lasers.
Do I have to organise everyone? Why can't these people think things through?

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[dont_think_twice]

Personally, I think you should criticize specific actions rather than the people themselves. Instead of saying "Paul Allen is bad, categorically" why not say "Paul Allen profited from Microsoft's unfair business practices" when the topic is relevent, and "Paul Allen is now doing some good and interesting things with his money."

I agree that critizing actions is more productive than critizing people. But the grandparent poster was suggesting that it was wrong to critize (Boo and Hiss) Microsoft because Paul Allen did something good, which is just plain silly. As you rightly point out, all people do some good and some bad. One example of good does not cancel out all the bad.

If Paul Allen really did want to cancel out all the bad, he should donate all the money he made to charity and keep only enough to buy a $250,000 dollar house and a used Honda, and maybe a small savings for retirement. He should also make all the donations completely anonymous, since he doens't deserve credit for donating stolen money. Until he does this, I will consider him more bad than good.

I mean, if he's just so awful he could just hoard his money and do nothing useful with it all.

I don't understand why people make this argument so often. Do we say "If Stalin* was so awful, he would have killed everyone. We should be glad that he only killed some people"? Of course not. Why do we make this excuse for rich people then?

*Evil dictator carefully chosen to avoid invoking Godwins Law.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Botty]

I demand you take the naked pictures of my girlfriend out of your sig!

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[alw53]

And Al Capone opened Chicago's first soup line during the Depression. Most monopolists end up giving money away after they run out of things to buy for themselves. It's good PR and it makes them feel better about themselves, so what?

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[D-Cypell]

That assumes that the exploring of the vast expanse of practically nothing couldn't lead to anything that could help the masses.

I totally agree.

'It is unlikely that an alien race broadcasted the answer to earth's problems at the exact moment so that it reached us in the timeframe we are able to receive it (between the invention of the radio telescope and the extinction of humanity, which is likely a very short timespan on the glactic scale)'

This just seems like a fairly safe assumption to me.

What would knowledge of ETs really change?

[October_30th]

uniqueness of life on Earth

I don't disagree with you, but let me play the Devil's advocate for a while.

What would it really change? That's what I've always been wondering about when the alien conspiracy nuts talk about The Truth being kept hidden from the public - "because it would cause mass panic, global public unrest and a religious crisis".

Why would there be mass panic, public unrest or a religious crisis?

Did the discovery that Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa cause mass panic and a religious crisis?

Re:What would knowledge of ETs really change?

[SeaDour]

Did the discovery that Earth revolves around the Sun and not vice versa cause mass panic and a religious crisis?

I wonder how Galileo, who endured the later years of his life under house arrest by the Catholic church, would answer that question.

I don't really know how most people of Earth would react to knew knowledge of life elsewhere in the Universe, but you need to remember that the Copernican model of the solar system was something that was easily denied for centuries by simply pointing out that the sun appears to travel from east to west. Having an undeniably extraterrestrial, intelligent radio message from another world may be another matter entirely -- though I suppose people would argue that it was a hoax by NASA to generate more revenue.

...heh, I suppose that's what I think would happen then: people would deny it for as long as they possibly could, but probably wouldn't go hysterical.

I SETI

[SmoothDime]

SETI is such an awesome project. I will put as many resources as I have toward this project.

Walmart...==look it up

[way2trivial]

click here if it fails, go to here and click "what we fund" in the nav bar

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Long-EZ]

Gates especially deserves kudos for his philanthropic work, which is far more extensive, relative to his net worth, than is strictly necessary to win him respect

First, it has less to do with how much philanthropy is required to win respect than it has to do with how much philanthropy is required to offset his enormous income to avoid paying taxes.

Secondly, as others have already mentioned, he could make anonymous donations rather than the ego boosting, public, "see what a great guy I am" donations.

Finally, I think a better measure of charity is the degree to which a sacrifice is made. I have a lot more respect for the single mom, working two jobs, who still manages to give $20 to a local orphanage every December 20th so some kid can have a present. When you have $50,000,000,000 in the bank, a billion dollar tax deductible donation is not going to adversely impact the lifestyle.

So, yeah, he's still evil.

First overheard transmission

[Presidential]

A la cuisine!

Doubters appear when ET is mentioned

[minator]

Funny when ET or space research in general is mentioned there's always people who appear that want the resources put elsewhere.

What is is about this subject which brings out such people?

The day ETs are detected will be the most important day in human history.

Why should we move the already scant resources which go into SETI to other much better funded research?

Protien folders got their own government funded $300 million purpose built computer, SETI didn't.

NASA may get good resources but a lot of their research goes back to industry and often brings tangible benifits to the public at large.

Re:Doubters appear when ET is mentioned

[Anarchy333]

The problem I have with SETI is *not* that they are looking for ETs (I believe they exist. Watch the recently released NASA camera footage).

My problem is that SETI is WASTING many valuable resources on projects that we know will not be successful. What are the chances that a lazer will hit the earth? Have you ever tried to hit a bee with a lazer? It's nearly impossible even on our dense Earth. What makes them think Earth will be hit with lazers in the vast, empty abyss that is space?

It is more probable that SETI is a cover-up organization diverting attention to intentionally futile projects than is the probability of actually detecting a lazer.

Due to the red shift phenomenon in the electromagnetic spectrum as waves travel through space, SETI should have been looking below the radio frequencies to find ET radio transmission.

Similarly, If there are ETs they must travel FTL and therefore will only be visible as energy in the ultra-violet frequencies of the EM spectrum.

Re:Doubters appear when ET is mentioned

[Anonymous Coward]

That's some good shit you're smoking, man. Where can I get some?

Re:A high quality of life is required

[Botty]

The economy is a funny beast and you can't just think of it as we have 'x' amount of dollars and we should spend x% on SETI and y% on health problems. Things like sports and music feeds the economy by moving money around.

The economy NEEDS things for people to spend their money on. Going to a baseball game and paying for a ticket gives money to the clean-up crew and stdium staff (to pick a tiny subset) and in turn some of them might be donating to your worthy causes.

The rate at which money changes hands in a system can drastically impact all areas of life including research.

Without jobs that sports provides money would be moving at a much slower rate and thusly slowing research down by stagnating the economy. What good is a scientist if he cant purchase the equipment he needs or get a loan for his house because the economy is too slow? Think he cares about the cure for cancer when he doesn't have a roof over his head?

Are pop stars and star quarterbacks overpayed? Sure. But is their high salary bad for the economy and in turn research? Thats a question that cant be answered without some research and thought.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Cally]

So is the evil that Gates does, and that Allen did before he cashed out of Microsoft, outweighed by the good works done with some of the money thus acquired? Would robbing old ladies to fund SETI (or cancer research, or development aid, or...) be justified? What about robbing banks? With guns - or via fraud?

As several people pointed out during the recent elections, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[metlin]

> as good as all their charitable things are, they can easily afford it,
> and more.

If it's my hard earned money, what I do with it is upto me. Nobody has an obligation to give away their money just because they can afford to, no matter what the voices in your head tell you.

> and it doesn't remove the fact they are fucking up
> the IT industry and now keeping society back
>years, maybe even decades.

Excuse me? That is *such* a blanket statement to make. But guess what? You said it yourself - IT industry. When you are in any industry, you're in the business of making money. Do not like their methods? Fight them on their turf but do not blame them for chasing profit.

You're an idiot if you think Microsoft hasn't contributed to technological progress in the IT industry. Perhaps you disagree with their methods, technology and ideas -- that does not mean they are wrong or that they are detrimental to progress.

In fact, I laud Microsoft because they have been one of the few people responsible for bringing computers to the masses. They have proven that software as an industry can sustain independently and have contributed a real lot to IT and computer science, but then you're probably too blind to see it.

Yes, they're a company that have had buggy softwares. Do you think building complex software is easy? It's a fine line between usability, security and stability and it's one that Microsoft has learnt to walk quite well. Funny, people still make fun of Microsoft products crashing but their products have become increasingly stable, reliable and secure over the years. Perfect? No. Better? Yes. Give credit where it is due.

Yes, they're guilty of a few questionable acts - but they are a business with an obligation to their share holders. You've apparently not stepped to the inside of a boardroom, so I'll not even bother telling you what or how hard business is.

And if you were a really genuine techie concerned about technology, you'd realize that progress is independent of who makes it -- it will ultimately happen no matter what. Not to mention that places like Microsoft Research quite possibly contribute much more to IT than you can ever possibly imagine.

> plus, true charity is anonymous.

Einstein, you would not know if it were anonymous.

> it's hardly altruistic (or anything remotely resembling it) when you give a
> small fraction of your wealth in exchage for having your name or
> company's name all over stuff. that's called "advertising" or "ego".

Funny, people have been doing this for ages - and yet when Bill Gates or Paul Allen does it, it's somehow wrong.

Heard of the Nobel Prize? Pulitzer Prize? Fields Medal? Guess who these are named after.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen are running a business in one industry and are using the profit they make from that to help make this world a better place. I somehow think fighting AIDS and famine is infinitely more important than writing software, but that's just me.

And I care two hoots on whether doing so boosts their ego or if they use their name -- they're helping science and society, and that is what matters.

Re:folding@home seti@home

[JohnnyCannuk]

Even better...

Thanks

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[metlin]

Evil? Yes, you mean like killing people, selling crack, prostitution and the like?

No? Robbing old ladies? You mean, they took a knife to their throat and asked them to pay up or die?

Oh wait, robbing banks? You mean, they walked in with guns and took away your money? Or maybe they stole your credit cards and laundered billions in a scam.

No - they sell things which people pay for. Don't like it? Don't buy it. They're running a business, and nobody is obliged to buy their products.

If people are, blame the people and not the company that is making it.

Disagreeable, perhaps. Evil? Yeah right.

Did we slashdot setiathome?

[Glowing Fish]

I recently got a new computer, and hadn't yet put Setiathome on it.
So, I went to apt-get it, and while the file downloaded, it is hanging in installation.
Did a whole bunch of people read this article, run to get setiathome, and slashdot alien.ssl.berekely.edu

?

Re:Did we slashdot setiathome?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar problem...found a solution here:

Error message when you install or start an MS-DOS or 16-bit Windows-based program
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx ?scid=kb; en-us;324767&Product=winxp

Please remember kids..

[Harald Paulsen]

do not look into space with remaining eye.

Speaking for the SETI's

[Anonymous Coward]

Get lost losers.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Kaboom13]

It would seem to me it would be a worthwhile ambition to have your name associated with important scientific research. There's plenty of easier ways to boost your ego. Also, that "true charity is anonymous" line is BS. Charity is about donating your time or money to a worthwhile cause, not some abstract ideal of giving without recieving any benefit. I suppose if I write charitable donations off on my taxes it wasn't "true charity" either. Noone is telling him he can't spend his millions on booze and hookers in proper pro-athlete/rapper style. What is wrong about wanting to leave a legacy as a supporter of science? What percentage of income do I have to give meet your ideal? Should I sell my home and live in a box to prove I'm giving more then I can easily afford? I agree their charitable donations do not outweigh their business decisions as part of Microsoft, but I still respect that they give to feilds I feel are important.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[nwbvt]

" So how much of your spare cash have you thrown at education or curing diseases?"

I have a few million less than he.

"And speaking of curing diseases, it seems that Mr. Gates already is already heavily involved in that arena (the Bill & Linda Gate Foundation); therefore it wouldn't make sense for Mr. Allen to duplicate his efforts."

Why not? I'm interested in hearing the logic behind that. Is there some maximum amount of Microsoft dollars the CDC can spend?

Yes, yellow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the Vogon constructor fleet is yellow - To quote -

The huge yellow somethings went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them - which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking for all these years.

New and Improved!

[Anonymous Coward]

Even faster in not finding any evidence of aliens!

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[jaoswald]

true charity is anonymous

While some givers prefer to be anonymous, for understandable and respectable reasons, there is also the possibility that the attachment of "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation" or some other famous name to a particular cause helps justify it to other sources of support.

That is, there is better PR for a charitable cause when a big name gives a big donation, rather than just adding another "Anonymous" to their list of donors.

I'm sure if Bill & Melinda Gates offered to give a large amount of money to an organization anonymously, there would be at least a gentle effort to make their identity public.

If anything, Bill & Melinda Gates are more likely to hide their identity if they feel the donation is *smaller* than would otherwise be expected. If Bill Gates puts a quarter in the Salvation Army bucket, I'm sure he doesn't want his name attached---why not at least a fifty, Billy?

Scaled Composites is not philantropy.

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as everyone wants to applaud the beginning of civilian space travel, Scaled Composites is a private company, with its own personal interests. It is not doing the things it does for the betterment of human kind, or to advance the common scientific knowledge base.

Allen's backing is a bid into the fledgling space tourism market, and a down payment on future free space flights. It is not a philantropic effort.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[mforbes]

I have a few million less than he.

Yes? And are you giving any portion of your income to the charity of your choice, or just whining that the super-rich have different priorities than you? I'm sorry, but this is too much like people who refuse to vote, but spend every election term complaining about the people in office (assuming that your answer to the above question is 'no'. If it is 'yes, I do give money to the charities of my choice, then I apologize in advance.)

Why not? I'm interested in hearing the logic behind that. Is there some maximum amount of Microsoft dollars the CDC can spend?

The Foundation doesn't give money directly to the CDC. I'm sure the Gates and Allen families do give plenty through their taxes, but the Foundation works through grants and direct distribution of vaccines, etc. Either way, with the billions that Bill & Melinda throw into that effort, surely it's difficult to propose that they're not doing enough?

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[iphinome]

Bill Gates gives a lot of money to republicans see opensecrets.org so he's not doing the world ANY favors as far as I'm concerned.

Re:A high quality of life is required

[jaoswald]

You economic reasoning seems confused. You are mixing up multiple concepts.

You are correct in one important insight, which is that the money labelling the transactions are not a finite amount of money being "used up" one transaction at a time.

However, there is most definitely a finite amount of land/raw materials, capital goods, and labor of more or less specialized skills available at any given time. It is possible for these scarce resources to be wasted when markets are inefficient.

One important way in which markets can be inefficient is when participants do not act rationally; another is that the price may not account for some benefit or harm. When governments allocate millions of dollars to build sports stadiums, for instance, it is not clear they are acting in the best public interest.

These failures have very little to do with the macroeconomic failure when interest rates are not set to induce a healthy amount of consumption vs. investment.

Re:Look what you just did!

[Rashdot]

You blew his cover!
It's "Allen Telescope Array" and his name is not Alien.
All rumours about aliens running Microsoft are untrue!

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[nwbvt]

"And are you giving any portion of your income to the charity of your choice"

What income? Currently I'm a recent grad who doesn't start his full time job for another week (hell I'm still waiting on my relocation check to come through the mail). The little money I have left will likely be spent living in area hotels before I can get an apartment. Once I start and am financially stable, yes I'll likely give a portion to charitable causes that I deem worthy of my money.

Regardless, I don't see where it is you are going with this, other than a possible ad hominem argument (which we all know is a logical fallacy, I could be Ebenezer himself and still think SETI is a foolish use of money).

"Either way, with the billions that Bill & Melinda throw into that effort, surely it's difficult to propose that they're not doing enough?"

When did they come into play? We were talking about Paul Allen. I have no problem with Billy's charitable gifts. Or is this some sort of /. conspiroucy theory that they are both the same person who changed identities in order to avoid the Feds?

Or are you arguing that medical researchers already have enough money? If that is what you are trying to get at, no, they of course can use more. Medical research is very expensive.

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Are people not mature enough to understand that you can both approve and disapprove of a person's or companies actions at different times? I guess not considering the fact that many people still can't understand how you can be against the war and still want to support our troops.

That's one of the reasons Al Gore lost in 2000

[ccmay]

It is expected and considered not only foolish (for tax purposes) but, to put it mildly, it is the lowest form of tackiness to be wealthy and yet have no sense of charity.

Very much so.

Al Gore learned this, to his great disadvantage, when his tax returns from 1997 showed an insultingly low pittance in charitable contributions. I guess he thought allowing the white trash in Jesusland to bask in the sunbeams shining from his face was charity enough.

Americans don't care if you get rich, they applaud it and wish to do the same. But they don't like skinflints either.

-ccm

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being unfair. You DON'T have to give your money to ANYONE or for ANY CAUSE,

Uh, that's an extreme response. "Your money" is protected by the institution of society, the financing of which is mostly done by the middle class in the poor. Anyone who claims Bill Gates actually pays 38% of his income in taxes is a either a lying rich fuck (who doesnt believe it), or some overworked Joe Sixpack who is gullible and believes it-- and BTW watches Fox News.

Go ahead and take the "Let them eat cake" attitude. It's refreshing to hear your honesty.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[2TecTom]

meant "assests"

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that each year Bill Gates gives over a billion dollars to various charities...

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

Right-O!

Paul Allen (and Microsoft) in search of a new
customer base, no doubt. They better hope
that any new "alien" customers are equally
nonchalant about buggy and vulnerable soft-
ware as their current user base. The new
"customers" might have ray guns, or even
asteriod launchers ...

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

When was the last time you gave 2% of your net worth to a genuine humanitarian charity? And is getting a tax break for it such a bad thing (remember, it is pretty much impossible for a tax break to equal the money spent on the donation - certainly at his scale).

Project HALO?

[tepples]

[Microsoft co-founder] Paul Allen funds a lot of good research. I was part of Project Halo/Digital Aristotle, an AI project

Enemy scripting for an Xbox launch title does not count as "AI research".

Re:Project HALO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you should do a bit of research (like 2 seconds on Google) before opening your mouth. http://www.projecthalo.com/halotempl.asp?cid=20

Re:Project HALO?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know somebody else who could use a bit of Google as well.

Avoiding the Windows tax?

[tepples]

[Microsoft] sell things which people pay for. Don't like it? Don't buy it.

Boycotting Windows is easier said than done. Where can I get a new x86 laptop computer with GNU/Linux and a good warranty?

Give to Caesar what is Caesar's

[tepples]

For one thing, large-dollar-value acts of altruism aren't anonymous; they have to be disclosed to governments for tax purposes. But even if an altruistic deed is anonymous to other people, people of most major faiths (notably Judeochristianity, Islam, and Hinduism) believe that a higher power still sees the deed and rewards the giver in some sort of afterlife.

Yummy

[wcanevari]

I hope they find us as tasty as their other enslaved planets.......

Impact on Religion

[Spiked_Three]

My understanding from a friend who pretty much had the bible memorized, is that according to it, there is no life on any other planet.
If SETI or by any other means, intelligent (or even not) life is discovered, that pretty much erases the Bible and Jesus.
What is driving people to spend so much money or something that will have such a great impact on society? Or, as I pretty much expect, do 'religious' people only believe from peer pressure and not true faith and would the discovery not really change anything as far as religions? I mean I know it would change things as far as how we see ourselves, but would a Christian Holy War break out against the scientists, or would facts in evidence cause a suppression of some religions?

Re:Impact on Religion

[Script_God]

You can't take the Bible literally all the time. Just becuase it doesn't say there IS life on other planets doesn't mean that there isn't.

Re:Impact on Religion

[should_be_linear]

So, as always, there will be yet another philosophical patch to the meaning of Bible. Yet another is waiting behind the door after Jesus's DNA is analized and his true parents are identified (this is actualy ongoing effort). That being said, Contact will change nothing more for religius people then discovery that Earth is really the center of nothing special.

Re:Impact on Religion

[Spiked_Three]

That would be the "believe from peer pressure and not true faith" scenario.

Re:Impact on Religion

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are saying if I'm correct is you essentially can't "truly believe" in God or the teachings of the bible AND also "truly believe" that other life exists on other planets?

If that is what you are saying I think you are insane, or misguided in your thought process.

I believe, granted lately my faith was shaken but that was from personal events in my life, nonetheless I still believe. I also believe that other life exists. On basic common logic and the law of averages any rational being with any forethought or intellect would have to assume that in the billions upon billions of planets just in our galaxy alone (which takes 100,000 years for LIGHT to cross it) any planet or planets have to sustain intelligent life at our level of evolution or greater.

The fundamental belief from those who believe in God is that he created ALL things, not just of this Earth, but all worlds, etc.

Just because the bible doesn't mention other worlds specifically why does that discount the concept? Furthermore, WHY would the bible speak of other worlds -- it was interpretation about God's creation of a specific world (Earth), a specific race (Mankind/Humans) and the life and teachings of his son Jesus (and the stories related thereof).

*DISCLAIMER: No I'm not a religous nut job, I don't force religion down anyone's throats -- the only reason I wrote this stuff was because the parent post on this topic was so out of whack I had to respond.

Re:Impact on Religion

[Just Some Guy]

My understanding from a friend who pretty much had the bible memorized, is that according to it, there is no life on any other planet.

I don't recall that verse.

If SETI or by any other means, intelligent (or even not) life is discovered, that pretty much erases the Bible and Jesus.

By what stretch of imagination? The owner's manual to my car says nothing about my Playstation 2, but that doesn't mean that the latter doesn't exist. The Bible is a collection of books chronicling our interaction with God, not necessarily that of other civilizations.

but would a Christian Holy War break out against the scientists,

No holy war. Such thing as evolution are infinitely debatable, since although huge mountains of evidence exist to support one train of though, there are no absolutely hard, fast facts saying "this is exactly what happened". An ET message saying "Hello, people of Earth! This is how you build a warp drive!" would be pretty impossible to deny.

or would facts in evidence cause a suppression of some religions?

Yes, but only those religions founded on the belief in a lack of ET intelligence. Although some Christians (and Muslims and Hindus and people from pretty much any religion other than Scientologists - they're into this stuff hook, line, and sinker) will freak out, the mainstreams will move onward as normal.

Re:SETI@Home

[Anonymous Coward]

Waffles from scratch? Kickass. Thanks, man.

Re:folding@home seti@home - is it that good

[BillyBlaze]

I'd guess a test tube of bacteria could easily contain orders of magnitude more protein encodings than we could simulate with computers in a reasonable time. The key is to make the bacteria's survival dependant on their destruction of the target molecule. But once you do that, you have practically infinite parallelism for free. I'm way too lazy to dig up a source, but I remeber reading about scientists using RNA and DNA matching to give probable solutions to the Travelling Salesman problem - just mix and stir - and the only speed limit is how fast you can interpret the results.

Ping mnoelharris

[Baloo Ursidae]

Yo, Harris...it's Johnson, I went to high school with you. Email me....

Re:Ping mnoelharris

[Glowing Fish]

We never went to high school together.

That was college, briefly.

But I am here. I have a static ip, you should ping it.

Re:Ping mnoelharris

[Baloo Ursidae]

Heheh, you and I both went to NRST and you know it. 8:o)

Re:Ping mnoelharris

[Glowing Fish]

Thats news to me!

Look through your old yearbooks. I am not in there.

Besides, like, metaphorically.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Drantin]

Er... not to nit-pick or anything.. (well, actually, yes.. to nit-pick) but the Nobel prize was created after the man's death...

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Cally]

But where do you (pesonally, or anmy other individual) draw the line? Presumably social standards are just a consensus of where otehrs draw the line. Is there evn such a thing as 'evil' or is it justa word meaning 'very, very, very disagreeable indeed'?

Why am I starting to sound like a first year philosophy student? Perhaps I picked the wrong year to quit smoking ;)

uhmmm....

[scheuri]

...well, then lets hope we wont get DDoSed (or slashdotted) by any interplanetary scriptkiddies or get hacked and used for a DDOS against, uhhmm..Alpha Centauri...

scnr
scheuri

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[HuguesT]

It seems that we are going over and over the same stuff.

The whole point of the Microsoft-abusing-its-monopoly saga is that *yes* almost everyone is *forced* to buy Microsoft wares. That is if you want to hold a job in most Western countries. What is the ratio of workplaces not using proprietary Microsoft format for almost any data exchange?

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[HuguesT]

It is a very easily provable fact that Microsoft hasn't contributed to the field of IT nearly enough in relation to its size and wealth. A lot of what you speak of: Microsoft Research, fighting AIDS etc are recent endeavours. They date from a few years after Gates got married. I.e if you want to thank someone thank Melinda.

Microsoft got extremely rich by building upon the work of others and exploiting what they had to the hilt. This makes excellent business sense for them and does require large amounts of smarts but I wouldn't go to the extent of thanking them for anything, much less for the enormous amount of time and expertise wasted down the drain learning the use of their tools during the course of various jobs. What a PITA most of their products are !

In relation to its wealth, resources and experience, Microsoft should be making the very best software on the planet. Instead they have perfected the art of doing "just enough" and relying on their existing marketing power, user and developer base to crush, buy out and eventually outsell innovative competitors. The history of Microsoft is littered with the corpses of litteraly hundreds of companies who had developed useful and innovative pieces of software but who were crushed on their way to success.

The only thing saving current innovative software developers is the sheer size of Microsoft. Microsoft will not bother with them unless their market become suddently potentially huge. See Google for the next story.

Now Microsoft has become an established huge giant that cannot grow so much anymore. They have started to innovate on their own because they have run out of companies and products to exploit, but this will not save them in the end. They were the top of the food chain in their heyday but now they have to contribute, and they are not good at it.

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got a good point, but you're also very unpleasant to have a conversation with.
--
Sick of pompous windbags, especially those whose automatic defense mechanism is to lash out with bizarre and easily refuted accusations? Change "Karma Bonus" modifier to -1 penalty.

Hat Creek Radio Observatory in NE California

[ikluft]

The new radio observatory that the article mentions in California is located at UC Berkeley's Hat Creek Radio Observatory. That's in far-northeastern California southeast of the town of Burney and north of Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Some links about the site...

• Topographic Mapping at the SETI Radio Telescope Observatory (UC Berkeley)
• Topographic map of site (Topozone.com)
• "The big idea in SETI: Think small" (MSNBC, Feb 8, 2004)

Trivia: the Hat Creek Valley where the observatory is located was already known to many Northern Californians for being inundated by muflows from the May 20, 1915 eruption of nearby Mount Lassen. Anyone who has climbed Lassen has looked down from the peak on the path of the Hat Creek and Lost Creek mudflows.

Re:folding@home seti@home

[leprkan]

i wasn't putting anyone into judgement, I was just raising awareness for folding@home which rivals seti in importance, and is lesser known. your points were valid if not a bit aggressive though. "I'll just say I urge ALL of you out there to run SOMETHING, anything, of your choice and share your spare CPU cycles for the betterment of society, be it seti@home or folding@home or something else." I strongly agree with that.

Re:folding@home seti@home

[JohnnyCannuk]

Sorry...read one too many anti-seti postings that day....

Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're really pathetic.