Slashdot Mirror
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."
~fitzprrklpop~ople of Earth, can you hear us now?~fwopzzwwep~
Direct link to seti.org press release without all the crapola popups etc.
So do they expect to be able to see space battles between Klingons and Romulans or something?
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.
A blog like any other.
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.
The all-sky optical SETI system at Harvard receives its funding from The Planetary Society and the Bosack-Kruger Charitable Foundation.
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.
As far as I am concerned Paul Allen is the very best thing *ever* to come out of Microsoft.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
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!
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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
leprkan...
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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"
Letter To Iran
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
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.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?