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SETI To Release Data To the Public
log1385 writes "SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is releasing its collected data to the public. Jill Tarter, director of SETI, says, 'We hope that a global army of open source code developers, students, and other experts in digital signal processing, as well as citizen scientists willing to lend their intelligence to our exploration, will have access to the same technology and join our quest.'"
Why NOW? They should have done this from the beginning!
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Wow!
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
This is like the young earth creationists releasing their data to the public.
They found nothing in what...50 years? And 11 years of SETI@Home crunching data. I mean, its a cool screen saver though.
We have a limited supply of coal and oil, and you're wasting our precious watts on this silliness.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
SETI, I'll save you the time... Just call Select Staffing, they'll send the aliens your way....
Access the raw data we have published at setiQuest and show us how to process it in new ways, find signals that our current signal detection algorithms are missing.
I suggest looking for data that fits too closely with white noise. Modern human digital data is highly compressed, and as such is nearly indistinguishable from random bits. Images, Music, Movies... the bulk of the traffic on the internet looks like random bits.
"His name was James Damore."
This isn't a bad idea, we'll have FTL travel and cities on Mars by next year if we can just convince the military industrial complex that there's a bunch turr'ist aliens out there.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Where exactly is a 'citizen scientist' going to get the world's largest supercomputer (the Seti@home cluster)??? Unless by 'citizen scientist' you meant 'black market botnet operator'... because they are probably the only ones with the resources to pull it off with the scale that Seti@home has attained.
How about democratizing the seti@home algorithm design? Maybe some fresh ideas, along with what is arguably the largest most successful distributed computing system ever created, is the best way to go; instead of just starting over from scratch.
cant wait for the false positives
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
If there is extraterrestrial life, unless it happens to be in one of the closest star systems (probability approximately 10^-22) we will never be able to reach it. SETI is thus pointless.
We will never detect advanced signals. Any communication will use encryption/compression algorithms better than anything we can dream of at the moment. It will always be noise to our ears.
With apologies to Carl Sagon.
E.T.'s signal-processing technology should be much better than ours. Just ask them for help.
One serious problem with SETI is that even if there are other civilizations out there the timespan where they are sending out lots of radiowaves may be small. For example, humans have only had radio for about a hundred years. We sent out a lot for around 80 years but are now sending out less as we get more efficient and have other methods of communication (such as fiber optics). Moreover, many devices today use a spread spectrum approach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum which looks like close to white noise. Unfortunately, we don't have many options for searching for other types of signals since almost any other signal type that we can conceive of we simply won't be able to find.
I have a feeling we'll be folding dimensions, poking holes in them and making new ones by time we understand how to break the laws of the one we're in. And then only to realize now that we've figured it all out why the hell would we want to figure out what else is in ours. Take out our trash and poof we're gone.
Before somebody pedantically states "wah wah universe is too big look at the scale of things we will never find life... enormous cosmic distances...blah...blah", let me just state to everybody making this argument until they are red in the face, one must consider the fact that an advanced Type II or Type III civilization may have the ability to utilize nifty physical principles like relativistic space contraction.
;)...
Just because something seems astronomically and impractically far away from the standpoint of classical physics, stating bluntly "we will never find intelligent life due to cosmic distances" is a bit bold, considering the possibilities that unfold once relativistic speeds are taken into account. I know this doesn't apply for electromagnetic signals, but what if an extraterrestrial body travels from the outer another galaxy via 'hyper-space', or crossing dimensional planes, with the possibility that they 'contract' the distance they must travel to our solar system by travelling at relativistic speeds, and then once they are here they broadcast their signals within a reasonable space-time range for our detection equipment to gather data. Of course this sounds far fetched, but these concepts are not new. Space contraction is a real phenomena, and is the reason Muons make it to our detectors, even though classical physics states that the time it takes them to travel to the ground is longer than their theoretical lifetime.
Yes this is making the assumption that these civilizations haven't reduced themselves to smoldering rubble once they discovered the power of nuclear reactions, and also making the assumption that they have the technology to generate the energies needed to achieve those speeds comparable to C in order to really take advantage of space contraction, but look at our society. In 100 years, look how far technology has progressed. Imagine a civilization that is 2000 years advanced from our current state. It is vain and ignorant to use arguments of what we have now to what is possible as technology grows by a function of time. 100 years ago, who would have imagined particle accelerators, space-ships, MRI machines, invisibility-cloaking technology, night-vision goggles, electromagnetic projectile accelerators, etc...All developments of the past two centuries.
But then again, as mind-numbing brain-wasting entertainment permeates our culture, perhaps our technological advancement may stagnate. Why would anybody want to study quantum-physics when they have Farmville
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
And don't forget, transporters and replicators!
No kidding. A thousand EVP enthusiasts just shat themselves in excitement.
After reading up on it I wasn't satisfied that the collected data was well analyzed. SETI@home admits this too. It is also radio frequency which we don't expect advanced civilizations to be using "currently"
So I hope this will change things.
Whoosh!
well, from the data i see that they (U.S.a) should release
the british hacker.
You mean the 'wow signal'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Repeat after me... Jill Tarter is director of the SETI Institute. Despite their desire to be called SETI, they are not SETI. SETI is a scientific discipline. The SETI institute is an organization.
Jill Tarter doesn't direct me, and, unlike most of the people at the SETI Institute, I actually do SETI.
Support SETI@home
It is my opinion that the proof of existance of other sentient communications would be profound, akin to proof of religious dieties existances.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
You've got to realize that SETI depends on aliens actively trying to make contact
Nope, they don't.
A lot of civilized activities make non-random electro-magnetic noise:
You're right however, that any civilization that can be discovered has to be further advanced than we are.
What if... contact was made decades ago and "The Powers That Be" decided to keep this a secret.
... the fears of "TPTB" are realized, that the world population will truly be pissed at "TPTB"?
The contactors waited patiently for disclosure and now are impatient and will make disclosure themselves.
What if
Should I feel sorry for the "TPTB" or should I call for the censure/ expulsion/ trial/ investigation of "TPTB" for all the grief perpetrated against all sentient life.
How would YOU respond?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
We've been looking for 50 years, and... we got nothin'.
So let's see if an army of tinfoil hat types and Star Trek nerds can find enough false patterns in the static to ensure our job security, because we're worried Obama wants to derail our gravy train. Something about "results." Don't people know that SETI is about giving hope to the world that we can find aliens that we can't communicate with in any way. Imagine what we could learn from the broadcast of an interstellar Jay Leno. The mind boggles!
And don't forget, transporters and replicators!
Or di-lithium crystals!
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
SETI release data to /b/, 3 months later, aliens are being trolled, DDOSed, and picketed by doughy white guys in Guy Fawkes masks.
We hope that a global army of open source code developers, students, and other experts in digital signal processing,
I had no idea there was this army. Who is the General in charge of it? What are its military objectives?
... and then they built the supercollider.
At some time in the future, aliens will be trying to decode OUR signals...
(The information they broadcast must be very important. It is repeated many times - they had rotary wing VTOL craft, wore Khaki and lived in tents)
The sheer enormity of any confirmation of the existence of life - especially intelligent life - beyond the Earth probably justifies the search, but people need to be made aware of just how immensely unlikely it is that there are signals capable of even being detected.
Much is made of our own signals (radio, TV, Radar, etc) which have been leaking out into space for the past 100 years or so, but few of the engineering facts are ever explained to the public, such as that by the time any of those signals have reached even the nearest stars they are so weak as to be essentially undetectable from background noise, and certainly indecipherable.
Even one detected and confirmed "alien" signal will be worth everything SETI, for sure, but few have any idea of just how long the odds are.
Ohh well, I must be cursed. I used PPC Ubuntu on my PS3 to access Usenet on Cox Cable.... lol but seriously, when are the people going to get a fair shake with all this corporate bullying?
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
So if there is a signal and they've made it available to everyone on Earth, how much does that work out to in damages?
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Of course, I didn't read the article:), but several pop-sci books on AI/ET that I've read lately have quoted scientists who are beginning to speculate that perhaps we've already picked up alien signals. However, the pattern may be so complex (so alien!), that seti missed it.
So one guess is that seti wants imagination and innovation that comes from crowd sourcing to help analyze the data for patterns that the 'old schoolers' (long time seti researchers) have missed.
A more pessimistic guess would be that seti wants a bunch of amateurs to make media/blog noise by finding and reporting a metric ton of false positives. That gets the words "alien/seti" back in the public's minds, and helps come budget time.
It took them that long to edit out the real data!
have the other civilizations did there analog trun off and they are to far out to be picked up?
Now THIS is the open source project I was waiting to work upon: exciting, new, unusual, you name it. Can't wait to see the first data !
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The search for terrestrial intelligence proves to be as elusive.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's likely that if we come into contact with a space-faring alien race, it's because they needed to get off their planet and find a new habitable one, for one reason or another. I'll wager that contact with ETs will prove to be our undoing if we succeed.
However if they are a space-faring race capable of interstellar travel, we couldn't avoid getting detected by them if they were less than 70 or so light years away. We couldn't hide if we wanted to. If they have the technology to fly faster than light, it's likely they have much more sensitive and sophisticated communication capability than we do.
While SETI is important scientifically, it serves no real purpose to broadcast our presence. They'll see us long before we see them with or without the "We're here!" broadcasts.
That being said, I believe intelligent life somewhere else is a statistical certainty. I don't know if I believe they've visited us or even know we're here.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
hmmmm. i think stephen hawking is right.....not wise to contact.....best to try and find earth like planets...if contact is made this could be our undoing.....risky business! definitely changed my mind on seti.