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.'"

Comments

You mean the 'wow signal'?

[mrflash818]

You mean the 'wow signal'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal

The SETI Institute is not "SETI"

[SETIGuy]

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.

2.5 Inverse-Square Law.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.