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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.'"
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.
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
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!