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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? Because now they found the alien mind control signal they have been looking for, the pink laser shining from the stars into the black iron prison. And now, now they unleash it onto the public. The plot thickens...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Because YEC drivel is in any way equivalent to scientifically measured radio telescope data. Yep, right, sure. Hey, we haven't found working fusion, gravity waves, proton decay, a cure for cancer, a cure for AIDS, and lots, lots and more lots of stuff. So, obviously all of this is bunk, yes? Hell, why don't we just stop doing science at all, it won't be complete ever, so it is a waste of time, correct? This used to be a site for nerds...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Yes, because on cosmic scales, 50 years is an eternity! I know if I were a highly advanced alien species, I'd spend all my time pointing transmitters at random planets in the night sky, especially ones which I haven't seen any activity from and which failed to respond to my last transmissions a mere 200 years ago.
You've got to realize that SETI depends on aliens actively trying to make contact. Even a highly advanced civilization would be unlikely to devote the resources necessary to flood the cosmos with signals that are detectable all the time and everywhere. It's more likely that they A) send signals in bursts, in which case 50 years really isn't that long to be searching or B) wait till they detect signals coming in (which would presumably be easier for them than it is for us), which means that the only civilizations we're likely to contact at this point are ones with 30 light years.
SETI should be, in my opinion, more interested in searching the asteroid belts for Von Neumann probes than listening for radio signals. Besides being more likely (again, just in my opinion) it would have the added benefit of providing actual communication with an alien intelligence (assuming a strong AI powered probe) verses shouting at each other and waiting 50 or more years for a response.
at which point of the process does it become silly to you?
1. believing that alien life exists?
2. believing that some of it is intelligent?
3. believing they would intentionally broadcast their existence to the rest of the universe?
4. actively seeking out that sign?
5. looking for it in narrow band radio signals?
i could live a little longer in this prison
I think their original hope was that those most interested in the SETI project would contribute their knowledge and expertise to a single project.
SETI@HOME proved that leveraging tons of processors to crunch algorithms developed by a relatively small number of good brains allowed them to expand their science. They've analyzed the everlovin' crap out of that signal for about 50 years now (or millions of years if you count SETI@HOME computer time) and nothing has surfaced yet, so maybe it's time to let others have a crack at it.
But there's good reason not to do that too soon.
The problem is that expanding the number of brains can be a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that more people will take novel approaches to analyzing the data, bad because there's going to be a lot of duplication, a lot of working at cross-purposes, and a lot of people so desperately wanting to be the one to discover the Greys that SETI will have to work up some method of validating claims.
And, of course, just debunking false claims from every 9-year-old who forgot to set the right floating point settings on his compiler and ended up with a filtration pattern, every nutjob who thinks that a pattern match of 2 bits against the latest copy of the "Music of the Spheres" constitutes a valid find, and every attention-seeker who just makes shit up in the hopes of getting their name in lights for a few seconds will now be a full-time job for a population of scientists much larger than the current SETI project supports today.
Right now, there are fewer brains working on the project, but they seem to have really good integrity. In radio terminology, there isn't much signal but the signal-to-noise ratio is quite good.
Make the data public, and you'll have a lot more theories on how to find a match, and some of them will even be good. A few will almost certainly be better than the original scientists had going on to start with. But the signal-to-noise ratio is going to be awful.
SETI already has credibility problems from those who do not believe that life could exist anywhere but God's Chosen Sphere, and those who believe that if life existed it would be a colossal coincidence indeed if it could emit patterns we'd recognize, and those who believe that such signals would never have had time to reach us yet. Add in a months' worth of multiple daily stories about some lunatic claiming to have found aliens based on pattern matching the raw SETI data against the screech marks on his underwear from the same day the data was collected, and they'll find it even harder to get funding.
But I suspect the SETI project, as it stands, is probably going to wither away at some point anyway. So releasing the data is a good way of making sure someone, somewhere, will preserve it in addition to expanding the uses of it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
no, he's suggesting looking for items that are whiter than the background. an intense burst could be a solar flare (or whatever) or a highly compressed bitstream of alien porn.
i could live a little longer in this prison
Having proof positive that aliens exist would not have a profound impact on our daily lives, true, but it would have a deeply profound impact on our outlook and perception of the universe around us. And, of course, who knows what information they may be broadcasting, if they do exist and we eventually find a signal?
Having said that, SETI has never been a very expensive project, so it's not like we're spending big money on SETI. Back when NASA funded SETI, it was less than one tenth of one percent of NASA's budget. Now that it's privately funded, it isn't really cutting too deeply into any other projects. Maybe you have a handful of scientists working on SETI instead of one of the other projects you mentioned, but then again most of our efforts in the world are wasted on things that are not only not in our best interests, but could arguably said to be acting against our best interests. SETI may not be optimal, but it's very small in the big picture and certainly doesn't appear detrimental.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
You mean the 'wow signal'?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Personally, I think SETI should be looking for patterns in everything that's out there - patterns that might indicate intelligent life - and I don't just mean via radio/light/whatever transmissions.
It is not unreasonable to think that in 1000 years humanity would be capable - assuming we survive and continue to advance at even a fraction of the speed we are advancing today - of projects that would essentially engineer our solar system to make it over into a place that is more conducive and efficient for human (or trans-human, if you go that way) life. Certainly in 10,000 years it isn't unreasonable to think - again assuming survival and any kind of advancement - that we wouldn't be capable of essentially gardening our sun to make it much, much more stable than it already is, extend the lifecycle of it, etc.
Let's look for that kind of change - stars that simply should not, by our theories, actually look like they do. On a bigger scale, areas of the universe that seem to have been tended or tuned to better serve life's (whatever that life is) purpose. We may not be able to recognize it as anything but a random pattern, but I'd say that it seems pretty reasonable to think, given our single example of an intelligent and technologically capable species, that intelligent and technologically capable life elsewhere in the universe might decide to modify its environment to better suit it as we have ours. Given how early we are in our own technological development it makes sense to look for the evidence left behind from species far in advance of ours (as it's astronomically unlikely they'll be at or near our level of advancement).
Radio signals are great and all, but that's not the only way to prove there's something out there. Let's look for sources that are in disequilibrium and figure out how that's happening. At the worse we find nothing, middle of the road we find things that are perfectly natural but that our theories don't account for, and best case we find some truly amazing stuff.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
In answer to the bad or intentionally fraudulent processing problem, they could validate any spurious signal quite easily - by putting it in to their own software and seeing if there's anything there.
If they find nothing there, but contact the person analyzing the data and determine that said person probably has the smarts and honesty to have found something legit, then they can work with that person, request a copy of their code, etc.
I don't think that mistakes or fraudulent results are going to be quite the problem you think they are - and I'm sure that the scientists who do the SETI programming/analysis have likely already thought this through. If I can think of a few ways to do validation of outside results in a couple minutes they have likely thought of many more ways.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.