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

Re:Why NOW?

[natehoy]

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.

Re:Meh

[natehoy]

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.