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Seti Live Website To Crowdsource the Search For Alien Life
bs0d3 writes "Scientists need your help in the search for life beyond Earth. The SETI Institute is asking the public to join in its hunt for signals from intelligent civilizations out there in the universe. Anyone can register on the new website, SETI Live, to help analyze data from SETI's radio telescope devoted to scanning the heavens for signals from E.T.."
>> intelligent civilizations out there in the universe
Why not start the search a little closer to home?
I just glanced over the website, and wasn't able to answer the question how this is any different from seti@home, buzzwords aside. Can anyone clarify?
Someone is going to fake results, lead to a massive hunt and cause a conspiracy of epic proportions... never let idiots look for ETL.
Hey, they could build an app that people could install on their computer or something! I think if they do that, they could give it a name like "distributed computing" or the like. Or even better, since most people use their computers at home, they could throw that in the name as well.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7YK2uKxil8
After Peter Weyland's brilliant TED speech I donated my money and spare computing power to the Weyland Corporation.
"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.'"
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
It's not as if the humans most likely to spend time looking for ETI signals are also the most likely to be affected by optimism and confirmation bias. I'm sure we'll see many more signals than when boring computers did it.
Current SETI projects would strain to detect an earth-like civilization even at our nearest stellar neighbours. I heard some talk years back about using MWA-LFD but I have no idea if it ever came to fruition. Until SETI improves its resolution, this is all just masturbation.
What's the point? We already know the Turians will find us, and we'll know in 2 weeks the feud with the Reapers.
Is SETI wasting its time listening for radio signals? Just how powerful would a stable radio signal (such as a television type of transmitter)have to be at the source from a "nearby" star-system (say 20 light years) in order to be detected here on Earth, and as a corollary to that question, how powerful would an inadvertent stable signal on Earth have to be in order to be be detected at the same distance using similar equipment as that used by the SETI program? Do we even transmit anything strong and long enough that it could be detected at such a distance? I would imagine that the signal-strength would drop off too quickly to be detectable.
I seem to remember an application like this back in '96/'97 timeframe that did the same thing with the fledgling WWW, around the same time as the Mersienne prime # search app. Did that happen?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
[citations needed]
Seti has been "crowd sourcing" since I was in high school...which was some time ago now.
... that an automated search WOULDN'T find but that a sentient being would recognize? Perhaps by being able to pick up some sort of quantum phenomenon that wouldn't register with deterministic sensors? (I read that there the was a proposed experiment to see if the human eye could perceive quantum entangled images; if they could, the subject would see some sort of pattern, if not just random "static").
Perhaps if the galaxy was full of self-replicating machines bent on the destruction of organic life, this would be a way for the organic life to seek out each other without attracting the attention of the machines. This follows from such sci-fI books as "The Forge of God".
Anyway, if such a signal were discovered and it was determined to be encoded in such a manner, we would seriously have to think about our safety in our galactic neighborhood! Perhaps there would be an effort to enact radio silence on a planetary scale.
(Ok, enough with the wild speculation).
Look for the aliens here already. I find them in nearly every crowd and flash mob I have been in. Oh, thats not what was meant by crowdsourced?
Silence is a state of mime.
The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
[citations needed]
It's not provable. But you sound like an imbecile when you say life evolved from nothing and out of random chance in this completely entropic universe. You sound like a fool when you speak of theories of order coming out of disorder. It flies in the face of your rock-solid thermodynamics equations.
So we need a citation for your nonsense. I don't think you have any proof, either.
I'm pretty sure this is a dupe.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/04/17/91338/seti-at-home
Don't the editors double check for anything around here?
Reeses
Have gnu, will travel.
Wow, you've never heard of the Miller-Urey experiments, or considered that local entropy can decrease, so long as the entropy in the surroundings increases to match? There are a raft of real-world phenomena where molecules spontaneously self-organize given some energy gradient.
Ah, why am I bothering, if you can look up everything, if you're actually willing. The onus isn't on everyone else to prove some invisible sky-man doesn't exist...
ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
There's what, 100 billion stars in our galaxy? Say, 1 in a thousand has a planet in the proper zone from its primary for carbon based life and liquid water. That's 100 million planets capable of carrying life as we more or less know it. How many galaxies are there in this universe? Every time I hear a number, I hear a bigger one 6 months later. Say, 250,000 galaxies so far, even though that's liable to be on the low side (any astronomy geeks handy??) So, we're looking at over 100 billion planets where life might be possible. They've already demonstrated how simple proteins could have formed 3 billion years ago here on earth. You're telling me that it's over 100 billion to 1 that life would start by itself? I think it's more likely that there's several hundred million planets in the universe with life on them. The odds seem to be on my side. For extra credit, look up 'the Drake Equation', even though I didn't go all the way through it, and keep in mind that Earth is 4.5 billion years old. It's not like life showed up, oh, say, 6000 years ago...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It's not provable. But you sound like an imbecile when you say life evolved from nothing and out of random chance in this completely entropic universe. You sound like a fool when you speak of theories of order coming out of disorder. It flies in the face of your rock-solid thermodynamics equations.
Um, no. The entropy of an entire system has to remain the same or go up, but there's nothing preventing parts of a system from losing entropy. Your air conditioner is a good example of that.
But anyhow, life doesn't imply order. If anything, life has increased entropy considerably, through chemical reactions and using energy. What you think of as "order" has nothing to do with the scientific term.
First you say:
The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
Then you say:
So we need a citation for your nonsense. I don't think you have any proof, either.
So because you cannot provide the evidence you claimed, your opponents should provide proof?
Do you not know or care about the difference between evidence and proof? Or that you've been called out on a lie?
The marketing departments of a number of failed businesses used the same math. You didn't show what the possibility is, you showed what all you don't know.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing is unique compared to its '90s counterpart except the name...
I sincerly hope that if there are aliens out there, we'll never find them, or rather, they never find us. As life on Earth is 3 billion years old, and the aliens can't be less developed than we are, give or take a few centuries, or they wouldn't transmit signals we can detect, there's a 99.9% chance that they are more developed than we are. Not by a decade, but probably by a few million years. A few million years ago, the most intelligent life on earth was as smart as cows. So, if aliens find us, they won't consider us equals, they will see us as live stock or zoo animals, or worse, as food. So for heavens sake, don't let them find us. There should be a global ban on sending out signals that aliens can detect, and there should be prison time for people who try to contact alien life forms.
no, I don't have a sig
First, to share the link that was going around on google+. Here is a shot of a galaxy similar to our own with a yellow dot to show how far radio waves would travel out from the center of the yellow dot in 200 light years.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2107061/Earth-calling-Tiny-yellow-dot-shows-distance-radio-broadcasts-aliens-travelled.html
From this you can see our efforts are puny.
The Arecibo message is now revealed to be a complete joke. It was aimed at a cluster 25,000 ly away which will be in a different place by the time our carefully crafted bitmap arrives from 1974, and of course it would take 50,000 years for any reply to come from that message if it had been aimed properly. I feel the current SETI efforts are in the same minor league of effort as this.
The other thought I have, to expand on another made here about use of light... What about these gamma ray bursts which arrive here once in awhile and show enormous releases of energy? Has anyone considered that they could be the equivalent of flashing a light in your eyes to see if you are paying attention? We don't have the means to produce such a burst of energy, and so it was assumed this must be a natural event. But we are thinking of our technology and our scale of capability. It doesn't mean there isn't another being capable of massive energy releases like this, to act as a lighthouse beam of sorts
Hmm... Why do we assume aliens are friendly ? What if they exhausted their natural resources ? What if they are looking for a source of food and we look like cows to them ? I don't think it's a good idea to assume E.T. is friendly. I don't think I watched way too much sci fi in my lifetime. I just think we really need to be careful.
Time to unearth my speak and spell.
"You killed my yogurt!" --Fred Fredburger
And you showed that you have no comprehension of mathematics. Turn in your geek card.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
You're right. I'm terrible at math, I used to work ib marketing. And... we used the same sort of math to project our profits!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
And yet you've never heard of the Drake Equation.
Lemme guess. Bookkeeper? Accounts clerk? Harvard MBA?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
And yet you've never heard of the Drake Equation.
Yes, I have, and you are misunderstanding it.
Lemme guess. Bookkeeper? Accounts clerk? Harvard MBA?
I can see we have a reading comprehension problem in general, here, as opposed to just the one that prevents you from understanding what the significance of that equation is. I just said I was bad at math and I was in marketing. Why would you compliment me by asking if I was a bookkeeper, accounts clerk, or even an MBA?
Anyway, you're misunderstanding it in a way that is hilariously similar to the way I've seen a marketing department fail. Let's boil it down:
"If one in a thousand planets meets some criteria that means there's billions of them out there!"
That's not a measurement of data you know. It's an indicator of what you don't know. The key word? If. Since you do not know what the conditions are for life to exist anywhere, all you're saying is: "Welp, there's lotsa places to look!" That may sound like it means lots of life is out there, but since you're missing the key info of what it takes to get life started on an average planet, it doesn't mean anything.
I'll put it another way, at the company I did marketing work for, we figured that the market we were entering our product into made something like 15 billion a year. So the math we used was: "If we sold our product to just one percent of those people, we'd be raking in tens of millions of dollars!"
We all nodded our head in agreement, hilariously unaware of how stupid we were. You see, we didn't factor in one crucial bit of the equation: Nobody wanted our product. Anything times zero is zero.
I don't imagine you're going to let this soak in, and that's fine. Just remember that a similar style of math was used to prove that we never actually landed on the moon. Turns out there's a less than one percent chance of safely landing a man there. Who know we could beat the odds so consistently?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
Evidence? You are jesting, right? Nobody has even formulated a single alternative theory about the origins of life. Evidence? There is none.
Whether or not there's intelligent life out there, I seriously doubt that we would recognise any alien signals as communication.
Some SF on this subject:
A strange discovery
We still haven't found extraforgostnic life
Both look at it from the perspective of aliens looking for us.
Free Martian Whores!
The odds are that there's life in other solar systems, and even greater (almost a certainty) that there's life elsewhere in the universe, but considering how slow EMF travels through the incredible distances between stars, it's also highly unlikely we'll come into contact with any of it any time soon.
There are only a handful of stars within 50 light years, and odds are good that there's no intelligent life on any of them. Odds are even greater that we could never communicate with them even if we knew they were there.
Free Martian Whores!