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.."

Comments

Re:Earth

[sehlat]

Because closer to home, like within 100,000 miles of Washington, the odds are VERY low.

Better idea

[devleopard]

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.

Re:Better idea

[LivinFree]

I thought the same thing. Although, from the site:
> One of the hardest parts of hunting for signals
> from space is separating what might be an ET
> signal from the earth-based RFI sources. We
> think that human eyes, and our amazing brains,
> should be better than a computer at finding
> interesting signals in the noise.

So it's an attempt to use the brain to manually pick out patterns? (I can't tell yet because the site may be overloaded - I get a "Loading..." screen but no updates.

I'm not sure that's a great idea, since the brain tends to make associations even if none truly exist.

Re:Better idea

[AdrianKemp]

the brain tends to make associations even if none truly exist.

Bingo.

I see one of two possible scenarios:

1. A person is concentrating so hard on ignoring earth-based signals that they mistake anything that could possibly be there as one and any potential discovery is missed.

2 (far more likely). SETI suddenly gets reports of eight million new signals because as you say, we're far too good at seeing patterns in noise.

Re:Better idea

[The Grim Reefer]

I knew a few people that worked at AOL in it's heyday. At one point AOL was one of the biggest contributors (cpu cycle wise) to SETI@home. I don't think it was a corporate idea. I believe that someone started installing it for their own personal reason and a sizable part of the company seemed to think it was a good idea.

Re:Better idea

[DigiShaman]

But costed the company in terms of an increased power bill. You're lucky you weren't using modern GPU and CPU technology. Depending on how many powerful workstations you have in an office environment, you might pop the circuit breaker searching for ET.

Re:Better idea

[arth1]

Thin provisioning for power is not a good idea. It will bite you in the rear, hard, the first time you have a power outage, and when the electricity comes back every device turns on and all the UPSes start charging as fast as they can, simultaneously.
That buys you another power outage.

Re:Better idea

[sg_oneill]

Your missing a key point though. Human brains make associations where none exist precisely for the same reason they are good at what computers are not.

Human brains are amazingly powerful pattern recognizers. We pick up almost any pattern that exists. Sometimes however those patterns are not significant and we get confused by it, but in this case, SETI just wants *any* pattern to be picked up. The RFI junk can be filtered out easily enough, but its finding the patterns thats hard. Its better to find all the patterns that exist but include some that are not significant, then not find any including the ones that are significant

I already donated to an alien life search company

[VinylRecords]

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.

Brilliant idea

[Arancaytar]

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.

Re:Brilliant idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Confirmation bias isn't an issue. Citizen Science works by people characterising various signals - such as categorising galaxies or pointing out transits in light curves. When someone flags up a potential find, the software then farms it out to multiple people. The current target for Galaxy Zoo is 30, which they deem enough for the moment. In addition the software does sneaky things like inverting images because apparently orientation is a big factor in whether you percieve a galaxy to be rotating clock or anti-clockwise.

Similar approaches apply to the Planet Hunters site:

We will always identify the simulated transit points in red after you’ve classified the star and list the radii and period of the simulated planet we injected into the light curve. The reason we don’t identify the simulated data first, is that if you knew the lightcurve had simulated events you might look at it differently. To be able to use the data from the simulated transits accurately, we need them to be examined in exactly the same conditions as the real lightcurves.

The people organising these sites know very well what humans are capable of misconstruing.

Is SETI wasting its time?

[Froggels]

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.

Re:Is SETI wasting its time?

[fyngyrz]

They are wasting their time if the (presumed) radio signals signals are like ours -- planet bound and not intended for other ears. If, however, someone is sending something this way intentionally, then it's well within the bounds of reason that we could hear it. With the relatively simple creation of an antenna and transmitter system in space, there's no reason a signal we could hear couldn't be produced. In fact, this is likely the only way, because the portion of the spectrum SETI is listening in isn't likely to be used for communications on a planetary surface, or if so, certainly not at the radiated power levels and steady aim required to light up any sort of detection at this end.

However, I would ask, why not light? You have a handy sun nearby, radiating all manner of otherwise unused visible energy... all you need to aim, focus and modulate that -- are mirrors. Seems like an altogether easier project, and certainly less expensive, plus less likely to have technical problems.

Re:Is SETI wasting its time?

[jamstar7]

I can so see an alien Stephen Hawking come up with the brilliant idea of beaming radio pulses at this nearby G-type star (us), and getting funding for a couple years.

And then I can totally see the local legislature pulling the funding for all that 'Buck Rogers stuff that nobody will get any use out of' in favor of buying itself some more votes and/or shutting the local neocon-alikes up before they march on the government with pitchforks and torches to kill them because the thought of intelligent life other than on Zykos is an affront to the gods.

Re:And this is different from seti@home ?

[icebike]

Human eyes involved instead of computer algorithms.

Re:SETI can't detect earth-like civilizations

[Concerned Onlooker]

"Until SETI improves its resolution, this is all just masturbation."

Well, then, count me in!

Re:And this is different from seti@home ?

[CohibaVancouver]

how this is any different from seti@home, buzzwords aside

Unlike the SETI@home 'screensaver,' it probably doesn't permanently burn this image into your CRT's phosphors:

http://blog.sherweb.com/wp-content/uploads/seti_home_screen_l.gif

So, ...

[PPH]

... it has come to this.