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.

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: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!