Extraterrestrial Contact?

[Brown]

From ABC News: (http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/SciTech/reuters20030312_603.html) Using 4 million computers worldwide, scientists based at the University of California, Berkeley said on Wednesday that they have identified about 150 sources of possible signals from intelligent civilizations.Before contact can be confirmed, however, the researchers plan to check out the signals with a radio telescope in Puerto Rico.The leading candidate signals compiled over more than three years of work are the ones that were particularly strong or have been observed in the same spot more than once, researchers said.

While scientists involved in the project are cautious about their chances of actually discovering a signal from an intelligent being in outer space this time, they believe they are on the right track for the future.Anybody want to take bets on whether any of these signals will pan out?

[Alaric]

Ive heard that chances are they are nothing. SETI gets them, flails its recievere back and forth across the portion of sky they origionated from, and then discovers they are just enviromental or whatever.


It would be great though. BTW- remember SETI@home ? Apparently we all made a computer pumping out 5 terraflops or something of data. What an amazing idea that was.

[Bluegill]

Originally posted by Brown
Anybody want to take bets on whether any of these signals will pan out?

Bets, huh? I'd be willing to pay off ten-to-one (limit: $1,000 payoff) that none of the signals will pan out.

What's really nice about that, though, is that either way, I win! If I end up paying out the thousand dollars, I wouldn't care...I'd be too distracted by the coolness of it.

[garys_2k]

One of the signals will probably include old television images of Hitler and include plans for a trans-dimensional contact craft. All we need now is a good looking starlet to pilot it.

[scotth]

Originally posted by Alaric
Ive heard that chances are they are nothing. SETI gets them, flails its recievere back and forth across the portion of sky they origionated from, and then discovers they are just enviromental or whatever.


It would be great though. BTW- remember SETI@home ? Apparently we all made a computer pumping out 5 terraflops or something of data. What an amazing idea that was.

This is seti@home, same project.

BTW, the average for the last 24 hours was 53 teraflops. That is a measure of computational performance and not an amount of data.

A "flops" = floating point operation per second. A floating point operation is a non integer math calculation.

53 teraflops would be 53 trillion (53,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.

[rwald]

Personally, I think that everyone using Seti@home should switch to Folding@home, a similar project which uses the massive computing power to solve some problems regarding protein folding. Protein folding is very important for creating new drugs, etc, and I think a far more valuable cause than looking for extraterestrial life which probably wouldn't send signals in our direction anyway. (And what if they did? We couldn't have a dialog with them, because of the distance.)

[Baggle]

Sounds cool, rwald. My router is a 450Mhz FreeBSD box sitting in a corner with an average CPU load of 0.00%. I might as well put it to work:) Linkage?

edit- answered my own question. www.foldingathome.com should've known....

-Baggle

[rwald]

Actually, as ironic as it seems, the link you posted is wrong. I was thinking of the Stanford project (link: http://folding.stanford.edu/). Of course, the two may be related, but I personally am not so sure.

[Baggle]

Ha. Should've known. Sneaky Canadian bastards.

In any case, the foldingathome.com program is what I'm going to be using since the one you linked to does not support FreeBSD and only that wannabe Linux.

Just remember this; FreeBSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for people who hate Microsoft:) Actually, I know my way around UNIX, but I am no pro. I know enough to set up an install of FreeBSD to function as a router/etc without a graphical interface, but not much more than that. So, please, no questions about it in PMs, because I won't know much....

-Baggle

[BillyJoe]

Is Bluegill Stephen Hawking in disguise?

[Kiri]

Originally posted by BillyJoe
Is Bluegill Stephen Hawking in disguise?

Don't think so- I can understand Bluegill.

[Skeptical Greg]

Everyone is welcome to join my Folding team..

DiogenesTeam (http://www.grid.org/services/teams/team.htm?id=70EA99FE-447B-44BA-B337-E01369A6AE38)

We are working on smallpox vaccines...:)

[rwald]

BillyJoe, was that a reference to Hawking's famous bet about black holes? (For those who don't know what I'm talking about, Hawking, who created many of the theories about black holes, once bet a fellow scientist that black holes do not exist. His reasoning? "If black holes are proven to not exist, much of my work will be discredited, so this way, at least I'll get some money from it.")

[BillyJoe]

Yes.

[gnome]

Does JREF have a Seti@home team?

[BillyJoe]

No.

[Always Free]

I used to be all a quiver at the thought of making first contact but not anymore. I don't think it is a good idea to advertise where we are, who we are, how advanced we are.

As for Voyager, well it will probably end up destroyed by a meteor
or some space object, never to be found.

Did any of you guys see 'Independence Day'?? LOLOL!

[Mr. Skinny]

Originally posted by gnome
Does JREF have a Seti@home team?
Look here (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/stats/team/team_75256.html) gnome.

[Bluegill]

Originally posted by BillyJoe
Is Bluegill Stephen Hawking in disguise?

:(

Now I must change names again. I'm always giving away too much.

[gnome]

Originally posted by rwald
Personally, I think that everyone using Seti@home should switch to Folding@home, a similar project which uses the massive computing power to solve some problems regarding protein folding. Protein folding is very important for creating new drugs, etc, and I think a far more valuable cause than looking for extraterestrial life which probably wouldn't send signals in our direction anyway. (And what if they did? We couldn't have a dialog with them, because of the distance.)

On the other hand, I believe the philosophical and scientific implications would be staggering. It's a super long shot... and the payoff is not in practical applications, but in knowledge. Particularly knowledge about ourselves. By studying another intelligent lifeform, we will learn a lot about what makes us human.

The folding project sounds terribly useful also, don't get me wrong. I think both projects are worthy.

[PygmyPlaidGiraffe]

Originally posted by Always Free
I used to be all a quiver at the thought of making first contact but not anymore. I don't think it is a good idea to advertise where we are, who we are, how advanced we are.



I wear a tin foil hat just in case mind-reading, space-faring ET life buzz this planet. Around that tin foil hat, I place a wet towel to interfere with signals that may be transmitted from any alien-implanted tracking devices placed there without my ken.


Where does the following come from?

The question is not whether or not you are paranoid, but whether or not you are paranoid enough.

I think Mel Gibson says something along those lines in the movie: Conspiracy Theory .

[arcticpenguin]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2900000/2900637.stm

Surprise, surprise, none of the candidate signals panned out.

[Always Free]

Originally posted by PygmyPlaidGiraffe


I wear a tin foil hat just in case mind-reading, space-faring ET life buzz this planet. Around that tin foil hat, I place a wet towel to interfere with signals that may be transmitted from any alien-implanted tracking devices placed there without my ken.


Where does the following come from?

The question is not whether or not you are paranoid, but whether or not you are paranoid enough.

I think Mel Gibson says something along those lines in the movie: Conspiracy Theory .

Boy you are sure paranoid. Me too!! LOL! I'm gonna go and make one of those fancy tinfoil hats. You never know who is listening in:eek:

[gnome]

Originally posted by arcticpenguin
http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/sci_tech/newsid_2900000/2900637.stm

Surprise, surprise, none of the candidate signals panned out.

It isn't over yet... there were no obvious signs found, but the data has yet to be thoroughly processed. It is going to be farmed out to Seti@home users soon for the final analysis.

From http://www.planetary.org/stellarcountdown/reobservations_7.html


With 18 hours of observation behind them, the SETI@home team still hasn't found any clear sign of ET. The current evaluations, however, are based only rough analysis in real time. The final results from the observations will have to wait until all the recorded data is parsed out into work-units and sent out to personal computers around the world. Only after SETI@home users process the data on their machines and send it back to Berkeley, will the SETI@home crew have a real notion of the results of their quest.

Also bear in mind, the SETI@home project only scanned a fraction (I think about 1/5) of the sky. If, say, there are only a small handful of signals to be received, it wouldn't defy probability that all of them happened to be out of the search area.

http://www.planetary.org/stellarcountdown/sky_map.html
(in the image, the gray area is the searched area)

I believe they plan an even more comprehensive search for the next phase:

http://www.planetary.org/stellarcountdown/reobservations_8.html