SETI to Upgrade Software, Telescope

Professor_Quail writes "Space.com reports that SETI@home is planning to transfer it's operations from Arecibo to another telescope in Australia, where they say lies an increased chance of finding extra-terrestrials. The Australian telescope is more powerful, with a wider view of the sky; scientists are betting that this new telescope will also help find signs of 'shriveling' black holes."

FYI: Parkes "stared" (pardon the pun) ...

[N Monkey]

Parkes is the radio telescope that stared in the movie "The Dish" which describes when it was used to receive the transmissions of the first moon landing.

Re:"Shriveling" black holes

[Xenographic]

Guess I should've read the article first:

According to Hawking's theory, "black holes give off radiation and therefore lose mass," Anderson explains. "So small black holes will basically kind of dry up and go away. In the moment of their disappearance, the theory predicts that they will give up a short burst of broad band radio radiation. Our data from Arecibo is an ideal place to look for that sort of thing."

SETI future

[jukal]

See the original "future directions" page [berkeley.edu] at berkeley.edu - which is the best source for knowing where SETI is going.

The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico receives information from about one third of the sky, all in the northern celestial hemisphere. But what if ET is lurking in the southern skies? The Parkes telescope in Australia is the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere and can observe all of the southern sky. Fortunately, SETI colleagues in Australia have agreed to colloborate with SETI@home and host a new data recorder at Parkes. Work on this new SETI@home data recorder is well under way. The new instrument will record data from 13 places on the sky simultaneously, observing 13 "beams" at a time compared to the 1 "beam" at Arecibo. We are trying to raise funds to conduct these southern hemisphere observations for SETI@home. Funding permitting, we expect the new data recorder to be installed and operational at Parkes in early 2003. For more information on the Southern Hemisphere SETI@home plans, see "SETI@home Gearing to Expand the Search" at the Planetary Society

They also name "AstroPulse - the search for pulsars, ET, and black holes" and "To support future projects we are developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)"

There is also the planned project time line until 2005.

As an employee of SETI@home ...

[muon1183]

and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article. SETI@home has been collecting data at the Arecibo radio telescope for the last several years, and we have observed pretty much everything that is visible from that location. We are building a new data recorder that will be capable of observing broadband data/many independent narrow bands, and we will be using this to observe in Australia. We have also applied to re-observe any interesting locations we have found at Arecibo, using this new equipment.

For the last several years, we have been using the data we have gathered for several purposes, amongst which are mapping the Hydrogen distrobution in the milky way and searching for SETI. We are about to start a new project that will search for broadband pulses (which must be very short in durration), which can be encoded to have a reverse dopler effect, which would be a clear sign of ET. However, a normal pulse would be a sign of an evaporating black hole, which has been predicted but never observed.

This new project will run on a system called BOINC [berkeley.edu], the Berkeley Open Infrasturcture for Network Computing (yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License). However, BOINC is not limited to running only Astro-Pulse (the previously mentioned project) and the next generation of SETI@home, but will also be running other independent distributed computing projects. More information is available at the BOINC [berkeley.edu] and SETI@home [berkeley.edu] websites.

Re:Is that such a good idea?

[Big Mark]

"Well, you see black holes compress matter- it's like a thick-spot in space, since a mass the size of Jupiter can fit into the size of a strawberry. Imagine for a moment how many thousands of alien civilizations could fit inside these black holss..." Black holes are singularities - that is, a single point in space with an infinite density. Nothing can live there, as everything is shredded into it's component sub-atomic particles before they even get there. They are formed by the collapse of massive bodies in on themselves - a favourite is when white dwarfs (the still-beating hearts of dead stars) accrete too much matter and go over a critical limit (something like 1.6 solar masses. I'm not too sure on this, and my textbooks are so far away...) leading to them collapsing in on themselves and a black hole forming. You can't get closer to a black hole and return from it than it's event horizon, the surface around it where the escape velocity is >= the speed of light. Well, you can, but you won't be around to tell the tale! If a hole is rotating there is a region known as the ergosphere where it is possible to get the universes most impressive gravitational slingshot from. Even a small black hole takes around 10^60 years to evaporate. The universe is about 1.4x10^9 years old. It's gonna be a long time until the black holes start disappearing, never mind the supermassive ones at the heart of galaxies. Physics is great.

Re:Dear Maude

[loraksus]

check out firedaemon, lets you run progs as a service under 2k / nt, also lets you assign processors per service, priorities etc
only thing is, if the seti client can't find a wu, it quits, writes an error to the app log, firedaemon restarts it, etc etc and the app log fills up damn fast.
firedaemon is also quite stable.
I'm lazy google the thing :)

Re:Dear Maude

[Anonymous Coward]

> Yes I'm aware there is a command line client, it is a main in the ass to get running
> and have STAY running for many people.

setiloop.sh:

#!/bin/sh

while true
do
nice ./setiathome
sleep 3600
done

Re:Grammar, man, grammar

[Raven42rac]

The phrase "Come on, people." happens to be a sentence fragment. This is the /. message boards, not Harvard School of Law, the internet has always been a pretty casual environment, basically, if you know what someone means, it doesnt matter if they write like a Rhodes Scholar, or a layman. Lighten up a little, you will find yourself with lower blood pressure, and chicks will dig you.

Re:Strong Evidence Found

[Crazieeman]

There is no logical reason why one part of the sky will have more chance of detecting a signal than any other.

Yes there is. The Arecibo radio telescope is situated in the northern hemisphere, which can only view the outer arms of the Milky Way. Not only that, Aricebo can only sweep 30 degrees of the sky with 1 beam.

Parkers is in the southern hemisphere, which can view the central dense mass (laymans' term - lots of freaking stars in the middle) of the Milky Way, and sweep 70 degrees of the sky with 13 beams.

In other words, we went all over 30 degrees in the northern hemisphere, lets take a look at the highly populated (star-wise) section of the Milky Way in the unscanned southern hemisphere with a bigger and better telescope.

Common sense, really.

If you don't give a heck to seti@home

[Ilgaz]

If you really don't believe in that project, you can do something would have more direct implications.

go to http://www.intel.com/cure and pick UD (United Devices,founded by seti@home project guy) Cancer project.

Phase 1 has ended, now they run Phase 2. Its running as IDLE process and no problems here. (runs non stop for 97 days here I read) Only for win32 though :(

I mean nothing is more stupid than an idle processor 24/7 while it can help something.

Oh btw, I am not against seti@home in anyway.

State of open sourceness of the BOINC+plugins?

[Anonymous Coward]

> yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License

Will the whole S@H part be also open source?

This far it has been rather questionable why S@H has been closed source. The explanations given by S@H staff hasn't hold water as there has been presented a way how many of the benefits of open source in a security sense can be accomplished without being truly open source:

[geocities.com]
http://www.geocities.com/usenet_j/vadcosl.html
VADCOSL - Volunteer Assisted Distributed Computing Open Source License

I remember lenghtly debate about the issue in USENET few months ago.

Um..maybe not powerful...

[Netdoctor]

The Australian telescope is more powerful, with a wider view of the sky

Okay, picky picky this one, but I think you mean more sensitive. We're not blasting the aliens with Ricky Martin (maybe they didn't like that, hence the move), we're listening here.

Bigger dishes and arrays have the advantage of higher signal gain and different far field patterns (listening area shapes).

You gotta have more gain to overcome loss of signal due to air, noisy equipment, and the like. You don't get many choices on moving a dish the size of a small town really, so you gotta move.

Dan N7NMD/9W2DU

Re:Aliens down under?

[N Monkey]

On a more serious note, are these characters saying that there are more advanced stellar civilizations in the southern sky than the northern sky? One shudders at the contorted logic and statistical analysis that could have led to such a conclusion.

It's a perfectly logical conclusion if you've ever looked into the night sky in the southern hemisphere. A larger amount of the milkyway is visible from "Down Under" and, given the relative proximity of our own galaxy's stars, it would seem a better set of candidates.

Simon

Re:Multibeam reciever

[pomakis]

The main advantage of using a multibeam receiver, as stated in the article, is to filter out noise from the Earth. If the same signal is received from different points in the sky (even if they're only slightly different), then it's almost definitely a signal that originated on Earth and is simply bouncing off the atmosphere. Being able to filter out false positives like this is extremely advantageous to the SETI program.

Re:The difference with SETI@home

[Duncan3]

Folding@home out of Stanford and a couple other NON-commercial projects are doing very fundamental research, and will never "generate money" but do generate plenty of published research. But you're right that you do have to do your homework when picking what projects to do - you may just need to do a little more homework ;)

Re:The difference with SETI@home

[Anonymous Coward]

Must have been a while since you checked. Try going here [stanford.edu] (Stanford Folding@Home download page).

Re:Not actually Parkes

[jmauro]

The both recieved transmissions from the first moon landing, but the dish at Huneysuckle Creek was not the right size to receive television pictures all that well. The first pictures were from Goldstone in California and Honeysuckle Creek, (switching between the two to find the best picture) but after Parkes came into view seven minutes into the broadcast, all the pictures came from Parkes.

SETI can't work

[SiliconEntity]

If advanced alien civilizations existed in numbers significant enough for us to hear their radio transmissions, the probability is overwhelming that at least one in a nearby galaxy would have embarked on a program of colonization. Evolution favors organisms which have a drive to expand (otherwise they would have been out-competed). Technological civilizations inherit their evolutionary drives and will share this expansionist tendency.

Expansion can be performed at a significant fraction of the speed of light. von Neumann machines - self-replicating, nanotech-based robotic spacecraft - can fly to a new system, make copies for exploration and colonization, and more copies which get sent off to other stars, all using local system resources. An entire galaxy or even group of galaxies can be explored and colonized at perhaps a tenth the speed of light. A million years will be enough to cover all the stars in a galaxy; a few times that will cover the local group of galaxies.

Once a solar system is inhabited by a technological civilization, its most important goal will be to manage the primary resource, the energy production of the central star. Stars in unmodified systems radiate 99+% of their energy wastefully into empty space. A civilization will want to capture that energy and put it to work, by building a Dyson sphere or some similar structures to collect the wasted light and heat from the star. Star systems inhabited by advanced civilizations will look very different from the ones we see in our galaxy.

The galaxy is ten billion years old. Our technological culture is no more than a few thousand years old. If other technological species have arisen, chances are statistically overwhelming that they are at least tens or hundreds of millions of years ahead of us. This means that they will have had ample time to fully explore, colonize and even modify the entire galaxy.

The only plausible way this can't happen is if there are no other technological civilizations out there. And in that case, SETI won't work, we won't find any signals. That's the only reasonable conclusion we can draw from the fact that we live in a galaxy unmodified by technology.

If the galaxy were so full of advanced life that SETI would work, they'd be here, and everywhere else in the galaxy, by now. Therefore SETI can't work.

Re:If they are gonna upgrade the software.....

[SETIGuy]

Under BOINC [berkeley.edu] there is more of a separation between the communications code and the data processing code. The data processing code is essentially a separate application controlled by the BOINC client

The BOINC client will know how many CPUs you have, how many you are willing to use for processing, and what fraction of your CPU time you want to spend on each of the BOINC projects you have joined. Application binaries can be cryptographically signed to verify origin. BOINC will cache workunits by default, with disk usage limits set by the user. BOINC will support multiple servers. Donation credits will be based upon the amount of work done (FLOPs, int ops, network bandwidth, disk space, etc.) If one project runs out of data, or the servers go down, you machine will devote time to the other projects you've joined.

We're really trying to address all of the lessons we learned throughout SETI@home. And, if there are some we missed, the server/client code is open source, and will be available on sourceforge. Project specific code can be open source or not as the people behind each project desire.

Re:Dear Maude

[eheien]

BOINC will allow for multiple applications running at once (processes rather than threads) so this solves your worker thread concern. As for your other question, SETI@home data are also being used in generating a neutral hydrogen map of the galaxy, as well as (eventually) in AstroPulse.

Other concerns mentioned here involved the autodownloading of executables in BOINC. We're taking security very seriously in BOINC, and are using MD5 and 1024 bit RSA encryption to protect against malicious attacks, as well as other general design techniques. Finally, the issue of optimization. Since BOINC is open source, you can optimize it however you want, but there won't be much gain since BOINC itself does very little processing. As far as I know there's still no decision on whether to optimize the SETI@home science.

For more information, you can check out the BOINC source [sf.net] and BOINC documentation [berkeley.edu]

Great, fresh data

[DrewK]

About time, recently restarted seti@home after a lengthy absence and the work units were dated 1999. While the project is interesting, who wants to re-analyze 3 year old data for the 1000th time.