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Space Science

SETI Goes to Arecibo To Stat *Candidates* 208

Posted by Hemos from the peering-into-the-future dept.
Neuropol writes "In the most rescent Seti@home news letter. Seti recieved (only!) 24 hours of telescope time at Arecibo to investigate interesting points in the sky where signals have not only shown up once but several times in data crunches in the last 4 years. The Planetary Society web site has an excellent summary of the reobservations. The Seti web site lists the reobservation targets and the 7,000 users whose computations directly contributed to finding them."
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SETI Goes to Arecibo To Stat *Candidates* More

SETI Goes to Arecibo To Stat *Candidates*

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  • This sucks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CptChipJew ( 301983 ) * <michaelmiller@gmail . c om> on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:23AM (#6093979) Journal
    Regardless of how you feel about Seti@Home's mission, whether or not it's worthwhile, I think 24 hours is quite a bit short.

    • Re:This sucks (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Drakin ( 415182 )
      24 hours is a bit short, yes. But I beleive getting time on the big radio telescopes is a difficult feat to start with.

      At least they were able to reschedual the 2nd and 3rd 8 hour periods, seeing solar flares washd out the original dates.
    • 3 days where you observe 1/3-1/2 the day is a very typical length of time for an observing run.

      [TMB]

  • Aw man (Score:5, Funny)

    by ericdano ( 113424 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:23AM (#6093980) Homepage
    My name is not on the list. Damn. Oh well, I hope we find something regardless.

    • Re:Aw man (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pe1rxq ( 141710 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:38AM (#6094026) Homepage Journal
      Me neither....
      Lets just say that with us checking the rest we made it possible for these lucky guys to find a real hit :)

      Jeroen

    • Re:Aw man (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:43AM (#6094037) Journal
      My name is not on the list. Damn. Oh well, I hope we find something regardless.

      Well, as someone who *did* make it to the list...

      I feel exactly the same as you do.

      I don't care about some top-6000 candidates list (although I will admit, I did originally hope to make it to the top 1000 overall... But failed, sigh. Just couldn't compete with the likes of SGI and Pixar <G>).

      I care that maybe, just maybe, all that otherwise-wasted CPU power went toward helping us find the first real proof of intelligent life off-planet.

  • father figure (Score:5, Funny)

    by Debian Troll Returns ( 678069 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:24AM (#6093982) Homepage Journal
    let's just hope that if they ever find anything using SETI that it's not fucking jodie foster's dad.

  • i thought (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Madcapjack ( 635982 )
    I thought that I had read a couple weeks ago that the SETI reinvestigations had turned up nothing. I think i read this on google news...

    • Re:i thought (Score:4, Informative)

      by Troed ( 102527 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:56AM (#6094070) Homepage Journal
      this [planetary.org] article?

      Although the SETI@home team was ready to pounce on any possible extraterrestrial signal the minute it was detected, nothing resembling such a signal was detected in real time, during the observations. This, however, is no cause for discouragement: real-time analysis is very rough, and would only detect the strongest and most obvious extraterrestrial signals.

    • Re:i thought (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Wolfrider ( 856 )
      --Personally, I'd rather be sending astronauts into space and developing a permanent presence there (moonbases anyone? saturn exploration anyone? asteroid mining? ... Bueller?) rather than listening intently for some stupid signal that might never arrive.

      • Re:i thought (Score:4, Informative)

        by el-spectre ( 668104 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @06:16AM (#6094268) Journal
        well, if it's a stupid signal, why bother... 'take me to your, er... duuhhhh'

        Seriously though, it's not as though SETI is competing with space exploration in any serious way. Since it's been privatized (and even before, actually), the yearly budget for SETI is _much_ lower than the cost of launching the cheapest satellite. Interplanetary travel is orders of magnitude more expensive.

      • I just assumed that since every Brit get's a free trip to either Moonbase Alpha or Gallifrey every year that it happened in the USA as well. I guess that's why they told us to keep it under our hats.

      • Re:i thought (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Eminence ( 225397 ) <akbrandt@gmail.TEAcom minus caffeine> on Monday June 02, 2003 @06:25AM (#6094291) Homepage
        It is way cheaper to analyze radio data, especially in the way SETI@Home does it (using voluntary contributions of computing power and data being a side product of other observations) than to send even a single astronaut into low orbit. We should keep on sending people into space but projects like SETI@Home don't harm that effort any more than other astronomy research.
        • So when the extra-terristrial version of Cortez comes around, you'd like to be the Inca?
      • Personally, I'd rather be sending astronauts into space and developing a permanent presence there (moonbases anyone? saturn exploration anyone? asteroid mining?

        So would just about everybody else. But any permanent presence in space, let alone a self-sustaining independent presence, seems completely infeasible at this point. It will probably be another century or two until technology is up to that. Until then, we should focus on unmanned exploration.
        • > It will probably be another century or two until technology is up to that.

          --No. It shouldn't *have* to be that way! We put a man on the moon within 10 years due to Kennedy's vision and boldness, we should be able to say+do the same for a Moon base.

          --The US economy is stagnant because there are no "frontiers" anymore. We can *do* this, we just don't have the *will* or the *mandate* to do so.

          --I can't take credit for this idea (saw it on /. a few months ago) but I truly believe the economy would s
          • 15 years? I see you havn't talked about this idea in a crowd of real people. No industry is going to rush to a space based production system for a measly 15 year tax break. By the time they're finally getting stuff in orbit it'd be taxed again and you wouldn't even get back your ruinous launch costs, not to mention the enormous amount of R&D money, plus your competitors would no doubt invent better and cheaper ways to do whatever you're doing while you spend all of your time and effort trying to figu

  • First Light! ;-) (Score:5, Funny)

    by richie2000 ( 159732 ) <rickard.olsson@gmail.com> on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:30AM (#6094003) Homepage Journal
    Telescope geeks rejoice. But what should one say for a radio telescope? "First wave"?
    • Nah. . . It would probably be a Troll anyway. . .
    • I though radio signals were just light in another wavelength...so first light holds...of course this also means that Puerto Rico will be covered with clouds (or something to block the radio wavelengths :)
      • I though radio signals were just light in another wavelength.

        I'm no physics professor, but that probably depends on if you see it as a particle or a wave. As a particle, light is photons while radio is electrons. As waves, it's the same (EM radiation) and my post is just a lame attempt at a joke.

        I like to think of them as wavy particles, kinda like really fast sperm, hitting the eye. :-)

    • "First fringes", actually.

  • 24h is a lot (Score:4, Insightful)

    by imsabbel ( 611519 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:32AM (#6094010)
    Hey, this isnt your neigbours dish antenna, they got a whole day on the largest radio-telescope in the world. This thing has 300m diameter. Compare this to the fact that the "normal" data they use is from a insignificant, tiny telescope.
    • being the largest antenna and its SET IN THE ground - how they turn this thing?
      two things can happen:

      1) they turn it very very slowly - a lot of the 24 hr is wasted pointing the dish
      2) they don't turn it and wait until the dish points in the right place - a lot of the 24 hr is wasted waiting

      anybody knows?
      • Earth turns, does it not? Basically the huge dish sees what's right above it at any given time. 24h time allocation lets the reobservers see the whole sky. They just 'listen in carefully' at each reobservation point as the sky turns.

        They can also (I assume) do limited 'pointing' by turning the reception gear that is hanging at the center of the huge dish.

      • Re:exactly what i was wondering (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:56AM (#6094068)
        Mostly, they just observe what happens to be above as the earth turns. They can effectively move the viewing position by two degrees either way by moging the position of the receiver across the focus, and the tilt of the earths axis "nods" the view up and down over the year, so in a year they get to see about half the total sky. Lokk at the maps on the Seti@home page to see what they can see.

        For many purposes, Arecibo is quite restrictive; for seti@home, it is excellent - unless, of course, ET lives due north or south.
        • > unless, of course, ET lives due north or south...

          --Heh; I guess that's *one* way to hide in plain sight... One of my favorite theories is that they're just on the opposite side of the sun.

        • Inclination to galactic disc... (Score:4, Informative)

          by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @05:40AM (#6094186) Homepage
          For many purposes, Arecibo is quite restrictive; for seti@home, it is excellent - unless, of course, ET lives due north or south.

          The Milky way is quite "flat" when you look at the whole galaxy, so if the earth is rotating in the same plane, you should be able to hear quite much. Right "up" or "down" there probably won't be as many candidates. Anyone know on what "scale" we're listening? Would that even matter, or are we trying to listen "locally", galactically speaking.

          Kjella

          • Except that the Earth is tilted. Therefor, the Arecibo radio telescope doesn't point straight into the galactic disc.

            And it only looks flat when you view it from afar. Just look out at the night sky, and see how many stars are "North" of you, and how many are "South" of you. There are stars in the Southern hemisphere that can't be seen from the Northern hemisphere, and vice versa. Because of this, one could assume that since Arecibo has such a limited view of the sky, we could very well miss a star from wh
            • All of this is true, but it's also beside the point. Even if the Earth wasn't tilted with respect to the plane of the solar system, we still wouldn't have to worry about the Galaxy. In fact, there is no reason to expect that the plane of the solar system would be aligned with with the plane of the Galaxy (and, in fact, is not).

              And anyway, there is plenty of sky to look at with "just" 24 hours.
      • I'm a little fuzzy on the geometric and astronomic terms to ask this, but does the plane of the Earth's orbit come close to matching the galactic plane?

        If so, Arecibo could cover most of the galaxy, excluding the stars in the local neighborhood to the North or South.

        • I would imagine that the plane of Earth's orbit would be largely irrelevant, because the Earth's axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane. In other words, the Earth is "tilted."

          Unless the Arecibo radio telescope was so carefully planed that it was built juuust the right distance from the equator so as to be aligned with the galactic plane, it's either going to point "down" or "up", and either way that's largely away from the galactic disc.

    • Re:24h is a lot (Score:5, Informative)

      by zcat_NZ ( 267672 ) <zcat@wired.net.nz> on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:48AM (#6094051) Homepage
      Compare this to the fact that the "normal" data they use is from a insignificant, tiny telescope.

      Uhhhh no. The data they get is ALL from Arecibo, but most of the time it's just 'wherever it happens to be pointing for someone else's research'. The only difference is that for 24 hours they got to decide what it's pointed at.

  • Whew (Score:4, Funny)

    by Timesprout ( 579035 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:47AM (#6094047)
    Thank god they did not have more telescope time or they might have found my secret super villian orbital base where I am currently using the weightless environment to concoct a series of deadly patents which will allow me to take over the world.
    (insert evil laugh here)

  • What the signal will look like? (Score:5, Funny)

    by jabbadabbadoo ( 599681 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @04:51AM (#6094058)
    It'll be "intelligent noise". Any civilization capabable of sending radio signals will be poluting the universe with signals from various sources, just like we've done for the past 80 years.

    Perhaps if we're lucky, we'll receive the first episode of their SCI-FI series - "Pale Men From Earth!"

    • "just like we've done for the past 80 years"

      But not for much longer and definietly not on the frequencies Seti is searching. I give our current single carrier based broadcast signals another 70 years before they are completely replaced by cable, line of sight, spread specturm, laser or whatever. Any of which will substantially reduce power and/or off-planet radiation.

      SETI doesn't search the easy to use frequecies used by broadcast media because they would be swamped by terestrial signals. But they argue

    • Don't forget the sequel "Hunt them down and kill them", where they send huge ships to destroy our major cities for our infractions (which were "Baywatch" reruns in seven languages, causing all sorts of confusion).

      In it they plausibly assert that deciding to run the mothership on Apple Xserve's is a good idea because no major Earth government would defy the monopoly and run anything other than a Windows OS.

  • what if they missed it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MoFoYa ( 644563 )
    the 24 hrs were broken into 3 sets of 8 hrs. during the first set they reobserved 80something targets. passing over the area near each for a short time. so, ~10 targets an hr is about 6min each.

    what if the aliens took a 10 min break?

    or what if whatever organization on the alien world that signals to us was only allowed 1 day, and it was yesterday.

    a place as big as the universe could be constantly monitored for 1000's of years, and may still come up with nothing.

    • Re:what if they missed it (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Eminence ( 225397 ) <akbrandt@gmail.TEAcom minus caffeine> on Monday June 02, 2003 @06:18AM (#6094276) Homepage
      what if the aliens took a 10 min break? etc.

      Bad luck then. This is - to some extent - a game of chance. But you have to play it to have any chance to win.

    • > what if the aliens took a 10 min break?

      That would be akin to the entire Earth, with all transmissions from it, including all Tv/Radio/Cellular/Military/Naval/Commercial Comms/3D Holographic Programming (this is the Aliens transmitting, remember) switch off and take a 10 minute break at the same time. Ain't gonna happen.

      Unless they had some serious planetary moment-of-silence thing going on just when we looked.
    • what if the aliens took a 10 min break?

      SETI is looking for extremely narrow band signals, simply because we really don't have the technology to detect anything else at astronomical distances. An extremely narrow band signal is really only good for one thing; a beacon that simply runs all the time.

      That would be akin to the entire Earth, with all transmissions from it, including all Tv/Radio/Cellular/Military/Naval/Commercial Comms/3D Holographic Programming (this is the Aliens transmitting, remember) switc

  • Its just some aliens that were trying to hack SETI to increase their job numbers.

    Pay no attention to those scabs!

  • Only? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eericson ( 103272 ) <harlequinNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Monday June 02, 2003 @05:00AM (#6094077) Homepage
    I know 24 hours may not sound like a lot, but just consider all they other "hard" science projects out there competing for resources. Getting 3 days on one of the largest radiotelescopes in the world is actually quite an achievement. Especially if you consider than most scientists consider SETI to be a bunch of crackpots.

    -E2

    • Re:Only? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by el-spectre ( 668104 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @06:20AM (#6094283) Journal
      Kinda unfortunate that they are thought of that way. While the odds of contact soon are low, there's nothing wrong with the science or basic assumption that there is other life out there.

      • They seem to be doing a good job mapping, indexing and cataloguing the radio-map of the sky. I bet there are people on SETI who don't think there's a chance of finding an ET, they just want to check out and catalogue cool unexplained signals.

        SETI has also done a good job with distributed computing.

        They've also captured the interest of millions of people around the world.

      • Kinda unfortunate that they[SETI 'scientists] are thought of that way[as crackpots].

        Let's say tomorrow we get some green alien saying "Hello, anyone out there?". We reply, and a thousand years from now, his 500th generation hears "Yes!" Maybe they figure it out. Now what? It's like two single people meeting at a party. "Hi." "Hello." "Um, so...uh...send radio signals often?"

        Why shouldn't they be considered crackpots? The SETI people ignore all the basic facts- namely that any signal we could "se

        • We know that there are none within a couple of hundred light years? Really?

          I must have missed the memo. I was under the impression that we were just now (last 10 years or so) able to detect planets, and indirectly at that. I think it's a tad early to start declaring omniscience (sp?) and declare the search unworthy.

  • This is old news (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MoobY ( 207480 )
    The reobservations have been done halfway March (which is stated on the page that is linked too), so this is not really *news*. For now, there do not seem to be any interesting results from these reobservations.

  • Some precisions (Score:2, Insightful)

    by IIEFreeMan ( 450812 )
    In fact the re-observations happened a long time ago (in March i believe) but the scientists are preparing the data to analysed by the SETI@Home program. Apparently it is quite a hard task as they used different instruments than for their usual data.

    Last SETI Update : 21/05/2003 [planetary.org]

  • Dupe... :D (Score:2, Informative)

    by Seahawk ( 70898 )
    Latest research concludes that the average memory of a member of the online community "Slashdot", seems to be something less than 3 months(original story [slashdot.org])

    That, or the internet is severely lagged at the moment(There was that IP over avian carrier thingy...)

  • Patterns...... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PS-SCUD ( 601089 ) <peternormanscott&yahoo,com> on Monday June 02, 2003 @07:27AM (#6094470) Journal
    Please don't mod this a troll because It's not.

    I just find it fascinating, how the SETI project is looking for signals coming from outer space that have the tiniest pattern to them. Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life. But back on Earth, they have been studying DNA, which has an incredible pattern. Yet they say that it doesn't have an intelligent creator.

    • Patterns? - Read the protocols (Score:5, Informative)

      by ianscot ( 591483 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @08:27AM (#6094742)
      Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life.

      Who assumes that? Certainly not the SETI @ Home people.

      There are quite elaborate "protocols" for weeding through the many, many signal patterns the SETI project does hear, precisely because it ain't necessarily so. That's, um, a whole lot of what the SETI project is doing, if you would care to consider what all those home boxes are up to with their spare cycles.

      The most obvious example of a naturally occurring regular pattern -- mentioned prominently in the article /. linked to -- is pulsars, which tick away regularly and give off a very distinct radio signal pattern.

      (You really want to read a criticism or two of the "watch watchmaker" thing you're arguing. Go find a critique or two of Darwin's Black Box, which is basically the same argument made on the same, sub-molecular level that you're already thinking of.)

      • The most obvious example of a naturally occurring regular pattern is pulsars

        Interestingly enough, when pulsars were first discovered, some scientists thought they had to have some intelligence behind them because their rotational periods were too regular.

    • If this is not a troll, then it is certainly comparing apples with pears, DNA!= radiosignal.... Really, i can't, for the love of my life, imagine what you're trying to prove? creationism? or...... No. Doesn't make sense to me, sorry. Would you care to elaborate?


    • > I just find it fascinating, how the SETI project is looking for signals coming from outer space that have the tiniest pattern to them. Because, they assume, if it has a pattern, it was created by intelligent life. But back on Earth, they have been studying DNA, which has an incredible pattern. Yet they say that it doesn't have an intelligent creator.

      The atoms in a dog turd sport "an incredible pattern", yet no one claims that dog turds have intelligent creators.

    • It's easy to see "contradictions" when you throw in false assumptions.

      Intelligece tends to create complex patterns. Not all complex patterns are created by intelligence.

      (Human) intelligence often create arches. Not all arches are created by by intelligence. [wapers.com]

      Evolution is a powerful natural process of creating complex patterns. If there is a natural system undergoing evolution and emmiting radio signals they could contain arbitrarily complex patterns without intelligent creation. That would be a huge scien
    • Your ignorance is telling. Patterns are an indication that their MIGHT be an intelligence behind it, not that there MUST be an intelligence behind it. There are lots of things that develop complex, repeating patterns, life being a major one of them.

      There are in fact many distint differences between patterns generated by intelligence, patterns generated by Life, and patterns generated by non-living natural forces.

      Patterns generated by intelligence are less likely to be repeated quickly/nearby. (Libraries

  • Just out of curiosity, does Seti@home tell its users if they picked up any interesting data or patterns?

    I've been running this off and on for years, and the only thing they've sent me is congratulations emails for processing a certain number of data sets. So I wonder, if I did find something of interest, would they let me know?

    • But according to experiments I've been doing with the code I downloaded and ran for them, the bit throughput rate does seem to dip when I throw something interesting in there.

      For example, when my computer was working on the data in an area near the equator at the body of leo [planetary.org] (look at the third yellow square for leo--that's approximately the location), I mixed in some Elvis with the data, and got back a 20-second pause in the bitrate.

      I have to say: it's really been great to be able to analyze the dynami

  • that SETI is just trying to get free HBO for three days :-P

  • I can imagine the fun (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_Bionic_lemming ( 446569 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @07:53AM (#6094563)
    Seti: "Hey Look - We can confirm that this is a radio signal!"

    World:(begins to panic)"Really? How far away are they? How old's the signal?"

    Seti: "Well, these signals came from that star cluster over there about 950,000 years ago."

    World:(disappointed)"Almost a million years ago - and they never invented space travel"

    World: //scraps space plans

    • Re:I can imagine the fun (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Monday June 02, 2003 @08:05AM (#6094615) Journal
      Funny perhaps, but an interesting point - if we did detect something from 1M years ago, why would they have come our way in the meantime ?

      I mean, *light* has only just got here, and galactically speaking, we were pretty boring a million years ago (hell, in even inter-solar-system terms, we're pretty boring now!) I wouldn't get out of bed to travel a million light years to see if there's something here ...

      So, they may have colonised their entire sector/galaxy/galactic cluster using weirdo-science space travel; just because they didn't make it here yet, doesn't mean they didn't/couldn't...

      Simon.

  • /. made it (Score:2, Informative)

    by skamp ( 559446 )
    Seems like /. [berkeley.edu] is in the list, with less than a thousand units returned. Way to go!
  • What's this! I've returned 13,000+ WU's but my name's not on the list? Oh well, at least I can be happy knowing that I've helped science by BEING IN THE 99.555th PERCENTILE! YEAH!

    What, this is about science?

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