SETI@Home Publishes Skymap 317
An anonymous reader writes "The skymap of where in the night sky to find the most promising SETI@Home signals is reported today, along with the research plan for the March Stellar Countdown project. The dedicated use of the Arecibo Telescope to revisit these spikes, pulses, and steady signals, focused on 166 star candidates. Those 166 were pruned from the five billion signals that have been found since 1999, depending on the signal's persistence, closeness to a known star, and frequency. The next step is particularly fascinating, if a signal appears to have increased since the first observation put that star on the checklist."
Should we be concerned... (Score:4, Interesting)
Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redundant (Score:5, Interesting)
That seems horribly inefficient!
Have the SETI people ever heard of cepstral [shef.ac.uk] techniques [libinst.com]?
There should be no need to iterate thousands of times over the pattern recognition algorithms when you can just take anouther FFT of the log magnitude spectrum to eliminate doppler shift (the same as what audio engineers would call 'pitch.') Cepstral analysis has been eliminating pitch in audio signal processing for decades. Too bad nobody told the astronomers.
What a waste of all those CPU cycles!
Will governments allow news to come out? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redunda (Score:2, Interesting)
A little OT but (Score:5, Interesting)
SETI was not the first distributed project (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that it'd be pointless, even if they did get a signal. It'd be a signal hundreds or thousands of years old.
Besides, Seti@home really helped to bring about this idea of 'distributed computing' to the world.
Pardon the pun, but what planet are you from? SETI was NOT the first, Distributed.net's RC5 challenge significantly predates the SETI@home client and was enormously popular. At least Distributed.net's ruler thing will be USEFUL.
Oh, and interesting to note that when SETI@home first started up, they ran out of data to process. So you know what they did? They just fed the same data back to clients, over and over and over again, without telling people- acting like they still had new data to process. A lot of people were furious, when someone realized it. The SETI@home project people wasted a lot of resources(power) for the sake of avoiding embarassment. Sorry, I don't have much respect for people who pull that kind of crap.
Re:Proximity to a star? (Score:5, Interesting)
Planets, as far our theories go, are generally formed during the creation of stars and seem to generally be captured in orbit around stars. (Of course, I doubt anyone has made a wide search for planets not close to stars.)
Thus, to look for life, look near stars.
Re:Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redunda (Score:3, Interesting)
If they were using the cepstrum to correct for doppler shift, they could get several thousand times speedup; much more than just four.
Re: Will governments allow news to come out? (Score:5, Interesting)
> Supposing SETI finds something, will the government let out the news to the general public?
Why would governments keep it secret when they could instead use it as a long-distance boogieman to justify increasing defense spending and cracking down on civil liberties?
Re:Doppler Drift Rate "chirping" seems way redunda (Score:3, Interesting)
I was under the impression that this had more to do with redundancy of complex data for purposes of security to ensure someone does not spoof data? If the analysis were to proceed by simply taking a derivative of the FFT and using that, the data would concievably be easier to forge? Perhaps this also is one of the reasons that the Seti@home crew is unwilling to make platform specific optimizations?
Re:A little OT but (Score:5, Interesting)
If life is common, the vast bulk will be single-cell goop, lichen, etc. The ones that go multi-cellular have a shot at intelligent species. Get intelligent, and you have fire, the wheel, and radio in short order.
The human race has had radio for 100 years or so: if we detect a signal from aliens, chances are that they have had radio for thousands or millions of years. We are almost certain to be the primitives in this case.
Interestingly, the radio age is probably extremely short-lived: signal compression, etc, should make any advanced race's radio look like noise to observers.
The WOW signal (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:SETI is a crock- here's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I don't think that the receivers used by SETI are sensitive enough to pick up anybody's omnidirectional signals. If we pick up anything at all, it would be because they are beaming massively powerful signals in a narrow beam directed specifically at our solar system. We certainly aren't going to stumble onto any random local alien TV broadcasts.
Re:A little OT but (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, our enlightened species would bring great things to these indiginous aliens. Wonders such as US approved democracy, shortsighted environmental regulation, and the commoditization of all things living and dead. The few "dollars" eked out by the free labor of the alien races could be brought right back to their liberators by making our race fashionable to their youngsters. Our race would be fashionable to their youngsters because we would be the haves which they fantisize they could become. We would bring them Brittany Spears, Coca-Cola, and C#. They would bring us chests full of gold. This synergistic relationship would be cemented into the rules of their law, and we would enjoy the bounty of their royalty-free culture.
Amen
Re:Straight Lines? (Score:2, Interesting)
Okay, looking at the map, the orange dots near the following locations are in lines:
7.2hr, +20 deg., near Gemini, 6 dots.
17hr, +20 deg., near Herculese, 6 dots.
14hr, +25 deg., near Booties, 5 dots.
The UFO statement was just a joke. But, I am curious as to why those orange dots do fall into a line on the map. I am just asking a question.
Up in the air (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to think we were simply looking into outer space with the SETI project and hearing complete silence. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. Even in the 'relatively quiet' radio bands, there's still a whole lot of signal going on, and by and large we can't tell it from noise.
The article mentioned is a bit humble when saying 'oh yes, there were more than 166 candidates'. Yes, there were a 'few' more, and it was pretty tough to pare the list down to something the Arecibo could be solidly used for, according to the Planetary Society [planetary.org]
Nor is the search in the radio band the be-all end-all to all the observation techniques; to that effect, there are a number of other observations and techniques [berkeley.edu] underway.
I suppose the "saddest" thing at the moment is that we honestly cannot currently tell the difference between "nobody's out there" and "ten billion civilizations are out there", due to our narrow and infrequent observation bands, our simplifying assumptions, and our limited processing power (think of the difference another 50... or even 10 years will make to that).
I suppose an additional question we might have to face if we hear an ET signal: how many people will play it backwards and hear Elvis or the Devil?
ET vs Cancer (Score:2, Interesting)
I look at in this way: What's the probability of finding intelligent life vs. the probability of me getting cancer.
I switched from seti@home to folding@home.
Re:Should we be concerned... (Score:4, Interesting)
uhh... no.
The Arecibo radio telescope is a fixed dish, which rotates along with the Earth. As the beam of the dish passes a constant power signal source in the sky, the power of the received signal will increase, peak, and decrease following a gaussian profile.
You are correct in the limitations of the dish, however. By pointing the detectors at different places on the dish, the beam can be moved in relation to the plane of the Earth's rotation. The Seti@Home equipment at Arecibo is capable of tracking +1 to +35 degrees declination, and has a beam width of 0.1 degrees. Thus it is only able to see 28% of the sky.
Seti@Home Whitepaper [berkeley.edu]
Power consumption of computers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Proximity to a star? (Score:4, Interesting)
[roughly, where can I learn more about chemosynthesis - based ecosystems?]
Try googling on "black smokers". Here's a quick overview: an introductory lecture about black smokers [oceansonline.com]
Re:Power consumption of computers (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually I live in Canada. In the winter we pretty much have to keep every heat producing appliance running just to keep the pipes from freezing. I need SETI just to keep the CPU pegged at 100% to keep the windows on that side of the house from frosting over.
Just kidding, obviously.
However, I was just responding to a question from another poster asking a legitimate question: Does a computer actually use more power while it's working than when it's just sitting there? The answer is yes, and I tried to explain why.
Also, let's say we're not just talking about your computer, but let's say you run it on your office computer. If every computer in an office uses $20 or even $10 more per month for electricity because everyone is running SETI@Home, then the owner of the business has a legitimate financial reason to not allow it on his or her network. On a 100 computer network, that could be $12,000 to $24,000 more per year in electricity costs.
Re:Proximity to a star? (Score:3, Interesting)
I gues why searching near stars is the preferred approach. Although civilizations might exist away from a star, more likely they exist near a star.