SETI To Release Data To the Public 150
log1385 writes "SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is releasing its collected data to the public. Jill Tarter, director of SETI, says, 'We hope that a global army of open source code developers, students, and other experts in digital signal processing, as well as citizen scientists willing to lend their intelligence to our exploration, will have access to the same technology and join our quest.'"
Modern data is "random" (Score:2, Interesting)
Access the raw data we have published at setiQuest and show us how to process it in new ways, find signals that our current signal detection algorithms are missing.
I suggest looking for data that fits too closely with white noise. Modern human digital data is highly compressed, and as such is nearly indistinguishable from random bits. Images, Music, Movies... the bulk of the traffic on the internet looks like random bits.
Re:Stop wasting my energy, dreamers! (Score:1, Interesting)
Unplug your tv we'll turn off our SETI.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, because on cosmic scales, 50 years is an eternity! I know if I were a highly advanced alien species, I'd spend all my time pointing transmitters at random planets in the night sky, especially ones which I haven't seen any activity from and which failed to respond to my last transmissions a mere 200 years ago.
You've got to realize that SETI depends on aliens actively trying to make contact. Even a highly advanced civilization would be unlikely to devote the resources necessary to flood the cosmos with signals that are detectable all the time and everywhere. It's more likely that they A) send signals in bursts, in which case 50 years really isn't that long to be searching or B) wait till they detect signals coming in (which would presumably be easier for them than it is for us), which means that the only civilizations we're likely to contact at this point are ones with 30 light years.
SETI should be, in my opinion, more interested in searching the asteroid belts for Von Neumann probes than listening for radio signals. Besides being more likely (again, just in my opinion) it would have the added benefit of providing actual communication with an alien intelligence (assuming a strong AI powered probe) verses shouting at each other and waiting 50 or more years for a response.
Re:Stop wasting my energy, dreamers! (Score:5, Interesting)
at which point of the process does it become silly to you?
1. believing that alien life exists?
2. believing that some of it is intelligent?
3. believing they would intentionally broadcast their existence to the rest of the universe?
4. actively seeking out that sign?
5. looking for it in narrow band radio signals?
Re:Modern data is "random" (Score:4, Interesting)
no, he's suggesting looking for items that are whiter than the background. an intense burst could be a solar flare (or whatever) or a highly compressed bitstream of alien porn.
Re:Stop wasting my energy, dreamers! (Score:1, Interesting)
You prove your own point with the very first part of your sentence. "we have a limited supply of coal and oil"... since this is the case,we need to get off this rock we call earth. If we can find other lifeforms that can help us do this, then I would say that this is pretty darn important.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I think SETI should be looking for patterns in everything that's out there - patterns that might indicate intelligent life - and I don't just mean via radio/light/whatever transmissions.
It is not unreasonable to think that in 1000 years humanity would be capable - assuming we survive and continue to advance at even a fraction of the speed we are advancing today - of projects that would essentially engineer our solar system to make it over into a place that is more conducive and efficient for human (or trans-human, if you go that way) life. Certainly in 10,000 years it isn't unreasonable to think - again assuming survival and any kind of advancement - that we wouldn't be capable of essentially gardening our sun to make it much, much more stable than it already is, extend the lifecycle of it, etc.
Let's look for that kind of change - stars that simply should not, by our theories, actually look like they do. On a bigger scale, areas of the universe that seem to have been tended or tuned to better serve life's (whatever that life is) purpose. We may not be able to recognize it as anything but a random pattern, but I'd say that it seems pretty reasonable to think, given our single example of an intelligent and technologically capable species, that intelligent and technologically capable life elsewhere in the universe might decide to modify its environment to better suit it as we have ours. Given how early we are in our own technological development it makes sense to look for the evidence left behind from species far in advance of ours (as it's astronomically unlikely they'll be at or near our level of advancement).
Radio signals are great and all, but that's not the only way to prove there's something out there. Let's look for sources that are in disequilibrium and figure out how that's happening. At the worse we find nothing, middle of the road we find things that are perfectly natural but that our theories don't account for, and best case we find some truly amazing stuff.
Re:Why NOW? (Score:4, Interesting)
In answer to the bad or intentionally fraudulent processing problem, they could validate any spurious signal quite easily - by putting it in to their own software and seeing if there's anything there.
If they find nothing there, but contact the person analyzing the data and determine that said person probably has the smarts and honesty to have found something legit, then they can work with that person, request a copy of their code, etc.
I don't think that mistakes or fraudulent results are going to be quite the problem you think they are - and I'm sure that the scientists who do the SETI programming/analysis have likely already thought this through. If I can think of a few ways to do validation of outside results in a couple minutes they have likely thought of many more ways.
SB