Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins 248
liqs8143 writes "Astronomers from the United States have begun searching for alien life on 86 possible earth-like planets. A massive radio telescope that listens for signs of alien life is being used for this project. These 86 planets are short-listed from 1235 possible planets detected by NASA's Kepler telescope. The mission is part of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, launched in the mid 1980s. A giant dish pointing towards each of the 86 planets will gather 24 hours of data, starting from this week."
crop circles (Score:5, Funny)
Re:crop circles (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:crop circles (Score:4, Funny)
The aliens would probably expect us to be able to solved all trivial problems like that.
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Duh, you just use the time of day and year when the last local redneck was anally-probed. Do they have to spell it out for you?
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Have you factored the rotation of the earth into this plan of yours?
Not only the is Earth is revolving on its axis but it is also revolving around our sun in an elliptical orbit and our sun is actually revolving around our galactic hub. I think it would be allot more accurate to use a blindfold and pins on a galactic map rather then rely on crop circles of which many have been proved to be hoaxes [cropcirclesecrets.org] :)
Re:crop circles (Score:4, Insightful)
I would first search the exoplanets pointed to by the most interesting crop circles from the global crop circles database [cropcircleresearch.com] why do the hard work when the aliens have done it for us, just draw a line from the centre of the Earth, through the crop circle to the appropriate starsystem
So the aliens are coming down to Earth from hundreds of light years away, and leaving hints in crop circles about what planets they are coming from instead of just saying hi? And they happen to use a calling card that is easily duplicated by low level technology? And the aliens happened to start in a handful of Western countries and then spread their message around the globe?
I was talking to my barber a few days ago. Nice chap by the name of Occam. He had some interesting things to say about this sort of claim.
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So the aliens are coming down to Earth from hundreds of light years away, and leaving hints in crop circles about what planets they are coming from instead of just saying hi?
They wanted to make sure they only had to deal with the smart people.
Re:crop circles (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm... odd, most reports about contacts have been from some hillbillies high on moonshine.
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There are hundreds of reports of UFOs from pilots who flew during WWI and WWII (the so called 'Foo Fighters'). Not to mention all the reports from Naval officers of USOs, UFO reports from astronauts, pilots, and mass sightings of UFOs over major cities. Lets also not forget about the UFOs that were seen over the US Capitol in 1952. President Truman even issued a shoot down order. I guess they were all drunken hillbillies too? Any logical person has to admit that there is something out there.
https://secure.w [wikimedia.org]
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No, those were Soviet spycraft and secret U.S. spycraft. Do you think it's a coincidence that the vast majority of these "sightings" happened at the height of the Cold War near U.S. military bases? The military wasn't covering up little green men, they were covering up their spy gear.
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Those people saw man-made craft, natural phenomenon or were hallucinating.
And you know this for a fact... how?
Most people have probably seen things in the sky that they couldn't explain, such as meteorites, but the rednecks are the ones who make absurd reports
Pretty much 100% of military pilots and airliner pilots are college educated. I would also say they are THE most reliable and authoritative people, as a profession, to judge what is a man-made flying object, what is a natural aerial phenomena, and what qualifies as neither -- certainly more than any internet geek posting on Slashdot --- because 1) they have the most experience with man-made flying objects than any other profession and know what they are and aren't capable
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i know several college educated people with mental illnesses, the symptoms of which include auditory and visual hallucinations.
mental illness wasn't particularly well understood back in the day.
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However I think in the case of Japan Airlines flight 1628 sighting, in which the entire flight crew including the pilot, copilot and the navigator saw the same thing, and is backed up by ground radar (FAA air tra
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They wanted to make sure they only had to deal with the smart people.
Not much chance of that on this planet.
Re:crop circles (Score:4, Funny)
It's obviously a project being run by an alien bureaucratic agency of some kind. Probably has been running for centuries to keep the "wooden board and rope" skilled aliens employed.
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It's obviously a project being run by an alien bureaucratic agency of some kind. Probably has been running for centuries to keep the "wooden board and rope" skilled aliens employed.
LoL. I get an image of a flying saucer hovering over a farm and beaming down a team of Greys with ropes and boards, who quickly press out the design they've been given. Then it's beam-them-up, and a smoke break while on the way to the next farm.
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Wonder how long you have to be on the job before you get to be the one holding the clipboard.
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So the aliens are coming down to Earth from hundreds of light years away, and leaving hints in crop circles about what planets they are coming from instead of just saying hi?
What makes you think that the crop circles are location hints and aren't the alien's way of just saying "hi"? I suppose you'd just land somewhere, pop open the hatch and speak. That's the obvious way to your naked ape mind. However, that may not be obvious to an alien species. It might even be considered extremely rude and aggressive. Instead, they leave sophisticated artwork in fields (helped along by a bunch of drunken art majors)
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Because crop circles are made by cows rolling in the fields. [invaderzim.tv]
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"I was talking to my barber a few days ago. Nice chap by the name of Occam. He had some interesting things to say about this sort of claim."
My barber came from england hes a bit odd, last name Todd used to live on fleet street very particular about his tools but does give a nice shave.
anyway i think he and Occam should talk tools sometime.
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That whoosing sound you heard was the GP's joke flying over your head. It's amazing how so many otherwise intelligent geeks have no sense of humor, or a broken humor detector at the very least.
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And the aliens happened to start in a handful of Western countries and then spread their message around the globe?
Do you really think that when crop circles were an unknown phenomenon and one would appear in Elbonia someone would rush to report that all over Europe? Only when the phenomenon was recognized did reports of the occurrences spread outside of the third world.
I'm not actually suggesting that crop circles are an extraterrestrial phenomenon. I am simple stating that just because you don't hear about something doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.
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That is how they say hi. Just because your primitive mind is having a hard time grasping it doesn't make it any less obvious as a universal form of greeting.
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Well, but he could probable be the one to answer that one question that would puzzle me to no end if I was an alien: Why is your species so hellbent on killing each other over nothing?
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Well, but he could probable be the one to answer that one question that would puzzle me to no end if I was an alien: Why is your species so hellbent on killing each other over nothing?
Well sometimes we just get bored...
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Well, but he could probable be the one to answer that one question that would puzzle me to no end if I was an alien: Why is your species so hellbent on killing each other over nothing?
Because we have a small talent for war.
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We don't kill them over nothing, we kill them because they're wrong, usually about incredibly important things like which side to butter your bread on.
Re:crop circles (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the silliest thing I have ever heard. Even if the aliens have found a way to generate universal peace amongst their own kind right now, they are the results of evolution just like we are, and they had to adapt to their own biospheres much like we did. That means a capacity for conflict. It is unlikely that an alien species who has any idea about evolution and natural selection, which is to say any alien civilization who could detect us or vice-versa, would stare at us in some sort of uncomprehending disbelief.
The only real possibility of that happening is that they are so old a civilization that they have actually forgotten where they themselves came from and even then, they can't be ignorant of the basic conditions that life has to deal with. More likely, they know exactly why we kill one another, they probably have just as much history of it as we do.
In other words, I find the whole E.T. concept of advanced alien civilizations made up of beings who can travel through space in starships, but somehow be unable to comprehend the basic facts of life to be ridiculous.
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Here's the problem. Every time a highly advanced species or group of individuals has met a less advanced group, eventually the lesser developed group perishes more or less with perhaps a few lucky individuals integrating into the more advanced group. Happy (for the less advanced) integration normally happens only within the same species. In cross-species situations if the lesser developed group is lucky they become servants for the more advanced group. Perhaps well treated servants (like horses and pets are
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Yes because I'm sure they managed to reach the point of developing a civilization that was capable of traveling the stars by only holding hands and never, ever doing anything "bad".
Que the limousine liberals and pickup truck right-wingers.
Re:crop circles (Score:5, Insightful)
why do the hard work when the people with rope and wooden boards have done it for us,
Fixed that for you
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Problem is that they are also generated by black holes as their axis sweeps across us. They are not an indication of intelligent life.
global crop circles database (Score:2)
Lame! That site hasn't been updated since 2008. Either that, or that's when the aliens stopped making crop circles.
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I would first search the exoplanets pointed to by the most interesting crop circles from the global crop circles database [cropcircleresearch.com] why do the hard work when the aliens have done it for us, just draw a line from the centre of the Earth, through the crop circle to the appropriate starsystem
I forget, is that done using Eastern Standard Time?
Re:crop circles (Score:4, Informative)
If this data (and I call it data, because it isn't useful enough to be called knowledge), were good for anything, then why doesn't the private industry seem interested in it[?] This type of research is just welfare for otherwise bright individuals who decided to get an ivory tower education so they could spend their lives on meaningless pursuits.
Because private industry isn't interested in "meaning", they're interested in profit. Oh, and "fixing the earth" is a political problem, not a resource problem.
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Yeah, and thats great and all, but how about we spend more of our public resources on fixing earth rather than useless trivia like this. Like, I don't know, reversing the government spending trend. If this data (and I call it data, because it isn't useful enough to be called knowledge), were good for anything, then why doesn't the private industry seem interested in it. This type of research is just welfare for otherwise bright individuals who decided to get an ivory tower education so they could spend their lives on meaningless pursuits.
Everyone is a Socialist when the government is helping/paying them and a Libertarian when it is helping/paying anyone but them.
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Without knowledge of general relativity, your GPS device would be off by a minimum of 4 miles, with inaccuracy increasing from there. Without GPS, our army is lost in the middle of the desert. etc. etc.
Right, because people couldn't navigate before there was GPS. And lets not forget that all soldiers learn how to navigate with a map and a compass in basic, and other school during their career give them refreshers. Even in the Navy they still navigate the old fashioned way, using GPS to verify their chart plotting. Same with the Air Force.
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Actually, GPS *did* make it possible for an offensive like the run through Southern Iraq to flank the Iraqi forces in Kuwait during the First Gulf War. In an otherwise featureless desert, they would have had to rely on things like roads to orient them, which would have constrained their axis of attack to one more easily covered and more expected by a lower tech military.
Speaking from experience, relying on the orienteering ability of your troops can have uneven results, especially without landmarks.
While m
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Without GPS, our army is lost in the middle of the desert. etc. etc.
Desert. Quagmire. What's the difference?
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You can have a quagmire without a desert. For example, Vietnam.
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Another example, "Family Guy"
Accessible data? (Score:2)
Open to the world? So all us nerds can search and sift through it with you using, for once, not only our bandwidth to help you Mr. Seti, but also our minds.
Re:Accessible data? (Score:5, Informative)
Data from all NSF funded instruments are in the public domain after a 'suitable' period for the primary investigator who proposed the actual science with the instrument has had crack at it.
For the telescopes this tends to be 1 year from observing, after that the data is available to all. It sounds like the data from this project will wave that 1 year period and be available for SETI@home as soon as it's done.
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Bah
Here's a comma or two, ',,,' to insert as you see fit, s/has had/to have a.
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Alien sitcoms! (Score:3)
too bad they cancelled TPF-1 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Short sighted? Or did they think ahead and realize that finding life bearing worlds hurts their religious voters?
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Let's be clear here. You could probably feed and clothe the entire world for less than the U.S. defense budget. Poverty and medical care doesn't need more money thrown at it, the real facts are in the logistics and whether you are allowed to spend your money on those things. Just think about it, what would be the response of a country like North Korea if we just said, "hey, we'll feed your people for you, just let us set up a working infrastructure to distribute food fairly and run it." Good luck with t
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That's on a Wednesday. I have to work. Could they wait until after 5?
What exactly.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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sort of like 'I Love Lucy' but in shrieking, alien speak.
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I always imagined it'd be more like the Honeymooners, but with the character of Ralph Kramden shouting "To the Earth, Alice! To the Earth!"
Re:What exactly.. (Score:5, Informative)
Over the planet's transit over the face of the star, from our angle, the light interacts with the atmosphere of the planet before passing through to be seen by our telescopes. The light is broken down into component frequencies to determine the chemicals present and their relative concentrations in the atmosphere. Some chemical signatures can be understood as the the result of natural processes, while others do not seem to occur without the influence of biological processes. We are looking for 'unnatural atmospheres' modified by exotic processes that cannot be readily explained under natural conditions.
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Over the planet's transit over the face of the star, from our angle, the light interacts with the atmosphere of the planet before passing through to be seen by our telescopes. The light is broken down into component frequencies to determine the chemicals present and their relative concentrations in the atmosphere. Some chemical signatures can be understood as the the result of natural processes, while others do not seem to occur without the influence of biological processes. We are looking for 'unnatural atmospheres' modified by exotic processes that cannot be readily explained under natural conditions.
So the TLDR version is we're watching for a sudden methane (etc) signature for an instant as the planet transits its star? Why watch for 24 hours, then, assuming the orbit has been well characterized?
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They're going to take a while to capture the data on each planet, since they can't watch continuously with an earthbound telescope. They may only have a window of a few days to capture a transit on some target planets, so it will take multiple transits to get that much data for all of them (the project will last a year). I believe they get the most valuable data when the planet first passes into the star's disk and then again as it leaves, as this gives some sense of differentiation between different parts
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Over the planet's transit over the face of the star, from our angle, the light interacts with the atmosphere of the planet before passing through to be seen by our telescopes. The light is broken down into component frequencies to determine the chemicals present and their relative concentrations in the atmosphere. Some chemical signatures can be understood as the the result of natural processes, while others do not seem to occur without the influence of biological processes. We are looking for 'unnatural atmospheres' modified by exotic processes that cannot be readily explained under natural conditions.
Hope they're looking at some seriously red-shifted planets, if they're trying to look at light with a radio telescope.
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But there has been talk of doing what you described. Do you know whether we're "there yet" with the necessary technology?
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So what they're looking for is "alien life according to our preconceived notions"?
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Well, if we just focus on "non-random noise", any patterns we find would be a big hint towards life -- as a form we know or not.
We're just looking for "signal". Wow! [wikipedia.org]
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Do you happen to have a reference for this? I have never heard of radio astronomy being used to detect molecular signatures (frequently microwave and mm-wave, but not radio). The molecular signatures during solar transit to which you are referring have typically been studied using optical and infrared telescopes, since the 200-20000 nm range is the region in which vibrational and electronic transitions occur.
I figured they were looking for classic radio-frequency patterns, much like the ones we're constan
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Google is your friend.
Wow, what a great idea. In fact I did search for it, and found nothing for it in regards to RF atmospheric absorption during solar transits, hence the query for a reference.
As far as the inverse square law goes, while it is applicable for all forms of emission, the noise base on RF telescopes is incredibly low, meaning that we're really good at detecting it, especially with monster dishes. Hence SETI and the whole SETI@home project. The 1/r^2 law also implies that the radio source i
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That second bit is not quite right, and your analogy actually shows that quite perfectly as light emitted from a lighthouse also obeys the inverse square law. The 1/r^2 law gives you the decay over distance, and this is the same whether you have an omnidirectional antenna, a sun spewing light, or a well focused laser. Try it some time with a flashlight and a lightsensor if you have one (I think many smartphones can give you a lux reading these days)
That said the inverse square law does not mean that you wou
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What was I thinking, you're totally right, my mistake (I should have known this, I work with lasers every day). It's really the fact that the lighthouse beam occupies a smaller solid angle than the possible full 4(pi) steradian.
I think the largest gain would be from the fact that communication radio signals can occupy an absurdly small frequency window, so even though a 100kW emission might fall off to a very small amount, it's all in a spectral range, so spectral power density is large.
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You're setting a very high and unusual standard for intelligent species by searching for nuclear materials, even assuming that it's possible to mine on their planet, and they have the incentive to do so. Would you even pick up those materials in Earth's atmosphere?
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Farts... that's right, farts. We're too far away to detect methane trace elements, but with current advances in super-flatulentelescopy, we can now detect any gas passing that may be happening across vast distances of space.
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Unless they are specifically beaming something very powerful in our direction and have been doing it for million years, we just wont see it.
Has anyone done the math on if it's even possible for typical terrestrial radio transmissions to be detectable above background noise a
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They will be looking primarily for deliberate transmissions. They look for continuous narrow-band signals, intermediate bandwidth pulses on millisecond timescales, broadband pulses on microsecond timescales, and soon (in beta) intermediate bandwidth signals consisting of a noise like signal followed milliseconds to seconds later by an overlapping identical signal.
Most leakage signals are too weak to be detected by the small telescopes we have like Greenbank and Arecibo, but the Arecibo planetary radar and
We're doomed!!!! (Score:3)
They'll intercept transmissions of our reality TV shows, decide that something like that can't be allowed to pollute the universe and then proceed to nuke the whole planet from orbit.
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Or even worse, they'll be tuning in and somebody will spill beer on the broadcasting equipment [theinfosphere.org].
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Nah they'll get be sued into oblivion by the MPAA for unlicensed distribution.
Telescope in West Virginia (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure why the author felt it was necessary to repeatedly reference 'a radio telescope in rural West Virginia' without giving an
actual link or reference to the GBT instead of yet another self referential physorg link.
The Green Bank Telescope GBT (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/) is a very impressive instrument just from an engineering stand point.
If you're even in the area it's well worth visiting though it is a bit off the beaten path.
With it's spectrometer (http://www.gb.nrao.edu/gbsapp/) it's also a good instrument for interstellar medium (ISM) biochemistry surveys. That may be a more fruitful area of study unless of course somebody does pick up the Ff99x22dddlw race's version of an Olympic broadcast.
Re:Telescope in West Virginia (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they aren't using the GBT's spectrometer. They are using an instrument that I helped to develop for pulsar research called GUPPI, which uses FPGAs and GPUs to real-time process 800MHz of radio bandwidth.
However, in this case they are using GUPPI's GPU nodes to record 800MHz of Nyquist-sampled band centered at 1.5GHz. Each sample is 2-bits, and with 2 polarizations, that is how they get 800MB/s (or almost a GB/s as it says in the article).
If you want some basic info about GUPPI, you can find it here:
https://safe.nrao.edu/wiki/bin/view/CICADA/NGNPP [nrao.edu]
Starting this week? (Score:2)
Damn! Alien sweeps week was last week. Nothing on but reruns now.
I seem to repeat myself on this subject (Score:2)
No alien life would intentionally broadcast it's planets location. They and we will send unmanned probes to interesting places for research. And then we would find a way to leverage the nature of the natural phenomenon to embed a signal. It's not inconceivable that someday we might be able to modulate a sun to transmit a signal on it's light. The place to look for signals is where you would be interested in looking anyway.
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No alien life would intentionally broadcast it's planets location.
No iPhones there?
Yet.
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you do realize there is a 30 light year sphere around earth of radio signals which point right back at us.
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It took until the 1930's for radio transmissions of decent power. More modern transmissions are digital and more directed. Our radio shell will be actually getting smaller.
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1, It was directed at an area of space with stars 25,000 light years away, instead of at closer collection within light-decades
2. There will not even be any stars at M13 when the signal arrives, the stars will have moved away
3. The binary
Planet Horton (Score:2)
Not "Boil that dust-speck, boil that dust-speck, BOIL!"
News from Seti@Home (Score:4, Informative)
From the relevant thread [berkeley.edu] over at Seti@Home:
"Grad student Andrew Siemion reports that new modifications to a data recorder at Green Bank that we need for our Kepler SETI observations are now complete, thanks to a huge amount of help from Paul Demorest, a former grad student and one of initial authors of AstroPulse. Our first hour of test time is scheduled for this Saturday, 17:30 EDT. We'll be observing with 450 seconds per target on 90 Kepler field stars with interesting planet candidates (~habitable zone, ~Earth size, ~Earth period, ~several planets), then do a raster scan of the entire Kepler field. " - Eric Korpela
IF they looked at us? (Score:2)
Mr. Politically Correct Opineth: (Score:2)
Way to pick the wrong submission.... (Score:2)
I, of course, submitted a direct link to the Berkeley press release [berkeley.edu] but apparently the Slashdot editors decided the one that was most wrong was the one to pick. First, SETI isn't a project, it's a field of study conducted by a lot of institutions. Nobody would talk about "the Physics Project started 2100 years ago by Pythagoras" when describing a particle accelerator.
This project in particular, is conducted by the Berkeley SETI group [berkeley.edu] which is known for their SETI@home project [berkeley.edu], Astropulse search for radio [berkeley.edu]
Just 24 hours? (Score:2)
Maybe I am not fully understanding how SETI works, even though I use the home client, but this has always really caught me as strange. Lets say an alien world is actually broadcasting. Not only would they have to be broadcasting at the exact time we are looking for them (or rather, how ever many lightyears ago relevant to the star's distance), but the planet would have to be in view of the earth at the time, their transmisions would have to be able to penetrate both their atmosphere and ours, and they would
Can't find anyone asking the obvious question (Score:3)
Is this telescope even capable of detecting Earth-type leaky RF signals at such a great distance?
And if it's not, isn't this like cupping your ear and hoping to hear conversations in China?
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I guess they are using a 24hr "block" of radio telescope time...
but it was just funny reading it. Like they are going to study
them for 24hrs for signs of intelligent life. As if it was their
"day length period".
I thought the negative elevation angle aspect was even funnier, assuming the targets are distributed in the galactic plane. I'm guessing they will take multiple days to gather 24 hours total of data. Or, maybe we've gone thru the journalism filter, and we're gathering "one days observation" and the journalist though 24 hours sounded "more scientific".
I suppose they could be limiting themselves to stars "that never set" in other word declination > (scope latitude + reasonable beamwidth / sidelobes)
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Your mothership is so large...
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and rubber gloves.. who's got the gloves?
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Neil deGrasse Tyson makes some interesting points in relation to this: (1) The five most common elements in the solar system are hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. (2) Of all the elements, the one that makes the most compounds is carbon -- there are more compounds containing carbon than all other compounds of all of the other elements combined. (3) Life on Earth is made mostly of H, O, C, N, plus some trace elements, and is based on C. ("Organic chemistry" means the chemistry of carbon compou
Re:lol (Score:4, Insightful)
OK smartypants, how are you going to detect technology that doesnt exist yet? How will you categorise signiatures from biochemical processes that we have never seen or studied?
We either have to use our own experience as a reference point or not look at all. I vote we look and hope we get lucky.
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Throughout human history there have been hungry and starving people. As long as breeding abundantly in times of feast works out good for some segment of the population, they will continue to do it. I don't see how dumping more sugar in the petri dish is going to solve anything.
OTOH, we probably have the technology to actually make a difference in whether humanity gets wiped out or not either by our own stupidity or some other extinction event. If humanity gets