Seti Live Website To Crowdsource the Search For Alien Life 90
bs0d3 writes "Scientists need your help in the search for life beyond Earth. The SETI Institute is asking the public to join in its hunt for signals from intelligent civilizations out there in the universe. Anyone can register on the new website, SETI Live, to help analyze data from SETI's radio telescope devoted to scanning the heavens for signals from E.T.."
Earth (Score:1)
>> intelligent civilizations out there in the universe
Why not start the search a little closer to home?
Re:Earth (Score:5, Funny)
Because closer to home, like within 100,000 miles of Washington, the odds are VERY low.
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Because, in the so-apt words of Monty Python, 'There's bugger-all down here!'
Re:And this is different from seti@home ? (Score:5, Informative)
Human eyes involved instead of computer algorithms.
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how this is any different from seti@home, buzzwords aside
Unlike the SETI@home 'screensaver,' it probably doesn't permanently burn this image into your CRT's phosphors:
http://blog.sherweb.com/wp-content/uploads/seti_home_screen_l.gif [sherweb.com]
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CRT? You are still using a CRT for your computer?
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CRT? You are still using a CRT for your computer?
The old SETI at home "screensaver" was popular ten years ago when most people were still using CRTs. Almost everyone I knew who ran it had their phosphors burned in their screen. That's what I was referencing.
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I am. It still works, why replace it? Waste of good money I could spend elsewhere. I mean, I'm a nerd but I'm not Bill Gates.
When the last CRT burns out (or phosphors become too dim) I'll replace it.
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Because god didn't create aliens. He only created humans and animals, and gave us the earth to fuck up and leave all the unbelievers to suffer on.
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Just send in Fox Mulder to investigate.
Better idea (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, they could build an app that people could install on their computer or something! I think if they do that, they could give it a name like "distributed computing" or the like. Or even better, since most people use their computers at home, they could throw that in the name as well.
Re:Better idea (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the same thing. Although, from the site:
> One of the hardest parts of hunting for signals
> from space is separating what might be an ET
> signal from the earth-based RFI sources. We
> think that human eyes, and our amazing brains,
> should be better than a computer at finding
> interesting signals in the noise.
So it's an attempt to use the brain to manually pick out patterns? (I can't tell yet because the site may be overloaded - I get a "Loading..." screen but no updates.
I'm not sure that's a great idea, since the brain tends to make associations even if none truly exist.
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haha, I read that in Seth's voice. Maybe I listen to too much 'big picture science.'
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the brain tends to make associations even if none truly exist.
Bingo.
I see one of two possible scenarios:
1. A person is concentrating so hard on ignoring earth-based signals that they mistake anything that could possibly be there as one and any potential discovery is missed.
2 (far more likely). SETI suddenly gets reports of eight million new signals because as you say, we're far too good at seeing patterns in noise.
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I saw something on TV a while back called, "Superjail" that might very well have been an alien transmission.
It was really really good, so if it was made by aliens, I really hope they come back soon.
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Your missing a key point though. Human brains make associations where none exist precisely for the same reason they are good at what computers are not.
Human brains are amazingly powerful pattern recognizers. We pick up almost any pattern that exists. Sometimes however those patterns are not significant and we get confused by it, but in this case, SETI just wants *any* pattern to be picked up. The RFI junk can be filtered out easily enough, but its finding the patterns thats hard. Its better to find all the
I'm dubious (Score:2)
Whether or not there's intelligent life out there, I seriously doubt that we would recognise any alien signals as communication.
Some SF on this subject:
A strange discovery [slashdot.org]
We still haven't found extraforgostnic life [slashdot.org]
Both look at it from the perspective of aliens looking for us.
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haha yeah i had seti@home installed on so many computers .. surprised that pretty visualization didn't get burned in to the monitors.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thin provisioning for power is not a good idea. It will bite you in the rear, hard, the first time you have a power outage, and when the electricity comes back every device turns on and all the UPSes start charging as fast as they can, simultaneously.
That buys you another power outage.
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The boinc move also removed my interest. I was enjoying seeing my results from implementing all that spare capacity; it was quite a bit of work across a number of architectures, and I felt a little proud being part of it.
Then they just started again, in a relatively non-intuitive manner, and what you'd done before didn't count. Lost interest, dedicated the cpu space to Condor and went away.
I already donated to an alien life search company (Score:3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7YK2uKxil8 [youtube.com]
After Peter Weyland's brilliant TED speech I donated my money and spare computing power to the Weyland Corporation.
From April 2010 (Score:2)
"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.'"
Brilliant idea (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not as if the humans most likely to spend time looking for ETI signals are also the most likely to be affected by optimism and confirmation bias. I'm sure we'll see many more signals than when boring computers did it.
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What they are lookimg for doesn't work well on computers... certainly not as well as humans. While confirmation bias will be an issue, its not like they aren 't double checking.
Re:Brilliant idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Confirmation bias isn't an issue. Citizen Science works by people characterising various signals - such as categorising galaxies or pointing out transits in light curves. When someone flags up a potential find, the software then farms it out to multiple people. The current target for Galaxy Zoo is 30, which they deem enough for the moment. In addition the software does sneaky things like inverting images because apparently orientation is a big factor in whether you percieve a galaxy to be rotating clock or anti-clockwise.
Similar approaches apply to the Planet Hunters site:
We will always identify the simulated transit points in red after you’ve classified the star and list the radii and period of the simulated planet we injected into the light curve. The reason we don’t identify the simulated data first, is that if you knew the lightcurve had simulated events you might look at it differently. To be able to use the data from the simulated transits accurately, we need them to be examined in exactly the same conditions as the real lightcurves.
The people organising these sites know very well what humans are capable of misconstruing.
Re:SETI can't detect earth-like civilizations (Score:5, Funny)
"Until SETI improves its resolution, this is all just masturbation."
Well, then, count me in!
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> > "Until SETI improves its resolution, this is all just masturbation."
> Well, then, count me in!
Is this what they call the Slashdot effect? :-P
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Well, they have conducted experiments that should be sensitive enough to pick up airport radar within several hundred light years and that would pick up a directed ping from an equivalent antenna over 10000 light years away. Our TV and radio signals are too weak and airport radar would be a lucky blip with no content, but the last one sounds like something we'd do in the next 50 years as we find good candidate exoplanets so we should be able to hear civilizations slightly more advanced than our own, assumin
"me too" (Score:1)
What's the point? We already know the Turians will find us, and we'll know in 2 weeks the feud with the Reapers.
Is SETI wasting its time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is SETI wasting its time? (Score:4, Interesting)
They are wasting their time if the (presumed) radio signals signals are like ours -- planet bound and not intended for other ears. If, however, someone is sending something this way intentionally, then it's well within the bounds of reason that we could hear it. With the relatively simple creation of an antenna and transmitter system in space, there's no reason a signal we could hear couldn't be produced. In fact, this is likely the only way, because the portion of the spectrum SETI is listening in isn't likely to be used for communications on a planetary surface, or if so, certainly not at the radiated power levels and steady aim required to light up any sort of detection at this end.
However, I would ask, why not light? You have a handy sun nearby, radiating all manner of otherwise unused visible energy... all you need to aim, focus and modulate that -- are mirrors. Seems like an altogether easier project, and certainly less expensive, plus less likely to have technical problems.
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Beings that we're just now able to see *entire planets* orbiting distance suns, I doubt a relatively small array of mirrors, encircling a sun (you would want omnidirectional) would be even close to visible. If they were intentionally going for ease and being highly omnidirectional, I think RF would be the way to go.
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Planets are very poor reflectors. Not comparable. You've not got your head wrapped around the thing. RF isn't that different from light in terms of visibility, focus, etc... except you have to *make* it, therefore need a power plant, etc. whereas the light has already been made for you, for free, quite reliably, and at quite significant energies. Light also concentrates wonderfully,
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>Planets are very poor reflectors. Not comparable.
Not comparable!??? From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
"The average overall albedo of Earth, its planetary albedo, is 30 to 35%, because of the covering by clouds, but varies widely locally across the surface, depending on the geological and environmental features."
Just because one square inch of mirror reflects better than one square inch of planet surface does not mean the mirror will be more visible. Your positionable mirrors will still need to cover a surface area that's
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And yes, I realize 1500 planets a second is a stupid low number considering a realistic beam width. Point is, anything you do will have to be over days aimed at a single planet...assuming you're trying to talk to us right now.
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And then I can totally see the local legislature pulling the funding for all that 'Buck Rogers stuff that nobody will get any use out of' in favor of buying itself some more votes and/or shutting the local neocon-alikes up before they march on the government with pitchforks and torches to kill them because the thought of intelligent life other
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In our case, funding for this kind of thing, however clumsy, has been unavailable basically due to fear. Congress has looked at funding several proposals over the years and has come down pretty solidly on the side of "seems like a risky idea. If it doesn't work, it's a waste, and if it DOES work, we could be in huge trouble." Listening for aliens is one thing... yelling "here we are!" is quite another.
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We do in fact transmit signal powerful enough to be seen by distant stars. For example when doing adaptive optics imaging we shine a laser into the sky which outshines the sun at a very specific wavelength.
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Good point. And if the aliens use digital communication (maybe with a bit of encryption and DRM on top of it :p), it will only show up as noise after analog conversion.
Even digital data uses a carrier wave.
The problem with this idea is that the human brain does not react well to large amounts of negative data. Eventually, the mental "squelch" of the viewer will drop to the point where they will see a pattern whether one exists or not.
I could see sending flagged data to humans, but this project is in "real-time". I think this is just a publicity gimmick.
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Probably because of timing. We just assume that our civilisation will go on for ever, but our own history shows that all civilisations die out in only a few thousand years. Given that if an asteroid hadn't randomly hit earth 65 million years ago a species that developed radio could have evolved any time between 65 million year ago and anytime in the future. There is no reason to suppose that there is any species in the galaxy whose evolution and scientific development is coincident with ours.
Hasn't this already been done? (Score:2)
I seem to remember an application like this back in '96/'97 timeframe that did the same thing with the fledgling WWW, around the same time as the Mersienne prime # search app. Did that happen?
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The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
[citations needed]
It's not provable. But you sound like an imbecile when you say life evolved from nothing and out of random chance in this completely entropic universe. You sound like a fool when you speak of theories of order coming out of disorder. It flies in the face of your rock-solid thermodynamics equations.
So we need a citation for your nonsense. I don't think you have any proof, either.
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Wow, you've never heard of the Miller-Urey experiments, or considered that local entropy can decrease, so long as the entropy in the surroundings increases to match? There are a raft of real-world phenomena where molecules spontaneously self-organize given some energy gradient.
Ah, why am I bothering, if you can look up everything, if you're actually willing. The onus isn't on everyone else to prove some invisible sky-man doesn't exist...
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The marketing departments of a number of failed businesses used the same math. You didn't show what the possibility is, you showed what all you don't know.
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You're right. I'm terrible at math, I used to work ib marketing. And... we used the same sort of math to project our profits!
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Lemme guess. Bookkeeper? Accounts clerk? Harvard MBA?
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And yet you've never heard of the Drake Equation.
Yes, I have, and you are misunderstanding it.
Lemme guess. Bookkeeper? Accounts clerk? Harvard MBA?
I can see we have a reading comprehension problem in general, here, as opposed to just the one that prevents you from understanding what the significance of that equation is. I just said I was bad at math and I was in marketing. Why would you compliment me by asking if I was a bookkeeper, accounts clerk, or even an MBA?
Anyway, you're misunderstanding it in a way that is hilariously similar to the way I've seen a marketing department fail. Let's boil it down:
"I
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The odds are that there's life in other solar systems, and even greater (almost a certainty) that there's life elsewhere in the universe, but considering how slow EMF travels through the incredible distances between stars, it's also highly unlikely we'll come into contact with any of it any time soon.
There are only a handful of stars within 50 light years, and odds are good that there's no intelligent life on any of them. Odds are even greater that we could never communicate with them even if we knew they w
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It's not provable. But you sound like an imbecile when you say life evolved from nothing and out of random chance in this completely entropic universe. You sound like a fool when you speak of theories of order coming out of disorder. It flies in the face of your rock-solid thermodynamics equations.
Um, no. The entropy of an entire system has to remain the same or go up, but there's nothing preventing parts of a system from losing entropy. Your air conditioner is a good example of that.
But anyhow, life doesn't imply order. If anything, life has increased entropy considerably, through chemical reactions and using energy. What you think of as "order" has nothing to do with the scientific term.
First you say:
The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
Then you say:
So we need a citation for your nonsense. I don't think you have any proof, either.
So because you cannot provide the evidence you claimed, your opponents should prov
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The irony is that the evidence for design is far stronger than the evidence for completely naturalistic origin.
Evidence? You are jesting, right? Nobody has even formulated a single alternative theory about the origins of life. Evidence? There is none.
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Is there any kind of signal... (Score:2)
... that an automated search WOULDN'T find but that a sentient being would recognize? Perhaps by being able to pick up some sort of quantum phenomenon that wouldn't register with deterministic sensors? (I read that there the was a proposed experiment to see if the human eye could perceive quantum entangled images; if they could, the subject would see some sort of pattern, if not just random "static").
Perhaps if the galaxy was full of self-replicating machines bent on the destruction of organic life, this
Excellent idea! (Score:2)
Dupe! (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure this is a dupe.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/98/04/17/91338/seti-at-home [slashdot.org]
Don't the editors double check for anything around here?
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So, ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Please don't. That xkcd meme is a new low, even for slashdot.
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but it got +4 Funny. You need to get laid.
I'd say the moderators need to get laid...
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Someone please change the description (Score:1)
I sincerely hope not (Score:1)
I sincerly hope that if there are aliens out there, we'll never find them, or rather, they never find us. As life on Earth is 3 billion years old, and the aliens can't be less developed than we are, give or take a few centuries, or they wouldn't transmit signals we can detect, there's a 99.9% chance that they are more developed than we are. Not by a decade, but probably by a few million years. A few million years ago, the most intelligent life on earth was as smart as cows. So, if aliens find us, they won't
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I believe it would be impractical for a space fairing race to be reliant on meat for food, or at least meat grown naturally rather than lab grown.
Any resource the Earth has, other uninhabited planets have more.
We would make horrible slaves since we would just barely be able to grasp their technology, we might make decent soldiers, but we would make great pets.
How far our signals have travelled (Score:1)
First, to share the link that was going around on google+. Here is a shot of a galaxy similar to our own with a yellow dot to show how far radio waves would travel out from the center of the yellow dot in 200 light years.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2107061/Earth-calling-Tiny-yellow-dot-shows-distance-radio-broadcasts-aliens-travelled.html [dailymail.co.uk]
From this you can see our efforts are puny.
The Arecibo message is now revealed to be a complete joke. It was aimed at a cluster 25,000 ly away wh
I don't think anniuncing our existance is good (Score:1)
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hmmm (Score:1)