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SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Compendium / Miscellaneous

We could pick up a spark from a gas lighter 10 miles away....

By way of our capabilities:
"The antennas must capture Voyager information from a signal so weak that the power striking the antenna is only 10 exponent -16 watts (1 part in 10 quadrillion). A modern-day electronic digital watch operates at a power level 20 billion times greater than this feeble level."
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/did-you-know/

Hi Timble2, your post got me wondering about the Voyager received signal power level. I found a fairly well described link-budget discussion which wasn't intended to specifically describe the received signal power, but rather as a practical adequate sub-element description in an ancillary 'side' discussion re; signal-power to data-bit PSD per bit distribution, eg., how much received power per bit.

See: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/24338/how-to-calculate-data-rate-of-voyager-1

I'd like to point out that JPL policy makers candy-coat everything, "now boys and girls, the moon really isn't made of green-cheese", type bull-shi.t. I was affiliated with one of the Mars Pathfinder engineers (and was the consultant in the creation of the most popular NASA website in NASA InterNet history). At one juncture during the creation of that website I had beseeched the acting NASA/JPL director to downlink 'live' data from the Flight-Unit-Rover & Lander on Mars as received by the Deep Space Network, via LabView (a bidirectional instrument programming/control interface to an apache webserver, but Donna said, "No!". The reason our website was soooo popular was because I realized that there exists a large population of technical persons in the civilized world, and to address that audience (we are the boys & girls who pay the taxes for their missions, not the children they treat us as), one need to speak to the technology involved. We wanna know what's inside the box, we wanna see the gadgetry, the schematics, the power-supplies, not the kindegarten green cheese bull-shi.t they foist on us!! Durring the MPF mission, our website was mirrored by 17 servers world wide and the White House had been one of the visitors!!! Yeah baybee! But NASA has forgotten that lesson, if they ever learned it? And they are back to the politically correct tell'm nothing of true value policy. They want my taxes, I expect them to give me back something of value in return, otherwise NASA can go screw-itself. I apologize for the ranting.

plutronus
 
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It will never happen.

The aliens are well aware of us here but choose to ignore.
We search afar when the truth is here.

Mankind think they are the kings of creation that we are created in the image of God and nothing can be higher than God.

So we look for life under rocks or await a squiggly line on SETI to indicate an alien's desperate attempt to contact us?

In truth they have already studied our language, know our science and probably watching me as I type this post and you answering it at the other end. They can pick up a spark from a gas lighter 10 miles away as SETI is just a joke!

The only thing that makes SETI great is that it is respectable. Science knows it is never going to happen as the aliens are already here.

This planet is the lowest planet and a learning school. The true aliens are spiritual and NOT the Greys. They are just the Drones to do physical work.

GeorgeK,

I basically disagree with your asessment re; the suspected multiple layers of alien agendae. It is my asessment that ET are not simply ignoring us, if anything, as Dr. Eric Davis at one time described in a public SETI-L e-mail addressed to me, there is (at least re; the exhibited alien activity studied at NIDS Sherman Ranch), that there is an obvious "incommensurability" between those ET and Human cognition. We are wired-differently and because of that, there is comm gap. Aside from that aspect, there is ample behavioral information that illustrates that there is an agenda at play, which in some manner is resource acquisition oriented, but that so far, at least in the Near Earth ET Studies 'public-domain' it's pattern doesn't match our perception of how they are using 'our' world and-or Humans.

Yes, I agree, we are fairly arrogant re; our belief of our exalted position in the food-chain!!

Re; SETI's idea of life under a rock....I completely agree! SETI, hah hah hah! Reminds me of that line in the movie "iRobot" when Will Smith (actor) says of Dr Calvin, "You are smartest dumb person I ever met!", hah hah hah, yep that basically summarizes my perception of the SETI crowd!! What a bunch of square-brains!! They are so intransitive to the idea of Near-Earth intelligent ET. At the COTI Conference in 1998, I had a running gun-battle exchange with Seth about Near Earth ET. Yeah, I envision SETI as having a great big condom stretched over their antennae which I refer to as being "Safe-SETI". They are NEVER going to detect ET using radio, something akin to a technically advanced civilization sending smoke-signals! I mean, the US PTB, gathered up all the guys and gals interested to scientifically search for ET, collected them under the HRMS umbrella and then, what was it, two years or three before Sen Proxmire cancelled their funding! How convenient? Fortunately, Steven Spielberg, having been approached by a few way-out-there searching for ET HRMS insiders (one rumor was Jon Lomberg and Carl Sagan) Spielberg donated $750 million Dollars? (the Dollar value is blurry now), thereby instantiating the SETI-I, else there would likely be no SETI today. It took the wonderful generosity of a movie mogul to successfully support way-out-there-safe-SETI-search. The deep-state ET info regulators apparently did not desire that the technically trained SETI types continue to be funded so they killed the project after identifying all of them! Very clever. But don't misunderstand me, while I think that SETI will NEVER produce any fruit, any technical search is good search, however ridiculous it might be.

The square-brains cooked up the most ridiculous search model ever envisioned based entirely upon the luminal speed of radio waves. Any practical (provided that those specis haven't resolved the short period aging problem) space-faring specis will have had to engineer some other method of comm and travel, to circumvent the enormous transit time required to be expended traversing the immense distance between the stars, else it just isn't in any sense, even if they have resolved the aging problem, to be practical in any manner that I can perceive. That doesn't mean that such a resolution isn't embraced somewhere in the cosmos, but I can't embrace it! SETI folks blazed the trail through all the academic naysayers out there, and trust me, those dummies think the SETI folks to be as loonie as the SETI folks consider the Near Earth ET Studies community to be. Hah hah hah. I guess that means that we are all phukn nuts!!

Re; ET having studied us, again that seems to be dependent upon which ET presence layer being cited. I agree that it seems reasonable that some ET have likely studied Humans, however that does not necessarily mean that they can understand us. How long have the smart curious folks studied ants? Do we understand their 'language'? They way most Humans communicate with them is via insecticides. There are many corollaries available. Depends on the wiring. Re; the Reptilians, now, those cats are a different ball of wax, in my opinion. Information that I've discerned is that they engineered us. And they haven't left, but where did they go? How does reconcile that matter? Of course the first prerequsite is one must be willing to consider that Humans could have been engineered by an alien specis. There are many folks here in this community that will consider this to be out-right poppy-cock. And in the long-run it might well turn out to be so, but that is not my opinion at this juncture. How well would a creator specis understand Humans?

<<<
This planet is the lowest planet and a learning school.
>>>

That seems to be the general census of some advanced Spiritual doctrines, as taught by the Masonic and Rosicrucian Orders.

<<<
The true aliens are spiritual and NOT the Greys. They are just the Drones to do physical work.
>>>

The Grey that I saw and with which I communicated appeared to me to be an insectoid specis. That Grey was a so-called 'hybrid', as it had been DNA modified to function outside of the minimal community pod of three Grey EBEs. It is my opinion that Greys are not Yetzirah entities as you impose. As for being 'drones' that is one of the general themes promoted by the love-light-&-clueless folks. Not intending to be offensive, but rather descriptive of right-hemi dominant thinkers. The more right-hemispherically oriented a thinker is, the less logical the thinking becomes, while being more functionally psi-intuitive, they appear to the rational thinkers to be 'clueless'. That is the main reason why the Ascension Schools work to condition the neophyte student for balance in their Spiritual progression curiccula. Without that indoctrination the brain's hemispheric switching is lopsided which leads to dysfunctional behaviors. Grey's Spiritual field are so strong that they are known to entrain Human's simply by their being proximally close to them. That was the point of the original 'Dream-Land' broadcasts by Art Bell. Folks were reporting that there were physical locations at Nellis (part of A51) AFB, where folks would slip into a dream-like state....Yetzirah.

Re; the 'drones', if that is true, who or what are they drones for? Again, layers. There are unobvious matters.

Best Regards George,

plutronus
 
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They are NEVER going to detect ET using radio, something akin to a technically advanced civilization sending smoke-signals!

Ha ha, yes - I've been saying this for years. They are probably using quantum entanglement, which we can't detect.
 
That entirely misses the point of SETI. If there are advanced civilisations out there using quantum entanglement or some other undetectable channel, then we wont detect those messages; but we will detect any messages which they choose to send in the form of radIo waves, which are intended to be detected by civilisations at our level of development. Any advanced civilisation that is both friendly and communicative would deliberately use radio (or some other detectable electromagnetic radiation) to talk to other civilisations, because that is the lowest common denominator. If they choose not to talk, then that is an indication of a secretive or unfriendly demeanour.

Even if one civilisation chooses to be uncommunicative, then there should be another that is willing to talk - unless, of course the uncommunicative civilisation is preventing this discourse somehow. In which case, they can get fucked, the miserable bastards.
 
Ha ha, yes - I've been saying this for years. They are probably using quantum entanglement, which we can't detect.

Hi Mythopoeika,

You got it exactly!!

An acquaintance of mine which, Dr Ron Blue, previously to having chatted with him, I had several years previously expended much time perusing his entire robotics website, back around 1993, announced in the open SETI-L forum that he had "a quantum 'computer' attached to CCD camera STARING at photo of Earth."!! Hah hah hah. Should have heard the sh.it-fest that caused! The SETI types were admonishing those interested in active-SETI...transmitting to possible alien worlds and Dr. Ron Blue (Ph.D.), a psycho-cyberneticist, told'm he had robot telepathically transmitting a photograph of Earth!!! Hah hah hah, I loved it! It was so ballsy. He told me in telephone conversations that he had modeled the Human brain which through his studies that he discovered said that the brain exhibits interference patterns...wavelets of "quasi-oppositional hemispheric processing" and then he hired a Ph.D. electronics engineer to fabricate his wavelet model into hardware which created a large qu-bit looped quantum 'computer' ("for lack of a better name" he told me) that exhibited autonomous-cognition behaviors!!!

Ron's AI quantum-bots, does not utilize a stored-program processor for the decision making system, while the robots do employ microcontrollers for various motor-control sub-tasks such as generating the servo motion-control signals for the wheels as commanded by the non-CPU/non-ROM/non-stored-program decision-making quantum-processor system. Unfortunately, Dr. Blue passed away two years ago from a heart-attack and his fascinating website disappeared. Strangely, ALL of his posts, all over the InterNet in virtually every InterNet psychology community forums (thousands of posts), also disappeared. My speculation is that information re; quantum-processor concepts has attracted the military and may have become suppressed. I am not suggesting that Dr. Blue was murdered by the military. Perhaps I am naive' but I just don't buy into that type of schema.

After chatting with Ron Blue numerously via phone, I encouraged Dr. Blue to take his self-conscious AI robots to an international robotics conference, where he gave a lecture, I think that was in 1998 as I recall? During Ron's lecture, he had 'let loose' one of his little wheeled robots, 'Corey' on the stage, and it was moving about with only a two axis servo gimballed CCD camera afixed to it for environment sensing. It was thinking for itself. Members of the robotics audience believed that someone was behind the stage curtain operating the robots with an RC transmitter...they believed it was hoax, and they very rudely got up in the midst of his lecture to peek behind the curtains!!!

It was recently announced in Military Electronics & Defense magazine that the Chinese have successfully engineered an operational (likely bypassing RADAR geometries and materials stealth strategies) quantum RADAR, whereby, the RADAR beam need not return to the emission site to detect the target, via quantum-entanglement. <s> Let us hope that Western World will not have to fight those guys. They are not dummies.

plutronus
 
That entirely misses the point of SETI. If there are advanced civilisations out there using quantum entanglement or some other undetectable channel, then we wont detect those messages; but we will detect any messages which they choose to send in the form of radIo waves, which are intended to be detected by civilisations at our level of development. Any advanced civilisation that is both friendly and communicative would deliberately use radio (or some other detectable electromagnetic radiation) to talk to other civilisations, because that is the lowest common denominator. If they choose not to talk, then that is an indication of a secretive or unfriendly demeanour.

Even if one civilisation chooses to be uncommunicative, then there should be another that is willing to talk - unless, of course the uncommunicative civilisation is preventing this discourse somehow. In which case, they can get fucked, the miserable bastards.

Hi eburacum,

I am not really certain that any type technical contact with ET violates the original SETI thinker's interests. I struggled with this point myself for many moons.

Also, I studied the SETI model for a long time and I associated within their forum community for an extended period. What you say is partly accurate in my opinion regarding their search model. As you correctly cite, their search model is designed specfically to 'filter' out any type of contact that is not within the 10cm ~ 21cm, and whose transmission source location is less than 100 solar dia distance minimus, while mainly their search effort is centered around the 21cm 'water-hole' radio wavelength, as it is believed that that specific wavelength would be part of the 'message' owing to the fact that that wavelength exhibits a lower passband attenuation...the signal is not as greatly attenuated. It is 'hoped' that ET would technically understand that those wavelengths are within the only passband frequencies where a signal has any possibility of not becoming so attenuated that it might allow distant detection. That notion assumes that distantly located ET are capable of transmitting an enormously powerful signal, which incidently is currently beyond our capability. One should remember the Dr Oliver and Dr. Packard were interested to detect ANY ET out-there, not just those that would do so using those microwave wavelengths. So in one vantage the original SETI thinkers were interested to detect any signature of technical ET activity, while the model has evolved beyond the original theme.

The underlying point here is, can ET transmit an enormously powerful signal which is beyond our technical ability, that we can detect? Isn't that a bit counter to the notion that those ET are like us? So there are two different streams of SETI thinking that I've encountered,
1) detect any technical ET signature, hopefully radio, but in practice very unlikely due to the enormous power required,
2) ascribe strictly to the current SETI model of detecting only 10cm ~ 21cm wavelength EMF emissions which is an element of, if not the entire 'message'.

I vote for quantum-message detection, as it is a non-local, non-latency comm strategy, while it does not violate the c limit.

Cheers,

plutronus
 
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We could transmit a powerful signal right now, using Arecibo or a phased-array radar station. Alexander Zaitsev has transmitted quite a few messages using slightly less powerful transmitters. I don't recommend that we do transmit using our most powerful transmitters, in case there are wolves out there. But eventually, someone has to break the silence.
 
eburacum,

The transmission magnitude, at centimeter wavelength need be enormous, something akin to the power-output of a sun.

As for breaking the 'silence', there have been numerous folks, beginning around 1885 (US Naval Mars radio contact experiment, also attempting to record messages using the Farnsworth Radio-Camera), and in 1965, (I forget who, but as I recall it was an attempt by an HP engineer), and others more recently, and including myself in 1998, who have transmitted invitational active contact messages. The project Ozma transmission that elicited the active-SETI moratorium is another example. Dr. Ron Blue, employed a quantum transmitter, machine telepathy (aka "psionic") in a 1999 attempt. Dr. Stuart Kingsley of Project OSETI fame, is another more recent example, but he uses a high-power, chirped LASER beam.

plutronus
 
We could transmit a powerful signal right now, using Arecibo or a phased-array radar station. Alexander Zaitsev has transmitted quite a few messages using slightly less powerful transmitters. I don't recommend that we do transmit using our most powerful transmitters, in case there are wolves out there. But eventually, someone has to break the silence.

But I thought that, after just a handful of light years, any signal sent by us, whether deliberately or accidentally as with TV and radio broadcasts, would degrade to the point where it would be indistinguishable from the universal background noise.
 
That depends on the amount of focussing the beam has. Yes, a broadcast TV or radio signal would degrade before it got to Alpha Centauri. However, a large transmitter, with a wide aperture (like Arecibo), could focus a radio signal so that it could be detected many tens of light years away by a corresponding receiver at the other end. The amount of focus possible increases with aperture and decreases with wavelength, so short wavelengths are best. But Arecibo cannot be steered, so it only has a very limited range of targets.
 
All of this reminds me of the TV broadcast of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, picked up by the ETs in Carl Sagan's Contact.

Apparently, not the first broadcast according to senior SETI astronomer Seth Shostak, but 'at a high frequency that might make it through the ionosphere. However, it would have been very low power, and with a non-directional antenna. The idea that aliens might pick it up is pretty far-fetched.'

This great article discusses this, as well as the Arecibo radio telescope's message of 1974, fired at the globular star cluster Messier 13, 20,000 light-years away.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/09/will-hitler-be-the-first-person-that-aliens-see.html
 
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That depends on the amount of focussing the beam has. Yes, a broadcast TV or radio signal would degrade before it got to Alpha Centauri. However, a large transmitter, with a wide aperture (like Arecibo), could focus a radio signal so that it could be detected many tens of light years away by a corresponding receiver at the other end. The amount of focus possible increases with aperture and decreases with wavelength, so short wavelengths are best. But Arecibo cannot be steered, so it only has a very limited range of targets.

There are a number of folks who are proposing to use the lensing effect of 'gravity wells' around suns to act as a radio focusing lens to concentrate the widely diverging incoming radio waves from the ecliptic. While it is true that Arecibo is a very large parabola antenna, it is just one antenna, and while it is not well known but it is rigidly mounted, the feed-horn is steerable to a small extent, so the radio-astronomers employ planetary rotation as well as planetary position within the solar system to permit large angular steering, but as I recall, at any angle it only sees about 1º of sky at any moment. Whereas, (Jodi Foster depicted as 'Jill Tarter', opening scenes of 'Contact' lying on the hood of her car amidst a bunch of dish antennas) of the VLBI (Very Long Base Interferometer Array) is a large (relatively speaking) array of parabola antennae which were engineered to create a large artificial aperature signal collection 'antenna' whose collective signal is 'stitched together' to gather enough signal energy to enable detection.

Sucessful spacefaring civilizations will have developed other solutions that do not rely range/power limited signalling strategies. While AC ("autonomous-cognition" scientific speak aka 'telepathy' or 'quantum signalling'), seems ludicrous to those who are not aware of that research loop, is a strategy that may well be an element in their deployed comm strategy. Virtually all ET contactees are also, interestingly, psi-intuitives...right-hemi thinkers. It is known that ET or their objects...ET radios? are attracted to psychics.

plutronus
 
If telepathy works (dubious) how could it possibly work between species with differently-evolved brains? There would be no shared language or mental architecture.

Hmm- maybe a sufficiently advanced alien civilisation could transmit coherent signals into the mind of a sensitive person. But the receiving individual would have no control over the messages received by this channel, and no way of checking the veracity of messages received in this way.
 
If telepathy works (dubious) how could it possibly work between species with differently-evolved brains? There would be no shared language or mental architecture.
Maybe it's using quantum processes within the brain to effect minuscule change? All brains may essentially use the same processes (even if different species).
 
We probably couldn't even communicate cogently with a bat, let alone an alien.
 
If telepathy works (dubious) how could it possibly work between species with differently-evolved brains? There would be no shared language or mental architecture.

Hmm- maybe a sufficiently advanced alien civilisation could transmit coherent signals into the mind of a sensitive person. But the receiving individual would have no control over the messages received by this channel, and no way of checking the veracity of messages received in this way.

Yes, that's precisely the thought processes that I introspected when I began to recognize the invariant data I was seeing. How is it possible? Eric Davis referred to the problem as being "incomensurability between specis", a result of their observation of the ET EBE behaviors on the Sherman Ranch. There is a significant cognition gap, but that doesn't portend that ET could not use machine telepathy between their own specis or mecha. An inherently conveyed inference is that telepathy would act as an interspeciel 'interface' which is obviously not correct, at least in my observations of ET contacts. Most folks sense that gap as being the so-called 'fear-field' that folks report. I too felt it when the EBE was walking down the center of the wall in my home. It was a palpable visceral fear that I felt. I at the time considered that the 'fear-field' was in fact a defense mechanism employed by the (supposed) advance ET that was interacting with me, but in retrospect, I suspect that its the primal primitive intuitional fear-flight response that, apparently, all Earthian organism feel when viscerally threatened!! Intelligent Earthian organisms autonomously recognize Earthian born psi-fields, as everything on this planet evolved within the Gai Soul Matrix, and when we sense an out-worlder, the differences between the soul-matrix is palpable. There is more to that point, which I'll at some juncture detail. Its not born entirely of just my own introspection.

As for transmitting information between specis, that presumes a significant understanding of those targeted specis, and in my mind implies a robust programmability to be able to interface between the synchretic thinking models. Thats a very slippery slope in my opinion. For one, telepathy isn't abstractionally oriented as one might expect, and as such is not conducive to discrete messaging packages. Its a bit like sharing a mutual dream, where upon all parties simply remember shared information without actually remembering how they remembered it.

plutronus
 
We probably couldn't even communicate cogently with a bat, let alone an alien.
LOL
Well..... bats are not sentient..can't vocalize, etc....I don't see the meaning in using bats as an example.
One would assume that an alien species capable of space travel would have some means of articulation and communication that we could learn...and vice verse in that they could learn ours.
 
The problem with bats is that they have an entirely different way of perceiving the world.
See the essay 'What is it like to be a bat?'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat?
I would expect aliens to be significantly more different than bats, making the cognitive gap much greater.

I think you and some others overestimate the 'alieness' of aliens. Almost every single exo-biologist thinks they would probably be somewhat similar to us regarding being bipedal. having mouths, eyes , limbs, and being upright in some variation of humanoid form.
If that's true we might have a lot more in common than some think. If you can get a hold of a book called....Paradigms Lost, John Casti has a chapter on whether ET exists..he explores all aspects including the famous Fermi Paradox, Drake Equation, etc.. and all the ideas about what an alien might be like. I honestly believe that any advanced species would be able to communicate with another especially regarding science aspects and principles. This idea that they would be so 'alien' that we couldn't communicate in any way..never made much sense to me....but that's just my take on it.
This is one of the reasons why I find all the so-called contact cases(and close encounters) with aliens to be suspicious....I have a huge problem with how the 'aliens' act and communicate in these events. As has been pointed out it's not a question of language barriers, because those would be expected, but the bizarre and often nonsensical behavior of a so-called advanced being that troubles me.
 
Almost every single exo-biologist thinks they would probably be somewhat similar to us regarding being bipedal. having mouths, eyes , limbs, and being upright in some variation of humanoid form.
No, they do not. Only a few think that the humanoid form is the most probable; most others think the humanoid form is one option among many.
 
Here, for instance, is an astrobiologist who does think that the humanoid form is probable - but he admits he is in a minority.
"If we were to eventually find other intelligent life in the universe, they would be humanoid, I think," Østman concludes. "I find that a high probability." But at the same time, he admits he's in the minority, and most other scientists agree with Gould that humanoid life is unlikely to evolve elsewhere.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/is-there-any-plausible-reason-why-aliens-would-evolve-t-1638235680
 
And I can only repeat what I have said before- a humanoid alien would not share any of our evolutionary past, so would have significantly different body plan to a human. It would not be a vertebrate sensu strictu, for example, so would need to have evolved an erect skeletal structure from an entirely different starting point. The taxon 'vertebrate' is not found anywhere except on Earth, and if there are any creatures with backbones out there in the universe they will have as many differences as similarities to vertebrates on Earth.
 
If telepathy works (dubious) how could it possibly work between species with differently-evolved brains? There would be no shared language or mental architecture.

Hmm- maybe a sufficiently advanced alien civilisation could transmit coherent signals into the mind of a sensitive person. But the receiving individual would have no control over the messages received by this channel, and no way of checking the veracity of messages received in this way.
Not that I think that telepathy would work, but...

If the receiving individual were to use the information received to do something extraordinary (person with no medical training provably curing cancer being a hypothetical one), and then on being asked where they got the idea, say "aliens told me", society would certainly do a double-take.
 
Sufficiently advanced aliens should be able to perform a wide range of apparently miraculous actions. Although I doubt they would be able to do everything one could imagine or desire, they should be able to do most of it.

I should note, however, that the pattern of physical and mental states inside the mind of a human (or an intelligent alien) is probably as complex as any system of data is likely to get, so hacking into such a system would be extremely challenging.
 
Instead of paying attention to what is coming here, scientists are making ridiculous unfounded claims about meeting ETs in 20 years... Sigh.
Seth Shostak (D'oh!!):
"The Pentagon has fessed up, and it seems that observers who accused it of hiding information about possible alien visitors were right. A New York Times report revealed that Harry Reid initiated a program to investigate the UFO phenomenon that lasted five years and cost taxpayers $22 million.
But it's hardly an unalloyed victory. The good news for those who believe the government has covered up an extraterrestrial presence is that they can retire their tinfoil hats. The bad news is that the study didn't produce unambiguous evidence that E.T. is sailing the skies in high-tech, interstellar Frisbees."

Hang in there Seth, and prepare for future apologies :cool:
 
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