- Joined
- Jul 4, 2009
- Messages
- 763
Sure, it could possibly inspire a new computer program? 
SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Compendium / Miscellaneous
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
Alien hunters: Searching for life
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News
The hunt for signals from intelligent extraterrestrials has been in full swing for half a century. But the effort's flagship facility recently came to a grinding halt. The first of a two-part series on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) takes a look at the facility and what it means for Seti's future.
"It's never been this bad."
Seth Shostak, principal astronomer for the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, is trying the door of an outbuilding at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). Like all the others, it is locked.
"There's always been at least one or two people around who can let you in."
The group of 42 antennas is, as the flyer posted nearby advises, "in the process of being returned to operations". Last April, there wasn't enough money in the Seti coffers to pay the staff, and the facility shut down.
A funding drive raised money from Seti enthusiasts including former astronaut Bill Anders, sci-fi author Larry Niven, and even Hollywood actress Jodie Foster. But it's only enough to keep going for a few months.
"Since 1993, Seti has had to run on private donations from people who think this is an interesting thing to do," Seth tells me.
"I remain confident that we'll find the money to make this a permanent operation. After all, you're not going to find ET unless you have the telescope operational."
But even if the telescope is operational, will the effort find ET? Ask Seth or his colleagues, and you'll get the same answer: it's a long shot. It may take years, or decades, or centuries to pick up a signal.
We humans have only been on the radio for about a century, and listening for cosmic signals for half of that. That is an infinitesimal slice of time in the 13 billion years that our Universe has been around.
Yet, we are probably closer, at least philosophically, than we have ever been to answering the timeless question of whether we are alone.
Fifty years ago, all we had was the Drake equation - a string of factors that, multiplied together, yielded a guess of how many ETs might be out there, phoning our home.
Many of those factors were a matter of complete guesswork in the early 1960s: the rate of star formation in the galaxy, how many stars may host planets, how many of those planets could potentially support life.
Today, some of those factors are being solidly quantified thanks to results from the Kepler space telescope, which is discovering far-flung planets - some potentially hospitable to life - at an astonishing rate.
And where once there were single radio dishes listening in on single frequencies - single radio stations - improvements in the electronics behind the scenes make it possible to sift through literally millions of stations automatically.
So Frank Drake, the originator of the equation, says it is a terrible time for Seti and the ATA to be experiencing what he calls a "valley".
"After many years of quite a lot of action, the economic troubles of the world have had a great impact," he told BBC News.
"There are very few searches going on in the world, despite the fact that at the present time we have far better equipment than we've ever had."
Seti does have its economical ways and means, however. As with other areas of science that require vast computing power, there is the Seti@home screen saver - which sends signals from the Arecibo radio telescope to millions of volunteers around the world.
"Everybody gets a different part of the sky to analyse, and it wakes up like any other screen saver when you go out for a cup of coffee," says Dan Werthimer, director of the Seti programme at the University of California Berkeley and a Seti@home pioneer.
"It goes through the [Arecibo data] looking for all kinds of possible radio signals. Any strong signals it finds, it sends back to our server at Berkeley. Your name is attached to that data, so if you're the lucky one that finds ET, you get the Nobel prize."
Other things are changing the nature of the hunt, too.
Radio is one good way to squash energy into a signal carried across the cosmos. But another is the laser, which can focus a lot of energy, or information, into a lighthouse-like beam.
Enter "optical Seti" - a hunt using good old-fashioned optical telescopes to look for laser lighthouses in the cosmos - one of the eight types of Seti searches that Berkeley carries out.
"We think the best strategy is a variety of strategies," Dan tells me. "It's really hard to guess what an advanced civilisation might do."
Back at the ATA, we find a technician who lives nearby to drop off the keys so we can head inside the control room.
Seth tells me that his take is that we should be looking for signs of artificial intelligence, as well as squishy "biological" aliens.
The autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners we have now are just a harbinger of the truly advanced intelligence he thinks will soon be developed.
And if any advanced civilisation can invent its technological successor, these "thinking machines" could carry on searching the cosmos long after their biological forebears are gone.
But it gets even more intriguing. Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University has proposed looking not for aliens but for footprints of alien technology, such as waste from their nuclear energy technology. And he has other ideas.
"The one that most intrigues me is the possibility that the aliens may have engaged in some kind of biotechnology - if they had come to Earth and tinkered with terrestrial micro-organisms, or even made their own from scratch, the products of that could still be around."
In other words, if aliens came through our neck of the woods long before we were here to see them, they may have left deliberate clues tucked in the DNA of microbes that have faithfully copied the message for millions of years.
Prof Davies reckons that, since we're sequencing the DNA of life of all sorts anyway, we should keep an eye out for this kind of "message in a bottle".
But as the locked doors of the Allen Telescope Array remind me, all of this does take money.
Those at the Seti Institute argue that the $2m (£1.3m) a year or so that the wider Seti effort requires is a drop in the ocean compared to, for example, military spending.
Jill tells me that she spends a lot of her time trying to organise a foundation that can fund the effort far into the future - not just money to keep telescopes turning, but also to pay the next generation of Seti scientists.
What is clear, though, is that the Seti effort speaks to something far deeper than the politics and the money issues that occasionally put it in the spotlight.
"Calibrating our place in the cosmos is something that's important for humans to do, to really get a better sense of where we came from and where we're going, and I think that's part of the Seti story," she tells me.
"That question 'are we alone?' hasn't lost any of its impact and its emotive power, even though it's been asked for millennia."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16265519
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News
The hunt for signals from intelligent extraterrestrials has been in full swing for half a century. But the effort's flagship facility recently came to a grinding halt. The first of a two-part series on the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) takes a look at the facility and what it means for Seti's future.
"It's never been this bad."
Seth Shostak, principal astronomer for the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, is trying the door of an outbuilding at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA). Like all the others, it is locked.
"There's always been at least one or two people around who can let you in."
The group of 42 antennas is, as the flyer posted nearby advises, "in the process of being returned to operations". Last April, there wasn't enough money in the Seti coffers to pay the staff, and the facility shut down.
A funding drive raised money from Seti enthusiasts including former astronaut Bill Anders, sci-fi author Larry Niven, and even Hollywood actress Jodie Foster. But it's only enough to keep going for a few months.
"Since 1993, Seti has had to run on private donations from people who think this is an interesting thing to do," Seth tells me.
"I remain confident that we'll find the money to make this a permanent operation. After all, you're not going to find ET unless you have the telescope operational."
But even if the telescope is operational, will the effort find ET? Ask Seth or his colleagues, and you'll get the same answer: it's a long shot. It may take years, or decades, or centuries to pick up a signal.
We humans have only been on the radio for about a century, and listening for cosmic signals for half of that. That is an infinitesimal slice of time in the 13 billion years that our Universe has been around.
Yet, we are probably closer, at least philosophically, than we have ever been to answering the timeless question of whether we are alone.
Fifty years ago, all we had was the Drake equation - a string of factors that, multiplied together, yielded a guess of how many ETs might be out there, phoning our home.
Many of those factors were a matter of complete guesswork in the early 1960s: the rate of star formation in the galaxy, how many stars may host planets, how many of those planets could potentially support life.
Today, some of those factors are being solidly quantified thanks to results from the Kepler space telescope, which is discovering far-flung planets - some potentially hospitable to life - at an astonishing rate.
And where once there were single radio dishes listening in on single frequencies - single radio stations - improvements in the electronics behind the scenes make it possible to sift through literally millions of stations automatically.
So Frank Drake, the originator of the equation, says it is a terrible time for Seti and the ATA to be experiencing what he calls a "valley".
"After many years of quite a lot of action, the economic troubles of the world have had a great impact," he told BBC News.
"There are very few searches going on in the world, despite the fact that at the present time we have far better equipment than we've ever had."
Seti does have its economical ways and means, however. As with other areas of science that require vast computing power, there is the Seti@home screen saver - which sends signals from the Arecibo radio telescope to millions of volunteers around the world.
"Everybody gets a different part of the sky to analyse, and it wakes up like any other screen saver when you go out for a cup of coffee," says Dan Werthimer, director of the Seti programme at the University of California Berkeley and a Seti@home pioneer.
"It goes through the [Arecibo data] looking for all kinds of possible radio signals. Any strong signals it finds, it sends back to our server at Berkeley. Your name is attached to that data, so if you're the lucky one that finds ET, you get the Nobel prize."
Other things are changing the nature of the hunt, too.
Radio is one good way to squash energy into a signal carried across the cosmos. But another is the laser, which can focus a lot of energy, or information, into a lighthouse-like beam.
Enter "optical Seti" - a hunt using good old-fashioned optical telescopes to look for laser lighthouses in the cosmos - one of the eight types of Seti searches that Berkeley carries out.
"We think the best strategy is a variety of strategies," Dan tells me. "It's really hard to guess what an advanced civilisation might do."
Back at the ATA, we find a technician who lives nearby to drop off the keys so we can head inside the control room.
Seth tells me that his take is that we should be looking for signs of artificial intelligence, as well as squishy "biological" aliens.
The autonomous robotic vacuum cleaners we have now are just a harbinger of the truly advanced intelligence he thinks will soon be developed.
And if any advanced civilisation can invent its technological successor, these "thinking machines" could carry on searching the cosmos long after their biological forebears are gone.
But it gets even more intriguing. Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University has proposed looking not for aliens but for footprints of alien technology, such as waste from their nuclear energy technology. And he has other ideas.
"The one that most intrigues me is the possibility that the aliens may have engaged in some kind of biotechnology - if they had come to Earth and tinkered with terrestrial micro-organisms, or even made their own from scratch, the products of that could still be around."
In other words, if aliens came through our neck of the woods long before we were here to see them, they may have left deliberate clues tucked in the DNA of microbes that have faithfully copied the message for millions of years.
Prof Davies reckons that, since we're sequencing the DNA of life of all sorts anyway, we should keep an eye out for this kind of "message in a bottle".
But as the locked doors of the Allen Telescope Array remind me, all of this does take money.
Those at the Seti Institute argue that the $2m (£1.3m) a year or so that the wider Seti effort requires is a drop in the ocean compared to, for example, military spending.
Jill tells me that she spends a lot of her time trying to organise a foundation that can fund the effort far into the future - not just money to keep telescopes turning, but also to pay the next generation of Seti scientists.
What is clear, though, is that the Seti effort speaks to something far deeper than the politics and the money issues that occasionally put it in the spotlight.
"Calibrating our place in the cosmos is something that's important for humans to do, to really get a better sense of where we came from and where we're going, and I think that's part of the Seti story," she tells me.
"That question 'are we alone?' hasn't lost any of its impact and its emotive power, even though it's been asked for millennia."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16265519
eburacum
Papo-furado
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2005
- Messages
- 5,805
The idea of messages hidden in genetic information is an old one, not original to Davies. However I doubt very much that any message would survive for very many generations without mutating into something unreadable.
'and the secret of life, the universe and everyggtthinaccg is ttaggcca ggatta "
'and the secret of life, the universe and everyggtthinaccg is ttaggcca ggatta "
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2009
- Messages
- 151
eburacum said:
The subject of an old Star Trek: The Next Generation 2 parter IIRC.
LordRsmacker
Abominable Snowman
- Joined
- May 1, 2006
- Messages
- 724
Mythopoeika said:
Yes they have. Schools.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,223
- Location
- Eblana
kamalktk said:I heard instead of schools they prefer to listen to their i-Pods.LordRsmacker said:Mythopoeika said:
Yes they have. Schools.
It gives them a porpoise in life.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
Alien hunters: What if ET ever phones our home?
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News
For decades we've been sending signals - both deliberate and accidental - into space, and listening out for alien civilisations' broadcasts. But what is the plan if one day we were to hear something?
If we ever detect signs of intelligent alien life, the people likely to be on the receiving end of a cosmic signal are the scientists of Seti, aka Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
This loose band of a couple of dozen researchers around the world doggedly listens to the cosmos in the hope of catching alien communications. It's often in the face of scant funding and even ridicule.
They watch signals coming from the world's largest radio telescopes, looking for anything unusual, or even the flashes of laser "lighthouses" designed to catch our attention.
Seti started as one man using one telescope dish in 1959. Today computers are used to sift through the cosmic radio traffic, flagging up to astronomers any potential calls from extraterrestrial life.
But what might happen if one of those computers found a bona fide alien phone call?
Conspiracy theorists will argue there would be a government cover-up. Even more nervous types might say there would be global upheaval.
Seth Shostak, the Seti Institute's principal astronomer, says both groups should calm down.
"The idea that governments would keep this quiet because otherwise the public would go nuts, is nuts. History shows that's not what happens.
"In the early 1900s, there were claims that there were canals on Mars - a vast hydraulic civilisation just 50m km from Earth. The average guy in the street said 'well, I guess there are Martians' - they didn't panic."
The first job if the computers flag up an interesting signal is to get it confirmed by other telescopes around the world - this would take the better part of a week.
"In all that time, you can be sure people are emailing boyfriends and girlfriends, writing on their blogs... the word will be out there."
So news of alien contact may reach most people via a tweet from a Seti astronomer.
A 1997 "false alarm" signal showed the likely reaction - and the futility of any cover-up attempts.
"We were watching this signal all day and all night, waiting for somebody from 'officialdom', whatever officialdom is, to call up," Dr Shostak recalls. "Even local politicians didn't call up, let alone the federal government. The only people that were interested were the media."
Surely there's an action plan in a red binder somewhere, detailing which international bodies to inform?
Not so. "The protocol is simply to announce it," Dr Shostak says. And then the policies for a chain of information, or command over the situation? "There are no such policies, and I don't think you could enforce them anyway."
The United Nations has a small outfit in Vienna called the Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), and Seti scientists have tried down the years with little success to work with it to fill that notional red binder with plans. Asked what might happen if an alien message arrives, UNOOSA replies that their current mandate "does not include any issues regarding the question you pose".
So planning is left to people such as Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University, who heads up the the Seti Post-detection Taskgroup. But we don't know what kind of information - if any - an incoming signal might contain. And decoding the signal could take years, or decades.
But what might it say? It could just be a beacon, saying nothing more than "Hello, Earthlings, we are here," says Prof Davies.
"It could be something completely disruptive and transformative, something as simple as how to gain control over the nuclear fusion process... which could solve the world's energy crisis.
"Because of the enormous travel time from some source many, many light years away, we have plenty of time to reflect on what the consequences would be if we open up a dialogue on this slow time scale."
Ask anyone in the Seti community if we should reply, and the consensus is yes. But what to say, and how to say it is a thorny problem.
"When we're dealing with an alien mind - what they might appreciate, what they might regard as interesting or beautiful or ugly - will be so much tied to their neural architecture that we really couldn't guess," Davies says. "So the only thing that we've got in common has got to be at a mathematics and physics level."
Back in California's Seti Institute, director of interstellar message composition Doug Vakoch agrees.
"It seems a little hard to understand how you'd build a radio transmitter if you don't know that two plus two equals four.
"But how do we build upon that common understanding to communicate something that is more idiosyncratic to each species? How do we let them know what it's really like to be human?"
Some Seti scientists argue that, once we know where to send an interstellar email, we might as well just send the contents of the entire internet, streamed down a laser light beam. Aliens would then have plenty of information from which to draw patterns, disentangle languages, and see images - of all kinds - of what it is to be human.
Vakoch thinks to send such a "digital data dump" is an "ugly" approach. "There has to be something more elegant to say about ourselves than that."
We could instead express our idea of beauty - albeit crudely - by sending a signal representing the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the prior two: one, one, two, three, five, eight, 13 and so on. It's a sequence seen in spiral galaxies and the way nautilus shells grow, and is tied to the "golden ratio" - an aesthetically pleasing proportion seen in classical architecture.
Dr Vakoch also hopes to show possibly idiosyncratic human characteristics, such as altruism, helping others at a cost to ourselves. To that end, he has prepared a simple animation of a person helping another up a cliff.
But any eventual message will be put together by international consensus - which will only be on the negotiating table if a signal actually shows up. In the meantime, he will keep coming up with ideas of what to say on the interstellar microphone.
"Perhaps more important than even communicating with extraterrestrials, this whole enterprise of composing messages is a chance to reflect on ourselves and what we care about and how we express what's important."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16273512
By Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News
For decades we've been sending signals - both deliberate and accidental - into space, and listening out for alien civilisations' broadcasts. But what is the plan if one day we were to hear something?
If we ever detect signs of intelligent alien life, the people likely to be on the receiving end of a cosmic signal are the scientists of Seti, aka Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
This loose band of a couple of dozen researchers around the world doggedly listens to the cosmos in the hope of catching alien communications. It's often in the face of scant funding and even ridicule.
They watch signals coming from the world's largest radio telescopes, looking for anything unusual, or even the flashes of laser "lighthouses" designed to catch our attention.
Seti started as one man using one telescope dish in 1959. Today computers are used to sift through the cosmic radio traffic, flagging up to astronomers any potential calls from extraterrestrial life.
But what might happen if one of those computers found a bona fide alien phone call?
Conspiracy theorists will argue there would be a government cover-up. Even more nervous types might say there would be global upheaval.
Seth Shostak, the Seti Institute's principal astronomer, says both groups should calm down.
"The idea that governments would keep this quiet because otherwise the public would go nuts, is nuts. History shows that's not what happens.
"In the early 1900s, there were claims that there were canals on Mars - a vast hydraulic civilisation just 50m km from Earth. The average guy in the street said 'well, I guess there are Martians' - they didn't panic."
The first job if the computers flag up an interesting signal is to get it confirmed by other telescopes around the world - this would take the better part of a week.
"In all that time, you can be sure people are emailing boyfriends and girlfriends, writing on their blogs... the word will be out there."
So news of alien contact may reach most people via a tweet from a Seti astronomer.
A 1997 "false alarm" signal showed the likely reaction - and the futility of any cover-up attempts.
"We were watching this signal all day and all night, waiting for somebody from 'officialdom', whatever officialdom is, to call up," Dr Shostak recalls. "Even local politicians didn't call up, let alone the federal government. The only people that were interested were the media."
Surely there's an action plan in a red binder somewhere, detailing which international bodies to inform?
Not so. "The protocol is simply to announce it," Dr Shostak says. And then the policies for a chain of information, or command over the situation? "There are no such policies, and I don't think you could enforce them anyway."
The United Nations has a small outfit in Vienna called the Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), and Seti scientists have tried down the years with little success to work with it to fill that notional red binder with plans. Asked what might happen if an alien message arrives, UNOOSA replies that their current mandate "does not include any issues regarding the question you pose".
So planning is left to people such as Paul Davies of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University, who heads up the the Seti Post-detection Taskgroup. But we don't know what kind of information - if any - an incoming signal might contain. And decoding the signal could take years, or decades.
But what might it say? It could just be a beacon, saying nothing more than "Hello, Earthlings, we are here," says Prof Davies.
"It could be something completely disruptive and transformative, something as simple as how to gain control over the nuclear fusion process... which could solve the world's energy crisis.
"Because of the enormous travel time from some source many, many light years away, we have plenty of time to reflect on what the consequences would be if we open up a dialogue on this slow time scale."
Ask anyone in the Seti community if we should reply, and the consensus is yes. But what to say, and how to say it is a thorny problem.
"When we're dealing with an alien mind - what they might appreciate, what they might regard as interesting or beautiful or ugly - will be so much tied to their neural architecture that we really couldn't guess," Davies says. "So the only thing that we've got in common has got to be at a mathematics and physics level."
Back in California's Seti Institute, director of interstellar message composition Doug Vakoch agrees.
"It seems a little hard to understand how you'd build a radio transmitter if you don't know that two plus two equals four.
"But how do we build upon that common understanding to communicate something that is more idiosyncratic to each species? How do we let them know what it's really like to be human?"
Some Seti scientists argue that, once we know where to send an interstellar email, we might as well just send the contents of the entire internet, streamed down a laser light beam. Aliens would then have plenty of information from which to draw patterns, disentangle languages, and see images - of all kinds - of what it is to be human.
Vakoch thinks to send such a "digital data dump" is an "ugly" approach. "There has to be something more elegant to say about ourselves than that."
We could instead express our idea of beauty - albeit crudely - by sending a signal representing the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the prior two: one, one, two, three, five, eight, 13 and so on. It's a sequence seen in spiral galaxies and the way nautilus shells grow, and is tied to the "golden ratio" - an aesthetically pleasing proportion seen in classical architecture.
Dr Vakoch also hopes to show possibly idiosyncratic human characteristics, such as altruism, helping others at a cost to ourselves. To that end, he has prepared a simple animation of a person helping another up a cliff.
But any eventual message will be put together by international consensus - which will only be on the negotiating table if a signal actually shows up. In the meantime, he will keep coming up with ideas of what to say on the interstellar microphone.
"Perhaps more important than even communicating with extraterrestrials, this whole enterprise of composing messages is a chance to reflect on ourselves and what we care about and how we express what's important."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16273512
kamalktk
Antediluvian
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2011
- Messages
- 7,219
Sending the Fibonacci sequence would be a terrible idea for just that reason, the prevalence in nature means it could be mistaken for a natural source and ignored. If you're purposely sending a signal, you want to make sure the receiver knows it's artificial.rynner2 said:
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
A light hearted look at this topic:
It Is Rocket Science - Series 2 - Episode 1
Return of the comedy that takes a quirky look at the science and history of space travel. Are there civilisations on other planets, and, if so, why do they never call?
Helen Keen stars alongside Peter Serafinowicz and Susy Kane for a second series of the factually-correct but funny exploration of the science and history of space travel. This week examines the Fermi paradox - if the universe is really infinite it should contain infinite life, and yet we have had no contact from alien civilisations. It also takes a look at different ideas through history of what life might be like on other planets, and some of the more surprising suggestions scientists have had on how to get in touch with it, from giant burning parallelograms in the Sahara to sending nude pictures into space....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... Episode_1/
It Is Rocket Science - Series 2 - Episode 1
Return of the comedy that takes a quirky look at the science and history of space travel. Are there civilisations on other planets, and, if so, why do they never call?
Helen Keen stars alongside Peter Serafinowicz and Susy Kane for a second series of the factually-correct but funny exploration of the science and history of space travel. This week examines the Fermi paradox - if the universe is really infinite it should contain infinite life, and yet we have had no contact from alien civilisations. It also takes a look at different ideas through history of what life might be like on other planets, and some of the more surprising suggestions scientists have had on how to get in touch with it, from giant burning parallelograms in the Sahara to sending nude pictures into space....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... Episode_1/
Analogue Boy
Bar 6
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2005
- Messages
- 13,529
What if we do reach ET?
Let's face it...they're not even making a contingency plan for Greece coming out of the euro.
I'm just going to start working on the assumption that the world is a hell of a lot less well-ordered than we think.
Let's face it...they're not even making a contingency plan for Greece coming out of the euro.
I'm just going to start working on the assumption that the world is a hell of a lot less well-ordered than we think.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,223
- Location
- Eblana
jimv1 said:
Maybe it'll turn out like BSG. The Aliens have links with Ancient Greece and make the Greeks Satraps of Earth.
Analogue Boy
Bar 6
- Joined
- Aug 10, 2005
- Messages
- 13,529
That all turned out rushed, badly written and rather disappointing.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,223
- Location
- Eblana
jimv1 said:
Don't be too surprised if the Cylons come for you and they won't be sending a blond.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,223
- Location
- Eblana
Yeah, right, they just want to serve us...
Anome
Bibliomancer
- Joined
- May 23, 2002
- Messages
- 5,528
- Location
- Left, and to the Back
It's a cookbook!ramonmercado said:
We have enough problems working out cultural differences between nations here on Earth, I don't think we stand a chance sorting out the motivations of aliens. Assuming that they want to conquer, eat, have sex with, or just study us requires an understanding of them that I don't think we can really justify at this stage.
Mythopoeika
I am a meat popsicle
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2001
- Messages
- 51,660
- Location
- Inside a starship, watching puny humans from afar
Hmm - if human beings are anything to go by, then sophisticated technological capabilities do not necessarily exclude one group from preying on and subjugating another. The Americas would have had a much different history up to the present, for example
Space is big, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stuff one culture needs is widespread enough to not warrant taking it from some other planet.Then again, aliens may be (and IMHO probably are) far too different from us for us to even contemplate any sort of motives, exploratory or otherwise. And the Earth may be extremely inhospitable to them - i.e. as is the case in Hal Clement's Iceworld.
Mythopoeika
I am a meat popsicle
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2001
- Messages
- 51,660
- Location
- Inside a starship, watching puny humans from afar
Jerry_B said:
Or in the case of Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity.
Mythopoeika
I am a meat popsicle
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2001
- Messages
- 51,660
- Location
- Inside a starship, watching puny humans from afar
Jerry_B said:
My point was that aliens may find this planet inhospitable because of its gravity.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
Search for alien life hit by the recession
Once, it was just described as the 'global' recession. But now, it seems that hard times around the world may also be felt on other galaxies.
By Jacqui Goddard, Miami
7:43PM BST 09 Jun 2012
Astronomers scanning the universe for signs of extra-terrestrial activity are facing a financial crisis that threatens to stall the 52-year search for intelligent life beyond Earth.
The respected SETI Institute in California, which scours for clues to the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe, will be forced to curtail its radio telescope operations, which sweep the heavens for signals from other worlds, unless it can plug a multi-million dollar funding gap.
The institute, whose initials are an acronym of the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence", descrbes the hunt for aliens as "the most profound search in human history".
The news comes despite the institute having steered itself out of a financial black hole last year, when it was forced to shut down its sophisticated Allen Telescope Array for seven months.
This time, warns alien-hunter-in-chief Jill Tarter - the director of the institute, on whom actress Jodie Foster's character in the 1997 alien thriller movie Contact was partially based - it could be permanent.
"It's at very great risk," she told The Sunday Telegraph. "We need to stretch what we have as far as we can, but it's imminent that we could be looking at SETI Institute no longer being able to use the very telescope we pioneered. That's a future we don't want to see,"
A convention being held in California later this month will bring together leading figures from the world of astronomy and astrobiology to discuss the future of the hunt for cosmic company and to promote SETI's work.
Guests will range from real astronauts to television astronauts, scientists to science fiction writers, examining topics including the fundamental question: 'Are we alone?' and capitalising on the heightened public interest caused by the recent release of sci-fi films such as Prometheus and Battleship.
[..SETI history..]
"There's definitely a crisis now," said Dr Tarter, who has resigned her formal position as director of the institute to save it her salary costs. She plans to continue as a fundraising figurehead to prove that the search for life off our own planet has almost infinite potential.
"If we try and size up space and say how much we have observed so far, the ratio is like taking eight ounces - a glass of water - out of the world's oceans," she said.
"If your experiment was to find if there were any fish in the ocean, and you looked at that glass and didn't see any fish, your first reaction wouldn't be 'Oh darn, there aren't any fish in the ocean.'" 8)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... ssion.html
Once, it was just described as the 'global' recession. But now, it seems that hard times around the world may also be felt on other galaxies.
By Jacqui Goddard, Miami
7:43PM BST 09 Jun 2012
Astronomers scanning the universe for signs of extra-terrestrial activity are facing a financial crisis that threatens to stall the 52-year search for intelligent life beyond Earth.
The respected SETI Institute in California, which scours for clues to the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe, will be forced to curtail its radio telescope operations, which sweep the heavens for signals from other worlds, unless it can plug a multi-million dollar funding gap.
The institute, whose initials are an acronym of the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence", descrbes the hunt for aliens as "the most profound search in human history".
The news comes despite the institute having steered itself out of a financial black hole last year, when it was forced to shut down its sophisticated Allen Telescope Array for seven months.
This time, warns alien-hunter-in-chief Jill Tarter - the director of the institute, on whom actress Jodie Foster's character in the 1997 alien thriller movie Contact was partially based - it could be permanent.
"It's at very great risk," she told The Sunday Telegraph. "We need to stretch what we have as far as we can, but it's imminent that we could be looking at SETI Institute no longer being able to use the very telescope we pioneered. That's a future we don't want to see,"
A convention being held in California later this month will bring together leading figures from the world of astronomy and astrobiology to discuss the future of the hunt for cosmic company and to promote SETI's work.
Guests will range from real astronauts to television astronauts, scientists to science fiction writers, examining topics including the fundamental question: 'Are we alone?' and capitalising on the heightened public interest caused by the recent release of sci-fi films such as Prometheus and Battleship.
[..SETI history..]
"There's definitely a crisis now," said Dr Tarter, who has resigned her formal position as director of the institute to save it her salary costs. She plans to continue as a fundraising figurehead to prove that the search for life off our own planet has almost infinite potential.
"If we try and size up space and say how much we have observed so far, the ratio is like taking eight ounces - a glass of water - out of the world's oceans," she said.
"If your experiment was to find if there were any fish in the ocean, and you looked at that glass and didn't see any fish, your first reaction wouldn't be 'Oh darn, there aren't any fish in the ocean.'" 8)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... ssion.html
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,223
- Location
- Eblana
Images at link. Should help popularise SETI.
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,223
- Location
- Eblana
To tweet ET or not tweet ET; there could be the rub out for us,
eburacum
Papo-furado
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2005
- Messages
- 5,805
GJ667Cc is not really very Earth-like; it is probably tidally locked, with a surface gravity of around 1.6 gees. It probably has a quite thick atmosphere and (possibly) deep oceans with no land surface. I'm not sure that life as we know it would thrive there, or that if it did it would be able to build radio telescopes to seach for our message. But you never know.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
For some reason I can't seem to copy any of the text of this article.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... -life.html
SETI to target Kepler-62 system within months.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/spac ... -life.html
SETI to target Kepler-62 system within months.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
And now for something very similar, except it's British...
UK astronomers to co-ordinate their search for alien signals
British scientists are to make a concerted effort to look for alien life among the stars.
Academics from 11 institutions have set up a network to co-ordinate their Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti).
The English Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees, will act as patron.
The group is asking funding agencies for a small - about £1m a year - sum of money to support listening time on radio telescopes and for data analysis.
It would also help pay for research that considered new ways to try to find aliens.
Currently, most Seti work is done in the US and is funded largely through private donation.
UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) co-ordinator Alan Penny said there was important expertise in Britain keen to play its part.
"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," the University of St Andrews researcher told BBC News.
"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."
The UKSRN held its first get-together at this week's National Astronomy Meeting.
British researchers and facilities have had occasional involvement in Seti projects down the years.
The most significant was the use in 1998-2003 of Jodrell bank, and its 76m Lovell radio telescope, in Project Phoenix. This was a search for signals from about 1,000 nearby stars. Organised - and paid for - by the Seti Institute in California, it ultimately found nothing.
Jodrell has since been updated, linking it via fibre optics into a 217km-long array with six other telescopes across England. Known as eMerlin, this system would be a far more powerful tool to scan the skies for alien transmissions.
And Jodrell's Tim O'Brien said Seti work could be done quite easily without disturbing mainstream science on the array.
"You could do serendipitous searches. So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you Seti research almost for free," the Jodrell associate director explained.
"There are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least have half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us."
In addition to eMerlin, the UK is also heavily involved in Lofar - a European Low Frequency Array that incorporates new digital techniques to survey wide areas of the sky all at once.
And Jodrell itself is the management HQ for the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array, a giant next-generation radio observatory to be built in South Africa and Australia. It will have incredible power, not only to screen out interference from TV and phone signals here on Earth, but to resolve very faint signals at vast distances. It has been said the SKA could detect an airport radar on an alien world 50 light-years away.
One attraction of Seti is the great potential for "citizen science" involvement.
The Seti@Home screensaver has proved to be a big hit with the public, using downtime on home and business PCs to analyse radio telescope data for alien signals. The UK has a strong history in this area also with projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which sees citizen scientists help professional astronomers sift and classify the colossal numbers of images we now have of galaxy structures.
Sir Martin said there was huge public interest in the Seti question and some modest state funding for the area would probably get wide support.
"I'd put it this way: if you were to ask all the people coming out of a science fiction movie whether they'd be happy if some small fraction of the tax revenues from that movie were hypothecated to try to determine if any of what they'd just seen was for real, I'm sure most would say 'yes'," he told BBC News.
The issue is whether UK astronomy, currently operating under very tight fiscal constraints, can afford any spare cash for a field of endeavour that has completely unknown outcomes.
Sheffield University's Paul Crowther doubted the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the main funders of UK astronomy, would be able to support UKSRN.
"Continued flat-cash science budget awards are constantly eroding STFC's buying powers, causing the UK to withdraw from existing productive facilities such as the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.
"[British astronomy] faces the prospect of a reduced volume of research grants, and participation in future high-impact facilities [eg the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope] is threatened. I would be shocked if STFC's advisory panels rated the support of UKSRN higher than such scientifically compelling competition."
Dr Penny argued Seti could make a strong case, and that his group would try to get research council backing.
"The human race wants to explore, wants to find things out, and if we stop trying we're on the road to decay," he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23202054
UK astronomers to co-ordinate their search for alien signals
British scientists are to make a concerted effort to look for alien life among the stars.
Academics from 11 institutions have set up a network to co-ordinate their Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti).
The English Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees, will act as patron.
The group is asking funding agencies for a small - about £1m a year - sum of money to support listening time on radio telescopes and for data analysis.
It would also help pay for research that considered new ways to try to find aliens.
Currently, most Seti work is done in the US and is funded largely through private donation.
UK Seti Research Network (UKSRN) co-ordinator Alan Penny said there was important expertise in Britain keen to play its part.
"If we had one part in 200 - half a percent of the money that goes into astronomy at the moment - we could make an amazing difference. We would become comparable with the American effort," the University of St Andrews researcher told BBC News.
"I don't know whether [aliens] are out there, but I'm desperate to find out. It's quite possible that we're alone in the Universe. And think about the implications of that: if we're alone in the Universe then the whole purpose in the Universe is in us. If we're not alone, that's interesting in a very different way."
The UKSRN held its first get-together at this week's National Astronomy Meeting.
British researchers and facilities have had occasional involvement in Seti projects down the years.
The most significant was the use in 1998-2003 of Jodrell bank, and its 76m Lovell radio telescope, in Project Phoenix. This was a search for signals from about 1,000 nearby stars. Organised - and paid for - by the Seti Institute in California, it ultimately found nothing.
Jodrell has since been updated, linking it via fibre optics into a 217km-long array with six other telescopes across England. Known as eMerlin, this system would be a far more powerful tool to scan the skies for alien transmissions.
And Jodrell's Tim O'Brien said Seti work could be done quite easily without disturbing mainstream science on the array.
"You could do serendipitous searches. So if the telescopes were studying quasars, for example, we could piggy-back off that and analyse the data to look for a different type of signal - not the natural astrophysical signal that the quasar astronomer was interested in, but something in the noise that one might imagine could be associated with aliens. This approach would get you Seti research almost for free," the Jodrell associate director explained.
"There are billions of planets out there. It would be remiss of us not to at least have half an ear open to any signals that might be being sent to us."
In addition to eMerlin, the UK is also heavily involved in Lofar - a European Low Frequency Array that incorporates new digital techniques to survey wide areas of the sky all at once.
And Jodrell itself is the management HQ for the forthcoming Square Kilometre Array, a giant next-generation radio observatory to be built in South Africa and Australia. It will have incredible power, not only to screen out interference from TV and phone signals here on Earth, but to resolve very faint signals at vast distances. It has been said the SKA could detect an airport radar on an alien world 50 light-years away.
One attraction of Seti is the great potential for "citizen science" involvement.
The Seti@Home screensaver has proved to be a big hit with the public, using downtime on home and business PCs to analyse radio telescope data for alien signals. The UK has a strong history in this area also with projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which sees citizen scientists help professional astronomers sift and classify the colossal numbers of images we now have of galaxy structures.
Sir Martin said there was huge public interest in the Seti question and some modest state funding for the area would probably get wide support.
"I'd put it this way: if you were to ask all the people coming out of a science fiction movie whether they'd be happy if some small fraction of the tax revenues from that movie were hypothecated to try to determine if any of what they'd just seen was for real, I'm sure most would say 'yes'," he told BBC News.
The issue is whether UK astronomy, currently operating under very tight fiscal constraints, can afford any spare cash for a field of endeavour that has completely unknown outcomes.
Sheffield University's Paul Crowther doubted the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the main funders of UK astronomy, would be able to support UKSRN.
"Continued flat-cash science budget awards are constantly eroding STFC's buying powers, causing the UK to withdraw from existing productive facilities such as the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope.
"[British astronomy] faces the prospect of a reduced volume of research grants, and participation in future high-impact facilities [eg the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope] is threatened. I would be shocked if STFC's advisory panels rated the support of UKSRN higher than such scientifically compelling competition."
Dr Penny argued Seti could make a strong case, and that his group would try to get research council backing.
"The human race wants to explore, wants to find things out, and if we stop trying we're on the road to decay," he said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23202054
Last edited:
dannycheveaux1
Devoted Cultist
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2003
- Messages
- 214
I don't understand how this post subject relates to UFOlogy
The SETI people generally don't believe that any UFOs could possibly be extraterrestrial visitors - as that would negate their reason for being
And off the top of my head I have some problems with the whole SETI thing anyway:
The non-receiving of a viable signal will be be used as "evidence" that we are alone in the Universe
We are looking for radio signals - even though we ourselves have only used this technology for the last 100 years or something
The premise for SETI is that somewhere out there a civilisation has evolved in a similar way to us, using similar technology, yet experts continuously tell us alien life forms wouldn't look anything like humanoid
The SETI people generally don't believe that any UFOs could possibly be extraterrestrial visitors - as that would negate their reason for being
And off the top of my head I have some problems with the whole SETI thing anyway:
The non-receiving of a viable signal will be be used as "evidence" that we are alone in the Universe
We are looking for radio signals - even though we ourselves have only used this technology for the last 100 years or something
The premise for SETI is that somewhere out there a civilisation has evolved in a similar way to us, using similar technology, yet experts continuously tell us alien life forms wouldn't look anything like humanoid
