>“There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” he said. “We have to do a better job of measuring what we’re excluding. Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches, and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere.”
Is this not the perfect job for AI today? Just sit there and digest signals for 30 years and report back the top 1000? I'm quite sure it could even work on the algorithms as a side-quest.
> They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.
This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!
This assumes that ETs are deliberately transmitting high power signals towards us (or into space in general), although I'm not sure that is a reasonable assumption. I think it would generally be unwise to loudly announce a civilization's presence.
According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
> “Until about 2016, we didn’t really know what we were going to do with these detections that we’d accumulated,” Anderson said. “We hadn’t figured out how to do the whole second part of the analysis.”
I've pretty much given up on traditional radio SETI ever finding anything, as its sole focus is on trying to find terrawatt/mega scale, repeating, intentional alien communication beacons, and nothing else. As I don't believe aliens would make such things, I don't believe traditional SETI will ever find anything.
Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded.
The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable.
If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
We have a statutory office within the US Department of Defense meant to track UFOs (AARO).[1] Why would such things be sending electromagnetic signals from outer space?
Literally thousands of witnesses. It's very odd to say "aliens may exist, but those nuclear weapons officers are crazy, aliens would definitely be sending signals from elsewhere, they would not be and are not here."
I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot.
I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.
13 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadIs this not the perfect job for AI today? Just sit there and digest signals for 30 years and report back the top 1000? I'm quite sure it could even work on the algorithms as a side-quest.
This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=3346...
According to chatgpt, our current earth-based radio telescopes would only be able to detect signals equivalent to radio leakage from earth at a distance of 1 light year.
No comment.
Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded.
The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable.
If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
Literally thousands of witnesses. It's very odd to say "aliens may exist, but those nuclear weapons officers are crazy, aliens would definitely be sending signals from elsewhere, they would not be and are not here."
[1] 50 USC § 3373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373
I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot.
I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.