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SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others

101 points by TMEHpodcast

by pokstad

3 subcomments

> 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!

by thegrim000

1 subcomments

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.

by 1970-01-01

4 subcomments

>“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.

by markus_zhang

3 subcomments

I used to run this on my computer in the early 2000s. I wish we had a similar project nowadays.

by esbranson

0 subcomment

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."
[1] 50 USC § 3373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373

by andrea76

4 subcomments

by muragekibicho

0 subcomment

I associate SETI news with the Youtube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011.

by sMarsIntruder

0 subcomment

> “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.”
No comment.

by cpncrunch

4 subcomments

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.

by jondwillis

1 subcomments

I remember donating a bit of my Alienware gaming laptop GPU on uni ethernet LAN in like 2010 ROFLMAO

by NedF

0 subcomment