SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others

[pokstad]

> 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!

[bkeyes]

Only if you hit the transmit button.

[harmet]

> This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door

This is what I thought also.

Maybe they didn’t find any signals, but just said, “To heck with it. We’ll just say we found 100 signals, and let them come to us!”

[rippeltippel]

I guess we'll find out in a few decades.

[thegrim000]

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.

[singularity2001]

On the other hand, I hold the slightly fringe theory that suns are sentient beings, and by just watching the stars, we may see them communicate.

[1970-01-01]

>“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.

[dylan604]

Digest signals for 30 years and report back? That's one hell of a super computer and significantly faster than Deep Thought

[CJefferson]

No, AI are terrible at finding these types of patterns.

You could hypothetically use AI to write algorithms to find the patterns, but people have already spent a long time super-tuning them.

AIs can't even (at least I keep checking) solve Sudokus as well as my mother -- they aren't good with piles of numbers and complex patterns.

[guybedo]

Claude Code: i'm entering plan mode to analyze the 10B signals in the database

[CamperBob2]

If nothing else, AI will probably be needed to filter out RF artifacts and spurious emissions from all the Internet satellite constellations that are either already online or ramping up in the future.

This sort of effort really ought to be conducted with antennas on the far side of the Moon, IMO. But good luck finding the budget for that these days.

[markus_zhang]

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

[serf]

folding@home is still going I think?

seti@home was definetly a cool screensaver, though.[0]

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Korpela/publicatio...

[cheschire]

The article links to BOINC. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

[qingcharles]

This made me go back and find the S@H team I started in 1999:

https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=3346...

[esbranson]

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

[andrea76]

Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)

[adastra22]

Way, waaay better than Interstellar. That's a low bar actually. Interstellar was visually stunning, but absolute crap otherwise.

[Zardoz84]

The book is far better. They completely removed the "artist signature" from the movie.

[dylan604]

Three Body Problem as well for detecting signal.

Pluribus as well

[LeoPanthera]

For your kids, “Elio” is basically “Contact” for kids. It didn’t get fantastic reviews, but I suspect it appeals to the HN crowd more.

[sMarsIntruder]

> “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.

[muragekibicho]

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

[antisol]

I can't resist bragging:

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.

[cpncrunch]

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.

[XorNot]

It's mostly not reasonable to try and ascribe human motivations to alien entities, particularly when we know some humans would definitely fire up the transmitter if they could.

The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.

[socalgal2]

I heard this as well by scientists from JAXA. They gave a presentation on SETI.

When it came time for questions I asked. So, if we were at Alpha Centari could we detect signals from earth with the tech we currently have? They said "No". That was 2019. Maybe tech is better today?

[jacquesm]

But what did you think?

[jondwillis]

ask chaptgpt about space telescopes

[jondwillis]

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

[dylan604]

I was at a shop that had beefy workstations for 3D/video/graphics work that I thought I was cool for running @home on the 10 boxes we had. I remember popping up in the top 100 list for a minute.