SETI....Worthless rubbish OR Worth Trying Anyway

This has been an interesting poll.

The results so far out of 21 votes, 16 people think that seti@home may be worth being involved in. 18/1/2007

5 people disagreed and thought that it was'nt worth trying or maby felt i had worded the vote badly, so they said no.

I does lighten my heart a little to know that the majority of people are willing to do what they can to further the search for life somewhere else. :lol:

John.

Pulled this for an article in space.com by Seth Shostak

When Does SETI Throw in the Towel?


“At what point would you abandon the search?”


That’s a question I get relatively frequently from folks who think that SETI may be a quixotic quest, as futile as searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. After all, modern efforts to find signals from extraterrestrial transmitters are now in their fifth decade. Could it be that those of us who still hope to tune in other worlds may be missing some writing on the wall? Some dead-obvious, chiseled text with a simple, if disappointing message: “There are no aliens”?


The question seems fair, since SETI’s obvious analogs–the historical voyages of discovery made in the centuries following the Renaissance–were completed in considerably less time than SETI has been beating the cosmic bushes. Columbus spent five weeks finding North America (and he wasn’t even looking). Captain Cook, a true paragon of explorers, and a man who mapped places that Europeans didn’t even know were places, never mounted an expedition that lasted more than three years.


But those analogs are false. The South Pacific, for all its watery wastes, is comprehensible in size. Even Cook’s unimpressive Whitby collier, powered by sailcloth, could cross the Pacific in a matter of months, come about, and cross again in a different direction. His quarry, the islands peppering the ocean like coins scattered onto a living room carpet, signaled their presence by clots of clouds even when the islands themselves were below the horizon.


The SETI wilderness is incomparably larger, obviously, and its quarry is cryptic. Even if there are ten thousand transmitting societies nestled in the arms of the Milky Way, we might need to search millions of star systems before we find one. The actual number of star systems that radio SETI experiments have carefully examined is fewer than a thousand.


It’s a simple truth, although one not universally acknowledged, that SETI is still in its early stages. Consequently, many of its practitioners will tell you that this is a multigenerational experiment, akin to building cathedrals in medieval Europe. In other words, a lot of SETI scientists will answer the question that began this article by saying “not in my lifetime, nor in that of my children or grandchildren.”


Fighting words, but could they be hyperbolic? To begin with, SETI experiments will have examined millions of star systems within a generation. And within two, we could carefully check every star in the Galaxy. The SETI ship has a lot of ocean to cover, but thanks to new technologies, it’s picking up speed. So clearly, if we haven’t found something by mid-century or so, it will be hard to argue that it’s still “early stages.”


And frankly, it’s conceivable that SETI’s basic assumptions might be proven wrong. Imagine that the new space-based telescopes (COROT and Kepler) currently being deployed to hunt for Earth-size planets around other stars come up empty. That would be a premium-grade bummer. But even if (as widely expected) they do discover rocky worlds, it’s possible that a decade or so down the line, their telescopic successors–atmosphere-sniffing instruments such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder–might fail to find any extrasolar worlds on which life has taken hold.


Spacecraft of the future might return to us the news that neither Mars, Europa, nor any of the other orbs of the solar system with liquid water have ever produced a microbe. If these are headlines of the future–if the local cosmic neighborhood turns out to be as sterile as prime-time television–then that would certainly put me on the defensive.


But the fact is that none of this incites me to break out the worry beads. Not yet. The various factors in the well-known Drake Equation, which is often used to estimate the chances of SETI success, have–at least until now–become more encouraging with time, not less. The more we learn about the universe, the more it seems disposed to house worlds with life. It didn’t have to be that way.


Somewhat more disquieting is the possibility that our approach is wrong. SETI today is overwhelmingly a search for narrow-band electromagnetic transmissions, or in fewer syllables, a hunt for beamed radio or light. We search with straightforward telescopic techniques, but it’s possible that alien broadcasts could be encoded in ways that we’re not set up to find. I’m not talking about how they construct their messages–or whether they’re broadcasting in Standard American English or a lilting Klingon dialect–but the technical scheme they use. For instance, Walt Simmons at the University of Hawaii has suggested that garrulous aliens might wield two widely separated transmitters and use quantum mechanical effects to encode their messages. The advantage would be that if we opened this type of alien mail, it would be impossible to tell from which direction it came, thereby protecting the anonymity of the sender. This sort of approach–still somewhat beyond our technical abilities–might make our present receiving schemes seem naïve.


In addition, there’s always the chance that the discovery of new physics will reveal some communication mode that’s either faster than light and radio, or requires less energy to use. This doesn’t seem likely, but science is all about surprises.


Indeed, my personal feeling is that if SETI hasn’t turned up something by the second half of this century, we should reconsider our search strategy, rather than assume that we’ve failed because there is nothing–or no one–to find. Would I ever conclude that we’ve searched enough? Would I ever truly give up on SETI’s bedrock premise, and tell myself that the extraterrestrials simply aren’t out there? Not likely. That would be to assume that we’ve learned all there is to know about our universe, a stance that is contrary to the spirit of explorers and scientists alike. We might yearn, or even need to believe that we are special, but to conclude that Homo sapiens is the best the cosmos has to offer is egregious self-adulation.

Some updates regarding the SETI endeavour and for those interested in taking part or currently utilizing SETI@home and the BONIC platform…

SETI@home looking for more volunteers
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 02 January 2008

“Yet, new and more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and better frequency coverage are generating 500 times more data for the project than before. The SETI@home software has been upgraded to deal with this new data as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era and offers a new opportunity for those who want to help find other civilizations in the universe”.

“What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now allow the telescope to record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources”.
www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/01/02_setiahome.shtml

There are currently ~42 active projects available to those running the BOINC platform (including SETI@home) some of the other projects that is available to participate in, is; Earth Sciences, Mathematics, Biology, physics and of course Astronomy. A relatively new project that may interest some of you is Cosmology@home.
The goal of Cosmology@Home is to search for the model that best describes our Universe and to find the range of models that agree with the available astronomical and particle physics data. In order to achieve this goal, participants in Cosmology@Home (i.e. you!) will compute the observable predictions of millions of theoretical models with different parameter combinations.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_projects
www.cosmologyathome.org/

While looking through the SETI League website there is some interesting links relating to theories, projects and research relating to the possibilities of Extraterrestrial intelligences. For example the “Contact in Context” website linked from the SETI League main page...

“Contact In Context is a peer-reviewed, web-based, academic journal. Since 2002 the journal has served as a scientific forum for research in astrobiology and the search for intelligent life in the universe. Within these areas, Contact In Context covers topics such as astroanalytical chemistry, microwave spectrometry, optical spectrometry, electrical engineering, physics, biology, social sciences, mathematics and statistics. Articles differ in scope and focus, but are intended for researchers in SETI and astrobiology, resource professionals, and scientists in general. Contact In Context encourages submissions of research articles, research reviews, scholarly essays, and book reviews on all topics related to SETI, astrobiology, and astroanalytical chemistry. The journal is published semiannually by the SETI League and is distributed without charge through the World Wide Web”.

There are some interesting articles from the Contact In Context website (all free); in particular I found this one article quite interesting: “Have We Got a Message from ETI? Three Dress Rehearsals for Contact Online”.
contactincontext.org/cic/v2i2/ieti3.pdf
This article is by Scarlett Wang, Ph.D. Project Manager, Invitation to ETI (I found parts of this article to be amusing as to what lengths some terrestrial people will go to).
Invitation to ETI, is a Web-based, scientifically credible SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) experiment built around those speculative questions. In these pages, you will find an invitation, issued by an informal group of approximately 100 scientists, artists and futurists from around Planet Earth, to any Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (ETI) having the capability to read it. This invitation is issued in hopes of establishing a constructive dialog between humanity and our cosmic companions.

SETI League website: www.setileague.org/
Contact in Context website: cic.setileague.org/cic/CIC_home.htm
Invitation to ETI website: ieti.org/

Clear skies
Mike

Wow, this sure is a popular thread. I haven't read any replies yet, but I have cast my vote in favour of SETI. I mean, surely we can't (either on a religious or biological level) be the only intelligent beings in the known Cosmos. So, I reckon they are 'out there', and like us, will, or are trying to, communicate with us. So, SETI should be kept going.

Seanie.

How many of you have the SETI software on your computer?

setiathome.berkeley.edu/

PJ, I had the software on my pc for a couple of years. I processed about 30 lumps of data in that period. My machine found nothing of course....but hey...just think if it is your pc that finds something ya might have an alian named after you....look out the PJ's are coming to get yaa...LOL

anyway read a seriously good book on the matter of what could possibly keep them alians from coming down and shaking tentacles with us. the answer seems to be our fast food and packed commuter trains freaks them out.