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New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

theguardian.com

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Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#71

Post by dang »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #66
tptacek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. The site karma thresholds are extremely low. They're an anti-abuse measure, not a reward.

You can label and the differences between extremely low karma accounts and 0 karma accounts however you'd like, but a low karma account has more power over the content of the site than a zero karma account. I also don't think it can be easily ruled out that there are additional, higher karma thresholds upon which an account may be bestowed with additional powers (rate-limit loosening, for example).

It can easily be ruled out by asking us. The highest karma threshold (that I recall, at least) is the downvoting one at 500. Pretty much all the others are 30 or lower.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#72

Post by SyneRyder »

ChrisGranger wrote: post #40
SyneRyder wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LunaSea had mentioned those reasons and some supporting evidence, it would have been a better comment. Two of the points raised by bllckchps I've been able to verify for myself: * The crowd funding campaign goal has been modified since the article was published. The article said the goal was $13,000, but the goal has now changed to $18,000. [1] * Some of the content on The Center for Planetary Science website is j…

Someone in the comments at The Guardian said that the initial goal was actually $10,000. That number has been all over the place. I'm interested in both crowdfunding and astronomy, but this particular campaign seems like one that should be avoided.

I just logged in today and it's requesting $20,000 now. That part of the campaign alone seems really odd....

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#73

Post by tptacek »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #66
tptacek wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, no. The site karma thresholds are extremely low. They're an anti-abuse measure, not a reward.

You can label and the differences between extremely low karma accounts and 0 karma accounts however you'd like, but a low karma account has more power over the content of the site than a zero karma account. I also don't think it can be easily ruled out that there are additional, higher karma thresholds upon which an account may be bestowed with additional powers (rate-limit loosening, for example).

I feel reasonably confident that there aren't karma rewards for people with more karma than me, although there should be some kind of sick reward for it.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#74

Post by ptrincr »

mcbutterbunz wrote: post #67
ptrincr wrote: post #34

Forgive me if this is a daft question, but, how much effort has gone into analysing the contents of this signal? It appears we have 72 seconds of data to work with, or is it just completely random data with no pattern at all? If we did receive an intelligent signal from an extraterrestrial source, what form do we think or hope it would take? Perhaps something along the lines of counting out the first 100 prime number…

> If we did receive an intelligent signal from an extraterrestrial source, what form do we think or hope it would take? For unintentional signals, I think it would take the same form of the early radio broadcasts from here on earth. These are likely some of the weakest signals but they have also traveled further than any other at this point.

These would probably be fairly difficult to detect. The vast majority of the radio messages we have leaked into space over the last 100 years or so weren't focused. By the time they reached a neighbouring star they might be hard to distinguish from background noise. Also let's say someone did manage to detect these signals and they were 80ly's away. They might not have detected them until say 2000, and if they immediately send back a message, we would not receive this until 2080.

I think our best hope is that an Alien civilisation has begun the search for extrasolar planets, like we have. They will be able to analyse the composition of our atmosphere using spectroscopy.

With this information they would either decide that life either exists or is very likely to exist here, and so would begin transmitting a constant and unmissable signal to us in the hope that we would eventually detect it. Providing we manage to monitor the right frequency and look at the right point in the sky..... as life has existed here on earth for Billions of years, perhaps this signal is already been sent to us and we just need to find it....

It's a long shot but perhaps it's the best one we have.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#75

Post by Houshalter »

ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Seems unlikely. If undiscovered comets were this prone to putting off such strong signals, there should be a lot more unexplained "wow!" notations in notebooks from them.

Depends. It might require the telescope to be pointed at just the right angle at just the right time.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#76

Post by sveiss »

iaw wrote: post #57
mrfusion wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? We just didn't record it?

In 1977 I suspect recording equipment was too expensive for radio telescope work when an alphanumeric graph can suffice.

This is still a problem. I attended a talk a few weeks ago by a member of staff on the Square Kilometer Array Science Data Processor project, and they were talking about data volumes on the order of an exabyte... per day.

Obviously, an awful lot of pre-processing has to be done to get this down to a manageable data volume for analysis (100s of TBs), but if something gets lost in processing in the early stages, it's gone forever. Even managing and archiving the processed datasets will be a challenge.

Oh, and the second stage of the project was going to add 100x to those data volume numbers.

Re: New effort to study astronomical ‘wow’ signal after almost 40 years

#77

Post by iaw »

sveiss wrote: post #76
iaw wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1977 I suspect recording equipment was too expensive for radio telescope work when an alphanumeric graph can suffice.

This is still a problem. I attended a talk a few weeks ago by a member of staff on the Square Kilometer Array Science Data Processor project, and they were talking about data volumes on the order of an exabyte... per day. Obviously, an awful lot of pre-processing has to be done to get this down to a manageable data volume for analysis (100s of TBs), but if something gets lost in processing in the early stages, it's g…

Some day, 30 years from now, people will look back on the term "big data" and laugh at how naive we were.
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