> “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.
SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
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Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#32Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)
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.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no space-based radio telescopes. (Well, none pointing at stars at least. There are some spy sats pointed down.)
could you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??
There's a proposal for a large constellation of small, cheap-to-build radio sats. Heard about it on a Fraser Cain podcast. They plan to send them to one of the Lagrange points and spread them out in x KM cube pattern. They also want some of the sats to do some RF processing on-site, and beam just the "results" back.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#34>“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 toda…
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.
AI has been used in astrophysics for a long time, now. AI is more than genAI of the past 3-4 years... Classification tasks are handled by AI now because it's the only thing that gives you some accuracy at scale.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
could you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??
There's a proposal for a large constellation of small, cheap-to-build radio sats. Heard about it on a Fraser Cain podcast. They plan to send them to one of the Lagrange points and spread them out in x KM cube pattern. They also want some of the sats to do some RF processing on-site, and beam just the "results" back.
These aren't telescopes, but it is quite similar to what you're describing otherwise:
https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalabl...
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#36This 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.
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.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are no space-based radio telescopes. (Well, none pointing at stars at least. There are some spy sats pointed down.)
could you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??
What's the point? The frequencies being listened to on these radio telescopes aren't affected by the atmosphere. Arecibo in space doesn't get you anything that Arecibo on the ground didn't (except hurricane resistance, I guess).
One exception is the far side of the moon to get away from radio noise. But other than that, there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
could you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??
What's the point? The frequencies being listened to on these radio telescopes aren't affected by the atmosphere. Arecibo in space doesn't get you anything that Arecibo on the ground didn't (except hurricane resistance, I guess). One exception is the far side of the moon to get away from radio noise. But other than that, there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space.
I'm a fan of ground based radio astronomy, however:
> there's no reason to put a radio telescope in space
sadly isn't as true as it once was ..
* https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2024/09/aa51856-...
Once that constellation is fully expanded as intended, the planned chinese constellation joins it, and other nations (India?, the EU?) pile on, things will get even noisier.
The dark side of the moon offers hope, but it's still a lot of addiional awkwardness and expense that could be avoided with better attention to "the commons".
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#39I'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.
Re: SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
#40This 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.
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?