> 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!
And that's why they won't find anything, IMHO. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.
At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.
Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately leaving your house will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is stay the fuck inside.
Having it safe to go outside is the very point of a society.
Outside of this safety Bubble there's a strong tendency for conflict and war. Only after two cruel world wars and a prolonged cold war, the western world got their shit together and decided 'enough of that'. And even that doesn't seem to hold much longer, so it seems we will only have managed to live peaceful among each other without an immediate conflict with somebody (cold war) for roughly 30 years.
If aliens are remotely like us, they shouldn't know about us.
>“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.
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.
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.
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.
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??
I associate SETI news with the Youtube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011.
> 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!
> 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!”
Only if you hit the transmit button.
And that's why they won't find anything, IMHO. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.
At the same time, no advanced civilizations will be using coherent RF communications that stand out from the noise floor, because it makes little sense to keep doing that once your civilization understands information theory.
Still, SETI was an undeniably cool thing to try, and I'm glad they did. Lots of other cooperative-computing tasks grew out of the same idea as the article mentions.
Why not just credit the dark forest for this idea?
Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately leaving your house will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is stay the fuck inside.
We tried that in 2020. It didn't really work out that well as most people were physically unable to stay the fuck inside.
Having it safe to go outside is the very point of a society.
Outside of this safety Bubble there's a strong tendency for conflict and war. Only after two cruel world wars and a prolonged cold war, the western world got their shit together and decided 'enough of that'. And even that doesn't seem to hold much longer, so it seems we will only have managed to live peaceful among each other without an immediate conflict with somebody (cold war) for roughly 30 years.
If aliens are remotely like us, they shouldn't know about us.
This reads like a Douglas Adams quote
>“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.
Digest signals for 30 years and report back? That's one hell of a super computer and significantly faster than Deep Thought
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.
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.
Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)
Way, waaay better than Interstellar. That's a low bar actually. Interstellar was visually stunning, but absolute crap otherwise.
Three Body Problem as well for detecting signal.
Pluribus as well
I used to run this on my computer in the early 2000s. I wish we had a similar project nowadays.
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...
Folding is still going strong, as is:
https://worldcommunitygrid.org/
I remember donating a bit of my Alienware gaming laptop GPU on uni ethernet LAN in like 2010 ROFLMAO
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.
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.
ask chaptgpt about space telescopes
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??
But what did you think?