Seti@Home

Is anyone here a member of Seti@home? If so how many Data units have you completed? And what do you think about it? Im up to 105 now... wow.

 

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The movie "Contact" hinted at the effects that the discovery of ETI would have on the Xtian wackjob population. In the film, one of these idiots perpetrates a suicide bombing to destroy NASA facilities in order to "prevent scientists from talking to your God for you".

If conclusive proof of life, past or present, is found anywhere but earth, it directly contradicts the account in Genesis, and undermines their entire worldview. They won't take this lying down....

 

I'm not a member but I'm down with it.

They cut the funding because it isn't really needed. We do not need to know about other life, and anyway Nasa has other areas that deal with that. And Nasa takes too much of our money anyway.

 

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I´m a member. Have been for a long time. But I stopped using the software for a few years. I started up again a few months ago and am up to 133 dataunits now

 

I used to run the seti client, for a while - even had my own group going (The Eerie Network - with members from my paranormal forum), but lost interest after a while. I fully support the project and the idea behind the project, and if I ever start my paranormal site going again, i'll probally start using the client again, but otherwise, no.

 

I'm a member and I've completed 283 data units...

 

Im now at 469 Data units

 

My data units have slowed, significantly. My puter is getting full and it no longer likes seti being the screen saver. So now it only runs when I manually turn it on...

 

It's an interesting project, but...I have doubts as to whether it will ever be successful. It's not that I don't believe in ETI (I think the statistical odds favor the idea), but I think that if they exist they would be so unimpressed by us that they would have no reason to contact us.

 

But they wouldn't have to be trying to intentionally contact us, right?

If their society uses electromagnetic communications, those signals are travelling out into the universe, whether they intended it or not. Finding a signal originating from an ETI would be important, even if it WASN'T specifically intended for us or any other civilization.

 

I think that an advanced civilization would probably find some way to avoid "leaking" electromagnetic waves in the way that we are, if they cared about being detected. It's also possible that electromagnetic communications would be obsolete to an advanced civilization (limited by the speed of light, grow weaker over distance). I don't know if it's a scientific possibility to communicate by other means, but I certainly wouldn't rule it out.

In other words, a civilization more advanced than us would have no desire to communicate with us and could probably prevent "accidental" communication. A civilization less advanced than us would not yet have radio capabilities. And I think that the odds of finding a civilization precisely at the same point of technological development as we are (give or take a few hundred years) are astronomically small.

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a SETI success (if there's an advanced civilization that still communicates by radio and doesn't mind if outsiders detect its existence), but I think the odds are against it. I don't think we should assume that just because we communicate with radio waves, most other civilizations do too.

 

Our communitcations now do not leak far into space. So its likely that we're looking for a 100ish year window assuming we're developing at an average kind of rate. I don't think its likely that SETI will succeed either.
Its equally unlikely that we'll detect any interplanetry communications as radio waves would be totally pointless for this purpose. Due to a complete and utter absence of any real space science research these days there are no other known principles upon which to look for communications.

 

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Exactly.

An "obsolete" technology may be exactly what one would WANT to use for an application like this, to enable the broadest possible "listenership". Similar to why our "greeting to the universe" on the Voyager probe took the form of a simple, childlike drawing and a PHONOGRAPH RECORD for audio content.

 

I used to have seti@home, but when I built my new box, I never installed it again. Really though, I don't think it's too promising. First of all, these aliens might be totally out there, just completely different than us. They might not even have the same senses as we do. Secondly, how do we know these aliens are actually looking for us? Maybe they don't belive in aliens. Also, you have technology. They might not even have the same type of stuff, reguardless of where they are on the technological time-line. I'm not trying to put down the project, I'm just trying to be realistic.

 

Even if advanced civilizations are interested in communication with other civilizations, I don't see why they would necessarily want a broad "listenership." Civilizations like ours would almost certainly be uninteresting to them...what possible reason could they have for communicating with us? It seems more likely that they would want to filter out dumb species like us.

It's very likely that a civilization a mere 1,000 years ahead of us technologically would see our civilization the way we see insect civilizations.

 

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I bet we wouldn't if they were light-years away, and we couldn't learn anything from them that we couldn't also learn from species on a world closer to ours.