Next week, for the first time, the SETI team will have the use of the Arecebo radio telescope for the dedicated purpose of examining the best candidate signals detected over the last four years of the SETI@home program. They only have 24 hours total of observing time in which to look at up to 200 or so candidates, but they can look at them in a lot more detail than they’re usually able to.
…and more will be added over the course of the coming week. The ‘real time results’ section looks like it could be particularly interesting.
The language on that website is typically guarded, but personally, I think this is the best chance so far of SETI actually detecting some ETI. Sure, chances are it won’t happen, but it’s still cool, and some of those anomalous signals might turn out to be interesting astronomical (natural) phenomena, too.
Here’s a sky map of the canditates they hope to examine next week. Just so you know which stars to smile and wave at, to send a good impression of Earth…just in case.
SETI is the biggest waste of human life ever concocted in the name of Science.
Note how great a percentage of our own planet’s lifetime has been obsessed with coded electrical messages in waveforms.
Put that way, you’ll see the answer is zero.
So why would a near zero percentage give us anything worthwhile.
And don’t you know that waveform messages are truly wasteful and redundant, so that in 100 years time we too will have abandoned them for more directed (point-to point aimed not broadcast) and digital (single or few-pulse, rather than long-enough stretches to recognize a wave form).
So SETI, if started a hundred years ago, would have consisted of checking meteorites for bits of wax voice cylinders that spacemen must have shot to us with cannon. And our Year-2000-Centric efforts are just as hilarious.
Thanks for the info Erroneous, but you do know that it’ll probably be awhile before they actually kick us the info? The packet my computer’s currently wasting my life on is dated Jan 25.
Of course it’s all pointless though because light is going to go out of vogue soon.