http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=377452

http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=219

So, I think it’s a waste of money to look for something that would never reach us anyways no matter how powerful they try to make it.

Nowadays, working for a British outsourcing company, doing Linux/SunOS administration and writing all kinds of “glue” software, everything is measured: power consumption, CPU load, traffic. Our stuff runs more efficient without Boinc (yes, even when “renice”d (8) to the max), so there, no more distributed computing for SETI, sorry. At home, bandwidth wouldn’t be a problem anymore, but I like my Mac mini and my iBook silent. I like the iBook battery to last 4h (compared to 2h with Boinc). Sorry again.

Darth Borehd’s security argument is also true. Potentially, any sufficiently complex daemon/service task you add to your OS increases security risks.

Because of all this, I think nowadays this kind of number crunching is best suited for dedicated server/grid-computing farms.

It’s a great CPU benchmarking tool, regardless. I avg. ~2 hr/wu on a 2GHz Athlon64 (no O/C), and I’ve seen many machines blow that away; my old PII/PIII boxes can take 6-12 hr (or more) for one workunit.

I never really paid attention to the fact that the windows version’s “screen saver” never moved the text around.

After about a year of running the Seti@home client, the frames around each section were burned into my monitor for good… Yeah it was mostly my fault for not noticing sooner, but I think the term “screen saver” has certain connotations, and they blew it…

A True Skeptic ™ I think it’s extremely unlikely we’d ever find anything, but I’m not a cynic so I’m excited at how amazing it would be.

I often promote SETI@home to the scientists and Skeptics I associate with, and have several times been shocked by this sort of response:

“I think SETI is incredibly dangerous and naive. We should not be trying to find or contact intelligent life elsewhere. Odds are it would be hostile and come here to wipe us out. We can’t afford to take this risk.”

To such people I say
“You can hide under your bed and quake in fear if you like, but that possibility isn’t going to stop me. You can’t stop me. Even if you’re hiding here as quiet as a mouse, someone else is going to be yelling at the top of their voice. Alien contact would be so revolutionary and amazing that there are always going to be people trying to make it happen. If there’s a risk they’ll harm us, we’ll just have to wear it.”

Obviously most people don’t give the paranoid response. But several scientists and locally prominent Skeptics have. I take this as a reminder that no-one is right all the time. Hmmm I think I’ve even read a newspaper article years back towing the same line.

“Ogg! Don’t investigate fire! Fire will burn down cave!”

[[Unless you are able to come up with some faster-than-light method of communications, wouldn’t you expect communications to use some sort of EM energy? And wouldn’t you expect them to use, for interplanetary communications at least, portions of the spectrum which are relatively “quiet” from background noise?]]

Maybe they use neutrinos. Maybe they use gravitons. Maybe they use gauge bosons which operate a force we haven’t discovered yet, and won’t discover for another 10,000 years. Maybe they open wormholes and send videophone signals straight to the phone number on another planet they want to contact. The point is, we don’t know what a three-billion-year-old civilization will use. As Carl Sagan put it, our attempts at SETI may be like Pacific Islands a thousand years ago listening for very loud drum signals made on gigantic wood-and-animal-skin drums.

It’s not a matter of not using radio. It’s a matter of not using high-powered radio.

Even as humans move into a digital age, what is happening to our RF signals… everything is reducing power. You don’t need a 100 kW TV station when a 50 W digital TV transmitter will get the job done. That 100 kW transmitter could be heard at much greater “interstellar” distances than a 50 W transmitter, even if you ignore the modulation issues.

The loudest things we have on Earth, radio-wise, are heavy search radars which can fire pulses in the megawatt range. However, we’re even using those less as other detection methods improve.

So, in 200 years, I would think that even if we do still use radio, it will be low power, with complex modulation schemes and very much indistinguishable from the noise. It’s probably fair to assume that advanced civilizations would follow a similar engineering curve.

How does SETI propose to detect a complex broadband signal using some combination of frequency, amplitude, and or phase modulation which at first glance would be indistinguishable from noise?

Neutrino beams. Just ask Cal Meacham.

- Jack