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The potentially extraterrestrial signals were picked up through the SETI+home project, which uses programs running as screensavers on millions of personal computers worldwide to sift through the huge amount of data picked up by the telescope.
[cnn.com...]
We don't even know how far it goes or what is out there past our current reach. How could one possibly make the assumption there is nothing else?
I just hope we are young enough to see these theories verified over the next 50 years. Our grandparents saw quite a few extraordiary advancements over the past 50 years. Just wait for the next 50.
I believe in ghosts too!
Maybe one day soon...
Syzygy
“It boggles my mind. We’ re looking for something that screams ‘Artificial’ but this just doesn’t do that,” said SETI scientist Eric Korpela.“The signal is moving rapidly in frequency. You would expect that from a transmitter on a rapidly-rotating planet,” the journal quoted SETI scientist Eric Korpela as saying. More interestingly, the signal was first detected by two home computer users in Germany and the United States, following which SETI redirected Arecibo towards the source.
>>Unfortunately, in checking for further details
the faint pulse, detected by the world’s biggest single-dish telescope, the Arecibo radio telescope, in Puerto Rico originated from a planet located somewhere between the two constellations Pisces and Aries.
[economictimes.indiatimes.com...]
Probably a false but,
“It’s the most interesting signal from SETI@home,” says Dan Werthimer, a radio astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) and the chief scientist for SETI@home. “We’re not jumping up and down, but we are continuing to observe it.”
[newscientist.com...]
Seems like "initial excitiment dimmed by further research and analyses" syndrome.
Or sloppy reporting. Who knows?
Worth keeping an ear to the ground though. I run SETI@home as a screensaver on all my machines, if for no other reason than to participate in a neat computing process. SETI@home is the single largest ongoing computing project in the world, and is a fantastic "proof of concept" of decentralized computationl power. That in itself is a pretty significant contibution to scientific study.
Finding alien intelligence would be spiffy, sure, but that's almost a side-benefit, IMHO.
"The Martian Embassy to Planet Earth"...
After six months ( and countless "conversations"..? with the french administration in all its forms ) I realised he knew exactly what he was talking about ...
I wanna talk to an alien lifeform ..I dial 12 or 1013 or 1014...
to communicate with the dead I dial "wanadoo customer hotline" $0.40c per minute ...
Or sloppy reporting. Who knows?
A SETI researcher on Newsnight (BBC2) last night suggested that journalists were blowing up the story way too much.
The New Scientist article also points to what I think is a major puzzle:
There are other oddities. For instance, the signal’s frequency is drifting by between eight to 37 hertz per second. “The signal is moving rapidly in frequency and you would expect that to happen if you are looking at a transmitter on a planet that’s rotating very rapidly and where the civilisation is not correcting the transmission for the motion of the planet,” Korpela says.
<snip>A planet would have to be rotating nearly 40 times faster than Earth to have produced the observed drift; a transmitter on Earth would produce a signal with a drift of about 1.5 hertz per second.
What is more, if telescopes are observing a signal that is drifting in frequency, then each time they look for it they should most likely encounter it at a slightly different frequency. But in the case of SHGb02+14a, every observation has first been made at 1420 megahertz, before it starts drifting.
My money's on something terrestrial, possibly connected with the telescope. I'll change my opinion if other telescopes in very diffferent parts of the world see the same phenomenon in the same place in the sky.
