This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!
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.
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!”
Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded.
The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable.
If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
With radio signals?
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.
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.
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.
seti@home was definetly a cool screensaver, though.[0]
[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Korpela/publicatio...
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=3346...
Literally thousands of witnesses. It's very odd to say "aliens may exist, but those nuclear weapons officers are crazy, aliens would definitely be sending signals from elsewhere, they would not be and are not here."
[1] 50 USC § 3373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373
Pluribus as well
No comment.
I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot.
I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.
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.
The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.
When it came time for questions I asked. So, if we were at Alpha Centari could we detect signals from earth with the tech we currently have? They said "No". That was 2019. Maybe tech is better today?
(Well, none pointing at stars at least. There are some spy sats pointed down.)
