A question sabout SETI - where to aim?

Question

Regarding SETI, the program scans the entire sky, but sometimes will focus on the direction of a given star if there seems to be indication of "something" going on there. Stars are light years away, however. If ET exists, they may well have more sophisticated communication technology than ours - technology capable of instant message transferrence even over vast light years. All stars save but for our own are multiple light years away, so focusing on their -visual- location seems erroneous. Shouldn't we calculate where in the sky it would be right now and scan there instead of the visual location where it hasn't been for many years?

Radio waves are an impractical communications medium across astronomical distances and it's highly doubtful that any ordinary stray signal to ping one of our satellites would be strong enough to seem significant. . I think focusing on radio waves transmitted the "old-fashioned" way is a wasted effort. The only radio waves we could pick up <2 b continued...>

to any reasonably noticeable degree would be one transmitted on the back of some sort of much faster (instantaneous?) "carrier wave".

to any reasonably noticeable degree would be one transmitted on the back of some sort of much faster (instantaneous?) "carrier wave".

Answer 1

SETI works on two principles.
1. There are advanced civilizations out there that want to communicate with other civilizations like ours. They themselves probably use a much more sophisticated way of communicating but they would probably be listening for radio just as we are. And they could possibly assume that more primitive civilizations would first make use of radio and send out simple messages via radio to be "backwards compatible"

2. And then there is the idea that many advanced civilizations would have begun emitting radio and tv signals at some point in their history like we are now. They might have moved beyond radio (or gone extinct) but their first transmissions would still be radiating out into space in every direction. If they were at our level 2000 years ago and at a distance of 2000 lightyears SETI could pick up their first experiments with radio communication.

Answer 2

i would like to point out that they are doing an optical seti as well using visible light since it can carry more information than radio waves can. however light and radio waves and all over electromagnetic radiation travels at the same speed, the speed of light.

the theory with seti is that these aliens will be sending out signals to other aliens, not necessarily in terms of a conversation but instead just to send a message out there.

and we're hoping to pick up on those messages.

your notion about looking at where the star would be right now instead of where it can be seen is intriguing but wrong.

if there was some signal moving faster than light we would need some whole new technology to pick it up. in the meantime if we pick up a signal from a star we might as well try looking at the star to see if it repeats. no point just looking around blindly hoping to get some random signal.

Answer 3

Well the SETI effort doesn't focus on stars. It scans the sky with the Aricebo dish. If there is a better technology that the ETs have and we have yet to discover, that would tell them that we are not advanced. That's why we are scanning the microwave spectrum. We'll find any new civilizations and any older ones that want to contact a moderatly advanced civ. There is little disruption over lightyears and it's a technology that a race would first discover.
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SETI at Home http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
SETI@home searches for possible evidence of radio transmissions from extraterrestrial intelligence using data from the Arecibo radio telescope. The software searches for four signals:[citation needed]

Spikes in power spectra
Gaussian rises and falls in transmission power, possibly representing the telescope beam's main lobe passing over a radio source
Triplets — three power spikes in a row
Pulsing signals that possibly represent a narrowband digital-style transmission

The process is somewhat like tuning a radio to various channels, and looking at the signal strength meter. If the strength of the signal goes up, that gets attention. More technically, it involves a lot of digital signal processing, mostly discrete Fourier transforms at various chirp rates and durations.

While the project has not found any conclusive signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, it has identified several candidate spots for further analysis. The most significant candidate signal to date was announced on September 1, 2004, named Radio source SHGb02+14a.

Seth Shostak (2004), a prominent SETI figure, has stated that he expects to get a conclusive signal and proof of alien contact between 2020 and 2025, based on the Drake equation.

While the project hasn't reached the goal of finding extraterrestrial intelligence, it did prove to the scientific community that distributed computing projects using Internet-connected computers can work and even oust the largest supercomputers[4].

With over 5.2 million participants worldwide, the project is the distributed computing project with the most participants to date. Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time. On September 26, 2001, SETI@home had performed a total of 1021 floating point operations. It is acknowledged by the Guinness World Records as the largest computation in history (Newport 2005). With over 1.36 million computers in the system, as of March 12, 2007, SETI@home has the ability to compute over 265 TeraFLOPS [1]. For comparison, Blue Gene (currently the world's fastest supercomputer) computes just over 360 TFLOPS.

Answer 4

There is no clear way to define what part of the sky to look up at for signals, other than to look for stars like our own. But SETI is in part to blame because they refuse to allow outside astronomy groups to suggest where to look in the sky. All decisions are made by a very small group of individuals.
So other groups have undertaken the task that they want to transmit to all parts of the universe signals that announce our presences.
As for the communications you proposed, we don't even have that level of knowledge to undertake such a project.

Answer 5

The SETI@home files we are currently processing are readings that were taken from such places as Arecibo up to as much as 7yrs or 8yrs ago...if anything is picked up from these then this is when they'll focus their attention, by other means, to whichever area showed any possible signs.

Answer 6

i dont really care about seti..maybe..lol....but their project in my own opinion is worthless these days....they are taking signals for what?..communications with ETs?..lol...


Ets will just come here..i dont think ET's will send radio signals..


Check this guy who is sentenced for 70 years in prison for hacking NASA computer files and top US organizations about UFO's :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PkNPCEnJM

this one is about Alien Engineering, just follow the vids[1-10] ill just post part1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDsQMZxsNQA

And finally, here check the disclosure project. its kinda long but A MUST SEE!!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyVe-6YdUk

to support the link :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disclosure_Project

in addition, australia also have thier own UFO related stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Disclosure_Project

THE ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE - IS NOT THE EVIDENCE OF ABSENCE....we aren't alone..think outside the box guys..

truth is out there.

Answer 7

the seti project was started many years ago and as far as i know they havent updated it since then ... yes i agree with you ... radio waves are quite a primitive way of communicating on the stellar scale ..... its a big error on the part of humans

we need to focus more on lightwaves .. since data can be sent across by light waves too or radioactive rays .... yes the aliens know we are here ... and they keep visiting us ... but they wont interact with us simply coz we are too dumb .. compared to their standards ... we are still school kids ... i believe aliens are our future generations .... visiting us .. maybe back in time.... aliens are a reality and the govt has tried its best to cover it up ...dunno why..... i think both our govt and the aliens dont want us to contact them... the truth is ... we have already found what seti is looking for.... and thats aliens ... we never found them ... they found us.... i dont know how to explain it simpler than this.

Answer 8

SETI is a joke. We already know that ET's exist. I don't know why they even bother. Perhaps it's all just a big front to distract the masses into thinking that we have not found anything yet.

Answer 9

I really don't think that we should randomly send messages into space. but if we do we should aim some where we see it and where it is just to be sure.

Answer 10

so you think you know where to aim but you have no idea how to actually detect the signal do you? sorry but i think this is a useless suggestion.