Re: Could SETI@Home results yeild discoveries through further analysis?
Posted by Uncle Al on Jan 29, 2004 at 09:58
(68.5.243.16)Re: Could SETI@Home results yeild discoveries through further analysis? (Chri)
The distributed SETI engine looks for non-random emissions. Of the purely enormous number of CPU-hrs so invested into the purely enormous database, about six intersting candidates have been identified.
Your proposal is complex and slow - certainly given the size of the database. The chance of an outworlder civilization beaming a detectable signal our way while we are looking is infinitesimal over time. SETI hopes to see a source of athermal noise not traceable to an astronomical event. The Earth is a brobdingnagian radiator of radio and microwave radiation - radio, TV, radar, geosynchronous satellite communications... cell phones plus their base stations.
Suppose we got a big fat SETI hit 20 lightyears away. Barring radically new physics, it would be of only passing interest: So be spend big $billions and create a large aperture high power radiator (Earth or moon based). So we start pouring data continuously to them. *Nothing at all* happens for at least *40 years.* That is ten Presidential elections and 20 Congressional elections.
Around 2100 First World civilization - assuming effete girl men persist against barbarian onslaught - will have concerns that wholly outweigh abstract catholic interests.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)