Yes, I'm serious. :)

I received an e-mail from SETI@home saying that they need donations to continue their work. (I've been running their software on my work computers off and on for the past 8 years.)

"SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data."

Main page
Donation page

Haha ..COOL ..

Well please donate to me and i promise i'll look up every night to see if  there's a alien in the sky

Chris

This is a pretty cool project. The way it basically works is that when you aren't using your computer, it processes radio telescope data looking for patterns.

I know about it we had 20+  systems at work run the software at night...
Chris

Quote - This is a pretty cool project. The way it basically works is that when you aren't using your computer, it processes radio telescope data looking for patterns.

Ha! With my luck I'd find some... or rather they would find me!  :scared:

When I ran it, I found that it continually tried to access my modem to phone home ;)

Klaatu barada nix-to-that!

Earthlings are enough trouble, why buy more?

Quote -

Ha! With my luck I'd find some... or rather they would find me!  :scared:

They already found me :)

I used to run SETI@Home in the early days - when I wasn't doing as much programming and 3D work and didn't have several servers running.

Here's my take on it: There is almost definitely extraterrestrial life out there (past/present/future - however you want to consider time across the universe).  There is a good chance that some of it has evolved into a sentient lifeform that can do things like build technology (like us).  The question is how far away and at what time relative to ours (i.e.: in the past, present, or future). Since Drake's Equation is just a nice parlor game (you can fiddle with the variables to arrive at anything from 0 to a nearly infinite number of technological sentient civilizations in the universe) I would tend towards the lowest of numbers for concurrent (therefore discoverable) technological sentient civilizations - say 10 to 1000 in the entire universe right now (as it were).  When I say 'right now', of course I mean that their 'signals' would be reaching Earth at about this time in our history and not a hundred years ago or older  That isn't searching for a needle in a haystack.  That's searching for a particular atom in an ocean the size of Jupiter.  Did we discuss signal decay over such long distances (thousands/millions/billions of lightyears)?  Most distant stars only dribble a photon here and there over a period of time - and they aren't exactly quiet when it comes to energy release.

PhilC: LOL!

Quote - When I say 'right now', of course I mean that their 'signals' would be reaching Earth at about this time in our history and not a hundred years ago or older 

So basically you are saying that the study of Astronomy is like history: the study of things past. Only with astronomy we have no idea what the current situation is because of the vast distance and time required (thousands, millions, billions of years) for light and sound to travel to our mini planet?

EDITED: to fix my boo boo!

argh nooooo
it's not astrology... thats' 'venus is in the 34rd house of pluto so you'll stub your toe...or not'
Astronomy is the word you mean....

Quote - argh nooooo
it's not astrology... thats' 'venus is in the 34rd house of pluto so you'll stub your toe...or not'
Astronomy is the word you mean....

Oops. Yep! That's what I meant to say!  I guess my Physics teachers were right in giving me a "D for effort" because I really sucked at Physics!  LOL Heck, I can't even get the name right :)

Read Larry Niven's "Protector".  You may not think trying to contact aliens is such a great idea after that. :)

Quote - So basically you are saying that the study of Astronomy is like history: the study of things past. Only with astronomy we have no idea what the current situation is because of the vast distance and time required (thousands, millions, billions of years) for light and sound to travel to our mini planet?

More or less.

Even the light from our own sun is @8.5 minutes old when we get it.

Quote - Read Larry Niven's "Protector".  You may not think trying to contact aliens is such a great idea after that. :)

Wasn't it Stephen Hawkings who also had this type of reservation on making such contact?

I think that we're pretty safe.  Unless FTL or forms of ultra-space traversal are possible - despite what all of the SciFi genre promotes heavily - there is little chance of any two sentient species from different planets meeting unless the planets reside in the same solar system.  My calculations of the time required just to jump from one galaxy to the next at light-speed is in the millions of years (!).  That pretty much rules out extra-galactic invasion without FTL travel.  Heck, the travel time to the nearest star at light-speed is something like 4 years (at more realistically possible speeds it may take 20 to 40 years).

Interestingly, the situation is bleak just by merit.  Like evolution on Earth that took a long time (and stable conditions) for a sentient species to evolve (4.5 billion years), I think that the universe operates in similar ways.  It is very probable that conditions weren't stable enough for so many billions of years (of the estimated 15.5 billion) for planetary systems to evolve.  Also, theory shows that elements of more complex types required long times to accumulate by the dying of many stars.  In other words, sentient lifeforms may not have been possible more than 5 or 10 billion years ago which would mean that sentient lifeforms may only 'now' be popping up in the universe due to stability and a rich source of elements.  And since the universe is like a history machine, each sentient lifeform would be practically isolated by several factors: expansion of the universe and speed at which light (EM) travels.

For instance, a sentient lifeform 5000 ly away would need to have peaked technologically at least 5000 years ago (our time) for us to receive any transmissions.  And for them to receive our transmissions they would need to have survived technologically for 10000 years beyond that (think of the two planets separated by 5000 (light)years each travelling along parallel lines of time (upward for future let's say).  Their signal leaves at A and arrives at Earth 5000 years later in which time both have moved 5000 years along the timeline.  We respond with a signal back that takes another 5000 years to arrive at A.  Not exactly instant communications. :)

Doesn't the Inverse Square Law mean that any radio signal from ET would be way to faint to be detectable? After all, if Alpha Centauri is just a dot in the night sky, what would an Alpha Centauran's radio transmission be like -- and would it be detectable against the radio waves emitted by Alpha Centauri itself?

It's a shame really. I miss the radio shows I used to listen to when I was a kid on Alph... oops!

Mike

Call me a racist, but I prefer to donate my spare CPU cycles to the benefit of terrestrial life. Folding@home or FightAIDS@home are much more in my completely selfish interest of helping the human race fight diseases.

Quote - When I ran it, I found that it continually tried to access my modem to phone home ;)

That's how it works. It downloads data, and when it is finished digesting it, it uploads the results. It doesn't work so well on narrow-band.

I think that PhilC is making reference to a certain 'E.T.' made famous in a movie similarly named.

stewer: Yes, I agree completely.  While finding extraterrestrials is nobel and worthwhile in some ways, wouldn't it be better to find ways to keep this boat (human civilization) from sinking before looking for distant boats on the horizon which couldn't be of much service anyway (possibly sinking as well)?  Not only do we need to fight diseases but to realize our heritage (lit. descent) and come to grips with it so that we can forge a better society and civilization more so devoid of the atrocities perpetuated by governments, institutions, groups, and individuals.  What can I say, I daydream alot. :)

mwafarmer: My point about photons from stars exactly.  Stars emit radiation at 360d (enumerable numbers of photons per second).  The further away a 'receptor' is the smaller the area of the emitter that is encountered.  When you start talking thousands and millions of light years, you are talking an area so small as to make encounters with these photons rare.  Luckily, photons are being emitted quite regularly from stars and do stream in.  But for some distant galaxies, we're talking a photon a second at best.  To build a blurry image of an object, you need several thousands of photons.  This is why telescopes train on a point in the sky and absorb light for hours or over days or months even!  To really get a signal from a far off ET would require that the ET was transmitting at 360d for a long time - and happen to have those signals start encountering Earth at about this time in our history for us to even receive them.

Worse than that is occlusion.  EM can't propagate through solid bodies (easily except at very high energies) - and can be diffused by gaseous or plasmatic bodies.  What makes up most of the Milky Way - big voluminous clouds of gas and plasma.  It doesn't look like that much when looking at the night sky - but you can see the band faintly on a clear night out of terrestrial light occlusion.  It'll be hard enough to get that incalculably small sliver of energy from an ET signal but add on the impediments it must cross in its path from there to here and you might be lucky once in a million times (i.e.: million ETs).  See my previous post for my estimates of ETs out there.

When I saw the title, I thought that perhaps this was a thread about immigration.......

Since the days of H.G. Wells on towards Astounding Stories magazine, its been "known" that aliens are out there.......somewhere.  Because people read all about them (in great detail) in science fiction.  Therefore: it naturally followed that it all had to be real.

Consider another possibility.  Consider that we are unique, and that the Earth itself is unique.  IIRC, I've read one or two scifi short stories where FTL travel was invented, followed by humans going out on life-seeking quests: only to find nothing but rocks, dust, gas giants, stars, and more dust.

What a boring universe.

Or, alternately, it can also be a "cute" universe, where the NASA folks assign names such as "Scooby Doo" to rocks found near the Mars rover's landing site.

I dunno -- there almost seems to be an underlying tone of desperation in the voices of those scientific types who are obsessed with finding life on other planets........much like the Spainards hunting for El Dorado in a former era.  We've dreamed it -- so it's just gotta be true!

The Fountain of Youth didn't exist, either -- but that didn't stop people from spending their lives looking for it.

Personally, I don't know whether there's life of our sort elsewhere in the current universe or not.  Frankly, it's not a matter that concerns me a great deal one way or the other.  I tend to suspect that the Earth is truly unique -- the perfect combination of factors for life as we know it are found in balance here.  Change one of those factors just slightly -- like move the Earth a hair closer to the sun -- and life as we know it couldn't exist in the form that it does.  Furthermore: I don't see how this perfect combination of factors could have happened by accident.

We can imagine lots of things.  And so we've imagined aliens -- but I've yet to talk to one of them.

just pay the aliens directly and cut out the middlemen. :lol: but seriously, humans will likely become extinct before they develop the capability to contact extra-terrestrial life. for the foreseeable future, they'll never even be highly enuff evolved to send some guys to mars to make first contact with the microbes living there. too busy fighting amongst themselves to do anything on a planetary scale IMVHO.

Quote - ...I think that we're pretty safe.  Unless FTL or forms of ultra-space traversal are possible - despite what all of the SciFi genre promotes heavily - there is little chance of any two sentient species from different planets meeting unless the planets reside in the same solar system.  My calculations of the time required just to jump from one galaxy to the next at light-speed is in the millions of years (!).  That pretty much rules out extra-galactic invasion without FTL travel.  Heck, the travel time to the nearest star at light-speed is something like 4 years (at more realistically possible speeds it may take 20 to 40 years)....

You're ruling out very long lived species who may be able to withstand high acceleration and/or boredom for long periods.  Maintaining a 4 G thrust for a while will get you to an respectable fraction of the speed of light and time dilation will start to have an appreciable effect on anything inside the craft.  There's also no reason to believe that 100 or so years is the upper limit of lifespan for an intelligent being.

There's also the idea of generation ships, which may travel slowly but contain an entire biosphere.  The original travellers may not be alive when they get here but their descendents would be.  

There are also some ideas which suggest intelligent life evolved a lot earlier, closer to the galactic core.  We're stuck out here, a day late and a dollar short. 

In any case, assuming we do receive contact from another species, there's still the matter of the "Outside Context Problem".   That is, contact with something or someone far in advance of the tribe.   Human history is littered with these, and so far, no contactee has ever come through it unchanged.  And it's usually for the worse.  

And while I have your attention, I'm selling a nice new line in very stylish tinfoil hats. :biggrin:

So will mass.  The more you accelerate towards the speed of light, the more massive and the more energy required to propel the mass.  That's why the only thing nearing light speed is, well, light (massless particles).  By the time you're moving 80% the speed of light you'll need a couple million spare stars for power. :)

Longetivity, modes of transport, take-it-all-with-you are all speculative unfortunately.  The problem with the latter 'entire biosphere' ideology is that, for instance, Earth isn't a closed system.  It has been fed by asteriods, comets, dust, solar radiation, and extra-solar radiation for billions of years.  Life on Earth is dependent completely on the Sun - ignoring vent life and subsurface microbes.  So, you'd essentially want to take your entire solar system out for a spin - the propulsion being?

I'll take two tinfool hats and an ACME laser blaster to go. :)

I certainly wouldn't want to argue with any species that can throw their solar system around like a Humvee. :)

Quote - When I ran it, I found that it continually tried to access my modem to phone home ;)

Did you save the phone number???

I suspect that we will have to rely on aliens altruistic enough to be deliberately sending radio signals (probably at something like the 21 cm frequency), rather than incidental RF signals, since any sufficiently advanced technology will have developed broadband internet.

Quote - all speculative

To say the least that can be said about subjects like this one.

With all of this talk of phones and such:

I once read another scifi short story -- written in the early 60's, I believe -- about a young man in New York City who accidentally dialed a wrong phone number.  As it turned out, that particular phone number was being used by a group of hostile aliens (disguised as humans) who were intent upon  taking over the Earth.  Convinced that the unfortunate young man was somehow onto them, the aliens nabbed him and carried him off to torture -- demanding to know how he'd gotten their phone number.

In a brief introduction to the story, the author stated that the story had been fiction back when he'd written it.  However, several years later -- according to the author -- that sort of thing started happening in real life everyday in NYC......so he was glad that he'd moved away.

We are the aliens, we are just about to finish this planet and in mine time searching for the next worlds for the future invasions... .. lol ha ha ha

we have really so much bad things going in our world,  that would be better to focus on this at first .. aliens can wait.. and if they exist they will contact us for sure.. I saw**  Invasion** yesterday the new one.. was cool..
Sometimes I wonder who will visit us at first Jesus or Aliens ? from what I read, they expect something for 2012 .. so about 4 years.. are you ready ? lol

Cath

Interesting topic for the Poser forum, nonetheless all or most of what has been said is based upon what we think we know about the universe. I think that we as humans give ouselves too much credit in what we think we know. There are things that have happened on earth that we can't explain, much less what is going on outside our own galaxy.  It really wasn't all that long ago that the earth was thought to be flat.

Quote - Call me a racist, but I prefer to donate my spare CPU cycles to the benefit of terrestrial life. Folding@home or FightAIDS@home are much more in my completely selfish interest of helping the human race fight diseases.

I do agree with with this, and if FightAids would work on my mac I would run it day and night to find a cure. Until then it's aliens when I have some spare time.....

More seriously, if we do locate a likely signal, what happens when
thousands of eager listeners buy appropriate receivers, tune them
to that freq, and listen at synchronized times?

The senders, if they are as advanced as we like to imagine, should be able to 
pick up the slight change in energy absorption from our direction, or perhaps 
even pick up the IF oscillation from all those superhet receivers on one freq.

We won't need to respond in any meaningful way; they will know we've
picked up the extension, so to speak.

(Actually this technique is delicate but hardly futuristic; both sides used 
it in WWII to determine if their clandestine signals were being intercepted.)

Quote - Interesting topic for the Poser forum, nonetheless all or most of what has been said is based upon what we think we know about the universe. I think that we as humans give ouselves too much credit in what we think we know. There are things that have happened on earth that we can't explain, much less what is going on outside our own galaxy.  It really wasn't all that long ago that the earth was thought to be flat.

We humans do know everything. Just ask us!

[..................................ducking and running........................................>

Probably nothing. Previous, focused SETI searches have more or less ruled out anything within a couple of dozen light years. I'm pretty sure that after a time delay of centuries, and against the solar and Jupitarian background noise, and feedback from the receivers will be well below the noise floor.

Plus there are hardly thousands of appropriate recievers. We're not talking about shortwave radio here, we're talking about using seriously powerful radio telescopes, which are capable of distinguishing very small changes in power. SETI at home uses the 305m Aricebo telescope which is the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world.

Quote - More seriously, if we do locate a likely signal, what happens when
thousands of eager listeners buy appropriate receivers, tune them
to that freq, and listen at synchronized times?

The senders, if they are as advanced as we like to imagine, should be able to 
pick up the slight change in energy absorption from our direction, or perhaps 
even pick up the IF oscillation from all those superhet receivers on one freq.

We won't need to respond in any meaningful way; they will know we've
picked up the extension, so to speak.

(Actually this technique is delicate but hardly futuristic; both sides used 
it in WWII to determine if their clandestine signals were being intercepted.)

I know we're listening for them, but are we also sending a signal, something that is likely to be detectable? If we can't hear them, perhaps they can hear us?

Now that's last thing I want to waste my money on (or cpu power).... looking for life in space while many on earth are starving to death. If there's any intelligent life out there, they sure must think we're not too intelligent, since we're letting our own here on earth die, spending lot's of money on looking for signs of life out there.

Quote - I know we're listening for them, but are we also sending a signal, something that is likely to be detectable? If we can't hear them, perhaps they can hear us?

We sent a few signals decades ago, but haven't done anything since. It is barely conceivable that if they are fairly close they might be able to make out something from our general RF traffic, but highly unlikely.

Quote -
We sent a few signals decades ago, but haven't done anything since. It is barely conceivable that if they are fairly close they might be able to make out something from our general RF traffic, but highly unlikely.

We are still sending out signals but not the type you may think, turn on your TV or Radio these signals are flooding our solar system right now.  If I remember about 6 months ago or so there was a special on either History Channel or Discovery about contacting aliens and how our first  TV and radio was are now just reaching our closest neighboring system. Even if there is intelligent life there how long would it take them to decode our several hundred languages or what they would make of I Love Lucie or the Twilight Zone?
And then if they figured out our language do you think they would want to contact us? And who is to say they haven't tried already and some cultures thought they where Gods of some type? Look at the some of  cultures from the past and what they have done with stone tools. Looks at the Pyramids in both South America and Egypt, StoneHenge and other wonders that people of the past had created and still our understand of why they created them or why their gods looked so Alien to us as moden human.
I could go on for hours on this subject. As for using my computer to search for alien life, no I won't.

the thing that always tickled me was how important it was for some folks to prove that there weren't any aliens..;)

Astronomy has detected over a hundred planets around stars near and far, so that ups the percentages a bit. There are (roughly) a hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and billions of galaxies. no matter how you set it up, there's got to be someone out there.

And unfortunately, since Pluto's not a planet any more (what are we Scorpios to do?..;), I don't know how we recalculate our horoscopes...;)

I love discussing the potential reactions of totally imaginary beings -- ((of which we know absolutely nothing even if one grants purely for the sake of argument that such beings might exist)) -- to signals from us.

But......the existence of such creatures has become an article of faith for some.  To suggest that perhaps it's all derived from the pages of Astounding Stories -- or from Star Trek -- in much the same fashion that the ancients derived their own speculative ideas through stories centered around made-up mythologies...........is considered by some to be reactionary at best: and outright blasphemous at worst.  Aliens have become (for some) a tenet of prevailing faith for the Modern Age.  An Age in which we've happily replaced the ancient myths with new ones.

Star Trek has shown us that it's the Way.  Those who take such beliefs to their ultimate conclusion join up with wacky cults.

Quote - the thing that always tickled me was how important it was for some folks to prove that there weren't any aliens..;)

That can't be proven.  But the existence or the non-existence of such beings in and of itself isn't the point.

The point is that even 'secular' astronomers are looking for their salvation in outer space these days.  Outer space is by definition a much nicer place than Earth is.  Our imaginations can people outer space with whatever we'd like to see there: whatever tickles our own fancies.

The difficulty comes in when individuals begin to confuse their fantasies with reality.

Well.  Unlike Mythologies and religion, the idea of extraterrestrial life isn't exactly founded in blind faith or just science fiction.  It is founded on facts - life exists on Earth and there is a slight possibility that it once existed on Mars.  Two outta eight (agreeing with pakled) is astronomical (hehe).  If Mars did indeed harbor life once, no matter how simple, that raises the odds of life elsewhere drastically - like, it's assured.  Not going to speculate on whether it is intelligent life or not - still attempting to find that here.

I have faith that the Sun will rise everyday - because the Earth rotates on its axis in a periodic fashion so that this phenomenon occurs.  I don't have blind faith that there is some deific and beneficent being minutely interested in my genitalia on an hourly basis... ;P

Hmmmm......much as I'd enjoy such a discussion with you, it's somewhat out of the purview of this forum.  Plus right now I just don't have the time to do it justice.

I will say this much: it's yet to be proven that life now does -- or that it ever has -- existed on Mars.  So in part it's operating on the basis of an assumption.

The fact that the Earth, along with all of its life, exists here in no way, shape, or form "proves" that such a phenomenon therefore simply must also exist elsewhere.  Such thinking is based upon nothing but faith: for all of the attributions to 'science'.

Quote - I do agree with with this, and if FightAids would work on my mac I would run it day and night to find a cure.

You can use a Mac to participate in the malariacontrol distributed rendering: http://www.malariacontrol.net/

so either way you slice it (secular or not), faith plays a role...;) it seems there's always more questions than answers...;)

Quote - so either way you slice it (secular or not), faith plays a role...;) it seems there's always more questions than answers...;)

Just a difference in what the faith is based.