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SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others

> They have been pointing China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope, a radio telescope referred to as FAST, at these targets since July, hoping to see the signals again.

This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door!

3 hours agopokstad

> This is how you get Trisolarians knocking on your door

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!”

2 hours agoharmet

Only if you hit the transmit button.

2 hours agobkeyes

And that's why they won't find anything, IMHO. Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately transmitting interstellar beacon signals will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is STFU.

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.

2 hours agoCamperBob2

Why not just credit the dark forest for this idea?

23 minutes agoabtinf

Anyone who spends five minutes thinking about the consequences of deliberately leaving your house will conclude that the only safe, sane thing to do is stay the fuck inside.

2 hours agopavel_lishin

We tried that in 2020. It didn't really work out that well as most people were physically unable to stay the fuck inside.

5 minutes agodylan604

This reads like a Douglas Adams quote

an hour agotraviswingo

>“There’s no way that you can do a full investigation of every possible signal that you detect, because doing that still requires a person and eyeballs,” he said. “We have to do a better job of measuring what we’re excluding. Are we throwing out the baby with the bath water? I don’t think we know for most SETI searches, and that is really a lesson for SETI searches everywhere.”

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.

3 hours ago1970-01-01

Digest signals for 30 years and report back? That's one hell of a super computer and significantly faster than Deep Thought

2 minutes agodylan604

If nothing else, AI will probably be needed to filter out RF artifacts and spurious emissions from all the Internet satellite constellations that are either already online or ramping up in the future.

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.

2 hours agoCamperBob2

Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)

20 minutes agoandrea76

Three Body Problem as well for detecting signal.

Pluribus as well

4 minutes agodylan604

I remember donating a bit of my Alienware gaming laptop GPU on uni ethernet LAN in like 2010 ROFLMAO

21 minutes agojondwillis

This assumes that ETs are deliberately transmitting high power signals towards us (or into space in general), although I'm not sure that is a reasonable assumption. I think it would generally be unwise to loudly announce a civilization's presence.

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.

2 hours agocpncrunch

ask chaptgpt about space telescopes

19 minutes agojondwillis

But what did you think?