3 ms·
The Alien-Life Summit (2013)
- motohagiography 3y agoIf there were an application for AI, rebooting SETI@home with modern feature extraction techniques might be it. Distributed clients to contribute compute for astronomy seems as worthy a cause as any. The ability to monitor 10m stars for technosignatures on orbiting planets seems well within the data processing capabilities over the next decade. I remember 90's era SETI@Home and the distributed.net DES cracking efforts, and I would estimate the entire compute of those efforts is less than someones basement cryptocurreny mining rig today. Maybe there is even some theoretical equivalent to a sonic boom where instead of sound, a type of radiation that gets emitted via gravity when a FTL craft goes super-photonic (super-luminal? super-temporal?) that could also be detectable in bursts over the background noise. Instead of looking for patterns that were strictly periodic or geometric, we could use classifiers to find candidates for 1/f noise that would indicate some kind of feedback and information shared between bursts, it could shrink the search space to ones with higher information, etc. Well into sci-fi, but it's the civilizationally interesting topic.
- gs17 3y ago> Maybe there is even some theoretical equivalent to a sonic boom where instead of sound, a type of radiation that gets emitted via gravity when a FTL craft goes super-photonic (super-luminal? super-temporal?) that could also be detectable in bursts over the background noise. There's Cherenkov radiation, but that has bigger implications. Alcubierre drives were supposed to have an issue with something like blueshifting particles along their paths, but I think that requires them to be heading for us.