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SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others
- muragekibicho 9mo agoI associate SETI news with the Youtube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011.
- 1970-01-01 9mo ago>“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.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoIf 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.
- dylan604 9mo agoDigest signals for 30 years and report back? That's one hell of a super computer and significantly faster than Deep Thought
- CJefferson 9mo agoNo, AI are terrible at finding these types of patterns. You could hypothetically use AI to write algorithms to find the patterns, but people have already spent a long time super-tuning them. AIs can't even (at least I keep checking) solve Sudokus as well as my mother -- they aren't good with piles of numbers and complex patterns.
- NitpickLawyer 9mo agoAI has been used in astrophysics for a long time, now. AI is more than genAI of the past 3-4 years... Classification tasks are handled by AI now because it's the only thing that gives you some accuracy at scale.
- lazide 9mo agoIt depends on what you mean by AI. I bet if the two of you used clearer terms, you’d both be right.
- guybedo 9mo agoClaude Code: i'm entering plan mode to analyze the 10B signals in the database
- pokstad 9mo ago> 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!
- bkeyes 9mo agoOnly if you hit the transmit button.
- CamperBob2 9mo agoAnd 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.
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoAnyone 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.
- traviswingo 9mo agoThis reads like a Douglas Adams quote
- dylan604 9mo agoWe tried that in 2020. It didn't really work out that well as most people were physically unable to stay the fuck inside.
- markus_zhang 9mo agoI used to run this on my computer in the early 2000s. I wish we had a similar project nowadays.
- serf 9mo agofolding@home is still going I think? seti@home was definetly a cool screensaver, though.[0] [0]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Korpela/publication/3422381/figure/fig2/AS:394692438052873@1471113418702/A-screenshot-of-the-SETIhome-client-program-The-bottom-half-of-the-screen-presents-the.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eric-Korpela/publicatio...
- hkt 9mo agoFolding is still going strong, as is: https://worldcommunitygrid.org/ https://worldcommunitygrid.org/
- sam_lowry_ 9mo agoWasn't protein folding solved by our AI overlords once? Demis Hassabis? Alpha Fold?
- jryb 9mo agoNot solved at all. Certainly AF is very useful but what it outputs is a fundamentally a prediction with important limitations. There’s plenty of utility in physical modeling.
- cheschire 9mo agoThe article links to BOINC. https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
- qingcharles 9mo agoThis made me go back and find the S@H team I started in 1999: https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=33462 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/team_display.php?teamid=3346...
- cpncrunch 9mo agoThis 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.
- jacquesm 9mo agoBut what did you think?
- cpncrunch 9mo agoWhat did I think about what?
- jondwillis 9mo agoask chaptgpt about space telescopes
- adastra22 9mo agoThere are no space-based radio telescopes. (Well, none pointing at stars at least. There are some spy sats pointed down.)
- dylan604 9mo agocould you imagine something as big as Arecibo was or FAST is floating in space? That'd be impressive. Would a constellation set up more like VLA be possible? Keep increasing the size of it with Starlink like launches??
- NitpickLawyer 9mo agoThere's a proposal for a large constellation of small, cheap-to-build radio sats. Heard about it on a Fraser Cain podcast. They plan to send them to one of the Lagrange points and spread them out in x KM cube pattern. They also want some of the sats to do some RF processing on-site, and beam just the "results" back.
- jondwillis 9mo agoI remember donating a bit of my Alienware gaming laptop GPU on uni ethernet LAN in like 2010 ROFLMAO
- dylan604 9mo agoI was at a shop that had beefy workstations for 3D/video/graphics work that I thought I was cool for running @home on the 10 boxes we had. I remember popping up in the top 100 list for a minute.
- andrea76 9mo agoContact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)
- Zardoz84 9mo agoThe book is far better. They completely removed the "artist signature" from the movie.
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoI think both are fine, actually. The movie definitely departed from the book, especially near the end.
- adastra22 9mo agoWay, waaay better than Interstellar. That's a low bar actually. Interstellar was visually stunning, but absolute crap otherwise.
- aurareturn 9mo agoI liked contact and I liked interstellar.
- dylan604 9mo agoThree Body Problem as well for detecting signal. Pluribus as well
- whntheduvscry 9mo agoAlso “Three Body” is the Chinese version of this, which is more in-depth.
- LeoPanthera 9mo agoFor your kids, “Elio” is basically “Contact” for kids. It didn’t get fantastic reviews, but I suspect it appeals to the HN crowd more.
- sMarsIntruder 9mo ago> “Until about 2016, we didn’t really know what we were going to do with these detections that we’d accumulated,” Anderson said. “We hadn’t figured out how to do the whole second part of the analysis.” No comment.
- thegrim000 9mo agoI've pretty much given up on traditional radio SETI ever finding anything, as its sole focus is on trying to find terrawatt/mega scale, repeating, intentional alien communication beacons, and nothing else. As I don't believe aliens would make such things, I don't believe traditional SETI will ever find anything. Out telescopes aren't sensitive enough to detect the power levels of comm signals that aliens would use internally. Even if SETI saw a random powerful signal that happened to hit us, if the signal doesn't continuously repeat it just gets put into the "random transient, didn't repeat, who knows" bucket, and discarded. The 100 signals they've detected will be looked at again with telescopes, and when they don't see the same signal repeating, they'll all just be discarded. Even if they were in reality actual emissions from aliens that we happened to see, if they're not intentional, repeating, comm beacons, the signals will just get discarded as unverifiable. If aliens actually made terrawatt scale comm beacons, we would have easily seen them by now.
- singularity2001 9mo agoOn the other hand, I hold the slightly fringe theory that suns are sentient beings, and by just watching the stars, we may see them communicate.
- robertk 9mo ago“Slightly fringe”
- GJim 9mo agoHeh Arthur C Clarke once suggested that some supernova could be industrial accidents. A curiously romantic idea, and one I rather like!
- pavel_lishin 9mo agoI think that's the premise of a novel that I've been meaning to read.
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- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- esbranson 9mo agoWe have a statutory office within the US Department of Defense meant to track UFOs (AARO).[1] Why would such things be sending electromagnetic signals from outer space? Literally thousands of witnesses. It's very odd to say "aliens may exist, but those nuclear weapons officers are crazy, aliens would definitely be sending signals from elsewhere, they would not be and are not here." [1] 50 USC § 3373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3373
- antisol 9mo agoI can't resist bragging: I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot. I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.