Re: SETI

On Apr 9, 9:48 am, Willie.Moo...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Apr 8, 1:56 pm, "Mike Combs" <mikeco...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



"Blattus Slafaly 0/00 ? ? ?" <boobooililili...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
messagenews:47fba144$0$24075$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

What would we do if we received radio signals from another star system?
Call back or run and hide? Could we risk contact?

Whether we chose to respond or not would be irrelevant. Our military radars
have advertised our existence to a far greater range than could any
relatively weaker information signal we might choose to transmit.

--

Regards,
Mike Combs
----------------------------------------------------------------------
We must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole
prerogative of a lucky few, but the inalienable and universal right of all
human beings... It would be cultural condescension, or worse, to say that
any people prefer dictatorship to democracy.

Ronald Reagan at Westminster Abbey, 1982

There has been no contact, and we've been looking since 1960. OSU's
RO did an excellent full sky survey - with 40,000 'hits' including the
quasi-famous WOW message. But they didn't meet all the criteria
established before the experiment, for a successful hit. Horowitz at
Harvard has been carrying out BETA for a number of years, following
META, and following Suitcase SETI. I happen to have a 64,000 channel
processing board from that system, which was donated to OSU's search
and re-tooled by moi. It operted there until the RO got sold to a
property developer to expand a golf course from 9 holes to 18 holes.

NASA was working toward a SETI program until it was killed by Senator
William Proxmire. Jill Tartar, Barnie Oliver and others, with help
from Hewlett Packard went private, and they form the basis of the
program run by the Planetary Society

http://planetary.org/special/seti

they're building an array of telescopes originally proposed by Oliver
and worked on by some OSU folks. They also support optical-SETI using
lasers.

Messages are known to have been sent by Arecibo and other telescopes
like the VLA - this is known as Active SETI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_SETI

Us research associates at OSU's RO - rigged the thing to send messages
to nearby stars - along the lines of sending images like the one shown
above. We didn't expect a response since they are light years away.
Still, it was satisfying to do.

The mlitary radars will fall off after a few dozen light years. The
directed pulses we sent with OSU's RO - will be far stronger at the
target stars than the military radar, so for those stars, these
signals count for a lot.

The Arecibo experiments sent messages to the nearby magellenic
clouds. Lots of reasons for that. One, is the beam would cover a lot
of stars so odds are good someone will see it. Two, any response will
be MILLIONS of years in the future, so its a low risk sort of thing
for us today Three - the beam strength at that distance is such that
it will be unmistakeable what they're seeing from this arm of the
Milky Way.
.
The Drake Equation - proposed by Frank Drake back in 1958 estimates
the number of communicative ETIs - if you're intrested in this topic
Sagan is the go to guy

http://www.bigear.org/vol1no2/sagan.htm

This is the reference book on SETI

Intelligent Life in the Universe (Mass Market Paperback)
by I. S. Shklovskii (Author), Carl Sagan (Author)

Available at Amazon from $61.00 -

Courses on SETI were taught at OSU back in the day. That's when they
had a radio observatory and were actually doing SETI. After the
creator of the RO - John Kraus - got interested in it, following his
discovery of Quasars.

The Drake equation multiplies a rate times a lifetime to get a
number.

Its easy to see what this means if we figure how many lightbulbs are
made per day and how many days a lightbulb lasts. Lets say 1,000 per
day and 300 days. We can see then that the factory can support
300,000 light bulbs glowing out in the world.

If we sold three kinds of light bulbs, say red blue and white, and we
wanted to know how many red light bulbs we had out in the world, we
could estimate that by knowing half the lightbulbs made were red. So,
the number of red lightbulbs would be 150,000 computed by multiplying
a rate, times a lifetime times a fraction in this case one half.

Now we can estimate the number of ETIs the same way. We take the rate
of star formation, multiply it by the expected lifetime of an
extraterrestrial intelligent species, and then a fraction of the stars
that have ETIs.

n = R* f(eti) L

R* = rate of star formation = 1 per year in the galaxy
f(eti) = fraction of stars with eti = 0.5 or one in a trillion or
less.
L = life span of civilization = 100 million years or 100 years

So, you get estimates from 50 million in our galaxy (one every 100 ly)
to none (we're the only one of ten civilizations in the entire cosmos)

The fraction is estimated by observing what happened on Earth over
time to give rise to us, and making a guess of what percentages of
stars likely had those same series of events...

So, for example, Earth is a planet that orbits the sun - so ETI
probably lives on a planet. Earth life is based on water. So we
probably need water. Earth life doesn't like radiation, so we need
those conditions and so forth.

The accepted form is iirc;

fp = fraction of stars with planets
fc = fraction of planets with conditions for life
fl = fraction of planets where life actually arises
fi = fraction of life that develops intelligence
ft = fraction of intelligences that develop technology

So, the optimists say fp=1 - all stars have planets. pessimists say
0.1 - 1/10th stars have planets. I looks like the optimists were
right on that one.

Optimists say fc = .0.5 - half of all stars have at least one planet
where conditions are suitable for life. This derives from the fact
that the surface of Earth, the surface of Titan and the surface of
Jupiter - all have complex organic compounds. The 1/2 comes in by
observing that only half the stars in the sky are population 1 stars -
stars with carbon nitrogen oxygen and heavier elements in their
photospheres. The other half don't have these elements an so cannot
support life as we know it.

Pessimists say fc = 0.1 - only 1/10th of the star systems that have
planets, have planets where the conditions for life exist.

Optimists say fl = 1 - all stars where conditions for life exist -
life will arise. This from the Miller Urey experiment where primitive
conditions were replicated in the laboratory and in a few days, from a
small beaker, amino acids were formed. The building blocks of life.
This suggests that very quickly whever conditions are right, organic
systems arise. This is borne out by the presence of colorful organic
dyes in the atmosphere of Jupiter, and complex organic molecules found
throughout space by spectral analysis.

Pessimists say that life is not amino acids and that to get something
like DNA you have about 1 chance in a million or worse. This is where
there's a big divergence. Life according to these folks is a miracle
- and not likely to be easily replicated.

Optimists say fi = 1 - intelligence is adaptive and selected for.
There are several intelligent species alive on Earth today - humans
certainly, but also primates which even use tools, elephants, and
dolphins. This suggests that over time life will eventually evolve
brains and that means intelligence.

Pessimists say that life on Earth arose less than 100 million years
after conditions were ripe for life. Then, it settled down into a
long stable period of large bacterial mats for several billion years -
no bodies, just single celled organisms. You cannot have intelligence
without bodies. Then, photosynthesis was developed, and that created
an oxygen crisis, this gave rise to response by the anerobes, the
collected into multi-celled structures to survive the rising oxygen
level. Organisms that fed on the organisms that were inside the newly
organized bodies, responded by developing a tooth to break the body
apart -and evolution of bodies started. Then with increasingly
sophisiticated bodies, life evolved for another several billion years
before just a few million years ago, brains evolved. Brains in humans
and other primates can be compared to tail feathers on peacocks. They
are far larger and more complex than they need to be. They have given
rise to behaviors that have become involved in sexual selection and
mating - so there's a selection effect - leading to enormously large
brains. The fact that it took two miracles, life, and multi-celled
life, to lead to a third miracle, big brains - make it seem to
pessimists that this is another 1 chance in a million or a billion.

Optimists say ft = 1 or close to it. We use tools, monkeys use tools,
birds build nests, tool using and technology go hand in hand with big
brains. Its a natural outcome

Pessimists say that ft = 0.001 - one in 1/1000 - they observe
intelligent dolphins could never develop fire, and with that, smelting
of ores and with that use of metal. Next building is an instinctive
behavior and it doesn't lead to the sorts of development that allowe
men and women to tame fire and use it. The development of technology
while rapid in geological terms - could have been sidelined by any
number of events - just as our shortage of oil is ending our reliance
on thermal engines - and returning us to the era of horse and buggy.

Optimists say L life time - is 100 million years or more. The average
longevity of a big mammal like humans, as a species is about 10
million years. We first evolved 2 million years ago, in our present
form 100,000 years ago. So, we have a while to go yet. As we
develop, optimists feel, our control of the environment will extend to
our genome, and with that, we will extend our tenure in the cosmos by
at least 10x if not more. Some feel humans
...

read more »

Good grief, get a fresh grip on your private parts. You're not even
remotely an expert wizard at SETI or much of anything else, including
hydrogen or that of any fly-by-rocket lander. Your nayism is an
artificial black hole, whereas everything goes in but nothing good for
the soul ever comes out.

I happen to agree that SETI is a pathetic joke, but otherwise a very
nifty tax free scam, that which I'd wished the hell that I had thought
and capitalized upon first.

There is other intelligent life within the universe, and we humans are
not even half way up to operating on a learners permit.

Intelligent other life is clearly that of whatever life manages to
exceed at their surviving wherever a naked human simply can't, and
that's even of whenever a technologically assisted human is limited by
way of whatever is brought along for the ride, because once those life
support systems fail is clearly when we and all of our supposed
intelligence is once and for all done for.

I'd consider an ET spore as representing better form of survival
intelligence, over that of what most of whatever humanity represents,
especially of those infected with the Mook mindset of perpetual
nayism.
. - Brad Guth
.

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