SETI Home Flags 100 Signals After Sorting 12B Others(news.berkeley.edu)
72 pointsby TMEHpodcast4 hours ago8 comments
  • pokstad3 hours 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!

    • rippeltippel36 minutes ago
      I guess we'll find out in a few decades.
    • harmet3 hours ago
      > 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!”

    • bkeyes3 hours ago
      Only if you hit the transmit button.
      • CamperBob23 hours ago
        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.

        • abtinfan hour ago
          Why not just credit the dark forest for this idea?
        • pavel_lishin3 hours ago
          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.
          • traviswingo2 hours ago
            This reads like a Douglas Adams quote
          • dylan604an hour ago
            We tried that in 2020. It didn't really work out that well as most people were physically unable to stay the fuck inside.
          • bulbaran hour ago
            Having it safe to go outside is the very point of a society.

            Outside of this safety Bubble there's a strong tendency for conflict and war. Only after two cruel world wars and a prolonged cold war, the western world got their shit together and decided 'enough of that'. And even that doesn't seem to hold much longer, so it seems we will only have managed to live peaceful among each other without an immediate conflict with somebody (cold war) for roughly 30 years.

            If aliens are remotely like us, they shouldn't know about us.

  • muragekibichoan hour ago
    I associate SETI news with the Youtube guy who searched for aliens instead of mining bitcoin in 2011.
  • andrea76an hour ago
    Contact, recommended movie to watch! (For me much better than Interstellar)
    • LeoPanthera34 minutes ago
      For your kids, “Elio” is basically “Contact” for kids. It didn’t get fantastic reviews, but I suspect it appeals to the HN crowd more.
    • adastra22an hour ago
      Way, waaay better than Interstellar. That's a low bar actually. Interstellar was visually stunning, but absolute crap otherwise.
    • dylan604an hour ago
      Three Body Problem as well for detecting signal.

      Pluribus as well

  • 1970-01-014 hours 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.

    • dylan604an hour ago
      Digest signals for 30 years and report back? That's one hell of a super computer and significantly faster than Deep Thought
    • CJeffersonan hour ago
      No, 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.

      • NitpickLawyer23 minutes ago
        AI 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.
    • guybedo39 minutes ago
      Claude Code: i'm entering plan mode to analyze the 10B signals in the database
    • CamperBob23 hours ago
      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.

  • markus_zhang3 hours ago
    I used to run this on my computer in the early 2000s. I wish we had a similar project nowadays.
  • sMarsIntruder36 minutes 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.

  • jondwillisan hour ago
    I remember donating a bit of my Alienware gaming laptop GPU on uni ethernet LAN in like 2010 ROFLMAO
    • dylan604an hour ago
      I 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.
  • cpncrunch3 hours ago
    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.

    • XorNot19 minutes ago
      It's mostly not reasonable to try and ascribe human motivations to alien entities, particularly when we know some humans would definitely fire up the transmitter if they could.

      The presence or current lack of alien signals at the very least bounds estimates of local population density and what energy scale they're operating on. Currently there's no nearby Type 1 Kardashev scale civilizations.

    • jacquesm2 hours ago
      But what did you think?
    • jondwillisan hour ago
      ask chaptgpt about space telescopes
      • adastra22an hour ago
        There are no space-based radio telescopes.

        (Well, none pointing at stars at least. There are some spy sats pointed down.)

        • dylan604an hour ago
          could 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??
          • NitpickLawyer25 minutes ago
            There'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.