Posted on 11/29/2005 5:14:59 AM PST by billorites
As if spotty teenagers releasing computer viruses on to the internet from darkened rooms were not enough of a headache. According to a scientific report, planet Earth's computers are wide open to a virus attack from Little Green Men. The concern is raised in the next issue of the journal Acta Astronautica by Richard Carrigan, a particle physicist at the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. He believes scientists searching the heavens for signals from extra-terrestrial civilisations are putting Earth's security at risk, by distributing the jumble of signals they receive to computers all over the world.
The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti) project, based at the University of California in Berkeley, uses land-based telescopes to scour the universe for electromagnetic waves. Just as stray radio and TV broadcasts are now zooming away from Earth at the speed of light, the Seti scientists hope to pick up stray signals, or even intentional interplanetary broadcasts, emitted from other civilisations.
All signals picked up by Seti are broken up and sent across the internet to a vast band of volunteers who have signed up for a Seti screensaver, which allows their computers to crunch away at the signals, when they are not at their desks.
So far, the only signals detected are bursts of radiation from stars and a murmur of background noise left over from the big bang. But, says Dr Carrigan, improved telescopes and faster computers mean scientists are ever more likely to detect a signal from extra-terrestrials.
In his report, entitled Do potential Seti signals need to be decontaminated?, he suggests the Seti scientists may be too blase about finding a signal. "In science fiction, all the aliens are bad, but in the world of science, they are all good and simply want to get in touch."
(Excerpt) Read more at technology.guardian.co.uk ...
Some researchers at FermiLab have way too much time on their hands.
I was gonna ask how I can get a job thinking up garbage like this.
Sometimes I am left speechless. I bet that guy is a college professor.
This guy from Illinois is a Euro-Weenie?
Carrigan is a particle physicist. His ET idea might be flaky but presumably his day job is particle physics. To become a particle physicist, you would first get an undergraduate degree in physics (or a related major with plenty of physics in it) then you would go to graduate school for your PhD in particle physics. It's a highly mathematical and difficult subject. To complete your PhD you must write original research of a quality sufficient to be published in a recognized, peer-reviewed scientific journal. Then you're on the job market. Some years, the market is favorable, and you'll get a position, perhaps at a college or university, perhaps (as Carrigan has) a research lab (these are often sponsored by consortia of universities or the government). But other years, unless you're particularly good, you might find yourself programming computers for a living.
Someone needs to slip a little Librium into his coffee... and danish.... and anything else he consumes....
First he assumes the little green men know what a computer is.(at least ours)
Second he assume that they would know what 'code' we use to program it.
And third he assumes they give a shiite!
FOOLS !
ETs have cracked windows and reverse engineered PCs long ago. Do you think they're stupid?
The threat is REAL !
Well, there's a big difference between knowledge and wisdom, isn't there?
The attached shows how much trouble the idiocy and arrogance of earthling scientists causes us.
As you know Seti signals are how we aliens maintain the internet. Without those "critical updates" and upgrades the system will cease to function.
A member of any species but these backwards humans would see Seti signals were on their computers long before the internet came along- and the logical conclusion to be drawn.
That's the problem with PhD's, isn't it... I have known a few of them who may have been brilliant in a particular subject, but didn't have enough sense to know when they had gone for too long without taking a bath. Wonder whether this guy has a similar "impairment"...
Dr. Carrigan, if you analyze the data you won't have problems. If you try to run the data, bad things may happen. A lot of computer viruses rely on getting the computer to try to run the data though overflowing a buffer. Only sloppy programmers don't carefully limit the amount of data they use so it doesn't overwrite things it shouldn't.
ping
Nope ... I misread that part. I started off seeing the article was from the "Guardian UK" ... So I glanced over most of it.
Another consideration is that to the scientists doing science, science is part play, definitely done for fun. (People get PhDs because they're fascinated with the subject.) Much mathematics research, for example, is done as if it were an art form, where the research is motivated by purely aesthetic considerations: a new mathematical theorem is held in high esteem if it possesses a certain beauty or elegance. So ideas are batted about that are meant just for fun. The remarkable thing is that this often leads to genuine breakthroughs or advances of great practical benefit. A theorem in number theory will suddenly become extremely important in cryptology, or a theorem in topology (the mathematical study of shapes) will suddenly help biologists understand the action the enzyme topoisomerase (which cuts DNA in cells).
Ok.... nevermind.... :-) sorry!
This physicist doesn't know the difference between data and program code. The SETI signals are data. No one is going to try to execute it as a program.
Well, we do know from ID4 that aliens are all Windows compatible.
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